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 ;-)
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