ReTweetMe

I find myself using metaphors nearly every day. I wonder if this is because the things I focus on are actually complex, or that they are not all that complex, it just seems that way. Many blogger, Journalists and Marketeers are trying to help people to really understand what is hype and what is real, regarding Cloud. Personally, I have spent a lot of time on Twitter lately, mostly research, but I ‘Tweet’ as well - participation is required. A quick aside - TweetDeck is a great tool, allows filtering etc.,… Honestly, I can understand how people could get frustrated with Twitter, if such a tool did not exist.

Some slight drama around the house this week, nothing like family drama to help put things in perspective. One moderate snowboarding accident, and my 14yo has a broken Radius, and he is not happy about it (not because Snowboarding is done for the season, rather due to Soccer season now a few weeks delayed). He will recover, bone heal.

Spending a lot of quiet time at home. I needed a little distraction from worrying about my son.  The experience did - of course - suggest yet another metaphor for Cloud computing. The accident occured at Stowe mountain resort in northern Vermont. The ski patrol did a marginal job ( he boarded the rest of the way down the mountain and they did not do a though diagnostic).  They presented a few options for treatment, a local family clinic, a local hosptial and the Level 1 trauma center in Burlington (FAHC - who did a stellar job).

The first choice was the local one, seemed to make the most sense - but a 3 hour wait changed my mind. We decided on FAHC. It turned out to be a good choice, as the break needed to be reduced (re-set, I will spare details), which is complex, and requires expertise.

How is this is this a metaphor for Cloud computing or SaaS? The family practice, while necessary and local, and probably able to handle many situations, was not prepared for the ’spike in demand’ (apparently many kids had issues on Friday due to very hard snow). The clinic was overwhelmed. Even if they had been able to do the initial diagnoses, they did not have the expertise house to complete the treatment. This points out two very important characteristics of larger, centralized services:

• Spikes in demand can be handled as a matter of course
• The model allows for expertise to be centrally managed (not for everything of course)

My experience leaves out all the scenarios which would have played to the strength of the local practice, of which there are many. But it is another way to think of Cloud and Utility computing. There are certain areas which it makes a lot of sense to centralize and pool resources to gain a higher value.

The Sports entertainment industry is nothing, if not opportunistic.  Again, a little backdrop is in order  If you are a US sports enthusiast, there is not a whole lot going on in March. Football (NFL) is done, Baseball is not really started, the NBA is resting players or trying modestly for home court, Hockey - which is not too bad this year - is mid-season still. OK - Some modest excitement in the EUFA Champions League but not many Americans really appreciate it.

Opportunity? Absolutely!

The media industry capitalized on the lack of ‘anything else to do’ and blows it right out of the water every March!  It is advertising revenue based, it has a massive audience (35 million, by some estimates).  Most (all?) of the online social networks are getting (have gotten?) into this as well. Facebook, ESPN** and  Yahoo jump onto any of them and see how easy  it is too find a group to join to fill out your bracket (a prediction of the tournament victors in each round).

** Try telling ESPN that they are not a social network. I am sure that Twitter will be ablaze with Tweets this season as well, the revenue model is still a little sketchy there - but we hear they are working on it.

Great, so what, where is the tie-in to technology? Consider the current economic conditions – IT budgets have been slashed, the phrase “do more with less” is driving us all nuts but we do have work to do.  Your Enterprise applications are not getting any younger, they need to be changed, updated and modernized – to add all the cool social networking stuff.  Work  still needs to get done, the competition is still moving ahead.

Opportunity? Absolutely!

The Infrastructure players mostly, and some SaaS players are trying to figure out how to monetize the investment they have been making for the past 5 years (Did you know Google has over a million servers?). In a strong economy,  Enterprise IT fights back the service model (computers not behind their 4 walls) shouting “risk risk risk” and they win (for a short while).

They also shouted the same thing about open source 5 years ago, they lost that battle and they are about to lose this one. Back to the economy, with capital budgets being cut, companies are still trying to figure out how to move forward. If they could only deploy new applications using operational budgets and stay within their means, they might be ok…Oh, wait, they can! It is all in place for Enterprise IT to capitalize on what many others have been building.

This is going to be a break-out year for Service delivery, which has been enabled by open source, in case you were wondering. If you do not believe me, just check out the US Presidents selection of a CIO, Mr Vivek Kundra.

Next on the agenda, “Cheer with your heart, make decisions with your mind.”

The central theme, of this first series on ‘ReTweetMe’ is focused on how to derive value from what people call “The Cloud” and to help Enterprise decision makers dissect hype from reality. The topic itself is moderately interesting, but given the time of year, using the March Madness, that is about to take center stage in the US, seems a good way to keep things even more interesting - Enjoy. You can follow Mitch on Twitter @mjayliebs

For those not in the US, or who do not follow sports the reference to March madness is an annual focus on the Men College Basketball. Each March there is a single elimination tournament (NCAA) to crown a College Basketball champion. During certain times within the tournament, games are during business hours and, well, let’s just say some folks lose focus a bit during the workday (by some estimates, the US workforce could lose $1.5B in productivity during the tournament).

You might say it is a stretch to try and relate a college basketball tournament to technology, specifically, Cloud computing and SocialCRM. I think that with some creative use of metaphors and hyperbole, we will be able to have some fun in relating these two topics. The madness that is March is dose of good competition, peppered with a  marketing campaign seeking to connect us with our long (some longer than others) forgotten college/university days. Do not get me wrong, the fans do get excited, but the rest of the country has some help.  If you would like more information about the tournament itslef, you can check wikipedia or HowStuffWorks.

So, what about Cloud - or “The Cloud”?

Cloud Computing is a very real value proposition for many folks in IT.  It is this strong push from the blogospere, the Press, your boss which makes us all wonder how and what we should be doing. The emotional play is based on the economy and reducing IT spend, without slowing down.

How to choose? Who to choose? What exactly do I need?

Back to Basketball -

The NCAA tournament has a few Cinderella’s  - you know, the David Versus Goliath,  the hopefuls that beat a higher ranked opponent when only a few gave them a real chance. Then, as victors, they become the disruptor, forcing bigger and better teams to figure out how and why they won. The viewing audience then starts to cheer for the Cinderella, and push them on to success. The media also jumps on the opportunity to keep the audience interested and watching and telling their friends - SportCenter will be sure to spend extra time on these types of games.

Another character in the story are the big names, the ones everyone loves  to hate (No names here – think a title of royals, in North Carolina, US). I bet a few of you have some ideas who the Cloud Provider analogies are here. The question here is, will anyone be able to challenge the dominance of Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, SUN or Rackspace from an Infrastructure perspective? Look for FaceBook to be a serious player here as well - or will Facebook simply be a platform play.

As we progress through the series, I will “peel back the Onion”, and show that the Cloud is a lot of things which unfortunately, too many people refer to ‘it’ when they really mean all that it represents. To a CIO, the Cloud is: infrastructure+platform+software available to me when I need it, where ever I am. SaaS is: an application, with access to storage and a network, available to my users when they need it, where ever they are.

We will leave the XaaS details for another day.

Helping you to choose wisely is an objective of this series. Some of the components are very mature – operating systems and databases, others are young with rough edges – pure Platform plays (Coghead), who did not last. It all depends upon your use and tolerance for risk.

Mårten Mickos observed, with respect to open source, that the community is willing to trade time to save money and the later community is willing to trade money to save time (customers). This seems to hold true in the Cloud space as well. The difference is free is not an option, but inexpensive is!.  In this respect, the Cloud and open source have a strong similarities.

This the first in the series, tomorrow the focus changes to the timing of it - Why Now?