| This week's sponsor is PGi. |  | Webinar: IT and Marketing: Extreme Collaboration
Tuesday, August 26th, 2pm ET / 11am PT | New Editorial Event!
Media outlets love to focus on the tension between IT and marketing. But if it's a war, both sides lose. Instead, CIOs have to partner with CMOs to help deliver on aggressive business goals in an ever-changing landscape. Register Today! |
Also Noted: Spotlight On... Why we swallowed the surveillance-based business model
OpenShift embraces Docker too; British newspaper being too forgetful; and much more...  Follow FierceEnterpriseCommunications on Twitter!
News From the Fierce Network:
1. California court rules that employers must reimburse all BYOD calls
2. Amazon's push into mobile payments could reflect industry trends
3. MIT's new data visualization tool identifies, removes aberrant results
Today's Top News 1. On second thought, 1.1 million comments to FCC weren't enough
In a surprise change of plans late Friday afternoon, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it has extended the already-expired deadline for public comments regarding its proposed revisions to Open Internet regulations until September 15. The move was made, according to the announcement, "to ensure that members of the public have as much time as was initially anticipated to reply to initial comments in these proceedings." Last week, FCC Special Counsel for External Affairs Gigi Sohn promised on the Commission blog that "every" (both boldfaced and italicized) one of the over 1.1 million public comments it had already received, will be reviewed as part of the official record. However, Sohn did not specify how this review would take place. Conceivably, this is a big data application if ever there was one. But another distinct possibility is that the Commission may find itself hiring temporary help simply to handle the deluge of comments it has already received. Extending the deadline once again may have been the most graceful way for the commission to postpone its time of completion for having reviewed all the comments, as Sohn promised. A check of the FCC's comment system just minutes after the Commission issued its announcement showed that 10 new comments had already been posted. Among them was this from a fellow in Richmond, Virginia: "The Internet is a repository of ideas and knowledge and incubator for innovation, and net neutrality is critical to ensuring the free flow of ideas and information. As well, state-granted monopolies are and should be subject to government oversight. In this instance, Internet service providers should not be allowed to discriminate against different content providers. The risks are straightforward and shared by all users of the Internet, while the benefits of such discrimination are only available to service providers, in the form of increased revenue; [to] content providers, in the form of being better able to promote their content; and [to] certain users who want access to the preferred content. The irony is that the Internet is the ultimate free market for ideas, and the service providers wish to profit from their regulation of that marketplace. Don't cave into this absurdity." But on the other end of the spectrum, there was this from a lady in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in support of Chairman Tom Wheeler's consideration to reclassify Internet services under Title II of the Telecommunications Act: "Reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers will prevent online discrimination as well as protecting consumers. Safeguard the public interest by keeping the Internet free." Related Articles:
Latest stage of net neutrality's war of the words ends with no victors
Net neutrality supporters: Deep packet inspection is a dangerous weapon
Another side of net neutrality: The case in favor of Title II Read more about: Net Neutrality
back to top |
2. Google, Amazon, partners to Obama: Don't solve a privacy problem that's not there
Any effort by the Obama Administration to support legislation that would tighten government compliance controls for major service providers, particularly around big data, could have the unwanted side-effect of stifling creativity and competition. That's the message given last August 5 by the Internet Association, an industry association that describes itself as "the unified voice of the Internet economy," whose members include Google, Yahoo, Amazon and AOL. Having read a report issued last May by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) after a 90-day review, ordered by the President, of possible policy initiatives for the big data industry, the authors of an Internet Association open letter to the Commerce Dept.'s NTIA (.pdf) advise the Administration to conduct another study into what they call "the existing regime" before taking any regulatory action or supporting legislative action. "At this time, any legislative proposal, to address 'big data' may result in a 'precautionary principle problem' that hinders the advancement of technologies and innovative services before they even develop," reads the letter. "Given the breadth of existing protections for consumers, we encourage the Administration to carefully examine the existing regime to avoid negative, unintended consequences." The letter then criticizes the NTIA report itself, saying that "a majority of concerns raised by the report were largely speculative rather than actual harms. This calls into question whether there is a need to engage policymakers and industry on this issue rather than focusing attention and resources to areas where users experience real harms, such as data security." It then called attention to the report's singling out how certain analytics practices, such as profiling, could result in discrimination against citizens. Stating that discrimination is a different type of injustice from a privacy breach, the Association suggested that officials turn their attention to the former, and perhaps let privacy breaches become a real problem before applying premature remedies. The Internet Association letter comes on the same day that Microsoft, under its own auspices, sent the NTIA a letter of its own (.pdf) urging the Administration to support "comprehensive federal privacy legislation." Penned by the company's deputy general counsel, David A. Heiner, the letter comes just days after a U.S. District Court judge in New York ordered Microsoft to comply with a Dept. of Justice warrant for emails believed to be stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland--in violation of E.U. laws. "Without new privacy legislation, U.S. companies will find themselves increasingly disadvantaged compared to foreign providers that will compete against U.S. companies in their home and other jurisdictions based on more protective privacy regimes," writes Heiner. "Over time, absent sound rules of the road, it will likely become harder for U.S. companies to keep the trust of consumers worldwide... The adoption of a comprehensive U.S. privacy law may, conversely, encourage the flow of data to the United States, triggering increased physical data center infrastructure and generating more big data-focused jobs and growth here at home. A comprehensive U.S. regime may also act as a counterpoint to more restrictive third-country proposals, inspiring countries to adopt a less protectionist view of privacy and encouraging the free flow of data globally--to the benefit of businesses and their customers both in the United States and abroad." The need for comprehensive privacy law emerges, Heiner goes on to argue, from the Administration's own Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights--a set of fundamental principles which Microsoft believes mandate the creation of laws to support them. The White House announced late Friday that Nicole Wong, the U.S. Deputy CTO who co-authored the NIST report, will leave her post effective today. For more:
- Consumer Privacy: Can the FTC Enforce a Voluntary Code of Conduct? [ReadWriteWeb, March 9, 2012]
- EU Commissioner: US Should Catch Up with Europe on Data Privacy [ReadWriteWeb, March 20, 2012]
- U.S. Deputy CTO Nicole Wong is leaving the White House [Washington Post] Related Articles:
Obama should push Congress to beef up big data privacy protections, says report [FierceITSecurity]
Along came the Data Transparency Coalition to clear things up [FierceBigData] Read more about: Microsoft
back to top |
3. John Chambers: Cisco's move to SDN will take many years
Ever the optimist, Cisco CEO John Chambers, is informing both reporters and investors that he is now reinventing Cisco "one more time." Standing in front of one of his company's dual-screen videoconferencing devices on Thursday, Chambers touted the high points of an earnings report released the day before that was basically flat. "Our strategy is working," he told Bloomberg Television, "our investors get that, and we're well on our way to reinventing Cisco one more time." His radiant smile was adorned by a lower-thirds graphic that read, "Cisco Slashes 6,000 from Workforce." Reinventing Cisco is a concept that Chambers has repeated so often over the previous five years that, during Wednesday's Q4 2014 earnings call at one point (Seeking Alpha transcript), he said "reinvent" when he meant "reinvest." From the transcript, Chambers also said: In 2011, we saw how rapidly the market was changing and understood that we require transformational change at our company. We saw these market changes earlier than our peers, and understood the market dynamics were not unique to Cisco. We required a strategic approach, and not tactical responses to the coming transactions... We rolled out our transformational plan with two principal objectives: First, drive innovation, speed, agility and efficiencies in our business and second, to transform the company to move from selling boxes to selling first architectures, then solutions, and now outcomes. Operationally, we've done a very good job against those objectives which has afforded us flexibility today and how we go after market opportunities. If Cisco is now in the business of selling "outcomes," then at least some of those outcomes are turning up negative. Chambers' interview on Bloomberg TV comes in the wake of a report in Bloomberg online overnight last Wednesday, featuring three of Cisco's own customers taking the unprecedented step of making a public plea with Cisco to change its policies or lose their business. The customers included investment firm Goldman Sachs, whose own networking analyst Simona Jankowski issued a report last April explaining the SDN platform market as completely different from the network switch market, with fragmentation preventing any one player--especially Cisco--from gaining more than a toehold. Yet the positive spin placed on the report after its publication was so successful that Jankowski's having distinguished Cisco and Juniper Networks from Apple and Google led headline writers to say Jankowski claimed them to be the Apple and Google of networking... and furthermore, that Cisco was the next Apple. In the most overt effort I've ever seen to suspend the spin, Goldman Sachs CIO Martin Chavez told Bloomberg on Wednesday that he had previously said to Cisco's Chambers, "What we spent on your gear last year is not what we're going to spend on your gear this year, unless you do something really different." One of Cisco's biggest customers is publicly laying down the gauntlet, demanding that Cisco take no longer than 12 months to complete the reinvention course it began in 2009. Chambers' response later that afternoon may not have come as much of a relief: We understand that the results of our strategy and many of the decisions we make may not be evident in a single quarter, and in fact at times we'll create volatility through our results from time-to-time. We also know that some of the investments we are making today would take several years to pay off. Taking a multi-year view, I'm confident that when we look back in time, this transformative period will be a distinguished part of Cisco's history, where we made both choices, moved aggressively and ensured our long-term strategic value for our customers, shareholders, partners and employees. For more:
- Cisco CEO Pressured by Goldman Sachs to Embrace Software [by Peter Burrows, Bloomberg]
- Barrons' report on Cisco and Juniper's slow embrace of SDN Related Articles:
Cisco tries new collaboration, compliance tools for diverse work environments
Cisco CEO Chambers: Most corporations will die unless networks can adapt Read more about: Cisco
back to top |
4. IETF working groups co-chair: Real standards need reference implementations
In the first part of FierceEnterpriseCommunications' interview with Brocade Networks Distinguished Engineer Tom Nadeau, he spoke about the need for a mature open source technology such as the OpenStack orchestration layer to be championed by a central, unifying leader that other contributors can look to for guidance, but not dominance. But OpenStack's history can still be measured in months, with its non-profit backer OpenStack Foundation having been founded in September 2012. How can a project that's barely two years old be anything close to mature? "Standards, and even open source, need to happen more or less organically. However, I think you can have a schedule, and you can guide the process," Nadeau tells us. As co-chair of the NETMOD Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, Nadeau is the caretaker of a language called YANG (no relation to Jerry), which is used to specify the order and arrangement of components in a network management data model. "When I form a design team to go work on a model, I don't say, 'All right, you guys have 30 days to get this thing done.' What I do is insist they have weekly meetings, for example. I do some project management. If people are left to their own devices, they will find higher priorities." When he joined the OpenDaylight project as a developer, he says, it was a fairly loose, open-ended project. As he describes it, OpenDaylight remains somewhat loose, especially compared to OpenStack, which he says is "highly regimented now." He points to OpenStack's use of so-called launchpad blueprints, which are formalized methods for proposing new features and getting them under way once approved. "The blueprint and the approval process are what a mature project needs. That's what makes it a richer project," he says. "I think that's why OpenStack, in the last 18 months, has narrowed down and refocused, and suddenly become a very viable alternative to using VMware, because of its stability and reliability and predictability. Yet it remains a very vibrant open source project." The mark of a truly mature development team, he continues, is its ability to produce reference implementations: working models that can actually be deployed in some production scenarios, even if the working level is minimal. "Existing standards processes, like at the IETF and ITU, were driven in the past by what amounted to a really long process for developing services, getting specifications written, getting protocols specified, getting code written in equipment, and then deploying that stuff. That was often a multi-year process--four or five years, in fact. I was part of the group that made MPLS, and we went through this brutally painful process. It took several years to get the first deployments of MPLS, and even though those were at places that were willing to take so-called 'non-stamped standards' to market." Those processes were driven mainly by requirements, he continues, which in turn drove vendors and service providers to specify on-the-wire protocols--the acceptable patterns and formats of bits traveling over the wire. But those standards did not specify how implementations should work. One example of a standard afflicted by this process, Nadeau gives us, is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)--the standard responsible for the ever-more-frequent problem of routers running up against the upper limits of their databases. "If you look at how BGP continues to be, frankly, an absolute mess to actually deploy--there are probably over 100 RFCs now around BGP, for all kinds of little, tiny extensions and optimizations--all of those things are driven by the fact that there really aren't any good reference implementations that people can see, other than at Cisco or Juniper. So in contrast to that whole process, imagine a world where you have one implementation that everybody uses. And that's really what open source is: Everybody can still get together and do the on-the-wire protocol specs, and things like that, but then they build a reference implementation, which then not only embodies the on-the-wire protocols, but also the literal processing of those messages." Surprisingly, Nadeau goes on to say that a properly formed reference implementation can reduce the need for interoperability testing among vendors. Once components made by competing vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper, are plugged together, then if both followed the reference implementation, there's a greater chance of them working out of the box. For some telcos, that's a savings of 9 to 12 months of testing. "One of the big things that open source brings to the table is that real possibility to super-accelerate deployment of new technologies and new services. When you deploy OpenStack in your network, you typically take a distribution from one of the three main distributors, and you deploy it. You don't need to test it for nine months before you deploy your orchestration system; it's just there and it works." Related Articles:
Brocade's Tom Nadeau: OpenStack deserves a champion
IPv4 size barrier for routing tables may be hit this week Read more about: OpenStack
back to top |
5. Munich city official takes heat for thinking about ditching Linux for Windows
It was already being declared a success--in the context of information technology, on a scale approaching the fall of the Berlin Wall: the city of Munich, Germany's 2004 migration plan away from proprietary software, specifically Microsoft's Windows and Office, and towards a specialized distribution of Ubuntu Linux called LiMux. It was part of the German government's effort to follow the European Union's lead in avoiding situations where government services found themselves restricted and constrained by a foreign country's standards and formats. But now, Munich Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid tells the online publication Süddeutsche.de (translating from German text) that his city has reached a state of desperation. Now Schmid is calling for a study to investigate the feasibility, and potential benefits, of moving some 15,000 city officials' desktops back from LiMux to Windows. One very large clue as to Munich's problem came two years ago, when the makers of the open source productivity suite LibreOffice (which uses OpenDocument format) announced that Munich would be changing its office productivity suite transition plans from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. This announcement came a full eight years after the previous transition officially began, leading some German journalists to wonder what was really going on. The answer was made clear by a very telling headline published in 2013 (translating from the German): nothing. As city officials stated just after the turn of the century, the problem with the mostly Windows-based systems they had was software fragmentation and the lack of standard choices, according to published reports. Despite the fact that Office was being used for general productivity, for example, city departments made their own choices about which applications to use, for instance, for designing Web pages or editing photographs. Each application stuck to its own proprietary standards, and IT workers were bogged down with requests for translating files (you can just imagine the floppy disk traffic) from one set of formats to another. But the problem that some city officials now report doesn't sound much different. Although LiMux comes with its own selection of free and open source software for a variety of general purposes, it appears general purposes are not the problem. There's evidence that federal government officials may be bringing in their own computing devices for special purposes. Specifically, the publication golem.de cites a lack of outrage among federal workers about the use of proprietary formats, who are evidently only using the ODF format when they really need to--an indication that they're bringing Office to work with them. Schmid is quoted by several sources as saying that his city is paying real money to adapt LiMux to the needs of city workers, though he did not say how much. Though supporters of the ongoing migration state it has already saved the city some €10 million in licensing expenses, a 2013 study conducted on Munich's behalf by HP (translated from the German) stated the city spent a full €61 million in IT-related expenses, including re-training, just to avoid spending license fees. Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter recently admitted to the press that, in the time he was waiting for Linux-based software to finish its job, he could go sing a song. Schmidt says he's willing to consider the possibility of advocating a move back to Windows--as a fan of neither system himself, he says, he hasn't made a decision. But Schmidt's comments have already been derided (translated from the German) as appeasements to Microsoft, specifically since the company is already doing a migration of its own: It's moving its German headquarters to Munich, and expects to be operational there by Summer 2016. For more:
- Munich shifts to LibreOffice [by Brian Proffitt, ITWorld, October 17, 2012]
- Microsoft Deutschland GmbH relocates its headquarters [Eversheds German real estate news, November 18, 2013] Related Articles:
Linux Foundation enlists Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook to help save OpenSSL
Cumulus Linux leaders: OpenFlow SDNs already outmoded Read more about: OpenDocument
back to top |
Also Noted SPOTLIGHT ON... Why we swallowed the surveillance-based business model Ethan Zuckerman is the director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, and the author of a book called Rewire, where he makes the case that the very forces that made the Web "free" to begin with have empowered corporate influences to take it over again, thus channeling the flow of ideas into potentially dangerous political silos. In Zuckerman's latest article for The Atlantic, he tells a difficult-to-dispute story about the only business model that Web investors were willing to swallow in large numbers: targeted advertising. As a result, most every positive idea Web developers may have had--him included--were channeled into methods for delivering targeted advertising. And since it happened so slowly (this is the part I must wholeheartedly agree with), people's attitudes toward allowing their habits to be observed and monitored were allowed to change organically. So Zuckerman makes the case that we sold ourselves out, but piecemeal rather than all at once. Read more: The Internet's Original Sin [by Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic] > Consumerization and the CIO - Now Available On-Demand From devices to services to apps, end users have a lot of choices - and those choices are bleeding into enterprise IT faster than ever. How do these changes affect IT strategy, budget and infrastructure? Register to watch now! > IT and Marketing: Extreme Collaboration - Tuesday, August 26th / 2pm ET / 11am PT Media outlets love to focus on the tension between IT and marketing. But if it's a war, both sides lose. Instead, CIOs have to partner with CMOs to help deliver on aggressive business goals in an ever-changing landscape. Register Today! > Advancing the federal cybersecurity workforce - Wednesday, September 10th | 2pmET/11amPT Join NIST and NICE leaders as they explore The National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, innovative spproaches to cybersecurity training and workforce improvement, the broader focus of NICE in advancing cybersecurity awareness nationawide, and more! Register Today!
| > eBook: 5 Key Strategies for Successful Mobile Engagement Read this eBook to discover how you can deliver highly targeted, personalized content and services to your customers across all mobile channels – and the key strategies that are critical to a successful mobile approach. Download today! > Whitepaper: Supporting VDIs and Thin Clients Companies have already begun deploying VDIs and thin clients (like Google's Chromebook) on a massive scale. The low-cost, easily deployed workstations present a significant cost savings for companies, but require unique tools to support them. This whitepaper, written by Proxy Networks, outlines the best way to do that. Download now. > eBook: eBrief | Making BYOD Work: 4 Critical Strategies for Midmarket and SMB Companies Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) can be a blessing for mid-size and small businesses. But getting the real payoff requires some attention to details that may differ from those at large enterprises. Download this eBrief to get more practical advice for making BYOD work. > eBook: Advanced Threat Defense Tactics Advanced Persistent Threats online are a painful reality for companies of all sizes. If your business has something of value to online criminals, you should assume that it will be targeted -- or already has been. Download this eBook today to find out about the nature of online threats, the particular risks your organization faces and special IT tactics needed to secure your infrastructure. | |
Editor: 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.