Issues that Cloud the Cloud Computing Promise

April 15, 2008 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Google, Web Services, Zombies

I’ve been getting quite a bit of interesting reactions to a post over at my ZDNet SOA site, “Is Cloud Computing Too Good to Be True?” In the post, I discussed Google’s latest entree into the infrastructure-as-a-service space, Google App Engine, and how it competes with Amazon Web Services.

Both vendors offer storage, messaging, queuing, and back-end server scalability that can conceivably offer an alternative to buying and managing onsite software and hardware.

Amazingly enough, access to Google App Engine will be offered for free, versus Amazon’s incremental pricing plans. However, Amazon’s services are priced so low that free versus a couple of hundred dollars per month may not be an issue for enterprises. (Individual consumers, however, will more likely be drawn to the no-cost Google model.)

However, what may be an issue for enterprises are things such as governance, security, privacy, and control — all issues that cloud the Cloud computing space.

In an online poll I am conducting with the post, sentiments are running against Cloud computing for the enterprise: at the time of this writing, 62% said Cloud computing is still too risky of a bet for enterprises, versus 32% saying it is enterprise-capable.

Readers of this blogsite may have already seen my arguments in favor of moving to the Cloud — not having to deal with software maintenance and upgrades, and paying for only what you need. However, there are arguments against enterprise-scale Cloud computing, which include the following:

• Cloud computing may create a dependence on the provider (Google, Amazon) and may make it difficult to move to another platform.
• Google itself admits that Google App Engine is targeted at consumer applications, not businesses.
• Enterprises leveraging Cloud computing may become homogenized — and lose the competitive advantage that may come from custom-built systems.
• There’s always the risk that the Cloud provider may change business models or even go out of business.

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Size Matters - When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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For All Those Who Have Said Blogging Was Just A Fad …

March 9, 2008 at 11:51 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Business Model, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Messy World, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software

I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.

Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread.  We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.

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The world’s 50 most powerful blogs

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.

Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.

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The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment.  Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so.  And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.

I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I  think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.

Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives.  That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites  they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.

It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0".  I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting.  I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.

In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group.  His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.

Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics.  In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said  "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.

It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.

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Mashups Made By Microsoft … 2.0 Be or Not 2.0 Be ?

February 10, 2008 at 11:18 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blue Monster, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Hugh McLeod, Microsoft, SOA, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Web Services, enterprise software, mashups

Mashups for the business world are a promising outcome of the application of design and development principles coming from the consumer application and web services arena to the business environment.

As noted in the excerpt from the NY Times below, Microsoft has for the most part been regarded as a laggard, or essentially a reluctant participant in the Web 2.0 world to date because of its focus on operating systems (though its Blue Monster initiative was created in order to address that perception, I believe).

While it’s Popfly initiative and a team of 17 programmers does not represent a wholesale shift in strategic direction for Microsoft, it’s an interesting signal.

While most readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with Web 2.0 and mashups, here’s a bit of context. Generally, Web 2.0 refers to a "second generation" of web sites whereon visitors / users can contribute information for purposes of sharing and collaboration. Web 2.0 applications use Web services - most commonly Flash, Ajax, Silverlight or JavaFX user interfaces, Web syndication, blogs, and wikis. There are no set standards for Web 2.0, and generally it has come into existence through the work of designers and programmers building upon existing web server architecture and adding / stitching together web services. It can be said that Web 2.0 shares some principles and characteristics with SOA.

Mashups are often thought of as Web 2.0 applications. "Enterprise mashup" describes Web applications that combine content from multiple sources into an integrated user experience.  Enterprise mashups are application hybrids combining content and functions from more than one existing source to create powerful Web applications, integrated Web experiences and to expand customer value networks. They are created when different application program interfaces (APIs) are combined or ‘mashed’ such that the functions from the combined applications come together to create an entirely new application.

As noted in the NY Times article, "Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold."

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Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft

[ Snip … ]

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

The mashup is at the heart of a generation of Lego-style software that is emblematic of the second generation of the Internet. Both Google and Yahoo have developed tools to help Web users display apartment rentals on maps, or build complicated Web sites like

The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.

A user might take Popfly and mash up his list of Amazon book recommendations with the Seattle Library book catalog on the Web, he said, and receive a notification when the waiting list for a particular book was down to zero.

“This is not just a passive experience,” Mr. Montgomery said. “You can take this stuff and use it in new ways.”

He now sees his target audience as people who are not professional developers, but who work with information.

Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.”

“They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be Internet-connected and it will have an innate sense of who your friends are.”

Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.

But Mr. Montgomery sees Popfly as a more ambitious and comprehensive effort. He also thinks that it could turn into a general educational tool for nonprogrammers.

[ Snip … ]

The largest challenge facing the Microsoft team of Popfly developers will be to gain the acceptance of the broader Web world. Because the company chose to design Popfly using a Microsoft Web graphics and animation technology called Silverlight, it will be treated with suspicion by an Internet universe that is increasingly committed to open standards.

Silverlight is an alternative developed by Microsoft to compete against Adobe’s Flash and, more recently, Flex systems, that are now used ubiquitously by Web developers.

Mr. Montgomery will also have to overcome the skepticism with which many Internet veterans now view Microsoft.

“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”

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I’m sure we’ll find out how serious Microsoft is …

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Forrester’s Most Recent Predictions for the Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Market

January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software

This just off the presses at ZDNet …

It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.

And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.

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Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester

Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.

Not a big revelation.

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UPDATE:

Huh ?  42% "Not on our agenda" and 32%  "Not a priority"  translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?

Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.

The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:

Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:

First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.

Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.

Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester

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Digital Natives … Making Enterprise 2.0 and Hamel’s “The Future of Management” (More) Real ?

January 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under Change, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds

Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" (both terms coined by Marc Prensky, a virtual learning / game-based learning guru), and recently colleague Rob Paterson offered up a post (The Social Web - A New "World") noting his "aha" moment about the issue. 

"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you.  It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.

Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ?  Will that change ? 

JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:

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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.

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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,

I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.

Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.

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‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business
Clint Boulton
September 20, 2007

Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.

LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.

As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.

"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.

Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.

Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.

While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.

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Tags: Marc Prensky, Rob Paterson, JP Rangaswami, digital natives, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy, wirearchy, the new organization, networks, Gartner Group

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Amazon SimpleDB: A New Database in the Cloud

December 23, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Web Services, enterprise software

Run an entire enterprise — including sophisticated IT — from the cloud? Just a couple of weeks again, I posted Ismael Ghalimi’s list of all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Ismael cited Dabble DB as an example of a cloud database that can provide such functionality.

Since that posting, Amazon Web Services announced a “limited beta” of a new service called SimpleDB.

SimpleDB, Amazon says, is a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provide the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Amazon charges for SimpleDB services on a per-use basis, which initially is priced at 14 cents per machine-hour consumed. Data transfer rates range from 10 cents per gigabyte for data transferred to the database to 13-18 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Structured data storage is $1.50 per gigabyte a month.

Cloud computing has interesting implications for enterprises in the long run. Already, cloud computing appears to be leveling the playing field for many start-ups, helping to basically avoid the necessity of any enterprise IT investment at all.

For example, online podcasting service GigaVox Media, an Amazon Web Services customer, reportedly spent just over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing. (I went into some detail about this case and cloud computing over at my ZDNet blog.)

GigaVox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The alternative would have been to buy disks and storage arrays to provide back-up storage, which typically range in price between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. GigaVox would also have had to invest in switches and hubs, as well as the expertise to put it all together and manage on an ongoing basis.

The company then adopted Amazon EC2 to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to serve as the glue between these services monitoring EC2 server instances, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing instructions for program processing. As Doug Kaye, co-founder and CTO of GigaVox, put it in a Webcast:

“Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers, which still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more,” said Kaye. “We didn’t have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a ‘cage.’”

Cloud computing services such as SimpleDB are more likely to catch on among smaller companies and startups. However, Oracle and Microsoft have little to fear at this point among enterprise customers suddenly dropping their onsite databases installations in favor of cloud databases. In fact, open source databases such as MySQL may suffer the most.

Along with small businesses, the cloud databases will most likely start to catch hold among individuals or departments within organizations that need to pull something together quickly, without the necessary budget machinations. But as with all new paradigms, cloud services may start at the peripheries of enterprises and slowly be absorbed into more and more functions. That’s the route open source is taking now, and Microsoft technologies took in the 1990s.

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