Cloud Connect is in full scale today. Yesterday, there was the Cloud Business Summit where top industry executives spoke about the impact of Cloud Computing on today's business. I had a chance to talk to many leaders in the industry and I could feel the cloud in the air. People are pretty excited about how cloud computing is going to change the entire business landscape in the coming decade. The sessions ranged from discussions about which business models are winning to exploring different challenges and opportunities in the enterprise market to the investment scene and go to market strategies.
I had a chance to speak to Mr. Jason Green of Emergence Capital Partners yesterday. Emergence Capital were an early investor in Salesforce.com and their portfolio includes such big names like Successfactors, Echosign, Yammer, etc..  He sounded very positive about the state of the clouds. He told me that they exclusively support cloud vendors, especially on the applications side. He was telling me that he sees a big increase in enterprise adoption and expects it to stay that way in the coming years. 
Another interesting topic in our discussions was about SaaS players using other cloud based services (platform and infrastructure) for their needs. I had a twitter discussion long back on the same topic. We see SaaS and Web 2.0 startups using IaaS and PaaS for their infrastructure needs early on and move to their own datacenters as they grow big. I am really keen to hear from SaaS companies on why we see such a trend while IaaS and PaaS players are trying to get enterprises move into the cloud. It is also interesting because on one hand, they want customers to trust them and put their data on their services but, on the other hand, they don't think they can rely on IaaS or PaaS players to deliver their apps. Ideally, I would like to see SaaS providers use the -aaS' all the way down to the infrastructure part of the stack.
In short, I get a feeling that Cloud Computing has finally taken off. In spite of some hyping on the vendor side and scare tactics on the side of the traditional software vendors, it has finally reached mainstream. I spoke with a couple of ISVs and both of them told me that they were at the conference because they want to move their apps to clouds. Nope, they didn't talk about cloud washing, they want to re-architect their applications so that they can offer them "as a service". If anything this conference has highlighted, it is the fact that the cloud has arrived.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

How do I know, when I’m not even there?  By reading what others say.  For starters, here’s Jolie O’Dell who attends this year’s conference:

Too many people, not enough tech.

…non-technical people aren’t here to learn; they’re here for self-congratulation and mutual masturbation. People I’ve never heard of are referring to themselves as Twitter celebrities and generally making me ill.

This show isn’t fun, and I won’t be coming back.

For contrast, non-attendee Danny Brown says: Why I’m Not Missing SxSW.  Dennis Howlett chimes in: The not attending SXSW grump report  Yes, Dennis is a self-proclaimed curmudgeon, but he has a point, and he does not seem to be alone.

I dropped by at the Cloud Connect conference yesterday (yes, dear organizers, I sneaked in with my badge from the previous event hosted by SAP’s CEOs, as your registration closed early.)  From the full house (standing room only) at Geoffrey Moore’s session I tweeted:

So are all the workabees @ #ccevent while the party types went to #SXSW?

Chirag Mehta  picked up on my teasing Geoffrey Moore:

Well, all iPhone folks are at #SXSW RT @ZoliErdos: Geoffrey Moore needs to update his speech- said look at your Blackberries LOL #ccevent

You probably get the drift by now… but here’s Jeremy Pepper spelling it out for you: I Don't Do SXSWi

For the past few years, I keep hearing the same thing about SXSWi:

• It's spring break for social media
• It's a week long party
• It's one night after the other of bars and alcohol
• It's great networking
• I go every year, and make my agency pay for it no matter what because it's a great party (this said to me by a former boss when I asked what the value is there - notice nothing about actual work, though).

I rarely hear "it's a great event for my company/agency to reach the right people for product A, B or C". It's always about the drinking.

… take a step back and think of this: can you justify missing Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday to your boss or client? And, well, the rest of the week is a wash also if you're hungover.

And, as a sage executive said to me about CES: there's going to be a bad day of reckoning for social media. Corporations are going to ask for ROI, and going to party is not ROI.

Sour grapes?  I don’t think so.  But back to the question on how I know SXSW has peaked?  Because declaring non-participant status is becoming trendy.  This would have been unthinkable last year.  So my prediction for next year: there will be even more : “why I am not going” declarations, and the year after SXSWI will be “uncool”.  The trendsetters move on to another party conference :-)

Image by Hugh MacLeod, who calls it the annual 5-day drunken orgy (which he is attending, btw….)

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The top open request from our recent survey has been for memcached. Memcached is a simple, fast and scalable in-memory object caching system. Dynamic web applications use memcached to store frequently used data, reducing database load. The Heroku memcached add-on is built on the NorthScale distribution of memcached (NorthScale Memcached Server) which includes an advanced, per-user security model. The service is fully managed by NorthScale – a company formed and run by leaders of the memcached open source project.

All Heroku users can use the add-on today. Read the docs for full details on getting started and add away. We’ll be using this beta period to analyze usage, determine final pricing, and collect user feedback. We are aiming for a late April full release of the add-on.

Amazon S3's new Versioning feature has now graduated to production status! Once you have enabled versioning for a particular S3 bucket, you can create a new version of an object by simply uploading it. The old versions continue to exist and remain accessible.

Versioning's MFA Delete feature has also graduated to production status. Once enabled for an S3 bucket, each version deletion request must include the six-digit code and serial number from your MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) device.

Read the S3 documentation to learn more about these important new features.

Here's a roundup of the tools and toolkits that already support S3 Versioning and MFA Delete:

• AWS SDK for .Net
• Boto Toolkit for Python
• Jets3t Toolkit for Java
• JamDisk client for Amazon S3 - runs on Windows and Linux.
• CloudBerry S3 Explorer - Windows
• Bucket Explorer - Windows

I decided to have some fun with the new versioning feature!

I found some pictures from a few years ago, sorted them into chronological order, turned on versioning for one of my S3 buckets, and uploaded each of the pictures to the same S3 object, creating a series of versions.

The first of the pictures can be seen at right (wasn't I cute?).

 

Here's a complete list of the versions for this object. Each one is linked to a particular version of the picture:

• 9oH0l4qQcgG1iiPT5XXRrxUkk9uWSBRF
• 9Hxj9xS_r4yeYdrKviQJF5rI167rQeC5
• 0l0zZ8wENs5C..qnl761Bmjn5shGBFwd (This one is my favorite)
• Jd4BpU4gYdDN2QLedlESpkqFhyLHblyp
• eldJ5CbWCDKg7VtAU3lhPu415R7emIxc
• r5bY1532SH400TkfDoDuPbosI0Fhum9x

I can always get to the latest version of my picture using the URL http://aws-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/jeff_barr.jpg. I can also use a versioned URL to access any version that I would like.

-- Jeff;

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Automated Managed Hosting, and Hybrid Hosting Services to be Available 24/7 through Easy-to-use Storefront

The launches are coming thick and fast at Cloud Connect here in Santa Clara. StrataScale is right now announcing the addition of three new cloud offerings. In addition to its physical Automated Managed Hosting service, StrataScale has developed  their own public and private virtualized clouds. The company also unveiled a Hybrid Hosting solution that allows customers to integrate physical managed servers and virtualized cloud servers on-the-fly in the same secure network and optionally cross connected with existing co-location infrastructure. StrataScale’s cloud offerings live on servers housed in parent company RagingWire 220,000 square foot data center offering 99.999% availability and N+2 redundancy.

StrataScale Vice President of Marketing, Dave Geada, gave me a demo of their offering and more importantly their new self-service storefront. I am of the belief that cloud services are becoming more and more commoditized – there are two ways to differentiate – one is by price while the other is by value add. The likes of Microsoft and Amazon will always be able to beat the smaller players on price, so companies like StrataScale need to compete on service.

In their case, StrataScale are making life easy for customers to provision – they’ve got a nice self-service storefront but at the same provide good one-on-one customer support. On the storefront customers can automatically scale up or down and add new computers and IT components without speaking to a sales representative. All systems are automated on the storefront, including physical managed servers, public virtual servers and private virtual servers

As for the technical details both public and private Cloud offerings deliver hypervisor based virtual machine instances running CentOS, Red Hat Linux, or Microsoft Windows. Hybrid Cloud customers can run Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Automated Managed Hosting servers all on the same network, managed through the StrataScale portal. The new offerings will be available after April 1 – pricing details below.

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If you use Twitter and think it is a valuable service then you’re probably tired of the steady stream of your friends who tell you it’s just a fad and they don’t feel compelled to join.  They “don’t care what people ate for lunch.”  They’re fine on their existing social networks, which these days mostly means they’re happy with Facebook.  I think they’re missing something.

I’ve covered Twitter topics much in the past.  I’ve talked about how Twitter is a new form of RSS (curated RSS), it’s a a new form of IM / SMS, it’s a place where business is conducted and it’s a place where advertising will drive leads due to the link sharing nature of Twitter.

But Twitter is different than Facebook because it’s more open and it’s asymmetric.  Traditional social networks are more restricted to people whom I already know and information and updates are less discoverable.  And as a result Twitter Networks are currently different in my mind than many other social networks.  Twitter Networks allow you to build open and serendipitous relationships with new people where social networks do not.

Let me give you some examples:

Tristan Walker: I first met Tristan online when he was merely human (e.g. before having 300k followers!).  He had followed me on Twitter and sent me a nice message about my blog.   I always look at who follows me on Twitter.  I can’t follow everybody back because I feel that this would clutter my Twitter stream and make it harder to hear from people I really know or from whom I want to learn.  But I do like to follow some random people that I don’t yet know.  Usually people that I think I might someday get to know.   I tend to to look at their bios, sometimes click on their links, read a bit of their Tweet stream and make a quick decision whether or not to follow.  If over time I don’t find any value in what they say I just unfollow in the future.  So when I saw the merely mortal Tristan with a normal sized Twitter following I clicked through to his link, saw his blog, saw that he was a second year at Stanford and just thought, “hey, he seems like an interesting guy.  Maybe I’ll follow him for a bit.”

The day after I first heard from Tristan I was coincidentally in Palo Alto and had a series of back-to-back meetings in one day.  I had a lunch meeting scheduled with Gadi Shamia, whom I love spending time with, at Shabuway on Castro Street in Mountain View (I only mention it because if, like me, you enjoy Shabu Shabu it’s a great place to go).

But I had an hour to kill before lunch and I was on California Street in Palo Alto.  I sent out a Tweet saying, “I’m in Palo Alto for an hour, anyone want to grab coffee?”  Within 2 minutes I had 5 responses to meet me for coffee.  One of them was Tristan.  So I agreed to meet him at Printer’s Cafe.  We spent an hour together.  I instantly loved the guy.  Great life story.  Energetic.  Ambitious but not too full of himself.  He had just finished a project for Twitter and was doing some side work for a small 5 person company called FourSquare.  If you follow them you’ll know that they’re now on fire and Tristan is now VP Business Development.  It wasn’t always so.  We’ve talked on the phone a few times and trade Tweets but we still only met that one time in person.  Somehow he still feels like an old friend.  Strange, huh?

Brad Feld: I first learned of Brad Feld like many of you – through his blog.  I was raising money for my second company and having been burned by term sheets on my first company I was eager to get myself knowledgeable before signing up to take VC again.  I started reading Brad’s “term sheet” series.  If you haven’t read it and you’re thinking about raising money, it’s a must read.  So when I first signed up for Twitter I naturally subscribed to Brad’s feed.

One day Brad Tweeted he was going to be in LA with his dad.  I generally try not to stalk people I don’t know when they announce they’re in town, but as a fellow VC (and a partner in Southern California’s largest fund), I felt we had a legitimate reason to connect.  As he wasn’t following me at the time I wrote to him with the @ sign as you can do in Twitter.  His father, Dr. Stanley Feld, who writes his own blog and covered the encounter in this post,

“Mark Suster twittered Brad on Saturday and asked if he could meet us for breakfast on Sunday. Brad did not know Mark. Brad googled him on his Iphone. He then twittered him a yes at the Mondrian Asia Cuba at 8.30 a.m. It is an instant world out there folks.

The breakfast meeting was wonderful. Again I learned how things are done in the New World.”

It was a great breakfast.  I obviously enjoyed meeting Brad, but I also really enjoyed meeting his father.  Brad was originally from Dallas and his father is still a practicing doctor there.  So is my uncle, Dr. Neal Sklaver.  So I played the usual game of “do you know” and it turns out that they used to have practices in the same building and knew each other well!  Small world.

A few weeks later I was in the Bay Area and  I saw another Tweet from Brad that says that he’s traveling with the governor of Colorado who’s in town to meet with VCs.  I sent a message to Brad saying that I was in town and he invited me to the meeting.  This is back when Brad wasn’t disappointed with the governor  Anyway, another nice, serendipitous encounter.

Ozumo Sushi:  Final story – a few weeks ago I was traveling to San Francisco and had pre-booked every imaginable hour of every day for the full 5 days I was there.  But I was flying in late on a Sunday night and never like to overbook the first night in case the plane isn’t on time.  So when I arrived late at my hotel I decided to try an experiment.  I sent out a Tweet that I was going to Ozumo Sushi in San Fran and if anyone was around they were willing to join me.  This was obviously more open than my Palo Alto Tweet because I actually named the location.

What a pleasure the night was.  It was late but three people still turned up: Justyn Howard (founder & CEO of Sprout Social), Jamie Quint (founder of a YCombinator company), Saumil Mehta (product lead at Kosmix).  I had known Justyn for a while and he was fortuitously in town from Chicago but I had never met Saumil or Jamie.  We (I?) had a great evening talking tech and startup.  We even had a pretty funny end to the night.  I just spoke with Jamie again today on the phone, which is what made me think to write this post.

The world is now wired, connected and open.  I believe you need to be careful with your public whereabouts more than many other people seem to feel.  But in a controlled way I like to get to know people through my Twitter Network in ways that other social networks don’t do it for me.  I get @ replies from many people I don’t know and I try my best to answer most of them.  If people have meaningful things to say, share good links, participate in the comments in my blog and introduce themselves at events, I look forward to getting to know them over time.  It’s the aspect of my job I love the most – meeting new people, hearing their stories, learning and building enduring relationships.  I find this new, open world very encouraging indeed.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table )
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Crowdsourcing continues to grow in popularity and importance across a number of industries. Tac Andersen, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, took in the buzz there, and notes that crowdsourcing is heating up. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010.

With that as context, let’s discuss the Cisco I-Prize. What’s that? I-Prize is an open innovation competition where anyone from around the world can propose ideas. Specifically, ideas that can be $1 billion businesses. This is the use of crowdsourcing to find major business units. Winning team earns $250,000.

Submission of ideas to the I-Prize site, which is powered by Spigit, runs through April 30, 2010. There are already 597 ideas on the site. Anyone can post an idea, and other people discuss it. You can even request to join someone’s team if you like a proposal enough, and the idea owner thinks you can add value. 32 ideas advance to the semi-final selection round.

One note about how the I-Prize works. Participants get virtual currency to buy and sell shares in ideas. Like a stock market. And 8 ideas with the highest price per share (“People’s Choice”) will advance to the semi-final selection round, along with 24 ideas hand-picked by Cisco officials (“Judge’s Choice”).

So the idea trading will matter.

I wanted to write about five ideas that I found interesting. Will they be $1 billion businesses? I don’t know for sure. But these ideas address current markets that reach into the billions of dollars. And I like some of the edgy thinking that goes into them. Along with descriptions, I’ve included their share price performance charts. Note that to view the ideas, and to trade them, you need to be registered on the I-Prize site.

The E-Learning Revolution, by Patrick Mellacher

Patrick’s idea is for students to collaborate and teach one another. Any student can record a lesson on any subject. Other students find this recording, view it and rate it. Top rated tutorials rise to the top.

A key element of his plan is closing the feedback loop. Specifically, how did those who viewed the tutorial perform on their tests? If their performance was above average, the student who uploaded the tutorial gets extra credit.

Because they’ve shown good mastery of the subject, and helped others learn as well.

In a discussion around the idea, Patrick comments:

The other main difference is that my system wants to encourage students to teach each other, not to force them to do so. Not every student is a good teacher, and it should also be possible to achieve the highest possible grade by only learning for yourself. There are, however, students that are very well prepared but fear to be unlucky and therefore want to secure a good grade. In the current system, they mostly try to learn even more(even if they don’t have to) and are not interested in teaching other students. My idea could change that dramatically.

This would be a big help in the education system, distributing the teaching load beyond teachers.

Webcam Game Show Network, by Philip Palmieri

Yes, you read that right: a game show network. Believe it or not, this idea has the highest price per share right now. Let’s find out why.

Game shows are a staple of networks, and they continue to get good slots in prime time. Why not port this experience over to online participants? The basics of this idea are:

• Everyone logs in at the regular time for the game show
• People have their web cams fired up (which chatroulette shows is a growing trend)
• Someone logged in to the game show site is selected at random to play

Right now, you can watch a game show, enjoy the contestants’ fumbling around and wonder if you could do better. With this idea, you just may get the chanced to find out. No flying to an L.A. studio to participate. Just sit in front of your PC at home.

This concept wouldn’t need to be limited to game shows. In response to one commenter on his idea, Philip wrote:

Fantastic, i love the idea about real pundits talking about live events..  this could be huge…  Post-sports games, let the community be analysts, or political events too…

Man, I could see the sports talk after a game. People would love that.

The Cisco Home Energy Mediator, by Robert Dziekan

Cisco currently has technology that helps companies mediate the energy usage of their facilities. What Robert proposes is to extend this into the consumer home market. We can see the power usage, by appliance, at any time via a web interface. And control it accordingly.

Here’s how Robert describes it:

This would give the users who elected to use this service the ability to manage their electricity usage, and truly see what devices in the home were using the most electricity, allowing them to run reports that show historical usage, and the option to set policies that would throttle usage in certain areas, or at least alerting a user if they are going to violate policy (for instance, by virtually running a laundromat in their home one week, exceeding their normal laundry device usage by 300 percent and increasing the high energy usage of devices like the dryer).

Aside from these reports and controls, the home mediator could send alerts when something is amiss for an appliance. I like this idea, and it’s something that’s being discussed out there. Tim O’Reilly noted this at the Web 2.0 Summit last year:

Consider the so-called “smart electrical grid.” Gavin Starks, the founder of AMEE, a neutral web-services back-end for energy-related sensor data, noted that researchers combing the smart meter data from 1.2 million homes in the UK have already discovered that each device in the home has a unique energy signature. It is possible to determine not only the wattage being drawn by the device, but the make and model of each major appliance within – think CDDB for appliances and consumer electronics!

If the cost of the system was relatively low, there seems to be a strong ROI for this. And there are a lot of homes out there.

Touch Immersion VR: A wearable device for physical interaction within a virtual environment, by Benjamin Rafael Intal

Virtual reality holds a lot of potential, providing a user with the simulation of experiences beyond her physical location. Estimates put the market size well into the billions of dollars. Areas of growth for virtual reality include:

• Healthcare
• Defense
• Gaming
• Learning
• Construction and infrastructure

This idea is for a device that provides sensory stimulus in a virtual environment. Combine the physical with the virtual to improve the reactions people have when using virtual reality environments. It envisions delivering these touch sensations: movement restrictions, temperature, pressure, shock. The proposed technology involves servo motors and solenoids, and small cavities with a viscous fluid.

Making what’s virtual more tangible for users strikes me as a really good idea.

EmoTransmission: Transmitting Emotion in Multiplayer Gaming “Feeling Transmission On Games”, by Ali Khalil

I like the way Ali introduces this:

Internet protocols now handle many different types of data, information, voice, and video…etc. But what about feelings like anger, happiness, satisfaction, fear, hate or sadness?

The framing of emotions as data to be captured and transmitted. Definitely edgy. And not out of the realm of possibilities. I mean, who would have guess checking in our locations would be so popular?

Ali envisions emotions integrating into the game experience. Imagine you’re playing one of those multiplayer online games. As you see others, you can get a read for the emotions they are feeling. Which is something that would occur in “real life” if you were engaged in fighting a big battle on your imaginary dragon beast.

There is technology out there which can enable this idea. Here’s how Ali describes it:

There are many types of biofeedback sensors available, able to detect such conditions as skin temperature, muscle tension, and pulse. Analysis of a persons voice could be done with a voice analyzer, as a persons voice is rich with information about a persons emotional state. These sensors and other input devices could be integrated into a device that would cover part of a persons body, like a glove or vest. This device would then be connected to a hardware input device and the software that resides on it would perform the necessary analysis and conversions, tying the detected emotions to the character in the game or simulation.

Good stuff, and something I can see the gamers liking a lot.

Crowdsourcing’s Many Flavors

I wrote previously about crowdsourcing and its effect on the design industry. Well, this is an entirely different approach. It rests on the ideas of others. This does not run into the spec work = free work controversy seen elsewhere. Someone might argue, why not start your own company off these ideas? Well, anyone is free to do so, and not propose them here.

But not all of us are itching to shuck it all take on the risk of entrepreneurship. Mortgages, kids, success in current careers…these are factors that would limit one’s interest in striking out on one’s own. Sometimes, you just have a good idea.

There are 592 other ideas on the I-Prize site currently, beside these five. Go see crowdsourcing in action.

(Cross-posted @ I'm Not Actually a Geek )

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I'm sitting in my hotel room in Santa Clara at the Cloud Connect event. A conference focused on the future of business computing -- so what better a setting to discover that Facebook has passed Google as most-viewed site in US in past week. An amazing feat to say the least, but why? How did this come to be? How did in a little over six years an upstart manage to surpass Google?

To understand you really need to think what the PC era has done to information. In effect the PC revolution started what the Internet has super charged - Information Creation. Think about it, more information is now being creating in the time it takes me to write this post than was probably created between the time humans first figured out how to write up until the birth of the Internet.

But for the most part the majority of the information humankind has created has not been accessible. Most of this raw data or knowledge has been sitting in various silo's -- be it a library, a single desktop, a server, database or even data center. But recently something changed, the most successful companies of the last decade have discover how to tap into this raw data. These companies are better at analyzing, mining and using this mountain of data sitting "out there" -- turning a useless raw resource into something much more useful, Information.

Before you say anything, Yes I know I'm not the first to say this. In a 2006 post Michael Palmer wrote "Data is the new oil!" declaring "Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value."

In the most simplistic terms Palmers post serves as a kind of Data manifesto directly outlining the reason why companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google will rule the next generation of computing. Not because they have more money, but instead because they have tapped into something much larger. They have figured out that those who can most effectively turn data into information will win.

Facebook & Twitter in a sense created the largest social analytics engine on the planet. They essentially know what we're thinking before we do. Using this raw data they can effectively predict trends and more importantly capitalize on these trends with the greatest of ease.

A recent article in the Economist puts the idea of data as power into perspective. "When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days."

The article goes on to point the use case "All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account."

Now just imagine anyone with a credit card given access to near limitless cloud computing resources. Yes, Data is the new Oil.
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Alpe d'Huez, My Favorite Long and Winding Road (courtesy Wikimedia)

“I wish I knew about GoodData before I went through all this pain….”

Something we hear quite a bit – smart companies, with the best intentions get sucked into the morass of reporting, ETL and data warehousing, and come out frustrated and with a lot less money. If this sounds like your journey, you may want to give us a call

Here’s what we see all the time…

1) First we figured out that the reporting with our existing systems didn’t do the trick

These various solutions have reporting capabilities that range from great to completely lacking.    Even in the cases where reporting is great,  the reports have a scope of data/insight that just spans the scope covered by that one solution.   None of them will easily report on data outside of itself,  leaving that task on our lap.

2) Next we tried to build it ourselves from scratch

Many days and dollars later we had a custom solution that produced a handful of reports.   This seemed good,  but as soon as we tried to begin adding to these reports, things started breaking and bad assumptions at the beginning required the revamp of some areas.    Frustration grew and the solution quickly fell apart.    It could be said that a better development team could have done a better job but at the end of the day,  we are not a software company and cannot invest indefinitely on development efforts that we cannot externally monetize.      So over time we learned that this was not a good road.    We bandaged up our bruises and went back to the drawing board.

3) So let’s take an ‘industry standard’ reporting solution and use that

Surely by committing to the mainstream we would be in a better place than trying to build from scratch.    This approach led to a handful of reports which all worked well but who were each only pulling data from a single data source.      Adding even a second data source to any of the reports was like hitting a brick wall.   Progress stopped.    It seemed that even the best Crystal Developers only had experience creating reports from a single database.   Trying to create reports across the multiple data silos that existed across our solutions was challenging.      One theory was to have a “data warehouse”,  sounds great doesn’t it?   But getting data into the data warehouse was challenging and for some SaaS solutions proved to be impossible.   So here we were with a Data Warehouse that was mostly empty and a handful of reports that were basically redundant to internal reports from individual solutions.

4) So we took a stab at understanding the world of ETL

This brick wall introduced me to the strange world of ETL (Extract Transform Load) tools.   It turned out there was an entire cottage industry built around Fortune 100s needing to suck data in and out of the multi-million dollar solutions they had purchased.    These ETL people definitely knew our challenge well and would be happy to help,  but they were so used to Fortune 100 money that they don’t even get out of bed for the size project we had to tackle.    Even the toolset makers themselves were ridiculously priced for a company our size.  Then we finally realized that getting the data out of one system and into another is not our ultimate goal, we just wanted to see some data that we already had in reports and dashboards.

5) But we still needed to do the reporting, which is how this whole thing started in the first place

It turned out that the data is actually not that hard to get at. Now that we can get the data into GoodData,  we can create the magical reports we had always hoped for.

This all reminds me of the old Meineke Muffler commercials — “I’m not going to pay a lot for my BI…”

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0, disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups, and branding on the cloud. This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are:

Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to step on the operators' toes by staying away from the voice plans. They further used heavy compression on their devices to optimize the bandwidth.

As much as elastic computing is integral to cloud computing not all the companies who want to leverage the cloud necessarily care for it. These companies, however, do have unique varying computing needs. These needs typically include fixed long-term computing that grows at relatively fixed low rate and seasonal peaks. This is a great opportunity for the intermediaries to jump in and solve this problem. There will be fewer and fewer cloud providers since it requires significantly hi cap-ex. However being a "cloud VAR" could be a great value proposition for the vendors that currently have a portfolio of cloud management tools or are "cloud SI". This is kind a like CDO (�?Cloud Debt Obligations’ :-)) – just that we will do a better job this time around!

Gaming-as-a-service: It was a while back when I first saw the OTOY demo. Otoy is scheduled to launch in Q2 2010. I believe that there is significant potential in cloud-based rendering for the games. Having access to an online collection of games that can be rented and played on devices with a varying degree of form factors is a huge business opportunity. The cloud also makes it a great platform and a perfect fit for the massive multi-player collaboration. Gaming-as-a-service could leverage everything that SaaS today does - frequent updates, developer ecosystem, pay-as-you-go etc. This business model also improves the current monetization options such as in-game ad placements that could be far more relevant and targeted.

App-driven and content-driven clouds: Now that we are hopefully getting over the fight between private and public cloud let’s talk about a vertical cloud. Computing is not computing is not computing. The needs to compute depend on what is being computed - it depends on the applications' specific needs to compute, the nature and volume of data that is being computed, and the kind of the content that is being delivered. Today in the SaaS world the vendors are optimizing the cloud to match their application and content needs. I would expect a few companies to step up and help ISVs by delivering app-centric and content-centric clouds. Being an avid advocate of net neutrality I believe that the current cloud-neutrality that is application-agnostic is a good thing. However we can certainly use some innovation on top of raw clouds. The developers do need fine knobs for CPU computes, I/O computes, main-memory computing, and many other varying needs of their applications. By far the extensions are specific to a programming stack such as Heroku for Ruby. I see opportunities to provide custom vertical extensions for an existing cloud or build a cloud that is purpose-built for a specific class of applications and has a range of stack options underneath that makes it easy for the developers to natively leverage the cloud.

(Cross-posted @ Cloud Computing )
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There are all sorts of interesting events coming up this spring. Here's a sampling; check out the AWS Events page and our newsletters for a more complete list:

Learn how to manage Grid Processing for Financial Institutions (March 17, 8:00 AM PST)

Register for this webinar to learn how to effectively manage large grid processing jobs on AWS with RightScale's cloud management platform. In this webinar RightScale will do a live demonstration of how a hedge fund would run a complete scalable grid application environment that is automated, resilient to errors, and auditable. 

Scaling out Java Web Apps on Amazon EC2 (March 23, 11:00 AM PST)

You'll learn about the challenges involved in scaling out Java apps in the cloud, and how EC2 can be used with Terracotta to cluster and scale-out all of the core components of Java apps including web sessions, caches, ORM, and job scheduling - by simply including the right jar files and setting a few lines of XML config. We'll demo this simple way to scale, and answer your questions.

Moving Mission-Critical Applications into the Cloud (March 24, 9:00 AM PST)

Learn how you can protect your mission-critical applications in the public cloud, while satisfying the most stringent security and availability requirements at a fraction of traditional data center investments.

Launch Your Game on the Cloud in Less Than An Hour! (March 25, 11:00 AM PST)

Attend this webinar to learn how to shorten your time to market and launch your game on AWS using RightScale's cloud management platform. Learn how several major gaming publishers, such as Playfish and Zynga, have used RightScale and AWS to power their highly-elastic social game applications. We will provide insight into launching your first game, avoiding common scaling problems, and automating your sys admin tasks.

AWS Start-Up Event – Silicon Valley (April 14, 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM)

Please join us for the half-day start-up project event, featuring Amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels, and learn how to be successful with Amazon Web Services – utilizing the same robust infrastructure and technological resources that power Amazon.com’s global web properties. We will show entrepreneurs, technologists, and business leaders how to get started with AWS infrastructure services and how to architect applications for the cloud.

AWS Cloud for the Enterprise Tour (San Francisco - April 14, London - April 22, Seattle - May 12)

In this exclusive half-day event, featuring Amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels, learn how Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers enterprises a scalable, cost-effective, flexible, and secure cloud computing platform. The AWS on-demand resources combined with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allow you to use your choice of operating system and programming tools for moving your corporate applications into AWS, helping you spend less time procuring or managing IT resources and more time focusing on your business.

-- Jeff;

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0, disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups, and branding on the cloud. This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are:

Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to step on the operators' toes by staying away from the voice plans. They further used heavy compression on their devices to optimize the bandwidth.

As much as elastic computing is integral to cloud computing not all the companies who want to leverage the cloud necessarily care for it. These companies, however, do have unique varying computing needs. These needs typically include fixed long-term computing that grows at relatively fixed low rate and seasonal peaks. This is a great opportunity for the intermediaries to jump in and solve this problem. There will be fewer and fewer cloud providers since it requires significantly hi cap-ex. However being a "cloud VAR" could be a great value proposition for the vendors that currently have a portfolio of cloud management tools or are "cloud SI". This is kind a like CDO (�?Cloud Debt Obligations’ :-)) – just that we will do a better job this time around!

Gaming-as-a-service: It was a while back when I first saw the OTOY demo. Otoy is scheduled to launch in Q2 2010. I believe that there is significant potential in cloud-based rendering for the games. Having access to an online collection of games that can be rented and played on devices with a varying degree of form factors is a huge business opportunity. The cloud also makes it a great platform and a perfect fit for the massive multi-player collaboration. Gaming-as-a-service could leverage everything that SaaS today does - frequent updates, developer ecosystem, pay-as-you-go etc. This business model also improves the current monetization options such as in-game ad placements that could be far more relevant and targeted.

App-driven and content-driven clouds: Now that we are hopefully getting over the fight between private and public cloud let’s talk about a vertical cloud. Computing is not computing is not computing. The needs to compute depend on what is being computed - it depends on the applications' specific needs to compute, the nature and volume of data that is being computed, and the kind of the content that is being delivered. Today in the SaaS world the vendors are optimizing the cloud to match their application and content needs. I would expect a few companies to step up and help ISVs by delivering app-centric and content-centric clouds. Being an avid advocate of net neutrality I believe that the current cloud-neutrality that is application-agnostic is a good thing. However we can certainly use some innovation on top of raw clouds. The developers do need fine knobs for CPU computes, I/O computes, main-memory computing, and many other varying needs of their applications. By far the extensions are specific to a programming stack such as Heroku for Ruby. I see opportunities to provide custom vertical extensions for an existing cloud or build a cloud that is purpose-built for a specific class of applications and has a range of stack options underneath that makes it easy for the developers to natively leverage the cloud.

When Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace, I was pretty excited about the prospects of this marketplace. While Ben wrote about how it will positively impact the SMB segment, I was getting ecstatic about its potential on the enterprise side. I think few years from now, when we look back in this space, we may even conclude that this is a pivotal moment that catapulted Google into a strong player in the enterprise market. This has a potential to not only lift the prospects of Google on the enterprise side, this move will also strengthen the future of SaaS in a big way.In my opinion, Google not only enabled somewhat bigger players to sell in their marketplace, they also provided a way for developers and other smaller service providers to play in the marketplace. For example, individuals can offer services like setting up Google Apps for $30. All they have to do is to guide the customer to signup for Google Apps, setup the DNS records and activate different services in Google Apps. Any marketplace that opens up many opportunities for small and big players alike is a true marketplace and it has the potential to develop into a vibrant ecosystem.
Somewhere in the hype about the marketplace, another interesting news got lost in the noise. Google has opened up the Google Apps script gallery to developers and users so that they can publish their scripts in the gallery for others to consume. Today, we are excited to make Google Apps Script available to everyone. Some of you may already be familiar with Google Apps Script within Google Apps, but in case you are new to it, Google Apps Script provides a powerful and flexible scripting environment that lets you automate actions across your spreadsheets, sites, calendars, and many other services.This is pretty neat. This not only allows experienced developers to add value to Google services, it also opens up opportunity for relatively novice developers to showcase their talent by adding features on top of Google services with their own scripts. All these make Google very attractive for developers and has a potential to ensure a vibrant ecosystem around their services. What do you think?
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It’s Cloud Connect week – which means that every Cloud vendor under the sun is launching new products or services. Not wanting to be left out, Appistry today announced the availability for beta testing of Appistry CloudIQ Storage. CloudIQ Storage is a play for data intensive applications in the cloud - beta clients are running highly sensitive, big data applications for government security and intelligence, using a combination of private and hybrid cloud setups.

CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable what Appistry is calling Computational Storage. Computational storage unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and intelligently locating application processing on the machines containing the relevant data. As a result, computational storage allows for the delivery of data-intensive applications more cheaply than otherwise.

Some relevant details:

• Special CloudIQ Storage “editions” will address the unique storage requirements of particular communities.
• The first of these, Hadoop Edition, offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), part of the popular Apache Hadoop open source framework.
• The HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository, called the NameNode. Because the NameNode is not easily clustered, it represents a single point of failure and a bottleneck for the entire system. CloudIQ Storage has no single point of failure and no centralized bottleneck, making it more suitable for mission-critical deployment.
• Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition ships with HDFS drivers, enabling it to be easily deployed in place of HDFS for applications where reliability and throughput are key considerations.

It’s an interesting play that brings file-based storage down a few notches in the cost rankings while overcoming data access issues by co-locating processing and data storage. Finally it brings a smart approach to application workloads, moving them closer to the data on which they work. CEO of Appistry, Kevin Haar talks it up saying:

Storage is an integral component of today's data-centric applications. It’s no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application… With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance.

  CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Today, Appistry publically introduced CloudIQ Storage at the Cloud Connect Conference in Santa Clara, CA. CloudIQ Storage is a new product that helps enterprises create a scalable, reliable and highly cost-effective file storage system with no single points of failure, using only commodity servers and networking.

As you will read in the press announcement, Appistry CloudIQ Storage is the latest addition to the company’s next-generation cloud application platform, Appistry CloudIQ Platform. We are excited about this announcement because of the integral role storage plays in today’s data-intensive applications. Traditional approaches to storage are a major factor in the high cost and lackluster performance often seen with these applications. With our CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance.

Appistry CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system leveraging commodity components to create a highly reliable, enterprise-grade solution, or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable Computational Storage™, which dynamically migrates application workloads to the data upon which they depend to deliver unprecedented performance at commodity prices.

Computational Storage enables exciting architectural choices for data-intensive, cloud-oriented software systems with the ability to unify application processing and storage onto a common commodity infrastructure. This results in a dramatic reduction of total costs and significantly better performance. This is a natural extension of Appistry’s CloudIQ Platform and a huge step forward in the realization of our vision of reinventing the enterprise application platform for today’s cloud-enabled, data-centric world.

We will also be offering a special Hadoop Edition of the product. CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition will address the unique storage requirements of the Hadoop community. Offering plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), part of the popular Apache Hadoop open source framework, this new product helps to protect against loss of data and poor performance due to the single point of failure in HDFS system. CloudIQ Storage has no single point of failure and no bottleneck, making it more suitable for mission-critical deployment.

If you are interested in learning more about Appistry CloudIQ Hadoop Edition, read the official press release, or sign up for early information and access to CloudIQ Storage for Hadoop

So whether you are concerned about the costs of highly reliable, high-performance storage for unstructured data or whether you need a cloud-based architecture for attacking large data-intensive problems, Appistry is very excited about our solutions in the CloudIQ Platform family of products.
2010 is proving to be an exciting year for Appistry and our customers and it’s just the beginning!

Kevin Haar, CEO
Appistry

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, there was a discussion on Twitter about the fate of small webhosts. I thought I will expand my thoughts here in this post. Traditional web hosting ecosystems is huge with big hosts offering enterprise level managed hosting to a college kid having a reseller account to sell hosting space to friends and family. As we move ahead with cloud based hosting, the natural question is about the fate of such small hosts. In this post, we will take a look at what is in store for them.

The cloud world will definitely be harsh on most of the smaller webhosts. There is no doubt about it. However, it doesn’t mean that we will see a world where there will be a consolidation of handful of monopoly cloud infrastructure players, which is a shortsighted idea. There are many constraints to such thinking along with other mundane reasons for a more federated ecosystem.

Two weeks back, I wrote a post about an European cloud infrastructure provider, ScaleUp Technologies, and I wrote about how one of the traditional webhost, Internet4you, has morphed part of their datacenter resources to offer cloud based services using 3Tera’s Applogic platform. Recently, I spoke with VMOps, a company developing software stack that helps service providers set up Infrastructure as a service easily. Their software stack comes with three components.

• A retooled multi-tenant hypervisor that supports dynamic resource provisioning and complete isolation of CPU, memory, storage and network resources for virtual servers.
• A management tool that helps service providers to package their offerings, setup and manage users and, also, an integrated billing solution.
• An easy to use self-service interface for end-users with necessary API to allow them to control the launching of applications in the cloud.

Companies like Reliacloud and Cloud Central have already tapped into the VMOps stack to offer IaaS offerings. I will dig deep into VMOps in the future but software like the ones offered by VMOps and 3Tera shows tremendous potential for smaller webhosts to jump straight into the cloud bandwagon. These software will help webhosts who have their own datacenters to reposition themselves as a cloud provider.

What about the shared webhosting providers who either rent a dedicated server or use a reseller accounts? A big chunk of them will eventually vanish to the pressures of market forces. However, there are still opportunities for these smaller hosts in the cloud world. They could add value on top of these cloud offerings and then resell it to low end users like some of the small businesses. For example, they could add some management layer and a customer support layer on top of raw EC2 instances and sell them to individual and small businesses who neither want to manage these EC2 instances or don’t know how to manage them. As I pointed out in my post about Blackmesh and the future of small webhosts, customers want support. They want to talk to a human beings and get personalized support. Then, there is the idea of regional clouds where some of the customers (somewhere in the long tail) want to do business with a cloud provider who has operations nearby. Now add the regulatory requirements and other factors based on diverse needs of the users, I see huge opportunities for smaller level players.

Yes, cloud era is going to drastically reduce the number of cloud infrastructure players. Yes, most of these smaller webhosts are going to shut down their business and go away. However, we will still see a vibrant federated cloud ecosystem and we will see software tools that will enable some of these small players to reposition themselves to play the cloud game. The future is in an open, federated cloud ecosystem.

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I lived in the UK for nearly a decade.  I loved my experience there and wish I got back more often now.  As a political junkie one of my favorite things to do was to watch Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs).   If you’ve never seen PMQ, it’s worth worth 2 minutes to watch this short video of Gordon Brown debating David Cameron and then check out the Wikipedia link I previous provided.  I wish US politicians had to go through these kinds of public debates.

Somehow we’ve lost that ability to have real and meaningful debates in this country.  At the presidential level we have them every four years and even then it’s so controlled and contrived.  In my mind public debate is the highest form of democracy.  It proves that you really have freedom of speech.  And there is relationship between public debating and blogging.  Let me explain.

I started blogging in 2005 and then re-started blogging about a year ago.  It’s a great experiment for me.  I love learning first hand about the differences in analytics platforms, social media conversions, the effectiveness of copy, how to cultivate an audience, etc.  Mostly it’s been one huge creative outlet for me.  I’m loving it and would encourage more people to consider trying it.  You can start in a lightweight, community friendly way like on Tumblr or Posterous without much effort.

The most important experience I have in blogging is the debate it encourages.  I’ve always believed that you learn a great deal when you’re presenting, teaching or writing about what you know.  It’s not only the “consumer” of this information who learns, the “producer” also does.  Part of the reason I always found presenting to people so compelling is that it forced me to put into writing (a PowerPoint deck) what I thought I knew about a topic.  This is a process I call “consolidating your knowledge.”  You have all of this implicit knowledge in your head but you only draw interesting conclusions when you’re forced to put structure around it and define what your belief system is.  7 years ago when I used to publicly present what we learned at BuildOnline, team members would come up to me afterward and say, “Wow, we really have learned at lot.  I knew everything you presented but I didn’t realize just how much I knew.”  So true.

So it goes with blogging.  I have learned lots of lessons over the past 20 years about technology, entrepreneurship and investments.  My points-of-view are not always right and at best nearly all of them are subjective.  I like to put them out into the ether and test their validity.  Several times a week I offer conjecture and get instant feedback about how others feel.  Sometimes it’s in the form of user numbers.  If I write about something that isn’t compelling I can see it in the unique reader numbers.  But I can also measure it in retweets, facebook shares and comments.  People who like what you say are much more likely to hit the Tweetmeme Retweet button to tell other people (I always appreciate that).  And they tell me in private emails saying that I made good points or that I’m full of shite.  Friends and random people alike.

After every post I’m willing to defend my points-of-view in the comments and willing to cede where people make points I hadn’t considered.  The net result of my posts plus the comments forms a tighter view of my evolving belief system.  An example of this was when I wrote the “App is Crap” post arguing that mobile apps were the best form of mobile interactions available today but that in the long-run if mobile apps “win” over mobile browsing it’s a net negative for our industry.  I was willing to state a controversial point of view.  Every now and again I get personal attacks or people saying that I choose controversy for “link bait.”  Frankly, that’s just stupid.  This isn’t my day job, it’s my hobby.  If I had link bait with stupid ideas then entrepreneurs wouldn’t want to work with me.  I’d rather have smaller readership and better ideas.

But the reality is that most “conventional wisdom” is a bit like Hollywood films.  Conventional wisdom is often a bit lazy it reaches the masses of audience that are often not as informed on issues as those that live on the inside of companies and industries.  When you hear conventional wisdom you should always stop to ask yourself, “why is this view held by so many and how did it become so?  And how do I really think independently about this issue.”

If Hollywood = conventional wisdom, I’ll take “indie films” or foreign films any day of the week.  They make you think harder.  The world isn’t “all good” or “all bad” as it is in Hollywood films.  Life is complex. Apple has great products and occasionally bad motives driven by profit maximization.  I don’t blame them for this – I’m a capitalist.  But I think it’s fair to point out when I believe that the profit motive is a net negative for startups or for our industry.  Think Hulu is done by the studios for all good reasons?  Think it’s purely evil to fend off competition?  The answer is obviously neither or both.  Venture capital is neither “evil” nor benevolent.

Anyway, this seems to be turning more into an essay than a tightly knit topical point of view.  But I’m enjoying it and if you’re not then by now you’re probably no longer reading  My main objective in this post was to discuss the nature of debating.  I’ve stopped debating politics with most people because I find it too often turns into a debate about whether the Yankees or the Red Sox are better.  People get dug in on supporting their “team” (read: political party) rather than dissecting an idea and trying to learn.

My favorite person I used to love to debate was Bill Eggers (brother of the now famous Dave Eggers, who incidentally is one of my favorite modern writers), my college fraternity brother and former roommate.  He was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an important conservative thinker.  For what it’s worth I’m a socially (very) liberal, fiscally-moderate libertarian that isn’t easily defined by the party system.  When Bill and I debated topics it was never personal.  Where I made points that I thought were well argued, it solidified my thinking.  Where he made good points and I could no longer defend my own views, I changed my view.  I grew up in a household of Democrats.  It is my discussions with Bill that made me realize I’m more of a Libertarian.

So it goes on my blog.  Yesterday I wrote about a controversial topic that bothered me.  In attacking “fail fast” I wasn’t trying to say the “lean startup” movement was wrong.  It’s not.  I just think that people in Silicon Valley have gotten carried away and taken some of the precepts a bit too seriously.  I made my point a bit too sarcastically, which probably doesn’t help the debate.  It’s just my writing style.

I was delighted that so many people agreed that the fail fast mantra had gone too far and thanked me for saying out loud what they were privately thinking.  I was impressed by the professionalism of 99% of the people who disagreed with me.  I personally got a lot out of the debate.  I moved my thinking a bit and got to explore why people who didn’t agree with me feel so attached to the word “failure.”  I haven’t changed my opinion but I understand their view better.  I enjoyed it.  I never delete comments that disagree with me and I never take it personally even when the comments are harsh (the only comment I’ve ever deleted was anti-Semitic).

So please continue to debate important topics.  Please don’t be offended if I make an assertion against a belief system that you hold – I’m not attacking you.  And please feel free to tell me when you think what I’ve said is bollocks.  That’s how I learn, to0.  And the beauty of the debate is that others can read both sides of the argument and start to form their own educated points-of-view.  I would far rather step a little bit too far over the line than write politically correct posts or be a wallflower.  The worst insult when I lived in England was to be called “boring.”  That stuck with me.

Thank you for being a part of this community.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table )

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It happens everyday.  You need a solution to a problem that can’t be fixed by mere mortals.  You need the IT department.

The problem is, your IT department is run by an IT Director that believes in hording control and resources.  We’ll call him William Mocking.  Mocking won’t let his team work on any line of business projects unless he is involved.  No quick resolutions, no updates to the ERP system, no excel spreadsheet macros unless he gives the green light. 

Mocking had become so alienated from the rest of the business units that they referred to him as a fanatic.  He loved to show how smart he is and how you’re not.  A bureaucrat that answered every question in every meeting so contemptuously that it appeared to him that you were working extra hard to remain stupid.

Everyone knew he needed to fired but no one did.  He had the keys to the empire.  Keys that unlocked every IT door.  He gave them out to his team but quickly got them back after an approved task was performed. 

Mocking’s reality existed because internal policy dictated that all software and corporate technology solutions be decided by IT.  Because of this, the company’s IT infrastructure was 5 years behind their competitors’. 

But then Marketing did something remarkable.  They shrugged. 

The VP of Marketing purchased a SaaS solution from Salesforce.com without IT involvement.  The company held its breath. 

And Mocking went ballistic.  He screamed at the VP of Marketing in such an excruciatingly shrill voice that easily could have shattered a few windows were they nearby.  He then set brushfires of doubt in the executives’ minds.  “Our data will be stolen, our business is going to be compromised, our ERP system won’t integrate with it, our our our…”

He also put such fear in the employee base that 90% of them didn’t use the new system.  Employees knew the system made their jobs easier and more effective but didn’t use it for fear of IT retribution.  The system sat cold for weeks. 

Then the VP of Marketing did something else remarkable.  She  boycotted IT.  She refused to have anyone in marketing have any contact with them.  No ERP, no email, nothing.  Her team started to use GMail,  Google Docs, Open Source Wiki’s, document sharing software and of course Salesforce.com to complete their work.  All were outside the firewall and out of Mocking’s reach. 

And they were successful.  At far less cost.  Which caught the eye of the CEO. 

Mocking wasn’t fired.  But he did give up the keys.  He later quit to start a CIO consulting company.  Surely to recreate his �?bottleneck in an Enterprise’ trick. 

Maybe you’ve seen him?   

(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega )

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There are a lot of great thinkers and practitioners in the Enterprise 2.0 space whom I follow for ideas, information, and advice.  The space as a whole is still fairly new and there really aren’t THAT many folks involved in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, especially when you compare that to the number of “social media experts.”  Why?  Well, quite frankly Enterprise 2.0 is a more challenging and strategic space which is precisely why I am so interested in it.  In fact, at the tender age of 26, I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest person in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  Once the Chess Media Group site is re-designed, visitors will see that we have partnered with some of the leading companies and individuals in the Enterprise 2.0 space (to help us with client projects and strategy).  So having said all of that, here is part one of my list of the top 10 people to follow in the Enterprise 2.0 space and why you should follow them.  You can also check out this list put together by Cloud Ave on the most influential Enterprise 2.0 bloggers (of which yours truly is a part of).

Susan Scrupski

Susan writes the ITSinsider blog and is also the founder of the 2.0 Adoption Council.  Susan is definitely one of the forward thinkers in the space who is always trying to move the industry forward.  She doesn’t blog as often as some of the other folks listed below but you should definitely be paying attention to her community sites.  In fact, I highly recommend you go to the 2.0 Adoption Community site and browse through their blogroll for some great E2.0 bloggers and analysts.  Susan has done an awesome job of bringing together the E2.0 industry and has a lot of exciting things planned for 2010.  Susan also puts together events and webinars (along with leading companies/individuals) to help guide and educate the industry.  You can also find Susan on Twitter.

Dion Hinchcliffe

I first met Dion in person during the E2.0 expo in San Francisco and then had some time to chat with him at a party hosted by Crowdcast and Andrew McAfee (I wonder if Dion remembers this).  Dion writes in several places but his most prominent blog is on Zdnet.  Dion has been around for a while and has a strong background in both technology and in dealing with enterprise size companies.  His posts are always in depth and thought provoking, not to mention the fact that his visuals are fantastic and clearly explain concepts that can be a bit gray at times.  I’ve learned a lot from Dion’s writings and from the content he shares.  Although he does have a Twitter account, he reserves it primarily for posting links to quality content that he either creates or finds on the web.  His Twitter stream alone is enough to educate you on Enterprise 2.0.

Dennis Howlett

Dennis is another Zdnet blogger and he’s one of the guys out there that will tell you like it is.  He’s been called the referee of the Enterprise 2.0 space, not because he is a skeptic but because he is a realist and a pragmatic analyst.  He questions thoughts, assumptions, and actions that are taken by companies and vendors in the E2.0 space.  Is he always right?  Probably not.  Do I always agree with him?  No.  However, Dennis think about issues in a critical way and usually asks some thought provoking questions.  Dennis is also on Twitter so be sure to say hello to him.

Mike Gotta

Mike writes quite extensively on collaborative thinking and his posts are usually pretty comprehensive and in depth.  I find out about a lot of my E2.0 news from his blog.  Mike provides everything from commentary on E2.0 issues to product and tool reviews and strategic analysis of the space.  Mike is currently an analyst over at the Burton Group (Gartner) where he works on content and collaborative strategies with clients.  If you’re looking for some great insight into the E2.0 space, then Mike is definitely one of the folks that you need be following and yes, he is also on Twitter.

Gil Yehuda

I’ve had the opportunity to chat with Gil quite a bit over the past few months and I definitely believe he is one of the leaders in the E2.0 space (otherwise I wouldn’t be interested in working/partnering with him).  Gil worked for Forrester as a senior analyst and also spent time work at Fidelity investments where he helped develop and implement various E2.0 initiatives.  Currently is employed by Yahoo! as the Director of Open Source.  Gil also wrote a framework for Enterprise 2.0 adoption which is worth a read.  Gil explores several issues in the E2.0 space and has diverse interests in E2.0 so one day you might be reading about how to get started with E2.0 and the next day measuring community strength.  This makes for a great set of topics so there is plenty to learn from Gil.  Gil is also on Twitter.

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter )

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