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Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam
Tags: web2.0, strategy, saas, cloudcomputing, webservices, zdnet, web3.0, api, convergence, webservice, dionhinchcliffe on 2008-08-05 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The promise of cloud computing has captured the industry’s imagination this year for two big reasons. The first is the growing realization that cloud computing can successfully be used to strategically cut costs and drive innovation. And the second is that current offerings are getting very close to being ready for prime-time use in enterprise environments.
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Google has a well-known reputation for globally scalable applications that can reliably service millions of concurrent users while successfully controlling costs and efficiency in everything from power and bandwidth to storage and processing power. So when they claimed that anyone can now “build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure” it received considerable attention.
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Businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive while at the same time investing in new ideas that will offer compelling new products and services to those same customers.
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Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears especially compelling. By offering easy access to more efficient IT capabilities across computing, storage, and applications while providing direct and immediate access to both external innovation and innovation capability, cloud computing offers an on-demand, scalable, and repeatable resource that can be used the solve two of the major challenges facing IT departments today.
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These aspects are:
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Reduced capital expenditures
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Low barrier to entry
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Multitenancy
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Security
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Scalability and performance
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Centralization vs. federation
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Service-oriented
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Here are some of the types of cloud computing services that are emerging today:
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One type of cloud computing tends to defy traditional categorization and that’s harnessing human workers in the cloud, as a service. This is best exemplified by Amazon’s intriguing offering, Mechanical Turk, which plugs thousands of people into its on-demand cloud.
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This model includes any service which provides a consistent, service-oriented interface over a network to interact with people in a directed, collaborative manner. This is an on-demand form of outsourcing as well a cloud-based form of crowdsourcing.
Where’s the next new thing in Silicon Valley? | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com
Tags: zdnet, Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley, innovation, Web 2.0, vc, Leadership, Investment, Strategy, Finance, Financing Startups, Jeff Nolan, sandhill.com on 2008-04-30 -All Annotations (0) -About
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He makes many good points especially that there is a lot of money flowing into
companies that only offer incremental improvements over what is already
available. -
Incremental innovation just won’t cut it. In my opinion innovation has to be
disruptive otherwise it won’t succeed, because there is little incentive to
change. -
As I survey the landscape of consumer- and business- focused software and
service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment.
SandHill.com | Opinion : Incrementalism and “The New New Thing”
Tags: Jeff Nolan, sandhill.com, innovation, Strategy, vc on 2008-04-29 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Today’s venture capitalists are funneling a lot of money into businesses which
are only incremental improvements over what the current market offers.
FAROO - Could P2P Search Change the Game? - ReadWriteWeb
Tags: business, faroo, p2p, readwriteweb, search, strategy on 2008-04-03 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The game-changing FAROO advantage is not that it is free software, it is their
Peer To Peer (P2P) architecture. This can totally change the economics of
search. -
"1. The search engine index is based on a real users [sic] browsing habits
: That means that web index will not serve those websites on which you don’t
spend time thus reducing spam results.2. The data is not stored anywhere but your own computer and you have the
control of your own data. Searching is completely anonymous.3. As per Faroo’s plans, you’ll be able to earn money from their
advertising based revenue model. This is yet not implemented, however, it’s one
of their declared plans." -
It is the latter point that is critical. FAROO can do this because they don't
have to invest in huge server farms. The search business is about giving a good
deal to both publishers and advertisers. You can offer a better deal if your
costs are lower. -
By searching, you make FAROO better, so it is quite reasonable to expect a
cut of the revenue. And if your search doesn't cost them much, they can share
more of that revenue.If their costs are low, they can reduce the cost of search terms for
advertisers, and as Craigslist has discovered, reducing price in a zero cost
environment has a dramatic effect on volumes and market share. -
- Can P2P search scale? I am not technically competent enough to answer that
question, but I have not yet seen evidence to convince me that it is impossible.
The success of other P2P services such as Skype make me willing to at least
reserve judgment on this issue. - The chicken and egg problem, based on the fact that the P2P search index
scales with the number of people using FAROO. When I first looked at FAROO last
year, this looked like a show-stopper. As the number of searchers is very low
right now, people are likely to try it, get lousy results and forget about it.
When I revisited FAROO in March, I noticed that they had taken steps to address
this. Their solution (not by itself a big deal and used by other alternative
engines) is to aggregate search results from other engines in addition to
results from FAROO. So you get some results no matter what you're looking for
and thus may continue to use the software. This also scales their index faster. - FAROO, being P2P, requires a client download. That can be an incredibly big
hurdle to adoption. When I first looked at FAROO, I thought their best shot was
to build on top of existing P2P services such as LimeWire or Gnutella. I now see
that they have a fundamentally different strategy. They are building on top of
.Net. Oops there go all the Mac and Linux heads... bye. This is potentially a
serious issue as lots of early adopters tend to be on the Mac. I am a Mac user,
so I could not use FAROO without borrowing somebody's PC. OSX and Linux support
is "coming soon." I assume this will be via Mono. Having been so
much in the Java world recently, I have no idea how well Mono works in
practice.
The 3 big hurdles are:
- Can P2P search scale? I am not technically competent enough to answer that
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FAROO has really addressed the privacy issue as they explain here. It does appear that
they have overcome the conflict between personalization and privacy that I wrote
about in
a previous post on this blog. That is huge. If users feel 100% confident
that their privacy is being protected, they will reveal more and thus create a
more accurate database of intentions (which will be more useful to advertisers). -
FAROO also appears to have a simple and elegant "implicit web" approach to
social search as they explain on their
blog. Their key point is that the user does not have to tag or take any
other explicit action to take advantage of social search: -
"FAROO utilizes the implicit web to direct the crawler to places the
users are interested in, to select, rank and personalize results
according to the attention users paid to the content visited, and to
implement behavior targeting for advertising based on present and past
behavior."
The Software-as-a-Service path for the midmarket | The Pervasive Datacenter - CNET Blogs
Tags: IT, SMB, SaaS, cloud, computing, datacenter, staff, strategy on 2008-03-26 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Thus, the vendor seeking to increase midmarket footprint typically has to put
together different types of product packaging, if not entirely different
products, and craft go-to-market (GTM) approaches that differ in substantial
ways from those supporting large enterprise sales. -
Computing isn't going to jump from the datacenter to the network overnight; if
nothing else, the rate and specifics or such a shift are matters for spirited
debate. But as a general direction for computing, it's hard to make
much of an argument. -
It's also hard to argue with a contention that, again as a general rule, SaaS
should have more near-term appeal in the midmarket than the larger enterprise.
The list of reasons why is substantial: midmarket companies have smaller IT
staffs, they tend to use more pre-packaged and less complex applications, their
IT infrastructures tend to have fewer "moving parts" (and therefore better lend
themselves to carving out pieces to run over the network), and existing
relationships with midmarket ISVs and VARs could make the transition to SaaS
applications from those partners fairly natural. Or, to put it more bluntly,
enterprises may find running their own IT infrastructures costly, but for many
midmarket companies, it's genuinely hard and even harder to bring new
applications and the like online.
The CIO’s innovation dilemma
Tags: CIO, Dennis Howlett, IT, Michael Krigsman, extinct, innovation, management, strategy, zdnet on 2008-03-25 -All Annotations (0) -About
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This
is an alien world for many folk in IT who have been conditioned to build
control over repeatable, automated processes based on architectures that were
never designed to support the ad hoc, infinitely variable nature of problem
solving at the interface between one person and another. I think this lies at
the heart of the dilemma faced by many IT organizations and not, as Mike largely
suggests, a combination of turf defending attitudes, understandable though they
may be. -
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The net effect on IT budgets means innovation is genuinely hard for the CIO yet
demands remain. -
The specific context for that discussion is for another post but the point is
well made. He is describing a typical IT pain point where socialprise or new
innovations can come to the rescue. So what about the place of IT in all of
this? -
On-demand models save users the problem of installing and maintaining solutions
while the seductive lure of ducking out from beneath the tyranny of the email
inbox resonates with users in many departments. There comes a point though where
IT has to be involved. -
Ross’s argument is based upon the assumption that many of today’s internal
business problems center around two things: exception handling and
collaboration, both of which are inherently human activities -
In contrast, the new breed of software holds enormous promise, is delivering value and is
satisfying the board level imperative of improving effectiveness, not just
efficiency. It’s an entirely different mindset that puts the order to cash
transaction into background and brings service into sharp relief -
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What we’re seeing is the wholly human problem of an organization that has
been variously called upon to deliver ‘value’ from an evolving IT landscape that
once placed emphasis on control but which now demands productive innovation.
Both demand very different ways of working, require different disciplines and
absolutely require change. -
If socialprise wishes to become a leading category for IT spend then perhaps it
needs to drink some of its own Kool-Aid. It can draw from Ross and others’
experience as one of the legs upon which IT can be brought to the party. Then
maybe we’ll start to see the breaking down of the siloes that allow enterprise
to effectively address the tough problems that innovation seeks to solve.
Is IT becoming extinct? | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com
Tags: IT, Michael Kingsman, SOA, SaaS, blog, extinct, issues, leadership, management, strategy, zdnet on 2008-03-25 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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In this new world, IT is caretaker rather than strategic business partner or
visionary -
[As the availability of standardized IT resources] increases and their cost
decreases — as they become ubiquitous — they become commodity inputs. From a
strategic standpoint, they become invisible; they no longer matter. -
Low-cost, external software providers are building and
maintaining network, and support, services previously belonging to IT. It’s
great for the enterprise, but reduces ITs power, influence, and budget -
IT loses credibility by speaking in technical jargon and failing to deliver core
projects on time and within budget -
….[E]verybody and everything should be about creating new business value on
behalf of the customer. [W]e have conned ourselves into believing there are
separations to justify organization charts where people build empires, when
actually you [should] have a bunch of people taking accountability for different
facets of the business. -
W]e have to get to the idea that we’re all in this together, because we are in
business together, and we are in the business of delivering value to our
customers. -
[M]any senior business executives don’t fully understand how IT processes
function, nor do they completely grasp the ramifications that technical
decisions can have on non-technical business strategies. -
As the older generation of marketing- and finance-oriented,
computer-illiterate senior managers die off and retire, you’ll gradually see a
new generation coming in that is fully comfortable with the day-to-day activity
and the strategic possibilities of IT, and who will be able to work more closely
with CIOs.
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