A year ago, both Gartner and TIF recommended that large corporations like ours should hold tight for 3-5 years and watch what's happening with the cloud market. They reckoned we could still deliver Messaging & Collaboration services more efficiently with an inhouse model because of the economies of scale we can leverage through our sheer user numbers. In 3-5 years, competition between the big players in the market will have driven down cloud services pricing and we'd then be in a good position to migrate.
However, looking at the stats, it looks like the time to act is now. More than ever, I think we made the right decision to take the risk and move now. The cloud is THE next big thing for messaging & collaboration and companies, big and small, are heading there as we speak. Yes it is still early days for the bigger end of the scale, but it definitely looks like those 50,000+ companies will be very close on our heels. And hey, doesn't it feel good to pioneer for once as opposed to follow the tested, well known and proven route?
Cheesy as it sounds, it's certainly a brilliant time to be part of EUT and I can't wait to get our first users into the cloud.
But for now, that's all folks :p
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
When the cloud takes over ...
... speaking about the time (if it ever comes) when all of IT will be provided through the cloud and how we are in the process of destroying our own jobs, and how can we therefore convince our people that this is the way to go, there was a quote I thought you might appreciate in the current climate.
"It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." ;-)
"It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." ;-)
The Chocolate Cloud
James then took us through his experience with a recent "incident" involving one of our promotion websites collapsing under the weight of unexpected usage peaks. I'm sure you'll know what I'm referring to, so I won't go into the details : )
This presentation won the award for Most Post-Pres Questions for the day hands-down, there were in fact so much interest & so many questions that James also hijacked the next open Q&A session, leaving me no chance at all to boo him, pfff :D
Jokes apart however, what was really appealing and unique about James's presentation during the day was that it was a real-world use case scenario where James's team had dealt with a true business crisis by using cloud services and in doing so had generated some real value to the business. I think the audience reacted very positively to the process, the story, the learnings. So go James for audience reaction, should really have brought those pom-poms ! ; )
This presentation won the award for Most Post-Pres Questions for the day hands-down, there were in fact so much interest & so many questions that James also hijacked the next open Q&A session, leaving me no chance at all to boo him, pfff :D
Jokes apart however, what was really appealing and unique about James's presentation during the day was that it was a real-world use case scenario where James's team had dealt with a true business crisis by using cloud services and in doing so had generated some real value to the business. I think the audience reacted very positively to the process, the story, the learnings. So go James for audience reaction, should really have brought those pom-poms ! ; )
"Big Bangs ...
... work for creating universes, they don't necessarily work for migrating to the cloud." :D
Ask the Experts session
In this session, we talked about a panoply of topics surrounding cloud computing. My interpretation of the discussion(s) below.
- Space to watch : Cloud ERP services. After years of madness surrounding ERP's, there seems to be a lull in the industry at the moment and indeed, we are seeing this phenomenon too. Most enterprises, just like us, are wrapping up their ERP implementation and are now in a stable state. Going back to the Keynote, it looks like ERP may be starting to become a commodity. Do any of our ERP processes add direct competitive advantage to our business? Ie, do they allow us to differentiate ourselves as an enterprise from any of our competitors? And if not, do we need to keep ERP processes inhouse? This lull might be THE opportunity for "standard", and therefore more efficient, Cloud ERP services to emerge.
- On the other hand, there are few systems that map out our business processes as closely as ERPs do. And some of our business processes are indeed directly linked to what makes our business different from other businesses ie that add real competitive advantage ... and it is for this very reason that we've customised SAP and its dependent systems so much ... would we really want to re-engineer our business processes to reflect a standard set of ERP processes for the sake of efficiency ? It comes down again to the fine balance between efficiency and quality, cost savings and functionality.
- There are organisations like IBM which have IT as their core business. There are organisations like ourselves which don't have IT as their core business. It is interesting to see the variation in the perceptions these 2 types of companies have of social software for the enterprise and its potential to enhance productivity. Enterprises with IT at the core of their business seem to be very eager to try anything and everything social networking, to the point that to us, they might seem like they're crossing that fine line between blue-sky-thinking and naivity. Just different worlds I guess :-)
- When enterprises roll out social software eg. blogs or wikis or Facebook-type social software, we tend to mix up expectations we have of individuals vs. expectations we have of roles in the enterprise. In other words, as an enterprise, there is a distinction between wanting to empower the individual to share information/opinions versus wanting to empower a role to share information/opinions. The implications are clearly also different. Empowering a role is ultimately a way of enforcing organisation control. Conversely, empowering the individual may in some cases weaken organisational control, especially where there are value clashes between the individual and the organisation. Are we, as a company, ready to promote individual empowerment? If not, we need to be very clear that we are empowering the roles in the organisation so associates understand what is acceptable and what is not.
- Federation between the clouds will be driven by business requirements. We are already seeing some forms of federation between IM clouds, but this trend will depend hugely on what cloud customers demand.
Standardisation through the Cloud is ...
... now that I've got no choice, I can tell the end user that they've got no choice :-)
Lotus Live - Online Collaboration Services from IBM
TIF circumvented one of their rules for this conference and invited a vendor to present : IBM's VP for Online Collaboration Services brought LotusLive to the forum, presented of course through a slide deck brought to us by Lotus Symphony, eat your heart out Powerpoint! :D
For the diehard yellow bleeding fans, you'll be pleased to know that they have now revamped LotusLive and made it, surprise surprise, yellow. Like the rest of the Domino suite we have raved on and on about, the UI is Apple-quality slick in (despite?) all its yellow glory, but my co-delegate quickly points out, is yellow really a good, credible colour for an enterprise product ?
Nevertheless, LotusLive has apparently taken the market by storm and they have signed up millions of users within the last year, Panasonic being one of the most notable ones with 90,000 users. Our presenter takes us through the unique selling point of the IBM product, its seamlessness from a user perspective. I won't bore you with the details again, I might start sounding like my own echo ;-)
However, from my perspective, it looked very much like the core of IBM's "cloud" collaboration strategy remained collaboration itself and IBM cloud services was just a wagon they've tagged onto the train, almost like an afterthought, to make sure they look as good as their competitors. My view is that IBM needs to make their "cloud" marketing more substantial. At the moment, nothing in their representation of LotusLive would convince me that it is a better product than their competitors' ... which is a pity, because in reality the IBM product IS better than their competitors' ... but then hasn't marketing always been IBM's weak link ?
PS : Although our IBM presenter promised he would not talk about the competition and would not try to sell anything (as if !), he could not help taking a dig @ ABC about the unkillability of Notes applications and how they were going to be around forever and ever and why therefore it didn't make sense to migrate ;-)
For the diehard yellow bleeding fans, you'll be pleased to know that they have now revamped LotusLive and made it, surprise surprise, yellow. Like the rest of the Domino suite we have raved on and on about, the UI is Apple-quality slick in (despite?) all its yellow glory, but my co-delegate quickly points out, is yellow really a good, credible colour for an enterprise product ?
Nevertheless, LotusLive has apparently taken the market by storm and they have signed up millions of users within the last year, Panasonic being one of the most notable ones with 90,000 users. Our presenter takes us through the unique selling point of the IBM product, its seamlessness from a user perspective. I won't bore you with the details again, I might start sounding like my own echo ;-)
However, from my perspective, it looked very much like the core of IBM's "cloud" collaboration strategy remained collaboration itself and IBM cloud services was just a wagon they've tagged onto the train, almost like an afterthought, to make sure they look as good as their competitors. My view is that IBM needs to make their "cloud" marketing more substantial. At the moment, nothing in their representation of LotusLive would convince me that it is a better product than their competitors' ... which is a pity, because in reality the IBM product IS better than their competitors' ... but then hasn't marketing always been IBM's weak link ?
PS : Although our IBM presenter promised he would not talk about the competition and would not try to sell anything (as if !), he could not help taking a dig @ ABC about the unkillability of Notes applications and how they were going to be around forever and ever and why therefore it didn't make sense to migrate ;-)
And then we had lunch ...
... and the IBM VP who I was desperately hoping would not recognise me came over for a chat, which went like this :
"Hi - looked at my badge - Karoona! How are you?"
"Very good thank you, how about yourself ?" with huge fake grin
"We've met before, haven't we ?"
"Umm, yes we have" Nervous laugh, what's the best hiding place in this hotel ?
"Somewhere in Orlando ? ... LoLa ? Yes that's it"
"Yes, LoLa" Stupid nervous laugh again
"Yes I remember, we had quite a few conversations about SaaS didn't we? How did it all go? Has a decision been made yet ? "
"Umm, yes"
So as expected he didn't know, as expected I had to tell him, and as expected he threw me A look and politely avoided us through the rest of the day, except for the times when he mentioned that Panasonic had moved 90,000 users to Lotus Live, at which points he threw us meaningful, if scorching, glances.
I know nothing!
"Hi - looked at my badge - Karoona! How are you?"
"Very good thank you, how about yourself ?" with huge fake grin
"We've met before, haven't we ?"
"Umm, yes we have" Nervous laugh, what's the best hiding place in this hotel ?
"Somewhere in Orlando ? ... LoLa ? Yes that's it"
"Yes, LoLa" Stupid nervous laugh again
"Yes I remember, we had quite a few conversations about SaaS didn't we? How did it all go? Has a decision been made yet ? "
"Umm, yes"
So as expected he didn't know, as expected I had to tell him, and as expected he threw me A look and politely avoided us through the rest of the day, except for the times when he mentioned that Panasonic had moved 90,000 users to Lotus Live, at which points he threw us meaningful, if scorching, glances.
I know nothing!
ABC & BPOS
ABC (code name ;-) are currently migrating to BPOS. I had a few "informal" chats with the ABC delegates and they also presented one of the sessions. My notes so far :
Speaking to ABC was for me the most value-added exercise of the whole day. Great advice and I have been able to secure some "offline" time with the head of migration as well as their programme manager where they will talk us through their challenges/reco's/gotchas etc. We've also been invited to join a user forum that has been set up between companies that have migrated to BPOS so far. The forum includes some big names which I will not post here otherwise I'll be told off :p Something to look forward to! (the forum, not the telling off)
- About 130,000 users in about 120 countries
- About 30,000 Notes apps (my heart goes out to them)
- Migrating to BPOS (45,000 users moved so far)
- Migrating ALL of their history across
- Do not neglect the deskless option - this can save companies significant amounts of money (up to 3/4 the cost of licences per user)
- Do not assume that the existing infra will necessarily support cloud services (existing AD's, networks). They have had to spend a few millions on revamping their existing AD to suit BPOS requirements.
- Rationalise the application strategy. I do not believe our friends are using any co-existence technologies and it appears from what they told us that most of their apps are based on the same template. Like us, they have not included any budget in the migration programme to migrate their Notes apps - they are leaving it up to Business Units to fund such migration as and when required, between now and 2011. However, they already know that come 2011, they will be under pressure to review the 2011 timeline and will be asked to postpone it : ) They have however already reduced SLA's on the Notes apps (eg. only broke-fixes will be attended to, no CIPs, contained env, pretty much the same as we are planning)
- Consider Sharepoint carefully. We get one chance at rolling it out, one chance to get the governance right.
- Personalise, do not customise. (Not that we have the option to anyway!)
- Realise that this is a learning curve for our favourite people-ready vendors too. They are still learning from us customers how to deliver SERVICE vs. SOFTWARE.
- It takes time to understand where the boundaries are as far as operations is concerned. Indeed, BPOS is almost a black box solution and it will be important for us to understand clearly how much control we have over ensuring minimal business disruption.
- We can choose to migrate history, but remember that without history we can migrate whole sites (thousands of users) overnight. With the data migration route they have chosen, their deployment plan has stretched out over 18 months.
- They recommend we have a cloud exit strategy. Their strategy is to consider another cloud vendor as a 1st option and to bring back the services inhouse as a last option - the main reason being that most of their savings have been through re-organising (rightsizing :-) their workforce around the cloud solution and should they have to bring the service back inhouse, they would need significant recruitment and reskilling.
- They ran a business change programme in parallel with the technology programme. The BC programme encompassed training as well as championing of the new platform by a significant number of users in the business.
Speaking to ABC was for me the most value-added exercise of the whole day. Great advice and I have been able to secure some "offline" time with the head of migration as well as their programme manager where they will talk us through their challenges/reco's/gotchas etc. We've also been invited to join a user forum that has been set up between companies that have migrated to BPOS so far. The forum includes some big names which I will not post here otherwise I'll be told off :p Something to look forward to! (the forum, not the telling off)
"What would make cloud computing safe for business ? "
... was a presentation about the top requirements that, if fulfilled, would make enterprises move to the cloud ...
The only 2 points of interest that caught my attention in between a multitude of bullet points were that :
The only 2 points of interest that caught my attention in between a multitude of bullet points were that :
- 93% of companies want an interface between their ticketing system and the cloud because they want to be able to benchmark their remaining inhouse services against their cloud services. This is likely to be an important point for us as we move to BPOS, because while our ticket numbers will still be measured through GTS & Magic, our ability to track ticket resolution times etc. will be hindered by the fact that Magic will not integrate with whatever system Microsoft uses today, not in the short term, anyway. We need to make sure we have the required processes in place as BPOS is rolled out.
- 78% of companies want dedicated servers. Security is the main concern here, but mostly because the correlation (or lack of) between security and server isolation is not well understood by most companies. In an ideal world, yes we would have assessed multitenant vs. dedicated in detail, but given our timescales for making THE decision, it makes sense that we have gone with dedicated rather than multitenant.
Keynote #2 - Stormy Weather
The second keynote was delivered by an ex-BBC employee and was in summary an evangelist presentation of social computing and social media.
He talked us through the pervasiveness of social software and how unproductive it is for companies to ban Facebook within the corporate network. Despite the perception of inanity that enterprises may have of social software and how people use it to tell each other what they had for breakfast (do they? even I have never done that ;-), our presenter argues that in today's world, he would see inanity as a trust builder. In other words, if he cannot find somebody through a search on facebook, he is more and more inclined to mistrust that body. New concept for me, made me stop and think I have to say :-)
We also heard about how social software is a key way to enable sharing of best practice in the corporation and how everybody should have access to it, regardless of whether they are manufacturing, sales, IT ...
Overall, nothing new for us regular readers of social computing articles, and I walked out of that session still unconvinced that social software (the Facebook-type anyway) would add any significant value in a company like ours. In the BBC, where the very heart of the organisation is information and sharing of information is their bread and butter, yes I can understand how social software could enhance productivity in a significant way, but for us, I remain doubtful.
Oh and I could only stare in admiration as he got away with not answering a difficult question at the end of his presentation by looking very grave and saying "This is a point of orchestration", which totally baffled the poor guy who had asked the question.
That moment marked the beginning of BS Bingo for the day, watch the space ;-)
He talked us through the pervasiveness of social software and how unproductive it is for companies to ban Facebook within the corporate network. Despite the perception of inanity that enterprises may have of social software and how people use it to tell each other what they had for breakfast (do they? even I have never done that ;-), our presenter argues that in today's world, he would see inanity as a trust builder. In other words, if he cannot find somebody through a search on facebook, he is more and more inclined to mistrust that body. New concept for me, made me stop and think I have to say :-)
We also heard about how social software is a key way to enable sharing of best practice in the corporation and how everybody should have access to it, regardless of whether they are manufacturing, sales, IT ...
Overall, nothing new for us regular readers of social computing articles, and I walked out of that session still unconvinced that social software (the Facebook-type anyway) would add any significant value in a company like ours. In the BBC, where the very heart of the organisation is information and sharing of information is their bread and butter, yes I can understand how social software could enhance productivity in a significant way, but for us, I remain doubtful.
Oh and I could only stare in admiration as he got away with not answering a difficult question at the end of his presentation by looking very grave and saying "This is a point of orchestration", which totally baffled the poor guy who had asked the question.
That moment marked the beginning of BS Bingo for the day, watch the space ;-)
TIF Cloud Computing, London - KeyNote Session1 - Situation Normal, Everything Must Change
Today, James M and I attended TIF's Cloud Computing Conference in London, Victoria Park Plaza, 2 floors underground.
The opening Keynote today was delivered by an enthusiastic geneticist and was very, very good. The presenter focused the opening session around the theme of commoditisation, kicking off the conference with an abstract model of how innovation turns into products which turn into commodities depending on their ubiquity vs. certainty ratio. Sounds geeky? Oh yeah ;-)
On an even geekier note, he also took us through the concept of how products, when they turn into commodities, will not only enable further innovation in their space but also accelerate the product's development itself. This is because as a product gets more stable, so does its capacity to undergo major disruption. To quote him, "the rate of evolution of a complex system is dependent on the organisation of its subsystems" eg. if we look at the computing stack (infra, platform, software) the reason software has been able to develop so fast is because infra and platform have themselves turned into commodities over the years and therefore have been able to support and accelerate development of software.
Which kind of made me think about the Domino vs. Microsoft debate again ... yes I know this is now history, but it did remind me of how IBM seem to have got to a point where they are now evolving the development of the seamlessness & usability of their technologies whereas Microsoft seems to still be focused on getting the technology itself right ... base layer stability anyone? : )
Anywho, back to the real world, it will definitely be interesting to see where innovation takes us once cloud computing becomes a commodity.
He also dispelled a couple of cloud computing myths upfront : 1) That the customer has a choice. According to our presenter, the only thing an enterprise will achieve by not moving to the cloud is to increase the competitive gap between their IT service and the market and this pressure will only keep increasing as cloud services costs go down through in-market competition. And no he was not a vendor. 2) That cloud computing is green and it will save customers money, which made me nod in agreement ; )
He wrapped up his keynote by confirming what has been our opinion in Mars all year : that the question about cloud computing is not IF, it's WHEN. Hmm, 2010, apparently :D
Overall, exceptional (if geeky) keynote.
Content Relevance : 4/5
Delivery : 4/5
The opening Keynote today was delivered by an enthusiastic geneticist and was very, very good. The presenter focused the opening session around the theme of commoditisation, kicking off the conference with an abstract model of how innovation turns into products which turn into commodities depending on their ubiquity vs. certainty ratio. Sounds geeky? Oh yeah ;-)
On an even geekier note, he also took us through the concept of how products, when they turn into commodities, will not only enable further innovation in their space but also accelerate the product's development itself. This is because as a product gets more stable, so does its capacity to undergo major disruption. To quote him, "the rate of evolution of a complex system is dependent on the organisation of its subsystems" eg. if we look at the computing stack (infra, platform, software) the reason software has been able to develop so fast is because infra and platform have themselves turned into commodities over the years and therefore have been able to support and accelerate development of software.
Which kind of made me think about the Domino vs. Microsoft debate again ... yes I know this is now history, but it did remind me of how IBM seem to have got to a point where they are now evolving the development of the seamlessness & usability of their technologies whereas Microsoft seems to still be focused on getting the technology itself right ... base layer stability anyone? : )
Anywho, back to the real world, it will definitely be interesting to see where innovation takes us once cloud computing becomes a commodity.
He also dispelled a couple of cloud computing myths upfront : 1) That the customer has a choice. According to our presenter, the only thing an enterprise will achieve by not moving to the cloud is to increase the competitive gap between their IT service and the market and this pressure will only keep increasing as cloud services costs go down through in-market competition. And no he was not a vendor. 2) That cloud computing is green and it will save customers money, which made me nod in agreement ; )
He wrapped up his keynote by confirming what has been our opinion in Mars all year : that the question about cloud computing is not IF, it's WHEN. Hmm, 2010, apparently :D
Overall, exceptional (if geeky) keynote.
Content Relevance : 4/5
Delivery : 4/5
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