Enough said. Because email isn’t going away in a hurry 
Wishing you a Happy New Year!
The future… if we actually had an endless supply of dilithium crystals or flux capacitors, gadgets like floating skateboards and Tricoders might be more common. But sadly they’re not; so the only real prediction I can make for the future (that’s relevant to this blog post anyway) is that Microsoft are planning to release a new version of their Exchange Server software every three years. We should be seeing the next version towards the end of next year, currently being called Exchange 15.
Like Christmas, it feels like new versions of core server software come round far too quickly, especially such valuable services like Microsoft Exchange. We’ve previously mentioned the lengthy procurement cycles that keep such services a constant version behind before, which generated some good feedback and discussion; many Exchange admins told me those delays adversely impact their own deployment plans, which is intensely frustrating for them and often forces their migration project into the red.
So, rather than roll out the ubiquitous predictions for 2012; I’m going to suggest that in the absence of 1.21 Gigawatts you can take a stab at future-proofing your Exchange environment now, so you’re not left thinking in future -
“I’m migrating again. Surely not? Didn’t I just finish the last upgrade?”
However the last migration or upgrade you performed was probably a little easier; the requirements were different then, and there was dramatically less data than today. The move from Exchange 2003 to 2007 was mostly about the new 64 bit hardware required, but the move to Exchange 2010 is often about the volume of data instead.
As your users make merry with the disk space allocated to the Exchange Stores, their mailboxes have grown and grown, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to move several Terabytes of data to the new Exchange platform; but, more importantly wondering when you might have to do this again. The short-term nature of IT and the constant cycle of upgrades and migrations means you may have to answer those question sooner than you expected.
One simple solution that future-proofs your migration and upgrade strategy is to deal with the data now by augmenting your on-premise Exchange with a Cloud based email management solution. Using this Cloud based email management solution is simple; the elastic and scalable nature of the Cloud lets you ‘dump’ your oversize email stores into a secure, scalable, flexible and resilient solution that will grow with you, but at the same time allow the users to have direct access to that email data through Outlook as though it was still on Exchange.
Now here’s the part of plan we don’t talk about very much, but one that provides a great degree of flexibility. When the next migration or upgrade comes around, or if you want to move from one platform to another, having already dealt with the data means your core email service i.e. Exchange, can be anywhere or anything. Upgrade, downgrade, move to Office 365 and back again, migrate some users or all users, the choice is yours; Augmenting Exchange with the cloud means you’re not tied to any one solution or version, both today and next year when it’s time to upgrade again.
Orlando Scott-Cowley
CISSP, CCSK
Mimecast, North America.
Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March
Click here for Part Two of my predictions, covering April through June
Click here for Part Three of my predictions, covering July through September
October
- Microsoft releases WinHealth Vista. Designed to make healthcare more friendly, this version is quickly found to provide a beautiful user interface, and to time its crashes to cause maximum damage to patients’ health. “You can’t have everything,” says CEO Ballmer.
- Atos announces the implementation of a voicemail-to-Jabber gateway. Unfortunately, many Jabber clients break under the weight of large audio messages, so Atos announces a preferred Jabber client that its employees must use. That software also supports email, but Atos disables all email-related features and begins developing Jabber-related features that do the same things.
- Feeling left out by Apple and Google’s settlement offers to the victims, the Eastern District Court of Texas sues Apple and Google for damages in the courthouse collapse. “We’re going to need to rebuild, of course,” says a local judge. “Besides, why shouldn’t we get a piece of this pie?”
- IBM announces a global expansion, hiring 35,000 new employees, nearly 3% of them in the US. IBM stock skyrockets to 400.
November
- Microsoft releases WinHealth 7. Designed primarily to undo the damage caused by Vista, WinHealth 7 is generally found to be stable and usable. Unfortunately, by now most health care providers have converted to Apple’s iHealth platform.
- A rash of workplace heart attacks leads to a series of lawsuits against Microsoft for its Kinect 365 product. A slimmed-down Steve Ballmer reluctantly announces the withdrawal of the product from the market. However, he is later photographed gleefully destroying his own Kinect 365 by jumping up and down on it while stuffing himself with donuts.
- An employee of Atos in the US fails to receive an email notice of his child’s illness at school, and files a lawsuit against his employer. Atos announces another upgrade to its Jabber/email gateway, this time to accept messages from any email address, not just those of its customers. Atos employees immediately begin receiving Jabber messages from deposed Nigerian dictators.
- Atos also announces that it has lost 25% of its customers in the third quarter. CEO Breton says this is unrelated to the ban on email.
- The few remaining independent patent litigation firms rush to go public. Fish and Richardson overnight becomes the seventh most valuable company in the world.
- HP announces that it is discontinuing the Blackberry product line. “None of this stuff is working out,” says Whitman. “We’re pretty sure there’s no future in smartphones, and we’re just happy to be figuring that out while Apple and Google are still wasting all that money on it.”
December
- Microsoft announces that buyers of the now-discontinued Kinect 365 product are eligible for steep discounts on WinHealth 8, whatever that turns out to be.
- The Atos Board of Directors fires CEO Breton. However, because they notify him by email, he shows up at work the next day, unaware. He is promptly escorted out by security personnel, who turn out to have been using email all along.
- Apple and Google settle the lawsuits related to the courthouse collapse, paying the victims, survivors, and Eastern District Court a staggering total of $95B. Apple, Google, Samsung, and HTC then announce a mutual settlement that withdraws all lawsuits between them, with no cash changing hands. “Combined with our lawyers’ fees, we’ve now fulfilled our obligation to Steve Jobs’ memory by spending every penny of our cash reserves on this case,” says Tim Cook. “I know Steve would have been proud.”
- IBM announces the construction of new campuses in India and China, to consolidate operations there and accomodate the influx of new hires. In an unrelated development, IBM also consolidates operations at its home base in Westchester county, New York, where three of its sites will be closed. IBM stock rises to 450. Her stock options make CEO Rometty the highest paid female executive in US history.
January 2013
- Mei Su, a college student in China, is allocated the world’s last remaining IPv4 address. Still, most IT directors feel that converting to IPv6 is just too scary. The Internet is now full. ICANN announces that it will unilaterally seize any unused IPv4 addresses and sell them to the highest bidder. When asked what gave ICANN the authority to do that, a board member replies, “Who’s gonna stop us?”
- Atos announces a next-generation email offering for its customers. “No one understands the value of email better than Atos” says the new CEO, Peter Bauer, who is absorbing Atos into his larger company, Mimecast.
All of us at Mimecast want to wish you a much happier new year than the one I’ve just described!
Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March
Click here for Part Two of my predictions, covering April through June
July
- Microsoft releases WinHealth 2000. This proves a popular upgrade to WinHealth NT, supporting modern medical equipment on a larger scale. Confusingly, the product is released in 374 different editions, one for every major hospital in the US.
- Atos announces that it lost 20% of its customers in the first two quarters. Recognizing that its customers are not ready to be as forward looking in abandoning email, the company announces an email to Jabber bidirectional gateway, so that its communications will look like email to customers but like Jabber on the inside.
- Tragedy strikes the sleepy town of Marshall, Texas, the country’s most favored patent venue, when the federal courthouse collapses under the weight of documents filed in the Apple patent litigation. A judge, two marshalls, and three clerks are killed, while dozens of others are injured. The survivors and the estates of the victims promptly file wrongful death suits against both Apple and Google.
- HP buys Research in Motion. “RIM’s Blackberry is a perfect match for our portfolio of failed smartphone operating systems,” says CEO Whitman. “It will coexist with Palm wonderfully. We expect this to be our best acquisition since Palm. Or Compaq. Or maybe EDS. Whatever.”
- Facebook goes public in the most successful IPO in US history. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when the weight of his cash causes Mark Zuckerberg’s home to be swallowed up by the Earth, taking half of Silicon Valley with it. IBM immediately asks Congress for emergency aid, which it uses to fund a major expansion of its operations in Russia and Brazil.
August
- Microsoft releases WinHealth ME, playfull named for “Mayan End-Times,” in tribute to the alleged Mayan prediction that the world would end in 2012. Unfortunately, the world actually does end for a disturbing number of patients. After a large number of fatalities the product is withdrawn amidst a flurry of lawsuits and government investigations.
- Kinect 365 is officially released to wide acclaim, and quickly becomes a staple in many offices. Health insurers begin to offer a “healthy working” discount to office workers who use it, and obese workers in particular begin to find themselves pressured to use it rather than their traditional keyboard and mouse.
- A reporter for CNET discovers that a simple LinkedIn search gives him access to a remarkable amount of internal Atos communication. Atos announces that employees should only use Jabber from now on, noting that their extensions have managed to turn it into a tool that’s almost as useful as email.
- Eager to curry favor with the Marshall, Texas, authorities, Apple offers a $350M settlement package to the victims of the courthouse collapse. Not to be outdone, Google offers a cool billion, and a bidding war ensues.
- IBM announces record profits, and its stock hits 300.
September
- Microsoft releases WinHealth XP — at last, a version of WinHealth that does everything its users want it to do. A big hit, this version lasts longer in the market than any other, and Microsoft will struggle for years to give XP users a reason to upgrade.
- An Atos executive returns from vacation to find over 10000 Jabber messages, constituting over 300 scrambled threads. Atos announces it will develop a threaded Jabber client to make asynchronous communication more efficient, like email.
- Apple sells some of its non-core assets to bolster its cash on hand to a whopping $300B. “We’re willing to spend every penny on lawyers,” says CEO Cook. “We know Steve would have wanted it this way.”
- HP announces it is killing PalmOS. “Now that we have Blackberry, we don’t need Palm any more. We, uh, just figured that out,” says Whitman.
- In a shocking major announcement, CA (formerly Computer Associates) stuns the industry by announcing that it does, in fact, still exist.
Part Four of my predictions may be found here.
Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March
April
- Microsoft releases WinHealth NT. This “industrial strength” release supports multiple patients, and works on the scale of a moderately large hospital. Unfortunately, it is revealed that Microsoft lured Sanjay Gupta away from CNN to design it, and CNN promptly sues for damages.
- All Atos employees who were seeking jobs on LinkedIn are accidentally “outed” due to the company’s broader use of the system. CEO Thierry Breton proclaims this to be a good thing, while Atos employees flock to other job sites.
- Google purchases two of the 10 top patent law firms in America. They are generally perceived as having overpaid, but the lawyers say it’s the free food that closed the deal.
- When Congress passes the aptly-named “Pre-election Allocation of New Dollars for Enhancing Recovery” economic stimulus act, IBM is first in line at the trough. “With these stimulus dollars,” says CEO Rometty, “we can create more jobs and ensure that great American companies like IBM continue to lead the world.” IBM stock hits 250.
May
- Microsoft releases WinHealth 95. Although it was preannounced as a system that would replace both WinHealth 3.1 and WinHealth NT, it is ultimately scaled back to be a toy that kids can play with to learn more about medicine. Most kids find it too unreliable to be useful.
- Steve Ballmer demonstrates a pre-release version of Kinect 365, spelling out an office memo using his entire body. “It’s just like the Village People spelling out YMCA,” he explains. “The Village People have always been the inspiration for my speaking style on stage, and now I can use their techniques even to send email.” After demonstrating one such email, Ballmer collapses into a nearby chair and calls for water.
- All Atos customers are told that they now need to use Linkedin, Twitter, or Jabber to contact the company. This message is, of course, delivered by email.
- Google’s Eric Schmidt testifies before congress about the importance of training more patent attorneys in America. Congress agrees, but ironically names the resulting law the “Jobs Memorial Jobs Bill.”
- HP kills WebOS. “OK, now I’m sure, we meant Palm, not WebOS, sorry,” says CEO Whitman. The company also announces a record first quarter loss. Chairman Ray Lane says he has “total faith in Carly. I mean Meg. Whatever, you know, the broad we hired last year.”
June
- Microsoft releases WinHealth 98. A stable, usable successor to WinHealth 95, it sweeps through the elementary schools of America.
- A minor misspelling of a customer’s Twitter handle causes Atos to leak some of that customer’s proprietary information, leading to the loss of a major contract. Atos announces that from now on, customers should contact the company using LinkedIn and Jabber only.
- Samsung, HTC, and Google announce a joint venture in which their patent portfolios are pooled to create what some call the world’s largest patent troll. It files 73 countersuits against Apple in its first month.
- IBM announces a global restructuring, including 20,000 layoffs worldwide. “This is strictly a business necessity,” says Rometty, “and is in no way related to the stimulus money.” Nearly 1000 of the 20,000 layoffs take place outside the US. IBM stock rises slightly, to 260.
Part Three of my predictions may be found here.
Disclaimer: Predicting the future is a black art. It is in fact conceivable that one or more of these predictions may not come true.
January
- Having said, in December, that health care reform requires a “Windows-like platform,” Microsoft pre-announces WinHealth 1.0, promising a demo “eventually.” Hospitals across America scramble to change their entire IT strategies.
- Having declared its intention to ban all email use by its employees, IT company Atos announces some of the details: in phase one, employees will use only Jabber, Facebook, and Twitter internally. The details are announced in an email message to the employees and the press.
- Apple announces that, while Steve Jobs had said he was willing to spend $40B on the patent litigation with Google over Android, they are, as a gesture in honor of his memory, doubling that amount to $80B.
- HP announces its latest new direction: they will revive the WebOS platform by merging it with PalmOS. “By combining the best features of two failed operating systems, we believe we can give consumers the best failed system ever,” says CEO Meg Whitman.
February
- Microsoft is at pains to remind potential customers that WinHealth 1.0 is only a prototype, but by the end of the month, 2/3 of the hospitals in America have already signed on.
- Buoyed by the success of Office 365 and Kinect, two of the most successful products in the company’s history, Microsoft announces “Kinect 365,” a revolutionary product that allows office workers to keep in shape while they work, using their entire bodies to control office applications.
- A minor slip on Facebook allows all Atos employees to learn that CEO Thierry Breton’s nephew has been arrested for public indecency at the Paris zoo. The company quickly decrees that employees need to use separate Facebook accounts for their work and private lives, with the work account names beginning with “atos-” to clarify their role.
- Apple’s patent attorneys petition congress for a visa exemption to bring in patent attorneys from other countries. “We just can’t hire them fast enough,” says CEO Tim Cook.
- HP announces that it is killing the newly announced WebPalm merged operating system. “We were just kidding,” says CEO Meg Whitman. “We really meant to focus on WebOS all along. Um, or was it Palm?”
- IBM testifies before congress that there’s no need for more H-1 visas allowing foreign engineers to work in the US. “American talent can compete with any in the world,” says CEO Ginni Rometty. Congress, impressed, shelves the visa issue. As IBM stock hits 200, Rometty begins a three month tour of IBM’s operations in India and China.
March
- The first production version of WinHealth — inexplicably numbered WinHealth 3.1 — is released. A major limitation is that it only allows doctors to treat one patient at a time, although Microsoft points out that this wouldn’t be a problem if doctors would just use a different computer for each patient. The system uses a blue screen to indicate a patient’s death, which doctors and techies find amusing, but not patients or their families.
- Using the handy new “atos-” naming convention, Atos’ competitors (and recruiters) find that they can quickly identify and communicate with all Atos employees on Facebook, leading to a massive raid on Atos’ talent. Atos announces they will be moving to LinkedIn. The announcement is made by email.
- Google announces a dollar-for-dollar match with Apple’s spending on the Android-related patent lawsuits. “May the company with the deepest pockets win,” says Eric Schmidt.
- The New York Times pioneers a new business model by requiring all visitors to their site to pay for their content, unless they type “pretty please” into a secure dialog box. “This ensures that no one will have access to our content without paying,” said a spokesman, “unless they really, truly want it.”
Part Two of my predictions may be found here.
There has been much debate recently about the value of email when compared to Instant Messengers and Social Media. I’m not going to reinvigorate that debate here, but the whole passionate brouhaha has got me thinking about what it means to actually have an email address and how important that short string of text has become.
Two words spring immediately to mind when I think about what is actually in an email address, those words describe a process that has quite a profound affect on you as a users of Internet services. Those words are;
“Password reset”
Your email address, whether given to you by your employer, your ISP (remember CompuServe?), or chosen by your own fair hand seeks to identify you. In many cases an email address is your name, or part thereof, and is generally recognizable unless you’ve taken steps to make it less so.
I have an incomplete thought about this identity; we take this identity for granted, we assume that this identity is true, and we generally don’t question the legitimacy of an email address or the identity of the supposed sender. This of course is exploited fantastically well by malicious senders who are attempting to dupe us out of our financial information or login credentials. As a former penetration tester I can tell you that I’ve always had 100% success with email-based attacks sent from addresses that ‘claim’ to be from someone they’re not, especially if the sender demonstrates a little knowledge of the recipient or subject at task.
But, and here’s the paradox; we understand social engineering and phishing very well, yet we still treat an email address as an identity don’t we?
Often this identity is all you need to carry out that password reset; gain control of an email address or account and you have instant access to a mind-boggling array of personal accounts and information. Often the ‘forgotten password’ link simply asks you for your address, sometimes you may be prompted for more information – ‘mothers maiden name,’ ‘place of birth,’ ‘month of birth’ etc – social media anyone? Some sites even ask you for ludicrous validators like “your preferred internet password.”
I expect that just supplying an email address to a website to request a password reset is a shortcut on that website’s part, they could do more but probably don’t want to over complicate things for you. This is a fantastically naive expectation of identity on a simple, string of text. I suppose the expectation is that the recipient hasn’t had their email account compromised, but no website I’ve ever used has asked that question.
Culturally an email address now makes up a significant part of you identity, in some cases it is 100% you. I suspect without the casual and formal asynchronous subject centric communications currently known as email (to coin a phrase of our CTO) you will find you lose a little of your identity, even if you can no longer reset your <insert website of choice here> password.
This week Mimecast has been at the Gartner Data Center Conference 2011, in Las Vegas, with a packed agenda full of insightful discussions and presentations. As expected the Cloud was a strong trend throughout the week, but I couldn’t help but notice that another trend has emerged since the last summit; that of Big Data, a topic this blog has written about many times before.
One particularly compelling presentation by Gartner Research VPs, Merv Adrian and Sheila Childs delved into Big Data. The packed session was standing room only, so this is obviously a hot topic for people looking for insight to help them solve their own unique problems.
Adrian and Childs identified a shortcoming in the way business and technology leaders talk about big data, in that the emphasis is often placed on volume. They rightly pointed out that
“The most difficult information management issues emerge from the simultaneous and persistent interaction of extreme volume, variety of data formats, velocity of record creation and variable latencies, and the complexity of individual data types within formats.”
As we’re concentrating on volume of data, we’re often forgetting about the velocity, variety and complexity of the data too.
Adrian and Childs went on to quantify velocity, which is when I started relating it to email data and Exchange Stores.
Velocity involves streams of data, structured record creation and availability for access and delivery. Velocity means both how fast data is being produced, and how fast the data must be processed to meet demand.
The most important factor when it comes to thinking about Big Data in relation to Microsoft Exchange Server, in my opinion, is velocity. Of course most Exchange databases won’t have the sort of big data that most data center managers have to worry about, but to those of us who manage Exchange Servers, I’ll bet the data therein is one of the largest repositories of data in your environment. To coin a phrase of our Chief Scientist, you have essentially got a Nano-Google’s worth of data, it’s important to you, but nothing that hasn’t been dealt with before, but trying telling that to the Exchange administrator when they’re planning to migrate the stores from one version of Exchange to another.
So what is the Velocity of your Exchange Server? If Velocity is the stream of data, record creation and availability for access and delivery, I’m sure there must be a quadratic equation that will actually give us a figure for this. But I was thinking more about it in terms of every day reality, especially if that reality means an upgrade or migration.
The unique big data complexity that exists within each Exchange environment is compounded by the velocity of the email environment that surrounds it. The data will continue to grow at a rate that can only be determined by a number of local factors; corporate culture, use of email, access to email, integration of email into other systems. Again, I’m sure there is a quantitative way to work out what this velocity is.
When you’re thinking of doing something with your nano-Google Exchange store I would suggest that getting a grip on the velocity of Exchange is the first step. I doubt very much that you can do anything to throttle this velocity, not without upsetting your users at least. So I’m drawn to the phrase “Just Enough on Site” which is one we use at Mimecast, to describe an Exchange environment that has been given the benefit of Cloud Augmentation to take the Big Data load off said server, before, during and after a tricky migration.
I would argue that the amount of ‘online’ data needed in an Exchange Server is pretty minimal, probably about a month or two. The rest doesn’t need to be offline, but keeping it near-line is way more productive. Remember velocity is also about how fast the data must be processed to meet demand. Surely putting the less accessed and older data near-line in the cloud means your Exchange can concentrate on the on-line velocity of the real time data?
Orlando Scott-Cowley
CISSP, CCSK
Mimecast, North America.
Mimecast’s CTO, Neil Murray, said the future is all about client/cloud in his blog post about Gartner’s 2012 predictions. He closes the post by saying;
“…the end user is king in our future and just about everyone else’s.”
Which is a really important point, and one you can’t have failed to miss if you’ve had anything to do with corporate IT over the last few years. This blog and others have written about the consumerization of IT, a seismic shift in the way IT is delivered, Gartner’s predictions were called “control slips away” which questions whether IT can be the dictator they once were. ‘Bring your own Devices’ in the workplace is reality for most IT departments, whether driven by policy or not.
At Mimecast we’ve been watching these shifts in the way IT is demanded and delivered in the corporate environment since we began. We started talking about Cloud based email management before Cloud or pre-Cloud concepts had really taken off, and we’ve published research about the way end users see less of a boundary between their corporate IT infrastructure and the services they consume ‘at home.’
Of course the Cloud and its clients have had a lot to do with the removal of these perimeters; the end user is finding the best, easiest and most available tool for the job. If they’re a mobile or remote user their demands on the corporate environment are even greater, and businesses have had to get used to them being “on the road” by providing access but without compromising security. Productivity is vital, and as we’ve all seen productivity is now available to end users on a variety of devices.
At Mimecast we’re launching a whole series of Apps, designed to allow end users to access their email archive from any mobile device. You may have already seen our BlackBerry app, which provides email archive search and email continuity; this is now joined by Mimecast Services for iPhone which gives iPhone users direct access to their email archive. Others are in the pipeline too, Windows Phone, iPad and Android.
At Mimecast we believe the end users will have an ‘any device’ mindset when it comes to productivity, and we’re providing them with the tools they need to get their email back to work.
Orlando Scott-Cowley
CISSP, CCSK
Mimecast, North America.
The Rise of the Client/Cloud Paradigm and the Age of the Cloud App.
Gartner has just published its predictions for ‘2012 and beyond’ and, as usual, there’s plenty of good content. The overall focus is on IT relinquishing the traditional notion of ‘control’ as the big macro trends of consumerization of technology and cloud take hold. Nothing particularly earth shattering there, but Gartner goes on to dig beneath the surface and look at how these things might manifest themselves over the next year or two, and this is where it gets interesting.
Matt Cain’s section on Social Software and Collaboration points to the move away from the ‘traditional desktop client’, prompted by the proliferation of mobile devices and a ‘richer mix of email clients and access mechanisms.’ All good so far. But he then goes on to suggest that we’ll see a big shift in favour of browser-based access to email, with HTML 5 acting as the catalyst in closing the functionality gap between browser email and desktop clients like Outlook.
And this is where I take slight issue, although of course making predictions is a mug’s game at the best of times. In my view, the idea that most people will consume their Exchange email via OWA is wrong. The more probable outcome is a client/cloud model – where the device you use (notebook, tablet, mobile) defines the client and the client simply interacts with the cloud service.
Even Gmail now has clients for iOS as opposed to stubbornly insisting that users use their HTML5 rendering. Taking this further, most Gmail users have pointed out that they see no need for an app or for using the HTML5 because they can simply set up their Gmail account on the iOS native email app and that gives them the best experience.
Facebook also realised this and eventually produced dedicated client/cloud apps for both iPhone and iPad after insisting – for years – that HTML5 was good enough. The fact is, HTML5 is there as a catch-all for client app gaps, but it’s not the panacea we might have thought it would be.
Instead, the panacea is a consistent user experience – but not in the way people tend to think. The consistency of UX is device-dependent, not application specific. People want an iPhone email app to work in the way that works best on an iPhone, same with WP7 and Android. UI mechanics, look and feel, application switching, local settings and so on need to work the way apps for that particular device work; otherwise it’s an annoyance.
Mobile notebook users running Windows will, I suspect, continue to use Outlook above OWA because it’s a Windows app with a rich experience and works the way Windows works. This leaves “bolted to the desktop” users with little to do in terms of remote access. They’ll use Outlook at work, and won’t use OWA at home or elsewhere – simply because they would have been given a notebook if they needed remote access anyway. So I see limited OWA use cases.
It’s all about client/cloud.
The rise of the app and the sophistication of touch UI means that you can’t dumb down the experience to a one size fits all anymore. Unfortunately, this also doesn’t mean that you don’t have to build HTML5 “clients” for end users – you’ll simply have to do all of the above, which is no mean feat for a service provider. But the fact is, this approach makes perfect sense to the end user – and the end user is king in our future and just about everyone else’s.
