Unwiring IT

Dan Turchin is the former CEO of Aeroprise (acquired by BMC Software). Follow him on Twitter.

Every week is big in enterprise mobility. But this is one we’ll remember for a long time.  And I’m not talking about the vendor detritus clogging my inbox from CTIA. Consider…

We mourned the passing of our icon, spiritual leader, and Zen master. A Steve Jobs story that is personal but worth sharing: my wife Julie got her PhD at Stanford in 2005. A healthy, humble Steve delivered the commencement speech that has forever made life more difficult for commencement speakers. I was mesmerized at the time and still am when I re-read it.

It’s as clichéd as it is true: when he finished speaking, a hushed silence fell over the stadium. We didn’t know whether to cry or applaud or rush the podium for a group hug. Most of us sat in awe and knew we had just become part of a special fraternity.

In other, less consequential news…

Amazon launched the remarkable Kindle Fire and Silk browser. It will do to the tablet market what every consumer tech vendor has failed to do: loosen Cupertino’s iron grip. It is elegant, marries content and distribution like no other device can, and makes innovative use of cloud storage in ways nobody outside Seattle saw coming. And most important, at $199 it’s priced based on reality. Kudos to Bezos.

…And one more thing.

A rare, under-hyped Apple product launched. The 4S is shattering Apple pre-launch sales records – and for good reason. Siri alone, Apple’s “voice assistant”, warrants all the launch euphoria and then some. It will be to human computer interaction what Atari was to video games and iPod was to digital music. There were ways to interact with computers before and there were even natural-language speech interfaces but we’ll look back on Siri as the next Apple technology to disrupt an entire industry that seemed mature and impermeable.

So what will next week bring? Who knows but it too will measure on the Richter scale. Until then…

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Before being acquired by BMC Software, Alf (@aeroprise) and I would hang out by the Ganesh totem (an explanation of that another time) at Aeroprise and solve the world’s problems. Unfortunately, no one wanted to hear our ideas for eliminating hunger or removing cruel dictators. But enough people pretended to care about our perspectives on the mobile industry that we started sharing them at team meetings. Sadly, both Ganesh and our team meetings are gone but we’re continuing the discussions in a new podcast series we call Mobile Monkeys.

Think Wayne’s World for geeks. Two dudes in mom’s basement waxing philosophical about topics ranging from the consumerization of IT to why ad hoc wireless networks will be the next disruptive mobile technology. Each episode is short – about five minutes – and we’ll cover one or two themes. In the first episode, we talk about the impact of HP killing webOS and Google’s bombshell acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Party on.

Dan Turchin is the former CEO of Aeroprise. Follow him on Twitter.

By Dan Turchin, former CEO of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

The Fab Four on Ed Sullivan in ’64.Neil Armstrong’s moon walk in ’69. Schilling’s bloody sock in 2004. All shook the earth when they happened. But it was the aftershocks that made them endure.

Today, I’m proud to announce Aeroprise has been acquired by BMC Software. I’m thrilled for our employees and partners and incredibly excited to be joining an excellent, wicked smart team. But I’m the first to admit it doesn’t mean much today – a headline, a new logo, no more Red Bull in the break room.

More important than today’s announcement are the aftershocks that lie ahead. Consider where IT is and where we’re going:

• IT is getting more social every day.
• Apps are moving to the cloud.
• Consumers are bringing computing habits and sensibilities honed after-hours (the “consumerization of IT”) into the workplace.

The thread that binds all of these? Mobility. Who gets that more than any other enterprise vendor? BMC.

I was with a customer last week who put it this way:

“How can we claim to support the business until we support smartphones and tablets? In twenty five years in IT I’ve never seen a more dramatic shift happen so quickly. Every day we wait to execute on our mobile strategy is a day we fall farther behind the competition.”

Powerful stuff. That’s why we’re teaming up.

My rendition of “Imagine” shatters glass towns away. I can’t moon walk to save my life. My curve doesn’t and my control makes Ricky Vaughan look like Orel Hershiser. And yet, I’m thrilled that our team will play a part in the reawakening of IT.

Thanks to everyone who supported me and our motley crew for ten years. I’ll never, ever forget that you got us here. To our loyal customers and partners: I promise you’ll benefit as much or more than we will.

Know this: you won’t see us doing a victory lap or patting ourselves on the back. In fact, the hour after the deal closed we were heads-down packing up Aeroprise (think Palm III covered in dust bunnies) so we could report for duty at 7:00 AM the next morning as BMC employees.

To say we’re excited and motivated is an understatement. We’re bringing all we’ve learned, all we’ve developed, and all our eccentricity and passion. Expect great things.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

We’re hosting a webcast this Thursday, June 2 at 2:00 PM ET about the major trends impacting today’s mobile enterprise like the consumerization of IT, web vs. native apps, and the ramifications of cloud for wireless solutions.

I’ll be joined by Philippe Winthrop – founder of this illustrious forum, reformed tech analyst, and omnipresent mobile enterprise pundit – and Chris Williams – BMC Software Solution Marketing Manager and too-suave-for-ITSM rock ‘n roll history aficionado. Expect a lively discussion. Arrive prepared to heckle, lob tomatoes at our hype machine, and otherwise knock us off our soap boxes.

Our target audience is enterprise IT leaders looking to better support mobile employees and admins tasked with implementing mobile solutions. Contact me in advance if there are topics you’d like added or specific questions you’d like addressed.

Register here if you haven’t already. There are a few spots available but we’ll probably reach capacity some time Wednesday.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

These days we can’t scratch an itch let alone buy a latte without announcing where and why we did it. Apps like Foursquare are harvesting and selling troves of data about our purchasing habits. It’s like the oft-tweeted, oft-cited internet meme says: “if you didn’t pay for it YOU are the product.” What’s ironic is that as we’re soaked by a firehose of useless data and as privacy breaches (Sony, EC2, Epsilon, …) spread faster than Charlie Sheen rants we’re getting almost no value out of powerful sharing technologies where they have the most impact: at work.

I’ll go out on a limb and say if 1% of the energy we commit to sharing our prowess at hoeing virtual gardens went into collaborating at work the US GDP would be two points higher by end of year. The power of sharing combined with the power of mobile technology changes everything. Consider three feature requests I’ve received in the last 30 days from customers on our Advisory Council:

1. Geo-location: “…we’d like to give our execs a dashboard showing open issues in the building they’re in.”
2. Augmented reality: “…we’d like to take a picture of a server to pull up its environmental specs.”
3. Near Field Communications: “…we’d like employees to submit trouble tickets by waving a smartphone in front of a bar code.”

Information captured that easily shared with just who needs it in actionable ways is potent. These are simple use cases that require almost no new technology, training, or expense. All they require is a team with vision and an organization that believes in continuous improvement.

Answer me this: what else could you do right now to improve service quality, make every employee more productive, establish hard cost benchmarks for all services IT provides, and bring together employees across cultures and time zones? I’m a little biased but I truly believe in the transformative power of mobility – not because I have some Polyanna faith in technology but because I see it in action every day.

Unlike Galileo (imprisoned because proof the earth revolved around the sun wasn’t in Rome) or Watt (credited with inventing the steam engine in London even though it was already in use in Moscow), we’re a swipe away from the world’s biggest brain and no longer need to make bad decisions for lack of information. As a thought exercise, next time you share hamster tai chi pics or your top ten favorite invertebrates or grandma’s goulash recipe think about what value that same technology could create at work. The good news? You’ll get more done in less time and create a culture of openness that will invigorate your company. The better news? You’ll share fewer hamster tai chi pics.

This is an introduction to the first law of mobile enterprise apps: they must be presence-aware. I’ll blog about the other six later. If you want a head start, read the whitepaper.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

When I started rock climbing years back I threw myself on the wall and flailed around like an epileptic gecko. I thought I’d be better. I’m reasonably athletic, have a low center of gravity (translation: I’m short!), and – heck – what real climbers did looked easy. But I sucked. Ever seen Mr. Noodle get dressed on Elmo’s World (highly underrated if you haven’t)? That was me on a wall in a harness with a talcum bag. Then I learned a few simple rules like use legs instead of arms, hold your body close to the wall, and preview the route. In no time I was climbing higher faster and not getting tired.

Enterprise mobility is similar. Follow a few simple rules and you’ll be Stravinski in khakis, performance-enhanced, geek royalty. Don’t and well, let’s just say there are lots of flailing geckos in IT these days. We just published a whitepaper called The Seven Laws of Enterprise Mobility to solve exactly that problem. Over the years I’ve seen too many well-intentioned sys admins, product managers, mobility gurus, and CIOs fall off the wall trying to deploy simple mobile apps. No reason for that. The whitepaper was my attempt to give away what I’ve learned in the hopes that no enterprise mobility projects fail from now on.

I’ll be discussing each of the laws in this space separately. For now, here’s a summary of all of them:

1. Mobile Applications Must Be Presence-Aware.
2. Mobile Applications Must Be Role-Based and User-Configurable.
3. Mobile Applications Must Be Device-Independent.
4. Mobile Applications Must Interoperate with Other Mobile Applications.
5. Mobile Applications Must Not Require Changes to Underlying Applications.
6. Mobile Applications Must Be Capable of Being Administered Without Wireless Domain Expertise.
7. Mobile Applications Must Create Real Value in Days Without Programming.

I assure you it’s not marketing drivel and it’s not a sales pitch. In fact, I’m critical of our own products for not fully complying with all the laws. It’s just an honest assessment of what it takes to succeed with enterprise mobility from a decade of lessons learned, feedback from hundreds of customers, and way too many jarring head blows in the cement mixer that is the wireless industry.

Have a read for yourself – but more important, let me know how it helped or what you think I got wrong so together we can improve it. After all, we may think we’re experts today but let’s just say the wall is high and even a decade later we’ve barely tied the first knot.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

Here’s something you can only say with a straight face in the bowels of geekdom: I had a conversation about SAML 2 authentication and IPv6 with my new friend Ollie, Chief Security Officer of a technology customer, this week and it inspired me. We were like two giggly school girls having a Bieber moment. Why?

He has an enlightened attitude toward mobile device security at a time when I’m down on enterprise infosec for holding back mobile innovation. Here’s how I define enlightened:

1. Taking proactive measures to partner with the business.
2. Questioning PC-era policies applied to mobile devices.
3. Redefining the role of security to be more door and less wall.

Let’s face it: in an age when data lives in the cloud, physical assets walk out the door daily, and everyone but the neighbor’s pet has access to your network, pretending infosec is the omnipotent immovable force it once was is futile. And yet what I see every day is political battles escalating to the CIO when security teams don’t yield to the mobile requirements of the business.

Yes, enforce remote wipe policies. Yes, educate employees about locking devices. But no no NO, don’t limit access to third-party apps and don’t even think about limiting use of personal iOS and Android devices for business because YOU don’t have a way to manage them.

CSOs, compliance officers, and security architects everywhere listen carefully and heal thyself: stop confusing “progress” with “threat”. If you don’t want to hear it from me take it from experts like JR Raphael (@jr_raphael), well-respected mobile tech pundit, who writes:

“…it’s a big, bad, scary world out there. But the answer isn’t locking it down and having some panel preapprove everything before it gets uploaded. The answer is exercising a little caution and common sense.”

Amen. To be relevant twelve months from now get out of your lair, meet the twenty-somethings who are Facebooking your sacred policies (or read their tweets), then go re-invent yourself. Or just talk to my friend Ollie. He’s way ahead of you.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

Every once in a while I hear a story that creates such a vivid, powerful mental image that I’m reminded why what we do is bigger than we realize. Call them jet packs for the soul. I heard one from a customer in [frigid] Fairbanks, Alaska last week. Hope it inspires you too:

Carl manages the datacenter for a utility that supports 250,000 Alaskans. If he’s sleeping on the job they lose power. When it’s minus 20 degrees and dog drool freezes before it hits the ground losing power is catastrophic. So Carl takes his job seriously.

Every morning he starts his day with strong coffee while devouring six reports showing system performance metrics from the past day. 5-6 times a month something unexpected requires him to brave 50 miles of back roads to get from his office to the server room. He dreads those visits. One time a few years back his truck got stuck in a pothole and he ended up frostbitten waiting for a tow.

The bigger problem with the site visits is they leave Carl disconnected from work and life for most of the day. So he spends almost a quarter of his working life hopelessly inaccessible. He once missed an anniversary date because he didn’t get his wife’s text in time. He routinely ends up in the office past 9:00 PM on “down days” because work piles up while he’s en route. There are seven other “Carls” in and around Fairbanks and, from my travels, a whole population of them around the world.

Carl was miserable and thought there was a better way. Over the past few months, he discovered it. He spearheaded an effort to get his reports and access to his CMDB on his HTC Android device. A few weeks later his knight in shining silicon, Mobile BMC Remedy, arrived. Life improved almost instantly. He now barely uses his PC, his smartphone replaced his laptop, and his truck became a mobile office.

Now, he checks reports before leaving the house and when there’s an issue he’s able to initiate an action plan – all before he’d normally brew that first cup. He can see who’s available from his team to work critical issues, evaluate impact on his customers, and notify management in advance of down time.

What happened next was more impressive: word of Carl’s pet project spread…and spread. Soon, the rest of IT then operations and now facilities are using their own mobile apps. Carl’s smiling face and [a nauseatingly sugar-coated] quote are on the intranet at the top of the “Request Mobile Service” page. His smug mug has become synonymous with a whole new culture of mobility at the company. Dude went from hypothermic, tardy schlump to Vanna White in Dickies overnight.

…And that’s what mobility is all about.

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

“Struggling predator Microsoft corners wounded prey in too-little-too-late bid to salvage futile mobile strategy.” Headline describing last week’s Elop-Ballmer Nokia-Windows Phone 7 announcement? Or 2006 headline describing the Palm-Microsoft tryst? The parallels are eerie. The result will be the same. Palm was mortally wounded then and Nokia is now. Both had nothing to lose and everything to gain by tying up with Microsoft. And as in 2006, knight-in-shining-armor Microsoft is well-equipped to fight the last battle (with an excellent platform now and market share in 2006) but ill-equipped to win the only war that matters today: for developer mindshare.

As Chris O’Brien (@scjobrien) points out in today’s Mercury News: “…it’s no longer enough to make gorgeous phones. The real challenge is persuading thousands of developers to write the apps that define today’s mobile experience.” It’s bigger than that: computing as we know it has changed forever. All software, particularly business applications, must first work well on smartphones and tablets. What doesn’t work well on mobile devices should be developed later (the operative term!) for PCs. From now on, to win in the enterprise vendors must win pocketspace. End of story.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s widely-circulated “burning platform” private (hah!), internal (hah hah!) memo said it all: “Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. Our platform [an effective double meaning, read the full memo] is burning.”

Nokia, kudos for doing something. Microsoft, kudos for persevering. Both of you, define the next battlefield instead of fighting the last war or brace for failure.