In with the In Cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 15/03/10 at 06:03:40 pm

Will Social Networks lead to a Community Cloud?

 

On Thursday 25^th March 2010, people from an estimated 200 cities across the globe will come together to celebrate and support the second Global Twestival. Defined by Twitter as ‘a way to take part in a global event that transforms lives’, Twestival was created last year by London based Amanda Rose, an events-minded entrepreneur, who believed that Twitter’s users could be brought together for the common good.

 

Ms Rose’s creation resulted in a series of worldwide off line events – from concerts to knitting groups – that raised over $250,000 for the chosen beneficiary - Charity:Water -  and brought worldwide public awareness to the global water crisis and the devastating fact that over 1 billion people lack access to clean water.

 

This year’s Global Twestival looks set to repeat last year’s achievements, at the time of writing a shade over $52,000 had been donated, with all proceeds in 2010 going to Concern Worldwide.

 

Perhaps it was the success of the first Twestival that led Wolverine himself, Actor Hugh Jackman to challenge Twitter users to explain in one short tweet why he should support their favorite charity. The charity supported by the most convincing “tweet” would win $100,000. In the end Hugh ended up donating $50,000 each to both Operation of Hope and Charity:Water. Another Hollywood Star, and everyone’s favourite tweeter - @aplusk - a.k.a Ashton Kutcher delivered on his promise of donating to Malaria No More, if and when he beat CNN to the million followers mark.

 

Likewise, last year ABC New Reporter, Bob Woodruff, who himself was seriously injured whilst on news duty in Iraq called upon Twitter users to donate to his foundation, which aids injured service personnel and veterans. To date his ‘Tweet to Remind’ initiative has raised over $200,000 towards its May Memorial Day target of $1.9M.

 

The examples listed above - all Twitter - are just a flavour of the hundreds and hundreds of fund raising tales that involve the use of social networking tools to spread their powerful messages and calls for action. And you can bet that they won’t be the last.

 

With 400M users on Facebook and 119M unique visitors on MySpace, and Twitter managing to acquire 6.2M new users per month, social networks offer non profits and charitable causes a huge opportunity for getting both their voice heard and raising vital funds (even allowing for inactive and deleted accounts).

 

Campaigns and petitions can be set up and released in seconds. The old saying a ‘picture tells a thousand words’ is never truer than on the internet. A 20 second You Tube video of an elephant being culled by poachers is far more powerful, and engenders a far more emotive response, than a 1,000 word article describing the slaying.

 

The beauty of the internet is that’s instant and will genuinely elicit a reaction in real time – which gives any organisation a pretty decent snapshot of whether their campaign is going to float or sink.

 

And as the trend for online social/community fund raising and campaigning grows apace so does the need for additional computing power to effectively support the demand. So used to simply logging in and typing away are we, that we are completely oblivious to the infrastructure that is humming away in the background to deliver the services we consume.

 

And this is an absolutely key characteristic of the other buzz term (social media just about outscoring it) cloud computing. To the end user, the cloud is invisible; the technology that supports the applications doesn’t matter — the fact that the applications are always available is key. Uptime is everything.

 

Take Facebook for example. When it first began in 2004, with a small number of members and with no photos or videos to display, the entire service ran on a single server. Today, some 30,000 servers later, the company is investing somewhere between $180M & $125M in a purpose built data centre in Prineville, Oregon. How many of us even remotely consider this fact or are even bothered by it as we join the other 35 million users in updating our status pages daily?

 

Yet this is a great example of how computing and communication is moving to the data center – someone else’s data center – the cloud. No need to invest in and manage your own infrastructure, you simply plug into the services offered by a third party supplier as and when you chose. But there is a risk of relying solely on ’free to net’ Social Networking tools for planned events and campaigns in that you are basically beholden to standard terms and conditions and have no recourse for action should your service provider fail you or suffer an outage. A thought worth hanging onto if you’re attempting to raise millions of dollars.

 

As the tech industry debates the benefits and merits of the public vs. private vs. hybrid cloud models, perhaps with initiatives such as Twestival, we may also begin to see the development of a fourth not so widely touted model - the Community Cloud.

 

It may take a while to become a reality, but you can certainly envisage the day when communities of like minded people/groups across the globe decide to take the socio-technical concept one stage further, and create their own virtual data centers utilising the spare capacity of their networked personal computers/laptops.

 

Not for them the Fail Whale, but their own dedicated controllable cloud. Not only will they control the messages and promotion but also the apps/storage/shared workspace behind the campaign. The technology exists today but there are still many barriers and questions to overcome, such as latency, resource management and security. These are not insurmountable challenges, and it will certainly be a while before the Community Cloud truly materialises – but it certainly is one cloud on the horizon.

 

 

The State of the Internet Past & Present - A whole lot of Web Hosting going on and on

Posted by Rack Packer - 03/03/10 at 03:03:44 pm

Kudos to JESS3 - a creative agency that specializes in web design, branding and data visualization - for this excellent ‘State of the Internet’ presentation. When you take a step back and consider the mind boggling numbers presented throughout this vid, you realise just how far we’ve come since Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Labs said back in ‘97 that “the internet was the most overhyped, underestimated phenomenon in history.”

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but how must the guys at Newsweek feel when they look back through their archives and read this piece from Clifford Stoll, published in the magazine on February 27th 1995.

“After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.” - Good opening, but one feels that Clifford should have wrapped at this point.

“Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” Oh dear Clifford, its not looking good. BTW remind me what is a CD-ROM?

“Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”  Might have been advisable to have been a little less dismissive of Mr Negroponte’s predictions.

” Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.” A world without Salespeople? What a preposterous idea. No one would welcome that.

Well there we have it. Clifford ‘Ex-Stolling’ the future of the internet. Phenomenon it most certainly has proved to be and long may it continue.

Footnote to this. Clifford Stoll was reminded of this article last week as it became something of a cult on the web (some 15 years later)  and he gamely came back with this reply:

“Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.

Wrong? Yep. At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck—trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions. Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff …

Warm cheers to all,

Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland”

A true internet Legend! (be interested to read Cliff’s take on Cloud Computing! - coming to a shopping mall the size of India soon)

So sit back and enjoy the fruits of JESS3’s labours as you see just how wrong one journalist can be…

Oh! and make sure you have your volume on when viewing as the accompanying music is so annoyingly catchy…and it just leaves you feeling good!

Miami’s Latest Vice - Cloud Computing

Posted by Rack Packer - 01/03/10 at 06:03:18 pm

There were a couple of things that I will remember from my time at the Parallels Summit ’10 which wrapped up in Miami last week.

The first was that the Summit’s venue – the Fontainebleau Resort – has a rich movie and music heritage, with its beautiful grounds providing the back drop for pivotal scenes in Goldfinger (Bond), Scarface (Pacino) and A Hole in the Head (Sinatra), whilst it is also the title subject of a song written by Neil Young and performed by the Stills-Young Band on their 1976 album Long May You Run.

The second was that, and the theme for the Summit, Cloud Computing will be the next game changer in IT, and that, with a little thought from within the Industry, it will survive the hype and deliver on its promises.

The organisers pre amble had stated that by attending the Summit ‘you will develop strategies to transform your business; you will better compete in the market through differentiated offerings and improve profitability through growth and operational efficiency’. A bold statement and one which was certainly not going to be fully implemented within three days, but thanks to the excellent key note speakers and the networking opportunity, the Summit certainly provided plenty of food for thought.

These are the points that I have taken away and will be mulling over for the next few weeks (quite probably months and quite possibly years):

There is no simple definition of ‘Cloud’

During the summit, cloud was defined as ‘Consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet’, ‘an enabler for Small Business to get access to the fully fledged IT services they need’, a ‘combination of PaaS, IaaS and SaaS enabling technologies’ and there even appeared to be train of thought that suggested Cloud is simply existing virtual server/hosting services rebranded and marketed. Perhaps the most brutally honest description was ‘Cloud is whatever my customers want it to be and what they want to pay for’.

What this simply highlighted was that as an Industry we have yet to crystallise a definitive simple meaning which is universally accepted and easily marketed. This situation is indicative of the evolutionary state of the Cloud and will eventually pan out in much the same way as access technologies ADSL, SDSL and Cable simply became ‘broadband’ in the mid noughties.

What was clear was the message that the existence of a cloud computing infrastructure is not an end game, it creates opportunities and encourages vendor innovation, and at the end of the day it will be the customer that lets us know ‘who has won and who has lost out’ in the battle for market share. One particular phrase which resonated with me was ‘Embrace the cloud and make it your own.’

Drop the Hype

See above. Almost to the man or woman, every presenter stressed that the Industry needs to stop stoking the hype fires and focus more on the benefits and the services that Cloud Computing will deliver customers. The term ‘Cloud’ has a really high recollection rate amongst businesses in general, but few are opting to avail themselves of the services - of making the ‘jump across the Chasm’ - with many of them slightly distrustful of the mixed messages and general vendor confusion. A recent IDC survey showed that 18% of business respondents stated that Cloud was simply ‘a renaming of an old concept’ and that a further 22% believe that the market is far too immature to even consider whether Cloud would be of benefit to their businesses. In other words the Industry has some work to do.

SMB Market is the sweet spot for the Cloud Services

As highlighted in my earlier blog post, the SMB market is seen as the real sweet spot for Cloud Service vendors provided the following criteria are met:

• Competitive Pricing
• Offers SLAs
• Option to migrate back to ‘on premise’
• Provides a turnkey/complete solution
• Understands my business
• Offers both public and private versions of the Cloud
• Large network of proven partners
• Can support me
• Technology and business innovator
• Reputation & Brand

And perhaps most importantly, a business that ‘I have already done/do business with’ was given as a key criterion by 50% of those surveyed – supporting the fact that ‘Trusted Supplier’ status will be a key USP for the Cloud providers.

What the results of this survey suggest is that the SMB seeks from its Cloud provider exactly the same set of standards/values that it would from any other provider of business services – peace of mind at a competitive price.

In the Shadow of Giants

One fear or notion, which was dispelled at the Summit was that the Cloud Computing market was set to be dominated by a few major brands – Google, Facebook (an interesting inclusion - but logical when you consider the size of its recent Data Centre investment), Amazon, Microsoft, HP etc.
One of the key reasons given by several speakers, was that (apart from the obvious: this is a ‘new’ market with plenty of headroom) Cloud Computing can be sliced and diced on so many levels or ‘layers’ gauranteeing  that no single company will successfully ‘own’ or dominate every layer. The consensus was that customers will buy as their computing needs require from every layer within the Cloud, be it the infrastructure layer, the hosting layer, the development layer and the apps layer. No ‘killer’ app was identified but most indicated that basic hosting, email, back up, data storage and archiving would drive the market past the early adopter stage.

Overall a great three days worth of thought provoking debate, excellent speakers, exotic location and the reinforced satisfaction of knowing that this is a very vibrant and innovative industry to be a part of.

Maybe the next time Auric Goldfinger is in Miami planning world domination and untold riches, he won’t have to consider a nuclear explosion in Fort Knox, he simply needs to look to the Cloud.

Small Businesses set to Check In and profit from the Cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 24/02/10 at 12:02:09 am

It is quite appropriate that Parallels have selected the luxury Fountainbleau Resort on Miami Beach for the location of the Parallels Summit ’10, as its combination of decadence, attention to detail, service ethic and physical setting are an example of the very best that the Hotel Industry has to offer.

And it’s a model that Cloud service providers are being urged to follow if they wish to succeed in attracting customers to their offerings. It’s a given that not every company will be able to offer 5 star service and not every customer will be able to afford 5 star prices, but the model or rather the Fountainbleau analogy , is one of a combined packaged service offering for an affordable price.

This theme ran loudly through the opening Summit keynotes delivered by Melanie Posey, Research Director at IDC, and Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO Parallels. Both Melanie and Serguei made a strong case for the SMB sector being the hot spot market for Cloud Services over the next 5 years. The reason was pretty simple: Cloud enables SMBs to get access to fully fledged IT services. The key word in this statement being ‘Services’ - SMBs need services not technology. They need a compelling business reason to spend their hard earned reserves on further IT services. They will need to buy into the concept of ‘Business as a Service’.

And this is a message that should be heeded by both the Industry, and marketing departments in particular, if Cloud is to reap the benefits that the hype suggests will be delivered. The figures are pretty impressive. IDC claims that there are an estimated 73.5 million small businesses worldwide, with a further 100 million SOHO businesses operating across the globe. 40% of all IT spend is attributable to the SMB sector, with 45% of this spend accounted for by businesses with less than 100 employees. Cloud spending is expected to reach $44 Billion by 2013, up from £17 billion in 2009 and at a CAGR of 26% this is far and away outstripping traditional IT spend. When you factor in the SMB spend predicted in this area – and that’s a big chunk of pie for service providers operating in this market.

So that’s it sorted then. We’ll all going to become very rich and Cloud will be very successful and we’ll all live happily ever after. Well not quite.

Melanie highlighted the fact that whilst most SMBs surveyed were generally aware of the Cloud, they were somewhat reticent to dive in and procure services. Several reasons were given for this, including hype over substance, internal resistance and security concerns – all of which suggest that we need to work harder to get the Cloud benefit message across. And it’s here that we should take a leaf out of the Hotel and Catering Industry’s book. The Hotel business has successfully packaged a very complex set of business processes into a simple to understand, simple to buy all in one service, tailored to suit a particular market.

When was the last time that you phoned a hotel to make a booking and was asked: “Would Sir like to avail himself of our laundry as a service, room cleaning as a service, food as a service, ability to use the internet as a service, stay in trim during your stay as a service, watch the Winter Olympics live as a service, whilst he stays with us?”. The answer is (hopefully) never.

Whilst accepting that the hospitality industry has had centuries to ‘market its message’, the challenge for our industry outlined by both Melanie and Serguei is well made. We need to focus less on the technology, the terms which seem to proliferate on a daily basis, and more on the needs of the customer.

A customer that is currently using a hosting company for shared hosting, domain name and email can be gently migrated up the value chain as their business needs dictate. In reality they are hardly likely to make the jump from their existing basic business services to a full blown Cloud CRM system just because we believe it’s what they need. If you think about the Hotel business again, you check in and once you are a customer of that hotel, you then have the option of purchasing many services available on a ‘pay as you use basis’ – the mini bar, the restaurant, the telephone, the laundry etc.

This is the model that appears to be gathering momentum and support for successful Cloud implementation. Service providers will need to extend the value of existing offerings, transform the customer experience and reinvent the service creation process if they are to attract the SMB market.

To further use another Hotel analogy, Cloud is about evolution of services not revolution. Hosting services have been around for a while and perhaps we should think of Cloud services as ‘old wine but new bottles’.

Cloud Computing: Rockin’ the corridors of Power

Posted by Rack Packer - 03/02/10 at 04:02:30 pm

Cloud Computing - The New Rock N Roll.

Two news items have caught the attention this week, and both brought the John Lennon and Paul McCartney penned Beatles classic “The Fool on the Hill” to mind (more specifically the line “Well on his way, his head in a cloud”).

One piece compares data centres with rock stars and the second, globally reported, contained President Obama’s $3.8 trillion 2011 budget blueprint designed to pull the US economy’s deficit out of the danger zone.

Although the headlines might appear unrelated, the actual content of both pieces reveal two sides of the same coin. The coin being Cloud computing. On one side we have the private sector investing heavily in the ‘sexy’ future of computing by ploughing millions into new data centres (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc) and on the other we have the public sector seeking to cut costs and balance the books by reducing its dependence on in house IT infrastructure. A potentially heady mix of supply and demand or to put it another way: an opportunity for companies to make money and politicians to win votes.

Not that this is particularly ground breaking stuff, nor should it fill the hearts of the tax payer with joy, given that ‘bandwagon’ and ‘politician’ are two words that are not entirely unknown bedfellows.

The recent past is littered with statements from well intentioned politicos claiming that technology will reduce costs, drive inward investment and deliver benefits to every citizen – data centers in Iceland and Tasmania anyone? - with reality proving the complete opposite (the UK has apparently recently wasted £26bn on a series of botched IT projects for systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether – equivalent to half the budget for Britain’s schools).

President Obama’s budget commentary was equally scathing when it stated: “The Federal Government spends tens of billions of dollars on information technology [IT], but fragmentation, poor project execution, and the drag of legacy technology has not delivered the productivity and performance gains to government that are found when IT is deployed effectively in the private sector.”

It’s not hard to see why this situation arises. Politicians need to promise big results within the four or five year election cycle and announcements are made about IT projects with very little understanding or consultation over whether they are technically feasible, financially viable or even required. The very nature of the political beast usually ensures that the person who kick-starts a project or makes the grandstanding statements is never around long enough to see the fruits of their labours, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.

But this ‘great idea that never delivers’ approach does not just apply to the private sector, many companies, particularly in the IT industry, have traipsed the well worn ‘if you build it they will come’ optimistic path (great movie line, lousy business plan) to unimaginable riches, and managed to fail on many levels – Vonage, Iridium and Zune to name but three from the noughties.

So what’s different about the Cloud? Shouldn’t we be worried that this term is now being used in the world’s corridors of power as freely as ‘digital divide’, ‘re-orienting operations’ and ‘e-learning’ and that its simply the latest buzz?

On the tangible evidence to date, the answer might just be no.

A politician, even with limited technical knowledge, is not going to struggle too hard to understand the efficiencies, cost savings and avoidance of future cost that the cloud offers, nor the fact that there are many capable companies ready and willing to assist them (as opposed to convincing them that they need their solutions).

Back in 2009, President Obama appointed a Government CIO Vivek Kundra to manage the US’s IT transformation. Speaking at an early press event, Kundra nailed his colours to the cloud by stating that the US Government could save money by using many of the Web-based technologies. He followed this up with the example of the U.S. Transport Safety Administration (TSA) spending $600K to set up a blog which a consumer can create for free.

“If in our lives, we can go online and provision Webmail within a matter of minutes, why must the government spend billions and billions of dollars on information that may not be sensitive in nature?” he said at the time. It is this line of questioning, and the answers gained, which has obviously had an influence on this week’s US Budget blueprint.

The White House is seeking to reduce its data center estate from 1,100, up from 432 in 1998, through cloud and virtualisation technologies, and it intends to do so without additional cost. The US Labor Department, and the 22 agencies under its umbrella, is leading the way. It is now using a cloud system built by Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) for the outsourcing of its department’s data storage as part of a seven-year, $50 million contract to revamp its financial management system. Likewise the Department of Homeland Security continues to migrate applications and systems from 24 data centers to two enterprise-wide data centers as part of a project to improve disaster recovery options.

Across the pond, the UK Government has weighed into the cloud with a similar public declaration. It will - not intends - consolidate hundreds of data centers to approximately ten or 12, resulting in an estimated saving of £300 million, and a 75 per cent reduction in power and cooling. At the same time, it intends to launch a G-Cloud Central Applications store that will in effect be an internal ‘pay as you use’ marketplace, speeding up procurement and delivering savings of £500 M annually. (No doubt modelled on the last year’s Apps.gov, an online storefront where US Government agencies can buy online applications from companies such as Google and Salesforce.com with other services such as storage, Web hosting, and virtual machines being offered eventually.)

One of the arguments suggested by organisations that are reluctant to adopt or consider cloud is that they view it more as an integration technology or as a simple extension of their existing set up. What the recent political announcements show is that cloud can offer the ability to completely transform how services are managed and delivered and provides the flexibly to address some of the unique challenges that the business, in this case - the world’s economies, are facing.

This adoption of cloud is not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take years to challenge, and address, some of the traditional attitudes that exist, particularly around security and outsourcing, but it’s on the move and it’s virtually unstoppable. When Rock and Roll started out in 1950’s it faced the similar attitudes, with one critic famously writing in 1956: “Rock and roll is an annoying development in popular music that is now at its peak. A fad that pains - It is awful. But from this point we can expect it to subside toward a deserved extinction.” Ho hum.

Cloud Computing? the new Rock and Roll? Not Arf!