Big Data: time to believe the hype?
Posted: March 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: big data, chips, datacentre, hadoop, intel, intel distribution of hadoop, mcafee, singapore, xeon Leave a comment
I was in Singapore this week for a big Intel announcement, ably covered by my Reg colleague Timothy Prickett Morgan here. That left me with no news but a bit of wriggle room to consider the bigger picture: just where is Big Data headed, what’s the big deal with Hadoop and is Intel really a software company now?
Well, let’s take the last question first. Yup, Intel has been a software company for several years now actually. It was the $7.6bn acquisition of security giant McAfee which really sealed the deal though and its roadmap for taking security capabilities down to the OS and chip level is taking shape nicely. This week’s big news was that Intel is getting into the Hadoop game with its own distribution of the open source Big Data management framework.
It’s a smart move for Chipzilla, helping to drive extra revenue and boost take-up of its Xeon chips. According to global director of Enterprise Computing, Pat Buddenbaum, however, there was another reason for the move, namely “to instill confidence that Hadoop will remain open”.
“One of the concerns was that its primarily driven by start-ups with venture backed direction, which may fork from the 100 per cent standardised open source path,” he told me.
Intel as open source saviour? Well you can be sure that commercial interests were probably its primary motivator here, and it has no plans to make similar moves for other open source frameworks which may be at risk of forking.
So what about Big Data? Should you believe the hype? Well, although even Buddenbaum admitted it was a bit of a buzz word, the premise behind it is sound. It’s about organisations making sense of the vast quantity of data – be it internal or external, customer-related data – literally inundating their datacentres, in order to drive business growth and improve agility in realtime. Analysts I spoke to are in agreement that the Big Data trend is a positive one and Intel’s move will benefit the industry. Now it’s up to the OEMs, SIs, and ISVs to play their part and enable the democratisation of Big Data by pushing Hadoop down to the mass market via their products and services.
Don’t hold your breath though. The industry is at such a nascent stage that, according to Intel’s APAC Datacentre Products GM Jason Fedder, it’s not even clear which region if any is ahead of the curve. In the meantime the hype will continue as long as IT vendors (excluding Intel, of course) think they can flog some extra units on the back of this latest buzz word. But I’m pretty confident that in a few years’ time we won’t be talking about Big Data anymore – not because it will have fallen from favour but because it will be ubiquitous.
Cameron’s Indian deal exposes outsourcing security failings
Posted: February 21, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: APTs, BPO, cameron, cyber security, hacking, HCL, india, information security, Infosys, Mahindra, outsourcing, prime minister, targeted threats, Wipro Leave a comment
Earlier this week David Cameron signed a deal designed to elevate the Indo-British relationship to an “unprecedented level of co-operation” on cyber security issues. It came as part of the PM’s three day trade mission to India and is certainly to be welcomed, but the agreement also implies some rather worrying things about the cyber readiness of the country’s big outsourcing firms.
The deal will essentially mean two things. Firstly, UK technical know-how and expertise in the cyber security sphere will be shared with Indian outsourcers, essentially to help protect the vast amounts of data from UK consumers and businesses which are now held on servers in the country.
Secondly, the agreement will see the two countries share relevant threat intelligence in order to thwart attacks on their systems, whether they’re coming from the UK, India or elsewhere.
Now, as mentioned, any kind of international co-operation on cyber threat protection is a step in the right direction, and Cameron certainly can’t be faulted for his assertion that “other countries securing their data is effectively helping us secure our data”.
My surprise is that big name outsourcers like Wipro, HCL, Mahindra and Infosys – firms which have built their business presumably on the quality (and security) of their BPO offerings – need an extra hand.
Any CIO worth his salt would surely relegate to the scrap heap a potential outsourcing provider who could not satisfy his or her list of pre-determined security requirements.
Sure, the smaller outsourcers will benefit most from this deal, but the big boys too?
Well, yes, according to Forrester’s New Delhi-based analyst Katyayan Gupta.
“Even larger Indian firms like Infosys, TCS, etc. will also benefit because now they will have an additional layer of security against cyber criminals,” he told me.
“This is not to say that these firms do not have good security right now. But the question really is – is it enough to keep all attackers out? Probably not.”
Now I know in this age of APTs and highly targeted attacks no firm can claim to be impervious, but it’s slightly worrying when those with huge resources – in an industry where reputational damage following a data breaches could hit hard – are apparently getting expertise flown in from the UK that they haven’t obtained anyway.
Also, as Gupta argued, the deal will still do nothing to stop perhaps the biggest threat to UK data residing on these firms’ servers: corrupt insiders.
It may be time to revisit those SLAs.
Most of China’s tech producers die in their teens
Posted: February 7, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, electronics, forrester, idg, lenovo, manufacturing, pearl river delta, shenzhen Leave a comment
An interesting bit of research cropped up on one of the few English language sites covering Chinese news in this region, Taiwan’s WantChinaTimes, claiming the average lifespan of a Chinese electronics manufacturer is a shade over 13 years.
Now this sounded pretty low to me, not having anything to compare it to, but it struck as an interesting stat which serves to illuminate a lot of the pressures Chinese manufacturers are facing today, and where the country wants to be in a few decades time.
The research itself came from a Chinese manufacturer called Global Market Group, which interviewed over 1,000 firms in the economic zones of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. It’s not a huge sample, given the sheer size of the industry in the PRC, but it’ll have to do.
The first thing to note is that 13.2 years is much longer than the average for survey respondents of 11.1 years – the report argues that this could be because electronics makers are forced to adapt quickly to changing tech to keep afloat.
More generally, though, 13.2 years doesn’t seem like a long time for a firm to be in business. But it does illustrate the rapid pace of change in the tech industry – where many fall by the way side in time because they simply can’t keep up with the latest trends.
It also shows, as Forrester analyst Dane Anderson told me, the intense pressure on Chinese manufacturers burdened with rising labour and energy costs and competition from other low cost suppliers in Asia.
US politicians and loathsome right wing media outlets often make out China to be the bad guy – taking American jobs by offering brand owners by far the lowest cost of production. However, increasingly it’s becoming a more complex picture than this.
“The perception in the West is often that the manufacturing industry in China is a bullet-proof juggernaut, but this view is inaccurate,” said Anderson. “It is a dynamic and highly competitive sector squeezed by thin margins and demanding customers.”
Too true.
But as China looks to move up the stack, away from being a land of contract manufacturers mass producing at low prices in incredibly competitive market conditions, things might change, according to IDG’s senior research manager William Lee.
“The electronics industry is typically a high clockspeed industry, meaning the average product lifecycle time span is shorter than say automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment. So electronics manufacturing companies’ lifespan is typically shorter than other companies in other industry,” he told me.
“However when the manufacturing industries mature and many of these companies begin to evolve to brand owners, the average lifespan will increase.”
With China still some way behind Taiwan, South Korea and other countries, it will be a while before this happens, but it surely will, as this is the direction the Chinese government wants it to go in. It recently announced ambitious plans to create eight super-companies in the tech space each the size of Lenovo ($100bn in revenues per year), which would have globally recognised brands.
When that finally happens, and the sweat-shops move out to Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere, maybe the US will have to invent another bogeyman.
ZTE in 2013: do smartphone designers dream of electric sheep?
Posted: February 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blade runner, CES, china, Chinese new year, FBI, Grand S, hagen Fendler, HD, hong kong, huawei, Iran, shenzhen, smartphone, telecoms equipment, zte, ZTE Grand Memo Leave a comment
I popped down to ZTE’s pre-Chinese New Year lunch for journos in Hong Kong earlier this week to see what the world’s fifth largest smartphone maker had to say for itself.
It’s not been an easy year for it or Shenzhen rival Huawei, who were both named as a national security risk in a US congressional committee report released at the tail end of 2012 in the bi-partisan hubbub typical of pre-election months.
In addition, ZTE has been under lengthy investigation by the FBI on suspicion of selling embargoed US-made tech to Iran and then covering it up when found out. Then there were the false rumours of swingeing job cuts at the firm and a $5bn cash injection from the Chinese government.
Despite its problems, however, ZTE remains on the move in the smartphone space, an innovator in telecoms infrastructure with its LTE offerings and has plans to grow the enterprise business despite the kind of government roadblocks put up in Australia, the US and now India.
Head of handset strategy Lv Qian Hao battled manfully with the flu to show me the firm’s latest high-end handset, the 5.7in Grand Memo (no pics I’m afraid). It comes across as a smallish version of Huawei’s massive six-incher the Ascend Mate and probably benefits from not being quite as large – in other words I could just about use it as a phone without looking daft.
In the rapidly developing smartphone space, specs like 13 megapixel camera, quad core 1.7Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 720p screen – specs which might once have elicited gasps of awe from the assembled masses – are now pretty standard at the high-end.
This is no criticism of ZTE but it certainly makes its job of climbing up the smartphone rankings and a goal of 50 million shipments this year that bit harder.
So where can it differentiate? Well, with high-end specs almost commoditised now, design is obviously one key area. With the best will in the world ZTE is not know for its beautiful design, but it’s hoping to change that with Hagen Fendler on board.
Pinched from cross-town rival Huawei, Fendler’s appointment and a new design centre in Shanghai certainly serve to highlight the firm’s vaulting ambitions in this space.
Fendler explained that his job is to create a design DNA which can be seeded throughout the firm’s handsets to help create a brand identity. It got off to a flyer with the launch at CES of the Grand S, an HD handset which at 6.9mm is currently the world’s thinnest.
It won’t be an easy job creating handsets that are both beautiful and distinctively “ZTE” but with 400 staff working on design alone, they’ve as good a chance as any.
It can be a frustrating time for a journalist talking to a designer, because so many of the concepts they tend to reference are abstract, ethereal and emotive rather than the nuts and bolts practicalities of engineering.
However, Fendler did reveal that much of his design inspiration comes from outside the immediate environs of the smartphone space – from books, magazines and films.
1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner was singled out for particular praise for sparking interesting ideas about “how humans interact with the technology around them”.
Just don’t expect to see the ZTE Blade Runner phone anytime soon. Actually, Google already got there with the Nexus, didn’t it?
Can fibre-based smart grids provide a solution to our superfast broadband problems?
Posted: January 16, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: AMI, AT&T, china, fibre broadband, fibre optic, japan, Ovum, Quocirca, SGCC, smart grid, smart meter, superfast broadband, triple play, verizon Leave a comment
Do you have superfast fibre optic broadband? The answer is probably not, because in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere projects are riven by funding issues, political in-fighting and delays, delays, delays. The answer just might be right in front of our eyes.
Take this new report from Ovum on smart grids. Before you fall asleep, the smart grid pilot project it refers to in China is being undertaken by the SGCC, the largest utility in the world, so plenty of food for thought for utilities globally depending on what happens with it.
The crux of the Ovum piece is that the pilot – if it goes nationwide – is likely to offer a potential windfall of up to $2bn for international fibre infrastructure vendors. Yup, the project is basically running power alongside fibre to kill three birds with one stone – deliver power, run a smart grid (ie collect and monitor smart meters in customer homes) and potentially offer triple play services.
This hasn’t really been done with any great degree of success outside of Japan, where investments were made over a long period of time, report author Julie Kunstler told me. But if it works out in China, the big question is whether it could show US utilities a way forward – yes fibre is pretty costly but apply for a telco license or lease the lines to comms providers and they could fund such an investment.
It’s sorely needed, in the US and elsewhere, to manage that difficult last mile problem. As Kunstler told me, it solves this issue because power companies already shoot their cables right into the customers’ home, and are pretty much ubiquitous to boot.
In the end it’s still very early days, and although a technology supplier in China I spoke to said they were confident of this 80,000 home pilot going nationwide, even then, the unique political and economic conditions in the People’s Republic may make it the only country where such a huge project can work.
As Clive Longbottom of analyst Quocirca told me, “getting Verizon and AT&T to work together is like getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on a new fiscal package”.
This is where China has the edge – a basically homogenous, state-run set up where what the government says goes…a government, by the way, which has seemingly bottomless pockets and huge aspirations to lead the world in technology deployments, the bigger the better.
In the meantime, the citizens of the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere will continue to suffer from the kind of political indecision and selfish stakeholders which have thus far hampered any kind of coherent national superfast broadband strategy.
China 2013: What to expect from its tech giants in the Year of the Snake
Posted: January 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: big four, canalys, china, china US stock market, chinese tech innovation, diaoyu, google, huawei, lenovo, senkaku, sina weibo, TCL-alcatel, tencent, US, zte 1 Comment
Just finished an interesting piece on what to expect from Chinese tech firms in 2013 so thought I’d précis the key points below.
To be honest as with any year end predictions to an extent there’s always more-of-the-same than anything else, and to that point there’ll be greater international expansion on the mobile handset front by ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, and potentially TCL-Alcatel.
Aside from the big names, Canalys analyst Nicole Peng told me there could also be attempts by feature phone vendors like Gionee and K-Touch to make it overseas, claiming that the technical and business support offered by chipset companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek is making it easier than ever to break into new smartphone markets.
But away from hardware, what about China’s growing raft of web companies?
It would be easy to write a story saying “the Chinese are coming, look out Facebook, Twitter et al!”, but the honest truth is that the likes of Tencent, Sina, Alibaba and others have become successful in China in part by copying their US rivals and in part thanks to local restrictions banning their rivals.
Where they have done well is in localising their platforms for the domestic user – something Alibaba and Baidu are doing now even for their mobile OS platforms – and innovating on top of what has gone before.
Aside from the odd service like Tencent’s WeChat which has managed to cross the Great Firewall to acceptance elsewhere, I’m sceptical that these firms will expand successfully in 2013, and to an extent, with less than half of the vast Chinese population online, there’s probably enough untapped growth left domestically to keep them busy for now.
Peng is slightly more optimistic, however.
“Many of the local mobile services/applications we have seen in China, such as Tencent Weixin, Sina Weibo provide great user experience and innovative features that we could not find from the international big name,” she told me.
“As long as they continue to innovate and own their IPs, I do not see Chinese internet companies having any major disadvantages in competing, as mobile services become device/OS agnostic in the future.”
Perhaps. But with local incumbents like Twitter, Facebook, Google et al, mature Western markets will certainly be too tough a nut to crack.
On top of this, Chinese tech firms will have to put up with increasingly hostile attitudes from various national governments.
National security concerns will continue to dog Huawei and ZTE on the telecoms infrastructure front, and there are signs that US regulators may soon begin the process of de-registering Chinese firms from US stock markets for failing to comply with domestic securities laws.
Oh, and there’s the small matter of a potential conflict over that bunch of barren rocks known as Diaoyu/Senkaku.
Plenty to look forward to, then, in 2013!
MediaTek and the battle of the budget quad cores
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 28nm chips, china, chips, huawei, LG, mediatek, mobile, MT6589, quad core, qualcomm, smartphones, SoC, Sony, Taiwan, US Leave a comment
Last week Asian chip giant MediaTek launched its latest System on a Chip design, the 28nm quad core MT6589. Before you click on to something more interesting, here’s why it should make anyone with a mobile phone sit up and take notice.
First, MediaTek. It’s probably the most ubiquitous chip company you’ve never heard of. Asia’s biggest and the fourth largest fabless chip company by revenue globally, it lists LG, Huawei, Sony and others among its clients. Until now the firm has largely been focused on the 2G feature phone market, especially in China where demand was huge until recently, but this announcement sees it really break out into the high end smartphone space.
The analysts I spoke to pretty unanimously agreed that MediaTek and arch rival Qualcomm between them are making a seriously disruptive play in the mobile space. Put simply, MediaTek is making quad core affordable by sticking CPU, GPU and wireless modem on the same SoC, which means the MT6589 will end up in plenty of cheap smartphones as well as some higher end ones.
The result? The big brands are going to have to differentiate on something other than quad core. In effect, as IDC analyst Teck-Zhung Wong told me, it’s going to kick off a whole new round of price competition, which is great for users and will spur the industry forward to keep on innovating, which is good for all stakeholders.
In the background there’s also the tussle between Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Qualcomm is doing amazing things this year and now sits third by revenue in IHS iSuppli’s new ranking of global chip companies. It has already produced a quad core aimed at the same market and has an advantage in its modem capabilities, which even MediaTek admitted to me. So it’s Taiwan versus the US in the battle of the budget quad cores. MediaTek historically has that huge customer base in China to tap and is likely to be faster to market but Qualcomm is catching up and apeing many of MediaTek’s technical advantages and customer relations strategies.
The jury’s out but it will be an interesting 12 months to see who the smartphone winners and losers will be.
China’s software revolution – fact or fiction?
Posted: December 10, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, china daily, exports, imports, software, trade deficit, trade surplus, US china relations Leave a comment
I’m not one to believe everything I read in the papers, especially if that paper happens to be one of China’s state run media outlets, but an interesting stat caught my eye in a recent article in China Daily.
The piece detailed how China – infamously a country which has a huge trade imbalance with the rest of the world, flogging it cheap exports – is actually importing more technology products than it exports.
The tech trade deficit apparently stands at $10bn – imports at $32bn and exports $21bn – which is a far cry from its huge overall trade surplus with the US which stood at around $300bn in 2011.
It is an interesting one because with China becoming an increasingly affluent and sizeable market in its own right it’s likely that more and more goods made in the country will not be exported but sold to its own consumers, so it’s hard to see how the government is going to be able to close this gap.
That aside though, the article pointed out that 89 per cent of China’s exports were in the sphere of “computer software”.
Really? The country famous for being the technology manufacturing centre of the world? Where the huge Taiwanese ODM/OEMs have plants the size of small towns, building everything from iPhones to children’s toys?
Yes, China has its successful web companies like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, but could its computer software industry really be that successful on the world stage?
Well, no is the short answer.
Gartner’s Matthew Cheung explained to me the likely reason for the unusually high figure is that they have counted revenue from a certain type of outsourced service in that figure.
Companies such as HiSoft, Beyondsoft and VanceInfo offer a raft of services to big name foreign companies looking to localise their own software products in China.
These services, Cheung said, have effectively been calculated as exports, as they are carried out on behalf of foreign companies, even though, aside from some work for the Japanese and Korean market, they are basically China-centric.
I have to say it’s a market I never knew existed but will be an interesting one to follow, because while China may not be the software centre of the world yet, it’s certainly an area where it could end up dominating if it decides to devote the full weight of its resources.
These companies are by no means minor players; some are NASDAQ listed, $10-$100m businesses and they’re already acquiring foreign rivals, said Cheung.
This could yet be the first stirrings of a Chinese software revolution to match that which propelled the country to become the pre-eminent tech manufacturing hub.
Nokia takes the wraps of the Lumia 920
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: asia pacific, computex, french window, hong kong, IFC, lumia 920, nokia, window phone 8 Leave a comment
I’d almost forgotten what product launch press conferences were like in Asia, but got a nice little reminder at Nokia’s grand unveiling of the Lumia 920 and 820 in Hong Kong last Thursday.
I have less than pleasant memories of the rugby scrum at Computex that formed after master showman, Asus chairman Jonney Shih, took the wraps of the Padfone.
“Is it a laptop? Is it a phone?” he teased, unaware that the vast majority of the audience couldn’t make an informed decision because of being unable to see anything past all the sweaty fanboys standing on their chairs.
It all came flooding back at the French Window, a swanky restaurant venue in the IFC Mall, on Thursday night. To describe the scene for you: lots of people talking over Nokia’s spokesperson and the over-exuberant local media star roped in to present the devices, no-body drinking.
After some barely audible back and forth and a play around with the new Windows 8 Phones, it was time for the money shot, namely the part when three attractive, scantily clad female models come on stage to hold the devices for the cameras … at perfect boob-height.
So does Nokia have much of a chance with the Lumias? Well I gave up trying to fight may way to the demo area, but smartphone fondlers in the media regard it as one of Nokia’s best for years: great build quality, blisteringly fast processor and superb camera, if a little bulky.
Wireless charging, which was demoed at the event, will also be a bonus and, of course, it comes with Windows Phone 8.
I like Nokia, I really do, and would love the European tech giant to get back on track with this one, it’s just that with so much competition, and with so many smartphones these days offering specs which are so similar, I wonder if it will be enough, especially in the hyper competitive China market.
If you’re a Windows Phone fan, happy days, if not, you may well be minded to stick with what you know.
Bruce Schneier: the internet is not doomed, but it is fragmenting
Posted: November 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: balkanisation, bruce schneier, BT, censorship, chief security technology officer, china, cryptography, great firewall, infosecurity, music industry, piracy Leave a comment
I had the pleasure of en evening with Bruce Schneier last night. Let me re-phrase that: I attended a BT event yesterday entitled “A Private Dinner with Bruce Schneier”.
Schneier, if you haven’t come across him, is BT’s chief security technology officer, author, cryptographer extraordinaire and philosopher-cum-infosecurity out-of-the-box-thinker.
Basically, what he says in info-security circles is usually listened to, although his propensity to tackle the subject more from a socio- or even biological perspective than a mere discussion of bits and bytes can make quotable extracts from a conversation with him pretty thin on the ground.
That said, Schneier was on form last night, focusing on the topic of trust and the notion that all systems, be they sociological, biological and so on, need co-operation to work. These systems also feature, inevitably, ‘defectors’, who don’t obey the rules and require security to keep their activities to manageable levels.
All fine and dandy, but what about the future? Does Schneier think we’re all doomed?
Well he certainly believes that the gap between the bad guys profiting from new technologies and the good guys catching up is greater than at any point in the past thanks to the sheer volume of new tech and the huge social change it is spurring, which is somewhat worrying.
However, there is hope that all is not lost. For one, he declared the bad stuff that happens online still a “tiny percentage” of the whole.
“I’m a short term pessimist but a long-term optimist,” he added.
As the older generation dies out things will gradually change too, he explained, as new norms around things like privacy come into play, and even the music industry is eventually be forced to change.
“The internet is the greatest generational gap since rock n roll,” he declared.
“People stealing music now are doing what will be normal in ten years’ time, they just figured it out first. The business model of scarcity doesn’t work.”
In less reassuring news, he argued that the balkanisation of the internet is likely to continue as national governments seek to establish their own controls – particularly appropriate given we were sitting in the Conrad Hong Kong, just a few miles from mainland China and the Great Firewall.
“It turns out the internet does have boundaries,” Schneier concluded. “Governments are enforcing their rules more and more and it makes for a less stable internet but it is the geopolitical future.”
phil muncaster 