Verizon, AT&T Dig In for Battle of the iPhone Plans

Designing an attractive set of service plans for a new device isn't always easy for wireless carriers, and as Verizon gears up to launch its own iPhone, the plans it offers could make a big impact on how many new users it manages to bring on board. Meanwhile, AT&T may offer new plans and even new functions to keep its own hordes of iPhone users from turning toward its biggest compe




As Feb. 10 nears, more information is coming regarding the pricing plans Verizon Wireless will offer customers who use the iPhone, which the carrier will make available on that date. Meanwhile, AT&T (NYSE: T) appears to be reworking its own plans, perhaps in a bid to convince some users not to run into the arms of its arch wireless rival.

On Tuesday, Verizon Chief Operating Officer Lowell McAdam told The Wall Street Journal that the company will offer iPhone buyers a US$30 unlimited data plan -- for now.
Meanwhile, reports have surfaced that AT&T Wireless has let some subscribers to its limited iPhone plans return to its unlimited plan if they had subscribed to it previously.
Perhaps AT&T's doing this to prevent iPhone customers from switching to Verizon, but that remains speculation.
"If people aren't reaching the limits of their wireless plans, unlimited plans may not be much of an enticement," Josh Martin, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, told MacNewsWorld. "Those who use unlimited data plans probably didn't leave them in the first place."
tether another device to the smartphone if they pay an extra $20 a month. This lets them draw from the 2GB data pool for which they already are paying $25 a month.
Although AT&T has never allowed smartphone users on its network to employ their devices as wireless hotspots, that may change.
"We're looking at this," Siegel said when asked if the company might change its stance on hotspots. "We haven't made a decision yet."

More Plan Changes on the Way?

AT&T and Verizon may further alter their plans as they battle to lure iPhone-craving wireless subscribers.
Verizon's McAdam reportedly sees the company's unlimited data plan as a lure to AT&T iPhone customers to switch. He also expressed disappointment that Verizon added only 955,000 new subscribers in the past quarter, as stated in its fourth-quarter earnings report, which was released Tuesday.
"Consumers are doing more with their phones in terms of content consumption, and unlimited plans can be seen as a competitive advantage or disadvantage, depending on which side of the fence you're sitting on," Strategy Analytics' Martin pointed out.
It's not yet clear how many iPhone owners will likely jump ship from AT&T to Verizon. But for now, AT&T's not admitting to any.
"Verizon hasn't offered the device yet," AT&T's Siegel remarked. "There are no customers to lose."




Sorting Out the Mess






Just how much data makes up 1 GB? It's sometimes hard to tell while using a smartphone, and some consumers may get a shock when they get their wireless bills once they are hit by a tiered plan.
"It's been challenging for consumers to understand how much bandwidth the app they're using consumes," Strategy Analytics' Martin said. "The tools to help people understand that still aren't in place."
Wireless carriers should create these tools, Martin opined.
"I've heard a lot of lip service from carriers in terms of making it easier to understand their plans," he pointed out. "They really should be providing these tools;erizon's McAdam reportedly sees the company's unlimited data plan as a lure to AT&T iPhone customers to switch. He also expressed disappointment that Verizon added only 955,000 new subscribers in the past quarter, as stated in its fourth-quarter earnings report, which was released Tuesday.
"Consumers are doing more with their phones in terms of content consumption, and unlimited plans can be seen as a competitive advantage or disadvantage, depending on which side of the fence you're sitting on," Strategy Analytics' Martin pointed out.
It's not yet clear how many iPhone owners will likely jump ship from AT&T to Verizon. But for now, AT&T's not admitting to any."Verizon hasn't offered the device yet," AT&T's Siegel remarked. "There are no customers to lose."

News Corp. Takes a New Stab at Paywalls With Buck-a-Week Daily

News Corp.'s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, will be officially unveiled next week. Readers will pay 99 cents per day to access its content. The Daily puts an unusual twist on digital news delivery with its iPad-only rollout, and the amount it will charge is considerably less than paywall pros like The Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times if it enacts its own paywall...The classic newspaper may finally gets its 21st-century update. News Corp.'s (Nasdaq: NWS) iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, is set to launch on Feb. 2. A weekly subscription will reportedly cost 99 US cents. Issues of The Daily will be delivered automatically throughApple (Nasdaq: AAPL) once users sign up.

News Corp. told the E-Commerce Times the company cannot offer more information before the Feb. 2 announcement.

The launch will be held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was slated to appear, but will not because of health problems.

subscription. "I think for a paid iPad news app to succeed, it has to allow the user to buy a subscription," said Howe. "At present, that's not allowed in the iPad app store, only one-time purchases."

Choices in mobile news -- whether on a tablet or smartphone -- increase every day. "TheNew York Times already has an online iPad app, which I use quite a bit," said Howe. "It will soon become a separate product, bundled free with print subscriptions, but also available separately. My guess is that The Daily will break the subscription restriction in the App Store, and that the New York Times will then be able to exploit that new-found freedom. All that said, though, it's going to be a long, slow slog to get app-based news to approach the consumption rates of Web-based and print media."

E-readers present a new way to deliver news, and their use is on the rise. "One of the things that will help this market develop is the increasing use of e-readers," said Howe. "The more people who have e-readers, the more interested the general population will become in getting other forms of content other than books on those readers. So this market won't be stalled forever -- it's just not there yet."

Mobile Content - New Arena for News Sites

News sites are striving to find an effective balance between what people are willing to pay for and what they expect to get for free. "Digital does not mean free," Al Hilwa, program director of applications development software at IDC, told the E-Commerce Times. "While modern media has been in the process of adjusting to the digital age, the mix of paid versus free news has certainly been in flux."

Content delivery on tablets and mobiles will be a battleground for news organizations.

"It makes sense to me that there may be a tier of news and analysis that has to sit behind paywalls," said Hilwa. "The tablet form-factor opens up more opportunities for experimenting with the structure of this paywall. Content-based applications as a category is definitely one of the more exciting new things going on tablets today.

Have It Your Way: Building a Cloud With Platform ISF 2.1

The latest offering from Platform Computing, Platform ISF 2.1, is targeted at enterprises that aim to build and manage private clouds. "Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons, but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics," said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner.Platform Computing last week released Platform ISF 2.1, which improves ease of use and automation for building and managing enterprise private clouds.

Platform's cloud management software helps enterprises transition from internal IT to more productive and efficient private cloud infrastructure services that support multitier applications.

New in Platform ISF 2.1 is a dynamic "single cloud pane" for cloud administration; expanded definitions for support of multi-tier application environments such as Hadoop, Jboss, Tomcat and WebSphere; and enhanced business policy-driven automation that spans across multiple data centers.

 automating delivery of complex enterprise infrastructure and production applications across heterogeneous virtual, physical and public cloud resources, Platform ISF also helps reduce electricity and cooling requirements while freeing up capacity in data centers. The management layer provides improved monitoring, policy management and workload management across multiple and heterogenous cloud and traditional IT stacks. By capturing corporate standards and business policies within the automation engine, companies can improve both compliance and security, said Platform Computing.

Via the single-pane administration capabilities, what Toronto-based Platform calls a "cloud cockpit," users can self-select approved services to support a wide variety of applications. Enhanced end-user portals are also new, including drag-and-drop portlet-based dashboards and customizable application instantiation pages.

What's more, the applications be can monitored from both private and public clouds, such as Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Web Services (AWS). The degree of management allows for future planning and capacity management, to help exploit hybrid computing benefits and cut the total overall costs of supporting applications.

Enhancing Agility

"Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons, but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics," said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner (NYSE: IT). "This means that the technology used to manage cloud environments should be similarly agile and act to facilitate and not impede this industry movement. IT organizations should look for tools that can address the various cloud usage scenarios without demanding excessive investments in management infrastructure or staff support."

Key capabilities in Platform ISF 2.1 include: self-service and chargeback, policy-based automated provisioning of applications, dynamic scaling of applications to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and unification of distributed and mixed-vendor resource pools for sharing. A unique "Active-Active" multiple data center supports higher availability and scalability by leveraging Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) GoldenGate.

Delegating Duties

Ease-of-use benefits in the new release, which is available now, include account management and delegation based on applications or business processes. Such delegation can occur for such cloud-supported functions as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and hierarchical applications and their supporting components and services. Also included is self-service hierarchical account and resource management (including Active Directory for 10,000+ users) supporting an unlimited number of organizational tiers.

Business benefits include less downtime for applications, even as they are supported by hybrid resources, SLA-driven shared services, less need for specialized administrators, higher availability and creation of richer applications services catalogs. Use of Platform ISF 2.1 for private cloud activities clearly puts the users in a better position to use, exploit and manage public clouds, and to move quickly to the hybrid computing model. The goal is to manage the heterogeneous applications lifecycle, not just multiple cloud instances, said Jay Muelhoefer, VP of enterprise marketing at Platform Computing.

A free 30-day trial of Platform ISF 2.1 can be downloaded here. Platform Computing is also hosting a webinar, "Building a Private Cloud Strategy -- Best Practices" on Feb. 16. For more information about Platform ISF or the webinar

ALM: The Workflow Conqueror

At the HP (NYSE: HPQ) Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona, we explored some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP's ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Now, this customer case-study from the conference focuses on McKesson and how their business has benefited from advanced application lifecycle management (ALM). To learn more about McKesson's innovative use of ALM and its early experience with HP's new ALM 11 release, I interviewed Todd Eaton, director of ALM tools and services at McKesson.

Here are some excerpts:

Todd Eaton: In our business at McKesson, we have various groups that develop software, not only for internal use, but also external use by our customers and software that we sell. We have various groups within McKesson that use the centralized tools, and the ALM tools are pretty much their lifeblood. As they go through the process to develop the software, they rely heavily on our centralized tools to help them make better software faster.

The ALM suite that HP came out with is definitely giving us a bigger view. We've got QA managers that are in the development groups for multiple products, and as they test their software and go through that whole process, they're able to see holistically across their product lines with this.

We've set up projects with the same templates. With that, they have some cohesion and they can see how their different applications are going in an apples-to-apples comparison, instead of like the old days, when they had to manually adjust the data to try to figure out what their world was all about.

When HP came up with ALM 11, they took Quality Center and Performance Center and brought them together. That's the very first thing, because it was difficult for us and for the QA managers to see all of the testing activities. With ALM, they're able to see all of it and better gauge where they are in the process. So they can give their management or their teams a better status of where we are in the testing process and where we are in the delivery process.

The other really cool thing that we found was the Sprinter function. We haven't used it as much within McKesson, because we have very specific testing procedures and processes. Sprinter is used more as you're doing ad hoc testing. It will record that so you can go back and repeat those.

How we see that being used is by extending that to our customers. When our customers are installing our products and are doing their exploratory testing, which is what they normally do, we can give them a mechanism to record what they are doing. Then, we can go back and repeat that. Those are a couple of pretty powerful things in the new release that we plan to leverage.

When we're meeting at various conferences and such, there's a common theme that we hear. One is workflow. That's a big piece. ALM goes a long way to be able to conquer the various workflows. Within an organization, there will be various workflows being done, but you're still able to bring up those measurements, like another point that you are bringing up, and have a fairly decent comparison.

With the various workflows in the past, there used to be a real disparate way of looking at how software is being developed. But with ALM 11, they're starting to bring that together more.

The other piece of it is the communication, and having the testers communicate directly to those development groups. There is a bit of "defect ping-pong," if you will, where QA will find a defect and development will say that it's not a defect. It will go back and forth, until they get an agreement on it.

ALM is starting to close that gap. We're able to push out the use of ALM to the development groups, and so they can see that. They use a lot of the functions within ALM 11 in their development process. So they can find those defects earlier, verify that those are defects, and there is less of that communication disconnect between the groups.

We have several groups within our organization that use agile development practices. What we're finding is that the way they're doing work can integrate with ALM 11. The testing groups still want to have an area where they can put their test cases, do their test labs, run through their automation, and see that holistic approach, but they need it within the other agile tools that are out there.

It's integrating well with it so far, and we're finding that it lends itself to that story of how those things are being done, even in the agile development process.

McKesson is a Fortune 15 company. It is the largest health-care services company in the U.S. We have quite a few R&D organizations and it spans across our two major divisions, McKesson Distribution and McKesson Technology solutions.

In our quality center, we have about 200 projects with a couple of thousand registered users. We're averaging probably about 500 concurrent users every minute of the day, following-the-sun, as we develop. We have development teams, not only in the U.S, but nearshore and offshore as well.

We're a fairly large organization, very mature in our development processes. In some groups, we have new development, legacy, maintenance, and the such. So, we span the gamut on all the different types of development that you could find.

That's what we strive for. In my group, we provide the centralized R&D tools. ALM 11 is just one of the various tools that we use, and we always look for tools that will fit multiple development processes.

We also make sure that it covers the various technology stacks. You could have Microsoft(Nasdaq: MSFT), Java, Flex, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Web Toolkit, that type of thing, and they have to fit that. You also talked about maturity and the various maturity models, be it CMMI, ITIL, or when you start getting into our world, we have to take into consideration FDA.

When we look at tools, we look at those three and at deployment. Is this going to be internally used, is this going to be hosted and used through an external customer, or are we going to package this up and send it out for sale?

We need tools that span across those four different types, four different levels, that they can adapt into each one of them. If I'm a Microsoft shop that's doing Agile for an internal developed software, and I am CMMI, that's one. But, I may have a group right next door that's waterfall developing on Java and is more an ITIL based, and it gets deployed to a hosted environment.

They have to adapt to all that, and we needed to have tools that do that, and ALM 11 fits that bill.

ALM 11 had a good foundation. The test cases, the test set, the automated testing, whether functional or performance, the source of truth for that is in the ALM 11 product suite. And, it's fairly well-known and recognized throughout the company. So, that is a good point. You have to have a source of truth for certain aspects of your development cycle.

There are partner tools that go along with ALM 11 that help us meet various regulations. Something that we're always mindful of, as we develop software, is not only watching out for the benefit of our customers and for our shareholders, but also we understand the regulations. New ones are coming out practically every day, it seems. We try to keep that in mind, and the ALM 11 tool is able to adapt to that fairly easily.

When I talk to other groups about ALM 11 and what they should be watching out for, I tell them to have an idea of how your world is. Whether you're a real small shop, or a large organization like us, there are characteristics that you have to understand. How I identify those different stacks of things that they need to watch out for; they need to keep in mind their organization's pieces that they have to adapt to. As long as they understand that, they should be able to adapt the tool to their processes and to their stacks.

Most of the time, when I see people struggling, it's because they couldn't easily identify, "This is what we are, and this is what we are dealing with." They usually make midstream corrections that are pretty painful.

Something that we've done at McKesson that appears to work out real well [is devote a team to managing the ALM tools themselves]. When I deal with various R&D vice presidents and directors, and testing managers and directors as well, the thing that they always come back to is that they have a job to do. And one of the things they don't want to have to deal with is trying to manage a tool.

They've got things that they want to accomplish and that they're driven by: performance reviews, revenue, and that type of thing. So, they look to us to be able to offload that, and to have a team to do that.

McKesson, as I said, is fairly large, thousands of developers and testers throughout the company. So, it makes sense to have a fairly robust team like us managing those tools. But, even in a smaller shop, having a group that does that -- that manages the tools -- can offload that responsibility from the groups that need to concentrate on creating code .

Budget Freeze Could Chill - or Boost - Federal IT Investments

"The federal government will need to rely substantially on IT if the president is going to be able to achieve his government reform goals to make it more competent and efficient," said Thom Rubel, vice president of research at IDC Government Insights. The market will remain strong, but we see significant shifts in spending within the market ... ."

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama frequently mentioned the benefits of information technology, touting the contribution of the Internet to economic growth, and the achievement of innovative enterprises such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook. He pledged to submit a budget to Congress designed to spur innovation.

"We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology, an investment that will strengthen our security , protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people," he said in last week's address.
In an effort to control spending and pare down federal deficits, Obama also called for a freeze on federal discretionary spending for the next five years.
For the IT community, especially vendors, keeping track of the Obama program could be critical in two areas. The first is the administration's goal to spur innovation both inside the government and especially, in the private sector. The second is how much government agencies will be investing in IT during the next few years in light of the spending freeze. Vivek Kundra, the Administration's chief information officer, has frequently noted that federal civilian agencies spend nearly US$80 billion annually for information technology.
"Just as innovation is the key to growing the economy, so it is for enabling government efficiency, savings and performance," Jennifer Kerber, vice president for federal and homeland security policy at TechAmerica, told the E-Commerce Times. "In the State of the Union, President Obama recognized the value of IT when he encouraged agencies to transform government through the use of technology."

Impact of the Freeze

Regarding the spending freeze, industry observers are waiting to see the administration's actual proposals.
"As far as the budget forecast, it's hard to assess the impact of any potential freeze on the discretionary budget, let alone the federal IT spend," Kerber said. "It is just too early to tell. We need to wait and see how the policy is actually implemented in order to determine what it means for technology."
There is some cautious optimism in response to the President's comments, however.
"It is early to say, as we have to see the president's proposals to Congress, as well as the next federal budget," Andrea Di Maio, a vice president at Gartner (NYSE: IT), told the E-Commerce Times.
"My sense is that IT budgets will not suffer, given the objective of using technology to simplify and transform government agencies. On the other hand, there might be a call for using less expensive technologies in certain areas," he noted.
Thom Rubel, vice president of research at IDC Government Insights, offered a more sanguine perspective.
"We believe that while the federal market is changing, and the rate of growth has slowed, the market itself is still very large, and will remain strong for vendors serving government," he told the E-Commerce Times.

Vendors Need to Be Proactive

However, the budget discipline that may come with the "freeze" could result in qualitative differences in where, and how, federal agencies invest in IT.
"There will be multiple opportunities for vendors, both because of specific investments in areas like infrastructure, renewable energy, and government transformation, and because of the need for agencies to strike a balance between cost containment and innovation," Di Maio said.
"An overall freeze doesn't necessarily mean that it will be uniform across all spending," Rubel said.
"The federal government will need to rely substantially on IT if the president is going to be able to achieve his government reform goals to make it more competent and efficient. The market will remain strong, but we see significant shifts in spending within the market, such as less spending for hardware, and shifts among software and services spending as agencies determine how to best achieve service goals within program freezes," he predicted.
"But IT can't be viewed simply as a way to automate and drive out administrative costs. It will have to be adopted in ways that change the way government agencies operate and deliver to achieve program goals and fulfill their missions," continued Rubel. "If government agencies are willing to look at collaborative information sharing and pay for IT as a fluid commodity, such as with the cloud, they'll see the way to productivity through continued steady IT spending."
Vendors will have to be more nimble and more responsive and will need to provide more assistance to federal agencies in using IT more productively, according to a January 2011 report, U.S. Government 2011 Top 10 Predictions, co-authored by IDC's Rubel.
"It is critical that vendors help government organizations leverage existing legacy investments and create the long-term view for them to migrate to the next generation infrastructure/service environment," the report says.
Along with the freeze will come a greater degree of accountability.
"There is going to be greater scrutiny and even greater transparency in how money is going to be spent," suggested Gartner's Di Maio. "The call for better program and portfolio management, the administration's "cloud first" policy for considering options, and the growing momentum on reuse and adoption of more open technologies will change the way agencies buy." 

Chamber axes Taste of Jackson

The Jackson County Area Chamber of Commerce scrapped its Taste of Jackson/Business Showcase, the annual fall event at the Commerce Civic Center that has long been the chamber’s biggest fund-raiser.

That move was part of approval last Friday morning of a new “program of action” that includes two new projects — a wings cook-off at Year One in Braselton and the “Jackson Derby,” a virtual horse race event that president Shane Short said will be “more high-brow” than other chamber events.

Although the Taste of Jackson was a top revenue producer, the profits from the event have been declining for years. The organization considered changing the event, but ultimately voted to replace it.

The Big Spring Wing Fling will take place at YearOne, and Short explained that Marjac Poultry will donate the chicken, making it less costly for teams to enter.

“Marjac is going to help us with the chicken,” Short said. “We’re excited about that and YearOne is excited.”

The Jackson Derby will be pricy, with tickets going for $75 to $100, Short said. It is planned for June.

Furthermore, in approving the program of action for 2011, the directors obligated themselves to sell (or buy) four tickets apiece.

“We try not to ask the board to do too much in terms of programs or events,” Short said, “but we really need your help on this.”

Women will be encouraged to sport hats and men jackets, as part of a Kentucky Derby look, Short said.

As for the location, the chamber would like to hold the event at a horse arena. Short said a Commerce area facility has already been offered.

Other events planned for 2011 include the annual awards banquet, which is Thursday night at the Jefferson Civic Center, the Jackson Chamber Classic Golf Tournament, The Chili Bowl chili cook-off, and the Woman of the Year Luncheon.