Poor Adoption for Cloud Storage

At least for large companies, it seems that cloud-based storage is off the table for now. According to a survey by TheInfoPro, a research firm based in New York City, less than 10% of respondents (247 of the Fortune 1000) are even considering plans to place bottom tier data in the cloud. Generally, respondents cited performance and possession as their primary concerns:

Performance still comes up in the commentary, as well. The problem is when you need the data back...there isn't a high level of confidence that they can do that through an external system.
-- Marco Coulter, TheInfoPro's research director of storage

What this tells me that we should be very wary of recommending cloud-based storage to business leaders. Granted, large companies have significantly more resources at their disposal when it comes to building out internal storage solutions. Therefore they can afford the high-end redundancy and recovery solutions that are beyond the reach of smaller organizations. However, they also have the resources to make cloud-based solutions viable. And they haven't figured it out, yet.

In this case, I believe that discretion is the better course. Amazon's recent failures, along with Google's system problems, demonstrate that these systems still have some reliability issues. And the risks still outweigh the benefits... at least for now.

Credit: ComputerWorld: Fortune 1000 firms shun public cloud storage

Google and IBM: the best cloud solutions

Evans Data Corporation, a software development research firm, conducted a study earlier this year to identify the best public and private cloud solutions. The company surveyed hundreds of software developers, asking them to rate cloud platforms across a number of areas, including of scalability, reliability, security, and openness.

The clear winner, in the public space, is Google. 31% of respondents view Google as providing the most scalable offering, with Amazon coming in at a distant second with less than 18% of respondents.

In the private sphere, IBM leads the pack, especially in areas of security, receiving a top ranking from 21.7% of respondents. The race for the top spot is much closer, with Amazon earning the confidence of 20.2% of the responding audience.

These results confirm Google's market leadership in the cloud computing space. I believe this will prove to be an important, long-term revenue source for the company, as well as a reliable solutions for small to mid-sized businesses.

Read more ...
Study: Developers Pick Google, IBM as Top Cloud Platforms by Darryl K. Taft, eWeek
The survey report (free with registration)

Making Testing Cheaper

Testing is expensive. Of course, unless your code is perfect, then not testing is even more expensive. One of the barriers to entry is, naturally, the creation of the testing environment. Ideally, you want it to be robust enough to handle thorough testing, but you don't want to break the bank on it.

Well, here's an interesting idea ...
Why not rent the environment? Get cheap virtual machine space from any one of a variety of vendors and use that as your test bed. The space will be far more reliable than anything you'd maintain on your own and it's fairly easy to scale its capacity back when circumstances allow.

Contact me if you'd like to learn more about this concept.

I didn't come up with this idea on my own ...
The Cloud's Next Big Thing

Cloud storage carries real risk

In February, Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered an eight-hour failure on July 20, 2008. In February, the S3 system was down for two hours. For enterprises that have outsourced 100% of their data storage to services like this one, this is a nightmare scenario.

When you cannot get to any of your data, you are effectively out of business. Your customer-facing websites will not function. Your accounting systems and personnel applications are useless. Depending on how your email system is configured, you might have no ability to send or respond to electronic correspondence.

For most situations, one day in the grand scheme of things isn't the end of the world. It will likely become the subject of jokes within a few short weeks. Although health-care institutions and stock traders cannot afford that kind of downtime, a real estate firm, software development company, or consulting firm will quickly recover from losing less than 0.5% of a their annual productivity. Even web-based services, like Smug-Mug, can handle these kinds of reliability rates ... CEO Don MacAskill wrote in a blog post last month, "No customers reported issues, and our systems were all showing typically low and acceptable error rates."

Considering the ridiculous costs associated with in-house mass storage solutions, your firm may find that storing data with Amazon, Microsoft or some other cloud-based vendor is a good risk. You'll be paying far, far less for high-quality, high-capacity data storage than you would with just about any in-house SAN solution. And I believe you will have more-than-acceptable reliability over the long run.

But, be prepared for the "nightmare" scenario. Eventually, everyone will laugh about it. But it will be highly unpleasant while you're in the middle of it.

Don MacAskill's Blog: S3 outage - We weren’t affected

Health-related Technology poised for a big boost

Recent spending bills have authorized $19 billion to accelerate the use of computerized medical records in doctors' offices. The legislation calls for incentive payments of more than $40,000 -- spread over the next few years -- to physicians who buy and use Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.

Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine found -- in a government-sponsored survey -- that about 17% of the country's physicians are using computerized patient records. The incentives, then, are a significant part of the government's effort to expand their use to the other 83%. Market leaders in EHR technology, such as GE Healthcare, Health MedX, and eClinicalWorks are no doubt ramping up efforts to take advantage in this change in the technology landscape. Professional services providers should follow suit, primarily by preparing small-market solutions to serve the 1-10 physician doctors' office.

Why?
Because over 75% of the country's doctors practice medicine in offices with 10 or fewer physicians. These small practices have been hit hard by a number of economic factors, not least the increases in insurance costs over the past 15 years. Yet, they will still want to take advantage of EHR systems, especially now with this incentive in place.

An EHR provider who can offer this capability in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, while successfully addressing security and performance concerns, will have a distinct advantage in the overall market. Can a cloud-based EHR work? I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Salesforce announces fourth quarter results

This past Wednesday, Salesforce.com’s announced that revenue for the quarter (that ended January 31, 2009) increased by 34% over the same period a year earlier. Even deferred revenue, which is a good barometer of new sales made by the company, was up by more than 26% quarter over quarter -- from $470 million in the previous quarter (ended Oct 31, 2008) to $594 million.

Obviously, the dramatically lower up-front costs of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) make that model very attractive to firms who are looking for ways to minimize large capital expenditures. And just as obviously, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff will take every opportunity he can to remind listeners of this point....

"Salesforce.com is proud to be the first billion dollar cloud computing company," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com. "At a time when capital is precious, big-ticket software purchases just don't make sense."

Does this mean that your firm should pursue a SaaS strategy for your Customer Relationship Management system?
Not necessarily.

The fundamentals of your decision haven't changed. Sometimes, a SaaS solution makes perfect sense... especially if you have a highly mobile field salesforce. At the same time, however, making a switch to a SaaS model isn't the best option ... especially if your current CRM solution isn't hurting your business. And of course, it's absolutely critical to remember that the only way a CRM will help your business if it actually and really helps the salesperson on the street.

Nevertheless, I see this as relatively good news for the economy in general. Salesforce claims to have signed up 3,400 new clients in the quarter, bringing them to more than over 55,000 total clients and more than 1.5 billion subscribers. This tells me that firms are still willing to invest in improving their business. And that can only lead to good things, in the long run.

Salesforce.com, Inc.: CRM (NYSE)
Earnings announcement from Salesforce: Salesforce.com Announces Record Fiscal Fourth Quarter Results

Google expands its email offerings

Google has announced the test-release of an important email feature: Off-line access. This may not seem like such a big deal to the average corporate user. After all, we've been using email on the plane for years now, sync-ing up when we get to a network connection. But G-Mail is different. There is nothing on your PC... it's all on the internet. This is the foundation of cloud computing and this release represents a radical strategic exception for Google, which has stake its future on cloud computing.

The bottom line is that Google needed to do this if wants to be a serious player in the corporate market. Consumers will tolerate not being able to read their email when there's no network, but business users will not. "This is a feature we've heard loud and clear the enterprise wants," said Todd Jackson, Gmail's product manager.

But will it be enough to move large corporate customers off of the industry standard, Microsoft Exchange? Will it even be enough to move small companies away from other open source, but more traditionally architected solutions? I'm not so sure.

Email is the mission critical application of modern business. You can survive having your A/P system down for a day. But take away email and you'll see everyone from the CEO to the receptionist gathering torches and pitchforks on their way to the data center. There are very good reasons why Exchange has earned its place as the market leader:

• It's highly reliable
• Tolerant of administrator and user mistakes, and
• Very straightforward when it comes to recovery.

Who in their right mind would want to mess with that? This is the hill that Google is trying to climb. And, given the current climate, I suspect that very few decision makers will risk making that kind of change.

For more information: A blog post on CNet

Google and SalesForce expand their alliance.

SalesForce.com and Google are at it again. Having first formed an alliance last July (2007), the companies have announced an expansion of this relationship. It is meant to further integrate the applications available through Google Apps into the Force.com development platform.

It remains to be seen what developers will cook up with this new alliance. However, it is a logical convergence between the two firms. For instance, Google's finance data could easily be available from within SalesForce.com, allowing a salesperson to have a quick read on a firm's current state while preparing for a sales call.

Link to the announcement from eWeek:
Google, Salesforce.com Partner on Cloud Computing

Can the internet really handle mobility?

The base architecture of the internet contains two fundamental and significant flaws. One has been addressed, but one has not.

The internet relies on the basic assumption that every device must have a unique address. That includes every PC, every PDA, every GPS unit... everything. The current protocol for assigning addresses is called IPv4, and it allows for a finite number of addresses. Look at the accompanying graph and you see that we are rapidly approaching the upper limit of available addresses.

A new protocol, called IPv6, is meant to resolve this problem. However, a recent study indicates that less than 1% of IT executives say they are deploying IPv6. Furthermore, those respondents cite government mandates as the only reason they have gone through with the deployment. It is unlikely that IPv6 will be widely deployed until government or market conditions compel organizations to do so, making it very probable that this particular IPv4 limitation will have a significant impact on all of us.

However, even if IPv6 is deployed flawlessly across the world tomorrow, we still have a significant problem, especially as it relates to mobility. Once a device is assigned an address, the internet establishes a path to that device. And the details of that path have a significant reliance upon geography. As a device moves from one region to another -- in an airplane or a ship -- that path will need to be updated. The computing power required to keep track of all of those individual paths, and their changes is virtually incomprehensible.

Unfortunately for all of us, the fundamental design and development of the base internet was "good enough" for the purposes of the last 15 years. However, to paraphrase Jim Collins, we've allowed "good enough" to become the enemy of progress. I'm sure there is no simple solution. But ignoring this problem will invite significant disruption in our global connectivity.

Read the findings from Nemertes Research: Internet Interrupted

Into the clouds

As you probably know by now, Microsoft (NYSE: MSFT) has launched Azure, their foray into cloud computing. In an important way, they have reverted to form in that they are piggybacking on the impressive innovations of nimbler, more creative companies, and then thrown considerable funding into trying to create a competitive product. This is what they used to do back in the 90's, when WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were household names. Word and Excel had been on the market since the early 1980's, released for the Mac OS, but no one took those products seriously. Microsoft wasn't even a recognizable brand, unless you knew what the MS in MS-DOS stood for. But the Redmond Raiders incorporated all of the features of the market leaders into their offering and took over the corporate desktop. Later, they used this strategy to put a big dent in Oracle's corporate database monopoly.

Now, Microsoft hopes to have the same results by competing against major cloud players like Google and Salesforce.com. They have released a version Office for the web, available for free. Its interface is very similar to Office 2007 and may be an effective defense against OpenOffice. Their press release indicates that Azure will include SharePoint services and CRM, along with support for .NET development and SQL Server. If the development community starts to create compelling applications for the platform, then the giant may earn back some of its swagger.

If you are looking for low-cost custom application development, let me know. This platform may be a great starting point, and our developers will be able to craft a great solution for you.

The Microsoft Press Release: Unveiling Azure