The Big Challenges

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The Big Challenges

• IT Futures Research Centre

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Introduction

• What is BT?
• What is Research and Venturing?
• What is the IT Futures Research Centre?
• What are our challenges?
• Where do we go from here?

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What is BT?

• BT is a Global IT and Networking Services Company
• We design, develop and manage IT systems for
  organisations around the world, helping them to
  address the challenges and realise the
  opportunities presented by the emergence of the
  digital networked economy.
• What differentiates BT in this marketplace beyond
  our size, reach and network assets which are
  considerable - is our unique expertise and
  insight into how networked IT can be used to help
  our customers address their strategic and
  operational issues on a global basis

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BT Group CTO - Research Venturing
Research Centres
Ventures
Broadband
BT Exact BT LoBs
Mobility
External Venturing
ICT
Network Transformation
Sector Programme
Security
Long Term Research
Intelligent Systems
Foresight
Asian Research Centre
Broadband Applications
Pervasive ICT
Mobility
Networks
IT Futures
Improving Customer
IPR Licensing
Experience

Business Support

Service Innovation

Partnership
CTO
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What we do

• The primary objective of the IT Futures Research
  Centre is to carry out world class research that
  will generate Intellectual Property and identify
  new revenue opportunities for BTs growing
  business in ICT.
• The Centre brings together research experts in
  areas such as
• virtualised computing and storage
  infrastructures
• automated ICT service assurance
• architectures for next generation operational
  support systems
• business and customer analysis to support new
  products and services
• next generation semantic web technologies
• managing system integration complexity to ensure
  the delivery of customer solutions that are on
  time, on budget and meet customer requirements.

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The IT Futures Research Centre Teams

• Strategic and Business Analysis Research
• Next Generation Semantic Web Research
• ICT Application Platforms Research
• Future ICT Management Systems
• Next Generation Computing Infrastructures

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Next Generation Computing Infrastructure

• Managing the ICT Infrastructure of the future
  through
• Distributed Computing Management
• Policy Based Management
• Service Level agreements
• GRID Computing
• Large Scale Distributed Storage

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Future ICT Management Systems

• Architecting Next Generation ICT Support Systems
  through
• Component Software MDA
• OSS
• Open Source
• Network Management
• Enterprise ICT Support
• Rapid Application and Service Provisioning

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ICT Application Platforms Research

• Stimulating revenues and cost reduction through a
  better customer
• experience
• Multimodal technology
• Application Development Platform
• APIs
• Service Agency

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Next Generation Semantic Web Research

• Enabling Next Generation Business and Knowledge
  Management
• Knowledge and Information Fusion
• Search and content management
• Collaboration technology (P2P)
• Semantic Web Services
• Web 3

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Strategic and Business Analysis Research

• Supporting Strategic ICT Decision-Making through
• Commercial Analysis
• Business Simulations
• Socio-economic/ ethnographic studies of the
  impact and use of emerging ICT
• Risk mitigation
• Dynamic Systems Modelling
• Services Science

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Some Assumptions on the Impact of Technology

• There will be an increased demand and provision
  of network-centric solutions
• There is rising expectation on ICT from increased
  converged services in the home/SoHo.
• Outsourcing will grow to provide management of
  virtualised resources
• Infrastructure no longer dedicated and physically
  bound to a task.
• Infrastructure will be flexible, distributed,
  dynamic and can be used on a pay-as-you-go basis.
• Industries, markets, products, service delivery
  processes are all growing in complexity - enabled
  by technology, driven by competition and
  regulation
• At the same time customers expect
  straightforward, complete, helpful experiences
• Automation will lead to increased self-service
  solutions.
• Several developing technologies could have a
  significant impact on ICT over next 5 years
• It is unlikely that any totally new technologies
  will have major impact over next 5 years

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Technology Domains
Semantic Layer Sense-Making and Semantic
Technologies
Service Integration Layer Integration
Orchestration
Interoperability
Management Services
Quality and Reliability
Infrastructure Layer Virtualised Resources
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Virtualised Resources

• Key objectives
• To provide virtualised computing and storage
  infrastructure distributed over an IP network
• To investigate methods, tools and techniques that
  will enable the undertaking of total ICT
  infrastructure and processes health analysis
• To undertake research that supports total ICT
  Service Assurance
• Key Research Challenges
• Automatic Inventory analysis Virtual Monitoring
  Framework
• Analysis of Computer Estate (N/W, IT,
  Applications)
• Automatic ICT Service Assurance to assess
  performance Total Performance Knowledge
  Dashboard
• ICT Root Cause Analysis
• Dynamic SLA management
• Negotiation and the illusion of choice
• Vocabularies and translation
• Automatic generation of policies interaction
  with the computing fabric
• Large Scale Distributed Storage Management
• Real-time Access
• Business Process discovery and Performance

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How did we get here?
The adaptive enterprise
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GRID will become mainstream 2007/08
2008
2006
Intra-enterprise GRID
Inter-enterprise GRID
Nascent

• Large enterprise private grids
• Focus on cost reduction and efficiency
• Business process improvement benefits begin to
  take effect
• Initially single applications

• Academia
• Research institutions
• Early adopters in enterprise space
• IT seen as a cost centre

• GRID for commercial use between Corporates
• End to End SLA management
• Shared IT resources and infrastructure adoption

Focus

• Dynamic partitioning
• Network load balancing

• Self healing/autonomic systems
• Policy based management
• Opportunistic management

• Distributed Storage
• Large scale distributed performance management
• Security and Trust solutions
• Enforceable SLAs
• Dynamic virtual partitioning

GRID technologies
Key drivers
Improve efficiency and hardware ROI
Improve operational costs
Companies using GRID computing
lt1
2
5
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BUT early opportunities are emerging NOW
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Service Integration and Orchestration

• Key Objectives
• To enable the migration towards architectures
  where desired services are created automatically
  as required, and integration provided
  automatically for the duration of the transaction
• To support rapid Service Creation and hosting
  environments based on re-useable application and
  OSS capabilities, backed by integrated 24x7
  operations and guaranteed QoS
• To enhance integration of network-based,
  application-based, and content-based services
  with (Semantic) Web technologies
• Identify SLA requirements at the Application /
  Service level of Abstraction
• Key Research Challenge
• Take a high level SLA and generate the SLA
  requirements for the constituents
• SLAs that straddle the Organizations, Business,
  Application, Middleware and end-to-end Networks
• Architectures and Methodologies that support
  rapid, low cost service delivery
• Service Discovery and Composition
• Automating Network Based Integration Services

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Managing ICT Services
21C ICT Management Architecture
Real-Time ICT Service Assurance Provisioning
Billing for Complex ICT Services
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Realising best in class systems
Open Systems
Reduced Time-to-Market Cost
21C Architecture Futures
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Convergence Service Agency Platform

• Concept developed in 2005
• New opportunity for a business to intermediate
  between consumers and 3rd party service providers
• Support core consumer services through
• Identity Authentication Management
• User interaction
• Purchasing and Payment
• Prototype
• Server web services
• Mobile (J2ME and MS) and PC clients
• Scenarios such as eBay bidding

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Sense-Making and Semantic Technologies

• Key Objective
• To make sense of a Complex and Dynamic Commercial
  Environments
• To maximising the value of Unstructured Corporate
  Information
• To determine the impact of Web 2 technologies on
  BT systems
• Use of semantic technologies to enable
  interoperability between systems in the absence
  of common integration standards
• Key Research Challenge
• Developing tools for sense-making, policy and
  decision-making (Tools for Thinking)
• Semantic integration of heterogeneous information
  sources
• Intelligent analysis of structured and
  unstructured information
• To develop models that manage complexity
• System dynamics and Agent Based Models
• Semantic Grids
• Real time Business Intelligence

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Next Generation Web

• Todays web
• Machine-to-human
• Tomorrows web
• Also machine-to-machine
• an extension of the current web in which
  information is given well-defined meaning (Tim
  Berners-Lee)
• making web-based information machine-understandabl
  e
• Enabling
• Semantic knowledge management
• Intelligent search, integration of multiple
  information sources
• Automatic web service discovery and composition
• I want a 10 day holiday in France starting next
  week sometime. Find me the cheapest hotels and
  flights and book taxis to and from the airports
  on my credit card.
• Faster, less costly next generation systems
  integration
• via semantic description of components
  facilitating automatic integration

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Semantic technology timelineenabling next
generation ICT via rich descriptions
Service provider alliances to respond to
particular market opportunities. The ability to
create reliable and scalable VOs on demand in a
dynamic, open and competitive environment
Solution specification at the business level
system integration as a result of BPM updates.
Business processes inside the organization are
generally not accessible to machine reasoning
From business goal to ICT solution.
Virtual Organisations
Semantic Grid
Pervasive Computing
Ambient Intelligence
Networked devices embedded in the environment
continuous and unobtrusive connectivity and
services
Unified access to heterogeneous information
sources. 43 of business resort to manual
processes and/or new software when integrating
data for reporting. Intelligent search.
Business integration
Semantic BPM
System interoperability
Semantic Web Services
Automatic service discovery and composition
leading to faster, cheaper integration. 30 of
all IT costs are on integration (Gartner)
Information integration KM
Semantic Intranet
2005
2000
2010
2015
The only path to scalable interoperability of
data, services, processes and devices
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Business Analysis
Create, adapt and apply computational
economics,to address BT's business problems

• Key activities
• Develop computer simulations to support strategy
  development.
• Strategic business and customer analysis, in
  support of BTs strategic plan and new products
  and services.
• Socio-economic/ ethnographic studies of the
  impact and use of emerging ICT

The way we dynamically deploy our skill pools to
deal with incoming volumes determines what we
deliver to our customers
Volumes
Lead times
People
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A Vision too far?

• Software will be personalised to provide users
  their own tailored, unique working environment
  suited to personal needs.
• Software will be self-adapting, containing
  reflective processes to understand how it is
  being used and implement ways to adapt to users
  requirements.
• Software will also identify the need to
  commission new or changed software and
  decommission redundant software.
• Software will operate transparently to provide a
  high degree of resilience against failure.
• All interactions with software will be conducted
  through natural forms and anticipation of users
  needs will be such that any such interactions,
  natural or otherwise, are minimised

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