Despite the unseasonably cold weather, I participated in a mobile security event yesterday at the historic Willard hotel in Washington DC. I set the stage and presented a bunch of ESG Research data on mobile device use, security, and management. Other organizations presenting included the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the (NRC), the US Patent and Trademark Office, and Juniper Networks.
It turns out that DISA is doing some very interesting things around mobile computing. For example, members of the US military can access an information portal called Defense Knowledge Online from their mobile phones. DISA also talked about a program called Go Mobile meant to provide numerous communications, training, and collaboration applications to mobile soldiers.
Since we are talking about the US Department of Defense, mobile device security is a critical requirement for this program so Go Mobile includes user authentication, secure data storage and transfer, secure device management, etc.
Initially Go Mobile was built for Blackberry devices but DISA is now adding support for Apple iPhones and Android phones because of high demand from users. Unfortunately, adding iPhone and Android support is more difficult than DISA anticipated. Why? Because both Apple and Google refuse to give DISA access to their security APIs so DISA had to do a series of workarounds to meet its security requirements. For example, DISA had to add an external Bluetooth device to provide secure personal networking capabilities because Apple wouldn’t provide API access to its iPhone security stack.
Hold the phone here! Apple and Google aren’t willing to provide additional technical support to the United States Department of Defense? Nope. One person I spoke with from DOD said that Apple flat out refused to play ball, telling DOD to “talk to our integrators and carriers.”
I understand that Apple and Google want to control their technology. If Citi or GE asked for API access, perhaps it would make technical sense to refuse but we are talking about the Department of Defense here.
Apple and Google have a market advantage and they know it — Androids and iPhones are so popular that Apple and Google can thumb their noses at DOD. In most cases, DOD would exercise cyber supply chain security best practice and refuse to purchase insecure Androids or iPhones at all. The fact that DOD is going the extra mile and developing workarounds demonstrates that it is willing to do the right thing for American troops in spite of this lack of industry cooperation.
It seems to me that Apple and Google are making self-centered bad decisions here that won’t play well with the American public. Clearly, Apple and Google should re-think these myopic and selfish policies. Providing API access to DOD is the patriotic and moral thing to do, especially since DOD is opening the door to lots of sales opportunities for both companies.
Tags: Apple, Bluetooth, cyber security, cyber supply chain security, Department of defense, DISA, DOD, Go Mobile, Google, iPhone, Juniper Networks, mobile computing, mobile devices, Security. Android Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Have you heard of the Technology CEO Council? Neither had I until recently. The council is made up of a strange mix of tech CEOs from organizations including Applied Materials, , , IBM, Intel, Micron, and Motorola. Why this group and not Adobe, Cisco, HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec? Beats me.
Anyway, the group published a paper in early October called, “One Trillion Reasons: How Commercial Best Practices to Maximize Productivity Can Save Taxpayer Money and Enhance Government Services.” The paper stresses the need to reduce federal spending and suggests some IT initiatives in support of this objective. The initiatives include:
The paper is available at www.techceocouncil.org.
I agree with the spirit of this paper as there are plenty of ways to use IT costs savings to reduce overall federal spending. That said, the paper is pretty weak and self-serving. Specifically:
The CEOs also need to remember that their own internal IT organizations are far different than those in the federal government. When EMC executives mandate a massive VMware project, all of IT jumps into formation. It doesn’t work that way in the public sector.
There were certainly some good points in the paper, but overall it is really a marketing piece put out by a lobbying organization. In my humble opinion, there is some irony in this paper and organization–while the Technology CEO Council puts out a paper about how the federal government can save money on IT, companies like Dell, EMC, IBM, and Intel are happily wasting dough on a half-baked lobbying/PR organization. Funny world.
Tags: Applied Material, CIA, Cloud Computing, data center consolidation, Dell, DHS, DISA, EMC, Federal Enterprise Architecture, FedRAMP, FISMA, IBM, Intel, Klinger-Cohen Act, Micron, Motorola, NASA, Technology CEO Council, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
If you’re interested in cloud computing, you should look into the activities at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). DISA provides complex IT services for DoD including network services, computing services, and complex application development services. DISA is also a leading example of cloud computing in the U.S. Federal government. For example, it has created its Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) to automatically provision resources for application testing and development. RACE is complemented by FORGE.mil, a series of open source collaborative development components. DISA will also lead the effort to consolidate thousands of e-mail and Sharepoint domains across the military into global enterprise services.
I participated in the Virtualization, Cloud, and Green Computing summit in Washington DC for the past few days and heard a review of DISA’s cloud progress from its CIO, Henry Sienkiewicz. Henry was talking leading edge stuff and as a geeky analyst, I was all ears.
When it came to the Q&A portion of his presentation however, I was quickly brought back to earth by the reality of DISA’s mission. The first question came from an Air Force officer who was leaving Washington DC that evening headed back to the Middle East. In contrast to the whiz-bang cloud computing efforts in Washington, the officer asked what DISA could do to help with network communications in Afghanistan. Both the Army and Air Force are responsible for IT activities in theater and they go about their business in different ways. Army people tend to go in and set up quickly, ready to move IT assets at any time. The Air Force on the other hand takes a more strategic view and sets up for longer engagements. Neither approach is right or wrong–the problem is that Army and Air Force troops don’t really coordinate their efforts leading to redundancy, inefficiency, and IT downtime.
The second real problem is bandwidth. While we here in the States have a choice between fiber providers, there isn’t any glass in the ground in Afghanistan. Army guys may run fiber and then leave it in the ground when they leave, but most communication is based upon satellites. This makes for a very thin pipe–not nearly enough to take advantage of rich DISA cloud applications running in Ft. Meade, MD.
CIO Sienkiewicz said he was aware of the problems and responded to the requests in general terms. When I spoke to the Air Force officer later, he told me that Sienkiewicz approached him after his talk to reassure him that he understood his plight. It seems that DISA’s CIO started his career in the Army infantry so he was extremely empathetic. Sienkiewicz really doesn’t own this problem, but my guess is that he will try and work with others at DoD to fix it.
There is a lesson to be learned in this dialogue. We in IT love to work on vision and hate to fix the mundane things that are broken. The Air Force officer’s issue is nothing new–telecommunications carriers have been struggling with the “last mile” of the network forever. In this case however, the last mile isn’t between a telecom CO and a residential neighborhood demanding HDTV, it is between “boots on the ground” and command-and-control units engaged in life-and-death communications. Cloud computing rapid deployment, resource optimization, and burstable capacity-on-demand are extremely beneficial, assuming we have the networks in place to take advantage of these resources. For the sake of our troops, let’s all hope that these prosaic yet critical network issues are addressed ASAP.
Tags: Cloud Computing, DISA, DOD, Henry Sienkiewicz, US Army, USAF Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Cisco Systems (CSCO) has long had a unique competitive position in the enterprise market. In the glory days of the mainframe, IBM still competed with HDS and Amdahl, but Cisco has had the enterprise networking market to itself for a number of years.
This monopoly seems to be at its greatest risk ever — ESG calls this market phenomenon the Cisco squeeze. Think of Cisco in the middle of a big triangle with the competition closing in on Cisco from three distinct fronts:
1. Innovation. Juniper’s (JNPR) Trio chipset and 3-D architecture set a new plateau for networking performance that Cisco can’t match. Yes, this is probably a bigger threat in the service provider market than the enterprise, but large enterprises like DISA and NYSE are buying into Juniper innovation. Beyond Juniper, companies like F5 Networks (FFIV), Citrix (CTSX), and Riverbed (RVBD) are out innovating Cisco in strategic areas as well. Finally, small enterprises are looking longer at innovative and affordable alternatives like Extreme Networks (EXTR), Force10, and even 3Com (COMS) to get better end-to-end functionality at a lower price point.
2. Commodification. While aggressive innovators hurt Cisco at the high margin data center and core network, commodification hurts Cisco at the edge. The best example here is HP. Low-cost edge and wiring closet switches with lifetime warranties are increasingly “good enough” for many Cisco customers. If history repeats itself and the low end scales to eat the high end, HP (HOQ), Dell (DELL), and other commodity networking vendors will continue to gain share at Cisco’s expense.
3. Server vendors. With its introduction of UCS (aka: California), Cisco effectively alienated major partners Dell, HP, and IBM (IBM). Publicly each of these companies say that they will continue to work with Cisco but privately they are mobilizing the troops. Both Dell and IBM now OEM networking equipment from Brocade (BRCD)and Juniper while HP is bolstering its ProCurve offerings with new products and partners. The rumor is that HP will no longer pay its sales reps commission on selling Cisco gear — that will certainly change selling behavior.
Cisco is a huge successful company with good products, great support, and some of the best sales and marketing in the industry. It also has done a great job diversifying into new areas like Telepresence, consumer electronics, unified messaging, and yes, even servers. Cisco is a machine that will continue to flourish but it clearly faces greater competitive and market pressures today than ever before.
Here are a few things I’ll be watching for over the next few quarters:
1. Layoffs or budget cuts in sales, marketing, or field support. This will tell me that margins are eroding, existing field skills are no longer useful, or Cisco is losing strategic battles.
2. “Back to basics” messages from John Chambers. If the ever-visionary Cisco CEO starts speaking to Wall Street in cliches like, “we took our eye off the ball,” or “we need to get back to basic blocking and tackling,” things are way worse than most people think.
3. Big acquisitions. If Cisco goes out and buys an F5 Networks, Riverbed, or ArcSight (ARST), it tells me that internal innovation can no longer keep up with the market.
4. Server deals. If Cisco wins large UCS deals, everything else will come along for the ride. If not, everything else will be challenged.
5. HP. If HP develops or acquires high-end networking equipment and new enterprise boss Dave Donatelli can instill an EMC-like sales culture at HP, Cisco will have its hands full.
Innovation, comodification, and competition are at the heart of the tech industry. Most industry leaders face these challenges from day one but Cisco through a combination of skill, luck, and lack of true competitors was able to tap dance around these pressures for a long time but no longer. Over the next few years, Cisco will be challenged like never before. It will certainly be interesting to see how it all unfolds.
Tags: Cisco Systems, Citrix, Dell, DISA, EMC, Ethernet switching, Extreme Networks, F5 Networks, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Riverbed Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
It was a busy week for the folks at Juniper Networks (JNPR). First, the company announced its quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street estimates for revenue and EPS. Next Juniper announced a new relationship with Dell (DELL) in which Dell will brand Juniper Networking Equipment as its own.
These events stand out on their own but to top it off, Juniper held a high-brow event with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday to highlight a flurry of announcements featuring:
* A new chip set. Juniper announced its Trio chip set claiming that it represents a quantum leap in 3-D scaling (i.e. the ability to scale network bandwidth, the number of users per device, and the number of applications per device). Juniper says that Trio can offer a 50x performance improvement.
* Operating system extensions. Building upon its JUNOS operating system, Juniper introduced Juniper Space, a development environment and application portfolio on top of JUNOS, and Juniper Pulse, an endpoint play that brings network services together under a common agent.
* A vision for the future. While details were few, Juniper talked about its Data Center to Cloud (DC2C) strategy, its “Project Stratus” initiative to virtualize data center-based L2 networks and security services, and “Project Falcon,” an initiative focused on wireless carrier services.
There is a lot to think about with these announcements but my overall reaction is simply — Wow! Juniper Networks, that geeky company that couldn’t talk to anyone without referring to multiple layers of the OSI stack has really grown up. This was a classy event held at the NYSE (coincidentally 80 years to the day of the stock market crash of 1929) with an audience full of financial folks, industry analysts, and customers.
As for the real “meat” of these announcements, the Trio chip stands alone. In one fell swoop, Juniper just leap frogged the competition on price/performance and “green” requirements while producing a multi-function chip set that will ultimately lower its manufacturing and support costs.
The jury is still out of SPACE and PULSE. Both have great potential but success in these endeavors will be a function of applications and partnerships. Juniper has some momentum in both areas but must build its own applications, dedicate internal resources to establishing a developer community, and recruit partners for this to really matter in the long term. My guess is that Juniper will accomplish these objectives easily in the service provider space, but the enterprise market will be a much bigger challenge.
Juniper’s vision stuff is extremely interesting. Yes, there are a lot of “blue sky” concepts here but large organizations like NYSE and DISA are buying in. Juniper tends to deliver — rather than change — its strategy over time.
Many journalists and analysts have written that Juniper was long on vision and short on details which is true. Juniper actually knew this going into this announcement. This makes it important for Juniper to follow up on each of these announcement over the next few months with products, sales programs, customer success stories, and roadmaps. Again, this is a lay up in the service provider space so Juniper’s real challenge is aggressively executing in the enterprise where Cisco (CSCO) rules.
One other note. These announcements should open doors for Juniper but it must be prepared for discussions beyond technology alone. Juniper should have detailed migration methodologies for customers and prospects that map out which pieces of the network to replace first, ROI benefits associated with these moves, and long-term migration strategies that meet customer business, IT, and network requriements moving forward. Enterprise-savvy partner IBM (IBM) can help here.
Ironically, Juniper also unveiled its new logo and welcomed the “new network” in its advertising but never mentioned it in its presentation. I find the new logo and tag line fitting. The network is radically changing which calls for new techology and innovation. Juniper is delivering here. The logo also symbolizes a new Juniper. Yes, there’s still a bit too much network-speak at times, but Kevin Johnson’s team represents a new Juniper that can not only deliver innovative technology but it can finally tell you about it even if you don’t have a PhD.
Tags: Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, DISA, Juniper Networks, NYSE Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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