Cloud as Disruptive Technology

In 2008, Gartner identified Cloud Computing as one of top 10 most disruptive innovations through 2012. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=681107. In 2010, the prediction seems reasonable, and it may be possible at this point to suggest some of the winners and losers that may be created by the increasing adoption of Cloud Computing. While there is still a lot of water upstream of the bridge, let's consider a few examples:

Clear winners: Storage companies. The demand for storage, both in internal and external clouds continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Companies that supply storage arrays, and the software to provision, manage and protect the data they contain, should thrive in the Cloud.

SaaS Providers. As one of the enabling technologies in the Cloud, the companies who have mastered this approach will reap the benefits as demand for both custom and standardizes apps grows.

Managed Service Providers: Many former VARS are morphing into this type of service provider, and the value proposition for the SMB is real and compelling. A major shakeout is probably in the offing, but there will be a number of clear winners.

This is just a start - Virtualization providers, networking providers, and green technologies are also likely beneficiaries of the Cloud. What do you thnk?

Probable Losers: White Box Suppliers: The predominant paradigm has moved to virtualized blades for datacenter and cloud supplier. The concentration of demand - focused in larger datacenters and in the cloud suppliers themselves will likely move demand to the largest players in this market - the clone wars may be over.

Traditional hardware distributors: These players have adapted to changing conditions over many tech cycles and will need to do so again. Professional services and online software need to occupy their offerings.

System admins: One of the mantras of virtualization and SaaS is the reduced need for administrative resources. Going forward, there will be lower demand for the traditional sysadmin, although other skillsets may provide career options.

This is just a first look - please add your ideas.

A Snapshot of the Internet Marketing Industry

After attending SMX (Search Marketing Expo) West, it inspired me to delve further into the Internet Marketing Industry and this is what I have so far. In 2008 the Internet Marketing Industry was valued at $23.4 billion, according to engineworks.com. It is clear that the industry is growing and Google is proof of that. Larry Page and Sergey Brin share the number 11 spot on the Forbes 400 richest Americans list. Google AdWords brings in 97% of Google’s revenue, according to organicspam.com. Let’s take a closer look into their PPC madness. Google AdWords is a text based advertising strategy that is easily integrated into site search results, mobile webpages, feeds, videos, online games, and TV inventory. It has also found its way into social gaming sites such as Zynga, Playfish, and grab.com.

What does this mean? This gives companies the ability to target their advertising to the places customers live on the web, pretty exciting stuff. http://bit.ly/thegoogleeconomy According to this blog post Google has the clear majority of market share at 81%. As long as Google has 81% of the market they can taylor their Google AdWords revenue based on how much they promised they were going to report to Wall Street.

Yahoo! converted their company Overature to Yahoo! Search Marketing (SM), which as of right now doesn’t stand a chance to Google. Now for my thought, since I am not using these techniques or in the Industry for that matter, I see Google being the clear winner. Google Adwords is very well known and it is easy to start an account.

Marketing and the Cloud – II Using Social Media

Using social media as a marketing tool is growing rapidly in virtually all segments of the market today. Marketing teams dream of coming up with a strategy to engage large numbers of potential customers with compelling messaging – the YouTube video that “goes viral”; the Twitter superstar who attracts an instant following; or a Facebook page that creates “fan-demonium”. If you are looking for the magic formula here, please move on to the next post. However, I do think that there are three principles that are emerging, that, not surprisingly, echo some of the key learning from internet marketing, and even from good old-fashioned direct marketing, and that make success more likely.

First, let’s be clear. Social media marketing is not “free”, nor is it “easy”. The basic tenets of marketing still apply. Know your audience. Know what you want to say to them. Know what you want your audience to do next. And know what you want to do next. That said, here are three things to consider.

1) Content is king. What you say is important. If what you say is important to your audience, they will follow along. If it looks like a commercial, they will skip it. So, it is critical to create interesting, relevant, and timely content. The goal is to get potential customers to hear your message.

2) Follow-through is the name of the game. Most marketing teams know what to do with someone who responds to an ad, offer, or invitation. Social media contacts are no less important. Deciding how to reinforce the messages that attract fans and followers is one thing. But keeping the interest of the fans and followers is a time-intensive and thought-intensive process. Let them drift away at your peril.

3) Fans and followers don’t just happen. And, they are not permanent. From a business perspective, they follow because there’s something of value for them. Attracting them takes time, as does finding the right content to keep them around. Once you start the process, the worst thing you can do is let it get stale.

As always, comments are welcome, encouraged, solicited, and hoped for.

Shedding Light on the Cloud Phenomenon

The last few years in the technology sector have been in a perfect storm based on a weak economy, high unemployment and Cloud Computing. That’s right, Cloud Computing! Many business leaders concerned with the bottom line have been looking at the various aspects of Cloud Computing as a way to reduce headcount and therefore fattening the bottom line.

Cloud Computing in its various forms like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can reduce costs normally associated with setting up a company’s technology infrastructure base. The key area the business executives immediately draw attention too is the reduction or elimination of IT personnel and the associated savings saved by not investing in servers.
It is true, putting key services in the cloud can have an impact on head count but you will pay subscription fees for every service you sign up for. We’ll come back to subscription fees shortly. An area most companies forget to address as they move more services to the cloud or bring on additional staff is in the actual technology infrastructure needed to get everyone out to the cloud provider(s)! That’s right, we’re talking bandwidth, switching and routing. Go cheap on equipment and bandwidth you choke productivity and create problems you hadn’t expected.

Back to the cost savings by reducing headcount, licenses are less expensive than personnel but there is a breakeven point and it’s not the typical support person salary vs. licensed seats. The breakeven point will occur when your business needs to make a change and the current subscription/Service Level Agreement does not cover changes you want/need to make to your business. This becomes very evident when you have several different SaaS applications from different venders and you need to move data and/or expand a key application or add something else to your cloud infrastructure.

Cloud based computing can save dollars via headcount but has associated costs to purchase, maintain, expand and change and access. Understand that the cloud computing arena is still very young and still changing. In my opinion the market has not seen major fallout from merger and acquisition and the usual consolidation that has traditionally occurred in the technology sector.

So what does all this cloud stuff mean to the business owner or CEO? It means you can reduce or eliminate headcount but you will still have operational expenses that will need to be adjusted over time. The cloud is a good thing but seek out an expert if you don’t have one on site to help you navigate through the fiction so you don’t get rained on under your cloud.

By Ted Franklin

Cloud Computing meets Smarter Planet Initiative

Earlier this week, I attended an IEEE Cloud Computing meets IBM's Smarter Planet Initiative event put on by the Santa Clara Valley Chapter Computer Society. The speaker, Lennart Frantzell, PhD of the IBM Innovation Center, San Mateo, has the goal of pushing technology until computers replace mankind.

Cloud Computing Adds Value in Specific Ways

The core of Cloud Computing made up of
- virtual machines
- high capacity broadband
- open source SW
- smartphones
- app stores such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I liked how Lennart Frantzell tied in current trends of smartphones and social networking to the growth of cloud computing. Without demand for more bandwidth and vendor neutral infrastructure by web users, the challenge of cloud computing activity may have stayed in the enterprise domain. Social networking is driving the growth of cloud computing.

Cloud Computing Globalization and Globally Available Resources

Frantzell explained how IBM Innovation Centers play a role in expanding the global digital infrastructure. A behind the scenes innovator in converting the world from analog to digital. The demo of one hospital based Cloud Computing implementation looked a lot like Big Brother. Wearable tracking systems allow computers to determine how well a doctor sticks to a predetermined checklist. Medical practitioners are at risk for being beeped at for failing to wash their hands long enough. The level of remote monitoring gave me shivers. Other remote management, like reading energy meters, are less intrusive.

Lennart Frantzell also discussed the differences between private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds and how they interact. Hybrid and public clouds can act as storage or computing capacity backup or fail over. Hybrid and public clouds give enterprises the flexibility to have an internal private cloud as well immediate ability to absorb short term spike in need.

Three co-existing Cloud Computing delivery models

Post by devans00

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Abstract of Talk

As the world becomes more and more global, integrated and "flat", it is also facing an array of problems: a financial crisis, climate disruption, energy geopolitics, food supply hazards etc. This is coinciding with technological innovations such as the following developments that can assist in resolving these problems:

The world is becoming instrumented. There are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten millionth of a cent.

Cloud computing and mobile computing are changing how software is deployed and used throughout the world.

All things are becoming intelligent. Algorithms and powerful systems turn those mountains of data into decisions and actions that can make the world work better. Smarter.

As the world's leading globally integrated IT company, IBM is attempting to use modern IT technology to tackle many of the world's problems. In this presentation, Lennart Frantzell will talk about IBM's global smarter planet initiative in its quest to make the world a smarter place.

IBM presentations of their cloud computing offerings available on cloud homepage.

About the Speaker
Lennart Frantzell, PhD, is a technical consultant at the IBM Innovation Center, San Mateo. He works with IBM Business Partners and startup companies in the IBM smarter planet initiative. The IBM Innovation Centers is a world-wide network of IBM business partner centers that provide business- and technical support to help companies get started and deploy applications in the IBM smarter planet space.

Lennart Frantzell has expertise in Cloud Computing, IBM Industry Frameworks, IBM Tivoli systems management, WebSphere and other IBM middleware products. He has worked in artificial intelligence, object-oriented programming and computer games.

Marketing and the Cloud - I

Cloud Computing raises some interesting questions about marketing. How can/should cloud companies market their services? Does Cloud Computing change marketing? How? How do social media play into the marketing mix? How does a latter-day marketing organization use the cloud to drive business? Undoubtedly, there are many other questions, and perhaps this blog can surface and answer some of them as we go along.

We’ll pose the questions one at a time, create a stake in the ground around a potential answer, and look for some collective wisdom.

Let’s start with the broad question, “Does Cloud Computing change Marketing?” At its core, I think the answer is no. Marketing still has the same set of goals: building and sustaining a Brand; finding, attracting, and (perhaps) acquiring customers; understanding, selecting and conditioning target markets; listening to customers and prospects to inform both the brand and future offerings, and shortening the selling cycle for sales and partners.

However, what do change are the processes and tools that can be used to achieve those goals. These tend to fall into three broad categories:

1) Listening tools: In the past, it was difficult to understand how your brand was perceived, or how your product experience was rated, except through cumbersome, time-consuming, and not-very accurate surveys, or focus groups. Today, with a variety of social media tools, it’s possible to listen and respond to customer conversations about your company, and to leverage that knowledge directly into your company strategy.

2) Content Management: Using the Cloud as a repository for marketing tools (brochures, sales tools, presentations, etc.) facilitates communication with, and support for, sales teams, partners and even customers. Access can be managed, usage monitored, and actionable feedback collected from a broader audience than in the past.

3) Customer acquisition: Many potential customers are in the Cloud already – on social media, conducting searches, asking questions, and interacting with self-selected peer groups. The ability to find and listen to these conversations, to engage without disruption, and to attract potential users is fast becoming an art/skill that can set one competitor apart from the others.

In future posts, we’ll look to dissect each of these questions and categories a little more. Meanwhile, all flak, questions, comments, etc. are gratefully requested.

Jim Lee

MySQL gets cloudy with Amazon's new database service

Amazon is offering a new relational database service for EC2 that is powered by MySQL. (By Ryan Paul, October 27, 2009)

Amazon is expanding its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure with a new offering based on the open source MySQL database system. The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) allows users to rent database capacity in the cloud and use it just like a regular MySQL database. Amazon has also introduced support for a new class of EC2 instances intended for high-memory workloads.

Amazon's EC2 service is an increasingly popular solution for deploying Web applications in the cloud, but its database options were previously somewhat limited. Amazon offers a custom database system called SimpleDB that is designed to store rows with simple attribute/value pairs. It lacks the sophisticated features of true relational databases and obviously isn't compatible out of the box with the multitude of existing Web applications that are designed to work with SQL. The new RDS option is a welcome enhancement for EC2 and it addresses one of the service's major deficiencies.

EC2 customers will be able to obtain RDS capacity by renting Amazon DB instances. The cheapest package, the Small DB Instance, provides 1.7GB of RAM and 1 ECU* for $0.11 per hour. A large instance provides 7.5GB of RAM and 4 ECUs for $0.44 per hour. There are five different packages altogether, the most expensive of which is the Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance, which provides 68GB of RAM and 26 ECUs for $3.10 per hour.

The Quadruple Extra Large instance is also available for regular EC2 computing for $2.40 per hour. Amazon introduced it today along with a Double Extra Large instance which provides 32GB of RAM and 13 ECU. Regular EC2 Double Extra Large instances cost $1.20 per hour and the RDS variant costs $1.55 per hour. RDS data storage capacity can be provisioned for $0.10 per GB. The database service includes an automated backup feature that can use the provisioned database storage.

"RDS provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks for customers. The service takes much of the hassle out of setting up and managing relational databases, such as backups and code patching, freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business," wrote Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in a blog entry. "Amazon RDS provides the full capabilities of a MySQL Database, which means that libraries, applications and tools that have been designed for use with MySQL can be used without modification."

Indeed, EC2 users have already figured out and documented the proccess of deploying Django on Amazon's cloud using RDS for database hosting. RDS is clearly a lot easier than trying to manually set up and manage MySQL on EC2 with Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Amazon's cloud services are evolving and becoming increasingly affordable, but aren't quite ready for everyone yet. Recent studies show that the service still can't match the uptime of in-house data centers and isn't cost-effective for large enterprises with heavy workloads. Amazon aims to change that eventually. In addition to the new features, the company has also announced plans today to reduce per-instance EC2 pricing next month. Amazon says that reduction, which is as much as 15% for some kinds of instances, was made possible by ongoing efforts to bring down its operating costs.

http://arst.ch/9b7

*Note: ECU = "EC2 Compute Unit". One ECU provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.