I got the chance to meet with Symantec’s Jose Iglesias yesterday. We had a good chat about his company and its green credentials and strategies. Iglesias is a wonderful advocate for sustainability but Symantec a firm has some way to go in that regard. He therefore sees himself as an internal, as much as an external, evangelist at this point.

Before I proceed its probably a good idea to point out that Symantec is about far more than antivirus. The firm acquired Veritas back in 2004, which brought it a bunch of enterprise file and storage management capabilities. Subsequent enterprise acquisitions filled out the portfolio. Symantec’s Green IT story is very much an enterprise play and arguably a solid sustainability product strategy could help to increase visibility for some of Symantec’s enterprise tools.

Thus for example – Symantec NetBackup PureDisk for storage deduplication could be used to cut the amount of storage and power.

One challenge for Symantec is identifying and serving the new buyers in energy reduction. Most of the firm’s traditional practitioner purchasers are not tasked with reducing the energy footprint of the products they manage….

“We sell to admins, but few get compensated on energy savings”

To which I would say… not yet.

Smart Grid as Game Changer

One major opportunity for Symantec to change the account management game there is to parlay its IT experience directly into related spaces such as Smart Grid security and asset management. I knew before the briefing that Symantec is having some early success in the Smart Grid market selling, for example, cryptography. Security is a major issue overhanging smart grid and remains a key selling point. Iglesias and I discussed Smart Grid Standards in depth – I will write that up in the near future.

I am not a fan of FUD though it certainly works. But let’s get real. In Europe for example we’re getting all excited about the need for smart grid standards to prevent tampering with our energy supply. Yet Russia could turn off a gas tap and we’d be screwed within weeks, no smart grid required.

Whichever way you look at it – energy reduction is going to be very big business indeed. The tail is starting to wag the dog.

Sustainability Reporting

GreenMonk has been tracking tech company CSR reporting efforts. Indeed- I am chair of SAP’s external stakeholder panel for its 2009 Sustainability Report. My colleague Tom Raftery recently noted an interesting split between the efforts of hardware and software firms when it comes to sustainability reporting –hardware companies good, software companies bad.

Sadly Symantec isn’t the exception that proves the rule (we leave that accolade to SAP). For one thing it only reports on Sustainability once every two years – pretty much an instant fail according to my Reporting taxonomy – Six Ways to Make CSR Reporting and Strategy not Suck.

Why should IT suppliers improve their efforts in CSR? The most obvious business is Requests For Proposals. Many massive tech purchasers, such as BT, won’t purchase goods or services from firms that don’t have a strong plan to reduce emissions. Then there are reputational issues. The best graduates aren’t falling over themselves to work for BP. When it comes to staff retention the latest research from Center for Creative Leadership indicates that “the more committed a company is to its corporate social responsibility initiatives, the more engaged and committed their employees are likely to be.”

We’d certainly like to see some leadership from Symantec on Sustainability Reporting.

It’s the Storage, Stupid

Iglesias showed what a propellerhead he is when he launched into the green opportunities around enterprise storage.

“I started my career as a mainframe programmer. Resources were very constrained.  IT is relearning many of its roots, and we need to learn from past mistakes- that’s where the Symantec Green IT program came from.”

Let’s take RAID for example, the data protection mechanism.

“Minimise the hardware you need. With dynamic storage you don’t need RAID 5. Analyse your workloads. Humans are awful at managing data placement in storage. Software is much better adapted to that. Our products- namely Storage Foundations will identify all files- jpegs say, and drop it down to tier 3.”

Another quick storage management win is policies based on age – if you haven’t touched it in six months you probably don’t need it nearline. Iglesias said companies should use use less expensive storage, in order to attain big savings in cost and energy.

According to Iglesias The same capacity in storage takes 8 times as much energy for tier one as tier two.  The delta between tier one and tier three is 1/64.

Final Thoughts

Symantec has a new CEO, Enrique T. Salem – and it will be interesting to see if he shows more or less of a commitment to sustainability than his predecessor- John W Thompson. My bet is on the latter former. The economic opportunity for sustainability leaders is very real indeed. Smart Grid is going to be perhaps the biggest tech market ever- IBM and Cisco look like leaders, but who else is going to make the investments needed to compete with them?

disclosure: IBM and Cisco are clients

We hear a lot from Cisco these days about TelePresence (hey its even a gag in 30 Rock now) vs HP Halo… but what about Skype Video?

Expectations are set high with Cisco Telepresence. You have to use one of their offices, so its a managed environment.  Quality of service is a given. As chair of SAP’s Sustainability Stakeholder Panel I was recently invited to Cisco’s offices in London to attend a meeting with the Panel, and SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe. You can imagine my disappointment when the system just didn’t work. Even worse – and how is this for unfortunate? – one of the panel members flew from their location to SAP’s Philadelphia office for the TelePresence meeting. Ah yes – sustainability and telepresence… Suffice to say the outcome was pretty embarrassing. Maybe Tim can make something funny out of it. TelePresence is utterly amazing- it really is like being in the room with the other folks on the call- when it works properly. And yes this was nothing but a configuraton issue. I am on the record as being bullish about Cisco’s Video Revolution.

In contrast see the zero expectations Skype Video, which saved us a lot of pain and money recently. You see- I was one of the organisers of the NoSQL EU show, which was scheduled bang smack in the middle of the Ash Cloud. We were worried about what to do – refunds, or whatever, given that some of our speakers wouldn’t be able to get here from the USA. Someone (it could well have been me) suggested we use Skype Video for the presentations. Feedback was uniformly positive, although special props go out to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels for making it to London via Reykjavik and Glasgow!!! All Things Distributed… including Werner! I would have enjoyed a keynote from Eyjafjallajokull though…

I know Skype Video can work for presentations because we have used it at HomeCamp, where Tom Raftery presented from Seville to a room full of UK geeks… and his session was highest rated as a call to action by the group.

I was just taken by the old High vs Low, Enterprise vs Consumer, Top Down vs Peer to Peer balance here.

Talking about balance how about work/life – you want the truth? The first time I used Skype Video to talk to my son I misted up. I just kept thinking:

“I can see my son from California. And this darned service is free.”

If you travel and have kids make sure you use it.

My point here is really not about technology so much as expectation management. It seems to me that if Skype gets its act together around the business model its Video product could be a runaway success (and by runaway I mean enterprisey revenues). Cisco evidently knows it needs to nail a “lower” end space – thus its acquisition of Tandberg. But Skype Video brings the barrier to participation down to one question- do you have a web cam? Greenmonk even uses Skype Video to record video interviews with Smart Grid Heavy Hitters.

SureMute may be a joke on 30Rock but its not funny when you can’t see the guys in the other room.

disclosure Cisco is a client. HP and Skype are not.

When I saw a tweet last night about HP agreeing to acquire Palm I immediately began spinning up scenarios. After about five minutes trying to work out some holes in the idea I was surprised by just how good the fit potentially is, even in areas that might at first glance be a problem.

HP has already been very clear about what it brings to the party- muscle. Distribution muscle, deep pockets and a huge customer base. But what about Palm? Palm’s webOS is a work in progress, but a very nice work in progress. The Pre’ is a shiny piece of kit (see the video above). HP gets an embedded OS, a surprisingly potent brand and a huge set of patents and related IP… and a web app development play.

What Went Wrong At Palm

The management of the company has made some mistakes – to my mind Palm’s biggest error was not being as open to developers as its platform was. webOS was designed to take advantage of Web development skills – but Palm tried to use Apple’s trick of secrecy first rather than investing heavily in developer good will and playing the open card. It didn’t work.

How Palm Fixed It

Palm realised its error last year and did something incredibly smart – it hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith to develop a new, web-savvy, strategy around its platform. These guys are developers, think like developers, talk like developers, walk like developers and eat dim sum like developers (the pizza thing is a myth). These chaps are awesome, they are friends of mine, and at some point (probably soon now) they will finally pony up to be a client. But don’t take my word for it.

As @chrisblizzard put it yesterday:

HP acquires @bgalbs and @dalmaer for $1.2 billion: http://bit.ly/dq3Xht

Web App Development at HP?

HTML5 and Javascript is the future, and HP is buying into that. Which is just the right thing to do for growth – buy into the future rather than the past. Key question for me is how far HP will support and encourage the new Web app DNA. HP could afford to quickly build a cadre of awesome webapp developers with Dion and Ben at the helm.

IF HP can’t encourage and foster and retain Dion and Ben though then its likely the acquisition itself will not succeed.

Seriously- they are a bellwether.   But it seems to be the new web-driven development model goes way beyond phones. Sure HP wants to play in that game- but now it owns an OS it can stick in car dashboards, TVs, set-top boxes, home power monitoring and automation units, printers even. And the OS runs standard Web apps. Nice place to be.

Oh wait- did i forget to say… iPad?

Software and Services: Towards Consumer Clouds

Perhaps more so than the actual runtimes involved – HP suddenly has a shot at Web developer relevancy that it didn’t before. Which could serve to really juice up its Consumer Web Services – not well known among the Flickr cognoscenti but with tens of millions of users – see SnapFish, or HP’s Gabble for video sharing.

When I first saw HP offering video and photo sharing services I thought it was kind of odd HP was building them. But the more Facebook turns its service into a place where you definitely don’t want to share photos of your kids the more attractive a trusted wall garden look. Oh sure – these pictures of my kids? Yes please- use them in advertising without permission… awesome. knock yourself out.

And hey look – now HP can offer “safe” phone/camera/video recorders etc too. Who would bet against HP offering a Cisco Flip “killer” in the near future.

End To End

Relying on partners can kind of suck, especially in fast moving consumer spaces. And customers vote again and again for tightly integrated experiences. Mark Hurd has to look at Apple and think – I’d like a piece of that. And he only needs a small fraction of Apple’s success to make a ton of money, and push up the shareprice.

Waiting on Microsoft or Google? Why bother? With webOS HP is in charge of its own destiny. I must admit, I am pretty excited about the competition about to ensue between HP with webOS and Dell with Android. Win!

Bridging Enterprise and Consumer – The Killer App

HP, unlike many other firms, most notably IBM, wants to sell to both consumers and enterprises. Its not making any false distinctions. And it seems to me IBM is on the wrong side of history here, for all its part attempts at succeeding in the consumer market. As I said on Twitter earlier:

blurring of consumer and enterprise tech is real. IBM has to adjust to that reality “we don’t do consumer” is not a strategy

Palm is a great bridge, in terms of what it is, and what the brand means. What’s the difference between a consumer and an enterprise device? Who pays the bill, basically. HP will be able to sell slick phones in stores, or offer volume licensing deals to corporations, using its IT installed base to resell telecoms services, creating new linkages with telcos and carriers, rather than trying to cut them out of the loop. One needs to be wary of “halo” strategies- Sun for example struggled to turn mobile Java into money through Big Server sales. But unlike Sun, HP will be making good money on every device sold.

Phones are for work and play. That’s perfect for HP.

What if HP messes it up?

This is course a possibility. HP’s acquisition record is patchy at best. Apollo, DEC etc. HP acquired both Agilent (medical imaging and diagnostics) Verifone (Point of Sale card payment processing) and Bluestone (Java app server) only to spin them out later, having failed to make the mergers stick.

All that said – while the jury was out on HP-Compaq while Carly Fiorina was in charge, HP’s current CEO Mark Hurd has undoubtedly made a success of the deal, driving the necessary cost savings, and even delivering the much overused word in deal-making “synergy”.

I think HP needs a balance of hands off and hands on. One interesting point to note is that Todd Bradley, head of HP’s personal systems group used to work at Palm. Clearly he knows how the firm should work.

Partners, What Partners?

When I started running scenarios something stuck me pretty squarely. Microsoft’s failures in the mobile phone market made it easy for HP to pull the trigger on the Palm deal. Partner loyalty is one thing, but being loyalty to a market laggard is another. If you’re going to be in fourth place, why not do it from a position of ownership, with much better margin upside.

No Need To Act Like An Android Sheep

I am a huge fan of Google’s Android mobile OS. I have an HTC Magic and it makes me very happy indeed. Happy enough to award the Android folks my team of the year for 2009. Clearly Android has extraordinary market momentum – notably among Asian manufacturing firms. And yet. And yet… Google wants to sell its own phones too – in the shape of the Nexus One. At some point Android is going to start looking evil – and from an HP perspective, why should it give Google a channel for its software products every time it sells a phone?

And that, dear readers, is a wrap. I know that Michael and Stephen also have analysis coming, so I think that’s enough on the deal for now. IBM is a client, HP is not.

Really not sure how it got to Friday with no blogs posted yet this week. I blame analyst conferences!

But I wanted to get some thoughts down about the future of these events. In the last two weeks Cisco and Microsoft have both run events for analysts designed to minimise travel budgets. Welcome side effects of not flying include:

• Spending more time with our families. Any day that I get to see my wife and son is a better day.
• Cutting our carbon footprints. The main carbon in any professional services firm is travel. As I often say, I could live in a mud hut and only eat vegetables and my footprint would still be unacceptably high.
• People won’t accuse us of constant boondoggles

The missing element of both conferences was testing the experience. Live Meeting and Cisco Webex both have their pros and cons, but neither offers a painless and guaranteed access experience, especially when you want to use multimodal sharing off desktops, videos and so on. My only criticism then was that both vendors should have got us online to get the experience right before the events themselves.

Judith Hurwitz wrote a good piece about her experiences of the Microsoft Virtual Analyst Summit.

There is no substitute for personal interaction with people. When I attend an industry analyst meeting I pay attention to more than the words the speaker is saying

Fair point. But actually I found the 1:1 phone calls with Microsoft to be excellent. Particularly the session with a customer of Visual Studio.NET Team Services, Ted Malone of Configuresoft. I had never met Ted before but we just clicked. With no video or anything else. GREAT conversation. The human voice is a wonderful instrument for comprehension. Ted is funny, and astute and totally gets that software development is about collaboration rather than just “workflow”. Honestly – the quality of the 1:1s was good enough to generate 8/10+ ratings for four out of five one:ones.

Note that a computer can tell if someone on the phone is being truthful or not. Well we are better at parsing truthiness than any computer. All that said, given Microsoft send us a video camera before the event, and a hefty bag of candy, I assumed we were expected to do more video conferencing.

But what about online videos? Microsoft basically pre-canned presentations rather than live-streaming them. Judith said:

Will a typical analyst have the patience to watch five hours of pre-recorded videos? Not likely. I might listen to a video that I am particularly interested in (like cloud computing or service oriented architectures, for example). But I will not listen to all the presentations. There are simply too many distractions and too many things to do. That is the reality of my life as a researcher, analyst, and writer. The reality is that unless you present compelling presentations with information that draws me in you will not capture my attention for long periods of time.

Stat. On the other hand, I don’t like going to keynotes and sitting there for two hours. All tech vendors err on the side of WAY too much information in keynotes. These days I like to follow the example of my colleague Cote, and watch the keynote from the hotel room, where the net connection is assured, and my twitter community is with me. Canned video suits me pretty well.

Interestingly enough Cisco this week used telepresence tools for some presentations from Corp. (it ran a half day face to face event and a second day purely virtual) and honestly, at least one of these might as well have been a video. Some speakers were reading from scripts, and it showed. No eye contact.

Frankly, boring content or boring speakers are going to suck whatever the context.

Judith’s conclusions are basically my own:

1. Virtual conferences need really good planning and execution. It cannot simply be a disconnected voice with some slides on a shared screen. That is called a conference call.

2. Streaming or live video is wonderful but it needs to have the technology foundation so that it will work no matter what the customer/participant’s environment happens to be.

3. If virtual conferences are to work they have to be conferences.  I don’t think that we have good models for executing virtual conferences that work. They need to be electric, informative, and have interactivity.  Right now the virtual meeting is not a true model. It is simply old execution applied to a new idea.

I think that we will see the emergence of a true virtual conferencing model. I can’t tell you that I can visualize a virtual conference that I would enjoy. Like many analysts, I am not good at passively sitting and watching. I need to be engaged and part of the action. I am not sure how you do this virtually. But I am ready to be surprised and delighted since it would be great not to get on an airplane.

All in all though this was a first time for both Cisco and Microsoft, so of course you’re going to get teething problems.  And I am looking forward to seeing Robb Mapp, from Microsoft analyst relations face to face when he visits London in a couple of weeks. I will buy him a pint.  One thing you can’t do virtually is share a beer.

disclosure: Microsoft is a client. I did drink beer during its event, after six pm.

The major theme for Cisco at this year’s C-Scape conference for analysts was video, which makes a great deal of sense. Too much of the internet has been tell, and now it can be show.

Video is one of RedMonk’s fastest growing revenue streams, for example. Its important to understand that amongst all last year’s excitement about We, The Media, and Man of the Year being you, a major fact was forgotten. The Youtube revolution isn’t just for kids sitting down, dancing on video. Its not just a “consumer” phenomenon. Its also all about B2B.

Every conference I go to now is like a competition to see who can video who the most. RedMonk is watching you watching us watching you. IBM does Gonzo video. So does everyone.

Companies not just individuals.

This video revolution of course creates opportunity – and Cisco is jumping in with a video server, the Media Experience Engine 3000, which re-purposes video for different form factors from phones to High Def, which I believe retails at $56k.

Cisco competing with Apple? Who would have thunk it? To really make its ambitions count I believe Cisco will make a play for Adobe, filling out a video internet value chain from low to high production to the web.

All in all Cisco clearly sees a strategic opportunity in hypermedia. So much so, that it now talks about the medianet rather than the internet. Cisco has a lot of work to do, but its right that their is a lot of opportunity in video.

disclosure: I wrote this post in ten minutes, so if you see any mistakes please let me know. Cisco is not currently a client, but it paid my T&E to C-Scape in San Jose. See you in London…