Michigan in the Cloud

Happy holidays from my home state, Michigan! I traded the Mediterranean climate of San Francisco for the possibility of a white Christmas here, and got it.

When I was growing up, Michigan was still near the top of its game in the automotive industry, and a manufacturing mecca for the industry and its suppliers.  It was like Silicon Valley is in the computer industry. Now, Michigan leads the nation in unemployment, largely because the state is heavily tied to the struggling automotive industry. Just as the automotive industry brought jobs, wealth, and talent to Michigan, I hope something else will replace or supplement it to help compensate for the nearly 1,000,000 jobs that Michigan will have lost between 2000 and 2011, according to this forecast by the University of Michigan.

Michigan’s present and future do indeed seem a little cloudy. Michigan CIO Ken Theis announced in September plans to build a data center up to 100,000 square feet that will provide storage and cloud-computing services to all levels of government in the state and to private industry as well. Theis positions the data center as a competitive alternative to offshore hosting for large companies; as a cost-effective hosting and cloud-computing environment for start-ups; and as a service that will standardize and streamline government computing environments, cut costs, and improve services.

As this article by Steve Towns of Government Technology indicates, Ken Theis is also working hard to bring IT jobs to the state, and he is succeeding. In September IBM opened a new software development facility in East Lansing that’s expected to generate as many as 1,500 new jobs over the next five years; in June General Electric announced it will build an advanced technology and training center in Wayne County that will employ 1,200 people.

Furthermore, in the Center for Digital Government’s biennial Digital States Survey, Michigan ranked first overall in 2004 and 2006, and second in 2008 and 2002.

Michigan provides a good example of a state that is working hard to innovate with technology and create new jobs during difficult economic times. Many businesses have similar goals and initiatives with cloud computing. Consider these innovative solutions as your company works toward improving its business performance next year:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Innovation has continually helped us through challenges in the past, and it will be key to better decision-making and a better business climate ahead.