Love them or hate them, social networking sites are everywhere. With the announcement today that Google has joined the party with their new "Buzz" service - it seems that all the major players now have some sort of offering. But just how successful will each one be? And what do they hope to achieve from the landgrab of available customers?

Taking a look at the social networking scene, although there are highly popular sites that feed off social networks like YouTube for video sharing, Flickr for photos, Reddit and Digg for news content, and MySpace, now largely used for new music - there really are 3 standout players that have made most of a mark:

King of them all is Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg's student network idea that turned into the world's largest social network - now with over 400 million users.

Next, filling the slot for career networking comes Linked In or what's termed as "Facebook for adults" - with 55 million users.

And last but not least comes new kid on the block Twitter - popular for its mini 140 character updates on what's happening in your life, your friends, and favourite celebs - growing quickly with 20 million users.

Looking at this list, what's interesting is that although they all offer something different, they all share something in common - and that's their origins. All were born from new start up ideas.

So what do the other IT giants hope to achieve with their versions? Above all, it rests on the ability to keep their current customer base. Many of us have e-mail accounts that hark back to the golden age of e-mail: Hotmail and MSN, Yahoo mail, AOL, and relative newcomer, Gmail. Indeed, after yesterday's announcement about Buzz, both Yahoo and Microsoft were quick to respond that they had social networking functionality way earlier than Google's offering.

But at the end of the day, will any of these new services lure us away from the 3 top social networking players? Probably not. If you're using social networking already, you'll of invested a fair chunk of time building up your profile, loading up your pics and getting your friends and contacts built up.

The big players know this, but it won't stop them having a damn good go at luring away your loyalty. In the race to get customers, grab advertising revenue, and get hold of that all important "data" on you and your life - everyone wants a slice of the pie.

Posted by Fran Bolton, Sumerian

It has been reported just today that gas supplies are running dangerously low, with power companies exercising the interruptible contracts that many manufacturing companies signed up to ensure gas supplies to domestic users.

There has been the well reported lack of grit stocks from councils all over the UK whereby only A and B roads are being cleared and has left many people stranded in their homes, not daring to venture out for anything other than necessities or emergencies (indeed the Police have advised many in the worst hit areas to do just this). We have also witnessed the inevitable interruptions to public transport due to adverse weather conditions, making the journey into work nigh on impossible for some. Just last week, I was in this position myself after a lorry jackknifed on the M8 and slid down the railway embankment leaving both the train line and motorway closed for 3 hours.

All in all, it's a difficult time for businesses and contingency plans are being put to the test. And none more so than IT services. With so many people stranded at home, there's increased demand on IT for remote access services, and web sites, particularly for public information such as rail and traffic reports, have been experiencing delays and outages due to high peaks in demand.

Faced with such difficulties, it's the organisations who can continue to operate in these testing conditions that will gain a competitive advantage.

Last year, the threat of swine flu threw business continuity plans a curve ball. In much the same way, 2010's snowy start is raising similar questions to how IT departments can best prepare for the worst.

If your IT is struggling to cope with the increased demand placed on it this week, take a look at our services and find out how IT Analytics capacity planning and scenario modelling can help you to be better prepared.

By Lynn Allan, Sumerian Analyst

Posted by Fran Bolton, Sumerian

IT enterprises have been consolidating and centralising services over the past 20 years. High speed networks, outsourcing, ISPs, and virtualisation have all helped to fuel the trend. So, it is inevitable that we now take a step further to find suppliers offering IT services to multiple companies. So what is different between cloud computing and outsourcing? The answer, if anything, is the pricing model.

Cloud computing, in its simplest term, is where an external provider offers IT services on a transparent pricing model based on consumption, rather like how we all buy electricity or telephone services. The classic cloud computing model (in a software as a service model) is Salesforce.com whose customers can make use of a powerful and flexible CRM system for a fixed price per user. When you compare the simplicity of the Salesforce pricing model with the complexity of the costs (not to mention effort) associated with hosting an internal CRM system (licensing, storage, servers, data centre, upgrades, network bandwidth, backup, technical support) – you can see why CIOs and CFOs find the cloud computing model attractive.

The downside to the cloud is three-fold: flexibility, security, and risk. Firstly there is the loss of control or flexibility in the solution; there is only so much you can customise the cloud solution. Secondly, relying on a third party to manage sensitive corporate data is a step too far for larger enterprises. And lastly, what do you do when the cloud provider lets you down? There is not an obvious disaster recovery option.

So in short, if you work for a large enterprise, the key IT applications will probably remain in-house in the short term. But ignore cloud computing at your peril. Instead, learn from the providers. Identify key services, understand service consumption, understand infrastructure utilisation, understand operational cost, and understand how cost will change as consumption (or business) grows or shrinks. Why? That is exactly what the cloud providers have to do. Their profits depend on it; they have to account for complex service costs beneath a simple pricing model. This is also what your CFO craves – financial transparency. And once you have that – you’d be amazed at how you can optimise.

If you want to know how you might achieve all that - give us a call.

Posted by Mike Allan, Sumerian Partner

Posted by Fran Bolton, Sumerian

Take, for example, what we do as a company: IT Analytics. For a start, what we do is relatively new in the market. Even for people that work in IT, many have never come across IT Analytics before. Where a lot of traditional suppliers can compare and relate their solutions to pre-existing ones, we couldn't do that. No one else was doing what we were doing.

So, to cut a long story short, we had to think of a way to get across what we do in a way that would catch attention and get people interested, from scratch. So how? Well it's a technique that's been around since the turn of the century. Not the last one, though - we're talking 20th! We turned to animation...

On our "what we do" web page, we have a 1 minute movie that explains our service in quite a different, eye-catching way. The movie takes the form of an abstract look at enterprise IT. It depicts IT services as cogs generating data that can be mined to release insight that helps businesses transform. It's been really well received by our clients, and we hope you'll like it too.

Of course, none of it would of been possible without the brilliant imagination, skills and vision of the animator, Selina Wagner (also known as Blobina). The images are hand drawn then replicated into an animation application, giving a superb level of detail to the final look. You can download the storyboard here if you're interested in how it was built.

We'd like to say a huge thanks to Selina, and recommend that you view this other excellent piece of animation by her - a short animated film called ‘Crow Moon’ which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2006.

Story by Fran Bolton, Sumerian.

Over the past few days, however, the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing has given us some pause for thought. Without wishing to start channelling Top Gear, some of the numbers surrounding the moonshot are staggering.

The Saturn V launch vehicle, for example, weighed in at only 170 tonnes when empty - less than a Boeing 747 – although overall it was more than 300 feet tall. However, where the fuel load for a 747 is a parsimonious 100 tonnes, the Saturn V carried 2,650 tonnes – 15 times its “dry” weight.

It was capable of carrying a payload of 120 tonnes into “Low Earth Orbit” where, by comparison, the current STS “Space Shuttle” manages only 24 tonnes. Further, where the Shuttle payload is limited to just 4 tonnes to Geostationary orbit (22,000 miles), Saturn V took more than 10 times the payload, more than 10 times as far (48 tonne payload, 250,000 miles to the moon).

The Saturn V first stage alone was capable of lifting the entire 3,000 tonne craft from a standing start straight up in the air and propelling it on to Mach 7 in under 3 minutes. No operational launch vehicle has surpassed it in height, weight, or payload.

Underneath these impressive statistics are some more subtle aspects. Of particular interest to us, the Apollo programme illustrates a remarkable shift in thinking as regards such mission critical systems as its navigation computers.

On the one hand, the “Instrument Unit” – a band around the top of the final stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle containing all the guidance, propulsion control and telemetry electronics and weighing four tonnes in all – was a relic of the very dawn of the computer age. It seems incredible that such a huge, complex and bespoke machine was destined to be used just once and then jettisoned when barely out of the Earth’s atmosphere.

On the other hand, space and weight considerations were paramount in the lunar module. There was neither the room nor the fuel to carry such an enormous device, yet the requirement for accurate navigation and delicate control of the thrusters was arguably more onerous – encounter a malfunction in Low Earth Orbit and everyone has time to correct it. Do so in the final stages of descent to the lunar surface and you don’t.

The design requirement was therefore extraordinarily demanding. To meet it, the Apollo programme produced a spectacular device. Based on ICs, the Apollo Guidance Computer was small, low power and fully programmable – it heralded the era of personal computing. You can learn all about the guidance control systems and run your own Apollo test simulations (recommended by our own technical wizard, Andrew De Quincey) - at this great little site.

Even so, Armstrong and Aldrin very nearly came unstuck.

So what, with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, do we learn from all this?

Firstly, although resources are always limited, mankind has not yet found a limit to human ingenuity. Small, nimble teams can – and do – produce extraordinary results: many, if not most, of our analysis projects arise from the need to answer questions that our clients consider essentially unsolvable. Equally, our clients’ views on what they consider to be possible are expanded radically as a result.

Secondly, leaving aside examples of spectacular, almost comic, test failures (still all too common today), even the best testing strategies sometimes miss a crucial element when simulating the live environment. Understanding how your system will behave in the real world is essential to understanding how much headroom you really have. The failure to link transaction volumes to capacity and performance data is akin to the simulation failure on the AGC: you’re missing the key input data that drives the system.

Next, never underestimate how systems can be interconnected to provide entirely new – and more powerful – insight. I hold in my hand, courtesy of our great friends at Apple, billions of times more processing power than was aboard the combined Command and Lunar modules, but much of it derives directly from the work done on that programme. I hesitate to suggest that man went to the moon just to give mankind the iPint, but the same is true of your data: we always find that we can do more with it than you expect.

Finally, we note that those who travelled to the moon came back with a much greater appreciation of the beauty of the Earth from which they came. Sometimes you need a change of perspective to help you see things differently. That’s what we do for a living.

Posted by Hew Bruce-Gardyne, Sumerian Analyst

The story of Project Tuva goes like this...Bill Gates has a passion for physics and mathematics and one of his favourite lectures was a series done in the early 60s by the late eminent physicist Richard Feynman (famed also for working on the Manhattan Project.) Bill made it his goal to hunt down these lectures, acquire the rights and make them free and digitally available for all of us to watch - on a very cool, new interface.

Even if you aren't especially interested in physics, the lectures are very entertaining with Richard Feynman's witty delivery and love for his subject making them accessible to all.
Hope you enjoy them too.

Story posted by Fran Bolton, Sumerian.

The graphic below is a DNA visualisation of the Sumerian website. It was created using an online tool called WEB2DNA - inspired by the work of DNA 11, a company who turns real human DNA into works of art.

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure. For example, an H1 is brighter than an H2, which is brighter than an H3 and so on.

At a glance you can see if your site is a well marked-up, semantically rich website as it will appear brighter than one created from messy old-style code.

Here's another beautifully visual way of looking at the Sumerian website, this time as a graph:

You're probably wondering what it all means, well...

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

This visual representation was created here http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Posted by Heather MacNiven, Sumerian Graphic and Web Designer

Covering some of the most spectacular countryside in Scotland, the challenge - which involves a 16 mile run followed by 39 miles of cycing - would put even the great man himself to the test.

The teams, which included Neil Ross, Mike Allan, Hew Bruce-Gardyne, Roly Angus, Ewan McDonald, David Sibbald, Scott Sinclair, Louisa and Peter Sturrock, and Russell Sommerfield, raised over £3000 for good causes along the way.

As with all great achievements, there's always someone working hard in the background to help out. In this case, fellow Sumerian Tracy Collins was on hand to get everyone there and set up with their kit. In her own words, Tracy recalls the day's events...

After the military planning of the logistics, we set off at 4:15am on Saturday morning to arrive in a midge-ridden Callendar about 6am, where the bikes were assembled tout suite, and we met up with the rest of the team.

We finished off with a drink, well deserved dinner of hog roast and a Ceilidh, where Ewan and Neil even managed a dashing white sergent! The finale was fireworks then everyone was off to sleep it off, and a week of post race analysis now awaits us...

Thanks to everyone who took part! Who's for next year?

Here's more photos and the finishing times.

So what difference will they really make? Well, once the initial joy of turning your kettle on and off to see how much it is costing you subsides, what they mean in terms for the consumer is information.

At the moment, many of us pay according to estimated bills by the utility companies, which many times can be wildly inaccurate. If we don’t know how much energy we are consuming both in terms of kWh’s and £’s, how can we alter our behavior? Studies have shown that consumers with smart meters installed save an estimated 7% off their bills in the first year.

Replace individual households with businesses (or kettles with servers) and the savings can be substantial, both in monetary terms and in cutting carbon emissions.

Electricity once produced, cannot be stored – supply and demand have to be matched instantaneously, as a result, electricity companies offer what is known as “demand response” whereby at times of peak demand, companies are offered incentives to reduce their consumption either through cash incentives or rate reductions.

Most datacenters have back up generation capacity in the event of blackouts – this is one method that can be used to participate in such a scheme. But what if we actually knew that in terms of server capacity that we could switch the load to different servers and power down?

If you're interested in this space, take a look at our Sustainable IT and Capacity Planning solutions - they allow IT to know exactly when peak demand times are most likely to occur, which allows a smarter way to manage your energy costs and reduce your carbon impact.

Posted by Lynn Allan, Sumerian Analyst

Although it's almost 10 years since the start of the dot.com boom, we can all name companies that rose from its ashes to become some of today's strongest players in the market: Google & Youtube, Amazon, and eBay. And then there's all the others that took influence from their success. Many companies radically modified their traditional business models to remain viable and stay competitive - online banking services grew rapidly, the way we bought food, music, travel and retail goods were all revolutionised. Today, we're seeing some of the ones that didn't change suffer the consequences.

If we take any lessons from this - it's that the ones who started early and prepared for the up-turn whom survived.

In our recent newsletter, we examined how business-aligned capacity planning is helping many of our clients work smarter with their existing IT assets. It's back to basics measures like these that are enabling companies to ride out budget cuts and stay competitive. But what happens when the recession ends, how will you know when to start preparing for growth again?

Two articles that reported on the current state of things grabbed my attention this week - both were from industry analyst Gartner. One was gloomy, one positive.

The gloomy one, reported in CIO.com, focussed on the fact that 4 out 10 CIOs cut their budgets in Q1 of this year. Not good news.

The positive one, reported in Network World, was that Gartner are advising tech companies to start preparing for modest growth in 2010. Citing economists' predictions that the US could start to see economic recovery in late 2009/early 2010, it's well worth a read if not only to take hope from phrases like "that window (of preparation) is now and you will regret it if you miss it."

Let's hope that this is one prediction that comes true.

Posted by Fran Bolton

That's one of many facts that are getting industry observers hot under the collar. Recent estimates state that the cost of running a server for 3 years now outstrips its initial purchase costs; and that the typical IT budget is now comprised, on average, by one third energy costs alone. But, for me, the most eye-popping fact has to be that the IT industry is now worse than aviation for the amount of CO2 it produces.

Just today I came across an excellent blog written by Michael Bullock on CIO.com that summarises one of the more likely reasons to why so many companies aren't getting to grips with the issue as well as they could be. It's down to our dear old friend communication - or more precisely the lack of it - between IT and Facilities teams.

It's something we've come across at Sumerian on a number of occasions. We've seen for ourselves, through work we've done for our clients, just how beneficial a good relationship between Facilities and IT can be. It can pay back on many fronts, not least reducing datacentre energy costs. Another massive opportunity is in optimising building occupancy, by introducing improved flexible working arrangements so more staff can work remotely or at home.

But what's key to all of this being successful is gaining reliable facts on which IT and Facilities teams can base their decision making on. That's where we've been able to help our clients - by using IT Analytics they've been able to gain an accurate baseline assessment based on real IT usage data, and scenario model changes to their datacentres and building occupancy before they green light work. If you're interested, take a look at our solution content on Facilities management and Sustainable IT. Both outline how together Facilities and IT can take a leadership role in improving the bottom-line.

Posted by Fran Bolton, Technical Author

Following on from Katja's previous blog on 'Infographics' and a picture speaking a 1000 words, I came across this website wordle.net, it allows you to create a 'word cloud' from your own text.

Greater prominence is given to words which appear more frequently in the source text.

See below one I made earlier using text from this blog.

And one I made using text from Sumerian.com

Posted by Fran Bolton, Tech Author