Topic technologies driving innovation solutions will include:  Windows Azure, Windows Phone, Windows v-next + Slates and Internet Explorer.   Additional technologies, that are still NDA, will also be incorporated into the early adoption programs and opportunities.   Joint marketing has been a key component of building and launching these solutions into the market place.

Key opportunities for customers to consider when engaging DPE:

1. The Microsoft Fiscal Year cycle kicks off on June 1st with planning.
2. A new fiscal year means new programs and innovation opportunities
3. Early adopter programs offer first mover advantage and access to emerging technology
4. Business partnership match making opportunities around innovation
5. Joint marketing campaign and reach of audience

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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:

1. Creating digital channels around mobile phones and slate devices has been a primary initiative for many consumer brands over the past year.  The channels are being more holistically created in terms of an enterprise capability vs. an application.   The idea being that you will continuously increase and evolve the channel to meet consumer needs.
2. The channels support social commerce.  Meaning they have integrated abilities of both online eCommerce and deep social media integration.   Analytics, consumer profiling, and 1:1 personalization are built as core enterprise components under all offerings creating an aggregation of data across all offerings provided and across all channels.
3. Large investments in quality content, expert content, and brand participation in the social verse is creating a gravity around the new channels to draw the target demographic directly to the enterprise channels.   Integration with the social sites helps in the broadcast and awareness, but also gathers analytics from those sites as well.   Over time, successful enterprise draw the community to their channels and ever increase the value of the channel to themselves and potential partners.
4. Those enterprises that have secured new digital channels and communities are now being approached by B2B partners and even competitors who need to reach these audiences.   Embracing partners and even competitors offerings only increases the effect of making a premier channel and providing your company with a larger scope of the industries analytics and XRM intelligence of consumers, partners, and the competition.
5. Having broader and more insightful analytics gives you another major asset in learning what the next round of consumer needs to be met and new services around industry analytics can be spun up to generate new sources of revenue.
6. All of the above is encourage companies to adopt more of a start-up mindset.   The goal being to devise new business models and get them to market fast in test markets to gather learnings and establish the initial channels.   The willingness to learn and adapt to the markets.
7. The best architectures combine building blocks from SaaS and PaaS models.   Create your own innovation platform of enterprise core capabilities with these building blocks, but do so with a vision that you will be reusing them across many of the businesses and aggregating the analytics underneath.
8. The cloud can scale to meet the infrastructure growth of new business.  Can your organizational processes, social media involvement, and B2B partners scale to the same level?
9. Invite test markets to vet out your new offerings and processes.  Learn to listen and empower the consumer to tune your business
10.   Global reach is only as far as your providers cloud can provide service.

Cloud reach is ever increasing:.  The Windows Azure platform is now commercially available in the following 41 countries:

Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, United States, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, and Trinidad and Tobago…

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Curriculum included:

• Fundamentals of Customer Centricity
• Gaining Customer Insights
• Customer Segmentation
• Value Proposition Development
• Identifying Market Opportunities
• Creating New Markets
• Understanding Brand Meaning
• Brand Strategy
• Customer Focus, Innovation and Profitability
• Building Brands
• Integrated Marketing Communication
• Marketing Communications Mix Optimization
• Data Driven Marketing Decision Making
• Leveraging Marketing Analytics

The class formats encouraged interaction with the professors and group discussion across the broad diversity of experiences and challenges in the Microsoft Marketing organizations.    It was also a great opportunity to build one’s network with marketing professionals at Microsoft.   Evenings where touring Chicago and enjoying good dinner conversation at restaurants in the down town area near the Kellogg campus.   Looking forward to the next round of professional training.

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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:

By bringing together the best of Microsoft with the best of Skype, we will drive a new era in communications. We see a huge desire to do more with video, to make it easier for people to connect from multiple devices, to move from chat to phone to video and back in a way that is easy, natural, and human. We see with Kinect the power of using the biggest screen in the house – the living room TV screen – as the place where people connect with friends and families. We see with Windows Phone 7 the way communication moves from personal to professional in a blink of the eye. And we know that people want more connection and richer communication, across many devices and around the world.  Together, Microsoft and Skype will deliver that kind of communication and connection. In the future, Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and we will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live, Messenger and other communities. I want to call out the success we have had with the introduction of Lync specifically and the value of connecting that to a consumer community of Skype.  And we’ll continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

The recent partnerships with NOKIA and RIM around mobile strategy,  growth of the XBOX/Kinect platform, and now increased capabilities with communication continue to expand Microsoft’s offerings to corporations and consumers.

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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.

These trends bring many new questions to mind in terms of factors to consider when exposed to this communication medium or planning to use them:

1. The speed at which news breaks now as phenomenal velocity.   Whether this is world news or perhaps corporate news like Toyota’s recent product recalls.   PR teams in corporations need to be prepared to respond immediately and stay engaged in the conversations.
2. News is forever changed due to having direct input from actual participants and observers at the events.   While this has the benefit of removing media “filtering,”  it also opens the door for inaccuracy or disinformation.   Certainly, the voice of bias or special interest groups can be seen within the conversation.
3. Analytics will play an ever increasing roll of understanding the flow of information and the quality of sources.   The ability to trace who, what, where, when to understand the source of the information and potential accuracy will be critical.   As that capability matures, it is important for corporations to remain active in a conversation that affects their brand to assure accurate information is being provided, questions answered and disinformation called out.
4. The social media revolution is not just a USA based phenomenon.   Respondents from Abbottabad, in our example above, where using twitter – but readily stated that Facebook is more prevalent in the area – that is an interesting statement.   Analysis for Japan’s disaster conversation also show a variety of disparity on which channels types of information flowed.   That spanned eye witness information, government responses, and the actual participation from professional media sources.   So the take away is it important to do the analytics by geography to see what channels they use culturally and which voices/information tends to exist on which channels.
5. What are the overall legal implications of social media conversations.   Can people/organizations be liable for disinformation, if used maliciously?   Can the data be analyzed and submitted in court as proof of actual events, conduct of organizations or comprehensiveness of actions taken.   How do these laws very across international boundaries with a global participate base?

The implications and complexity is extraordinary.  Though it is clear that these recent exceptional global events provide a unique opportunity to study the trends, impact, and patterns of how social media is transforming the word.   Understanding those implications will have profound outcomes on the strategies of government, politics, corporations, organizations, and individuals.

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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.

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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:

1. In game advertising is providing significant revenue opportunities and reach to targeted audiences
2. One to one Marketing and profiling is becoming a key asset in tracking player preferences and trends
3. Loyalty programs are starting to blend point acquisition and redemption across gaming and commerce channels
4. Gaming consoles are becoming a primary entertainment channel in the home, and thus a primary business channel to capitalize on
5. 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.

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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.

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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?
5. 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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