I attended a Microsoft FY2012 planning meeting at the AON Center in Chicago this week. Planning revolved around the beginning of the fiscal calendar starting June 1st. This years sees another extensive reorganization of Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism corps known as DPE. The pivot of the change centers around the focus on brands that develop software commercial or as consumer offerings/services. The North American teams will still retain an existing focus on Tools and audience breadth developer evangelism. The innovation arm will now be focused on commercial and consumer ISVs breaking those respective ecosystems into various tiers of account responsibilities ranging from large to start-up ISVs.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft FY2012 Planning at Aon Center Chicago’
Investments in cloud computing continue to accelerate as vendors add capabilities to differentiate themselves. Offerings in the forms of Software as a Service (SAAS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and Private Cloud appliances are rapidly entering the market. My innovation team has been working with enterprise customers for over four years creating some of the initial architectures and hybrid solutions blending legacy and cloud services. We are seeing solution development times rapidly decreasing. Major enterprises are spinning up new business models and bringing them to market in record time. Though this, we are seeing higher ROI and lower TCO. Technical departments are discovering that the skill sets of their personnel rapidly adapt to the new development architectures and really their depth of experience in enterprise security, integration, and orchestration of complex business processes fall into familiar patterns, but now accelerated by building blocks being provided as services. The ability for IT to adapt to the cloud was never really in question and is proving to be a shift they are readily capable of making.
What is of higher interest is the effect it is having on the business and creation of new business models. As speed to market increases, so does the speed of competition. The scale, reach, and cost of cloud computing is open new doors for business to experiment in new offerings and reach new markets. We are seeing some bold moves in each vertical where new offerings and channels to consumers are creating a pattern of disruptive innovation that is game changing to the current status quo of leadership in a given market. Business are having to rapidly consider the effects that the competitors have having in emerging markets.
Some areas of consideration that many of projects are encountering:
Continue reading ‘Cloud Considerations – Speed of Innovation’
I completed a certification course of integrated marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. I attend the course with some 50 Microsoft marketers that spanned a wide variety of topics and strategies. The course is taught by the schools PhD marketing professors: Sawhney, Hennessy, Chernev, Walker. The course is a week long deep dive in excessive of 40 hours of classroom and workshops with 4 exams required for certification. Each day we formed work groups to take on case studies design marketing strategies around diverse criteria and market challenges. The case studies were from a diverse set of verticals and study real companies track records in approaches and results. Foundational topics where studied with an emphasis of how current trends have evolved traditional approaches and how all aspects of marketing and analytics are being integrated into holistic campaigns.
Curriculum included:
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Microsoft Acquires Skype
Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to buy the voice-over-Internet company Skype for $8.5 billion, including the assumption of debt. Skype will become a new business unit within Microsoft, to be run by current Skype CEO Tony Bates. He will report directly to Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer.
Skype is a powerful consumer brand with more than 170 million connected users, synonymous in many places around the world with voice and video communications. This is a significant acquisition for Microsoft to bolster its communication offerings to compete with Google Voice and Apple Facetime.
Steve Ballmer announced:
Social media has created a multitude of new channels and transformed the level of individual access to broad distribution capabilities that traditionally has been controlled by media giants. This game changing trend serves both the individual and corporations equally as a new variable in the dissemination of information and marketing messaging. Some clear examples of the speed social media has occurred in the past months with the news of Japan’s disaster and death of Osama bin Laden.
Even before the President cloud address the world on a surprise news conference last Sunday, the the news was already breaking on social media channels. The first part of the story began to break, not from journalists or officials, but from residents from Abbottabad as the operation began. Sohaib Athar was on of the first to mention on Twitter that unidentified helicopters where flying over his home in Abbottabad. Twitter confirms that by 2am on May 1st, users were tweeting at a rate of 3400+ tweets per second on the topic. Social networking ranked third, at in a Washington Post poll, behind network news and cable news, of people 18 – 34 years old that learned about the story through social media vs. broadcast channels. Even this example of speed and volume of communication is modest in comparison to the 7,000 tweets per second at the height of the tsunami and following earth quakes in Japan.
Continue reading ‘The Speed of Social Media – Breaking News’
Microsoft and RIM ( Research In Motion ) announce a collaborative partnership in the mobile market. At the RIM conference Steve Ballmer and Mike Lazarides announced that Microsoft would invest “uniquely” in RIM services. While RIM would make the Bing the “preferred search provider” in the BlackBerry Web browser and will get prominent display in BlackBerry App World. Bing will also be the default search and map application on new BlackBerry devices presented to carriers, though they can still override it if they have signed a deal with Google.
What is SINOCES?
I attend CES in Las Vegas in January 2011 and interacted with a wide number of vendors from great Asia. With over 140,000 in attendance it was an amazing show to experience cutting edge innovation and business development conversations. Now the opportunity to attend SINOCES is right around the corner.
From their site:
SINOCES, the China International Consumer Electronics Show, is a collaboration between the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® producer of the International CES® and the Qingdao Municipal People’s Government. An anticipated 80,000 CE professionals from China and around the globe are expected to attend SINOCES.
Exhibitors showcase the latest CE products across a wide spectrum of product categories including:
- Automobile Electronics
• Mobile Communication Equipment
• Digital Content
• Mobile Storage Devices
• Digital Entertainment Products
• Portable Office Equipment
• Home Appliances
• Security and Protection Products
• Home A/V Products
• Software Applications and Solutions
• Home Network
There is no cost to attend SINOCES, simply register here.
Sony Play Station announced they had a security breach in their online gaming platform. This is the second negative cloud story in a weeks time from the Amazon outage story. These two occurrences bring to the forefront the risks of failover and security as some of the largest barriers to cloud computing.
Much focus has been paid in the past year to the cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Many new services and solutions have been launched by all vendors with their share of success stories and struggles. Less in the spot light has been the broad use of cloud architectures for year supporting the gaming platforms of XBOX, Play Station, and Wii plus the multitude of Massive Online Gaming infrastructure being supported by 3rd party gaming firms. The large scale of users that play and interact on these infrastructures is perhaps the leading edge of cloud computing refinement in terms of scale and performance. It is often overlooked due to the fact that the gaming is not considered as mission critical as perhaps a traditional enterprise system is thought of.
This perception is will be challenged in the near future for a variety of reasons. First of all, gaming itself is becoming big business in terms of membership, hours of screen time, and direct consumer channel. So it represents big money and is mission critical in its own right.
Several major trends in gaming put it on a collision course for merging with main stream business:
- In game advertising is providing significant revenue opportunities and reach to targeted audiences
- One to one Marketing and profiling is becoming a key asset in tracking player preferences and trends
- Loyalty programs are starting to blend point acquisition and redemption across gaming and commerce channels
- Gaming consoles are becoming a primary entertainment channel in the home, and thus a primary business channel to capitalize on
- Gaming platform vendors are opening up their platform to enterprise customers to create next generation applications available over these gaming channels. This will be an aggressive and competitive landscape to integrate these enterprise and entertainment offerings in the home
Clearly commerce, entertainment, marketing, advertising, and analytics are all converging. Cloud architectures will be a key component of delivering these solutions to consumers in their homes and across their world of personal devices. Corporations need to be engaged in cloud computing today to develop their capabilities and learnings in this environment to compete in the innovation space in the coming years.
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Espoo, Finland and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Redmond, Washington announced the signing of am agreement on a partnership that will result in a new global mobile ecosystem. This comes following the joint announcement made on February 11 of the partnership conversations.The companies have made significant progress on the development of the first Nokia products incorporating Windows Phone. With plans to launch portfolio of new Nokia devices featuring the WP7 OS. Nokia has also started porting key applications and services to operate on Windows Phone and Microsoft will provide access to key services like BING Search and application galleries.
Microsoft hopes to capitalize on the global reach of Nokia user base and Nokia hopes to benefit from the large developer ecosystem that supports the Microsoft Platform. Microsoft also brings a significant cloud strategy to the table for global support of services, applications, and 3rd party solutions.The relationship seems to be a strong win-win proposition, but there is much complexity in maintaining momentum and equitable relationships between the two firms. Microsoft was already facing strong competition in all mobile markets so it remains to be seen if this will hinder Nokia’s market share or be the accelerant that both companies hope for. Financial investment and revenue aspects will continue to evolve as their offerings and market position evolve.
Hopefully the partnership will provide a competitive challenge to today’s market share distribution. The better the competition, the better it will be for all consumers and enterprise customers.
Amazon and its customers encountered a mass outage of the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service. EBS instances can only exist in on Availability Zone but customer paying for multi-zone service should have had their databases failed-over to an alternate zone automatically, or they could use their snapshots to create new instances in another zone manually. The control plane for creating new EBS instances struggled with bandwidth preventing any ability to fail over automatically or though manuel efforts. This single point of failure was a “discovery” for Amazon customers. Overall it took in excess of 15 hours to get databases moved over and back in operation.
Now all complex systems mature at the rate of discovery and learnings of their environments and all could vendors will experience many of the “maturity moments” in the coming years as cloud computing becomes more prevalent in the mission critical domain.
Let’s explore some key considerations for customers to address in developing their own cloud strategies for evaluating vendors.
- Data replication and multiple geo data centers. Many cloud providers boast replication and redundancy both in geo and cross geo in terms of data center capacity. The key consideration is which cloud vendors rely on replication at incident vs. real time replication. An example of this real-time architecture would b Windows Azure. Azure does triple replication at the time data is written to the storage services. This consists of a write to the primary data store, a second replicant copy to a fail over storage at the same data center and a third write to a replicant copy in a out of geo data center. The goal being local fail over if possible and a secondary geo failover in case of complete data center failure in the primary geo. This infrastructure means redundancy is achieved real time vs. in fail over.
- Automatic DNS update during failover to assure URLs are still valid. Even if you can activate new instances, you still need the calls to the services to resolve correctly to the failover locations.
- Speed at which the customer notifications from the providers are sent. Currently the best SLAs specify that customers are notified of failover scenarios within 5 minutes of an outage vs. being notified by your own customer services centers being overrun with calls.
- Service Level Agreements: Currently this is probably the the least mature area in cloud computing. While the technology is rapidly improving and process are constantly being refined, the SLAs side of the conversations seem to be lacking in complexity. Today it is common for providers to claim most outages occur because of the architectures of the customer solutions being hosted, this will be a barrier when considering mission critical applications and the potential business losses in the near future. Cloud providers will need to expand their level of application architecture best practices, architectures reviews and perhaps even certifications to win market share. SLAs will have to provide indemnification for sharing business losses.
- Most cloud solutions today are hybrid architectures combining any combination of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and on Premise services. This creates extra complexity that any of these can a point of failure and potential involves different forms of failover, redundancy and recovery strategies. You need to understand the process involved in each aspect of your architecture.
Key Recommendations:
- Now is not the time to sit on the sidelines are wait for cloud computing to mature. It is time to be running pilots and less critical applications in the cloud so help your organization learn and mature in the complexity of these new architecture and business operations models.
- Manual processes need to be refined by customers. Regardless of the level of automation your organization needs to understand both the process with your provider and your “alternate” processes in case of a major outage like the Amazon scenario.
- Consider hybrid architects that have redundancy between the cloud and on premise or between multiple cloud vendors. Perhaps have 70% of your capacity in the cloud and 30% still running on premise. In case of an outage your on premise is still working and can be expanded until the cloud capacity is back on line. If your on premise fails, just increase your cloud capacity until its back up. Alternately, distribute your services between cloud vendors. If one is down, then ramp up your capacity at the other until the problem is solved. These kind of strategies rely less on the complexities of failover and more on completely separate and independent environments.
- Dedicate resources to understanding the SLAs and indemnification implications of outages. Most companies would find it hard to really measure their losses in a real time scenario much less be able to negotiate equitable terms. SLAs today don’t cover much, but the next phase of maturity will involve “custom deals” for major brands and partnerships. Are you ready to compete in that phase of competitive deal making with your rivals with the cloud vendors?
- North America is slowing wading into cloud computing, mainly because of large investments in on premise infrastructure and legacy systems. This will take a while for these investments to age to the point they are obsolete and future investments in IT will be for cloud based systems. At the same time, emerging markets consider cloud computing to be a huge enablers. It is not a competitive advantage to try and build your own $500M data centers around the world when you can pay for the use of others. Consider a future where large markets like China or India build next generation vertical services in retail, insurance, supply chain, transportation, etc. all in the cloud, available for use in their own markets and around the world. Cloud computing my very well enable the emerging markets to leapfrog the legacy systems North America is running on today and our slower pace of adoption. North America won’t lead in converting all our old systems, but we need to lead in the learning, so be involved today with pilot projects and hybrid systems.
Forrester predicts the cloud market to reach $241 billion by 2020. Today companies are already realizing huge benefits in cost, scale, speed, and reach of the cloud infrastructures. Even with some risks, the gains and clearly exceeding the losses. So this trend and shift in paradigms inevitable. The technology vendors will knock down the hurtles as they are discovered, but it is up to your organization’s leadership to prepare the organization for competition with these new architectural and business models.
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