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.

The Universe and the Digital Universe are Expanding into Clouds

History of the Universe - click to expand

I’ve been watching two excellent series on the Discovery Channel: Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, and Life with Oprah Winfrey. They complement each other very well and do a great job explaining our current understanding of the universe and the various categories of life on Earth. I was reminded that the universe is 14 billion years old and probably has a life span of 28 billion years ahead. That will give us plenty of time to figure out what to do with all the data we’re creating. The universe is expanding and so is our love affair with creating and disseminating data.

History of the Universe

According to an EMC-sponsored IDC study published yesterday, “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” the digital universe is expanding at an almost unimaginable rate. That may be no surprise, but consider these statistics compiled from: the news release announcing the study; the EMC Digital Universe page; and the multimedia presentation of the study:

• The creation and replication of new digital information set a record in 2009 by growing to 800 billion gigabytes, 62 percent over 2008. Try to picture a stack of DVDs reaching 240,000 miles to the Moon and back.
• The amount of digital information created in 2010 is projected to be 1.2 zettabytes (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). That equals 707 trillion copies of the more than 2,000-page U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into Law in March 2010. Stacked end to end, the documents would stretch from Earth to Pluto and back 16 times or cover every inch of the United States in paper 3 feet deep. The distance between Earth and Pluto is between 2.6 billion and 4.6 billion miles, depending on where Earth and Pluto are in their respective orbits.
• The expansion of the digital universe is expected to gain further momentum over the next decade, increasing 44-fold to 35 trillion gigabytes (35 zettabytes) by the year 2020. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars. That’s between 17 million and 125 million miles, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits.

The view from Earth; click on image to enlarge it.

I think it’s clear that the expanding digital universe can only be managed in the cloud, with its elastic ability to rapidly scale to meet varying levels of demand. Here’s a good piece of information for cloud computing vendors from the study:

• Based on the use of cloud computing services by companies to reduce the portion of their IT budget devoted to legacy system maintenance, IDC estimates that the increase in IT dollars spent on innovation could drive more than $1 trillion in increased business revenues between now and the end of 2014. This projection will increase substantially as private cloud and other cloud computing models move into mainstream adoption.

If you are a vendor that could benefit from the $1 trillion that IDC estimates will expand into cloud computing by 2014, you may want to examine your pricing strategy. Price optimization ensures that you are pricing your products appropriately for each of your customer segments. Price optimization SaaS solution Mimiran was just profiled by Inc.magazine as one of four killer sales apps that could help you succeed in monetizing the expanding digital universe.

Consider these scalable cloud-based systems that are very capable of managing and interpreting the increasing amount of data that your organization will create and access during this decade of the rapidly expanding digital universe:

• 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.

Universe collage - click to enlarge

How do you plan to manage your expanding digital universe with cloud-based systems?