Rack Pack Blog

Will Cloud Computing add value to the marketing mix?

Posted by Rack Packer - 07/09/10 at 09:09:52 am

The Advertising Industry is cutting through the hype and beginning to realise the Cloud’s potential 

For the past 18 months the hype has suggested that Cloud Computing will be the next game changer. But will it? Or are we simply witnessing the next major land grab by a few technology giants on a perceived new market segment?

A plethora of recent surveys has shown that whilst organisations are generally aware of the cloud, they are reticent to dive in and procure services. For every survey that suggests that a CIO is considering Cloud Computing as a priority for his or her organisation you will find another survey stating that business leaders haven’t a clue as to its meaning or how it will aid them.

With over 20 different definitions of cloud computing in play, it’s hardly surprising that the market is suffering from a ‘fog’ of confusion. Several reasons are given, which include hype over substance, internal resistance and security concerns - all of which suggest that the industry spin doctors need to work harder to get the cloud benefit message across.

The industry needs to focus less on the technology and more on the needs of the customer. We need much less of the ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ type jargon and more of the ‘Business as a Service’ approach. Cloud is about evolution of services not revolution.

The core attraction of cloud is that companies can avoid buying and running their own hardware, software and other equipment by contracting with a hosting vendor to supply the systems on its own servers. This outsourcing of computing resources offers flexibility, scalability, agility and costs savings over the traditional in house approach. Four attributes which should, and is, making cloud a prime candidate for early adoption by campaign and project managers.

Campaigns and one off events are notoriously dynamic and really benefit from the ‘on demand’ nature or elasticity that the cloud offers. In theory the cloud should rid us of server crashes as we clamour for the hottest tickets and news, with spikey demand being controlled and managed.

StreetSmart, which asks diners in the nation’s top restaurants to give an extra £1 on top of their bill during the festive period, was one of the first UK Charities to have its website fully hosted and managed on a cloud platform.

Glenn Pougnet, Director of StreetSmart, said: “The cloud has presented us with the perfect solution for handling the short term increase in demand that we face with our annual StreetSmart Christmas campaign. The cloud has removed the worry for us of having to manage our website capacity ensuring that our site is always available to potential donors and restaurant patrons. We are left free to concentrate on running the campaign and raising vital funds to give homeless people hope and a new start in life.”

Think Publishing, the communications agency behind Kate Humble’s charitable web site Stuffyourrucksack.com has also turned to the cloud to cope with seasonal visitor peaks. Think Publishing increases processing power during the summer months, when its campaigns are at their most active, targeting travellers embarking on their vacations, and more importantly only pays for the additional short term resources consumed.

Conversely, ineffective or unworkable projects can be reviewed and pulled without the additional burden of wasted hardware investment affecting the decision making process. Social media, viral campaigns and trending topics can all be maximised and exploited through the real time deployment of cloud servers, providing an agency with agility, thought leadership and competitive advantage.

New Media Age recently revealed that only 17 of the total 200 videos featured in their Viral Brand Chart appeared for a second week, meaning there’s only an 8.5% chance of being a top-ten viral for more than a week. The simple reason given for this is that impact of a viral video is simply diminished because of the volume of video content being uploaded to sites such as YouTube, which receives more than 24 hours of content every minute. Apparently we don’t want to share things once they’re past their sell by point because we don’t want to seem uncool. Gone are the days when we would have planned to support a viral campaign for several weeks and would have utilised servers accordingly. Now we need an infrastructure that can cope with high demand over a short time frame - the perfect attributes of the cloud.

Likewise if we are fortunate enough to have a campaign that attracts the support of an uber Tweeter such as Lady Gaga or a Taylor Swift and they happen to tweet about your brand/offer etc - you can expect a huge surge in traffic. In the old days you might have been able to contact the PR and asked for a timed ‘mention’ to assist with capacity planning but not today. That’s not how the net works. You simply need to be prepared and be able to increase capacity on the fly.

But cloud shouldn’t simply be viewed as a technology. It does generally have the ability to change organisational process for the better. One huge advantage of the cloud is that it offers designers the ability to test, create and share without their destiny being controlled by “corporate IT”. It is often thought that the IT department of the future will be staffed with orchestrators and strategists not simply technicians. The IT department will become drivers of innovation not merely suppliers.

With the right culture in place, the cloud has the ability to bring together the talents of the creative world allowing them to work collaboratively on projects that interest and excite them. This is already happening but as cloud based technology advances it will become even easier.

The US Media Group, Journal Register Company, demonstrated this concept back in July by running the intriguing experiment of involving community Crowdsourcing and the use of free online publishing tools for the production of all their publications. Journal Register produced all of its 18 daily websites and newspapers using only free web-based tools, such as the cloud based Google Docs, social media websites, Facebook and Twitter and the open-sourced software, Scribus.

At the time, Journal Register Company’s Chief Executive Officer, John Paton stated that whilst his company would not be converting to a fully integrated Crowd/Cloud model in the immediate future, he believes that the idea is a potentially viable one.

No one should claim that moving to the cloud suits everyone or that it is easy. Agencies will need to be convinced that service levels are real, tools are available to track and manage individual clients/campaigns, billing is transparent and that the vendor has the appropriate expertise and security processes in place to safeguard their business. Trust will be the single biggest factor in the success of the cloud.

But overall, the arguments for adopting the cloud are too compelling to ignore and it would appear that the media industry is beginning to cut through the cloud hyperbole and is starting to investigate how it can reinvent its IT architecture and processes into a much more flexible and efficient tool for business.

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye – why it will pay to turn to Green IT

Posted by Rack Packer - 06/08/10 at 11:08:34 am

Waves have been making, well, waves this week.

Google announced that it will no longer being investing in further development of Wave, the much heralded collaborative working application which was eventually going to replace email. Whilst some commentators have been quick to point out that this does not mean that Google Wave is dead (the code is available as opensource), it certainly appears to have crashed against the rocks.

The company has also recently been in the news for another ‘natural element’ themed story. Google Energy recently announced an agreement to purchase 114 megawatts of wind power capacity per year for 20 years at a set price from an Iowa wind farm owned and operated by NextEra Energy Resources. Google spokesperson, Jamie Yood, stated: “This is the first contract for Google Energy. We plan on exploring other opportunities to provide our data centers with environmentally friendly power in 2010. It isn’t limited to wind power.”

Which links nicely to the other major wave story of the week, and one which centres on a 12 tonne mollusc shaped ‘socket’ that has been laid on the seabed off the north coast of Cornwall. The Wave Hub is a marine testing facility that is designed to connect wave power with the national grid. The Hub will consist of a cable distribution unit connected to arrays of wave energy devices floating on or just below the surface.

This project is seen as a vital element in the UK’s renewable energy programme. The UK has some of the largest wave and tidal energy resources in Europe. Allowing for technical, practical and environmental limitations, wave energy alone could potentially generate up to 15% of the UK’s electricity consumption. By 2020 the wave energy market in the UK could be worth £0.2 billion.

The UK Government is committed to increasing the amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources to 10% by 2010 and 15% by 2015, with an aspiration to reach 20% by 2020. The hope is that renewables will help to address increasingly important energy and environmental issues surrounding the continued use of traditional and fossil fuels.

For the Hosting and Data Centre industries, the availability of readily available renewable energy is going to be vital to its long term viability.

The UK Government Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, caused widespread consternation this week, when in his first annual energy statement he indicated that UK energy bills by 2020 are expected to increase by one percent domestically, but might rise by as much as 43 percent for businesses, as national policies are implemented aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

The IT industry is responsible for around 2% of the world’s carbon emissions and data centers are the fastest growing part of that footprint. It’s estimated that the average data centre uses as much electricity as 4,000 homes annually, so the Industry could be set for some hefty increases in its fuel bills - increases which will inevitably be passed on to customers.

And it’s this cost that is now, rather unsurprisingly, focusing the minds of tech companies everywhere on how it can be contained and reduced. Renewables will play a major part in reducing environmental impact but operational efficiency will be vital in reducing actual energy consumption.

Pike Research in its recently issued report “Green Data Centers” claims that energy efficiency now has a “major emphasis” at IT firms, and that investment in data centres will increase from $7.5bn (£4.7bn) this year to $41.4bn (£26bn) in five years’ time. The report also suggests that green server farms will account for 28% of the entire market.

Pike Research analyst Eric Woods stated: “But as datacentre energy costs become more visible, the financial benefits of moving to a greener mode of operation are being recognised.”

And it’s not hard to see why the future is suddenly changing its hue from orange to green. Usage stats pulled from one of our data centres, combined with an average server utilisation of less than 10%, suggest that the average server is costs anywhere between £8 and £12 per month in energy costs for simply being plugged in, powered and cooled. If your IT estate runs to a couple of hundred servers, you could potentially be losing £26K per annum on wasted power costs. Become more operationally efficient and reduce your servers by 50% and you add £13K straight to the bottom line.

One long standing criticism of the industry has been that it has only really focused on the low hanging fruits, that it has paid no more than lip service to changing its operational methods, but perhaps we will now see a ‘sea change’ in the way we tackle the issues. Advances in technology such as unified communications, virtualisation and cloud computing coupled with the availability of renewable energy sources present the industry with many of the ingredients required to genuinely reduce costs.

If organisations won’t adopt a more environmentally-friendly attitude themselves, seeing the ‘all things green’ as the preserve of the eco warrior and the tree hugger, then perhaps the threat of a near 50% increase in power costs will grab their attention.

All for One Cloud and One Cloud for All

Posted by Rack Packer - 19/07/10 at 03:07:28 pm

Today has seen the vision of an open source cloud move one step closer with the launch of the OpenStack project.

 

The project has the backing of over 25 leading technology companies and NASA, and is designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. The project’s key aim is to enable anyone to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments. OpenStack is not itself a cloud provider, rather it is a software offering that lets the end user build a cloud, either for public or private use.

 

An OpenStack Design Summit was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.  Much of the code tested is written in Python, using the Tornado and Twisted frameworks.

 

 An open cloud is essential if the long promised benefits of cloud computing are to be fully realised. The success of the cloud will be ultimately determined by the levels of choice and freedom that it offers the end user. Choice and freedom equals innovation, flexibility and usability. An open cloud will provide the tools to enable end users to build and customise their own computing clouds to suit their specific needs, budgets and timescales. And more importantly no one or entity owns it.

 

The internet would not be what it is today, had it not been built on open and interoperable standards. The cloud’s success will be driven by a global connected community delivering applications and media using a cloud that fosters creativity and openness. A truly open cloud will encourage tomorrow’s innovators to innovate today.

 

The industry does not want, or need, a digital sky dominated by proprietary clouds from a few deep pocketed large computing brands, it needs to ensure that people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services – competition is healthy and needed.

 

It is a theme that Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission, strongly voiced earlier this month when he stated: “Fostering openness and preventing closed markets and unfair competition is key to the development of innovative digital media and technology in Europe. Open and interoperable environments drive down the cost of innovation.”

 

For the cloud to be truly ‘open’ code standardisation is a fundamental requirement, one of the key aims for OpenStack, and the reason so many founder member ‘competing’ companies have put aside their traditional rivalries, is to establish a common standard base.

 

It is essential that end users enjoy total interoperability, making it easier for them to connect clouds together, moving data between and off them when they choose – rather than being locked in to one providers cloud.  

 

If end user needs to change providers, and sometimes this can be an enforced choice: a merger or acquisition or as a result of a new regulation; they need to be able to do so easily. Resources that may have been spent on difficult migrations can instead be spent on core business development.

 

One of the value propositions of the open cloud model is the ability to scale resources as needed. An open interface will enable end users to build out new and existing systems at speed and with agility. And if we look at perhaps the biggest perceived barrier to cloud adoption, the issue of security and data integrity, we can see that the open source model enables the end user to take advantage of a commercial partner’s scale and infrastructure, whilst tailoring the code to ensure that their valuable assets don’t leave the in house environment.  The true hybrid cloud.

 

In essence the OpenStack project is attempting to deliver a type of co-operative cloud that enables economies of scale to build whilst returning control back to the community that built it. In theory OpenStack could extend the benefits of open source into the full computing stack and that could result in the largest single cloud ecosystem next to the Web itself. A claim too far? Only time will tell.

 

Finally, OpenStack should not be confused with the ‘Open Cloud Manifesto’ initiative that was heralded with much fanfare in March 2009. This saw IBM lead dozens of major tech companies in calling for open cloud standards. However the call was not heeded by all the perceived major cloud players, with rival Microsoft Corp dismissing the effort and accusing IBM of seeking to exert control of the field, whilst Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc, Salesforce.com Inc were all conspicuously absent from a list of companies endorsing it.

 

So what’s different with OpenStack? OpenStack is attempting to build interoperability in public, not behind closed doors, and without any exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building trust and a spirit of co-operation, both of which are key ingredients of developing a successful standard.

 

Oh and yes and with OpenStack you can actually download the code now.

Social Media to score big at the 2010 World Cup

Posted by Rack Packer - 11/06/10 at 11:06:02 am

Business can look, tweet and learn from the impact that social media will have at this year’s World Cup

The World Cup is now upon us and excitement levels are reaching fever pitch across the globe. It is estimated that a billion people will tune in at some stage during the tournament to watch the likes of Messi, Kaka and Drogba light up the magnificent South African stadiums. Many pundits believe (hope?) that this will be the most exciting and memorable World Cup ever staged, and it’s not simply because of the quality of the players on the park. This World Cup is full of firsts.

The first time the tournament has been staged on the African Continent, that 3D broadcast technology has been used and that marketing and broadcasting revenues for a sporting event will top £2bn to give but three. And it will also be the first major sports event that will truly benefit from the digital age.

With the games airing live on cell phones and computers, the World Cup will get more online coverage than any major sporting event ever. Akamai Technologies Inc., estimated to deliver about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, expects World Cup traffic to be two or three times as heavy as that measured during President Barack Obama’s inauguration — thus far, the high point for traffic volume at about 1 terabit, or 1 trillion bits of data, per second.

And this will be the first world cup where every kick, decision, goal and team selection will be debated globally using social media. (Even Sepp Blatter the 74 year old FIFA President has opened his own Twitter account in time for today’s opening ceremony.)

For those of us involved in the technology industry for the past decade, the rise of the phenomenon that is social media is not that surprising. It has long been predicted that the true power of the internet would be harnessed once its users evolved away from passive browsing to actively participating .

In fact you could argue that the template for social media is centuries old. We humans have been gossiping and sharing ideas since evolution. The difference today is that our technology enables us to communicate our messages around the globe, without face to face interaction, instantly.

Gradually social networking will impact on almost every role, in every kind of company. It is no longer a fad and is already changing the rules of the marketplace meaning that companies need to embrace it whether they feel comfortable with it or not.

Boardrooms across the land have often taken a ‘Marmite’ approach to social media – they either love it or hate it. However interacting online has now snowballed to such an extent that it can no longer be dismissed by businesses as a ‘not for me thank you.’

It is estimated that Facebook now has 400 million users and serves 6 million pages per day (a staggering 37.4 trillion per annum). The ‘net’ now houses 126 million blogs and 27.3 million tweets are sent and over 1 billion YouTube videos are viewed on a daily basis. If you thought this was limited to the young, bored or the geek, then think again. The professional networking site LinkedIn now has 65 million members and is growing at a rate of one new member every second.

The statistics are compelling. So, if you want your company to engage with this massive audience, what do you do and how can you make it work for you? The key piece of advice that I can impart is that whilst it might be termed social media and appear to be a completely different world, it is still business and the business rules that apply offline should apply online as well. Corporate risk of litigation, brand protection and legal liabilities still apply in hyperspace!

The first step that companies need to do is to create an holistic social media strategy. They need to decide and be clear on what their objectives are from day one, how they intend to resource and invest in their strategy and whether they are willing to open a two-way dialogue with the outside world. Too many companies have jumped in only to be left bemused by the apparent lack of success they have derived from the exercise. There is a widely held misconception that the domain of social media should be the preserve of the sales and marketing team and that engagement must involve lead generation – this is fundamentally wrong. Social media has the ability to improve processes at all levels and in all departments within an organisation if used properly.

“To listen well is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well and is as essential to all true conversation.”
Nowhere does this old Chinese proverb ring more true than in social media engagement. Don’t dive in, take your time, do your research, understand how other companies are using social media successfully and chose the applications that will serve you best and then determine the ‘tone’ that you wish to adopt. This ‘tone’ is important. It should reflect your organisation’s true personality and should avoid at all costs the ‘me, me, me’ syndrome. You need to talk to the market intelligently and without any marketing speak so people will want to respond. You will need to care about what is being said about your organisation and you will need to be prepared to receive feedback that is negative as well as positive. Above all you must stay consistent and you must persevere. Social media is a daily discipline.

If you use the medium properly you will be able to listen to current customers, new prospects, industry experts and opinion formers and perhaps just as importantly your own employees to ensure your business derives maximum benefit.

Once your strategy is in place, you need to communicate it internally. Draft a corporate social media policy that gives guidelines to employees on how they can best represent their organisation on line. Without making sure your entire staff is on board things can go bad very quickly as Vodafone discovered to its cost recently when an employee tweeted an obscene message via the company’s official Twitter account leading to public outrage. And returning to South Africa, the Netherlands players have been banned from using Twitter during the World Cup after Eljero Elia sparked a racism row with comments on a live streaming video.

Whilst these two examples made the headlines, there is no need for managers to recoil in horror as they imagine what these incidents would have meant for their own organisations. For every toe curling example of bad social media practice there are many thousands of positive stories.

Virgin (again!) received high praise for its ‘Did your driver do a good job today?’ message on the back of its Virgin Wine vans. Rather than the more usual corporate ‘Well driven?’ people were asked to contact the company and provide personal feedback on the driver because ‘There could be something in it for them’ – a perfect example of good business practise through customer engagement and employee reward.

A more jumbo-sized example of this involves hundreds of 5ft fibre glass elephants and London’s largest ever outdoor art festival - the London Elephant Parade. The UK domain names provider Easyspace decided to sponsor one of the elephants that are being displayed around the UK’s capital for the next few weeks. Rather than simply write a sponsorship cheque, Easyspace decided to use social media to maximise its involvement and extend the brand into areas not normally associated with web hosting. Local art students designed the elephant for us, an online campaign to raise awareness of the charitable reason for the Parade was launched, a Facebook page complete with video diary was posted and customers were invited to name the elephant – they chose ‘Cosmos’. All of which has helped change the perception of a brand which traditionally operates in the rather dry IT arena.

Finally the biggest question that is often asked of companies engaged in social media is, how do you measure its value? What is its ROI? The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. To get a community ROI requires work and effort. You have to track down data from a variety of sources some of which you will have no direct control or access to. Obvious data sources include web site analytics, sales lead sources and membership details but you also need to widen your search to include blogs, referrer pages, reviews, videos, fans, tweets and PR rankings, some of which can be measured using tools such as Howsociable?, Omgili and Tweetbeep. The key is recognising that processes must be in place internally to ensure that all data is captured and analysed.

Sometimes though you will just know when something has worked. I leave you with the story of Boeing and a young boy who loves airplanes.

Harry Winsor had sent Boeing a crayon drawing of a plane he had designed with a letter suggesting the company might consider manufacturing it. What he received back was a standard legal letter saying Boeing could not accept unsolicited ideas. Harry’s father, an ad agency executive, recounted all this on his blog and Twitter feed.

Boeing, who had only been using Twitter for two weeks, picked up the tweet and responded admitting “We’re expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We’re learning as we go.”

From being criticised for its original corporate response Boeing turned its mistake into a positive. It has spoken to Harry and promised better internal processes for handling submissions from children.

As Harry’s father said: “It was just so cool to see a company become kind of human.”

And that is what social media is all about.

Footnote: If you want to get close to the footy action , here’s a handy list of verified Twitter accounts of various World Cup players including Anelka, Iniesta, Donovan, Aguero and Forlan)

Plenty of spare storage capacity up in the Cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 12/05/10 at 05:05:31 pm

 Let cloud storage control your data before it controls you.

“Terabyte storage? That’s so last decade Darling. This year’s black is the zettabyte.”

For us luddites still mourning the loss of the 1.44MB (2.0MB unformatted) disk, the thought of the zettabyte is truly terrifying (although pretty handy for Scrabble).

The zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes and according to IDC, in its latest global digital output report, the world’s generated data volume is expected to pass through the magic zettabyte figure for the first time later this year going on to exceed 35 zettabytes by 2020. (A zettabyte is estimated to be roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States, or for Jack Bauer fans, a full-length episode of FOX TV’s hit series “24″ running continuously for 125 million years.)

As IT becomes ever more prevalent in every aspect of our lives, the amount of data generated and stored is growing at an astounding rate. It is estimated that 45GB of data currently exists for each person on the planet and that this will grow annually by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020, as all major forms of media complete their transformation from analog to digital.

Or to put it another way, it is estimated that the bytes of data generated by digital cameras, mobile phones, enterprise IT systems and devices will equal the number of grains of sand on the world’s beaches within the next year or two. And whilst 85 percent of this data is predicted to come from consumers snapping photos, surfing Web pages and sending e-mail, about 60 percent of that data will still enter and cross corporate networks. Simply put, 35% more digital information is created today than the capacity exists to store it.

Over the next few years, businesses will face tough decisions on how to store, find and access information whilst complying with regulations. Much of the data is unstructured, unmarked and resides in a variety of disparate locations, makes it almost impossible to retrieve and use.

This unprecedented growth in data volumes is having a significant effect on many businesses, with the most obvious impact being ongoing operational costs, performance and compliance.

And this is where the cloud may find its true calling. For a couple of years now, the industry has been touting the concept of cloud hosting as the ‘knight in white armour’ that promises to transform the way we operate in the future, whilst secretly praying it doesn’t pan out to be ‘a nerd in tin foil’.

Companies that are following the classic ‘strategy by bandwagon’ approach to business have not exactly been backward in slapping the word ‘cloud’ over any product that has an internet association - in the hope that they’ll mop up. This marketing approach has resulted in mixed messages and confusion, with cloud computing being hailed and jeered in equal measure. Deriving obvious benefits from cloud computing has not always been apparent to the market.

Data Storage represents a really viable utilisation of the cloud. It is very clear that the volume of data is going to keep growing and companies need to address this demand. IDC reports that the number of files, images, records and other digital information containers will grow by a factor of 67, each needing to be managed, secured and protected.

Organisations face a stark choice. Do they invest, and continue to invest,  in hardware and software - King Canute style? Can they re-engineer their business processes to cope with the additional data demands without increasing labour costs? (Interestingly the IDC state that IT professionals globally will only grow by a factor or 1.4 despite the data deluge) Or will they simply turn a blindish eye and hope that the various Data Protection Agencies don’t catch up with them?

Cloud computing gives organisations the opportunity to buy ‘peace of mind’. Data storage is a headache and can prove to be a costly one at that. By utilising a cloud service provider’s infrastructure on a demand basis, organisations can rid themselves of the hardware investment and the aggravation. Despite rumours to the contrary, a private cloud model offers a secure data repository that is protected by cast iron service guarantees (and if your service provider can’t provide them – consider looking elsewhere), which can either be used as a standalone option or integrated within existing client infrastructure to form a hybrid solution.

And it’s not just the corporate world that will see cloud storage boon. 2010 ABI Research released this week shows that revenue related to US consumer use of cloud-based backup technology will grow from almost $75 million in 2009 to more than $372 million in 2015, (CAGR of 27.89 percent) - helped by the rise of netbooks and devices such as the iPad.

Cloud storage shouldn’t be that hard a concept to grasp, afterall Man naturally looks to the skies when seeking additional storage and archiving space at home - its called the Loft.

I’m off to get a calculator to work out next year’s craze – the lovvabyte.