The Facetious CIO

Why can't we all just get along?

2010-09-17T11:18:00.001-04:00

My response to:

Clouderati vs. ITILista. My response to Skep

Why is it in America everything has to be at one extreme or the other?

You are either a Democrat or Republican.

You are either a Terrorist or a Patriot.

You are either a Clouderati or an ITILista.

I have to agree with Skep, partially because he is on a different continent, but mostly because he's right!

Rodrigo, you experienced the worst part of ITIL. This idea that one must hit every step and dot every i before moving on to the next step. People who create process for sake of producing process and making themselves seem indispensable while doing so. These people will always exist and they use ITIL as a blueprint and excuse for doing so. This isn't unique to ITIL either. CMMi, COBIT, ISO xxxx, none of them are bad on their own. It's the damage you can inflict in their name that makes people run screaming when they hear another four letter acronym attached to the word process.

Skep summed it up in his first statement: "we aren't anti-automation, or dismissive of automation. Process-geeks understand that you have to fix the process before you automate it, else you'll be accelerating backwards. Automation makes bad process faster. Automation is one of the later stages of refinement once you have something worth automating."

Why does it take longer? One can assume that the process in place now about to be automated, outsourced, or both, has room for improvement. Automation does not improve a process, it only makes it faster. Outsourcing a process does not improve a process, it only makes it cheaper. So, a cloud implementation of a process without reviewing its' merits or benefits will allow you to do it cheaper and faster, but the customer will see no improvement. Cheaper and faster benefits the IT department, not the user. It should not take 12-18 months to improve a process. If it takes longer than 3 months (1 financial quarter). You are doing it wrong.

Rodrigo, your original article had a comparison chart of ITIL and Cloud. You categorized, ITIL as being focused on customers and Cloud being focused on infrastructure. I think this clearly makes ITIL the winner, as infrastructure is meaningless if does not meet the needs of the customer.

ITIL results in cloud implementation. Cloud is a natural outcome of ITIL. The two need one another and are not mutually exclusive.

Change is [NOT] Good

2010-08-12T15:08:00.009-04:00

I saw a sign today at work that said, "Change is Good".

What a load of BS!

I love to change things. I have a personality type that insists that there is an improvement for everything. This leads me to change them. I am not against change. The Facetious CIO's business card reads "Agent of Change". I am a facilitator of change, but I cannot agree with the happy little sign that reads, "Change is Good"

Change is the process of letting go of the familiar. Change is often likened to the five stage grieving process:

Denial and Isolation
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Do any of these things sound good to you? I think not. Change is often a painful process but once it's completed, we are better people and the change is hopefully one for the better.

I weight too much. I need to change this. Since there is no magic pill that will make my waistline smaller, I need to change my behavior to reach my goal. This means increasing the amount of activity and decreasing my food intake. Will this be good? The pain felt in my legs after a run on the treadmill and the decrease in the amount of my favorite foods will not be good. At least, it wouldn't be good that night as I try to fall asleep with a pain in my knees and a grumbling stomach. I would argue that this is not good. However, as a result of my change in behavior, I will have more energy and better fitting clothes. So, in this example, change is not good, but the result of change is fantastic.

How about another example, smokers. Quit cold turkey? That's a good change right? Not at all, it will be terrible, painful ordeal. No longer smoking after 1 year is awesome. The result is good. The change was not.

In IT, I find a lot of people with similar personality types to mine, the improvers. Yet, they don't realize that 95% of the population are not improvers. They dislike the change process and with good reason. My role as an agent of change is to act as a counselor to help people through the difficult change process.

Please consider these thoughts the next time a project comes along and someone suggests that staff will just have to "deal" with the change.

Seven Truths about Change

Service and evolution keep commoditization at bay

2010-07-26T10:38:00.002-04:00

Lincoln Murphy is one of the guys in Cloud Computing consulting that "gets it". He has a clear understanding of the business "dos and don'ts" of producing, marketing, and selling SaaS. Here's a great insight from him:

“Lincoln Murphy pointed out that within servitized products, it is the service that keeps commoditization at bay. A successful vendor becomes more directly involved and responsible to the end-user both as the service provider and the subject matter expert in the field they represent. As Lincoln pointed out – we can go to our personal computer and start “Word 2003″ and it will work just fine – just as it did in 2003. But if Word was online, we would expect it to seamlessly evolve and be something more that it was six years ago – just as iGoogle is a clear line of evolution from the iconic single search box we all came to love when it first began.”

Here's the whole article:

http://blog.sciodev.com/2009/08/24/saas-xaas-what-makes-up-a-service-part-1/

4 things Microsoft needs to do to catch up with the cloud

2010-05-10T11:27:00.004-04:00

Phil Wainewright from ZDNet wrote an article called "VMforce.com redefines the PaaS landscape". Boy was he ever right. The VMForce announcement sets a new bar for PaaS providers. In case you missed the announcement, VMWare and force.com announced they will let java developers work in SpringSource IDE and publish their native java applications on the force.com platform instead of force.com's proprietary APEX language. In a single stroke, VMforce has increased their developer count by about 4 million, eliminated a major risk in using their platform (proprietary), and solidified a standard IDE for java.

Now Microsoft needs to play catch-up. It's Azure platform has been lagging behind and with this announcement from VMForce, it has a lot of ground to make up. One advantage Microsoft has always held is it's IDE and it's ability to deploy to all it's platforms (mobile, desktop, etc...). The IDE doesn't allow for deployment to it's cloud with a simple push. So, that's the first thing MS has to do:

1) Allow for deployment at the push of a button of .net applications from Visual Studio into Azure environment.

2) Use real C# code and not a reduced subset on Azure

3) Release MS Office and CRM on Azure

4) Everything on Azure automatically works on mobile devices (including the iPad)

Although VMForce is not yet available, Microsoft must be able to offer these four things to combat it when it does. This time, the vaporware promises that Microsoft will someday have it are not gonna cut it. Force.com and VMWare have too much momentum already.

and now Ray Ozzie's departure..

Who is Nicholas Carr?

2010-04-15T16:14:00.005-04:00

It has come to the attention of The Facetious CIO that there are those amongst us that do not know who Nicholas Carr is. It can be said that a man is defined by his work, and since I do not know Nicholas Carr personally, I can only define him by his work. So here goes:

"Does IT matter?" - written in 2004, this book was already answered in Mr. Carr's "IT doesn't matter" article in the Harvard Business Review the prior year. In both works Mr. Carr argues that the strategic advantage of IT has diminished to a point that it is no longer a differentiator when comparing businesses. In other words, there is no strategic advantage to the way you deploy your CRM system on a PC server that is any different from your competition. The result: CEOs begin to reign in on growing IT budgets and CIOs begin to question their worth

"The Big Switch" - written in 2008, this book draws similarities between the power utility market just after the industrial revolution, but before the information age and current IT services. Mr. Carr envisions a future where IT services are commoditized to a point where they can be purchased like a utility. Just as most manufacturers used to make the power they consumed to build things and now they just get it from the grid, so too would companies shed their IT departments and just buy services from the cloud. The result: CEOs begin to distribute IT budgets out to individual departments to go get their own services from the cloud and CIOs start looking for new jobs.

"The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains" - This one comes out sometime in 2010 and is supposed to answer the question, "Is google making us stupid?"

You may follow Nick's musing on a more regular basis by following his blog.

So, to those of us in the Cloud Computing and SaaS industry, "The Big Switch" is the book of Genesis in our bible. I believe that makes Marc Benioff, Moses.

Things are looking up

2010-03-09T10:54:00.003-05:00

Recently the Facetious CIO updated his status on various social networking sites with the title of this blog entry, "Things are looking up". A simple and vague message that prompted many responses inquiring the specifics around why I was "down" and congratulations on the fact that things were turning in a positive direction. Going upwards (in my case) really only indicates that I am not where I want to be and intend on climbing further up. Who amongst us has no plans for moving upwards? The other reason for my message was a general trend that I have witnessed. 2009 sucked. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that 2009 was a great year for them. Most were happy to close the book on it and leave it behind. I have already (only 2 months in) started to see turnaround and see that 2010 will be a better year than 2009. The Facetious CIO would like to know from you, are things looking up for you as well?

Five Reasons SaaS doesn't suck

2009-07-24T10:27:00.009-04:00

Sending your company's critical applications into the cloud is not for the faint of heart. The risk and rewards used to choose on premises software in the past are greatly exaggerated when choosing a SaaS application. As with any business decision, if you understand the risks and can take advantage of the rewards then cloud computing is for you. The article below addresses the concerns of consumers of cloud applications who did not understand the risks.

Here's the Facetious CIO's response to each of the Five Reasons SaaS sucks:

1. "My Internet connection sucks!" Not understanding that your connection to the Internet becomes a critical extension of your core network is dangerous. When entering into cloud computing your environment changes. Analyze what it takes to deliver that application and secure the underlying technologies (some you still own even in a SaaS world) to match or exceed your applications' SLAs.

2. "I don't trust the Internet..." And rightly so. Given recent high profile security breeches you should be wary of the information placed on the Internet, who has access to it, and most importantly what you are using to authorize access to it. Security breeches so far have been due to poor password management. Your application and data are now available on the Internet instead of behind your firewall. Please use something more restrictive than a username and password.

3. "I always forget to hit the 'save' button." I fail to see how this is any different from on premises solutions. Sorry, but if your users couldn't figure this out with local applications than it won't be any easier with an application hosted elsewhere.

4. "I don't understand why (insert SaaS app here) can't just (insert desirable feature here)" Again, this does not change between the on premises and cloud worlds. If you do not correctly set expectations up front your implementation will fail. This holds true if you buy a product off the shelf, develop it in house, or rent it from the cloud.

5. "What do you mean ten years from now I'll still be paying for this thing?" Yup, it's true. Unless you plan on keeping your current on premises system at its current version for the next ten years, it's less expensive and hassle free to just rent it. Software, even mission critical software, can barely be considered an asset to your company. Buy a building and add it to your company assets, rent the software.

How to go from buying records to renting MP3s

2009-07-13T15:16:00.009-04:00

Rhapsody has a great business model. They offer unlimited (yet restricted) use of their entire music catalog for a monthly fee lower than the price of a single printed CD. They also sell unrestricted music at market prices. You may stream as much music as you like using their web site or using a recommended portable device. The trick is that once you discontinue service, any music that you did not purchase becomes unavailable to you. My guess is the record distribution companies that own the content get a flat fee for each user regardless of how much that user does or does not use. As most subscription service business models work, they account for a significant number of subscribers to be lazy and not use the full capabilities of their membership.

This is the progression of the music industry's retail model:

selling singles
selling record albums
selling albums on tapes and CDs
selling singles on the Internet
renting catalogs of music

The marketing of tapes and CDs is significantly different from albums because of the loss of control record companies had with the technical capabilities widely available at the time to produce near or exact duplicates. Pricing models began to compensate for this loss. Most online sites are using model number 4 with iTunes being the most popular. Rhapsody and a handful of others have reached model 5. Not only is this the "future of music", as Fortune magazine referred to Rhapsody , but it is the future of software.

This is the progression of the software industry's retail model:

Selling platforms to create custom applications
Selling generic applications
Selling applications plus support
Selling applications plus implementation and support
Selling applications plus implementation, support, and annual licensing
Renting platforms to create custom applications
Renting cloud applications and selling implementation services

Looks familiar doesn't it. Software companies used to press and release records and now they want to be in the business of renting MP3s. Just as the music industry has experienced, this is not easy but necessary. This model for music would not have existed if it wasn't for Napster showing that the customer base for this distribution model existed. The music industry just had to figure out a way to monetize it. The single most important thing for software companies that are looking to leap from traditional distribution to SaaS is how to correctly charge for their service. The next most important thing is how to get customers to stick with them long enough to collect that all important recurring revenue. Rhapsody figured out what to charge (less than a CD) and how to lock customers in (loss of music they enjoy listening to).

Why MSFT's strategy isn't working?

2009-06-16T15:08:00.002-04:00

The Facetious CIO's response to "Why Isn't Microsoft's Strategy Working Anymore?" can be found here.

English to Snacklish translator

2009-06-11T09:12:00.001-04:00

English to Snacklish translator

Give it a try. The Facetious CIO's name translates to Tasteious Chief Infeasting Officer.

This is NOT the Knowledge Age

2009-06-08T16:51:00.000-04:00

In 1966, Peter Drucker described the knowledge worker in contrast to the manual worker. The knowledge worker is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. This type of worker is a product of the Knowledge Age described by Savage in 1995 as "the third wave of human socio-economic development". The first two being, the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age. This third wave points to a time when the majority of workers will deal in information. They will work with their minds more than their hands. In the Agricultural Age land meant power and in the Industrial Age, factories meant power. In the Knowledge Age, knowledge is power.

The fact is, the United States has been in the Knowledge Age since the 1950s. At this time the number of white collar workers began to exceed the number of blue collars workers. The Information Age (as it was known then) began. This is the decade that brought us the mainframe and many other business technologies that are still in some form used today.

If knowledge equals power in the Knowledge Age, how do the powerful give away knowledge to get more powerful? Many of the blogs that I read and the twits I follow freely give away the knowledge they have. When they do, they are considered experts and grow more powerful as their standing in the community is raised and their demand increased. We have grown beyond the Knowledge Age. Thanks to web 2.0, all knowledge is shared. Wether it is a blog, a tweet, or just a posting I can google, it's shared. Having the knowledge is no longer powerful. How to aggregate the data and use it to create new ideas is powerful. We are now entering the Creation Age. In the Creation Age, creativity is power.

If you are a knowledge worker, there are two things to do to reach the next level of career evolution.

Recognize that you may not be a knowledge worker: Just because you work with data does not automatically make you a knowledge worker. You may be acting as a manual laborer pushing paper instead of operating a wrench. Anybody can be taught to use a wrench, if what you do doesn't have a value add then you are the 21st century equvilant of a manual laborer. You too will be replaced by automation, just as factory workers were replaced at the end of the Industrial Age. Avoid this fate by differentiating your work from what other people can offer.
Give away the knowledge: Since knowledge is not power, give it away. The more you share the information, the more indispensable you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's worked for many already. Giving away the knowledge lets people know you are the expert. Now instead of maintaining knowledge and educating each individual about pieces of your expertise, you can concentrate on growing your abilities and creating something new.

2008 was all about the mash-up. Writing the music is good. Combining it is genius.

The same wave will transcend art and be adopted by business and education in 2010.

Welcome to the Creation Age.

The world's fastest data network is ...

2009-06-05T09:45:00.005-04:00

This information week article on how Amazon Web Services suggests using snail mail as an initial upload to their S3 service reminded me of this NY Times article from 2002. Both spell out a reality that FedEx, UPS, and the USPS transfer more data than all Internet providers combined. When you take into consideration the massive number of DVDs netflix sends out to people's houses with next day delivery the bandwidth of your local mail carrier is staggering even when pitted against your home broadband.

Since the 2002 article, Netflix has offered more and more content on their watch it instantly section. Recently, netflix moved to using Microsoft's silverlight compression to stream full DVD quality to your computer. So, does this mean that Internet is winning the bandwidth race? Not by a longshot. Although the quality of video has improved, the data transfer rate has remained the same. Today's desktop computers have the ability to uncompress at amazing speeds and new compression technologies are taking advantage of that.

Those people in shorts being chased by neighborhood dogs are still speedy data carriers with low packet loss I might add. So the next time you need to send four or more gigs of data somewhere, please consider a padded mailing envelope to be your best protocol.

You know this, but your Mom doesn't

2009-05-29T15:26:00.000-04:00

What's great about Twitter..
I've been using Twitter for a few months now and I like it. To me, twitter is like a crowd of people all talking around me. The crowd is always exactly the right mix of information and humor because I invited all of them. I hear snippets of conversations from all around me and I pick out the most relevant ones I wish to hear more about. It's also a great way to keep up with the most recent news about a new subject like cloud computing. The personal marketing opportunities are still great as twitter is still on a growing curve.

Twediquette:
Everyone I follow has been invited to my party. There is a certain etiquette that I expect of people who are in or can be invited to my party. Here's a quick list:

Don't tweet hello. I know who you are. I know you are out there. Tell me something useful.
Tell me something useful. You just got back from lunch is not useful to me. You just got back from lunch and would like to recommend your favorite dish is useful.
Don't tweet too often. Filling up my screen with messages forces me to sift for the good stuff. Less is more.
No Bodily functions. Nothing more to say about that.

Twitter improvements:
There are a few things I don't like about twitter. Please cache my address book and alert me when my contacts join twitter. I do this every couple of weeks to see who on my contact list has joined in, but LinkedIn does it for me automatically. Oh, and how about an auto-refresh option. Sometimes I leave Twitter open on a tab and realize, "What for?" I have to refresh the page anyway, might as well kill it and go back later.

Twitter cloud application:
If you've ever seen the 2D image of the sculpture above, then you know the fail whale. The fail whale appears when too many tweets overcome the twitter environment and the servers have difficulty keeping up with requests. I haven't seen it too often, but when it does appear hitting the refresh key usually provides immediate results. It did cause me to read the status bar and pay attention to where the hold-up was taking place. I was surprised to see AWS was the last request. So, twitter is using the power of elastic cloud computing to run this social network. Little or no capital investment in hardware necessary to run this popular service. Here's the kicker though, you don't care. All these terms (cloud, elastic, utility computing, etc..) are marketing terms that businesses use to speak to other businesses about IT. The end user (in or out of a business setting) just doesn't care how the service is delivered, they just want it to work. Speaking to most users about the cloud is like explaining how the electrical grid works. It's a utility and most people only care that when they hit the switch, the light comes on and who to call if it doesn't. Does the power you are using right now to read this come from hydro, coal, or nuclear? Can you even find out?

Does Corporation = FAIL in SaaS?

2009-05-28T15:52:00.004-04:00

Can enterprise software companies do SaaS?

An interesting perspective from the venture capital viewpoint. Venture capitalists are predisposed to disliking enterprise corporations because they don't have values like these that draw venture capitalist to startups. So, I take what the experienced investor quoted in this article has to say with a grain of salt. The goal of the venture capitalist is to help a startup grow to a point where an enterprise company will purchase it's assets and cash in. Enterprise software companies do possess capital as pointed out in this article as the one advantage enterprise companies have over startups. Therefore, venture capitalists are counting on enterprise organizations to become SaaS companies so they can cash in on all those SaaS startups. While cash is king, innovation will continue to be dominate at the sub-enterprise.

So, the answer to the title question is No. Enterprise software companies will compete on the SaaS stage at first by strategically purchasing startups and smaller players. After establishing a corner of the market, they will use their investments as a cornerstone to a larger piece of the market. Again, the capital power of the enterrpise organization will give them the long term advantage.

around the world in a Mini (x3)

2009-05-19T16:10:00.006-04:00

This is the Pitney Bowes Business Insight Mini. Well, it was the MapInfo Mini prior to MapInfo being purchased by Pitney Bowes in 2007. Its a 1978 mini cooper and it is currently on its third trip around the world. The vehicle is outfitted with a satellite phone, three GPSs, a laptop with two screens, and killer sound system. The trailer in the back houses a spare engine, a bike, and two tents. At the top you can see a satellite antenna and a small bank of solar cells that produce over 20 amps of power for all the equipment inside. Standing next to the mini is its driver Duncan Mortimer. The ten-month journey started in the UK and will take Mortimer through the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Russia, Poland and back to the UK through Europe. You can follow Duncan here:

www.mapinfo.com/minimap.

and here:

http://envention.mapinfo.com/envention/ecx/track/Duncan.zul

A near hit, not a near miss

2009-05-16T01:13:00.003-04:00

To the bike riding gentleman who nearly became a hood ornament on the front of my wagon today,

Please wear a helmet. You never know when you could be knocked off your bike especially if you are not where drivers would expect to find you.
Please don't ride on the sidewalk. This is reserved for pedestrians, not vehicles.
Please don't ride facing traffic. When crossing at a crosswalk you will not be expected to be traveling the wrong direction.

As a bike safety advocate, I would have felt awful if I injured a fellow rider. Be seen!

How I stopped a 3 ton truck with one bare hand

2009-05-11T13:34:00.004-04:00

Bike riding in the United States is seen as a recreational activity. While it is very fun and a great form of exercise, bicycles are transportation vehicles. As vehicles, they are subject to all rules and regulations when operated on streets. Most drivers understand this and treat cyclists as slow moving vehicles when they come across them on roadways. For example, I was riding my bike recently in the city of Albany and came to a busy intersection where I needed to take a left. Safely, I moved from the right most part of the right hand lane to the middle of left hand lane and signaled my left hand turn. As there was traffic moving in the opposite direction, I was forced to stop and wait. Behind me I heard the air brakes of a large truck squeal and hiss. Glancing back, I saw only the grill (which was at least a foot taller than I stood) of this tall truck. I could barely hear the other traffic over its diesel roar. It felt pretty powerful to make a hand gesture that was able to freeze a vehicle that outweighed me by at least 30 times. I used a standard protocol for signaling a turn recognized by all road worthy drivers. My small hand became equal to any size vehicle on the road for a brief moment. This is the power of standards.

Supported by the European Union, the Reservoir Project seeks to create a uniform SLA for utility infrastructure. It will be very interesting to watch how the Reservoir Project will intersect with the Open Cloud Manifesto. While the Reservoir Project will focus on Infrastructure and the Open Cloud Manifesto will focus on service, these two depend upon one another and will have to cooperate in order for both to achieve their objectives. These are two of the major overall standards that are emerging. Individual layer standards are becoming defacto as their mass adaptation pushes others aside. Until a governing body (like IEEE or W3) takes control of the approval of these standards, standards will be decided by the marketplace.

Why do IT people love standards? When a governing body decides on standards, the outlook for such standards reaches into the future. Many proprietary protocols are not future proof and will never play nicely with protocols from other vendors. The marketplace sometimes picks those protocols because they come from an established vendor or they are first to market. Standard protocols are the only ones guaranteed to be agnostic and long-lasting. Standards give portability and options. The best thing about cloud computing is how quick and easy you can jump from your existing on premises solution to a cloud based one. The worst part (for service providers) is how quick and easy it is to jump from that vendor to another.

In the beginning there was SaaS..

2009-04-12T20:31:00.004-04:00

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback on my blog postings. One comment that has surfaced a few times has been the level at which the postings are written. There is an assumed level of knowledge they are targeted at. However, I would like everyone to get something out of these postings so I would like to provide a beginner's guide to Utility computing and define some of the common TLAs and FLAs used. (See below definitions if you missed those)

Utility Computing - The concept is similar to electric utilities we are all familiar with. In this model, you get electrical service to your house under an SLA and you pay for what you use of it. It's exactly the same with utility computing. An SLA is provided and companies use as little or as much computing resources as they wish and get charged only for what they use. Why do this? Providers can build large scale, fully fault tolerate environments that non-providers cannot afford to build and charge them for using pieces of it. It's a "the parts are worth more than the whole" business model. For users, they get all the advantages of this large scale, fully fault tolerant environment without having to shell out millions in capital expenditure and without the administrative overhead. It's a win-win for all.
SaaS-(pronounced sass) Software As A Service is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. So unlike a traditional on premise solution, customers don't ever own the software, they are only licensed to use it. They only get charged for how much they use as well, whether that be by the hour or per user per month.
PaaS- (pronounced pass) Platform As A Service is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. Companies such as Amazon, Force.com, and Microsoft are offering complete development environments and a complete infrastructure stack via the Internet.
Cloud Computing-A style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over a network. In the cloud, the concept behind where an application is located disappears. The physical location and even the physical hardware ceases to stay static or be relevant. Applications in a cloud computing environment run on a bank of systems in multiple locations. This guarantees their performance, scalability, and resiliency.
Public and Private clouds-Cloud computing can take place in a private cloud within an organization's network or publicly where the resources exist on the Internet.
Azure>-Microsoft's PaaS offering.
AWS-Amazon Web Services. Online retailer Amazon provides infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. They sell pieces of their vast computing resources. You can purchase individual pieces (described below) or a complete infrastructure.
S3- Simple Storage Service. An Amazon service providing online storage.
EC2-Elastic Compute Cloud. Another Amazon service providing resizable compute capacity.
TLA- Three letter Acronym.
FLA-Four Letter Acronym.

I hope this helps clear up some of the techno-babble surrounding utility computing. The concepts are very different from the current model of infrastructure and software distribution and licensing, but are easy to understand. In fact there is little that's new about it at all. Most of you have had an online e-mail account for years now. You don't own the mail software. You are licensed to use it. It's a utility application. You pay for what you use and it's available for you when you need it. It's licensed as SaaS. You are reading this on a blog. The blog software doesn't run on your computer. The creation didn't really happen on my computer either. The creation and publishing are SaaS applications. Thanks to these earlier successes and a more robust Internet, more complex software such as office production packages and financial packages are now being offered as SaaS.

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."

-Frank Zappa

The Blues Brothers, master code developers

2009-04-06T09:29:00.004-04:00

It's Monday morning and I'm reading tweets, my e-mail (home and work), and the various blogs that I track. Unable to think of a good posting myself right now as I am only half way through my first cup of coffee, I offer you this:

The Blues Brothers, master code developers

I must add one more allegory. Jake's wife (played wonderfully by Carrie Fisher in the film) is the stakeholder that comes from out of no where. The project is moving along despite a few pitfalls along the way. Suddenly the requirements change from another person at the customer's organization who at the last moment has decided that they need their fingers in this project. This is the moment when you think everything is about to fail. Project lead Jake pulls out all the BS he can muster and lets the project continue as planned.

Does this ring true?

Next: Can we create an allegory between project management and Star Wars?

Customer Service makes the difference

2009-04-03T20:26:00.002-04:00

Tonight, the family ordered dinner out from a small local restaurant. My wife ordered the meal and I picked up the dinner on the way home from work. Arriving at the busy restaurant, I was asked to confirm my order, but I didn't know what was ordered. I answered yes and took the food home. The order was wrong. Not only was it wrong but the meal they sent me home with was linguine and clams and my wife is deathly allergic to clams. So, she called them and explained that they made a mistake. The restaurant decided to send a staff member with the correct entrée to my door. They included a dessert and an apology. On a busy Friday night, this restaurant was willing to be without a staff member for about half hour to remedy my situation. Of course, I will order from this restaurant again and do one better, I will recommend them to everyone. This is the benefit of great customer service.

As a multitude of players enter the SaaS marketplace, leaders will emerge. You have many choices when you wish to dine out. After deciding whether you want Italian or Japanese, you will make your decision on based on price, quality, and customer service. Successful cloud companies will offer the triple threat, price, performance, and excellent customer service. Without being a leader in all three categories, SaaS and PaaS providers will fail. Fifty percent of all new restaurants fail within the first two years. They fail due to loosing out to the competition on at least one of the three factors. I predict new cloud companies (and established companies entering the cloud marketplace) will experience a similar fifty percent failure rate when they fail to take the lead on price, performance, and customer service.

Open Source growth by SaaS adoption

2009-04-03T11:07:00.011-04:00

Richard Stallman Interview about Utility computing

This is the best quote of the interview:

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity, it's a marketing hype campaign, Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

While I agree that nothing is inevitable, Utility computing will be revolutionary. As vendors compete in the Utility computing space, they will be forced to lower overhead. Open source is great way to do that and with the economy of scale offered by Utility computing open source will grow.

Utility computing works because someone can build a large bank of resources and charge out for small bits of it. Not everyone can build an environment that fast and resilient without a serious draw on their margins. The same argument was made of open source engineers. They are costly. However with a few large companies employing those engineers, they can again build an excellent coding environment and sell small pieces to a lot of customers for a large profit margin. Smaller companies will use those engineers as well to build vertical specific applications on top of Utility computing environments. Again, with many players in the game, lower overhead is a must and therefore open source is a must.

In short, without an 800 pound gorilla in the room, it's up to the fastest, most marketed, and cheapest players to rule

2009-03-25T22:01:00.002-04:00

Another birthday survived. Old enough to know what's right. Young enough not to choose it.

The more things change

2009-03-25T10:23:00.003-04:00

I am sad to see that CNet's download.com has closed their music section. It was a great source for new and established artists to hock their wares to eager audiences. They have suggested people move to last.fm. I have resisted last.fm for a long time, but may now check them out. In my search for new music, I did discover this Local Artist Tamizdat has published their latest online as a free download.

So, what does all this have to do with SaaS or IT? Well, things change pretty rapidly in IT. They change much faster than users would like them to. Now enter SaaS into the game. In a true SaaS multi-tenant environment, IT is constantly updating and not just for a small group or for your company's installation, for everybody. Look at backlash facebook has received from constant and drastic changes to their environment. When things change in your environment, users will seek a new way to cope with that change. While I am sad to see the old CNet site go, it's disappearance has lead me to two new sites. Great leaders will know how to direct people to the next step seemlessly and without leaving them to scramble for that step on their own.