Transitions in Sports and Enterprise Computing

Spain's 2010 World Cup soccer team celebrates its victory

In sports we’ve seen several significant transitions in the last few weeks: Spain won its first World Cup against The Netherlands, which was also contending for its first World Cup. Tom Watson crossed and kissed the Swilken Bridge at the St. Andrews Links golf course where the British Open was held, signifying the last time he would play the world's oldest golf course in competition. Louis Oosthuizen from South Africa, where the World Cup was held, won his first major golf competition at the British Open. Lebron James moved to Miami. George Steinbrenner passed away.

Louis Oosthuizen accepting the British Open trophy

There is a similar wave of transitions in enterprise computing, although the stories are about business and technical trends rather than individuals. I compiled several articles that illustrate the current transitions to enterprise cloud computing:

• Yankee Group: Cloud Proponents Outnumber Skeptics for First Time, Yankee Group Finds
• IDC: SaaS Revenue to Grow Five Times Faster Than Traditional Packaged Software Through 2014, IDC Finds
• Huffington Post: Google Wins Security Clearance, Launches 'Apps for Government'
• GigaOM: Emerging Markets Will Bring A Third of Global Mobile Data Revenues by 2014 
• TechCrunch: Report: Mobile App Store Downloads to hit 25 billion by 2015
• CNN Money: The End of the Desktop PC (Seriously)
• Techcrunch: Enterprise Software is Sexy Again 

Tom Watson crossing the Swilken Bridge at St. Andrews Links

It is exciting to watch new sports heroes like Louis Oosthuizen win, while respecting the achievements of greats such as Tom Watson. I think a similar excitement for new achievements is occurring with cloud computing, while we respect all of the achievements in computer science, IT, and business that brought us to this point.

Online Applications on the Center Stages of Innovation

On Independence Day weekend I attended an excellent performance of patriotic and country music at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vince Gill, the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, and a dazzling fireworks display at the end. It was a great opportunity to commemorate the birth and history of the United States in a venue that, throughout its history, featured so many legendary performers of the many types of music that enrich our lives and express our diversity.

The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, August 23rd, 1964

The Hollywood Bowl website presents a pictorial history of the venue and lists some of the legendary performers who graced its stage. Probably the most famous rock concerts there were The Beatles in 1964 and 1965. Here is a video clip from one of the performances. This weekend, the Hollywood Bowl commemorates The Beatles with “A Beatles Celebration,” while Ringo Starr celebrates his 70^th birthday this week. The Independence Day and Beatles concerts on successive weekends illustrate the interdependencies of strong cultural, political, and commercial ties between the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Hollywood Bowl and The Beatles changed over time. The Hollywood Bowl was modified several times with various acoustic shells above the stage; The Beatles began their career sounding similar to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and ended within a decade incorporating many styles, traditions, and innovations, including Indian and Western classical music, jazz, hard rock, and progressive rock.

As this timeline shows, the history of computing is also very rich, diverse, and complex. There’s a big gap at the beginning of the timeline between 500 B.C. and 1614 A.D., but I’m sure we all would have no problem filling in all that occurred in computing during that time. The timeline ends on December 31, 2003, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted for creating the World Wide Web. That event provides a segue to the main development of the following years that I’m sure we all could fill in with details: cloud computing.

The Beatles exemplify the cultural transformation of the 1960s, which included an unprecedented popular interest in diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, all pillars that inspired the foundation of the United States. While music was and still is an important vehicle for diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, cloud computing is now carrying us to a new level and era of exploration and understanding like those that occurred in the 1960s; the Age of Enlightenment when the United States was born; the Renaissance; and the ancient civilizations worldwide that launched our traditions of inquiry and exploration that remain today.

The consumer and business application stores at Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and VMWare illustrate the new renaissance and enlightenment that we now have available on small devices almost everywhere. They provide the stages, or platforms, that display and run the innovations of today. The hundreds of thousands of applications available through these stores also illustrate how much easier it is to create software applications today than ever before, because the platforms that developers and users need are inexpensive and always available in the cloud.

Since the 1960s many rock bands have come and gone, but few actually made it big. We now have a similar situation with so many excellent applications available online. How will your application get the exposure and visibility it needs to succeed and become a rock star of innovation? If you build it and upload it, users won’t necessarily find it. Just like The Beatles, you may need an agent to help you see the limelight.

The Big Shift to Enterprise Cloud Computing

As most business and IT professionals know, a big shift is occurring in enterprise computing toward cloud computing. Here are several articles, surveys, and reports that illustrate where we currently are and where we are headed:

• GigaOM: “The Big Shift: The Rise of Cloud Computing” cites trends such as job, investment, and data growth in the cloud.
• Pew Research Center, Future of the Internet survey, “Some 71% agreed with the statement: By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”
• R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group: “Research Report: How SaaS Adoption Trends Show New Shifts in Technology Purchasing Power” documents that business users are increasingly the decision-makers and purchasers of cloud products, rather than IT.
• Gartner press release: “Gartner Says Worldwide Cloud Services Market to Surpass $68 Billion in 2010“
• IDC press release: “Through 2014 Public IT Cloud Services Will Grow at More Than Five Times the Rate of Traditional IT Products, New IDC Research Finds”
• John Soat, InformationWeek: “Five Reasons for the Cloud Computing Boom”
• Larry Marion, Datamation: “Business Intelligence Software and Post-Crash Strategy” reports the results of a Bloomberg Businessweek Research survey about the business changes during the recession and the increasing focus on business intelligence and cloud computing to support current business requirements.
• InformationWeek Analytics press release: “InformationWeek Analytics New Research Finds IT Pros Expect Public Cloud Services Will Have Limited Impact on Employment” presents the results of a poll of 828 information technology professionals at North American companies regarding the current and anticipated impact of cloud computing on IT staffing levels, required job skills, and specialties.
• IBM survey press release: “Wall Street Firms Set to Increase IT Spend Through 2011 on Transformation Initiatives” “Despite the positive technology investment outlook, Wall Street professionals cite lack of IT staff and high implementation costs as the biggest inhibitors for technology implementation – which remains consistent with findings obtained in 2009. To overcome some of these challenges, the industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing (61 percent) to force business model change.”
• Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek: “Healthcare Taking Computing to the Cloud” “Nearly one-third of healthcare sector decision makers said they are using cloud applications, and 73% said they are planning to move more applications to the cloud, according to a recent report by Accenture.”

How do you plan to participate in the shift to cloud computing, to help your organization meet its business goals with flexible, cost-effective, and scalable cloud-based systems?

Time Travel, Cloud Computing, and Business Intelligence

If we could travel to the past, maybe we all would like a trip to fix a few things. However, on his Into the Universe series on the Discovery Channel, physicist Stephen Hawking argues that time travel to the past is impossible. Hawking was just about to address time travel to the future when I paused the recording from the past to watch the NBA final game that I had also recorded in the past. That game was an exciting and interesting journey through time.

Although Hawking argues that we can’t really travel to the past, the incredible amount of on-demand video content now available allows us to review past events more than ever before. For example, I used to know musicians like Wes Montgomery only from their recordings, but now I can watch them play and learn from them all I want. This video of Wes Montgomery is a nice example of that luxury. We can now easily record many events that will only make it easier for future time travelers to come back to our world.

If we also can’t travel to the future through a wormhole in space-time, we can at least learn about what may happen from organizations like the Pew Research Center, which just published its fourth Future of the Internet survey. 71 percent of the expert respondents agreed with the statement:

“By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”

The study also found that 81 percent agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices.” See slide 13 of this deck.

Just as we can learn from the past through videos and other content, businesses can learn from the past and predict the future from data. Business intelligence is one of the hottest trends in business and IT, because it helps companies understand their business and remain competitive by analyzing and visualizing past results and predicting future results based on data.

Analyst Howard Dresner takes us on a journey through time with this excellent survey and slide deck about enterprise business intelligence adoption, “The Wisdom of BI Crowds.” The slides show that SaaS BI is growing among business users because of its affordable price point and its ease of use, configuration, and deployment. Business users are increasingly implementing a departmental SaaS BI solution to augment the enterprise system already in place. Dresner’s survey is another way to journey through time and see historical use of enterprise BI and where it’s heading today and in the future.

In another post, Chuck Hollis, VP — Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation, writes about a coming revolution in business analytics where business users access self-service business analytics environments, select their preferred data sources and tools, and drive their own analytics, rather than requesting and waiting for reports from IT. Hollis also writes about new enabling technologies, such as flash drives, terabyte-class memory spaces for in-memory processing, and columnar databases.

The above surveys and posts indicate that business intelligence and cloud computing are heading toward a high point, like the summer solstice today in the northern hemisphere.

For a humorous look at time travel, check out these advertisements for current digital devices written as if they had been launched in 1977 by time travelers from today.

With so much information and insights at our fingertips, we can indeed travel through time. With time travel via content, data, information, and surveys, we have never been better equipped to succeed.

The Golden Age of Biotech and IT

I was very interested to read that J. Craig Venter and his colleagues created the first synthetic cell a couple weeks ago. It is the seed of a new and second Tree of Life. Dr. Venter described the cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” According to articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Science, synthetic cells open many possibilities for creating biofuels and vaccines.  I think we are entering a new “golden age” of scientific research and products with this discovery. I think we are also entering a “golden age” of computing, as our devices and web-based services change our lives for the better.

Bob Evans, senior VP and director of InformationWeek’s Global CIO unit, thinks a golden age of IT has begun. In this excellent article, he lists six reasons:

• IT vendors are delivering new capabilities that streamline IT and provide new opportunities in analytics, real-time operations and decision-making, mobility, and cloud computing.
• The age of CIO as “high priest” is over.
• In the past few months, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP have launched specific programs aimed at helping CIOs build their way out of the old, brittle, inflexible, and expensive IT infrastructures they’ve cobbled together over the past 10-20 years.
• The rise of predictive analytics: never before in the history of the tech business has so much predictive power been brought to bear on business problems, operational dilemmas, customer behavior and preferences, supply-chain optimization, and more.
• The rise of real-time computing that will in turn fuel real-time production planning and real-time decisions on pricing, merchandising, routing, inventory optimization, and financial operations.
• Mobile is the new desktop.

For a deeper dive on the way analytics is transforming business and IT decision-making, read Rob Preston’s related article, “Down to Business: Analytics for Every Action.”

It is exciting to watch so many improvements occurring at this time in biotech and in IT. These products are helping CIOs and line-of-business managers improve their operations and their decision-making to usher in the golden age of IT:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 Attensity360 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.

What do you plan to do with cloud-based systems to create a golden age of IT and decision-making at your organization?

Cloud Computing and Workshifting

Today I’m working from home. Yes, I’m really working, and this post is evidence. I actually write most of my posts at home, where I can more easily think and concentrate with no distractions. Some people can listen to music in the office to tune out distractions, but I am a musician with two degrees in music, so I analyze the scales, harmonies, rhythm, instrumentation, structure, and influence, or just enjoy listening to some of my favorite music, to a point where listening to music is as distracting as any other activity.

According to an excellent report published this week, “Workshifting Benefits: The Bottom Line,” compiled by the Telework Research Network (TRN) and sponsored by Citrix Online, there are many benefits to working at home in addition to optimal productivity for certain tasks. The press release announcing the report states that “virtual work policies could save U.S. businesses over $400 billion per year in increased productivity, lower office costs, and reduced absenteeism and staff turnover.”

Here are the key findings of the report, from the press release:

TRN’s Savings Calculator is based on data that shows 40% of American workers could work from home at least some of the time and of those, 79% would choose to if given the opportunity. If those people worked from home just half of the time:

• A company of 100 people could gain approx. $576,000 per year and the U.S. economy as a whole would gain $235 billion in increased productivity.
• U.S. business would save an additional $124 billion in office costs, $46 billion in reduced absenteeism and $31 billion in reduced employee turnover.
• Each employee could save an average of $362 on gas per year, plus $3,840 on related expenses such as parking, food and clothing.
• Individuals could recoup approx. 2 weeks of free time per year otherwise spent commuting.
• Employee gas savings would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 53 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking over 9.6 million cars off the road – and it would save $23 billion a year in imported oil, which equates to approx. 288 million barrels of oil.
• U.S. taxpayers could save $2 billion in highway maintenance costs.
• As a nation, the U.S. would save $11 billion in traffic accident costs.

Here’s a great post on workshifting.com with graphs of the above statistics from the report.

Enterprise cloud-based systems play perfectly in the above advantages of workshifting. With cloud-based systems, you don’t need to install software on specific machines or be in the office to complete your work. You can do your work from anywhere, to optimize your productivity and to support changes or other requirements you may have.

Consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented quickly and that support our innate desire for flexibility and work-life balance:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 Attensity360 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.

How do you plan to use cloud-based systems to support your modern organization to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud?

Lady Gaga and Cloud Computing

She’s everywhere. Like Madonna in the ‘80s, Lady Gaga is almost ubiquitous. She was on the Grammy Awards broadcast; on American Idol; she’s all over YouTube and in so many photos, magazine and television interviews; and, she’s on tour. Even I am writing about her in a cloud-computing blog.

Lady Gaga is among a new generation of pop artists who carry on a tradition of blending music, fashion, theatrical performances, and multimedia that blossomed with artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Queen, David Bowie, KISS, and Alice Cooper. You can see her on demand from anywhere, and she probably has a long career ahead.

She reminds me a lot of cloud computing: still new on the scene; gaining a lot of momentum and attention; a bit controversial; strong initial following and success; a bright future ahead; on demand from anywhere; and carrying on an earlier tradition. With cloud computing, that tradition is metered, pay-as-you-go computing where processing occurs on servers accessed by thin-client terminals.

Social media analysis of Lady Gaga - click to enlarge

Just to see if my comparison holds true, I performed a social-media analysis of Lady Gaga and cloud computing, using social media monitoring software as a service Attensity360. Not surprisingly, Lady Gaga trounces cloud computing in social media. Over the last 30 days, Lady Gaga was mentioned 232,958 times in social media. Her topic is gaining this month over last month, and Facebook leads the list of sources with 884 mentions. She is normally mentioned around 8,000 times per day, but, on April 30 and May 5, her mentions soared to 14,000.

Social media analysis of cloud computing - click to enlarge

In an earlier post, I did a social-media analysis of cloud computing, and found that the topic was declining in social media. Cloud computing only received 19,781 mentions in March, so cloud computing promoters like me have a lot of work to do to catch up to Lady Gaga! Actually, fewer mentions of a new and promising technology is a good thing; it means that cloud computing is now beginning to mature, just like Lady Gaga.

Gartner and cloud expert David Linthicum confirm that cloud computing is ending its initial peak of inquiry and thought leadership, and is now moving toward mainstream adoption. In this press release Gartner indicates that cloud computing has now reached its peak of inflated expectations and will enter mainstream adoption over the next two to five years. In this post, “The cloud computing hype is beginning to die,” David Linthicum noted a perceived decline in hype and information about cloud computing, which he thinks is “a good sign that cloud computing is about to enter the mature stage of actual usage.”

No company can afford to ignore social media and the insights that SaaS social media monitoring products like Attensity360 provide. With social media you have the largest focus group in history that you can monitor and engage. This video illustrates the staggering adoption of social media over the last several years.

There are stellar SaaS products that you can quickly implement to analyze, forecast, and improve your business performance and insights, such as:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 Attensity360 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.

Lady Gaga and cloud computing are on a similar trajectory, moving to wide adoption after their initial splash. I think Lady Gaga should cross another boundary and add a venture capital fund for cloud computing companies to her empire.