Andi: Hi everybody. Welcome back to Tech Views Unplugged from CA Technologies. I’m Andi Mann. I’m here with my colleague, the ever adaptable George Watt. Hi George, how are you doing?
George: Good.
Andi: Good to hear mate. Let’s get into it. I’ve got some new and cool news for you. Ray Kurzweil, now you know Ray, renowned inventor, innovator, futurist, currently the boss at Google Engineering as well, just by the way, super smart, a brain the size of a planet. This guy is into predictions. His latest prediction is about nano-technology in the cloud and I’ll quote, “millions, billions of blood cell-sized computers in our bloodstream keeping us healthy, augmenting our immune system, also going into the brain and putting our neocortex onto the cloud.” Now, I love this idea, George, because I’m forever running out of RAM in my neocortex. I need some infinitely scalable on-demand resources. That’s for sure. Now look, you can dismiss Ray Kurzweil about anything, right? Super smart guy. He’s predicted some interesting stuff, right? He predicted computers would beat human chess players. He predicted that wireless would bring down authoritarian regimes. I’m going back here like 15 years ago for these predictions. He predicted robotic prosthesis, eBooks, wearable computing, including glasses with augmented reality. Sound familiar? So, this is a really smart guy. He’s been spot on. His record is probably 100%. Other people say not so much with his predictions but I’m not going to get into that. So, I don’t know. I mean this sounds like a great idea. But, you know what, my take on this, it’s a little absurd. You know what I think about predictions in general right, it’s a bit of a mugs game. He’s predicting for 2035. Now, cast your mind back to what like 1990 something. Would you have predicted Twitter, Facebook, social media, all of this sort of stuff, the Internet of Things? This is like a scene from Star Trek. It’s Borg nanoprobes. It’s being injected with probes. I think this is really cool if you’re talking about the Alpha Quadrant. Honestly though, I think Kurzweil a little bit a pie in the sky on this one.
George: But I’m surprised you wouldn’t want to take advantage of the opportunity to improve your witty repartee as Kurzweil speaks about it in his article. But since we’re talking about cloud, something maybe a little closer to the present. India has just opened its first school in the cloud, founded by 2013 TED prize winner Sugata Mitra. It’s a very cool concept that applies to what they refer to as minimally invasive education. Essentially, children get answers to questions on their own and they rely upon one another and upon mentors and resources they can access online. Now what’s even more cool about this is how it all started. Back in 1999, Mitra left a computer behind a clear plastic panel in a slum in New Delhi and when he returned 8 hours later, he expected to find it had been disassembled, sold for parts and so forth. But that’s not what he found. What he did find was that there was a group of children surfing the Net and doing it in English which was a language that they didn’t understand. So he thought there may have been some bias in his first test, perhaps somebody who showed them what to do. So he ran it again in a more rural village about 200 miles further away. This time he left the computer for 2 months and when he returned to the village, he found children working on it as if it were second nature to them, again, in English. And in fact, one of the children said, and I think this is a quote, you’ve given us a machine that only works in English so we had to teach ourselves English, very matter of fact. So they called this the hole in the wall experiment and it led to the discovery that children have this amazing ability to learn on their own and that they may even absorb more information when the learn that way. They call it sole, S-O-L-E, self-organized learning environment. So, Mitra used his TED winnings to open the school in the cloud and he’s leveraging another program that he started called Granny Cloud which allows retired UK teachers to connect with those students and that’s something I bet they’re both enjoying.
Andi: That’s excellent. I mean, this is a really smart use of the cloud and this is today, too. I mean minimally invasive is good too. I don’t want people injecting Borg nanoprobes into me, but I love the idea of using cloud for teaching, especially connecting people across the world. That’s brilliant. Hey George, let’s get into some news. I’ve got some interesting stuff here. A guy by the name of Frank Palermo, who I don’t know personally, but is now obviously a friend of the show. He’s from Virtusa, I think that’s how you pronounce it. He was in Information Week and he was talking about consumerization 2.0. Don’t get me started on the whole 2.0 thing, but this is an evolution of consumerization that Frank describes here and I quote “the reemergence of the CIO as the person in charge of integrating, securing and accelerating consumer technology and the application development process.” Now, I have to say bravo. I love this. I’ve written about this before in my blog on pleasediscuss.com, a shameless plug: the CMO doesn’t want to be in charge of IT. This has historically been true with distributed computing, with desktop computing, even to a degree with portable computing. Business units start using it. Eventually they figure out, hang on, all of a sudden I’m running a technology department. That’s not my core competency and they want to give it back. Had a great discussion with Bob Dara of GigaOM about this. Now, in his article, Frank talks about some really good tips to make this happen. So, design for mobile first. Learn to leverage the cloud. Protect and secure mobile devices. Be social. He gets into some detail on this. Really smart tips and it really is a way that IT is going to become even more relevant because of BYOD and consumerization. Because of this evolution. It’s going to be interesting times.
George: Yeah. I agree and I’ve written about the service boom as well and I agree that the impact of consumerization definitely continues to grow but it also continues to evolve, right? And, we’ve spoken about, or maybe I’ve ranted about, the importance of providing the compelling engaging experiences customers demand do I promise I won’t do that again now unless you want.
But, we’re beginning to see businesses respond to those things now. In some cases, actually delivering on some of the hypothetical use cases you and I and many others have spoken about many times in the past. Specifically, one of the hypothetical cases we spoke about that’s no longer hypothetical, you might remember a rant where I painted a scenario where at the end of the scenario, hotel guests would walk up to the room and the door would recognize their smartphone and would automatically unlock for them. Well, Starwood has actually deployed technology two of their hotels that enable their guests to use their smartphone as a room key.
Andi: Oh, cool.
George: No more forgetting your keys. No more fumbling with card keys, remembering where you put them or working with card keys that have been erased by your smartphone. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had to do that walk of shame, but it’s less than convenient when you’re tired.
So this is a simple but pretty good example of technology that catches someone in the moment, providing a service when they most need it. Now, of course, an application like this means that ensuring your phone is secure and especially only you or those you can authorize can access your phone is even more now. And because this is becoming more important, and because consumers are demanding simplicity and compelling simple experiences, we’re seeing consumers demand more behavior-based and biometric technology for verifying identity. You know, essentially they’re saying please, please don’t give me another password to remember. They’re not effective anyway. And so, perhaps, for example, to log into that phone, they simply want to be able to touch it or speak to it or let it take a photo of their eye. And, businesses are beginning to embrace this as well and, in some cases, the businesses are actually even driving it. So, in fact, Gartner recently predicted that 30% of companies will use this type of biometric identification by 2016, not so far off in the future, in order to secure and manage mobile devices connected to their networks. And, this is actually their response, a pretty clever response, to the BYOD movement essentially providing consumers with a less irritating response to their own security needs. So, no matter where you are and no matter what technology you’re carrying, or wearing, it’s who, or I suppose more appropriately, what you are that will once again matter.
Andi: Yeah, it’s interesting; the idea of the wearables and the use-specific cases coming to the fore is really interesting. There was an article that I read this week in CNET, some top executives from various companies, ARM, Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek, some pretty smart cookies here talking about the future of wearables, right? Again, predictions, but we’re going to that, but they’re saying the future of wearables is on some use-specific cases like fitness and health bands. They’re going to be king for now. Things like your FitBits and so forth. We’ve spoken about wearables before. You know my theory, the general purpose computer wearables is just the starting point. There’s a lot of space to go. The market’s maturing. And, it’s going to be about use case-specific wearables that are going to really drive the change, I think. And look, I’m not hugely surprised to read that the experts agree with me on that. They agree with me on a lot of things actually.
George: That makes one of us.
Andi: But, experts, George, experts. They expect a lot of new entrants. Glasses and watches are just a start. They’re talking about things like wristbands, like the FitBit. They’re talking about rings, clothing, the buttons on your clothing being able to do specific things. I think that’s sort of cool. It’s all going to be driven by the Internet of Things, the rise of sensors, and, I’m really excited, there’s going to be a new emphasis on aesthetics. Instead of wearing Google glasses which, honestly, as we’ve spoken about, a little bit of a Segway for your face, they’re going to start looking at really aesthetically beautiful designed wearables and that’s going to make a huge difference as well.
Now, George, we haven’t got a lot of time left, so I’ve got a minute on my clock here and we’re going to get into Quick Fire and I’m going to ask you a question and your time starts now. Wall Street Journal says that IT underestimates how many cloud apps businesses are using. Are you shocked?
George: Yeah, an average of 397 cloud apps per enterprise with an IT estimate of 40 to 50. I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who has been following closely but perhaps the magnitude will be a bit of a wakeup call for some. Andi, recently, Laurie McCabe tweeted an article that gave 7 reasons we need to rethink security that includes concerns about mobile banking. Are you concerned?
Andi: Well this is from a security firm so take it with a grain of salt. Risks always exist. I don’t think there’s any new reasons to panic. Staying on banking, and staying on risk, a whole lot of ATMs are apparently still running the out-of-date Windows XP. What are you going to do about it, George?
George: Yeah, well this could be a bigger challenge than you might think. Some of those machines may not be capable of running a new version of Windows or running it with adequate performance without hardware upgrades of some sort, and I wonder if any of those machines are still using OS/2 to be frank. Andi, recently a Cisco study predicted mobile traffic will grow eleven-fold over the next four years. Do you think that number will be significantly lower now that Flappy Bird is no longer available for download.
Andi: Oh, no, no, no, finally people are going to use the mobile Internet for important things. George, I read master inventor Lisa Seacat of IBM has become the first woman in IBM’s history to reach the 100 patent plateau. Right, on the buzzer. So George, is this awesome or is this the most awesome thing ever?
George: It’s the most awesome thing ever. I think it’s outstanding that she owns 115 patents, 50 of them issued last year, and has 250 more pending. You know, I review patent proposals for CA and I can tell you that’s not only an amazing accomplishment. It represents a tremendous amount of work, sweat equity, and of course, ingenuity. And her post gives some insight on her journey. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Andi: Yeah, absolutely. It’s inspirational, chapeau and Lisa. Look, that’s all we’ve got time for today. One shameless plug, the day after Facebook went to OCP and told the world how it uses CA Technology’s data center infrastructure management solutions in its data centers, it officially became a mobile ad firm, 53% of Facebook’s ad revenue came from mobile. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. Check out ca.com/dcim for more details. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got time for this time. We’ll see you next time. I’m Andi Mann with my colleague from CA Technologies, George Watt on Tech Views Unplugged. Catch you later.
George: Take care.
