The Big Challenges

1. The Big Challenges IT Futures Research Centre

2. 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?

3. BTGroup 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

4. 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 BT’s 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. ICT Application Platforms Research Stimulating revenues and cost reduction through a better customer experience • Multimodal technology • Application Development Platform • APIs • Service Agency

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

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

13. 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

14. Grid deployment Business process management Level of enterprise adaptability Web services Service-centric management Internet Client server Personal Mainframe Silos of technologyinflexible to change, over-provisioned Horizontal architecture flexible, stable, supply matches demand Time How did we get here? The adaptive enterprise

15. GRID will become mainstream 2007/08 2008 2006 Nascent Intra-enterprise GRID Inter-enterprise GRID • 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 <1% 2% 5% 10% …BUT early opportunities are emerging NOW

16. 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 • SLA’s 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

17. Requesting Application Policy Direction (Real Time) Policy Administration Policy Enforcement CEODesktop Datacentre Apps BranchDesktop Managing ICT Services 21C ICT Management Architecture Real-Time ICT Service Assurance & Provisioning Billing for Complex ICT Services

18. Partner Network Provider Customer Customer Service Provider Partner Create Config IP PBX Order Product Shipment Ordered IP PBX Delivered IP PBX Auto Configures Active Service Reported Realising best in class systems Open Systems Reduced Time-to-Market & Cost 21C Architecture & Futures

19. SERVICE AGENCY Capability Exposure Access De/MUX Self-care Web Portal HTTP-TCP/IP HTTP-GPRS GPRS 3G TCP/IP User Interaction Payment Location MANY MORE… Authentication Register/Selector Admin Web Portal Location manager Payment manager 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

20. 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

21. Next Generation Web • Today’s web • Machine-to-human • Tomorrow’s 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-understandable • 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

22. 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 Semantic technology timelineenabling next generation ICT via rich descriptions 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 SemanticBPM SemanticWebServices System interoperability 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 2015 2000 2010 “The only path to scalable interoperability of data, services, processes and devices”

23. 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 BT’s 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

24. 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 user’s needs will be such that any such interactions, natural or otherwise, are minimised