Thanksgiving, Pacemakers, and Cloud Computing

The St. Jude Medical Accent RF pacemaker with wireless monitoring

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a great holiday celebrating the people, events, and things for which you are thankful.

My holiday began well, with my mom flying in to visit for a few days. However, on Thanksgiving morning, she fainted and we took her to a hospital for tests. She felt and seemed fine minutes after fainting, but she has a pacemaker, so there was additional cause for concern.

Pacemakers store data for configuration and for reporting. A technician interrogated the pacemaker, using a computer with sensors to review its configuration, test its performance, and gather data around the time my mom fainted. He reported that nothing was wrong with the pacemaker, its configuration, or its ability to interact with her heart.

I asked the technician if pacemakers would eventually be able to transmit data wirelessly at regular intervals or even in real time, so that a computer could monitor the data and automatically generate alerts when it detects a problem. “That’s the new technology,” he replied. This article, written last week for the Chicago Tribune, is about the new generation of pacemakers that provide wireless monitoring.

Wireless pacemakers are a good example of technology that continually improves to serve us better, faster, and cheaper. Cloud computing is another example; rather than taking months or years to implement, cloud-based solutions can be delivered in days or weeks with drastically reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs and requirements as compared to on-premises systems.

Consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented immediately to improve business performance, drive revenue growth and profitability, and solve IT concerns in the cloud:

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 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.

My mom was released from the hospital in excellent condition late on Thanksgiving. The pacemaker optimizes her heart rate and improves her quality of life. I am very thankful for that.

Cloud computing can quickly help you optimize the way you run your business. If you start now, you will be thankful for it long before next Thanksgiving.

What types of business solutions and results would you like to see at your company before next Thanksgiving?

Colin Powell, Cloud Computing, and a Tale of Two Conferences

This week I attended Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce Global Gathering in San Francisco and heard Colin Powell’s keynote in an audience of 8,000 people late Thursday afternoon, the last full day of the conference. It was interesting to hear the man who was secretary of state under George W. Bush, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W. Bush, and national security advisor to Ronald Reagan talk about studying data processing in 1969; placing his first cell-phone call in 1979 using Motorola CEO Robert Galvin’s phone; watching his son become chairman of the FCC; and now serving as a strategic limited partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the renowned Silicon Valley venture capital firm that funded companies such as Amazon.com, America Online, Citrix Systems, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Lotus Development, Macromedia, Netscape, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Symantec, Tandem, Visio, and Verisign. Powell underscored the resilience and innovation that made the United States a great nation, and that cloud computing is the next generation of innovation in computing.

In his keynote at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff unveiled new Salesforce services such as Salesforce Chatter, which brings microblogging capabilities similar to Twitter and Facebook to enterprise collaboration, Sales Cloud 2, and Service Cloud 2. As part of the keynote he shared with Colin Powell, Marc Benioff presented a check for $2 million to the University of California San Francisco to help build a new children’s hospital. The award honors Colin Powell, who supported the launch of the Salesforce.com Foundation 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, at Interop in New York, executives of storied tech companies Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems heralded the arrival of cloud computing in their keynote speeches. According to an InformationWeekarticle by Paul McDougall, “Interop: IT Forecast Says Clouds,” Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton said, “The Holy Grail is to deliver IT services on-demand.” In her keynote, Marie Hattar, VP for network systems and security solutions at Cisco Systems, said, “It’s all leading to a world where business is conducted through networks that are virtually borderless.”

Notable exhibitors at Dreamforce included:

• Pervasive Software: Integration platform that quickly connects Salesforce.com with enterprise applications, databases, file formats, other SaaS applications, and legacy data.
• Sesame Software: Relational Junction product suite provides a SQL interface to Salesforce.com for integration and bi-directional data warehousing of all Salesforce data with any database platform.
• Birst: On-demand business intelligence providing analysis and reporting solutions that are quick to deploy, easy to use, and affordable, so that many users can benefit from greater insight into their business.
• BranchIt, an enterprise relationship management solution that helps your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.

Other great SaaS products that integrate with Salesforce.com include:

• eiVia, a SaaS business intelligence (BI) application that provides predictive analytics for decision-making.
• mashmatrix Dashboard, an enterprise mashup dashboard that provides 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.
• Mimiran, a price-optimization application that helps you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• TrackVia, an enterprise cloud database that enables you to quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• TriCipher, a cloud-based single sign-on system that provides a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications. It improves administration by making it easy to grant and revoke access to enterprise cloud-based and on-premises applications.

With 19,000 attendees at Dreamforce, Colin Powell now a VC in the cloud-computing industry, and pro-cloud keynotes from Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems at Interop, it’s clear we’re on to something.

How do you plan to join great companies and leaders moving to cloud computing?

Encryption is the Key to Cloud Computing Security

One of the major concerns about cloud computing, or any type of computing, is security. Rest assured, security professionals and vendors are quickly addressing the concern. According to a post by InformationWeek.com Editor-in-Chief Alexander Wolfe, encryption is the savior of cloud computing security.

To illustrate the power of encryption, we can compare computer security to traditional security, and data to cash. The goal of a bank robbery is to get cash, and the goal of cybercrime is to get data. To steal cash, criminals need to penetrate a building, possibly several rooms, and then the device that stores it. To steal data, criminals need to penetrate a firewall and several servers or storage area networks to get to its location.

In robberies or burglaries of the past, if criminals got the cash and got away, they had some extra spending money; but now there are dye packs triggered to explode in bags of money handed to criminals. The money becomes worthless, there is red dye everywhere, and possibly also tear gas.

In cybercrime, if criminals locate unencrypted data, they can copy it and view it; but with encryption, criminals may be able to locate and copy the data, but they cannot view it without an encryption key that converts the encrypted data to readable form. Risk is then limited to those who have the encryption key.

In his post, Alex Wolfe mentions a new type of encryption invented by IBM. “Privacy homomorphism,” or “fully homomorphic encryption” allows encrypted data to be used for analytics, meaning that reports can be run without a human able to read or decrypt the data and no individual privacy can be compromised. In the press release announcing fully homomorphic encryption, Charles Lickel, vice president of software research at IBM, said, “Fully homomorphic encryption is a bit like enabling a layperson to perform flawless neurosurgery while blindfolded, and without later remembering the episode.” Contact IBM before trying this.

Encryption also addresses concerns about multitenancy, where all accounts use the same application instance. With encryption, no one can read data without a key, and each account would of course have its own encrypted data and keys.

It may be possible to crack a safe, but it’s nearly impossible to crack a 128-bit encryption key. According to this post on MyCrypto.net, it would take 20,000 years under ideal conditions to crack a commonly used 128-bit encryption key. According to posts by Verisign and Inet2000, it would take “a trillion years” and “significantly longer than the age of the universe” to crack a 128-bit key.

While data is the end goal of cybercrime, encrypted data is useless to a criminal. Encryption protects data no matter where it resides or how it is accessed, so encryption may indeed be the savior of cloud computing security.

For more about security threats and protection, read this page from security leader TriCipher.

Do you believe that encryption is the savior of cloud computing security?

13 Laws of Cloud Computing

As the final installment of my series of numerical posts this week, I offer on Friday, November 13, 13 laws of cloud computing.

If you suffer from triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13) or paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13^th), I assure you that 13 is a lucky number.

Sierpinski Triangle

This post is based on three sources (three is also a lucky number):

1. An excellent set of 10 laws of cloud computing, plus one bonus law, announced on 11/11 by Bessemer Venture Partners

2. A Deloitte poll of executives about cloud computing announced last week

3. My own observations

Bessemer packages its 10 laws in four ways: a press release, a post on Sandhill.com, on its website, and in a whitepaper available from the website. The press release provides a quick summary, the post on Sandhill.com provides a little detail, and the website content and whitepaper provide more depth and support for each law.

Here are the 10 laws and the bonus law from Bessemer’s press release:

1. Less is more – leverage the cloud everywhere you practically can.

2. Trust the six Cs of cloud computing–build a reliable CEO dashboard to monitor the business.

3. Study the sales learning curve and invest behind success.

4. Forget everything you learned about software channels – the Internet is your new channel and technology enabled service providers are among the few partners that actually care if you succeed.

5. Build employee software – employees are now powerful customers, not just their managers! We are witnessing the “consumerization of software” so focus on ease of use.

6. Savvy online marketing is a core competence – if you are a cloud business, your sales prospects are online by definition. Become an expert at online marketing to reach them!

7. The most important part of “software as a service” is service – support, support, support!

8. Leverage and monetize the data asset – the data hosted by a SaaS provider can become a valuable asset if harnessed appropriately.

9. Mind the GAAP! – Cloud accounting is all about matching revenue and costs to consumption.

10. Cloudonomics requires that you plan your fuel stops [financing] very carefully.

11. Bonus Law: While one or two of these laws may be violated, very few companies succeed if they ignore three or more.

Law 12, from the Deloitte poll press release, is that cloud computing will create new business models in the IT industry, including cloud-based consortiums that combine to present themselves as a larger market presence; and brokers and aggregators that offer “two-way” markets for cloud computing resources among enterprises.

Law 13, from me, is that, no matter how individual SaaS companies may interpret or apply the above laws, it will be difficult or impossible to survive alone.

As a bonus to the 13 laws of cloud computing, I offer for consideration nine SaaS companies that will quickly deliver return on investment (nine is also a lucky number, adjacent to 13 in the series of lucky numbers):

• 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 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.

The next Friday the 13^th is August 13, 2010. What types of cloud-based solutions will you be lucky to have by then?

Eight Levels of Analytics

Just after writing yesterday about “six degrees of separation,” I discovered this article, “Eight levels of analytics,” and so I was probably destined to write this post on 11/11. Today I also saw “‘Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Being SaaS-y’ Updated for Cloud Computing,” from Bessemer Venture Partners, and “Seven SaaS Revenue Streams” from Sixteen Ventures, both of which contain numerical titles and very interesting recommendations and analyses of SaaS revenue streams by venture capitalists. I even began this post at 11:11 and finished it at 12:22 for a total time of 1:11!

If there is a pattern in my numerology today, business intelligence (BI) software could help discover and understand it, and predict what will happen over given timeframes. The ability of BI to find patterns, answers, and forecasts for complex business problems and data sets is high on the list of CIOs today. According to this article by Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters, companies want to increase their adoption of BI beyond executives to front-line decision-makers, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI is making this possible due to low cost, quick deployment, and return on investment (ROI).

Although the article is basic for BI cognoscenti, “Eight levels of analytics” by Jennifer Kavur of Computerworld Canada is based on a presentation by Jim Davis, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer of SAS Institute Inc., a leading on-premises BI software vendor. The article provides a good, quick, and simple overview of BI for those who just read that their company is planning a large rollout of SaaS BI to improve decision-making and business performance.

Below are the eight levels of analytics, according to Jim Davis. The first four are the most commonly used and they analyze past data. The second four look at the future and are the hottest areas in BI today because businesses now want more help in modeling the future.

1. Standard reports answer questions like “What happened?” and “When did it happen?”

2. Ad hoc reports answer questions like, “How many? How often? Where?”

3. Query drill-downs answer questions like, “Where exactly is the problem?” and “How do I find the answers?”

4. Alerts answer questions like, “When should I react?” and “What actions are needed now?”

5. Statistical analysis answers the questions, “Why is this happening?” and “What opportunities am I missing?”

6. Forecasting answers questions like, “What if these trends continue? How much is needed? When will it be needed?”

7. Predictive modeling tells users what will happen next and how it will affect the business.

8. Optimization answers the questions, “How do we do things better?” and “What is the best decision for a complex problem?” This includes areas such as price optimization, markdown optimization and size optimization. This isn’t just about cost-cutting and can be the difference between success and failure for an organization.

SaaS BI companies to watch as the SaaS BI market continues to grow include Birst for reporting and analytics, eiVia for forecasting and predictive modeling, Mimiran for price optimization, and mashmatrix Dashboard for enterprise data mashups, dashboards, and visualization.

It will be interesting to look back at this post on 11/11/11 and see how high the SaaS BI market has grown since 11/11/09. We can use predictive modeling to predict the SaaS BI market growth now and set an alert to remind us to run that report at 11:11 on 11/11/11.

Do you predict that your organization will have SaaS BI implemented for more decision-makers by 11:11 on 11/11/11?

Six Degrees of Separation

Chances are you are familiar with the idea of “six degrees of separation,” that there are at most five people you would need to go through to get to any other person. From the Wikipedia, “Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the ‘Human Web’) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth. It was popularized by a play written by John Guare.”

I saw the play, but it still doesn’t seem possible that there are only five acquaintances between me and anyone (and I’m not going to do the math at this time); but I do believe that, in the business world, there are usually fewer degrees of separation than six. If you are an active user of business social-media services such as LinkedIn, it’s not hard to see or estimate how many degrees you are away from anyone in your industry.

The tremendous success of social-media platforms confirms that relationships are important; but even with the amazing ability that social media provides in maintaining and discovering relationships, there are still many relationships with potential customers or business partners that you are unaware of in your organization.

That is where cloud-based enterprise-relationship-management (ERM) services such as BranchIt come in. BranchIt analyzes email patterns in your organization to help discover relationships with potential business partners, while keeping the relationship-holders anonymous until they agree to help build a bridge. One BranchIt customer was able to discover employee relationships with more than 20 percent of a list of prospective customers.

Maybe we are only six degrees away from anyone else, but without ERM solutions such as BranchIt to help us uncover the relationships that build bridges between the degrees, that number may as well be infinite.

What applications of enterprise relationship management could you see in your organization?

Dim Sum SaaS

Last week, my colleagues and I had a great dim sum lunch at Great Eastern Restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I recommend the restaurant; in addition to the great food, the experience inspired this post!

From the Wikipedia: “Dim Sum (touch the heart) is usually linked with the older tradition of Yum Cha (drinking tea), which has its roots in travellers on the ancient Silk Road needing a place to rest. Thus teahouses were established along the roadside. Rural farmers, exhausted after working hard in the fields, would also go to teahouses for a relaxing afternoon of tea. At first, it was considered inappropriate to combine tea with food, because people believed it would lead to excessive weight gain. People later discovered that tea can aid in digestion, so teahouse owners began adding various snacks.”

The advantage of dim sum, especially with a group, is that there are many different dishes to choose from. Rather than ordering individual dishes for themselves, everyone gets to try many dishes.

Software as a service (SaaS) is like dim sum, in that it’s so easy, quick, and usually inexpensive to get up and running with the number of users you need. It even provides an opportunity to easily try new applications, because there is no software and hardware to install, no large initial investment or commitment required, and there is often an opportunity to try the service for free.

In his article,  “BI for the Front Lines,” Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters suggests making business intelligence available to more employees than only executives for decision making, and that SaaS BI is making this possible. Small investments in SaaS can be spread quickly across many users for rapid business results, improved communication and collaboration, and return on investment (ROI).

Consider these SaaS delicacies that you can quickly roll out to your users:

• 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 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.

The business results, ROI, and cost savings over on-premises alternatives that SaaS products can provide will touch the heart like dim sum and become a staple in your approach to addressing business needs with flexible, integrated, specialized, and efficient on-demand solutions.

What’s your favorite dim sum dish?

What types of SaaS applications would you like to add to your environment to quickly serve and satisfy changing business needs?

Cloud Computing and Decision-Making

Unfortunately or fortunately for Minnesota Vikings Quarterback Brett Favre, he faced a difficult struggle between 2006 and this season in deciding whether or not to retire. However, given Favre’s and the Vikings’ performance thus far, it appears that his string of decisions worked out well. One thing most of us can probably agree on is that Favre is fortunate to be able to change his mind and continue his career as a starting NFL quarterback. He is clearly one of the best.

Business and IT managers also face difficult decisions, especially in committing to multi-million or even multi-billion-dollar initiatives. One of their largest decisions is committing to specific on-premises enterprise software that requires high initial investments, multi-year implementations, costly customization, and confidence in the vendor’s future. These circumstances have led research and advisory firms such as ZapThink to question the future of single-vendor enterprise software, and argue that the best strategy is service-oriented architecture (SOA) and multiple cloud-based applications that use the services.

In a ZapFlash document, “Is there a Future for Enterprise Software?,” Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink argues that “dependence on a single product, single vendor for the entirety of a company’s operations is absolutely ludicrous in an IT environment where there’s no technological reason to have such dependencies. The more you depend on one thing for your success, the less you are able to control your future. Innovation itself hangs in the balance when a company becomes so dependent on another company’s ability to innovate.”

Enterprise architecture aside, cloud-based applications do make decision-making easier on several fronts, because they:

• Do not require long commitments and high initial licensing investments
• Can scale up or down quickly as needed to support business requirements
• Can be rolled out in days rather than years
• Can produce business value within days
• Do not require enormous investments in infrastructure to operate

Even if a company has considerable investments in single-vendor enterprise software, cloud-based applications can supplement those investments with many niche applications that would often take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to define, develop, configure, test, and implement with on-premises enterprise software. For example, consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented in days to quickly solve business problems:

• 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 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 asTriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

When faced with an enormous decision to commit to an uncertain future and millions of dollars with a single on-premises vendor, there may be a way to get better results faster and cheaper with enterprise cloud-based solutions and SOA. Best of all, SOA and cloud computing provide the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing business conditions and still succeed in ways you could never entirely predict or plan for, just like Brett Favre did.

How does your organization plan to implement enterprise cloud-based solutions and SOA to reduce risk and improve flexibility in decision-making?