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.

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?

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?

Cloud-based Systems are Your Tools for Business Composition

Audiotool application - click to enlarge

A friend recently introduced me to Audiotool, a very interesting, fun, and easy-to-use music-composition platform. It contains the tools you need to quickly create digital music: drums, synths, effects, and a library of guitar, bass, vocal, and other sounds. You select the tool you want to use, create a beat, a melody, or an effect with it, and add it to the mix of your composition. I was amazed to watch my friend use Audiotool to quickly create a mix that sounds good on its own or in your favorite dance club. You can save the piece you created as a file for posterity or for additional editing. Audiotool is also a social-media platform for sharing your music and following your influencers.

Here’s a review of Audiotool by Terrence O’Brien of Switched, and here are some compositions by Sam’s Sound Box in the Audiotool community. Play it again, Sam! I’m currently working on “In the Hybrid Cloud,” my first Audiotool composition! I’ll have to work hard to catch up to Sam. I think I’ll follow his updates. If you need help getting started with Audiotool, here’s an excellent tutorial.

Audiotool makes it easy to experiment with sound. You scale up when you want higher volume and density in the mix, or scale down for quieter, minimal sections. You also don’t need to master a musical instrument or buy, maintain, and configure a lot of expensive equipment. Audiotool has what you need on demand from anywhere.

You know where I’m heading: cloud computing is quite like an Audiotool for your organization! With cloud-based systems, you can focus less on buying and configuring expensive and complex hardware and software, and more on provisioning the applications you want to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud. You can easily scale up to deliver more and better insights to more people, or scale down when your business needs change. You can classify most cloud purchases as operational expenses of your departmental budget rather than capital expenses of your organization, which usually require more levels of oversight and approval. With cloud computing, you have the creative license to experiment while improving your ability to serve and delight your internal and external audience.

Consider these cloud-based systems that you can use to quickly deliver business results at a tempo that matches the pace of change in your organization:

• 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 compose solutions that will be a hit with your customers?

Health Care Reform and Cloud Computing

Organizational chart of the health plan; click on image to enlarge it.

Last Thursday, March 25th, Congress approved a bill for major health care reform, which has been a priority for several administrations and a topic of discussion and controversy for decades. I compiled below a few articles, perspectives, and summaries of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590):

• New York Times: “Final Votes in Congress Cap Battle on Health Bill“
• HealthReform.gov, managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
• Examiner.com, “A plain language summary of the current health care reform bill“
• American Medical Association letter to Speaker Pelosi, supporting the bill
• AARP Statement on Historic Health Insurance Reform Package
• Kaiser Permanente Comments on House Passage of the Health Care & Education Affordability Reconciliation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

While the business side of health care will change considerably as the new regulations take effect, I think it’s also interesting to take a quick look at current and future technology improvements in patient care, such as bionics and nanomedicine. Artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought are currently being developed and tested, while nanomedicine will create breakthroughs in treating many diseases at the cellular level.

• National Geographic article, “Bionics“
• The Pentagon Channel on YouTube, “Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms“
• UnderstandingNano.com: “Nanotechnology in Medicine – Nanomedicine“

In most business environments, business intelligence is high on the wish list to help control costs, improve performance, and identify business opportunities by discovering patterns and insights in data for improved decision-making. According to the below articles, business intelligence is also a high priority in health care:

• SearchDataManagement.com: “Business intelligence in healthcare: Special report“
• Information Management Magazine: “BI’s March to Health Care“
• BeyeNETWORK: “Trends in the Healthcare Business Intelligence Marketplace“
• The Health Care Blog: “Next Generation Healthcare Analytics“
• Healthcare IT News: “Investors keen on analytics, patient safety tech“
• Information Management Magazine: “Bringing Analytics to the Treatment Level“
• Federal Computer Week: “Tracking Pandemics –  A Closer Look at Healthcare Analytics“

Cloud-based business intelligence solutions can help health care companies achieve their goals of reducing cost, streamlining operations, and delivering better care through improved decision-making, because BI SaaS can be instantly activated and scaled to meet business requirements. Just as health care reform promises improved access to health care for more people, BI SaaS provides insights to more employees for better decision-making. But is health care ready for cloud computing? According to these two articles, the answer is “yes.”

• The Health Care Blog: “Is Cloud Computing Right for Health IT?“
• iHealthBeat: “Health Care Might Be Ripe for Cloud Computing“

If you are interested in reforming your business to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud, consider these cloud-based solutions:

• 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 reform your organization to better serve your patients and customers with cloud-based solutions?