Management vendors show Windows Phone some love

Microsoft also has to ship enterprise feature pack on time, analyst said

IBM-owned Fiberlink and BlackBerry are adding Windows Phone to the list of platforms they can manage and protect, as enterprise interest for the smartphone OS is increasing.

Microsoft has always had a strong position in the enterprise, but has struggled to keep up with Apple and the Android camp as they have stepped up competition with Blackberry over the enterprise smartphone market.

But with an upcoming enterprise update and wider support from MDM (mobile device management) vendors, Microsoft will soon be in a better position.

"Of course it's really important that the MDM platforms enterprises use have support for the OS. Many have already chosen and purchased a product, and they will hardly throw it out and buy a new one to get support for Windows Phone," said Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice president at Gartner, via email.

Blackberry has recently started pushing cross-platform management functionality more aggressively as it tries to turn around its fortunes.

"What we have said in conjunction with that is that as we hear from customers that they really want to support a platform we don't currently support, we'll add it. So the requests from customers got sufficient enough for Windows Phone that it was time to step up to that. BES 12 seemed to be the logical time for us to look at that capability," said John Sims, president of global enterprise solutions at BlackBerry.

BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) 12 will start shipping at the end of the year, and can be used manage devices running Blackberry's own OSes, Android and iOS, as well.

A broader adoption of Windows Phone 8 in the U.S. and Europe was also enough for Fiberlink to launch the MaaS360 Secure Productivity Suite for Windows Phone 8, which includes secure email, calendar, contacts and browser. To protect enterprise assets, the IT department can use enterprise app containers to prevent data leaks and block the forwarding of documents, according to Fiberlink.

Microsoft is also taking matters into its own hands with a long-awaited enterprise feature pack that was first announced in July last year.

The update will arrive "later this spring" and improve security with signed and encrypted S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) and a virtual private network client that automatically is triggered when an enterprise resource is accessed, Joe Belfiore, who runs Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, said Sunday.

The feature pack is an important update for Microsoft, according to Wallin.

"Microsoft must put out the feature pack during the first half of the year like it promised to show the company is serious about the enterprise market. Surprisingly, there were a number of small things missing from Windows Phone 8 that when put together showed a lack of focus on enterprise needs," Wallin said.

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Major SSL flaw found in iOS, OS X

Apple has released a patch for iOS and says an OS X fix will be released 'very soon'

Security researchers revealed late Friday that iOS's validation of SSL encryption had a coding error that bypassed a key validation step in the Web protocol for secure communications. As a result, communications sent over unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots could be intercepted and read while unencrypted, potentially exposing user password, bank data, and other sensitive data to hackers via man-in-the-middle attacks. Secured Wi-Fi networks, such as home and business networks with encryption enabled, are not affected.

Apple released a patch Friday evening, available to al iOS users. iOS users should have already received a notification of the update's availability or have had it automatically installed, depending on their device's iOS version, update settings, and available space for downloading the update.

[ It's time to rethink security. Two former CIOs show you how to rething your security strategy for today's world. Bonus: Available in PDF and e-book versions. | Stay up to date on the latest security developments with InfoWorld's Security Central newsletter. ]

But on Saturday, several researchers reported that the flaw also affected OS X 10.9 Mavericks and perhaps other OS X versions. Late Saturday, Apple said it had a fix ready for OS X and would release it "very soon." On OS X, the flaw is likewise limited to SSL connections over unsecured Wi-Fi networks, though only in Safari.

The update will be available through OS X's Software Update utility, which is set to download security updates automatically by default in recent OS X versions.

iOS uses the WebKit-based Safari engine even in non-Safari browsers, so all iOS browsers can be exploited. By contrast, OS X lets each browser use it's own browser engine. A Google security researcher said Chrome does not have the coding flaw; other researchers have said that Mozilla Firefox is likewise safe.

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So Long IT Specialist, Hello Full-Stack Engineer

At GE Capital, the business is focused not simply on providing financial services to mid-market companies but also selling the company's industrial expertise. They might help franchisees figure how to reduce power consumption or aid aircraft companies with their operational problems. "It's our big differentiator," says GE Capital CTO Eric Reed. "It makes us sticky."

And within IT, Reed is looking not for the best Java programmer in the world or an ace C# developer. He wants IT professionals who know about the network and DevOps, business logic and user experience, coding and APIs.

IT Specialist Out, Full-Stack Engineer In
It's a shift for the IT group prompted by an exponential increase in the pace of business and technology change. "The market is changing so much faster than it was just two or five or, certainly, 10 years ago," says Reed. "That changes the way we think about delivering solutions to the business and how we invest in the near- and long-term. We have to think about how we move quickly. How we try things and iterate fast."

But agility is a tall order when supporting a $44.1 billion company with more than 60,000 employees in 65 countries around the world. "There are several markets we play in, and we can't be big and slow," says Reed. "But the question is how to we make ourselves agile as a company our size."

Like many traditional IT organizations, GE Captial had one group that developed and managed applications and another that designed and managed infrastructure. Over time, both groups had done a great deal of outsourcing. It wasn't an organizational structure designed for speed.

An engineer by training, Reed saw an opportunity to apply the new product introduction (NPI) process developed at GE a couple of decades ago to the world of IT development. Years ago, a GE engineer might split his or her time between supporting a plant, providing customer service, and developing a new product. With NPI, we turned that on its ear and said you're going to focus only on this new product," explains Reed. "You take people with different areas of expertise and you give them one focus."

That's what Reed did with IT. "We take folks that might do five different things in the course of the day and focus them on one task -- with the added twist being that you can't be someone who just writes code," says Reed.

A New Type of IT Team Forms
Last year, Reed pulled together the first such team to develop a mobile fleet management system for GE Capital's Nordic region. He assembled a diverse group of 20, who had previously specialized in networking, computing, storage, application, or middleware, to work together virtually. He convinced all of the company's CIOs to share their employees. They remained in their initial locations with their existing reporting relationships, but for six months all of their other duties were stripped away. "The CIOs had to get their heads around that," Reed says

The team was given some quick training in automation and given three tasks: develop the application quickly, figure out how to automate the infrastructure, and figure out how to automate more of the application deployment and testing in order to marry DevOps with continuous application delivery.


There were no rules -- or roles. "We threw them together and said, 'You figure it out,'" Reed recalls. "We found some people knew a lot more than their roles indicated, and the lines began blurring between responsibilities." Some folks were strong in certain areas and shared their expertise with others. Traditional infrastructure professionals had some middleware and coding understanding. "They didn't have to be experts in everything, but they had a working knowledge," Reed says.

The biggest challenge was learning to be comfortable with making mistakes. "GE has built a reputation around execution," says Reed. "My boss [global CIO of GE Capital] and I had to figure out how to foster an environment were people take risks even though it might not work out."

Project Success
The project not only proceeded quickly -- the application was delivered within several months -- it established some new IT processes. They increased the amount of automation possible not only at the infrastructure level, but within the application layer at well. They also aimed for 60 to 70 percent reusability in developing the application, creating "lego-like" building blocks that can be recycled for future projects.

Business customers welcomed the new approach. In the past, "they would shoehorn as many requirements into the initial spec as possible because they didn't know when they'd ever have the chance again," says Reed. "Now it's a more agile process." The team launches a minimum viable solution and delivers new features over time.

For IT, "it was a radical change in thinking," says Reed. "We've operated the same way literally for decades. There were moments of sheer terror." And it wasn't for everyone. Some opted out of the project and went back to their day jobs.

But Reed is eager to apply the process to future projects and rethink the way some legacy systems are built and managed. "We had talked about services-oriented architecture, and now we have something tangible that shows it can be done," Reed says. "On the legacy side, we have to decide if we want to automate more of that infrastructure and keep application development the old way or invest in this."

Some employees remained with the fleet management app team. Others started a new project. And a few went back to their original roles. "We're trying to make disciples so more people can learn about this process," Reed says.

Reed can envision the IT organization changing eventually. "What we look for in people when we hire them will change. There were years when we went out in search of very technical people. Then there were years of outsourcing where we sought people who could manage vendors and projects," Reed says. "Now we need both, and we need to figure out how to keep them incentivized."

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Bill Gates tells Reddit he'll target cloud, Windows and Office in his new role at Microsoft

Gates sounds like a CEO setting product goals, inspiring good work

As he starts work advising Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella on products, Bill Gates described his role to a Reddit chat group as also including agenda writing and setting performance standards, roles generally associated with the CEO.
Bill Gates

His message on products: get busy making Office in the cloud better and bringing more features to storage in the cloud.
Gates told the Reddit Ask Me Anything session that he sees potential to get more out of the Windows operating system, cloud services and improving Office.

+ Also on Network World: Satya Nadella and Bill Gates's apron strings | What's Microsoft going to look like after Ballmer? | So you think you know networking? Quiz II +

“I am excited about how the cloud and new devices can help us communicate and collaborate in new ways. The OS won't just be on one device and the information won't just be files - it will be your history including being able to review memories of things like kids growing up,” Gates wrote. “Even in Office there is a lot more that can be done.’

“Office connected to the cloud has a LOT of potential and we are off to a good start. Cloud Storage needs to be a lot richer though.”

He says he’s thrilled Nadella asked him “to make sure Microsoft is ambitious with its innovations,” and that he plans to spend a third of his working time on the task with the rest being spent on his charitable foundation.

With Nadella just finishing his first week on the job as CEO, Gates set himself up as setting goals and seeing they are carried out. “I make sure we pick ambitious scenarios and that we have a strong architecture to deliver on them,” he says. “I encourage good work (hopefully).”

While much of the questioning was about his work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, some of it was more related to technology, including what PC he uses. His answer? “Surface 2 PRO which works well for me,” which is a bit of a gaffe since the actual name of the device is Surface PRO 2.

What was his favorite project at Microsoft? Windows comes first, but, “Office was also great.” Those two products defined Microsoft’s success in the 1990s, he said.

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