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Weekly digest of week 9 2010

This week an explaination about what the difference is between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, boomers slowly moving to the mobile web, should IT run like a business or a nonprofit and the next generation user interface: skinput.

Light reading:

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 8, 2010

The Ninth Type Of Deadly Waste

Even with the troubles of product defects at Toyota, the Lean methodology derived from the Toyota Production System is still valid. The simple fact is that Toyota has strayed from their own path and ventured into the world of mass production ways of working. With disastrous effect. The plan that Mr Toyoda has presented basically comes down to a renewed, and more strict, focus on the customer and on quality. And even though many people still view Lean as only applicable to manufacturing, it still moves up in the world of services. And rightfully so.

One of the key features of Lean is eliminating Muda, or waste. The continuous improvement is aimed at finding waste in an organization and remove it. In literature and practice, seven types of deadly waste are identified (unnecessary transportation, excess inventory, unnecessary motion of employees, waiting, over production, over processing, rework), and structurally removed from operations. In some circles, an eighth type of waste is acknowledged, as being the underutilizing of human talent. I think we can identify and remove a ninth type of waste: excess use of resources.

For this ninth type of waste, you just have to look around you to find vivid examples. It ranges from excess use of energy by leaving machines or lights switched on when not necessary, extra long meetings with too many attendees who do not all need to be present, excess use of paper by printing everything you need to read. But the example I want to go into a bit deeper is more hidden, but is relatively easy to eliminate: excess use of data storage space.

Most of us are used to communicating with our colleagues through email. We send important documents, messages and requests by mail to the recipients, meanwhile copying our managers, co-workers and anybody else that we think should be interested. Every time we send an email, what we actually do is create a digital copy that consumes storage space. If it is a short message to one person, it might not seem that much. But just look at the last 25 mails you’ve sent. The average distribution list probably contains at least 4 people, the average message contains the complete mail chain, and 1 out of 4 messages probably contain an attachment. An example calculation of the direct storage space needed could be as follows:
- message size: 50 KB
- attachment size: 1 MB
- storage size needed: 5 times 1.05MB = 5.25 MB.
Then take into account that you probably send/receive about 20 messages like this per day, and just imagine that you work in a company with roughly 80.000 employees world wide. Factor in the datatraffic and backup storage costs, plus the energy used for all of this. I didn’t dare…

But how can we do this different? Imagine a world where we have as centrally hosted messaging platform. And next to that, a centrally hosted document repository. As a cherry on the cake, we also have a system that allows us to talk to eachother directly with information stored only in memory, unless we indicate we want to save the conversation. Doesn’t really sound futuristic, does it? This world exists, and is often referred to as Enterprise2.0. But whatever nametag you put on it: we don’t use it enough. There are platforms that allow centrally hosted group discussion within a closed network. Yammer is an example, but Lotus Connections is as well. And there are many other solutions like that. Next to that, most companies have a document repository at their disposal. Ranging from a shared network drive to fully open source knowledge management systems of the Drupal type. On top of that we have Office communicator, GoogleTalk, FacebookChat, Skype and many other instant messaging solutions, that often support voice over IP as well (say goodbye to a large chunk of your monthly phone bill).

So, in my last post on this platform, as I am leaving Capgemini with a small tear in my eye, I would like to call on you to think before you mail. Please consider to use that internal or external social media platform like Yammer or Twitter more, and centrally store your documents and just communicate links. Either through a microblogging platform or instant messaging. Eliminating the waste of excess resource usage can be so simple. Just do it!

Arjan Tupan is a Transformation Manager at Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or LinkedIn

Posted by Arjan Tupan on February 23, 2010

To search or to find? That is the question

Search Cap.jpg There's more information on the Internet than one could apprehend in a hundred lifetimes, and it's growing too - and (most of the times) kept up-to-date. Different organisations, places and networks holding that information make it hard to get it all together, so how to make that information homogenous, and uniformly accessible?

Can it be done? Should it be done?

Over the last decade we went from data to knowledge.The World Wide Web has linked companies and consumers in the last decade. This inspired the more shy organisations to build intranets, where only company people would find each other
That was about linking data: the same things could be done in a new way
Then web shops came. Forums. Peer to peer networks for sharing ever legal and not so legal delight. All that came and became mainstream so fast that the inter-intra move didn't even have time to "happen".
That was about connecting, and information: more or less new things were done in new ways
In the last few years, social networks conquered the digital earth: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Such a different kind of behaviour, it was absolutely new. It was using the infrastructure already laid out (computers, networks and people using those) to build upon.
That was about sharing information, acquiring knowledge: entirely new means to an entirely new end.

Meanwhile, WikiPedia was born. An unprecedented source of information with more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.
Stats in monthly unique visitors for all that: LinkedIn 15 million, Facebook 130 million, Twitter 55 million, WikiPedia 60 million.
That's a lot of data, information and knowledge. And it's all out there. Wait, where?

Yes, it's all out there, pretty much. Google helps us in finding it, almost real-time. We've seen some struggles with Facebook that treated their data as a walled garden, but they're slowly opening up too. With Google starting to index books, video and other content, all knowledge in the world starts to become available online and realtime.
But it is scattered all over the place, in different forms, behind different doors: not uniform or homogenous. It's very diverse

The Integration theme: overcoming diversity

Integrating applications, departments and companies has shown this same theme over the last decades: diversity in form, location and accessibility has to be overcome.
The European Parliament shows how that can be done: introduce an intermediate language (or two, in that case), support different communication channels, and facilitate-by-translation.
That works very well for all: the focus and attention remains on the "stars" themselves, the highly specialised participants. Like business shouldn't be bothered with IT, they aren't bothered by the linguistical barriers and can just move in and out.

There's a big precondition to all that though, which is that the semantics are agreed upon beforehand. In the European Parliament somehow magically, changing semantics are picked up by all parties involved. Now how does all this work in the World Wide Web?

The first WWW problem: different format
Structured versus unstructured versus semi-structured. HTML, text, .doc, .PDF, Facebook updates, Tweets, it's all different. However, search engines make all of that transparent. After all, there are only so many syntaxes around. Of course, visuals like video and images are an entirely different topic, but even those are magically informated by Google
The second WWW problem: different location
Is it on the web, or behind a company firewall? Does it need authorisation? Only what is openly available can be searched. And it doesn't matter whether it is located north, east, south, west, or orbiting around earth. Search engines make all of that transparent too
The third WWW problem: different languages, dialects and typos
It still takes too many rules to perfectly translate a language to another one. English is widely present though, and there are as many typos and spelling errors made by native speakers as by foreigners. All that has to be taken into account as well. Luckily most search engines do. They suggest correct spelling if you search something and misspell it. They'll even include misspelt search results

The real WWW problem: different semantics

The biggest problem is (changing) semantics. Wikipedia spends pages and pages on disambiguation explaining the differences between one word or acronym, and the other. The word web, for instance, can have entirely different meanings in different contexts. Even if, across all different forms, locations and languages, you are looking for the word web, what is the context you want to place it in? Heck, you might not even know that yourself...
The best example of how vivid a semantic discussion can be is the initial discussion around  E2.0 and Social Business Design

The possible solution: autonomous tagging

Tagging is a way of labelling a piece of information with a single word or phrase. Tags are decided upon individually by humans, in relative isolation. There is no central, global tagging system where one can pick their tags from. Although tags now also are a form of language or at least communication. If information were to be tagged, these tags could be translated or related, and form connections across all diversities.

What if there were a tag knowledgebase much like today's Wikipedia? Where tags are maintained, explained, etcetera? This would be the ultimate source of metadata, making it possible for the Single Source of Search to be conducted. Its interface could be defined and plugged into, and it would be the single source of truth for the Semantic Web
Bots could crawl the entire Web tagging information whether it's HTML, PDF, Video or images or whatsoever

In my last post I explained about the position and quality of humans versus machines. This very complex and dynamic terrain is definitely something that needs to be explored and maintained by humans first. When that's succesful, we might be able to automate that, and skip to the next level: wisdom

Thanks to Paolo Saitti for asking a few nasty questions and giving a few nasty answers at the same time; here they are:

Tagging however will require certain semantical and cultural alignment. The level of knowledge also dictates the detailedness of search. SQL Server is too generic if you want to find something about SQL Server 2008 Service Broker - but you need that level of knowledge to be able to know the difference!
At the basis, agreed semantics are needed. Human beings simply call it a dictionary. The traditional dictionary experience is quite enlightening: new words spring up from informal usage, often from jargon language. This is the dynamic and "democratic" evolution of natural languages. As they become (very) common, the compilers of the dictionaries decide to include the new terms in the "official" language. Here an upper authority is required to provide a formal unambiguous definition for the new word.
Distributed, informal, continously evolving tagging (a bottom-up process) is enough for human interactions. On the other hand we'll need a formal, robust and agreed tagging dictionary with a consistent effort to develop and maintain it (a top-down process) in order to build semantic applications exploiting contents over the web.

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter. Paolo Saitti is Enterprise Software Engineer within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter

Posted by Martijn Linssen on February 16, 2010

Weekly digest of week 6 2010

In this week’s digest: There is a new younger generation: the iGeneration, schools shouldn’t block social network sites, we all know benefits of SaaS, but are there more benefits than just more low costs. And if you have been buzzing about Google Buzz, take a look at the special edition of the weekly digest about Google Buzz.

Light reading:

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 15, 2010

A New Landscape: SAP in the Amazon Cloud

Last year, Capgemini’s VP of Packages, John Waymire challenged the SAP Solution Centre here to put SAP ‘in the Cloud’. A small team of us took up the challenge and started looking into how the public Amazon Cloud (Amazon Web Services or AWS Cloud) could be used.

SAP is deeply involved in the AWS Cloud and has been supporting the company’s internal systems since 2008 (see a video here and a wiki here). As a SAP Partner, Capgemini leveraged its strong relationship with the company to deploy a Proof of Concept (POC) landscape in the AWS Cloud in October 2009.

I’m pleased to say, it’s 2010 and the challenge has been met. Our SAP Solution Centre boasts a solid understanding of SAP in an Amazon Cloud environment. How? Simple. We put SAP in the Cloud to prove to ourselves it could be done, then built it for our clients to spread the word.

So what exactly did we build?

Currently the SAP Solution Centre has a Proof of Concept (POC) laboratory running in the AWS Cloud, primarily on Windows, but also on Linux-based servers, a key part of our next phase of development.

As the person responsible for the technical aspects of the landscape, I was part of the team that deployed, at various stages, the following systems from the SAP Business Suite 7 portfolio:

After signing a contract with a major British Utilities services company just before Christmas, the newly appointed Capgemini project team quickly found that there was no way to provision the required hardware for a blueprint system through normal channels. The project had to start within days of the contracts being signed, and the team was ready to move across multiple geographies.

In order to keep the contract on-time and on-budget, and ensure the climate was right to commence, it was decided to build or ’stand up’ the environment in the AWS Cloud. In four days we were able to build the above landscape in the AWS Cloud and have it ready for functional consultants to begin and complete work in 48 hours. In a traditional hosting environment this landscape would have taken weeks to create, simply because of the number of people it involves.

However, rapid deployment is not the only driver for the AWS Cloud as cost is also a key benefit. The solution outlined above has been deployed for approximately 40% of the cost of a standard hosting landscape. So successful was the deployment, it turned heads within our SAP Solution Centre. Within days, several consultants were exploring what part of their SAP landscapes could be put into an AWS Cloud.

This is a new and fresh challenge, as we seek to ensure that this solution is only used at the right time and in the right way. To that end, below is a framework that the Capgemini team has constructed to assess whether or not a solution can be deployed safely in the AWS Cloud.

Some of the high level criteria are:

·         Time constraints - How quickly do the systems really need to be available?  

o    Everyone wants their systems immediately, but when does the system actually need to be available?

·         Cost requirements - What are the cost drivers for the customer?  

o   Of course everyone wants to use the least costly option, but some drivers for reducing costs are more compelling than others, and they should not be taken at the expense of the project outcomes

·         Who is responsible for provision of the systems? - Is it Capgemini or the client?

o    This has a huge bearing on whether a landscape can and should be deployed into the AWS Cloud.

·         SLAs - Is there an SLA for service provision?  

o   The AWS Cloud has no SLAs in place for a normal account, it is built upon the concept of disposable servers and computing power

·         Access requirements - Who needs access and from where?

·         Data security - What sort of data will be held within the system?  

o   Although AWS has passed several security certifications, there is still some fine tuning required to the security model in relation to SAP

During the last 5 months, we have been able to move from a theoretical exercise of deploying SAP in the cloud to actually having a live SAP project deployed for a major British company as part of an overall programme that runs into the £100’s of millions. The learning curve has been substantial, especially moving from a POC environment to a live environment, as there are many things that are often forgotten in a POC. We have encountered several challenges during our landscape deployments, but we have resolved them and provided more functional and flexible environments in doing so. Technology always moves quickly, and all too often companies are guilty of claiming they can do something or that something is possible before it’s actually been done. We’re proud to say that we’ve not fallen into that trap.

In terms of next steps, Capgemini is working exclusively with SAP to provide better applications to help manage systems in the AWS Cloud and to expand our expertise into other areas, like SAP on a Windows Azure platform or IBM’s Compute Cloud. Following our success with Amazon, both companies are very interested in working with Capgemini to deploy SAP landscapes on their Cloud platforms.

The possibilities that the Cloud presents are immense, and on a personal level, I honestly can’t remember being so excited about being involved with something at such an early stage. However, in order to realise those immense possibilities, we as trusted advisors must guide our customers to use the right tools and methodologies at the right times. We must not allow ourselves to be prejudiced against traditional methods if they are right for the circumstances. This can spoil the party for everyone.

This entry was written by Chris Kernaghan. Chris works in the SAP Solution Centre within Technology Services in Capgemini UK, he specialises in SAP upgrades and infrastructure migrations.

Posted by Rick Mans on February 9, 2010

Cloud and Social: the tectonic plates of IT 2.0

Tectonic_plate_boundaries.png

We're on the verge of a new era in IT. Web 2.0, E2.0, SOA 2.0: anything 2.0, which I combinedly call IT 2.0

My first IT experiences dating back 25 years, I've noticed that it basically provides humans with machines. Or more accurately, human tasks are slowly replaced by machine tasks where possible

It takes time to turn human tasks into machine tasks, so basically they shouldn't change while being built. They also shouldn't change much after being built. That's why building houses on sand was considered foolish millennia ago already.
It's almost exactly like portrait painting. It's a lot easier doing that when the model sits still, and when done the result looks much more alike if the model doesn't change too much after that

Knowing the how, now the question is: which human tasks can be replaced by machines, or automated?

The closer you come to business, the more humans you'll need. The further you move away from business, the more machines you can use. Basically, business needs people, and machine needs infrastructure

That puts humans on top in the IT foodchain, and machines at the bottom. Although arguably both depend on one another and couldn't live without...

Having said that, there are lots of different properties for humans and machines. Here's a quick model:

Machines serve automation. They are (and must be) rigid, because what runs directly on top is simple and static: great for storing business rules, they handle data very well. They sit in the infrastructure layer
Humans serve people. They are (and must be) flexible, because what they support is complex and dynamic: great for handling business exceptions, they handle information very well. They are part of the business layer

If you compare that to the latest trends, machines perfectly translate to Cloud, and humans to Social

IaaS, Paas and Saas all perfectly fit into the infrastructure layer mentioned above thanks to virtualisation and Utility Computing.
What can be xaaS-ed will be done so in the coming years, and albeit a relatively small slice of the enterprise layer, a large part of its current infrastructure will simply move into the cloud.
And in the years after that, a larger part of the enterprise will become infrastructure, and follow along: Invisible Infostructure is becoming an ever-increasing fact
The enterprise will become more standardised and simple at the bottom, and shrink

Social is 100% people-stuff and fits perfectly into the business layer. Communication (Blogs, Microblogging, Social networking) and Collaboration (Wikis, Social bookmarking, Social news) are tools that need to be plugged into the enterprise. Tools will come and go, be added onto, expanded, shrunk, and the people using them will move along. Process-on-the-fly is here to stay
Organisationally, culturally, politically a lot will change and it will keep changing before more than half of that becomes absorbed by the enterprise, and settles down.
The enterprise will become more complex at the top, and expand

Sketching the future, one can see the structure of IT 2.0 being sandwiched: at the bottom, the floor of the building will slowly be Clouded, while at the same time its ceiling will be Socialised. Two giant movements in opposite directions, much like tectonic plates operate on this earth's crust

Where will the twain meet? What will be there? Will that be crushed, or torn apart?
What will the consequences be for Enterprise IT as we know it, but especially for the future we have in mind for it: E2.0, SOA 2.0, SocialCRM?

I'm looking forward to your answers and ideas! I do foresee quite a challenge

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him at martijnlinssen.com

Posted by Martijn Linssen on January 31, 2010

In 2010, Twitter will be the pulse of the planet

It's the end of year, a time of looking back, and ahead. A fun time to make predictions, and look back at predictions made earlier - although that usually is much less fun

I predict that:


  • everyone will have a Twitter account in 2010

  • Every company will also have one, and use it too

  • There will be Twitter boards in public places, public ones as well as private ones, some of which will be censored to a degree, much like the delay already present on US radio- and TV shows

  • The private Tweet boards will also monitor Foursquare and BrightKite in order to see what the world is thinking about that particular place

Companies will have a Twitter identity just as they are supposed to have websites

Doing so, companies can prevent public outrage like this weekend's Channel tunnel drama
The real disaster there was not knowing anything. It took Eurostar on Twitter 20 hours to respond, and that amount of Tweets is still almost nothing compared to the buzz going on

  • A business case for Social Business Design? Not needed

Given the fact that the initial investment is almost zero, and the fact that an online presence is a requirement already. You do need a plan though, as for everything. And don't try to push old marketing failures down this new channel

Of course the effect of all that will be measured. No better way to visualise, than a great visualisation I say


With all that, and even without some:
  • Twitter will become the source of news
  • Either making it, or spreading it like crazy
  • Old-fashioned news networks will take a beating from this
  • And if they move in the opposite direction, they might not even survive

I wish you all a great new year!

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can follow him via Twitter or join him on LinkedIn

Posted by Martijn Linssen on December 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 42 2009

This week again claims on why email is dead (or not dead yet), Sir Berners-Lee says the // in the URLs was a mistake and the complete history of Lemmings.

  • Email is Dead? Oh Really?
    The WSJ is making the call—email on its way out. Dying. Dead. It's an interesting conclusion, derived from the fact that both growth and absolute numbers are on the side of social networking this year. But we disagree.
  • Twitter has lift-off: now you can tweet from 20,000 feet
    Even if you're 20,000 feet above sea level there's still no escaping the presence of social media, with the launch of a Lufthansa tool that automatically updates Twitter or Facebook with flight position updates.
    GE, enterprise 2.0 since….1989
    One of the most frequently mentioned enterprise 2.0 successful project is General Electric’s Support Central. It’s true that their numbers are really impressive even for those who usually criticize anything that’s about 2.0. So, inevitably, people wonder how they did it.
  • Facebook fatigue sets in as growth slows
    Facebook's growth slowed this summer, according to one report, suggesting that despite reaching the 300 million members milestone in September, the site's growth may have hit a saturation point in some markets for the time being.
  • The Complete History of Lemmings
    Lemmings started life as a simple animation back in August 1989 when DMA Design had just moved into their first office (which only consited of 2 small rooms), and were begining a new game called Walker (based on the walker that was used in Blood Money).
  • Study: Firms still invest in social media
    Despite the recession, most companies are continuing to invest in social media tools and online communities, according to a new survey by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research.
  • Twitter and Facebook aid small firms
    Companies that have jumped on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon are reporting a surge in customers while others struggle. With minimal marketing budgets available to many small businesses, social networking sites offer a quick and, more importantly, free means of promoting their wares to a global audience. In the face of stiff competition and a global economic downturn, it is a route more and more companies are going down.
  • Web 3.0: The Building Block Web
    Some talk about the “real-time web” being Web 3.0, or the 2010 Web, but when you look at it “real-time” is just using the web as a platform, making it real-time.  The web still hasn’t really changed in essence to something else beyond the web becoming “the platform”.  The web needs to shift to something else for that to happen. I think that shift is happening in a form I call “the building block web”.
  • The “//” in URLs was a Mistake, Says Sir Berners-Lee
    Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, modest creator of the internet, has a confession to make. When confronted with the question, “if you could go back in time and change anything along the way to inventing the internet, what would you change,” Sir Timothy hedged.
  • Finland becomes the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.
    According to YLE.fi, starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

 Light reading:

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 19, 2009

Business case or prototype

If you love social media you probably already saw the YouTube movie about social media and if it is a fad. It is a very impressive movie showing a lot of statistics about social media. Although I am spending quite some time every day on social media and helping people and enterprises on what they can achieve with social media, I think some numbers require some perspective. For example the time to reach 50 million users of a certain service. My colleague Mark Walton-Hayfield made a nice visual of some of the items that appear in the video:

statistics.png

Before you start thinking that Facebook is far more superior than any other medium please take into account that:

  • The phone was something that was quite costly
  • Nobody used the phone, so buying one was risking
  • There was hardly any infrastructure for the phone, since it was new
  • Same goes for radio: there wasn't a lot to listen to
  • The World Wide Web had it easier, since some of the infrastructure was already there, as well as the medium (Personal Computer)
  • Facebook is the only service that requires no upfront investment
  • Facebook uses an infrastructure that is already there, even more: if you don't have access to that infrastructure you cannot access Facebook
  • Facebook 'just' extended an existing platform that had already more than 50 million users, instead of creating a new platform and acquiring new users.

Are social media statistics therefore a fad? No not at all, however you should not compare apples and oranges. You should not compare a service that costs money and needs an infrastructure to be developed with a service that is free and is running on an existing infrastructure. However you can conclude something from the visualization: we now have the possibility to introduce new services on top of existing infrastructure which have no initial investment except for time and which has an immense potential reach at the moment they are released.

If you want to build the next Facebook (or a service that has Facebook's reach), you don't need to have millions of dollars, the only thing you need to have is some time and if you want to reach out to the public you can start for a few dollars with online hosting. It doesn't require a big investment upfront to create a great idea. So are you still building business cases for months, spending a lot of money and time on paper without any tangible result, or are you starting to develop a working prototype? The prototype is cheaper to build and you are likely to be able to present your idea more tangible.

What you choose is up to you, however you can save more money than ever since it has never been so easy and so cheap to get a solution up and running and have access to 1.6 billion potential customers. Off course you still can build a business case, however with the same amount of time and money you have to use for your business case you are probably able to deliver a solid prototype which speaks for itself.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 2, 2009

Moving from service to infrastructure

Are you using a certain service? Do not judge it by its cover. Sometimes the medium someone is using for a service will become some kind of personification of the service. Like for some Outlook is equal to email and TweetDeck for Twitter.

For example some weeks ago I was having a conversation with a colleague on Yammer. At a moment in the discussion I referred back to a previous conversation that was related to the subject, she told me that she read that discussion, because she already received my emails of this conversation. At first this was rather surprising for me, especially since I only spoke to her via Yammer and never send her an email before. When I gave it some thought, I realized that you could also Yammer via email (as you by the web interface, SMS, IM and third party tools).

What I also realized that we never get rid of email (even if we really want to) and that some services will move from service to infrastructure. Twitter and Yammer are both moving (or already there) towards being a piece of infrastructure (a protocol) and people can use these protocols to communicate with one another. People can choose which tools they use to use the protocol. It could even go further (especially with the tools that take care of distributed microblogging) and tools could even make the protocol irrelevant (which should be done, since it is about communication and not about data exchange via a specific protocol). This way someone might read the information you posted to Twitter on his TV while accessing Facebook.

It will be just a matter of time till services and protocols become more and more irrelevant to the end users, they will not even be aware of the fact that they are either using Twitter or Yammer or Facebook, the service itself is hard to differentiate on anything other than the network effect. The medium will matter, since every medium has its value. It should be the ultimate goal of every service: moving from being a service to becoming a piece of infrastructure.

If you like this article please retweet it

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on June 9, 2009

Don't focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility

The whole blogosphere and Twitterverse seem to be buzzing about the McKinsey slide deck “Clearing the air on cloud computing” with little positive feedback. Will Forrest tries to address the following in the report:

While it has great potential, many of the claims being made about cloud computing have lead some to the point of "irrational exuberance" and unrealistic expectations. The purpose of this report is to focus the nascent cloud industry and its consumers on setting realistic expectations by taking a "hype free" approach starting with the most basic question of what a "cloud" actually is.

Joe Weinman’s post on Gigaom tries to pinpoint the reasons why the McKinsey report missed the mark where he drills down on the wrong focus by McKinsey on the unit cost instead of the total cost. I’m not going to jump on the “question the McKinsey report” wagon since there are plenty of posts already out there doing so. No, I’m going to question the overrated focus on costs.

Joe has a very valid point to question the unit cost vs. total cost in his post. McKinsey is right to say that renting cloud infrastructure is pretty expensive but that is something that Chris Fleck from Citrix already pointed out in his blog last September. If you have the scenario that you have a steady 100 % usage of your resources without irregular usage patterns or spikes, then it is too costly to move away from your data center to a cloud. To be fair, that is what the McKinsey report also shows. Morale of the story is that cloud is good for certain scenarios, so McKinsey would have done a hell of a job (and probably received more kudoz) by taking it a step further and doing the same for calculating scenarios where cloud is very cost effective for large enterprises.

My biggest complaint so far when I see posts on cloud cost calculations is that the majority of the people focus too much on the costs and less on the other benefits. The McKinsey report started good on slide 4 with the mentioning of the faster time to market, but doesn’t seem to focus on this. I think that for several companies the fact that you can have a very fast time to market thanks to cloud technology, outweighs the potential higher cost of adopting cloud. (Note that I use “potential higher cost”).

Imagine that your national soccer team passed the semi-finals of the world championship, while nobody even had a clue that they would even qualify. Imagine that you are a large retailer that wants to jump on this wagon and quickly want to launch a huge campaign. The marketing and social media strategy guys cook up something in two days and want to launch it in another two days with the expectation that it will attract hundred thousands of visitors in a very short period. In a company with a traditional IT department with own data center, you can forget about this. In many companies it is next to impossible to deliver a large amount of server capacity in just two days. I know companies where it take weeks. Just figure.

Is going cloud in this case expensive? Yes, but you pay for your business agility. The fact that your IT department can move almost as fast as the business is for many companies a wet dream coming true. Even more, in this case the retailer might save a lot of money since most likely the soccer team will be beaten in the finals, meaning that in another couple of days they won’t need all those servers anymore…

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Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on April 24, 2009

In search for cloud companies in the risk mitigation space

Are you a software company or startup that is focused on delivering products or solutions in the cloud or SaaS space in the field of risk mitigation? Think about Jericho-style security, cloud-VPN, appliance-based solutions, monitoring/administration, etc. Do you have the next big thing (whether or not NDA covered) that will solve difficult issues related to private clouds, infrastructure, data center?

Well, we are searching for you then! :-)

Drop a mail to lee dot provoost at capgemini dot com or even better, contact me on Twitter.

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Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on March 5, 2009

No more "regulatory compliance" excuses for cloud adoption please

Microsoft Online Services anounced today that GlaxoSmithKline bought a 100.000 seat license for their SaaS solution. Two interesting things here:

  • GSK was a Lotus shop before. This is also the biggest group that Microsoft is targeting with this BPOS service offering with a pretty compelling price offer. Microsoft Online does NOT want to replace on-premise Exchange nor Sharepoint solutions, let that be clear.
  • "GSK is a highly regulated customer in a highly regulated industry". This is pretty intruiging because you always hear people saying "oh coud is not for our company, we are too much regulated to adopt that". Well guess again.

Now you have to realize a few things here. You need to make a distinction between the primary processes that are really critical and the secondary processes that just support your business. Big part of most companies' IT systems belong to the second and that part is easier to move to a SaaS or cloud solution. Even more, you see that SaaS vendors are more and more coming forward to addressing the issues of archiving, long-term viability, compliancy etc. Choosing a large stable partner like Microsoft or Google might be in that case a safer bet than an obscure Web 2.0 startup. (ok don't whine about the Gmail outage please :-p)

And then you need to ask yourself: "are we really prevented to adopt the cloud by some regulatory compliance issue, or are we just assuming that?" There are probably a lot of gray areas where people think that they can't but actually with taking some measures they can.

If you take for instance the GigaSpaces framework for building your cloud application on the AWS platform, then you can actually have a solution where your data is stored on-premise and the cloud is used as your processing datacenter. If you make sure your data is encrypted according to certain standards and make use of the fact that the GigaSpaces framework can allow you to process everything in-memory without writing anything to the disks of the processing servers... well are you still breaching any laws then?

So, in several cases it's just plain obvious that you can't go all the way cloud, but I have the feeling that there are a lot of cases where you actually can if you take the right measures. Any law-firms specialized in cloud? ;-)

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Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on March 3, 2009

Will Microsoft Semblio disrupt the eLearning market?

While everybody seems to be firing staff due to the economic downturn, Microsoft manages to create a new kind of role in education centers, universities and schools, which I would like to call: ReLeC developer: Rich eLearning Content developer. When I saw their new Semblio product (btw what kind of weird name is that?) I had a vague “I’ve seen this before” moment. Not completely sure what the name was exactly back then, but it was some kind of rich elearning production software from Macromedia (now bought by Adobe).

It should be part of their next Office 14 release and geared towards very easy use by teachers to create rich learning content for their students. Don’t get fooled, in order to create those fancy demos as shown on the Semblio website, you need to be a skilled .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation developer, thus creating a new job role in learning institutions.

semblio.jpg

Why is this interesting? Well, with all those cost-cutting and optimizing staff utilization, eLearning becomes more and more the only way to get training nowadays in a lot of companies. It also fits in what we at Capgemini likes to call the You-experience: getting what you want, when you want and how you want it. Microsoft could grab the opportunity here to open some kind of eLearning market place, built on top of their cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure where companies can exchange or sell their courses. Since it would all be using the same foundation (Windows Azure Services Platform), it could quite easily interoperate and integrate with each other. Connect that with the upcoming Microsoft Office Live (hosted office suite, SaaS-style) and you get some interesting opportunities…

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Lee Provoost is an emerging technologist with a focus on cloud computing strategy and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on February 6, 2009

Does it make sense for Amazon to buy Gigaspaces?

The positioning from Amazon Web Services in the cloud computing market is an infrastructure provider (Infrastructure as a Service), which is differently than for instance Microsoft that offers Azure as a development platform (Platform as a Service). Would it make sense for Amazon to start competing with Google and Microsoft in the PaaS market as well? Let’s say by e.g. buy Gigaspaces?

It would contradict with the initial philosophy of Amazon to keep things simple and to give developers ultimate freedom. Whatever they create, there will always be complaints that it just does not meet the expectations. But by offering PaaS with Gigaspaces, they could attract a different kind of customer and on top of that they can offer “cloud vendor abstraction” since Gigaspaces allows you to easily move over to other vendors like GoGrid. Why would they do that? Why not? By offering “openness” to your customer, you position yourself as a “good citizen” and can genuinely say that there is no vendor lock-in. (Although you are kind of locked-in the Gigaspaces framework, but hey you can’t have it all.)

Would that be bad for Google and Microsoft?
Does competition drive innovation? Are bananas yellow? I rest my case.

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Lee Provoost is an emerging technologist with a focus on cloud computing strategy and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on February 3, 2009

Does it rain or does it pour?

Cloud computing is one of the disruptive technologies (read some facts here) that is the new standard in the invisible infostructure. As Mark stated earlier on this blog, Cloud Computing is about trust and 'trust is a value I am choosing to rely on for anything I do on the web. Without trust, the web wouldn't have evolved into what it is today'. Trust is a good thing, however trust does not solve everything. By trusting a party you can help a party to exist (merely your trust consists of paying for their service), however you cannot prevent them to disappear from the stage while taking your Cloudy services with them in their exit.

Have you ever thought about that? The Cloud may be part of the ecosystem of Internet, however it is not unlikely, that, like a real cloud, it will start raining. After the rain stopped the Cloud will be smaller. What if your data / application, service in the Cloud will disappear due to the disappearance of a service provider. You cannot expect that all providers of Cloud services will keep on existing the next ten years (do you remember the free hosting providers Geocities, XOOM and Fortunecity in the late nineties? Geocities was bought by Yahoo, Fortunecity still exists, and XOOM disappeared as free hosting provider, and so did its data).

Currently it is rather cloudy and the Cloud keeps expanding, however it is a fact that the expanding stops and that some pieces of the Cloud will rain down. What kind of measures did you take to prevent that your data is lost or that you cannot use a service in the Cloud? What is your fallback for your Cloud usage or will it pour at your place when it rains?

Posted by Rick Mans on December 28, 2008

Is the cloud bursting?

With IBM, Amazon and Microsoft fighting for our cloud computing attention, we might forget to think about useful scenarios for all this fancy airy stuff. We all know the classical e-commerce example with its season-bound resource spikes and the occasional raw processing/render power we need, but this week I stumbled upon something new: cloud bursting.

Before I get into that, let’s first take a little step back. A recent blog post by James Urquhart (now helping Cisco in cloud computing strategy) lets us wonder whether a cloud computing strategy is always cheaper than having your own data center. As you might have guessed: no. The main idea is that applications that are always running on 100 % are often hosted cheaper in your own data center than paying for the elasticity of a cloud (which you actually don’t use).

So, applications that do need the elasticity (e.g. the e-commerce and render farm we talked about earlier) can benefit financially from the cloud. One other strategy that I didn’t think of earlier (stupid me) was pointed out on Scobleizer’s post of his visit to the Cisco data center: cloud bursting. Simply said: run everything in your own data center and once you detect heavy usage, offload it to the cloud! Example he gives is 12seconds.tv that offloads a movie to Amazon’s S3 file storage when they detect high view rates.

Can we think of any useful applications in the enterprise space? Oh yes: update / file servers (it only gets busy when you release a new product or service pack), payroll processing (only once a month, but do you want this in the cloud?), … Any other suggestions?

Posted by Lee Provoost on November 28, 2008

Tech Predictions 2009: Cloud-in-a-Container

Cloud computing is cool. Cloud computing could potentially save you some bucks. However, a lot of companies are still having some doubts about compliance, control, security and other reasons. So why not having the cloud on premise? Let’s say that Microsoft says to some large system integrators and clients: “look, you guys are big, you guys have a big system landscape and basically you are already building some kind of cloud anyway, why don’t you just adopt our cloud?”.

Does that make sense? Does that contradict a bit the whole hosted XaaS cloud hocus pocus thing? (yes I quite like hocus pocus) First reaction would be… yes! But when you think about what a lot of global companies are doing, no. Couple of large clients have already big data centers with tons of iron and they have a whole application landscape where (web) services are reused. This all in order to stimulate reuse and consistency across the company. Unfortunately in reality it is not that easy, it costs a lot of money and effort and if your architects have some wrong (or different?) ideas about how things should be, it will badly affect the company (and cause a lot of frustration among your developers). Adopting an industry solution from let’s say Microsoft or any other cloud vendor could make a lot of sense in this case.

However, how can the cloud vendor still keep a bit of control over the cloud and make it “worry-free”? If I adopt cloud technology, I don’t want to be bothered with the hardware failures and software upgrades or changes. Since that is the very reason why I chose for a cloud computing solution. So let’s take the concept that Google already does for its own data centers: cloud-in-a-box, or rather cloud-in-a-container. Microsoft can make containers that can be plugged together and form actually a cloud data center. It’s connected with the Microsoft übercloud (so that we can actually easily scale up in case of spikes and for backups) and some system integrators (or Microsoft themselves) can do hardware maintenance.

I like it.

Posted by Lee Provoost on November 12, 2008

Tech Predictions 2009: “stop this Web 2.0 hocus pocus, we told you so”

Because of the economic downturn, a lot of companies will be looking at taking radical measures like moving their data centers into the (green) cloud. Where the CIO cried out loud that there are too many compliance, governance and security issues, the cost reduction factor is so compelling that companies are taking the risk. Change can happen... I heard.

2009 will be the year where we will see large companies move their application infrastructure into the cloud (Amazon? Microsoft?) and thus create an invisible infostructure. It will also be the year where we will see some issues (growth pains?) coming up, think about a cloud vendor’s data center that goes down due to some “unforeseen circumstances”. The old-skool CIOs (and legal department?) will cry out loud “stop this Web 2.0 hocus pocus, we told you so”, but this shift in thinking where you trust a third party to take care of your commodity infrastructure that allows you to focus on the 10 to 20 % that will give you a competitive advantage will set a precedent for the future.

Companies that survive 2009 AND took the opportunity to heavily invest in revamping themselves will be the new darlings of Wall Street and tell the world: “in your face!”.

Oh and dear CxOs that read this blog: whatever you do, please continue investing a lot in your talented employees. They are the ones that will drive your company through these economic difficult times and will implement the necessary transformations. They will make sure that your company will rock and roll the new world after the dust has settled down :-) Reading this document might also help.

Posted by Lee Provoost on November 5, 2008

Clean Clouds - how to secure utility computing

So, I can use my home broadband which gives me a reliable 10Mbps for £10 per month ... or I can use a corporate network which gives me a slightly less reliable 100Kbps for £200 per month or more ...

Most corporations are don't build great IT infrastructures but, luckily, they don't have to, any more than they have to generate their own power or build their own road networks. As the above comparison shows, there are staggering cost savings available if we can solve the security and integration issues of cloud computing.

We need what I call Clean Clouds - computing utilities with security built in.

What does that mean - specifically, what do businesses need from Web2.0 that individuals don't? Here is an incomplete list of ideas:


  • Legal and liability - if my business used a cloud and the cloud fails, who can I sue? People are still trying to back-to-back their liabilities but I don't think this works with utilities. This type of risk needs to be accepted, or transferred through insurance.

  • Identity - how can I separate out my assets and users from others on the same cloud? This can be solved by federation which is now a reasonably mature technology

  • Information control - how can I enforce the right security and information lifecycle controls over my information when it's stored in the cloud? Actually, there are two problems here. The first is that information access policies must be much more accurate and much more complex when they cover cloud objects. There are tools available now to do this - think of the XACML standard for encoding security policies. However, I don't think this is something that most organisations will be able to do for themselves - instead, policy development for cloud objects should be itself a cloud service. The second is that organisations need a variety of services, such as bullk upload/download, that individuals don't. This has to be solved by the market in conjunction with standards organisations.


I wish I could say that this is all new, but I can't. This is all de-perimeterised security as proposed by the Jericho Forum.


Posted by John Arnold on October 24, 2008



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