Firms should avoid contact with Fast

We received a letter from the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast) offering to provide help and on that basis invited their representative to meet with IT and senior management (Fast cracks down on pirate firms, 19 June). A well-rehearsed presentation was then made, which quickly turned into a heavy selling session.

Under pressure the salesman admitted he represented two companies and if we signed up for a very expensive “educational” package with one company then we would have no problems with the other. The entire session was a disgraceful abuse of Fast’s position as enforcer for the software industry and entirely unethical.

My advice to IT managers is twofold: first, keep your software licences in good order and secondly, have nothing whatsoever to do with Fast.

Name withheld on request

Regulator should be investigated

We had a visit from an officer of Fast who, in a 10-minute Q&A, identified “16 areas of concern” with our IT practices (Fast cracks down on pirate firms, 19 June). Nearly all were bullshit, with some very minor exceptions. She then suggested that we should join Fast as a corporate member to complete the training, just in case (hint, hint) Trading Standards ever came around to do an audit.

What this tells me is that she is obviously a salesperson, working on commission, signing up as many members as possible. This strikes me as a highly unethical way of doing business for what is essentially a regulatory body.

My personal view is that Trading Standards ought to be investigating Fast.

Name withheld on request

Piracy body sees guilt everywhere

As far as I am concerned, nothing seems to have changed about the methods Fast employs to get companies to sign up to its so-called “education programme” (Fast cracks down on pirate firms, 19 June). I haven’t had any direct dealings with Fast for four years, since my company became part of a larger group, but past experiences seem exactly the same as now.

I have on numerous occasions told Fast’s telesales staff to go forth and multiply. They are aggressive in the extreme, put IT managers under intense pressure and virtually imply that everybody is guilty until proven innocent.

Name withheld on request

Video over IP tools are fit for purpose

There must be a reason why I do not experience the problems Steve Kennedy sees with video over IP (The trouble with video over IP, Letters, 12 June,). I would recommend he try the new generation of video over IP software.

For the desktop you need a business-quality software client, plus a good-quality webcam. Free, public “chat” video is absolutely fine but, as Kennedy says, cannot be guaranteed. But for less than £100, business video over IP clients handle more than just packet loss and at 192kbit/s on a standard ADSL link you can have high quality, multi-party calls.

Last Thursday I had a two-hour, three-location video conference call with Slough and Paris, using a VPN over ADSL to link to my office from my home in Wokingham. It saved me having to get up at 4.00am to catch the 6.20 to Charles de Gaulle.

Nothing is guaranteed, but I wouldn’t go back to ISDN when I can have instantaneous, cheap, flexible IP video from virtually anywhere.

Tony Heyworth, Polycom

Scant evidence to support laptop plan

Roger Howorth's article about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is unduly optimistic (How altruism could reshape IT, 12 June).

I have been looking into the research underpinnings of OLPC and find them remarkably thin. Howorth mentioned a "recent initiative with about 50 laptops in Cambodia". When pressed, members of the OLPC project admit that no research report of that experience exists, although OLPC leader Nicholas Negroponte consistently refers to it as seminal in the formation of the project.

Nowhere can one find a reasoned argument about how laptops will eliminate poverty through education. We are thus confronted with a project whose basis is: "we will do this because we can and because we have the highest political and economic connections."

To those who trust the project because it has MIT’s backing, I respond that OLPC did not make the most elementary power calculations before announcing the hand-cranked power source for the laptop. A few days after I posted these calculations on my blog, all references to power generation disappeared from the OLPC website. What is there to trust here?

Lee Felsenstein, Fonly Institute

Curb your SOA enthusiasm

It would seem that service oriented architecture (SOA) is taking off as a fashionable technology (IBM launches catalogue for SOA components, 13 June).

As usual, most of the news is generated by people wanting to sell it as the next big thing. I am concerned, however, that if followed as it is being sold at present, the concept is liable to lead to significant performance problems.

SOA is sold on having a large number of “users” who are often other systems. This is followed all the way back to the real users through an unknown number of tiers. The complexity of managing this sort of architecture increases significantly as the number of tiers increases. If this is then implemented without due consideration for managing the system capacity and performance the result will be problems in the future.

That is not to say that I don’t see a benefit in the overall technology – there is great potential. Just consider carefully how the performance of operational systems might be proven to be sufficient for the long term.

David Howard, Sarquol

The economics of conferencing

Green issues aren’t the sole factor driving adoption of video conferencing (Executives must curb their wanderlust, 5 June). Enterprises want to see clear return on investment whether that is reduced travel budgets or other communication costs, and productivity benefits.

But most conferencing vendors aren’t helping. The traditional business model is to charge for conferencing solutions separately from voice and web connections, on a per connection and per minute basis. Conferencing is typically introduced as a productivity tool but usage is quickly throttled to bring costs under control.

Only when providers integrate voice, web and video conferencing at a fixed cost will enterprises take conferencing seriously and see it as a potential alternative to travel.

Tony Gasson, Interwise

How councils can protect ID details

Local authorities shouldn’t panic in light of the recent warning from Cifas about the risk of putting planning details online (Council web sites aid ID fraudsters, 12 June).

Instead of defacing documents to hide personal information, local authorities should design, configure and implement technology to give them the flexibility to hide signatures and address details. 

James Thompson, CAPS Solutions

Equipping an SME is no small task

Kelvyn Taylor makes an excellent point about the failure of large IT vendors to address the needs of the UK’s millions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (Large IT vendors have a blind spot, 5 June). We suspect that the cause is a combination of low margins on hardware, which makes smaller sales unprofitable, plus a lack of appetite to develop skills in niche application areas. As Taylor notes, this situation leads to bewilderment for smaller companies trying to buy systems and services. The challenge for SMEs is that they typically lack in-house IT and telecoms expertise. They need to rely on service partners who can take on that role. 

The arrival of Microsoft Office 12 promises much for smaller firms seeking to develop innovative ways to run their business – but how many SMEs will have the technical understanding to exploit the new technology? And how many large vendors have the business model to support them? We predict that their collective blind spot is about to get a lot bigger.

David Carmichael, Business Systems Group

Finding fault with today’s IT culture

Les Hatton’s recent article examining the potentially high cost of apparently trivial errors was interesting in its perspective (Hidden errors can be costly, 29 May). In 1978 I spent about two weeks finding and fixing an error in an invoicing system in the 100th and 1,000th parts of a penny.

Until Microsoft came along we didn't know that we were allowed to leave faults in software.

Graham Griggs