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How the internet search giant secures, operates and stress-tests

its custom-built cloud datacentre fleet

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Secrets of Google’s datacentres revealed

Broadband controversy will linger on despite BT Openreach split

British Medical Association has prescription for digital success

Editor’s comment

Buyer’s guide to next-generation storage

Businesses get to grips with big data projects

Using the power of AI to deliver on the promise of the internet of things

Downtime

Lloyds Bank IT jobs to move to IBM in £1.3bn outsourcing dealLloyds Banking Group will transfer nearly 2,000 jobs to IBM as part of an outsourcing agreement worth £1.3bn over seven years, accord-ing to the Lloyds Trade Union. Lloyds CIO Morteza Mahjour said in a presentation that jobs in UK datacentres would move to the US IT supplier. When contacted by Computer Weekly, the bank said it was looking to extend the use of cloud computing.

Scottish police’s i6 project failed due to loss of trust, auditor findsThe failure of Police Scotland’s i6 programme to deliver an integrated IT system was caused by “loss of trust” between Accenture and the police, says an Audit Scotland report. In 2013, Accenture won the £40m deal to deliver a new opera-tional policing system, but last July, Accenture, the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland agreed to terminate the contract.

The UK needs more women in cyber security, says GCHQ chief Outgoing GCHQ director Robert Hannigan has called on every UK organisation to do more to encour-age women into the information security profession in the face of a growing skill shortage. “If we are not tapping into women, we are depriving ourselves of a massive talent pool,” he told the CyberUK conference in Liverpool, which was convened by the National Cyber Security Centre.

BT formally agrees to Ofcom’s terms over Openreach splitBT has formally agreed to telecoms regulator Ofcom’s requirements for the legal separation of its network unit Openreach, which will now become a distinct company with its own staff, management and strat-egy. The agreement means Ofcom will not need to enforce the legal separation of BT and Openreach, and clears the way for the split to go ahead later in 2017.

National Theatre raises curtain on Office 365The National Theatre is moving to Microsoft Office 365 to improve collabo-ration between staff and have computing capacity on demand. The move from an on-premise Microsoft Exchange system will address these issues through Office 365’s mobile and storage on-demand capabilities. The cloud-based software will improve collaboration between staff, such as designers and technicians, who do not use traditional desktops.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online.

NEWS IN BRIEF

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Secrets of Google’s datacentres revealed

Broadband controversy will linger on despite BT Openreach split

British Medical Association has prescription for digital success

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Buyer’s guide to next-generation storage

Businesses get to grips with big data projects

Using the power of AI to deliver on the promise of the internet of things

Downtime

NEWS IN BRIEF

UK identity fraud at record levelsA record 172,919 identity frauds were recorded in 2016, accord-ing to UK fraud prevention service Cifas. That is an increase of nearly 2% from 2015, but is 68% up from the number of ID frauds in 2010. Identity fraud now represents over half of all frauds recorded by Cifas.

Unicef employs data science Unicef, the UN relief agency for children and mothers in disas-ter areas, is using data science to track refugees. Natalia Adler, data, research and policy planning specialist, said Unicef was looking at how the “data revolution could improve the lives of children”. Sales slump hits server marketThe giants of the server market saw year-on-year revenue plummet by 12.9% across Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) during the fourth quarter of 2016, as demand from hyperscale cloud firms for white box servers continues to soar.

Smart meters could exacerbate digital exclusion, says OfgemUse of advanced smart meter tech-nology to manage domestic gas and electricity consumption is highest among wealthier socio-economic groups, and this indicator of digi-tal exclusion shows little sign of changing, says regulator Ofgem.

London IT companies are trying to increase worker diversity Nearly half of London-based IT companies have human resources policies that are designed to increase the diversity of staff, but a lack of diversity and a gender bias remains an “Achilles heel” to the sector, according to research.

Technology firms to get first look at CIA hacking toolsWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says technology firms will get the first look at alleged US Central Intelligence Agency hacking tools before any more documents from a leaked archive are published. n

Glencoe ski resort lifts 4G to a 2,800ft highEE has turned on one of the UK’s high-est 4G mobile sites, covering the slopes of the Glencoe Ski Centre in Scotland. Visitors will be able to access superfast 4G mobile network speeds to access the internet and share pictures and videos.

❯ US accuses Russian spies of directing Yahoo breach.

❯ What’s in the UK government’s 5G strategy?

❯ Microsoft offers enterprise chat via Office 365, Teams.

❯ Cloudability buys Australian automation firm.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online.

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Secrets of Google’s datacentres revealed

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British Medical Association has prescription for digital success

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Buyer’s guide to next-generation storage

Businesses get to grips with big data projects

Using the power of AI to deliver on the promise of the internet of things

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Secrets of Google’s datacentres revealedAt the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, the internet search giant opened up about how it secures, operates and stress-tests its growing cloud datacentre fleet. Caroline Donnelly reports

The sheer number of users and services that the datacen-tres of the hyperscale cloud giants have to support has prompted many providers to rip up the design rulebook

on how to kit out and connect the huge number of facilities they operate around the world.

Instead of building singular, standalone facilities that are backed up to a datacentre at another location, they favour the creation of multiple, huge, campus-like server farms that are devoid of any single points of failure to guard against downtime.

Seemingly infinite capacityHyperscale operators often opt for custom-made hardware designed with specific workloads in mind, which is bought in huge quantities to ensure – as more users flock to their services – they have seemingly infinite capacity to cope with the demand.

Over the course of several days at the Google Cloud Next con-ference in San Francisco, the internet search giant shared a num-ber of candid insights about the work that goes into ensuring its own datacentres are run in a sustainable, efficient, resilient, secure and fast-performing way.

Google’s work around datacentre sustainability is well docu-mented, with 2017 already pegged as the year when it will hit its 100% renewable energy usage pledge for its datacentre estate.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, the company also recently opened up about how it is drawing on the artificial intel-ligence expertise of its Deepmind division to cut the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) scores of its datacentre fleets.

One new region a monthAnother commitment it is about to fulfil is a promise to open one new datacentre region a month throughout 2017. At Google Cloud Next, it also announced plans for additional builds in the Netherlands, Canada and California this year and in 2018.

By the time these are complete, the firm will have 16 geographic datacentre regions in play across the globe, made up of around 50 availability zones and more than 100 points of presence.

As well as standing up the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and its business productivity tools, G Suite, these datacentres also host its consumer-focused services, such as search and YouTube – the backbone of almost everyone’s internet experience.

ANALYSIS

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For this reason, the company’s datacentre infrastructure is designed to ensure users can be as productive as possible at all times, said Urs Hölzle, senior vice-president for technology infra-structure at Google Cloud, during the event’s second-day keynote.

“We designed every element of our infrastructure so you could be uniquely productive and enjoy the performance we created,” he said. “You have to optimise every single element, from efficient datacentres to custom servers, to custom networking gear to a software-defined global backbone, to specialised application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for machine learning.”

Huge networking capacityThe company has invested $30bn over the past three years to build a resilient and responsive infrastructure, which is under-pinned by huge networking capacity.

“Analysts put our network’s traffic at 25-40% of global internet user traffic,” said Hölzle. “As a GCP or G Suite customer, you ben-efit because your traffic travels on our private, ultra-high speed backbone for minimum latency.

“To carry this traffic to pretty much everywhere in the world, we also need to cross oceans. Nine years ago, Google became the first non-telco to build an undersea cable. That was US to Japan, and since then we’ve built or acquired submarine fibre capacity pretty much anywhere in the world, so we have a redundant back-bone to almost any place.”

Joe Kava, Google vice-president for datacentres, presented a session on the penultimate day of the show that offered delegates a look behind the scenes at how the firm builds its server farms.

ANALYSIS

GO

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LEEach Google datacentre is individually designed

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While it would be logical to assume the company must take a one-size-fits-all approach to datacentre builds, the truth could not be more different, with each datacentre’s location hugely influencing the design and setup.

“We’ve pioneered and developed advancements in water-based cooling systems, such as seawater cooling, recycled grey water cooling, storm water capture and reuse, rainwater harvesting, industrial canal water use and thermal energy storage,” said Kava.

“We’ve also designed datacentres that don’t require any water for their cooling at all. Instead, they’re cooled with 100% outside, fresh air. The point is there is no one-size-fits-all model. All of our datacentre designs are custom made for their specific regions to get the best efficiency.”

Custom-built hardwareLike many other hyperscale cloud firms, Google favours the use of custom-built hardware for cost and performance reasons, with Kava alluding to the fact that without doing so, the com-pany would struggle to meet user demand for its services.

“Nearly all our infrastructure is custom-designed and purpose-built for our own computing needs, all working in conjunction and optimised to provide the highest performance, at the lowest total cost of ownership computing anywhere,” he said.

“Our servers have no unnecessary components, such as video cards, chipsets or peripheral connectors, which can introduce vul-nerabilities, and our production servers run a custom-designed, stripped-down version of Linux. Our servers and operating sys-tem are designed solely for powering Google services.”

As mentioned during the second-day keynote, the company is also the world’s first cloud provider to deploy Intel’s Xeon pro-cessors, known colloquially as Skylake, in its infrastructure. Hölzle hails the move as a show of the company’s commitment to per-formance improvements.

“We are pushing the envelope in so many directions on per-formance, which means we have to work very differently, and Skylake offers great performance for compute-intensive work-loads,” he said.

When he joined Google nine years ago, Kava admitted to feeling perplexed as to why the company needed such a high degree of customisation in its infrastructure to deliver its services.

“I soon learned we go through such extraordinary effort because what we needed at our scale didn’t exist when we started,” he said. “To achieve the performance, efficiency and price targets, we had to build our own servers and develop and create the hardware, software and culture of reliability to make Google successful.”

Since March 2016, Google has been actively involved with the Facebook-backed Open Compute Project (OCP) initiative, and

“All our dAtAcentre designs Are custom mAde for their regions

to get the best efficiency”Joe Kava, GooGle

ANALYSIS

❯AWS CISO says there is no need to sacrifice security to pursue innovation in cloud.

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has contributed designs relating to the 49V rack systems with which it kits its sites out. “We also invest a lot in robotic innovation in our datacentres,” said Kava. “Each of our datacentres has fully automated disk erase environments that allow for faster, higher throughput, more efficient and better inventory management.”

That is not to say human beings don’t play a role in keeping things ticking over in the Google datacentre estate, said Kava, as the organisation has 24-hour support on hand at each one.

“We have our own team of Googlers, who have been intimately involved from the design, through construction, commissioning and operations,” he said. “They are the best and brightest engi-neers and operation professionals available anywhere.

“Many of them have come from mission-critical environments, such as the navy nuclear submarine programme, where mistakes can be catastrophic. They understand mission-critical.”

Impervious to human errorKava was also keen to point out how impervious Google’s infra-structure was to human error. “On the infrastructure side, the industry norm is that human error accounts for the overwhelm-ing majority of incidents,” he said. “Because of our designs and highly qualified staff, only a small fraction of issues are related to human errors, and none has ever caused datacentre downtime.”

Whenever doubters call into question the security offered by public cloud companies, a common retort often sees providers compare the financial and staffing resources they have at their disposal to those of a smaller, everyday enterprise organisation. It is an approach Google has seen fit to pursue in the past, and one

Hölzle reinforced during the keynote, when he revealed that one datacentre campus operated by the company has 175 security guards on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This, in turn, is backed by cameras, motion sensors, iris scan-ners and laser-based intrusion detection systems, all designed to keep out people who should not be there.

Security commitmentThis security commitment extends to the physical hardware too, with Hölzle using his keynote to debut Google’s Titan chip, which is fitted in all the firm’s new datacentre servers.

“We put a security chip on all our new machines to serve as the basis of trust for that machine’s identity,” he said. “This chip is designed by Google, and helps protect servers from tampering, even at the BIOS level. It helps us authenticate hardware, and on top of that, helps us authenticate the services. When they call each other, they must mutually prove their ID to each other.”

Google also has a novel way of ensuring its security defences are up to the job, Kava revealed during a question-and-answer session. The firm covertly recruits existing Google staff and tasks them with trying to break its datacentre security defences.

“If anyone knows where the weaknesses are and how to exploit them, it’s your own staff,” he said. “They don’t tell their colleagues they were recruited, and they try to do things you’re not supposed to be able to do. If a vulnerability is exposed, it is corrected around the world. If there are never any new exploits found, maybe enough is enough, but we haven’t got to that point yet. There is always something more we can do.” n

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Broadband controversy will linger on despite confirmed BT Openreach splitCommunications experts welcomed the news that the legal separation of BT and Openreach will go ahead, but it remains unclear how, or when, the state of the UK’s broadband will change for the better. Alex Scroxton reports

Some two years after Ofcom first announced its Strategic Review of Digital Communications – covering the regula-tion of competition, investment, innovation and the avail-

ability of products in the broadband, mobile and landline markets – the process has reached a sort-of conclusion with the news that BT and Openreach are to move ahead with their legal separation.

In reaching a final agreement with the telecoms regulator, BT appears at first glance to have accepted all of Ofcom’s conditions, establishing a legally separate business unit with its own board and branding, and the ability to set its own strategic direction, make its own investment decisions, allocate its own budget, and negotiate on an equal basis with all its communications service provider (CSP) customers. But up until recently, BT had vigorously resisted many of these ideas. So what has changed?

One can only speculate at what machinations took place behind the scenes to get to this point. Might the recent collapse in BT’s share price following revelations of a book-keeping scandal at its Italian business have led the board to consider the damage a fight

ANALYSIS

BT

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over Openreach would cause? After all, CEO Gavin Patterson is widely held to have lost a packet over Italy, and at the time of writ-ing on 10 March BT’s shares were heading upwards.

Or maybe, with government opinion swinging firmly behind fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband for the first time, as chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond made abundantly clear in both his November 2016 Autumn Statement and his

March 2017 Spring Budget, BT and Openreach at last realised they would have to line up their internal policy with that of the government.

Or perhaps, with the triggering of Article 50 to take the UK out of the European Union (EU) now imminent, pressure from Westminster came to bear on BT and Ofcom to avoid the

complexity of a legal tussle in Brussels during the awkward Brexit negotiations, and bring some stability back to a worried market.

Positive outlookMark Shurmer, formerly BT director of regulatory affairs but now taking up the post of managing director of regulatory affairs at Openreach, would not be drawn on the back-room shenani-gans, but said a “massive shadow” had been removed from Openreach’s staff, investors, pensioners and customers.

Shurmer stressed that BT’s position that the best outcome was the preservation of some kind of relationship between BT and Openreach had always been at the centre of its argument and this had never changed. “It’s fair to say this has been a tough process for BT and one in which BT has faced a lot of criticism,” he said. “That has been challenging for us at times, but we have taken those criticisms on board. We recognise that there needs to be a different approach, and I am confident this is a good solution for BT, its investors and customers.”

The view that avoiding the delay of a judicial challenge to full structural separation – whether that be in Brussels or London – was a positive, was held up by Martin Courtney of industry watcher TechMarketView.

“The timing of the announcement looks significant on paper, coming a day after BT Group announced a new chairman in Rio Tinto chief Jan du Plessis,” wrote Courtney in a research note. “Like a football team appointing a new manager, we detect a desire to kick off with some positive news to boost confidence all round. But it is equally likely that du Plessis and other BT execs simply

ANALYSIS

“bt hAs fAced A lot of criticism, but we recognise thAt

there needs to be A different ApproAch, And i Am confident

this is A good solution for bt, its investors And customers”

MarK ShurMer, openreach

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felt this particular Openreach battle was simply not worth fighting considering the company’s more pressing concerns elsewhere.”

Ovum analyst Matthew Howett agreed that keeping Patterson out of the courts was probably for the best. “A voluntary agree-ment has always been the preferred outcome over a forced legal separation, not least because the EU route that Ofcom were plan-ning to use is uncertain, is untested, and would likely have taken much longer to conclude,” he said.

Good outcome for consumers?The majority opinion in the country now holds that FTTP, deliv-ering gigabit broadband download speeds far above and beyond what is needed by most today, is the right, future-proofed solu-tion for the UK as it seeks to enhance its digital economy – something that will become even more vital after Brexit.

However, this may not be the way things go just yet. Openreach CEO Clive Selley has always been a vocal supporter of a mix of technologies as the best solution to ensure every household and business in the UK has access to ultrafast broadband. This would include technology such as G.fast, an ultrafast delivery mecha-nism that makes use of existing copper lines.

Even though Openreach has swung more behind FTTP in recent months as the technology becomes more cost-effective to deploy and government opinion shifts in its favour, it seems unlikely at this stage that its delivery programme will change, and its future net-work will be a mix of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC), G.fast and FTTP. In short, this means users should not expect to see a big spike in their broadband speeds above what they were already in line for.

Tom Mockridge, CEO of Virgin Media, which operates its own hybrid fibre coaxial network in the UK and is therefore not dependent on Openreach, was especially critical in his view that short-term change was unlikely: “Openreach is just the same old snail’s-paced network with a new shell. Call it what you like, but it’s still BT – four times slower than Virgin Media.”

Mark Collins, director of strategy and policy at alternative fibre network owner CityFibre, said that although it was good that the

negotiations over Openreach’s future had concluded, there was nothing in the announcement that suggested Openreach would necessarily start to seriously address the UK’s lack of FTTP broadband. “Ofcom’s focus needs to shift to encouraging alterna-tive fibre builders to do the things Openreach can’t or won’t do – whatever its legal status,” he said.

“openreAch is just the sAme old snAil’s-pAced network with A

new shell. cAll it whAt you like, but it’s still bt – four times slower thAn virgin mediA”

ToM MocKridGe, virGin Media

ANALYSIS

❯UK will not benefit from competitive broadband without major government reforms.

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Those with a clear stake in consumer rights were a little less critical of the agreement. They included Andrew Ferguson, edi-tor of service comparison website Thinkbroadband.com, who was more optimistic and said the agreement sent a clear message that 2017 was the time to push on with delivering full FTTP services.

“The full-fibre revolution in the UK has been going on for a long time, but the mass behind it is growing and we are seeing evidence

for some of the two million promised full-fibre premises passed by 2020, with lots of city centre areas that have missed out on super-fast services before now in line for FTTP,” he said. “I am hopeful that Openreach will look at expanding this significantly beyond 2020, and while the current belief is that G.fast will be the dominant tech-nology in a decade’s time, there is a real chance that full fibre may beat it with the right investment decisions.”

ANALYSIS

BT

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Ferguson pointed out that FTTC services had always been built ready to support FTTP at a later date, so Openreach, in reality, already has fibre backhaul into 81,000 locations around the UK. “It just needs the workers, budget and ambition to start pushing this out from those points to millions of homes,” he said.

Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Ofcom-accredited comparison site Cable.co.uk, added: “This is good for the average broadband, TV and phone customer too, who will enjoy all the ben-efits the stoking of competition in a fairer marketplace is likely to bring, without suffering the costs and delays to infrastructural roll-out a full separation would have incurred. We should not, however, rule out a full separation happening at some point in the future.”

Hannah Maundrell, editor-in-chief of Money.co.uk, agreed the agreement was a step in the right direction. “I hope it will eventu-ally mean cheaper and better broadband for everyone,” she said. “With the government’s pledge to get everyone online, having a solid, able and independent party responsible for its roll-out is imperative. Households deserve an affordable, reliable broadband connection and a choice of supplier wherever they live. Hopefully, this move will take us one step closer to that being possible.”

Situation needs monitoringIn its announcement, Ofcom stressed that it would keep a very close eye on both BT and Openreach to ensure all parties fol-lowed through on the agreement.

“We will carefully monitor how the new Openreach performs, while continuing our work to improve the quality of service offered by all telecoms companies,” said Ofcom CEO Sharon White.

Dido Harding, CEO at BT rival TalkTalk, agreed it was important that “robust Ofcom monitoring and enforcement” was in place to guarantee Openreach delivers the improvements the regula-tor wants. “The new company will be better placed to deliver the improved investment and service that consumers and businesses deserve. We hope this is the start of a new deal for Britain’s broad-

band customers, who will be keen to see a clear timetable from Openreach setting out when services will improve,” she said.

Ovum’s Howett said questions remained over how Ofcom would monitor and enforce the changes, particularly with regard to remov-ing and replacing the current undertakings that govern Openreach, and additional sticking points around the BT pension scheme and how assets will be transferred from BT to the new company. n

ANALYSIS

“households deserve An AffordAble, reliAble broAdbAnd

connection And A choice of supplier. hopefully, this move will tAke us one step closer to

thAt being possible”hannah Maundrell, Money.co.uK

computerweekly.com 21-27 March 2017 13

British Medical Association (BMA) CIO Ian Turfrey is putting improved collaboration and productivity at the forefront of the organisation’s technology transforma-tion strategy.

As a trade union, the BMA has more than 160,000 members across the UK, supported by 600 staff countrywide. The associa-tion is also active in lobbying and informing government policy through its various committees.

After joining the organisation a year ago, Turfrey set out a new vision, dubbed “Members working anywhere working smarter working together” (Mast), to engage members better in what products and services can be offered, as well as engaging staff.

“I was brought in to start a digital transformation at the BMA, whereby we knew there were far more capabilities out there in modern architectures, and I think it’s fair to say the architecture we’ve had in the past was not what was going to get us to the future,” Turfrey tells Computer Weekly.

Risk-averse about cloudAccording to Turfrey, the BMA was “slightly risk-averse” about migrating to the cloud. But the previous on-premise arrange-ment was a hurdle to business agility, so the mindset had to change. He says staff were initially both reluctant and resistant to use more “modern-day cloud technologies”, but the BMA’s infra-structure no longer supported what it needed going forward.

“From a technology perspective, the infrastructure was reaching the end of its useable economic life, which gave us the opportu-nity to look at investing in modern-day architectures,” he says.

BMA finds prescription for digital success “Think big, start small, act now” is the motto of British Medical Association CIO Ian Turfrey as he leads the organisation through a technology transformation strategy. He speaks to Angelica Mari

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Before getting the buy-in for cloud, Turfrey had to demonstrate that the security aspects, such as advanced threat analytics and encryption, would exceed what could be delivered on-premise.

“When I first came, there was a huge reluctance about cloud, but within two months, we were able to prove that the technology was solid,” he says.

The BMA has now embraced infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a ser-vice (SaaS). There are also plans to relocate the datacentre from BMA House to a different site in 2017, but the modernisation agenda does not mean there will be any abrupt changes.

“I am a firm believer in hybrid IT. Not everything goes to the cloud. Where it makes sense, we will have a hybrid infrastruc-ture, also to take away the burden of having to patch and maintain things that have been commoditised, but the change does have to be carried out and managed correctly,” says Turfrey.

“Cloud is about giving us the agility and ability to free up peo-ple’s time to do some of the newer things. Now employees have unlimited access, they can collabo-rate and share information any-where,” he adds.

“But using modern tools and tech-nology does come with a price. It is not always cheaper, but if we’re looking for the quality and what’s in our staff’s best interest, that also helps our members.”

Also within the cloud realm, the association has introduced Microsoft Office 365 to all its staff, as well as an intranet, over the past 12 months. This has been considered instrumental in improving collaboration and sharing tools for office-based staff and its 150 home workers.

Another pillar of the Mast programme is to build systems and capability to support a digital offering

to members, with the delivery of more personalised content. One of the IT initiatives geared to enhance the BMA’s member

services was the introduction of Microsoft Azure, in which plat-forms and service engines are now built.

“We have committees that do government lobbying in topics such as sugary drinks,” says Turfrey. “We’ve now built an online engine that’s been hooked up with single sign-on access, which has helped run an online election among members, for example.

“Where we’ve previously taken quite a lot of time and manual processing, these things now get done in minutes. If we want to have millions of different committees to do the elections, again

this can happen, and will run and integrate seamlessly behind the scenes for our members.”

Similarly, the BMA has also started to make use of business intelli-gence (BI), with the introduction of PowerBI, to get deeper insight on the products and services needed by members and target them more

INTERVIEW

❯Eurostar’s head of digital talks about the benefits of

bringing development in-house, Wi-Fi headaches and

on-board entertainment.

“cloud is About giving us the Agility And Ability to free up

people’s time to do newer things”ian Turfrey, BMa

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effectively. “Not only have we now built cloud-based engines and capabilities, we’ve embraced BI to become more data driven as an organisation,” says Turfrey.

The past 12 months were mooted as a “year of hygiene”, intro-ducing the basics needed to provide a rich digital experience and focus more on services based on customised, high-quality con-tent to members.

“We have many different doctors with varied requirements dur-ing their working life,” says Turfrey. “It could be a junior doctor aged 25, for example, or a general practitioner over the age of 33. Their needs change over time. It’s really about tailoring their experience. For instance, mobility can play a key role in making our library services more accessible and easier to use.”

Predictive analyticsTurfrey plans further building of the BMA’s BI capabilities with new datasets, as well as predictive analytics. “I’ll also start investing and experimenting around machine learning with some of the data,” he says. “We need to enhance areas such as member retention, which is really important to us.”

With Office 365 now in place, the BMA is looking at improv-ing conferencing tools for staff and clients, so the introduction of Skype for Business is also on the cards.

The team is also looking at hardware devices for the future, with a plan to roll out Surface Pro 4s for employees with more complex mobility and collaboration requirements.

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation is also coming up, and the association wants not only to replace an

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in-house setup with new functionality for business areas such as finance and sales, but also the ability to handle novelties such as online shops with BI integration.

A key component of the BMA’s application architecture going forward, the procurement process for the future ERP package began in January 2017.

Overcoming leadership challenges In terms of the leadership journey so far, Turfrey has adopted a motto: Think big, start small, act now. “Over the course of the past year, we have started small, using cloud as the area to inno-vate securely,” he says. “We made sure those important ‘hygiene’ fac-tors were all there.

“In the past, we have had a lot of the right tools for what we needed to do. But, a bit like Morecambe and Wise, we didn’t necessarily have the right notes in the right order, so we have been reorganis-ing priorities.

“Some of our processes within IT needed to be improved, and this was done,” says Turfrey. “This now enables us to lift the chains. We have designs for everything. We are now working in a far more modern way than how we did in the past.”

There was a need to ensure the right set of suppliers were in place to execute this model, which meant adding to in-house IT

expertise. But above all, setting a plan with priorities and present-ing it coherently to the board was key.

“Communicating the strategy to staff and speaking to them about it is not an exercise in criticising what happened in the past, but painting a vision for the future,” says Turfrey. “Change is always difficult, and people are worried about their roles and their jobs, especially when you start changing technologies.”

The deliverables of the past year have gained IT more credibility in the business, as well as with the board. Now the foundations have been laid, the next year will see further improvement of the IT-based systems directly related to improving member service.

“In a year’s time, we will have built a collection of engines that sup-port our members’ needs. There are many channels of engage-ment for that, and we will have to become a lot more omni-channel,” he says. “We’ll also have far more data, allowing us to personalise content and information, and help us to decide how we best support our members. All our staff will be

able to collaborate seamlessly any time, any place, anywhere.”Turfrey adds: “We now have a modern IT estate. All the infra-

structure is running and the right platforms are in place. There may be other opportunities we have not thought about yet that we can leverage for the future. The differentials in my business are what I remain focused on.” n

INTERVIEW

“like morecAmbe And wise, we didn’t necessArily hAve the right

notes in the right order, so we hAve been reorgAnising priorities”

ian Turfrey, BMa

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UK tech must go forward with confidence

Let’s think about the UK in 2027 for a moment. By then, just 10 years from now, we will have been out of the EU for eight years. We might not even be the UK any more, but if we are, the population is likely to have grown to 70 million, according to the Office for National Statistics – up from about 65 million now. Some 30% of those people will be aged over 60, and one in 12 will be over 80.

Consider the added pressure on public services – especially the NHS and social care. Who knows what state the economy will be in – thanks to Brexit, it is impossible to predict. We need to fall back on a few certainties – things that we can state with confidence will be sure-fire hooks upon which to hang our business and public service coats.

We can’t rely on financial services the way we have for the past 20 years. We can’t expect to revitalise a manufacturing sector that largely has moved eastwards. We’re already scaling back on clean energy investment. But we can argue with confidence that, 10 years from now, the world will be vastly more digital. What do we, in the UK, need to ensure is in place to exploit the opportunities on offer?

For one thing, we’d need near-ubiquitous availability of high-speed communications networks – likely based on full-fibre broadband to everyone that wants it, and second-generation 5G mobile technology.

We all know this. The government sort-of knows it, and is making positive – if baby – steps in the right direction. Ofcom’s success in convincing BT to put Openreach at arm’s length shows the regulatory environment is moving forward, if slowly.

Digital transformation is gathering pace. Even Whitehall is getting there, but local government and the NHS are lagging. We can hope that moves for better technology education in schools and apprenticeships will bear fruit by 2027. But still it doesn’t feel like this is hap-pening quickly enough, and two years of uncertainty will perpetuate caution. And yet we know that our future is more digital.

Once prime minister Theresa May triggers Article 50, we have two years when much of the UK rocks in its chair, worrying for the future. The tech sector has its concerns, too. But the digital revolution continues apace, regardless. Despite all the short-term uncer-tainty, the next two years can be a time for UK tech to take confident steps forward – our economy in 2027 will depend on it. n

Bryan Glick, editor in chief

❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs.

EDITOR’S COMMENTHOME

we cAn Argue with confidence thAt, 10 yeArs from now, the

world will be vAstly more digitAl

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It only seems a short while back that the incumbent storage suppliers were pouring scorn on the new kids on the block, the all-flash array (AFA) suppliers. Now, Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, Hitachi and NetApp all offer AFAs alongside the young

pretenders such as Pure Data, Kaminario, Tintri and Tegile.During this tumultuous time, we have also seen what looked like

good solid companies being acquired (SolidFire by NetApp and XtremeIO by EMC, for example), while others have faltered due to having great technical architectures that have proved difficult to move with the times (such as Violin Memory).

Quocirca remembers discussions with the early AFA suppliers around what the future for flash would be. Several of them did not see any need for any form of performance tiering in flash storage systems, because the difference in performance between flash and spinning disk was so startling that tiering did not make sense. When it was pointed out to these suppliers that the same was said when the move from tape to spinning disk started, looks of confusion were the frequent response.

Not the be-all and end-allEven in the early days of AFAs, it was apparent that this was not going to be the be-all and end-all of the storage wars. Violin Memory tried to redefine the concept of the “disk”, replacing it with Violin Inline Memory Modules (VIMMs). This was a great architecture, but without gaining traction from third-party origi-nal equipment manufacturers (OEMs), it has been unable to fol-low the falling prices of 3.5in and 2.5in standard solid state disks (SSDs) as used by the other suppliers.

Flash: it’s not all over yetClive Longbottom looks at the need for new approaches to storage

as ever-increasing demands are placed on all-flash arrays

BUYER’S GUIDE TO NEXT-GENERATION STORAGE | PART 2 OF 3

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The result of the rapid “dash to flash”, though, has been effectively raising the bar. As more primary workloads have moved to AFAs, the competitive edge in performance gained by the early adopters is beginning to fade. Suppliers are finding it difficult to squeeze an appreciable amount of further per-formance from their AFAs.

For example, consider a spinning disk array with a data latency of, say, 40ms. Sounds quick, but as disk speeds became quicker, suppliers managed to squeeze this down to, say, 20ms – a 50% improvement. Combine this with better read/write performance as well, and input/output operations per sec-ond (IOPS) moved significantly.

Latency in microsecondsNow, look at the same performance with an all-flash array. Latency moves down into the microseconds. Assume that the first AFA you purchase has a data latency of 400µs. That origi-nal possible improvement in performance by two factors (40ms to 400µs) is more than any storage administrator has seen in living memory.

Then, if the suppliers improve the AFA performance from 400 to 200µs, it is still a 50% improve-ment, but may be constrained more by the storage interconnects and the server capabilities to deal with such a fast data stream.

Plus, making that leap is not as easy as it is with spinning disk. There are no mechanical bits to fiddle with to optimise performance; any major improvements at the flash substrate level require a new substrate fabrication plant – and building that is more expensive than a new magnetic disk plant.

Yet the demand for faster systems is still there. To this end, new storage approaches are having

to be investigated. Sure, advances in substrates are still going ahead: the move to 3D-Nand memory has driven higher storage densities and better performance to a degree, and the promise of Intel/Micron’s 3D XPoint/Optane memory will drive even higher performance.

Struggling to keep paceThe constraints of a disk-based array are showing, though. iSCSI, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and even InfiniBand are struggling to keep pace with the amount of data that a well-engineered, high-speed 3D-Nand array can serve to the network.

How to get around this? Server-side storage. Here, non-volatile memory is used to store data as close to the CPU as possible, using PCIe cards, M.2 systems or even DIMM slots. Already, converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems are moving to use such storage, “hidden” within the engineered system itself.

suppliers Are finding it difficult to squeeze An AppreciAble

Amount of further performAnce from their AfAs

BUYER’S GUIDE

❯All-flash arrays have virtually eliminated flash storage

performance issues, for now. But applications and user expectations will catch up.

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The first systems used spare PCIe slots in servers to hold spe-cialised cards containing non-volatile memory (NVM). Data was stored and retrieved from these cards at computer bus speeds, rather than at LAN speeds. Suppliers such as Intel, OCZ, FusionIO and Texas Memory Systems (TMS) were earlier pioneers in this space. FusionIO was acquired by SanDisk in 2014; TMS was acquired by IBM in 2012.

But there were problems with the early systems. A SAN or NAS storage array can have multiple redundancy approaches built into it, ranging from RAID or erasure code to direct data mirroring across systems. PCIe storage meant that all the data eggs were in one basket – if there was a failure of the server, all the data on that server at the time could also be lost.

Suppliers such as Pernixdata tried to deal with the issue with a supplier-agnostic software-based approach. However, Pernixdata was acquired by software and hardware enterprise cloud supplier Nutanix in 2016, being subsumed into Nutanix’s software suite.

As the need for data speed has increased, more firms are work-ing on how to optimise the use of server-side storage. Alongside those trying to figure out how to deal with the weak links of such storage are those who have taken a slightly different approach.

One example is Diablo Technologies, which has taken server side storage to its current logical limit. It has developed non-volatile DIMMs (NVDIMMs) in conjunction with driving stand-ardisation with industry bodies JEDEC and SNIA. Diablo uses the NVDIMMS as byte-addressable non-persistent storage – it

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recognises the difficulties of providing a completely fault-tolerant server-side flash storage system, opting to provide the best pos-sible data manipulation and analysis speeds instead.

But this could change. The non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture of a highly par-allelised NVDIMM storage system does lend itself to the possibility of a highly efficient, erasure code style of data resilience across multiple serv-ers connected via high speed inter-connects. In other words, high-speed resilient highly available persistent server-side storage may not be that far away.

Also, Diablo says it has abstracted as much of its technology as possible without affecting performance. As such, when (and if) Intel/Micron’s delayed 3D XPoint flash substrate starts to ship in commercial volume, Diablo will be able to embrace the technol-ogy and make the most of the extra speed capabilities.

Mix of storage typesAnother possible candidate will be the cloud. Increasingly, the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and other public clouds are put-ting in place high-speed data manipulation and analysis systems, using a mix of storage types controlled directly by the cloud pro-vider. As long as the business logic and data storage systems are co-located, this could be a good solution for those struggling to keep pace with the changes in the storage landscape.

Overall, the data speed race is internecine. It will be impossi-ble for any supplier to meet the needs of the user through any persistent storage needs – even if Intel managed to build in tera-bytes of storage as Level 1 cache in its CPUs. Users want absolute

real-time data analysis; even on-chip cache cannot provide this.

With so many different ways of providing non-volatile memory sys-tems, there is a stronger need than ever to provide intelligent data cach-ing and tiering capabilities. For many (such as Diablo), this is where the “secret sauce” comes in.

Nanosecond timescalesWith spinning disk storage, the latency of the data meant soft-ware could easily outperform the disk and deal with optimis-ing the data within the milliseconds in which the disks operated. Now, as flash deals in micro and even nanosecond timescales, poorly written and implemented caching and tiering software can actually slow down the performance of a system – drastically.

As a storage buyer, accept that there will still be major steps forward in storage performance across SAN, NAS and server-side environments and make sure that what you choose enables you to embrace what could come down the line.

Unless unavoidable, and there are distinct major business ben-efits in doing so, do not choose systems that will require a forklift upgrade and major change in the infrastructure in the future. n

BUYER’S GUIDE

it will be impossible for Any supplier to meet the needs of the user through Any persistent storAge needs

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For about £80 a month – about the same price as a high-end home broadband package – firms can now gain access to some of the most powerful software ever developed.

This is what Ocado pays for its artificial intelligence (AI) natural language processing application programming inter-face (API) from Google to help manage and prioritise the 2,000 emails it receives from customers each day.

The significance is not only the low price – it is also transpar-ent, and helps business leaders understand the cost and value of their big data projects, says Dan Nelson, head of data at Ocado Technology, the online grocery store’s IT division.

“You could not get access to this kind of technology just a few years ago. But also, because we know the cost, it helps the busi-ness decide how much time it wants to invest in new data pro-jects,” he says. It is important to engage the business in these pri-orities, Nelson adds.

Big data strategyData scientists now have a mass of tools to analyse huge vol-umes of data arriving from myriad sources at phenomenal speed. Email, social media, the internet of things (IoT) and smartphones are just some of the sources businesses can draw on to reach useful conclusions and improve their performance. But a successful big data strategy is not just a technical problem.

Ocado Technology has developed a model for data projects, which sees product owners in the business lead projects helped by development teams and data scientists. Among them is a natural language project to analyse customer emails to ensure

Businesses get to grips with big data projects

Big data projects need to be managed, and Ocado and Graydon have been figuring out how. Lindsay Clark reports

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customer service agents are not overrun at peak times (see Ocado case study below).

Trading since 2002, Ocado strives to steal a march on rivals by building much of its technology in-house. But it is not just busi-nesses born in the dotcom era that are demonstrating the impor-tance of a thoughtful management structure to data projects.

Credit reference and company information provider Graydon dates back to 1862, and for two years has been working to create

a central approach to business intelligence (BI) that will lead to adopting a big data approach to providing services to its clients.

Bart Redder, director of customer and business intelligence at Graydon, says his team moved out of the marketing department to become a shared cross-group activity so it could work more closely with all stakeholders, including IT, finance, operations and commercial departments. To ensure equal service to all these par-ties from a coherent set of data, Graydon developed a value chain

BIG DATA

Case study: Ocado brings data projects into the business

Data scientists are not always the best leaders of data pro-jects, Ocado Technology is learning. The IT division of the online grocery retailer and supermarket is striving to help the business take advantage of data with a 60-strong central team, but they do not lead projects.

“We have resources at our fingertips, but try not to do data science projects,” says Ocado Technology head of data Dan Nelson. “If you do, you end up with something very clever but hard to implement or nobody feels the ownership to support.”

Instead, it is placing leadership for data projects within the business teams in the form of a product owner, whose task is to identify problems that could be solved with data analysis.

A recent example saw Ocado take advantage of Google natural language processing artificial intelligence APIs to help

understand and prioritise customer service emails, particu-larly when volumes are exceptionally high.

Using the head of service delivery as business sponsor, the project was managed by the product owner of the contact centre working with the central data science team and devel-opment team that would implement the technology.

This structure helped data scientists understand govern-ance problems in terms of customer privacy, without remov-ing all the value from the data. Development teams were able to guide the project from the start to ensure it could be rolled out quickly in a production environment when ready.

Support for data science goes to the top of the organisation, however. Nelson says his department’s priorities are set by a business steering committee, chaired by the CEO.

computerweekly.com 21-27 March 2017 24

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of data insight model. “You need different departments, different sets of data and different business rules if you want to generate insight,” he says.

To bring these together, Redder and his team identified a six-stage value chain of data. It starts by looking at the data sources. Then it asks if the input of data has been done correctly. Then it looks at data processing. Next, it considers data transformation. The fifth step is to build up dashboards. And finally, it looks at how those insights trigger action in the business. The team calls data governance meetings where the business owner for each stage discusses progress and problems.

Where the problems areRedders says this approach helps the BI team and the business understand where the problems are, and where resources are needed, right from raw data to an insight and business action.

Graydon has implemented Birst, a cloud-based BI platform, to bring together information sources across the company and provide self-service analytics dashboards to teams in marketing, sales, human resources and finance.

The platform is currently used to analyse Graydon’s internal performance and processes, but will be extended to the data and analytics it provides its customers. The firm is also experimenting with providing big data analytics to its customers, for example by assessing whether restaurant reviews provide early indications of businesses struggling financially.

However, Redders says strong management of structured data projects is needed to take advantage of unstructured sources.

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“If you want to succeed in big data, you will have to have financial data and all the other processes correct and in line before you start,” he says.

While big data is helping firms in established markets, it is also opening up new business models. Open Energi is taking advantage of smart meters measuring the electricity demands of buildings, factories, machines and fridges to help its custom-ers understand their energy consumption and sell back unused resource to energy providers. The model, known as demand-side response, relies on effective analysis of big data from thousands of meters sampling energy consumption every few minutes.

Big data platformOnce the company reached a certain scale, it realised it needed a big data platform, which it found in the Hortonworks Hadoop distribution. But it still needed to build a team that could work together, says Open Energi technical director Michael Bironneau.

“When we started out, our skills were on the data science side,” he says. “We underwent training and figured out how to use the new technology. We made a good start, but when we ended up hiring software engineers, we found we needed to bridge the gap between the two groups. That was a big challenge. It was like they spoke different languages. A data scientist would talk about a machine learning model that runs in real time, and a software engineer would ask for the component design. Data scientists care about accuracy and the elegance of the model, whereas soft-ware engineers want to build something that does not break.”

Bironneau initially worked as a translator between the two roles, but the two disciplines are now more aligned and can understand each other’s priorities.

He also recommends recruiting a data engineer to bridge the gap between the two fields. “Any company that has never looked at big data and is considering a project in that area should hire a data engineer,” he says. “That was the catalyst for us,

and it has turned out to be a very important role.”Ray Eitel-Porter, leader for Accenture’s analytics practice in the

UK and Ireland, says that as businesses move big data projects from a pilot phase into production, they need to get management and governance right. He recommends a hub-and-spoke model where a central team takes responsibility for tools, data quality and definitions, while satellite data scientists sit within business units to see how they can benefit from big data and analytics.

Business sponsorshipThis also ensures the activity is jointly funded, he says. “It is critical to have business sponsorship. If you have all the funding centralised, you might not hit the business need. Some business ownership and funding is essential. You also want cross-enter-prise investment in a Hadoop platform and build a data lake. You want central funding earmarked for certain things.”

Businesses can easily be dazzled by big data, but before they can reap its rewards, they must have the right management struc-ture, funding and data governance in place, or the big data con-cept is unlikely to live up to its hype. n

BIG DATA

❯Genomics, an IT-dependent area of medical science

research, could benefit from the UK leaving the EU by lower

barriers to data acquisition.

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On an unseasonably warm February day, a small com-mercial drone hovered alongside Highlight Towers, a striking, angular glass block soaring 126m over a suburban Autobahn on the outskirts of Munich, with

equally striking views.Inside the building, Harriet Green, general manager of Watson

Internet of Things (IoT) at IBM, and Ilse Aigner, deputy prime minister of the state of Bavaria, linked hands over a big red but-ton, watching the video pictures relayed by the drone.

As it climbed to the very top of the tower, the familiar, linear IBM logo swam lazily into view and, to applause from their audience, Green and Aigner pushed the button, lighting up the sign and offi-cially inaugurating the IBM Watson IoT headquarters.

It is a little over a year since IBM first announced its intention to locate the global base for its Watson IoT platform in Munich, and since then it has been very busy, not only fitting out its new home, but advancing IoT technology and drawing businesses such as automaker BMW, outsourcing and facilities practice ISS, and ICT channel distributor Avnet to its banner.

At the inaugural event, which saw customers, collaborators and journalists descend on Munich en masse to find out more about what the IoT can deliver for enterprises, IBM announced a new round of enterprise partnerships at the Watson IoT lab, described by Green in her opening remarks as a “collaboratory”.

IoT advancesAlex Scroxton visits IBM’s Watson lab in Munich,

where customers are using the power of artificial intelligence to deliver on the promise of the internet of things

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It would probably be fair to say that, despite its long history, IBM is not renowned for its expertise in networking, and nor has it sought to be. But it doesn’t need to, for what IBM is bringing to the picture is not connectivity, or a desire to push a proprietary network standard, but the grow-ing power of the Watson cognitive computing platform.

IBM wants to deliver a whole range of offerings, capabilities and partnerships to extend the power of cognitive computing (so memora-bly demonstrated by Watson on US quiz show Jeopardy) to the IoT via the Watson IoT Cloud.

Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM distin-guished engineer and a key figure in the Watson IoT project, points out that there have been many rushed IoT projects that pushed to market the minimum viable product – often riddled with mas-sive security holes – giving the IoT a bad name. Therefore, it is important to take the time to get the IoT right, which is where IBM comes in.

The whole point of Big Blue’s involvement is not that it can’t resist trivial use cases – such as a Red Dwarf-style talking toaster that can “print” the weather forecast on your toast, or any number of silly applications – but rather that if one of its partners sees a busi-ness opportunity and a monetisable stream for selling something as a service, then IBM will have their back, says Stanford-Clark.

“The Watson tools like speech enablement, conversational understanding, image processing – whatever API [application pro-gramming interface] it is – gives them the building block to make that product,” says Stanford-Clark. “We’re not sitting here saying,

‘Yes you can do it’, but if you want to do it, we’re here to help.”

Gabi Zodik, IBM research director of IoT and mobile platforms, says: “One way to think about the IoT is not just as an isolated thing, but as a gateway to cognitive systems. How do we access cognitive systems? Through the IoT devices that are around us all day, so that’s the shift. The IoT is not out there on its own, it’s in cloud and cognitive.”

SNCF plots a path to cognitive IoTCustomers flocking to the IoT lab include Dutch drone maker Aerialtronics, industrial hardware supplier Bosch, entrepreneur funding platform Indiegogo, Finnish lift and escalator builder Kone, office technology supplier Ricoh, French state railway operator SNCF, and financial services giant Visa.

Public transport has been at the forefront of use cases for the IoT pretty much since the term was first coined, so for SNCF’s CTO, Raphael Viard, the concept of connecting anything and eve-rything he can is not new. SNCF is using Watson IoT in the IBM cloud to address its biggest challenge – maintenance.

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“one wAy to think About the iot is not just As An

isolAted thing, but As A gAtewAy to cognitive systems”

GaBi ZodiK, iBM

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Like other rail operators, SNCF suffers from two big problems: its maintenance depots are generally located on constrained sites near city centre termini; and its trains are increasingly sophisti-cated and carry more and more components. All this adds up to make its maintenance windows far longer than they used to be. And with no room to grow, its support infrastructure is at capacity.

On its most heavily trafficked Parisian commuter routes, SNCF is outfitting new-generation trains with 2,000 sensors that forward 70,000 data points every month, so its engineers can remotely monitor the stock to get early warning of issues with doors or air-conditioning, for example, freeing up their maintenance capacity.

For passengers, says Viard, the harvested data can be used to improve its communication around delays, helping its custom-ers to plan around any problems on the rail network.

He is also looking to use the IoT to monitor trees at the track-side. “We are doing a lot with big data for vegetation, trying to analyse where we may have issues due to high winds and trees falling on the catenaries [the overhead power supply], and so on, so we’re doing a lot of experimentation around that,” he says.

SNCF has not yet started to use Watson’s cognitive capabilities, but Viard is keenly observing developments and coming up with use cases for the railways. “In the first phase, we are looking much more at analytics and big data. When we have done this, cognitive may be involved,” he says. “In addition, when you do cognitive, you need to have all your data in Watson, and right now we don’t, we just have our IoT data there. We are gathering data, and when we have enough to analyse in that way we’ll look more at cognitive, but the challenge for us at this time is trying to gather more data.”

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Above: Harriet Green, head of Watson IoT (left) and Ilse Aigner, Bavarian state minister of economic affairs and media, energy and technology, press

the button to activate IBM’s global centre for Watson IoT in Germany

Below: IBM is collaboration with BMW Group to explore the role of Watson cognitive computing in personalising the driving experience and

creating more intuitive driver support systems for cars of the future

IBM

IBM

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For SNCF, cognitive computing will likely find a strong use case in passenger-facing areas, accord-ing to IBM general manager of global technology services Remi Lassiaille. “You could imagine cog-nitive in the CRM [customer relationship manage-ment] sphere to manage customer relationships, and maybe also in the call centre,” he says.

EEBus uses cognitive to improve energy efficiencySNCF may be at a relatively early stage in its use of cognitive computing, but for EEBus, a major new pan-European IoT alli-ance initiated by the German government to explore initiatives in the energy industry, the benefits are already writ large.

The members of EEBus – which besides IBM itself include lead-ing connected home stakeholders such as Bosch, Miele, Schneider and Vaillant – are exploring a standardised and common lan-guage for interoperability of devices to support communication between, for example, smart heating systems, electric vehicles, solar panels and household appliances.

“Our solutions and algorithms learn from the consumer side, and connect to cognitive systems to combine the knowledge and experience from many homes to improve the user experience, because we can learn very quickly about the user and what he or she needs,” says Sven Schreiber, executive vice-president of resi-dential business at EEBus member SMA Solar Technology, and also a member of the initiative’s executive board.

For Schreiber, it is vitally important that future smart energy systems are able to run as unobtrusively as possible, so that they

become a background component of people’s lives.“There should be no loss of comfort for the user

– they don’t want to have to go back to university to be able to run a domestic system, so it must be intuitive, hence there is big potential to connect the intelligence of Watson,” he says.

Bernd Wunderlich, IBM Watson IoT industry leader for Europe, says IBM’s involvement in EEBus

will accelerate the use of the IoT in the energy industry. “We have one showcase that we have built already for a heat pump, where we have developed a minimum viable product in just a few weeks, which shows how we are bringing external APIs into the game, such as from The Weather Company [a recent IBM acquisition] to make such systems much more intelligent,” he says.

Cognitive keeps users happyLike Viard at SNCF, Hugues Delval, executive vice-president of services at Kone, a leader in escalator and lift technology, is already using IoT sensors to monitor the health of the firm’s installed base of equipment, checking whether or not a lift car is levelling correctly, or noting abnormal vibrations, alarm system function, and so on.

For Kone, which makes half its €8.8bn annual revenues from recurring services contracts, bringing cognitive analytics into play to extrapolate trends in its datasets that may indicate an oncom-ing problem is a key differentiator for its businesses.

“We are able to tell our technicians that this elevator’s doors are vibrating abnormally, it’s probably coming from the door lock, so

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please make an intervention in the next 48 hours and make sure you have this component in your van,” says Delval.

“This enables us to guarantee the availability and performance of the equipment. It’s also very important for customers. We can provide the information to the customer on his mobile so that when he, as a tenant of the building, calls Kone to say he has noticed this issue, we can say we’re already intervening.

“It brings value for us in terms of our ability to serve our customers in terms of performance, safety and availability, and it also helps us make our people look more professional, because they come with the right information,” says Delval.

In the future, Kone hopes to expand its use of Watson artifi-cial intelligence (AI) to introduce services that will enhance the user experience still further. In years to come, Delval predicts that lifts in apartment blocks will recognise mobile devices when they are brought into the building and, knowing that said device is associ-ated with a property on the eighth floor, will have a car ready to whisk the resident home without them having to wait for it.

More prosaically, Kone hopes to use Watson to analyse inbound calls to its contact centres to help its agents ask the right ques-tions and find the potential root cause of a problem quicker. Such a system may also be used to identify how a caller is feeling – angry,

calm, and so on – which the contact centre agent can then use to tailor their approach and line of questioning.

“We will augment people’s capabilities to better serve our cus-tomers – that’s a key element for us,” says Delval. “We are entering a period where we can really tap into the cognitive analytics capa-bilities to design these new services, and the further we go down this road the more cognitive and AI capabilities will go with us.”

A guided tour of IoT HQVisitors to Watson IoT’s new home are left in no doubt as to how lav-ishly IBM has spent on the experi-ence. While other suppliers tend to demonstrate small-scale use cases, often involving model cars and cuddly toys, IBM pulled out all the stops to impress the press corps, enlisting some of its top technologists, such as electrical engineering veteran John Cohn, to

run guided tours of the facility.At the client experience centre, IoT explorers can peruse every

single connected component of BMW’s i8 electric supercar, hear music generated by real-time IoT data flows from the trains on Munich’s U-bahn network, and see case studies projected onto a digital tabletop.

Elsewhere, a clearly excited Cohn demonstrated some of the IoT capabilities IBM has built into its offices, using a

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“we Are entering A period where we cAn reAlly tAp into the

cognitive AnAlytics cApAbilities to design new services”

huGueS delval, Kone

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text-to-speech interface to book a hotdesk, while overhead lights lit up to guide him to it.

Meanwhile, strategically placed mood lighting lit up in shades of red and green to let busy IBMers know how long the queue at the downstairs coffee bar was getting – it is illegal in Germany to show anybody’s face over a webcam without their consent, but

not to display the fact of their presence in the space, so a network of infrared IoT sensors reads the ambient temperatures in the room to see how many people are there, and changes the lights to achieve the same effect.

In other parts of the building, IBM engineers used Watson cog-nitive computing and the IoT to convert speech from English text to Chinese calligraphy written by a robotic arm, and showed off Olli, a US-built electric vehicle that uses Watson IoT not only to analyse and learn from high volumes of transportation data, but also interact with its passengers using Watson developer APIs: speech to text, natural language classifier, entity extraction and text to speech. n

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IBM

IBM Watson IoT is headquartered in Munich’s

Highlight Towers

visitors to wAtson iot’s new home Are left in no doubt As to

how lAvishly ibm hAs spent on the experience

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Sex toy data cock-up leaves users red-facedDonald Trump’s strategist Kellyanne Conway caused uproar online last week when she implied that former president Barack Obama may have used a microwave oven to spy on her boss. Conway was spouting alternative facts, but with the array of devices filling our homes, it’s easy to feel they are spying on you.

And maybe they are. Canadian startup We-Vibe, a maker of “adult sensual lifestyle products”, has been fined $4m in the US after it emerged that security flaws in its flagship app left custom-ers worryingly exposed. We-Vibe’s connected sex toy, designed for couples who want to spice things up a little, can be controlled

over long distances using a smartphone, or locally using Bluetooth. The cock-up saw intimate data gathered from We-Vibe’s toys through the app, including temperature, intensity setting, and how often the vibrators were used. It also turned out the toy was vulnerable to control by other devices within Bluetooth range.

Users can claim up to $10,000 compensation if they can attest they used the app to control the sex toy. Standard Innovation, the firm behind We-Vibe, said it took security seriously and had taken steps to secure its products. But just in case, Downtime recom-mends avoiding the connected vibrator and using your imagina-tion, which isn’t yet vulnerable to hacking – as far as we know. n

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