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The setup is similar to that in New York, with the consultancy giant and the banks joining forces with local public bodies – in this case the Technology Strategy Board, the Mayor’s Office and the City of London Corporation – to accelerate financial services startups. Applications will be accepted until the start of November, and six startups will win a place on the 12-week program.

Applicants will already have to have a working beta, and will have to demonstrate that they will really benefit from the access to senior banking executives that comes with the course.

“London is the world’s number one financial centre and a global leader in technology innovation, which is why the FinTech quest for entrepreneurs is such an exciting proposition,” mayor Boris Johnson opined.

If the original iteration is anything to go by, the London FinTech lab should come up with some interesting services. Recent grads from the New York operation range from ‘gamified compliance’ mobile apps (TrueOffice) to big data search tools (EidoSearch) and analytics engines for combating fraud (Centrifuge. Not the sexiest material, but all useful to the big names lined up behind the scheme.

And what a roster that is, with many names – Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and UBS – being familiar from the New York version.

“In the UK, the intersection between the technology space and financial services space perhaps didn’t have the sort of accelerator that we’re looking to set up,” program manager Karl Meekings told me. “There’s obviously a whole array of accelerator programs that exist, but nothing focused on the financial services sector in this way. So we thought this was a good way to identify technologies which are relevant to financial services and which could improve upon the efficiency of the industry as a whole.”

From the organizers’ perspective, setting up the London lab makes sense: while anyone is free to apply to these programs, they need to relocate if they’re accepted, so it’s a natural move to have at least one European base. Meekings also noted that initiatives such as Tech City showed there was “something we could already tap into” in the London scene.

Could we see another of these labs elsewhere in Europe? Doubtful: if Accenture and pals are looking for that magic confluence of tech innovation and high finance, there aren’t too many places outside New York and London to look. If anywhere’s next on the list, my guess would be Singapore.

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The consulting firm dubs the combination of hardware (even down to the silicon) and operating system as well as services and software a “superstack.” The focus of the report is the spread of this “superstack” concept from the mobile and consumer world over to the enterprise, especially as it relates to cloud services. But the concept hit me at a personal level, especially since yesterday I received an iPad for Mother’s Day. My first reaction was tepid since we already have an iPad and I don’t buy my content from Apple or use its services. (Seriously I have gone at least four years without remembering my iTunes password, and only my recent receipt of a MacBook Air with the Mac App Store forced me to finally get back on board and update my credit card.)

Too many platforms and not enough time.

Instead I’ve spent my time on Google’s Android “superstack” and buying and keeping my content on Amazon’s “superstack.” Apple’s place in this universe was as a provider of beautiful, lightweight hardware with a battery that lasted for almost a whole day. But with the iPad I’m suddenly back in the position where I have to make an effort to move my Amazon content off its cloud and onto my hard drive and into iTunes if I want to consume it on the iPad. And on the movie front I can’t actually download content from Amazon or Google Play, and must go to the Apple store.

Suddenly I’m stuck having to ask myself what movies or music or apps do I want to use or play and then decide the device I need in order to play them. And that is the truth of the superstack. The entire point is to circumvent the openness that the Internet and the digitization of content has enabled and once again lock consumers into a single platform for their content determined in part by the hardware they choose. And yes, I am aware that I can spend time transferring unprotected content between platforms and can download apps to help me use Gtalk on a Mac for example, but for many consumers this is too much: consumers trade convenience for choice.

Superstacks are everywhere in the new economy.

And it’s not only happening at the device and cloud layer. The creation of “superstack” services, where one predominant player controls an entire field, occurs all over the web today. There, the tools for lock-in aren’t agreements struck with content owners and different OSes, but access to data and the limits placed on APIs. For example, your attention is Facebook’s most valuable asset, so it strikes deals to let folks access it and can play kingmaker for a variety of apps. Meanwhile and Twitter guards those who can access its API well. And there will be plenty of others rising up to own various platforms on the web in travel, payments, games, coupons, etc.

There’s another large area where superstacks are developing, which I find to be the most problematic, and that’s between the Internet providers and the content industries. So Comcast’s ownership of NBC-Universal and its access to Hulu is troublesome. Even if an ISP doesn’t own a content company directly, the ties and influence the pay TV side of their business exerts over its broadband access business can be a problem. That’s why companies such as AT&T, Cox and Charter are joining Comcast in implementing broadband caps.

Somehow, we’ve moved from locking customers into proprietary systems using hardware as was done in the old Bell and IBM days to building proprietary systems using operating systems, control over data and access to content. As is generally the case, the consumer tends to value convenience over choice, until the choice outside the walled garden looks better than what’s inside (see TiVo). The challenge for any of these companies is to make sure it’s options still appeal to consumers even if it means co-opting the innovations occurring outside the wall (again, see TiVo and video on demand), while building its walls as high as possible.

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If you think cloud computing confuses tech users,  it has positively flummoxed IT vendors that now must deal with a bewildering array of business models thanks to the proliferation of  SaaS, PaaS and IaaS deployment options. And as cloud deployments continue, the vendors don’t seem to be getting much better at handling these new business models, according to a recent Accenture report.

Back in the day — say ten years ago — most hardware and software vendors only had to worry about selling their software licenses or boxes up front (then selling follow-on maintenance and upgrades). That’s a pretty straightforward set of processes and accounting procedures.

Now, those same IT providers must deal with five, six, maybe even seven ways of selling (or renting) their product, without necessarily bringing on expertise to deal with that fundamental change, said Tim Jellison, a senior executive with Accenture’s software  business. Jellison co-authored a report based on information provided by 30 major tech vendors.

One business model does not fit all

“If you were a software company, you maybe had two models — traditional software license sales and some sort of professional services model,” Jellison said in a recent interview. ”Now most [of these] companies have to have some sort of SaaS model, some sort of appliance model tuned to a particular application, some add an advertising-based model, many have a PaaS,” he said.

Microsoft  is an extreme example because of its size and the breadth of its offerings from consumers up to CEOs, has all of those plus models in play. Plus, with  ”Xbox and Xbox Live it also has an integrated hardware-and-software offering paired with an online service,” Jellison said.

And yet, many of these IT vendors still try to use a one-size-fits all operating model and that’s where things break down, he said.  One major issue is that top management in these big companies don’t seem to get that these individual delivery models require different billing mechanisms and revenue recognition processes. The level of complexity is off the charts and yet most have not added personnel or expertise to deal with that.

By  2014, big companies will spend close to $35 billion a year (and more than $110 billion cumulatively in the next five years) on SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and other XaaS models combined, according to Gartner data cited in the report. And,  that doesn’t even count the emerging advertising market, which represents another business model, and which will hit the $55 billion mark in the same period.

RightNow: Exception to prove the rule

The report did highlight some IT vendors that have done the transition right. RightNow Technologies for example, which once derived 15 percent of its revenue from on-premises software sales, managed to flip the switch completely to cloud only. That’s probably the main reason that Oracle, in search of cloud credibility, bought RightNow last year for $1.5 billion.

The RightNow buy aside, Oracle remains an example of the kinds of problems mixed business models pose to legacy IT companies. The bulk of its revenue and profit still come from good-old-fashioned software license sales (and the extremely profitable sale of maintenance and upgrades.) That is one reason many see Oracle having a big cloud problem moving forward.

Feature photo courtesy Flickr user Ian Muttoo

For rent photo courtesy of Flickr user Charleston’s TheDigitel

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Narinder Singh

Appirio, the systems integrator that pioneered early software-as-a-service implementations, has netted $60 million in Series D funding led by General Atlantic. That brings total investment in the company to $80 million. General Atlantic, a growth equity firm, joins current investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.

The company built its business by diving into the then-relatively new world of software as a service, helping companies deploy and customize services from Salesforce.com and Google and ensuring that they worked with customers’ older legacy software.

Appirio Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh said the company’s revenue has grown 80 percent every year since it was founded almost six years ago, but would not comment on profitability.

The company will use the money to further fund expansion into new geographies. Late last year it bought London-based SaaSpoint to raise its profile in Europe. It will also boost its CloudSpokes crowdsourcing project

About 30 percent to 40 percent of Appirio’s work revolves around Salesforce.com applications, another 30 to 40 percent around the Salesforce.com platform and the rest around Google, he said.

“When we started out, the notion of cloud applications was completetly orthogonal and disruptive to on-premises applications,” said Singh, who spent time at Accenture and SAP before joining Appirio. That disruption gave rise to new-look integrators that didn’t have a vested interest in the older software or older software vendors.

Current Appirio customers are split between companies that are slowly moving more of their workloads to a SaaS model, and younger companies that are fully invested in the newer deployment model, he said.

While Appirio got into the SaaS game early and reaped the rewards as more companies got comfortable buying into the SaaS model, but now most integrators can talk the SaaS game. Still, with a roster of customers including Carnival, Home Depot, Starbucks and Medtronic, Appirio has a good foundation to build on.

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Cisco's Marthin De Beer at Green:Net 2011

As I sat in a Cisco TelePresence room for Cisco’s energy analyst briefing, I was thinking about two things. First, how glad I was to be able to use TelePresence so I didn’t have to spend a day in airports and airplanes. Second, how I would possibly find a single, simple theme for the many announcements and implications embedded within Cisco’s two-hour session.

I finally gave up on the idea of a simple summary. Instead, I’ve listed below the nine points I found most important.

1). Cisco is IT and OT. By virtue of its networking and back office gear, Cisco is in place at 85 percent of the world’s utilities. Now they are moving out from their information technology (IT) stronghold. They seek to become every bit as adept at operational technology (OT) and the peculiarities of power systems. They’ve hired some of the world’s best minds, including some of the best power engineering minds. Two years ago, I wasn’t sure they could adapt to OT. Now I’m convinced they’ll not only adapt, they’ll advance the cause.

2). Cisco is in the communications business now. I haven’t yet figured out the boundaries, but I do know that Cisco is pushing further into field area networks (FANs) than I had expected. When discussing their work at BC Hydro, they said that Itron was doing the meters and the meter data management, while Cisco was handling the FAN. Cisco also said that its other metering partners had decided to step away from communications and focus on metrology and data management. I do not expect Cisco to build the communications modules inside the meters, but it looks like they’ll do much of the rest. Stay tuned for clarifications as I uncover more.

3). Cisco may have solved the hybrid network issue. Most utilities operate with a half-dozen different communications systems, some dating back 20 years. Cisco is proposing a two-tiered architecture for its field area network. Floating above is a “services canopy” to host myriad services from Cisco and its partners. At the lower level, it connects to multiple “purpose built networks for things such as electric vehicles, AMI, solar PV and so on. In this fashion, multiple networks are managed in one place and gain the benefits of sophisticated security, management and interoperability.

4). Cisco is issuing its own reference architecture. Called GridBlocks, it will both complement and compete with similar efforts from Accenture, IBM and Microsoft. At first glance, the Cisco version seems to be more advanced on the OT side – more sophisticated about ways to modify IT networking for the peculiar needs and challenges of power networks.

5). Cisco’s architecture emphasizes a core networking platform as a necessary foundation. Drill into IBM’s architecture and you’ll find it leans on IBM services and servers. The Microsoft architecture implies Microsoft software as the foundation. No surprise, then, that Cisco’s mantra is “the network is the platform.” I believe this is a message that will resonate with executives who want to move away from today’s collection of standalone apps towards an enterprise network that can be reused over and over again for new services.

Cisco’s key message: we will build you a multi-service field area network that you can leverage and build upon for years to come. Other vendors – Sensus, Silver Spring Networks, Tropos – tell a similar story, but none with as much weight behind it.

6). Cisco will provide business and policy “architectures” as well. Cisco is working harder than any other organization I know to uncover and document new business models that justify and exploit the new technology. I expect them to have business model template soon, followed by policy frameworks.

7). Cisco is tackling regulatory blockers head on. Smart grid sales momentum is slowing . . . but not because of technology blockers. Instead, it is regulation that is holding the industry back. Not content just to complain, Cisco is actively campaigning to change minds. If successful, we will all owe a debt to IBM and Cisco, the two companies doing the most to enlarge the pie for everyone by educating policymakers and regulators.

8). Cisco is engaging at the highest levels. Many of their conversations (and even some of their paid consultations) are with utility CEOs, top policymakers and energy ministers.

9). Cisco is investing heavily in R&D. IBM has always been my smart grid research hero, since it invested more (and sooner) than any other company. Cisco is now pushing hard into the smart grid space and coming up with clever new approaches. For instance, they uncovered a money-saving way to send large batches of synchrophasor data continent-wide using a variation of techniques used for video on other networks. But Cisco is not just researching new technology. They’re also investigating new business models and new policy models with help from leading universities and research institutions.

At first blush I think it is a step forward. And a welcome one, given that the stimulus surge has died down and the industry is searching for a spark. Cisco is demonstrating a level of commitment, confidence and strength that should be reassuring to skittish utilities. Your take?

Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com. He consults to smart grid companies seeking market entry advice and M&A advisory. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the US and abroad, he also serves on the Advisory Council of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Energy & Environment directorate.

A version of this article originally appeared on SmartGridNews.com. SmartGridNews.com is the Internet’s oldest, largest and highest-ranked smart grid site. Visit for up-to-the-minute analysis of smart grid trends, smart grid technology and smart grid companies. Sign up for the free email newsletter or follow SGN on Twitter.

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The decision to outsource Symbian was first announced back in April, and Nokia finalized the terms of the deal in June.

Today’s completion of that deal was noted by a terse statement from the company:

“Nokia announced today that it has completed the transaction to outsource its Symbian software development and support activities to Accenture. The signing of the transaction was announced on June 22, 2011. As a result of the transaction, approximately 2,300 employees will transfer to Accenture.”

One thing to note is that when the deal was first finalized back in June, Nokia noted that 2,800 employees would be affected, although Nokia’s note says only 2,300 were transferred today. We have contacted Nokia to find out what has happened to that other 500 and will update this post as we learn more.

Update: An explanation for the discrepancy in jobs cut. “A number of people have found new roles either within Nokia or outside of Nokia,” writes a Nokia spokesperson in response to our question.

As per the original agreement, Nokia has said that it would continue to support Symbian until 2016, and indeed it has been steadily releasing Symbian based-devices this year, with plans to offer more. Following the naming convention of Android and Windows Phone, Nokia is currently releasing “Anna” Symbian devices and is now gearing up for its first “Belle” devices to hit the market later this year.

For now, it looks like the Symbian handsets will largely be aimed at the lower end of the smartphone market while Nokia uses the bulk of its smartphone force in promoting and developing devices based on Windows Phone from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Yesterday it was reported that Nokia may also be looking to develop a Linux-based OS for feature phones.

That new OS, code-named Meltemi, would be built from the ground up with features like touchscreens in mind, could ultimately be used to replace Symbian as well as S40, the OS that Nokia uses for its feature devices.

Yesterday, Nokia also announced a factory closure and the streamlining of operations in its locations and commerce division, with about 3,500 jobs affected, as part of its larger drive to cut costs and improve focus on future products and services.

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Why Basho?

One of Rippert’s responsibilities at Accenture was leading the company’s Technology Lab, through which, Rippert said, he was frequently coming across big data and NoSQL. His team’s job was to research, analyze and prototype these new technologies so Accenture would be ready to implement them when customers demanded them. Rippert realized just how important tools for handling the onslaught of unstructured data would become, and he decided he wanted to get into that space for a living.

He knew some of Basho’s executives, including then CEO Earl Galleher, from their time at Akamai, so they got to talking. It turns out Galleher wanted to transition to a chairman of the board position, so he stepped aside to let Rippert come in as CEO.

Now that he’s been there for a while, Rippert said there are some differences between Basho and his former employer. Sheer head count aside, Rippert is now immersed in the core technology, which is a big change from his role at Accenture. Further, he said, it requires a big attitude adjustment to move from a services company to a software company. Whereas services companies react when technologies come to them, he explained, software companies have to make a major investment in technologies long before the revenues start rolling in.

Basho has already made a lot of that investment, Rippert said. Riak is a fully distributed key-value store that’s based on Amazon’s Dynamo research paper, although all of its code was written from scratch. Now he thinks his industry experience will help him position Basho’s Riak as a legitimate option for enterprise data centers.

Forty percent penetration for NoSQL

Enterprises will start adopting NoSQL en masse, Rippert thinks, because the types of data they’re now dealing with require new technologies. “We are the data store for the new type of data being stored,” he explained. Existing relational databases were invented decades ago, he said, but they weren’t prepared for the worldwide data-volume surge that hit around 2004. And volumes are only growing — IDC predicts that more than 1.8 zettabytes, or more than 1,800 exabytes, of information will be created and stored in 2011.

That data is largely of the unstructured variety coming from web applications, machines and other sources that aren’t the traditional business-transaction data for which relational databases were created. Relational databases were the answer to almost everything previously, but now Rippert thinks NoSQL is “the answer to about 40 percent of business use cases today.” Relational databases aren’t going anywhere, but he thinks NoSQL databases can move in on new applications and replace existing databases that are storing data better suited to NoSQL technologies.

Of course, he acknowledges, NoSQL has nowhere near 40 percent of the database market. “When I go to sleep at night, I dream about 40 percent market penetration, but we don’t have it now,” Rippert joked. Although, he noted, NoSQL easily has more than 40 percent penetration among web developers and other folks building next-generation applications. And as those applications grow in number, so will NoSQL’s market share.

He thinks the tipping point for traditional enterprise adoption is about three years, after companies see more use cases pop up and become more confident with the products. Rippert noted that NoSQL databases are generally far less expensive than relational databases, so that will help, too.

While at Accenture, Rippert said one large technology client was already using Riak, as is Comcast as part of the infrastructure for its Xfinity cable service. Since joining Basho, he said the company has signed on one large customer and has several very promising leads.

Expect lots of M&A

Assuming enterprise adoption picks up like Rippert thinks it will, he predicts that legacy software vendors will start snatching up NoSQL startups to ensure they get a piece of the pie. He thinks integration likely will be a tougher task for vendors that also have a hardware business, though, because NoSQL databases are designed for scale-out, commodity hardware. Those companies will try to sell their high-margin gear as long as they can get away with it, he said. However, NoSQL does add some higher-level opportunities around analytics and visualization that will help offset those hardware losses.

If NoSQL companies are to survive on their own, Rippert thinks they will have to expand beyond their current capabilities. Customers will be willing to run multiple databases, he thinks, but the fewer they have to buy, the better. For example, he said, a NoSQL database that blends key-value, document and columnar features would be a good idea. Basho is working on expanding the capabilities of Riak, he added. Couchbase recently launched its flagship product that melds the Membase key-value store with the CouchDB document database.

At this point, Rippert said Basho spends most of its energy convincing customers that NoSQL is a legitimate option rather than comparing itself directly to competitors such as MongoDB or Couchbase. As I’ve noted before, though, as business picks up and large vendors start drooling over acquisitions, so will the competition among the still fairly congenial NoSQL crowd.

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