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It's a long walk to orange business live when the tubes are on strike. Little Anthony needs a rest.

 #orangelive09

Stewart Baines
Futurity Media
stewartbaines@futuritymedia.com

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Day 2 of the Orange Business Services customer event here in London. Despite the industrial action going on in public transport in London today, we are getting ready for a very interesting set of presentations, videocasts, podcasts etc.

Yesterday, more than 2000 people followed the debates and discussions online.

Stay tuned to our blogs.

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com/live
> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness

This buzz session covered how to improve the efficiency of your ict infrastructure and looked at three key areas: wan optimization, cloud computing & m2m. The key takeaways were:
1. Look at entire ICT infra
2. Gain visibility before WAN optimisation
3. Look to selective outsourcing
4. Test less critical apps in cloud computing
5. Improve business processes through m2m
 
More on this later...

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com
> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness

We've just attended the 'Preparing for the new Future' session with the Keynote from John Gantz, Chief Research officer of IDC. Hear are my notes from his presentation, which make interesting reading and which will be turned into a full post soon;

Periodic crisis, the economy will get better and the economic versus IT spending trends don’t match, some years the poor state of the economy is good for IT and vice-versa The IT industry marches to a different drum than the economy, there’s major IT shifts, the mainframe, the PC, etc.

Economic crisis as a technology change agent and an economy full of stress and duress, IT will play a part in the change whether we like it or not.

IBM, GE, Burger King, HP, CNN, MTV, FedEx, Hyatt are all companies launched in a recession.

Telecom spend in Emerging markets, 42%

Internet users 60%

Mobile users 67% outside western Europe.

I – Workers 72% are outside of mature markets.

Eligible users outside of mature migrates 84%

Spend will migrate to where the people are.

Tech adoption. In emerging markets

IT staff – 1.1X growth, 10% practically no growth. – more with less

Servers – 1.9X growth. Almost 100% (virtual servers, 2009 virtual out shipped real servers)

Mobile Internet Users – 3.0X 300% growth

Non Traditional Devices – wireless meters etc 3.6X, IP surveillance cameras etc. M2M. – security issues, real time process management.

Information  5.1X each device, creates and captures information.don’t have to store but have to transport it. 85% of information is responsibility of the enterprise.

User interactions – number of connections between people on a network, 8.4X, number of people Internet times the ways to communicate. 840% growth. – how end user enablement, system capacity, Enterprise Policy.

All these pressure, and limited staff, need to be deal with resource efficiencies, Complexity and Economies of scale, off premises. Will not leave past next 4 years without outside help Change over time in a new technology paradigm, smart adopters can pull ahead. Leaders are already pulling head.

Hot

Security management

Mobile data

Enterprise social media

Business Analytics

IT outsourcing & BPO

SaaS

Virtual Machines.

Search and Discovery

Storage replication

IT automation.

Watch

Visualisation mgt sw

Real time analytics

Ethical hacking.

IT driven sustainability

Location based services

Video search

Compliance

Reputation management sw

M2M

Out of crisis comes opportunity - the Chinese word for crisis and opportunity is the same, if you move the radical around, i.e. do some work to turn crisis into opportunity.

(not a comprehensive account, will also be covered more comprehensively on our http://blogs.orange-business.com/live)

How the crisis will act as a catalyst?
Emerging markets is where the people are. This is where the money will be made and where IT will develop. Difficulty is how to develop one's business in these markets?

Technology adoption between now and 2012.
- IT staff x 1.1 (cost-cutting measures)
- servers x 1.9 because of virtual servers
- mobile Internet users x 3: means a lot in terms of security, burst of communicatipons costs. Rise of mobile applications with impact on maintenance and support
- non traditional devixces x 3.6 including surveillance, m2m in real time navigatin systems, software control
- information x 5.1 more devices being connected. More data exchanged. Not all data has to be stored. 50% of information produced by users and not by the companies that they belong to
- user interactions x 8.4 number of people being connected to one another. More interconnections, uses of social media, twittering etc. How do you support this and how do you make it possible for these users to host their stuff?

There will be as a result, a lot of pressure on IT departments. The pb is resource sharing and the difficulty is management complexity. That will be a long journey. With that kind of pressure, none will be able to deliver without getting some help from outside partners.

Opportunities

Hot areas (high growth rates): enterprise social media, decentralised information, all depts will want their access to information, IT, BPO outsourcing, SaaS (only item for which numbers are up after the crisis has hit)

Watch: virtualisation, m2m, ...

BUT IT will have to reorganise

The idea that IT is a subcontractor of business units and has Service Levels with them is not really working anymore. Business and ICT frontiers will blur. ICT success will be driven by business units.

Conclusion

The next 4 years will be a period of opportunity
Those ahead of he curve will be he winners
Doing so will require "all hands on deck"including partners

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com
> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness

Here are some of the bullet points that I picked up from one of the Buzz sessions on reducing costs. The items are way's in which you can reduce your costs quickly, I paid particulary attention to the reducing the access costs sections which are spot on. The Session ran by having options for the audience to use, so they came in a random order. So here are a few ways to reduce costs;

Save up to 10% of access spend

Increasing market complexity and a wider choice of access means along with reviewing you access inventory over time, leased line tariff decrease 5% per year

-         opening local markets - new entrants and new technologies.

-         entrance of new players - alternative carriers offer competitiion.

-         roll out of new tech - Leased Line to Ethernet.

Case study, Financial institude.

16% reduction through change of supplier.

Payback in 6 months.

Renagotiation 4%

Reducing mobility by 50%

Looking at business Everywhere to reduce costs.

‘black budget’ wi-fi costs on expenses, where employees use travel expenses to pay for wi-fi, which remains hidden.

Reducing access by 20% by replaing high speed leased lines with Ethernet.

Data traffic doubling every 18 months.

Ethernet is a true alternative and is 25% cheaper.

Single protocol.

Future upgrades are cheap.

Orange 32 countries.

Target for headquarters, data centers and sites with high capacity.

Hidden spending.

Long distance calls for conferencing.

Audio bridge in US and global workforce, people have to dial +1 to the US to reach the bridge.

Mobile workforce, also dialing in to conference bridge and dialing into US bridge is very experience.

Local numbers in 55 countries, so users can dial a local call.

Toll free or local calls, by bringing the calls into your VPN(?)

Case study

500 people, 12.5% on road/mobile, saved 300K euro, just be avoiding those international charges.

12,700 Euro per user per year.

Reduce corp real estate expense and improve productivity.

Intro flex work arrangements to share office space.

Remote worker profiles.

Road warrior, engineers

Home office worker. -  support etc

SSL Web based soltuon provides access to the corp network.

Green solution too.

Example – desk sharing stragey saved Orange 12,700 euro’s per user, per year.

DSL can offer 25% saving.

Using DSL to replace low speed lines.

ADSL in 157 contries.

SDSL 18 countries.

Orange can help you choose.

Balance trade off between performance and cost.

Small office solution service,

#orangelive09

Ahmed Hamzawy, GM for UAE and Head of Sales (MEA region) for Orange Business Services.

After parts 2 & 3 dedicated to offshoring, Ahmed depicted the regional view. Ahmed is Egyptian but he is based in Dubai.

All countries in Gulf talk Arabic but all are very different. Some souks unchanged for centuries and modern shopping malls. Very diverse. Camels and sretched limos ... Egypt has 80m inhabitants, Qatar only 0.8m! Some rich, some poor. Working all day but free time on Fridays, except in Lebanon. Normal days all month and special month of Rahmadan.

Doing business:
- growing economies, willingness to invest, available liquidiy, easy access to CxO's, skilles resouces
But there are challenges
- cultural differences, strong restrictive regulations, hard to accept remote support (like to see people)

Orange Business Services in that region
Is growing with double digit revenue growth because Orange Business Services understood the culture very well

Solutions for operators being developed in that region, and also solutions for real estate developers.

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com
> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness