Google Cloud Platform : Good Times Ahead

Labels: Cloud, Cloud Computing, Clouds, Google, Innovation, IT Business Value

Enterprise IT : Future Proofing Vs Failure Proofing - Part II

Look at this – like the proverbial death by thousand cuts – the cloud services can really disrupt the carefully laid out enterprise IT strategy much to the discomfort of the IT department – the disruption can range from enterprise IT strategy leading to shared services mechanisms. Everything changes from sourcing to provisioning to metering through consumption. It’s needless to emphasize that the cloud services can be made operational for enterprises rapidly and in many cases more economically. In the journey of cloud adoption inside enterprises, it must be noted that in a number of cases that the business executives can, and do, buy them independently of their IT department’s plan. This is partly accentuated by the fact that there exists an ever widening gulf between the innovation cycle-time of the IT department and of cloud services providers. One should see this in the background of constraints centered on budgeting inside enterprises.

There are well meaning advise being dished out by the experts – essentially advocating that enterprises first get their feet wet with cloud services, gain a reasonable perspective of where cloud services could fit in for their needs – fully understand their risks and benefits.. This is well meant as sometimes in their over enthusiasm they evangelists tend to created many solutions that may be fragmented with unmanageable information flows. Sometimes, an inelegantly architected solution could create fragmentation in the landscape, accentuating the challenges of information flows and vendor relationships. On the other hand, a well thought out cloud solution can provide an elegant architecture that can help organizations scale well and provide consistently reliable performance. IT department inside enterprises should regularly factor-in the strategic leverage of such solutions that should take stock of big picture thinking and long term plans for the enterprise. This in turn would enable the IT departments to feel on top of IT Management. The key strategic perspective here is that cloud services would imbibe the benefits and wisdom of looking outward at the sea of opportunities.

Like any major initiative, no doubt, cloud services will benefit a set of users and may provide disappointing results to another set of users. From a strategic standpoint, it may be even be the cases that while a majority adding cloud services as part of their IT strategy will yield good results, but for a small number of players, it may pose greater threat than providing an upside. A structured framework should be used in assessing cloud readiness inside an enterprise to align them into a coherent IT strategy. Well thought out cloud services within the enterprise would bring more clarity and method in assessing their effectiveness therein. All these clearly point to the fact that the chariots of cloud are hitting enterprises around the world and an unexpected casualty in this process happens to be the traditional IT department. With business and external service providers beginning to play such an important role inside the enterprises, should this trend continue and become a mainstay practice, the role of the IT department gets more and more tough to retain their crucial positioning inside the enterprise, and would force them to act in way more and more strategic to retain their standing.

Forward looking IT departments address these challenges as opportunities to get more strategic to the enterprise – one of the most common approach employed by these firms is to either on its own or in tandem with business initiate a detailed assessment of the enterprise cloud strategy – what part of the business and IT could leverage cloud services , what part of the IT portfolio could get affected, what should be done short term, medium term and long term, what type of risks and benefits would different scenarios provide and what type of governance would best suit the enterprise. By being in the forefront of such strategic planning initiatives, and thereby putting themselves in the center stage of things, some IT departments manage to retain their positioning inside their enterprise.

If IT can position the company for a transition, it can rightfully take the role of an anchor facilitating change to make business successful rather than a drag holding back progress . Contextually, if it can be determined early enough that leveraging cloud services can provide flexibility and be more economic overall, and with the right security models of implementation then it actually provides IT a big opportunity to make such services become a platform of growth for the enterprise and if IT can push such an agenda and deliver successfully, it becomes that much more strategic to the enterprise. End f it all, cloud is a democratizing force where access to resources gets more widespread and readily available at typically lesser cost of access. IT will have to recognize this shift and make the right moves.

Every CIO and business leader inside enterprise would want their IT organization to be more proactive and get outside of being in the reactive mode. The ability to shift gears to move from being in a reactive mode to get to a proactive mode is generally a very carefully calibrated journey. Every IT department inside enterprises that have been in existence for a while faces simmering tension with business over complex systems, inflexible, inextensible and come in the way of enterprise getting agile. While business expectations have by-and-large grown from looking at IT to support their operations – it’s moving towards enabling more rapid delivery of services and applications to powering or enabling business. The classic ratio of investments to support past decisions vs investments needed to provide innovation/new lines of service is always a hut button issue inside enterprises. Its well known that reactive organizations end up spending more than 2/3rds of their IT investments in managing legacy infrastructure and applications and the remaining budget mostly get consumed in expansions/extensions/upgrade, leaving very little resources to support building new expertise to support emerging opportunities.

Globally, business is challenged on cost, time-to-market and on being able to adjust to market realities at a rate faster than the rate of change seen in the marketplace. New business models, innovative services, self service mechanism, online order fulfillment – most of these heavily rely in IT and would not be possible without IT contribution. It’s not uncommon to see cloud making its footprint inside enterprises very opportunistically (many times under the radar that IT doesn’t get to know after these are up and running inside enterprises). In such cases, it is noticed that business functions directly have procured cloud services including consulting support from external partners. Typically, it can be seen that business teams indulge in such practices, owing to perceived inefficiency /poor service level adherence of IT inside enterprise. Many times, IT architecture team use their architecture and stack standardization as a defense weapon to block external partners providing new types of service that business find attractive to leverage. Sometimes, IT is not even ready to structurally accommodate new cloud service partners –as it may call for changes to their processes, support levels and in some case contractual adjustments tied to support functions and financial models in place.

It then begs the question what can be done make IT move away from being reactive to be proactive. Redefining the ways of working, leveraging the foundation of cloud services for making business get flexible and grow faster, nailing down the right security model and architectural fitment will provide IT with huge headstart in changing itself and in changing the impact that can be made to business. Some of the specific ways in which these can be build include but not limited to are as under: • Actively continue making investments in cloud services and work towards creating a cloud services centric foundation for growth; • Proactively co-opt external partners in the growth, innovation story of the enterprise; • Actively enable more and more self service functions, that provides business with lot more benefits that would catapult IT to be a larger strategic partner for the enterprise; • Innovate around the charge mechanisms – by changing the measurement mechanisms and move towards more and more variable pricing model – the benchmark here would be to identify cost of service that business consumes; • Heavy automation of IT functions with ability to self monitor and correct thereby increase IT reliability that business experiences. Forward looking enterprises have their IT focused on leveraging cloud to create more value for business by changing the processes, technologies, level of dependence on IT

A combination of factors like new investments, higher degree of automation, new business models etc go towards getting more value from IT. True cost of operations that can come out of redefining the measurement system helps both business & IT to optimize resource allocations and plan better for growth. The loft goals set by CIO’s in general revolve around being the change agent for growth and being able to transparently provide benefit analysis enhances the stature of IT inside enterprises and play a defining role in future –proofing their roles inside enterprise.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT

Enterprise IT : Future Proofing Vs Failure Proofing - Part 1

Just returning from an intense workshop with a customer on their future IT plans on spending and mode of operation . The meeting reinforced amongst other things that in the world of business, in some pockets men and women who are smart otherwise somehow fail to fathom the complexities in the area of business processes and therefore fail to provide for efforts needed to drive transformation inside their respective enterprises. Substantial number of executives regard technology and process evangelists as “ silver bullet holding parachute jumpers ” – people who land from sky and offer them their so-called “silver bullet” solutions. Are process transformations touting cloud evangelists in this category? Perhaps. If they influence the organization sufficiently to look at powerful enabling technologies and intertwined processes as the harbinger of innovation. Seasoned business and IT executives have a way of managing such class of consultants – they simply turn off on such views. Cloud services evangelists, however, are a much bigger problem because they proffer pervasive organizational disruptors – preassembled bundles of people, processes and technology – not plain technology point solutions. One of the fascinating aspect of cloud solutions had been the unexpected empowerment of business in embracing state of the art solutions at varying scale promising piecemeal to holistic organizational disruption to executives throughout the enterprise. In a number of occasions, IT is forced to act under compulsion aka align to the business identified/owned initiatives. The IT department inside every enterprise needs to buckle up. The changes are going to be far more sweeping than imagined and the balance of power could be seen to be decisively swinging towards business. The hold that IT had on provision of services for enterprise is certainly getting weaker atleast in respect of new initiatives/transformation centric initiatives. In such a context, IT inside every business need to map out their own vision and draw programs to maintain their leadership and in some cases their relevance inside the enterprise. Have no doubts.The IT department must change its outlook to retain legitimacy and authenticity inside the enterprise.. It is being challenged in its role as the key provider of services for the business in the enterprise and clearly a new crisis of relevance is popping up – the IT departments need to respond comprehensively with a solidified plan.

This is quite paradoxical but unfortunately very true. The IT industry has traditionally enjoyed (at least in the last 10-15 years) as the pace setter for introducing change and ushering innovation – be it in terms of enablement of core business, or powering new models of business or in terms of supporting existing mode of business more efficiently. Inside many enterprises, keeping step with the changes in the fast moving IT industry solutions were mostly challenging for business – be it in terms of technology, mode of operations or being more efficient, more agile - all direct contributors to business success. It has been a constant practice to see that executives being in the back foot desperately trying to catch up while implementing yesterday’s wave of innovation enabling technologies while noticing the next distracting wave of today while awaiting/ thinking through the next wave of innovations that are in the anvil.

In doing all these things, many businesses are tempted to call vendors and the evangelists selling/propounding new solutions as FUD agents thriving on creating confusion with the promise of an ever increasing range of new and sometime innovative solutions. In this journey, some executives inside enterprises look at cloud technologies as very appealing as it promises: A. Progressive investments as the solutions rolls on; B. A huge swathe of hitherto unimagined levels of control to business, sometime s even bypassing internal IT. All well here, but for the vendors over-hyping the benefits of narrow solutions and they typically tend to highly understate the costs, risks and complexities of implementing such solutions. Traditionally IT initiatives backlogged organizations (in terms of IT/Process adoption), are naturally attracted to such vantage propositions - so much so , overtime, enterprises begin to understand how an hasty adoption based on such promises could inter alia cause more harm outweighing the potential good. Most IT executives have, however, worked out ways to manage these good samaritans. They ruthlessly control the enterprise IT strategy and procurement activity. Some find innovative (originally unintended) defenses in the form of the mantra of “consolidate, rationalize, standardize, retrofit, retire, re-factor” as a defensive shield. With such a powerful fortress, their way of managing is to not entertain details discussions of these tastes of the day advances thereby protecting their turf.

But it’s always a tussle between future proofing an enterprise Vs failure proofing an enterprise. This new age proponents of advances Viz Cloud services have a different way of interjecting themselves inside enterprises – they are changing the rules of the game which had traditionally empowered the IT departments. They now directly deal with / create a sphere of influence much beyond the defensive fortress of IT divisions. The nature of the beast( cloud services) is such the reach can’t be stalled - like some aroma that appeals to the olfactory senses even without being visual, cloud services parade themselves of having greater transformative potential with far reaching benefits than the bare bone cloud technologies from which they are assembled. This calls for a calibrated response to leverage their true strengths. Fresh perspectives are needed to manage the onward journey of cloud powered transformative services inside the enterprise.

Let’s now characterize what makes the cloud services so powerful in their appeal and reach.The first and foremost characterization of the cloud services lay in the fact that a mature, enterprise-grade cloud service is vastly different from traditional IT / Business solutions – an evolved cloud solution brings together a nice combination of pre-assembled/ custom bundle of people, processes, and technology – rather than a new technology building block. The appeal of the cloud services is not just in its raw power – but in using the advances in technology to provide differentiated services enabling new ways of working for the adopting enterprise. In doing this, they seem to override the carefully built plans centered around strategy & architecture and extending further in some cases , the cloud replaces the traditional IT’S role as a provider of compute, storage, network (infrastructure) and application services. Why are these services so different and how different ate these form the other advance that the IT industry keep rolling out. The cloud services in full display of their might do indeed pose a significant challenge to the in-the-comfort zone- status-quo seeking IT department . Typically status quo manifests itself as internal sub-scale, under-invested, and under-skilled/ hardwired IT shared services arrangements. A deeper assessment shows that compared to a range of many prevalent enterprise shared services, in a number of cases, the leading edge cloud services are better optimized shared services that actually deliver better bang for the buck, more flexible, and bring in empowerment to enterprise and their customers. This takes the myth head on: flexibility and choice can’t co-exist with economies of scale and a wide range in functionalities. It will behoove enterprise and their IT to seriously assess suitability of cloud services for their immediate and future needs and not dismiss them off hand. They need not be resisted but should be considered for suitability.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT

Salesforce.com: Onto Becoming The Enterprise Nerve Center

I attended Dreamforce 2012, Salesforce.com’s 10th annual user conference, in San Francisco, and came away feeling very positive about the company, product and the possible solutions that can get conceptualized. With ~90,000 registered attendees, 350+ partner companies and ~750 sessions, Dreamforce 2012 could very well be the largest user conference by any IT company ever on earth. From a day filled with so many sessions, conversations and demos, the key takeaways:

1) New product Community, based on Chatter technology, will become the bedrock of external facing customer and partner on-line communities. This will not only have the effect of replacing old portal products, but also make external facing CRM functions to be more social, and for business create avenues for generating new revenue streams.

2) Work.com, a major area of investment for Salesforce.com, aims to transform how work is organized and managed by present day businesses. A tight integration between Work.com with CRM applications could increase the productivity and effectiveness of sales/marketing/service operations.

3) Radian6’s, which SFDC acquired last year and is gaining lot more teeth with more integration with other SFDC assets -in the process the Marketing Cloud story gets more powerful, potentially tapping the multi-billion business potential therein. Through Buddy Media, Radian6, and CRM platform integration, Salesforce.com offers a product differentiated through its breadth of features.

4) The Service Cloud is getting more and more powerful with lot more focus on making it broad based and feature rich.It’s now clear that Service Cloud’s social and mobile focus will certainly position it to capitalize on a large market opportunity and develop into a $B business.

5) Salesforce Touch, and Data.com, Social Key: Salesforce Touch, powered by HTML5, expands on salesforce.com‘s native mobile strategy and will bring Salesforce to any mobile device—this is regardless of platform—and empower sales to collaborate on deals anytime, anywhere. And Salesforce Data.com Social Key will unite the best context from social networks with traditional company data, enabling enterprises to build stronger relationships with customers and close more deals, faster.

6) Salesforce Chatterbox: Salesforce Chatterbox will deliver simple and secure file sharing across any device with the proven trust of Salesforce. With Salesforce Chatterbox, people will be able to manage and share files in the context of their business.

Chatter based Communities for customers and partners It may be noted that Chatter( aimed at facilitating internal employee collaboration) has achieved significant adoption since launch two years ago with a little less than 200K company networks till date. It appears that SFDC s leveraging Chatter technology to enable more of customer and partner facing functionalities. Along came the announcement that a new product called community will be launched in summer of 2013 that will power various online communities for enterprise critical functions such as customer service, channel partner collaboration, marketing engagements and enterprise sales execution. Chatter is now broadbasing its role by essentially becoming the platform technology that infuses various external facing CRM business processes covering different stakeholders of the enterprise. The roadmap descripton shows that this new Community product will entirely replace the old customer portal or partner portal products - a big shift appears to be in the offing here. Although so far Chatter has primarily been used as a tool to increase the customer engagement with CRM apps, with this annoucement of Community, it’s also clear that Salesforce.com will take the next big step of directly monetizing the Chatter technology with separate licensing. Chatter is indeed making the entire CRM function to become more social and collaborative for all participants- covering all the stakeholders -customers, partners and employees.

The Big One: Marketing Cloud As per data shared by SFDC, currently 65% of marketers feel pressure to improve social media effectiveness, and 48% feel pressure to report quantified outcomes of social media marketing. SFDC has sensed correctly so that this will be a big area of focus for enterprises to invest and reap returns. Marketing Cloud is well positioned to address these top concerns by marketers. Marketing Cloud ties together some existing Salesforce products and delivers the key outcome that businesses need in the social age – the ability to initiate actions, measure, and react to external social influences. The story here is that when marketing cloud is enabled along with the monitoring aspects of social and when tied to actual workflow and automation, Salesforce provides a end-to-end solution that will lower the barriers to entry into the social realm for its enterprise customers. Through the Buddy Media and Radian6 integrations, the Marketing Cloud offers a more comprehensive product - enabling both creating marketing content and mining marketing intelligence data, all integrated with the core CRM platform. This is a powerful combination when it works effectively for enterprises. Radian6 enables enterprises to keep an active pulse on customer sentiment and use data to drive launch and content strategy. With Radian6 enterprises can generate reports including volume, geographic location, age/gender demographics, word cloud charting, and volume of positive and negative social comments. The integrated functionality can help enterprises respond to social media mentions across a variety of channels from a single operating platform . If cases get raised through the CRM, they can be automatically routed to relevant departments such as sales or customer service depending on key words/tags/attributes in the social post. This integration is a key differentiator for the Marketing Cloud, creating synergies across CRM’s product portfolio and broadening the product footprint.

Service Cloud adoption on the rise Service Cloud is well positioned to become another mega business over the next several years. The product itself is getting better with time and with a number of success stories around the world, this is only gaining huge momentum. One of the most notable feature is the 3rd party application integration, as it allows a company to incorporate in-house or industry specific applications in the Service Cloud interface, dramtically expanding the reach of the application. The more powerful part of Service Cloud : Integration across multiple channels (web chat, email,phone, video) permitting cases to be managed across various channels from an an integrated mannner. The social dimension kicks in here with the launch of features like live news feed - these can push urgent notifications from multiple sources directly to the agent, empowering the agent much more in the process. Integration with Radian6 also allows rapid response to social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels. Like in every other part of SFDC product spectrum,the emphasis on mobile and tablets were clearly seen as coming - and SFDC higlights that the interface experience through tablets would be identical to the desktop experience - an important one as mutiple tablets are enabled within the larger SFDC platform.

Salesforce Touch Experience Salesforce touch delivers on Salesforce’s long opined perspective that the future will be delivered over multiple devices and in multiple contexts. They were arguably the first company to really recognize the enterprise value of the tablet, and touch will enable their customers to deliver highly contextualized applications to their staff and stakeholders. Similarly with Chatter Communities we see Salesforce spread a fabric of social engagement outside of the organization itself and create continuity across the spectrum of customer to vendor touchpoints. And Data.com Social Key simply allows the organization to move away from the current paradigm where enterprise contact data is seen as distinct from external contact data – rather the two things will be merged into one global contact – the way most of us work in our day to day lives.

Other significant announcements

• ChatterBox enables content to be deeply embedded within an enterprise application and ChatterBox does this. As it can be seen, content is an integral part of core workflows and processes and not something in and of itself. Well evolved deep integrations of third party applications can be a very compelling model for content management, but a native product brings with it huge advantages. • The new Salesforce Identity will deliver “Facebook-like identity for the enterprise,” a single, social, trusted identity service to access and centrally manage every cloud app. With nine major enterprise cloud platform services, companies can now accelerate innovation and deliver next generation social and mobile apps with unparalleled levels of speed, mobile and trust on the Salesforce Platform. • Heroku integration with the Salesforce assets will now be enabled through the newly developed identity that works across all Salesforce assets as well as integrate across clouds – in a manner similar to Active Directories within the enterprise but the scale here can be really much large.

Summary : Let's now look into how the CRM industry itself is changing:

• Shift from transaction to engagement. CRM traditionally focused mostly on the customer management, and later evolved to cover functions like relationship, service etc. Shift forward to engagement strategies point to a move towards bi-directional conversations, unstructured information, and models of influence.

• The distinction between consumer and enterprise is slowly melting away – In other words the consumerization of the enterprise is becoming more and more real.

• The emergence of customer experiences. CRM/Front office system’s typically covers SFA, marketing, service, eBusiness. Integrated customer experience is a reflection of aligning the front office and back office functions to provide an unbeatable customer experience.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Dreamforce, Enterprise Software

Cloud Business : Some Perspectives

Cloud may mean different things to different people – It would be better to focus less on technology but devote more energy to cloud business in terms of how, where, and why these could be used to get unique value was the key message in the Cloud Business Summit, which I attended last week at NYC, courtesy of invitation by Bill Mcnee and his team at Saugatuck Technology. In a very intensive set of sessions, significant insights were brought out by impressive set of presenters followed by good amount of discussions. Let’s examine the context.

It’s now clear that in almost all forward looking business organizations, cloud journey is definitely happening/about to happen in most part of their business/technology operations. The reach is going to be ever expanding and the effect is definitely going to be significantly felt – though this can be an open ended journey in terms of learning and accruable benefits . These force enterprises to plan and manage cloud journey as more and more knowledge on realizable benefits begin to accumulate. Let’s examine the context in a little more detail: As there is a widespread interest in adopting cloud for business, varied approaches grounded on different schools of thought begin to sprout. What we see across the board in the context of cloud and business is that cloud can enable new business application architectures, transform business and create new revenue channel opportunities aside from improving process efficiencies while supporting existing business models. New business services can fundamentally redesign the ecosystem across the extended enterprise creating a new measure of performance across the value chain. These sort of heightened impact calls for a very studied and measured approach to embrace the cloud and that’s where the insights and discussions add immense value.

For example, Saugatuck emphasizes on leveraging cloud for creating new business value and enabling new business opportunities – this is where differentiated and lasting value comes out and as such is very important dimension for business to explore. The CIO panel brought out the fact how business and IT working together can be enabled and why this becomes necessary to create value. More importantly, the ability to take the right set of use cases and deliver business value comes only by working together and it becomes imperative for CIO organizations to steer their organizations in such directions.

Xerox brought out details of their cloud journey in areas of SaaS, Expense Management to see significant improvement in business efficiencies and improved business agility. The more significant theme came out on cloud centered approach towards firmware/software updates for their traditional copiers/scanners/printers – this is an illustration of opening up new business opportunities – something only a cloud based solution coud have enabled. Such successful initatitives spur them to do more, makes their ecosystem partners more excited setting the stage for more such things to happen with Xerox and I would think across the industry as well.

Another important message is to have a pull centered view – from the customer to inside the enterprise. Remember taking the customer to the boardroom discussions in the past – here’s a demonstrated way to make this happen with the emergence of cloud. The key is systems thinking – looking at linkages and relationships across the board and identify opportunities for better orchestration across the ecosystem to create larger value.

SAP’s Nicholas Cumins provided his view of the changing business software / application landscape, the need to effectively leverage Cloud with traditional suites, and how these are being addressed in the next generation of enterprise version and SAP’s strategies in offering varied solutions. I think we need to think through the right pattern of fits: what type of differentiated capabilities could be mapped to applications, devices and delivery methods. Fidelity further elaborated on their cloud journey in the summit.

An important aspect of cloud business either gets overemphasized inside enterprises to the point of avoidance or gets completely overlooked : Am referring to risk management, Important discussions around was an eye opener of sorts. Risk here transcends the traditional boundaries of functions like IT, Finance. The right approach would include identifying, characterizing/ classifying, prioritizing, and then governing Cloud Business changes and implementations. This needs to tie in to the sourcing process of the cloud solution – a very involved engagement but one that can deliver very high value to enterprises.

From an enterprise/CIO perspective, for the first time in this century, IT now has the chance to reposition itself and its role in the enterprise. The shackles that tied traditional IT could now be broken open with the emergence of cloud . Leading CIOs have already started to redefine their role and the value of IT resources away from a focus on provisioning and operating technologies and toward applying information and technology to create unique and sustainable business value. IT has always been waiting for the moment to reassign more funding from maintenance to innovation, to enable creating greater value. Cloud provides that window of opportunity to CIO’s and business now. The economics of IT and opportunity to add business value was never this pronounced in the IT world. Let’s examine this: The need to invest now and wait for results ages later don’t necessarily apply here. Cloud enables companies to gain some of the efficiencies of scale without having to scale themselves. The result is freeing up money previously locked into the 70% of IT committed spend for innovation and new solutions. Typically these are the type of value propositions that interests business and this helps business to take more direct role in making such solutions happen – its more just IT baby and business being an uninterested partner. The relationship fundamentally changes and will demand CIOs react and reform IT.

Around the world and across the board, business is desperately looking for ways and means of creating new solutions, particularly for addressing adjacent markets and new geographies. Cloud fits in very well here: in extending the reach of IT and to provide value added services and in creating new solutions leveraging the ecosystem partners. Integrating in the process, growth and innovation with benefits of economics inside enterprises. We have reached a stage where running business with IT help is normal and the differentiation comes only by creating differentiated and sustainable business value and cloud is a nice fit here. Examining cloud from the standpoint of operations would under leverage its true potential but true opportunities manifest themselves in the business context of growth, innovation and strategic pursuits. CIO’s need to find solutions that aligns with their work culture, their appetite for risk, ability to absorb change, governance and their technology maturity. Irrespective of what these may indicate, increasingly in the cloud world, new ways to make things happen always exist. This doesn’t mean that old models of operation give way to something entirely new right from the word “GO”. A neat blend can exist.

The beauty of this cloud business journey is the fact while cloud can make many things happen at different levels, the realization is that this is still evolving, but for those early adopters it is clearly delivering substantial value Cloud IT and Cloud Business can’t be and needn’t be separated - scalable services and sustainable value can happen only when these two work hand in hand. Saugatuck should be complimented to bringing together business leaders, vendors and analysts to look at cloud as business opportunity and not just just as technical solutions.Clearly with cloud, we are seeing the pioneers and business leaders unshackling the traditional bonds and aiming high and reaching there as well. We will actually see more business taking this path.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Emerging Models

AWS Outage & Customer Readiness

Reddit, Foursquare, EngineYard and Quora were among the many sites that went down recently due to a rather prolonged outage of Amazon's cloud services. On Thursday April 21, When Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) went offline, it took many of its Web and database servers depending on that storage down. With Amazon working aggressively to set this back right, on Sunday April 24, most of the services were restored back . As promised and as would be expected, Amazon has now come out with a detailed explanation describing what went wrong, and explaining why the failure was so widely felt and why it took that much time to restore back all the services. Some say that measured against Amazon’s promised availability, this lengthy outage would mean that Amazon may need to maintain full availability for more than a decade to adhere to their promised availability service level commitments.

Now, let’s examine what happened and how this happened. To start with some basics: Amazon has its facilities spread out around the world. Most users would know that its cloud computing data centers are in five different locations. Virginia, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, and Tokyo. These centers are so architected that within each of these regions, the cloud services are further separated into what Amazon calls Availability Zone. The availability zones are within themselves self contained with physically and logically separate groups of computers setup therein. Amazon explains that such an arrangement helps customer choose the right level of redundancy as appropriate to their win needs. Such a design with a spectrum of options helps customers choose the right level of robustness also when they for a premium choose to host them in multiple regions. The logic here is that hosting in multiple availability zones within a same region must provide comparable robustness (as in hosting across multiple regions) but would come with a much better economics benefitting the customer.

Amazon offers several services as part of this arrangement. Amongst those services, Elastic Block Store(EBS) is an important service. With EBS, Amazon provides mountable disk volumes to virtual machines using the more well known Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). This is quite attractive to customers, as Amazon with this service, provides the virtual machines with huge amount of reliable storage – typically this gets used for database hosting and the like. The powerfulness of this feature can be seen by the fact that while this can be used from EC2, another Amazon feature called Amazon Relational Database Service( RDS) also uses this as a data store. As an added feature for its services, Amazon has designed this feature for high availability purposes and replicates data through EBS between multiple systems. Given the volume and variety involved therein, this process is highly automated. In such an arrangement, if for some reason an EBS node loses connection form its replica, instantly an alternate storage within the same zone is made available to maintain connectivity.

As per Amazon, while doing routine maintenance operations in Virgnia operations on April 21, engineers were trying to make a change in network configuration to the zone. As part of the process, traffic to the routers affected apparently got moved into a low capacity network as against getting moved onto a backup. The low capacity network, is meant for handling inter node communication and not large scale replication/data transfer internally between the system and so the additional traffic made the network malfunction. With the primary network brought down for maintenance and the secondary network completely mal-functioning the EBS nodes lost their ability to replicate for want of nodes. This is where the unintended consequence of automation began to rear its ugly head. Every system in this network acted as if they are at risk and began to frenetically look for available nodes with free space for replication. While Amazon tried to restore the primary network, damage has been by then done, with all the available space within the cluster were already used, while some remaining nodes continued their search for nodes with free space available – while such nodes with free space were not available.

With a massive deadlock of nodes trying to find replicas, while there were not nodes with free space, impacted the control system’s performance. The control system performance issue severely impacted execution of new service requests like creating a new volume. A long back up began to get created for the slow control system to act upon and this with time reached catastrophic proportions, with some requests beginning to get returned with fail messages. Now, comes the second but the most crucial part of the outage – unlike other services, the control systems span across the region and not the individual availability zones. The net impact was therefore experienced across different availability zones. Remember the idea of Single Point Of Failure? That was proven here in its full might.

Slowly and deliberately, Amazon began the course correction – by beginning to tend to the control system and by adding more nodes to the cluster. Over time, the backlogs on the control system began to get cleared and this took painful efforts and a lot of time in the process. Outages of public cloud systems have made news in the past but clearly with time, the body of knowledge and maturity levels ought to improve things. Cloud service providers make high availability as the cornerstone of their offerings but this outage would in many ways, put such claims to question. Even while this outage happened with Amazon Virginia operations, there were many users of AWS, who managed to maintain availability of their system. A majority of those installations had fall back in terms of multiple regions, multiple zone coverage. Such moves necessarily bring cost, complexity equation into consideration.

It’s a little odd to see that when the problem of non availability of nodes happened, Amazon almost began to get into a denial –of-service attacks within their environment . Amazon now claims that this aspect of crisis related actions have been set right but one may have to wait till next outage to see what else could give way It may be noted that Amazon cloud services suffered a major outage in 2008 – the failure pattern looks somewhat similar upon diagnosis.Clearly, the systems need to operate differently under different circumstances – while it’s normal for nodes to keep replicating on storage/access concerns, the system ought to exhibit different behavior with a different nature of crisis. With the increasing adoption of public cloud services, certainly the volume, complexity and range of workloads would increase and the systems would get tested under varying circumstances for availability and reliability. All business and IT users would seek answers to such questions as they consider moving their workloads onto the cloud

It is interesting to see how Netflix, a poster user of Amazon cloud services managed to survive this outage. Netflix says,” When we re-designed for the cloud this Amazon failure was exactly the sort of issue that we wanted to be resilient to. Our architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and the SimpleDB, S3 and Cassandra services that we do depend upon were not affected by the outage”. Netflix admits that their service ran without intervention but with a higher than usual error rate and higher latency than normal through the morning, which is the low traffic time of day for Netflix streaming. Amongst the major engineering decisions that they implemented to avoid such outages includes designing things as stateless applications and maintain multiple redundant hot copies of the data spread across zones. Netflix calls their solution –“ Cloud Solutions for the Cloud” as the claim here is that instead of fork-lifting the existing applications from their data centers to Amazon's and simply using EC2, with their approach they believe that they have fully embraced the cloud paradigm. Essentially, Netflix has automated its zone fail-over and recovery process, hosted its services in multiple regions while reducing its dependence on EBS.

Clearly there are ways to get the best of cloud – except that some of these may have different economics and would call for greater ability to engineer and manage the operations. Amazon may have to increase the level of transparency in terms of their design and the operational metrics need to cover many more areas of operations as against the narrow set of metrics that users get to see now. To sum up , I would hesitate to call AWS as failure of the cloud but this journey into the cloud would call for more preparation and better thought out design to be in place from user’s side.

Labels: AWS Outage, Business Models, Cloud Computing

CIOs & Cloud Centric IT Organization Refresh Strategies

As enterprises concentrate on growth, they remain vigilant about costs and operational efficiencies – coming out of recession, even in times of high growth and radiant optimism. Such a model of growth provides IT with a lot of fresh opportunities to adapt and innovate . More than ever, this new model of growth mandates IT to raise its strategic importance to the business rather than just be content to focus on delivery of generic business plans. In many ways the tenor of change is set in with such changing context – With the continuing tight budgets, the CIO’s are now getting forced to” think and act different” – one of the critical ways that can be tried is to follow the time tested model of being creative in discarding the past while taking a bold and fresh approach in creating a new future of IT within enterprises.

The classic way of looking into conceptualizing a new IT organization and its contribution to the enterprise starts by thinking aloud typically by asking the question “What If?” Now in the radar of every CIO and IT organization, Cloud happens to be mostly at the top where some expect more than half of new workloads to naturally move to the cloud besides the expectation that a majority of applications and infrastructure inside the enterprises would move to the cloud over the next few years. That forces the hand of enterprises in ensuring quick think through of the future possibilities for IT in terms of alternate models and the cloud.

Let’s face the facts : CIO’s of large organizations have to manage the burden of the past in terms of legacy systems, data and the processes set in there. They come with huge costs in terms of maintenance and in many cases impose restrictions on flexibility and extensibility. More importantly, in many cases, these systems come in the way of contributing to business agility in an increasingly dynamic world of business across industries,

The cloud model is increasingly being adopted by companies looking to lower cost and improve scalability and enhance flexibility. Many different models of cloud adoption abound varied by size, maturity, expectations, nature of the industry etc. But all agree on one need – cloud services need to be well integrated with existing legacy systems. Some are choosing a hybrid approach between online and on-premise services as a low-risk way to test the benefits. To work, these cloud services need to be well integrated with existing legacy systems.

Possibilities include selectively letting go of the past and unlocking resources and in realigning priorities and setting new directions towards creating more space for innovation and greater business value. Some CIO’s see this as an opportunity to look beyond delivery models towards getting strategic advantage to business through sophisticated information and insights. Cloud centric technologies are a big driver in enabling IT to take center stage in support of innovation, business growth and delivered value.

For enterprises and the CIO, this journey is replete with possibilities, challenges where the upside swing could be alluringly high but the downside fall could be steep if not carefully strategized and executed on those strategies well enough. After all, we are living in an era where technology edge is almost equivalent to business edge and this warrants a new approach to business technology architecture and strategy. That’s when Saugatech came with the interview with Mike Wilens, on Fidelity’s cloud journey , I got real interested.

In a very detailed discussion Mike covers a series of topics and brings out the fact that while people talk a lot about lock-in, reliability, and security in the cloud , these are manageable with good engineering and good planning and it’s not really all that scary – cloud is indeed doable and can be a key enabler for business innovation and enterprise agility. The key here is that the cloud is indeed revolutionary in how we think about application delivery and infrastructure.

In discussions published as part of cloud leadership strategies, Mike outlines the approach to the cloud, the execution plan and alignment to business needs. Covering all aspects of cloud journey within Fidelity, there are lots of important insights coming out of actual experience. Starting with foundational issues, such as standards, cost avoidance and experimenting with new capabilities in the Cloud, the discussion then extends to centralization versus decentralization. Inside Fidelity, the cloud model is slowly altering the degree of decentralization with a view to lower costs but not compromise on ability to innovate around business needs. The key insight here is dealing with reducing risk and cost while not inhibiting innovation that can lead to top line growth.
Moving onto the more interesting aspects of cloud and business the discussions revolve around business innovation, governance frameworks and balancing opportunity and risk. In areas like collaboration and social computing tools, the logic behind determination of what can be used internally and taking into account the regulatory standards, the usage of such tools externally requires very carefully considered solutions. Wilens points out that the standards that are evolving to help public clouds power down the economies of scale are now becoming available for private clouds as well.

Cloud can be a big platform for testing out /piloting new ideas and can be scaled out and scaled up – at any point in time this pilot footprint on cloud should be actively pursued. For example, he believes that migration to mobile devices and the related implications for the presentation layers of any technology infrastructure will be implemented within the cloud based technologies, private or public. Similarly co-opting the startup partners to try out new operational/innovative models and make them scale up on the cloud infuses new dynamics in developing partnerships and new offerings. Fidelity has found that private Cloud portals can deliver to its clients access to financial information, while still maintaining the on-premise, legacy, mainframe record keeping systems. Here comes the reinforcement, that hybrid solutions leveraging the data of on-premise systems will soon become the norm.

The best practices talked about ranges from adopting de-facto cloud standards, for example cloud infrastructure could be coalescing around the LAMP stack. Some other notable insights include:
- Creating shared services with a common platform, look and feel
- Use of cloud as testing environment
- Portioning of clouds – confidential /mission critical data where to keep -on-premise or outside
- What volumes of new workloads to be pushed onto the cloud – particularly in long standing industries like financial services where lot of data tend to be in old but reliable platforms

Operating at both ends of the stacks with a robust risk management plan and governance makes cloud an indispensable framework for IT, Innovation and Business Agility. I recommend reading this for demonstrating that with a good strategy and well laid out execution on such strategy, even in a fast moving but highly regulated industry with a lot of legacy system in place, clouds can be successfully and progressively deployed with demonstrable results in providing flexibility and making business agile.

Labels: BVIT, Cloud Computing, Emerging Models

Cloud & Outsourcing Service Providers

Far too often, am asked the question – Won’t cloud disrupt the outsourcing vendors in a big way. My answer is Yes & No. Yes. The cloud will definitely impact those outsourcing vendors who just wait and watch or do superficial adjustments to the emergence of cloud. For those outsourcing vendors (just like in the case of all the players in the software ecosystem), trying to understand the impact of the cloud and proactively embracing the cloud, the impact is going to positively felt. Let’s examines this further. It’s clear: The cloud’s impact on outsourcing over the next five years will be profound because “it will significantly influence the demand made on the nature of services and the type of expertise built by service players as seen in the industry today. On an As-Is scenario, one of the key changes would be that the demand on labor will go down – as cloud could cut down need for support processes while enabling near real-time data processing across the value chain for business”. At the same time, the disruptive cloud technology can enable whole host of new business opportunities centered on new business and technology and support execution models hitherto just dreamt of.

Zoom forward: The beauty of the cloud technologies is such that overtime, it would be seen that cloud technologies will enable IT service providers to deliver end-to-end services regardless of the various platforms, applications, and technologies involved. Extend the thought – one can easily see that within enterprises the classification of core/non-core would begin to diminish overtime as cloud enables Enterprise IT to act as a hybrid environment of on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud services.
The cloud-based services will change outsourcing contract methodologies. “Buyers will move away from long-term contracts where the return on investment depended on continuous improvement, and move to shorter-term contracts with more flexibility to quickly buy new services. In respect of some business functions, the complexities involved in structuring a deal centered around cloud would encompass requirements like providers promising to take over customer infrastructure and run it from their shared centers to minimize multiple cloud vendor management for customers”. Cloud-based services will also cause an evolution and huge change in the way outsourcing providers price their services.

There are various types of cloud-related services that outsourcers will typically provide:
• Consulting around integrating enterprise IT with private and public clouds to create a hybrid environment
• Organization change management & risk management
• Implementing and managing private clouds to consolidate and optimize infrastructure
• Developing custom applications for the emerging cloud software platforms
• Developing new applications that integrate collaboration, communication, and cloud platforms
• Migrating enterprise applications to the cloud and the related testing, certification, and governance for risk and compliance
• Offering many commonly used functions as –a –service
• Governance mechanisms, regulation compliance
• Making Business –IT alignment realized over time.

In its fully evolved state, service providers will take on the role of a trusted partner to integrate cloud services of multiple service providers with Enterprise IT. Outsourcing providers are going to move up the value chain, offering consulting and information management services — not in the actual delivery of IT but in how buyers should provision and organize their systems and business process workflows.

Services providers that focus on providing services at the lower levels of the infrastructure and platform stack will need to become more agile and nimble to new technologies and faster technology cycles. They will have to provision new services as quickly as their cloud computing alternatives. The ease with which users can access social technologies, mobile devices and SaaS technologies will mean that IT and outsourcing partners will be bypassed, leaving a myriad of contract support challenges. Inevitably, outsourcers will have to support new technologies and do so in a far more rapid manner. This will lead to tactical responses by outsourcing providers for example leveraging service catalogs to provide a range of computing alternatives and service options to business users (including dedicated, shared and cloud services at different prices and service alternatives). But the real change is one of drastic business model change from hierarchical command structures to a modularized, configurable set of services that can be provisioned to clients in a rapid fashion.

Cloud Computing challenges services providers to sell beyond IT - . Service providers that own the IT budget do not have the relationships to effectively sell many of the cloud enabled business services that are emerging, as they require IT, business and executive relationships – and of course process knowledge. “Upwardly mobile” services providers capable of selling at the process layer will become aggregators of on-premise and Cloud IT technologies within hybrid environments.

If a service provider’s revenue is dependent on increased resource consumption as defined by resource units (e.g., managing more servers) any move to the Cloud most likely will result in a net reduction in resource consumption as infrastructure is consolidated, automated and virtualized.
Overall, I think Cloud Computing is about to bring a lot of changes to the traditional Outsourcing world with a few challenges such as security which is slated to have crossed the tipping point and is poised to put customers at greater risk at the cost of low-cost cloud alternatives that today present themselves as the new-world outsourcing parties.
Nevertheless it will accelerate offshoring / outsourcing, in my opinion because:
- It will drive the traditional outsourcing parties to adopt faster nimble methods

- Contract cycles and agreements will have to be revisited as niche core cloud service players will go after the buyers as contract renewal approaches.

- Fixed Contracts will come under fire as demand of variable contracts will increase. Traditional vendors will have a problem as their models are based of one-time fixed with incremental charges while with hardware/software costs dropping dramatically customers will end up paying more

Cloud computing is surprisingly incremental – software provides a potential risk, hardware provides a potential risk but platform as a service offerings and ability to tap huge new markets tilt the scale. We believe cloud models, like SaaS, will take more years to go mainstream in a true sense of the term, ie, relative to the size of the overall software market. This implies that while SaaS has already displaced traditional software in some categories (eg, CRM), a widespread shift will only be gradual. This provides a window of opportunity for IT-services vendors. Newer offerings like platform BPO adds to the service provider pie. Platform BPO can be described in many ways. For example, it can be considered a SaaS model implemented across a business process, or something akin to “process as a service”.

In effect, platform BPO is about:
- Automating a business process to ensure lower dependence on manpower resources;
- Hosting that process on shared infrastructure (of the vendor or rented by the vendor) rather than on the customer’s premises;
- Pricing the offering on a transaction-based model rather than on a cost centric - people deployed model;
- Sharing of the core platform across many customers (multi-tenant) rather than proprietary to a single customer. Platform BPO is, thus, a new way to deliver processes that have already been around, and it is much influenced by the emerging cloud-computing concept.

Three years from now I would say a good number of enterprises will have their strategies in place for how they plan to use the cloud. The smaller the enterprise the greater the potential exploitation of a third-party cloud will happen. The larger customers will likely use cloud-like technologies, but internally private clouds. Our customers are unlikely to use any public platforms except for what they would deem as commodity activities, such as payroll, F&A, HR, etc (not core strategies). How does that impact companies like us? Large enterprise market, our predominant market space, is likely to adopt cloud technologies internally, and try to charge back their internal clients/departments on a cloud-like billing pattern. Therefore, they would like to reduce the complexity of what they have to take advantage of the variable costs from a costing perspective. In a three-year timeframe that will be a substantial transformation for a lot of companies, which translates into opportunities for people like us.

On a three to five-year perspective, most of the enterprises will be transitioning to a cloud-based delivery strategy for tech and services. Not likely too big, as big a transformation as ERP, CRM, etc as it will be technology-driven transformation on the inside. Business benefits that the end user will see will be greater efficiency, from infrastructure, hardware perspective. There will be a better sharing of resources. What we are seeing in a lot of pilots is speed. Change and speed will be much better in a cloud environment.

And that provides an opportunity for outsourcing service providers when it comes to cloud integration, cloud enablement of existing applications or creating new applications all together on the cloud.

As long as the outsourcing partners’ providers continue to be innovative, and adapt themselves to the market conditions, there should be no room to get worried. After all, the outsourcing service providers do carry with us the knowledge of the applications, ecosystem and architecture for the customers we operate with. Value gets created only by assisting the end client in their business process. In its true sense, value is not just created by cloud infrastructure providers, as they are only going to commoditize the data centre service.

So, overall, well run offshore headquartered firms shall see net positive opportunities with large enterprises embracing the cloud.

Labels: Application Outsourcing, Cloud Computing, Emerging Models

The Cloud & Enterprises

This is in continuation of the previous note:

Thomas Friedman makes the case that Value creation is becoming so complex that no single firm can master it without closely collaborating with a wide set of partners. John Hagel brings this up :” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed”. All these thoughts presuppose or recognize the role that information technology plays in making this shift happen. Extending the thought, once can see that from an infrastructural perspective, externalization of data and processes, for example through cloud computing, can create a secure foundation for collaboration that will eventually be indispensable. This flow and collaboration – critical components in the shift becomes so important that it is worth dwelling a little more into this theme.

With the global competitive forces getting more and more powerful one case that business around the world are keen to get more agile and more lean. With dependence in IT increasing with time, solutions centered on IT get more significant. With cloud as an enabler to such a change, one can see many things are coming together to make benefits get realized. As business tends to focus on getting the easy to do business with tag, the ease of provisioning extranets makes the organization more agile as it establishes lightweight, short term partnerships and outsources granular services to external providers. When information and goods flow across borders and enterprises, the concern of rising transactional cost is bound to arise. With well designed cloud solutions , transaction costs can be actually managed better. And by reducing the transaction costs of contractual collaboration the company can effectively leverage external resources without engaging in full scale mergers and acquisitions or setting up joint ventures.

How to engineer a seamless and reliable experience that can not only absorb changes in the external environment but also function as a critical enabler of such change? Look carefully and we can see that at the operational level , an increasing number of data sources are becoming available in the form of web services, truly interoperable and are easy to integrate. Enterprises move really aggressively to make gains on this count – some of them are able to leverage these effectively have an advantage over their competition. The real advantage comes by being able to extract context sensitive, pattern based business intelligence by combining the data sources with their internal information and that of their partners.

This in essence sets the stage of preparing to not only take advantage of emerging technology to stay competitive but also potentially help a set of enterprises to create new standards of competing and thereby create competitive advantage through differentiation. Talking of differentiation, form the perspective of business enabled through the cloud it can be seen that the increased service orientation of cloud squarely uplifts the importance of identifying and analyzing competitive differentiation. Once core functions are established inside enterprises likely centered around core competencies the next question to seek is : determining whether they lead to a business benefit and the larger question therein is whether they are indeed unique and whether the uniqueness is sustainable in the fast changing world?

In such critical turns and decisions, enterprises need to take a far more involvement in activities that may look too mundane and operational. For example, it is a perfectly valid question to ask and keep asking at regular intervals as to how much of IT should be delivered by internal sources. As the technology and technology enabled markets and business services mature, many viable and economical solutions become available for enterprises to consider. And if standardized services (preferably configurable) are available on the market on a more economical footing, then it is obligatory on the part of enterprises to investigate whether it would be possible to leverage them. There may also be alternate forms of delivering the services. Let’s see from an IT perspective - in such a scenario, very effective solutions delivered over the cloud are becoming more and more commonplace. For example, self service portals can reduce human involvement overhead and can thereby lower the costs of basic services. Add ability to configure and integrate – the potential multiplies. Such decisions help enterprises move resources to focus on efforts inside the enterprise that could yield far better returns and may help enterprises become more lean and efficient and in some cases can make them more innovative as well.

Then where does it leave genuinely core processes that are supposed to provide differentiation by design? Where these processes begin to get intertwined with undifferentiated tasks, the effectiveness definitely goes down. Many of the generic IT solutions with customized overlays clearly fall into this category. Such a scenarios also provides enterprises to examine objectively if it would be possible to isolate the generic functions and have them sourced from the most effective and efficient source. Obviously there may not be standard answers for every conceivable scenario but enterprises can think through and decide on embracing appropriate choices.

Now comes the question of horizontal scalability – can the core competencies be looked as a platform to provide a base for a broad range of solutions? Can most of the solutions be plausibly monetized? Too often we see that the competitive advantage can begin to help in gaining business in related areas as well – there cloud solutions can provide can help in providing quick entry and act as a simulation media before eventually becoming a core infrastructure for leverage in steady state on scale up. Similarly IP that can be enabled through cloud can facilitate embracing new business models for cross domain/ cross enterprise usage. Obviously these things don’t happen just by chance – every such possibility needs to be thought through and details worked out in a rigorous manner. When competencies get stretched to serve a more broad base of services, it would invariably call for a realignment of resources and focus inside enterprises. Enterprises then get sucked into taking decisions on designing organization structures ranging from divisions to horizontals.

With market shifts happening more frequently – the dynamism with which enterprises monitor and prepare for them increase more rapidly. Too often, today we see that corporate strategies are reflecting upon changes across all stakeholders – competition, suppliers, customers besides geographies and market segments. This is a more complex game but technology and cloud by extension can provide more strategic enabling support. Such changes can foist huge demands on enterprises –some of them could be very direct and some of them could bring in an indirect but overbearing expectations on the business. The utility model is not just limited to computing CPU cycles and counts the saving. Its actually about making a range of services available on demand – information consulting, data streams, business processes, real time collaboration etc. The reality is that almost all the industries would have a need to consume such services as they begin to navigate the effects of changes that are happening in their industries and in some case extend such services when they act the role as providers. The lesser recognized part of the equation viz. the indirect impact : this can be more powerful and with a larger reach. How? In this complex web of business, enterprises which don’t provide such services may have to engage in transactions with others that do provide such services. Now one will have run as fast as the ecosystem to at least hold on to the current competitive position ( in some cases –in fast changing industries, one will have to run faster to hold on to the position). So the moral here is : no enterprise is likely to be immune from this sort of change and this is going to create a series of cascading changes across the business landscape.

The fact remains cloud provides a very huge canvas. By its huge capabilities and reach , the cloud can effectively change the business dynamics along with the progressions that it creates and this can simply dominate careful setups laid inside enterprises. By attacking the cost structure of IT operations and being seen as business friendly, it can find more support in its absorption. And, the truly disruptive phenomenon that cloud is - shall influence this business ecosystem more rapidly and with greater reach : net result – cloud could become the harbinger of change that will accelerate the changes in the partner landscape in this interconnected world.

Labels: Business Models, Cloud Computing, IT Business Value

The Cloud & Its Impact!

Was on a long flight to Asia, when conversation with the co-passenger began to get centered around cloud computing and what could be its impact that an educated executive ought to know. I have seen the various definitions of cloud computing that include elements of the varied description of the term, yet they typically do not address every single aspect that is associated with cloud computing. The definitions vary from being seen as IT as a service independent of location by IT resources to massive scalable IT capabilities provided as service across the internet to multiple customers to infrastructure hosting of customer applications and billed by consumption.

My intent here is not to add confusion with yet another attempt at fine tuning the various definitions that are currently available. Each and every thought strand provides a good job at giving an idea of what is involved. Nothing of importance suggests to me that there is any particular value in having an authentic/authoritative/cardinal definition. The attributes provide a more meaningful way to provide a near close authentic touch : off premise, elasticity, pay-as-you go billing, virtualization, service delivery, universal access, centralized and distributed management, multi- tenancy etc.

For me, the way I see it, the innovation of the internet from a technical perspective lies in identifying the confluence of several technical trends , look forward and visualizing how these can combine with improving cost factors, a changing environment and evolving societal needs can combine to create a virtuous cycle that generate an ever increasing economies of scale and benefits from network effects. Look carefully. One can see that cloud computing is similar in nature while admittedly its difficult to isolate a single grain of technology strand triggering the cloud’s advent and progress. A number of incremental improvements in various areas ( notable among those fine grained metering, flexible billing, virtualization, broadband, SOA, service management) have all come together recently. Combined together they enable new business models that can dramatically affect cost and cash flow patterns and are therefore of direct great interest to the business . In the backdrop of economic changes affecting the business environment and a investment overhang of IT , cloud and the opportunities it presents look very significant to business.

If we examine further, the combined effect has reached a critical threshold by achieving sufficient scale to dramatically reduce prices, thus leading to a virtuous cycle of benefits (cost reduction for customers, profits for providers), exponential growth and ramifications that may reverberate across many of our lives, including technology, business, economic, social & political dimensions. As cloud computing establishes itself as primarily a service delivery channel, its likely to have a significant impact on the IT industry ( by maximizing service interconnectivity), by stimulating requirements that support it.

The Capex Vs Opex discussion is well known and I won’t repeat it here but would like to point out that the reduction in fixed costs also allows the company to become much more agile and aggressive in pursuing new revenue streams. Since resources can be elastically scaled up and down they can take advantage of unanticipated high demand but without being burdened with the excess costs when the market softens. The outsourcing of IT infrastructure reduces the responsibilities and help organizations focus in the area of delivering true value of IT. The shift can help IT to focus from Plan-Build-Run onto Source-Integrate- Manage mode of functioning.

Another form of business impact may be that the high level of service standardization that cloud computing brings may blur the traditional market segmentation. The conventional distinction that separates small and medium businesses from enterprises, based on their levels of customization & requirement for sales and service support may fade in favour of richer set of options & combinations of service offerings. Let’s zoom out and come back. In some ways, cloud computing is only a small part of a much larger trend that is taking over the business world. The transition to services centered economy is gaining momentum over the decades - the critical constraint had been on collaboration - if we do a root cause analysis we can find that the constraint is rooted on trans- enterprise barriers and a cohesive well geared technical infrastructure.

The difficulty rests on the fact that unlike in a tangible product, it is very difficult for one to break services into its elemental components that come together to provide a seamless efficient service. The transaction costs that are associated with identification, contracting, monitoring and collection were far too high to justify bringing different entities together. A s we progress towards an ecosystem where everything –as-a-service becomes a defined norm, the gamut expands to include a lot of business as well. From Human resources management to finance to logistics to manufacturing all can be potentially handled by a strategic partner. And cloud here can play a critical enabling role of providing an infrastructure that acts as a critical component of this transformation.

Regardless of whether a company seeks to adopt cloud computing, the technology may have a significant impact on the competitive landscape of many industries. Some enterprises may be forced to look at cloud computing simple keep pace with external efficiencies in their ecosystem. And for some, it could be the case that their core business is being eroded by the arrival of newer agile competitors. As a result, I think that it very likely that there will be a market shift as some companies leverage the benefits of cloud computing better than others. These may trigger a reshuffling of the competitive landscape, an event that may harbor high risks and huge opportunities. More on this theme later

Labels: Cloud Computing, Emerging Trends

Cloud : Vision & Tactful Deployment

I was moderating an informal discussion amongst decision makers on how much resources to allocate to cloud computing efforts inside their respective enterprises. Someone wanted to know if there is a benchmark available as to how much individual enterprises spend on cloud efforts to stay ahead of the curve. I murmured that this may not be so relevant as a factor for taking decisions inside their respective enterprise but at best can act as an aide – either to reinforce that we are doing what everyone else is doing – little or more as the case may be, but can’t become a guiding mantra. Remember best practice vs next practice dilemma. Cloud actually provides an opportunity to create transformational change inside IT and enterprise. I told myself that the key remains evolving a vision for cloud inside every enterprise.

Cloud is a truly disruptive use of technology and many of the traditional principles such as vision, strategy and trusted execution partners are highly relevant in assessing and managing cloud adoption progress inside enterprises.What I see all around is the fact that, many enterprises are not developing a full vision for their cloud computing efforts. I see that in a number of cases, cloud efforts are pilot efforts, departmental efforts, proof of concepts etc. Seldom does one get to see a full blown real time cloud efforts inside enterprises. Why these half steps – while testing the water is per se not bad, winners need to learn to swim –fast and in an easy manner. Enter cloud computing vision – connected dots, big picture ….

Since it is the early days of the cloud, it is understandable that people take baby steps on an experimental basis as a start point , but the rate of adoption of the technology is getting faster and faster. This is irrespective of the nature of the cloud – private, hybrid, public – all are seeing faster rates of adoption and enterprises are sooner than later going to be confronted with the question – how fast are we moving on their cloud initiatives.

The early initiatives of virtualzation hold an ominous parallel here. When server virtualization fever began to grip enterprises, we saw that everyone wanted to rush into that, so much so that many parallel initiatives were happening inside enterprises - so much so no one owned these at a central level and mostly many purused them as independent efforts – the result, enterprises began to face the rising prospect of VM sprawl. This created opportunities for vendors to sell new services around managing VM sprawl. The point here is – without an overaching vision, efforts which look successful in the short term but may create a formdable set of problems to manage – medium to long term!

Simple questions like who manages the process inside to manage these deployments – whats the overall security compliance etc.. In many organizations, individual efforts begin to bubble up at a central level only when security, risk , compliance efforts get pushed from the CFO/CIO organizations, That’s when most of the so called local efforts come together to show a gargantuan picture of the number of moving parts so to say that need to be shephered together..

When enterprises focus on shepherding and untangling the messy knots – already time has passed to examine the business value such efforts could bring in. The shift to cloud does not bestow long lasting benefits by just doing all over - rather I argue , it is going to come out of having a lasting vision, with a well detailed out program plan and aided by flawless execution. A strategy that speaks for itself and a concerted plan of action communicated well enough inside enterprises would go a long way in realizing benefits out of cloud efforts.

Cloud computing is all about driving holistic change in IT, but comes with the flexibility to start locally – this is a double edged sword – you can move fast locally thinking that bottoms up could work but harldly true based on real life experiences. What helps is having an overarching vision and tactically executing smaller programs locally in alignment with the overall vision.Such vision/strategy ought to illustrate how cloud facilitates pursuit and accomplishment of a set of goals articulated at the enterprise level. The plan should espouse the plan of adoption and address issues like compliance, security, governance, change management, partnership plans, auditing, provisioning , chargeback, exit strategies etc. Departmental efforts can draw from this plan the appropriate linkages and drive towards achieving the stated goals through their efforts. Think about this : such effors would help drive business value by bringing alignment across all internal initiatives, bringing cohesion across all efforts and help achieve larger goals such as capex to opex centric spending models, compliance, security etc. Such efforts would truly provide the basis of creating a platform centric IT infrastructure for enterprises to enable IT leverage for lot more benefits.

For cloud initiatives to be successful, enterprises need to focus on the larger end goal and have a game plan to achieve them in a truly centrally driven but localy executed model of execution. Success in large enterprise initiatives are always predicated upon their vision and execution – cloud adoption fits into this model very well. Is the partner system ready for this? The answer is Yes. The benefits of what is available today to service providers in the Cloud ecosystem provides more than ever the promise that they can focus on the business goals of the organizations they seek to support.

Typically larger enterprises need to focus on an array of things centrally to make progress on cloud adoption. Enterprises need to worry about new scale, different levels of security, reliability to support the new order of things. This means putting in place a new model of information and infrastructure governance, deployment, training, support - needless to say all these need to be reframed inside the enterprise. The IT environments need to be upgraded to provide for very high transaction workloads, security infrastructure needs to be retuned and app experiences need to be completely rehauled to provide a consumer feel for look and usage.

We have been waiting for the moment when transformative disruptions of this nature and scale happen. Learning organizations always had a charter to capture the latent knowledge that reside within people, process and systems, Existing technologies and methods could provide a lending hand to capture that vision in a limited way. People across the ranks inside organization can now participate in such transformation efforts quite easily and this could become the bedrock of new forms of collaboration leading to innovation and productivity improvements. Ironically this is mostly facilitated by advances in technology and communications and those responsible for technology management need to be ready to make this transformation possible inside their enterprises.

As I wrote elsewhere earlier, too often, inside enterprises, IT today is seen as the dampener towards embracing change at a mega-scale. IT organizations have an urgent need to transform themselves to keep pace with the change and become more relevant and stay aligned with business to leverage the opportunities that revolve around improving productivity, improving the efficiencies of operation, making organizations more innovative etc.. This also becomes a major force towards attracting talent. The clarion call here is for the enterprises to adopt to this change and create a new basis of competing – to distinguish from competition and create a leading distance from others through good plans, design and practice.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Emerging Models, Emerging Technologies

Making Consumer Technologies Help Enterprises Create A Winning Edge

There’s a revolution taking place in the IT ecosystem today. When more and more focus is put on innovation, its evolution, growth and in managing innovation while looking through what conventional collaborative mechanism in fusion with powerful mechanisms like internet enabled collaboration could help achieve –all these point to a world of immense possibilities. With a dominant number of internet users poised to take a dip in the virtual world, the virtual world could become more and more real!! Ten years back it is told that less than 3% of U.S. households had access to broadband. Today, it is estimated that nearly 90% of U.S. households have access to broadband.

Apple and the high tech semicon industry can vouch for the pull from the consumer segment – for both of them, consumer segment happens to be the largest consuming class!
Let’s look at the numbers : Morgan Stanley data tells us there are more than 1.2 billion consumers with Internet access, 700 million consumers with their own PCs, and 2 billion consumers with mobile phones, of which more than 400 million users have access to the internet through 3G connections. 1 billion users around the world access the internet through wi-fi connections. Let’s look at what customers do with these devices. Obviously, around the world, they use these devices to send billions and trillions of emails and text messages


-600 + million customers watch videos or YouTube or listen to music on the Web - most of them download music, video etc.

- 600+ million customers use instant messaging - a majority of them participate in online communities and a 100 million plus users actively blog

- The mobile brigade is not far behind. More than half a billion users access the internet from the mobile today around the world. The growth of the mobile markets is reinforcing the growth of the mobile apps market as well in a big way.

Of those 1–2 billion consumers using mobile phones, computers, and the Internet, 300 million people work inside enterprises. End of last year, the estimated number of connected devices at 6 billion devices on the planet — growing to 7 billion this year. These devices include camera phones, computers, , digital cameras, GPS devices , mobile devices, printers, smart phones, Internet phones, MP3 players, surveillance cameras, sensing devices and many other types of gadgets, gizmos, and chip-powered devices. Interestingly, amongst the population of connected devices, it can be seen that four out of five of these devices were not computers (either PCs or servers). Atleast, half of these devices are of the consumer electronics genre. The projections show that over the next three years, this category will double in size, growing much faster outpacing the growth of the traditional computer system.

Plain common sense thinking shows that while all these devices may not arrive inside the enterprise, the reality is that a majority of these devices would begin to show up in the enterprise. Obviously, consumers are bringing the chariots of fire with these connected devices into the enterprise – and in large numbers. The key thing to note here is that way above the investments made by the enterprise; we see that consumers in large measures are self investing in learning to use the connected devices and along the line are creating a huge market for tools and apps for connected devices.

This large group of consumers works with a huge swath of connected devices and wants similar access and experience of the applications and access mechanisms inside enterprises. They are getting used to accessing all information at near zero latency levels. The connected world may not respect the boundaries of enterprise and consumer in terms of experience and access - granted the security and audit mechanisms could be different between these two worlds. This expectation is creating a huge pressure on enterprise IT organizations to harmonize and integrate consumer-oriented devices and applications. Most of the young people joining the workforce have become quite accustomed to the experience that the world of mobile, social networking and connected devices . Clearly this expectation would keep increasing with time as more and younger workforce joins the enterprise.

Just like enterprises began to come under pressure to webify their enterprise(s) in the start of this decade, we see that the consumer driven revolution centering around connected devices are creating a new wave of pressure on enterprises to make their systems and processes ready for the connected devices. The Smartphones, Superphones, iPads, Social Networks get used /consumed quite extensively across the enterprise and at home - to stay informed, connected and productive in their professional as well as their personal lives. Add to that the changing usage demands of an always-on environment with anytime/anywhere access - this fundamentally changes the nature of support and service requirements.

A number of factors go towards making this shift happen: ranging from perceived gaps in the capabilities (in either functionality or ease of use) of existing corporate tools; employees incorporating their favorite social and collaborative tools into daily workflow; the low or absent cost of most consumer-grade tools and economic pressure to do more with less; and a narrowing of the differences between tools designed for the consumer and those built for enterprise. The gap between consumer and enterprise tools is narrowing quite rapidly. Gartner’s Nick Jones says he expects there will essentially be no difference between enterprise and consumer mobile tools within five years. The wave of change is indeed very powerful. New real-time cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. The challenge before enterprise IT is to marry this phenomenon to business. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. If we look at the real world, Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet, all of us know that inside the enterprise, the software used to run is anything but real time. This forces enterprises to look for tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

This “Consumer-Powered IT” trend is having a prolific effect inside enterprise IT. They are clearly changing the rules of the game in respect of the IT support models. It’s a powerful new way to work that will transform organizations over the next three to five years . Against this background, if we were to assess the readiness of most of the enterprises, we find that a majority of enterprises woefully unprepared to leverage this huge impactful opportunities. Such opportunities would revolve around improving productivity, improving the efficiencies of operation, making organizations more innovative etc..
The interesting thing here is change and transformation is happening bottoms up here – so we will see employees not waiting for things to change but their own expectations and expertise, becomes the change that enterprise IT needs to have to realize the potential of this changing nature of connectedness. The security risks, management issues, and policy and governance implications that arise from mass introduction of consumer devices and applications into the enterprise becomes a concern for enterprise IT to handle on their own. One of the things that internet did to traditional business is the deflationary effect it brought on them. Similarly the connected devices and social networks are going to bring in an unusually high degree of delayering within organizations so much so what appeared to be very sophisticated and confined to certain class of users may become very common and accessible to all those who seek them.

This means enterprises need to worry about new scale, different levels of security, reliability to support the new order of things. This means putting in place a new model of information and infrastructure governance, deployment, training, support - needless to say all these need to be reframed inside the enterprise. The IT environments need to be upgraded to provide for very high transaction workloads, security infrastructure needs to be retuned and app experiences need to be completely rehauled to provide a consumer feel for look and usage.

We have been waiting for the moment when transformative disruptions of this nature and scale happen. Learning organizations always had a charter to capture the latent knowledge that reside within people, process and systems, Existing technologies and methods could provide a lending hand to capture that vision in a limited way. People across the ranks inside organization can now participate in such transformation efforts quite easily and this could become the bedrock of new forms of collaboration leading to innovation and productivity improvements. Ironically this is mostly facilitated by advances in technology and communications and those responsible for technology management need to be ready to make this transformation possible inside their enterprises.

Too often, inside enterprises, IT today is seen as the dampener towards embracing change at a mega-scale. IT organizations have an urgent need to transform themselves to keep pace with the change and become more relevant and stay aligned with business to leverage the opportunities that revolve around improving productivity, improving the efficiencies of operation, making organizations more innovative etc.. This also becomes a major force towards attracting talent. The clarion call here is for the enterprises to adopt to this change and create a new basis of competing – to distinguish from competition and create a leading distance from others through good plans, design and practice.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Consumer Technology, Emerging Trends, Emerging Models