BizTwoZero

Beyond Cloud - a series of interviews

David Terrar — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:25:50 GMT

A few weeks ago I was invited by Daniel Steeves to kick off his "Beyond Cloud" series of around 15 documentary interviews. It went live on IntelligentHQ.com and Vimeo yesterday. Daniel is putting these sessions together with IntelligentHQ and Groupe INSEEC London (the French business school). Daniel's idea is to have a series of video interviews based around the same set of 4 questions to cover the trends, issues and realities of the Cloud landscape from the many different perspectives of the players involved. I was providing the consultant's perspective, but he will be covering the viewpoint from the very large Cloud provider, the traditional vendor, the SME provider, the Cloud orchestrator, the network provider, the data centre, the Cloud broker, middle-ware provider, orchestrator, security expert, some different styles of SaaS provider, the industry analyst, the business user, the micro business DIY user and the Cloud lawyer. He's hoping to get some heretics, detractors and realists along with the evangelists and enthusiasts. At the end of the sequence Daniel is bringing me back so I can interview him with the same 4 questions to wrap up the issues and explain what he's learned from the sequence.

Daniel's 4 questions are:

Q1: You are here as the (whatever - I was the Cloud Consultant). Tell us about your role and how your business has changed as a result of today’s cloud computing environment, in terms of both risks and opportunities.

Q2: Why is this big thing different than the last big thing?

Q3: What are your views on regulating the cloud, or the cloud providers, or what sits in the cloud?

Q4: If you accept my premise that the cloud is a delivery vehicle, where is it taking us and what comes next along the way?

So here is my take on why Cloud (and particularly the intersection of the shift to cloud, mobile and social) is so important for all business, how it changes the balance of risk, why its not "just another technology disruption", and where we are headed next. I hope you enjoy it.

Beyond Cloud Interview with David Terrar from D2C from IntelligentHQ on Vimeo.
(viewing on an iPad/iPhone? - click link above to watch direct on Vimeo)

Daniel has a number of interviews "in the can" already. Anyone who is involved with this kind of video will understand how much work goes into the editing and production side beyond filming the raw footage. He expects to publish at least 1 a week from this point on.

IntelligentHQ is a platform that provides digital business insights, growth, executive education and change through the social media innovation lens to business – both startups and corporations.

INSEEC is one of the best known French business schools, with 14,500 students, 38,000 Alumni, located in four French cities ( Paris , Lyon, Chambery and Bordeaux ), as well as Monaco, London, Chicago, and Beijing linking to a network of 200 partner universities offering MSc, MBA and academic exchanges worldwide.

Daniel Steeves runs Beyond Solutions Limited with a consulting approach that has a lot of overlap with my own. He provides practical 'real world' advice on technology as an investment, delivering to the corporate view and to business requirements.

photo courtesy - IntelligentHQ & INSEEC London

ICAEW event: Cloud is just sizzle?

David Terrar — Sun, 19 May 2013 11:40:13 GMT

Last month, on 17 April, I was invited to attend the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW)'s annual Cloud accounting event - Winning business in the cloud: reap the benefits of SaaS. A great title with with the promise of making the case for deploying Cloud. The hashtag for the event was #icaewcloud - it's now at the stage that if your event hasn't got a hashtag, you're missing out in a big way. Actually this event was generally good, except for one presenter who was well off message, and with whom I have to take issue - more on that later. First I have to disclose that ICAEW is one of my biggest customers (we provide the technology supporting their on-line community), and that I have a huge amount of time and respect for Richard Anning, the head of the IT Faculty. He and Paul Booth do a good job putting on events like this one, and fostering IT Counts which is a great resource for peer to peer technology advice in the accounting space. I should also disclose we resell Twinfield's online accounting - they presented last year and the year before, but not this time.

Richard did a fine job chairing and asking instant poll questions to test audience reaction with feedback from little handsets we all had. The event had 3 product showcases as well as 2 expert presentations. Chartered Accountant's Hall is a great venue for this kind of event.

Simon Rose of Intuit did a merely adequate job of presenting Quickbooks Online. He didn't handle some of the basic questions well, and I can't work out why all the presenters focused too much on basics - I know your accounting system can do debits and credits - I want to see what's different, why I would switch from the traditional Sage/Quickbooks/whatever accounting solution but merely hosted, to actually doing things differently, doing things better. QBO being hosted in America, Simon was asked whether the US tax authorities could interrogate a customer's data, and just didn't really answer properly - data integrity and protection is crucial, and I'm sure Intuit have it covered properly, but that didn't come across on the day. QBO must have more potential than this?

Hugh Scantlebury did a better job presenting Aqillla. It looks a good all round solution but came across a little like an Excel spreadsheet put on-line, with a user interface that's nothing special. The best job on product was done by Kevin McCallum of FreeAgent. Their solution takes a business rather than double entry bookkeeping style approach, works for freelancers and small companies up to 15 people, and has a very nice user interface. FreeAgent started in 2007 in Edinburgh and I know the founders (Roan Lavery worked with me on the ICAEW project). They've grown to 53 people and 30,000 paying subscribers which is impressive! They're probably the largest UK cloud accounting provider in the SME space. They also mentioned they're hosted in 2 nuclear bunkers at The Bunker (more disclosure, The Bunker is a customer of ours too).

Andrew Joint a partner of Kemp Little, and Ian Dunn, Assistant General Counsel of KPMG did a double hander on Cloud legal issues. They highlighted significant Cloud benefits both companies have achieved and went through all of the contractual, IPR, data protection, lock-in and service level issues to consider. They were great.

My main concern was with Chris Tiernan's "The Business Case for Cloud". The second presentation of the day which should have supported the "reap the benefits" title but didn't. I can understand that ICAEW want to present a balanced view - accountants are risk averse at the best of times and they don't want sales hype, but it became clear from Chris's presentation and answers to questions that his opinion of Cloud solutions is anything but balanced or accurate. He was giving a précis of the document of the same name he authored for ICAEW (attendees got it free, others have to pay). In questions he was asked about Cloud advantages and his opinion was that Cloud compared to traditional solutions are generally cost neutral, and asked about advantages his answer was that Cloud was "just sizzle!". I have to apologise to the other people sitting on my table because I was heading towards incandescent during most of his session and Q&A and that overflowed to disgruntled, strangled noises as well as comments on Twitter. His presentation did contain a slide of Cloud business case benefits (shown here), which Kevin Salter has listed in a blog post and and put his own sensible spin on here. Paul Booth also blogged about Kevin's spin and mentioned the controversy caused by Chris's pitch during questions and on Twitter. However, Kevin's words of explanation and Chris's slide bullets (or in the longer business case document) did not match the way Chris actually presented on the day. It's quite clear that Chris's experience of public Cloud solutions like QBO, Aqilla, FreeAgent, FinancialForce (who had a stand at the event), Twinfield, e-conomic, Kashflow, or more importantly larger scale solutions like Saleforce, Workday, Netsuite, or SAP's various Cloud offerings is very limited. Pretty much all of his examples and positioning was around traditional IT software being hosted in the Cloud versus an outsourcing approach, or around private cloud solutions. A business case it definitely wasn't! Instead of presenting the advantages of Cloud solutions, comparing the differences with on premise, explaining where you'll get a return on investment, he kept listing all of the things you will need to worry about. He also kept mentioning how the cost of change to a new system needs to be considered. I asked about this. Surely the cost of change is there whether the new system replacing the old is Cloud based or on premise (he talked as if this was only a Cloud thing). One of the two big things he ignored is how these costs are different. Implementation and training with Cloud solutions happens in a different way - a smaller, leaner project. Training itself is different because Cloud solutions generally have a better UI, more self help, more on-line training, different support and on-line forums. I asked about this in the Q&A and he just didn't understand - a clear lack of real world experience implementing any of the type of public Cloud offerings I listed above. The other huge thing he ignored was how Cloud solutions help a company do things differently in ways you can't with on premise. Where was that concept in his "business case"? In so many surveys asking why people have deployed Cloud offerings they answer agility ahead of cost savings. The return from that agility has to form part of the investment case.

After the session we talked. I agreed to go through his business case document and give him feedback if he would go through my Intellect's Business Case for SaaS document (free download, no capture of contact details necessary) and give me feedback. Although first published in October 2009 (I was only one of over a dozen contributors, but oversaw the editing job) I stand by everything it says today. Please take a look at it.

If you do get the ICAEW document you'll see Chris's business case isn't a business case. There is little explanation of the advantages of Cloud and the only case study example is negative. The language is positioned very much in the pejorative and the negative throughout. Nowhere does it cover the proper ingredients of a business case of any kind. It comes from an old world IT perspective and raises the many different things to consider versus on premise traditional applications or outsourcing. It feels like the topic is being presented as so complicated you need the help of experts. Is it a business case or an argument to suggest you employ a consultant to help you through the maze? My recommendation is only read it if you can get it free, don't pay for it. The ICAEW have an excellent brand, and this document isn't worthy to be published under it.

In email dialogue since the event I've given Chris detailed criticisms in writing. Up to now he hasn't responded about the Intellect Business Case in detail apart from to say that we view things differently. We certainly do that.

UPDATE: My friend Dennis Howlett, well know in the accounting world, also attended the event. As I was writing this and having my email discussions with Chris I wanted to corroborate whether my opinions of Chris Tiernan's so-called business case were just me or I'd got it wrong. See this post on diginomica he just published yesterday: ICAEW flubs cloud case

My trip to a nuclear bunker - a rather safe place for your Cloud

David Terrar — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:43:49 GMT

Last Monday I visited a data centre housed in a nuclear bunker. Visiting data centres isn't usually that inspiring - rows of server racks, cabinets with uninteruptible power supplies (UPS) and the like. This one's different, which is why I want to tell the story. Can you think of anywhere safer for your data than an underground bunker capable of withstanding nuclear attack? But I must start with two disclosures. The first is that this company is our latest customer - we're helping them with product messaging, website content and social media strategy. The second, you may know anyway, is that I'm a bit of a business geek and I never tire of doing the tour of a new company or industrial site. I'm fascinated by the way organisations set themselves up, from the layout of the office to the machinery on the "shop floor", and all the processes in between - whether it's an agency using words, design and a bit of technology to heavy manufacturing and big machines making "things" I get excited. This visit was a bit more than special though.

I've known The Bunker for years. I thought they had just picked a cool name for their company. I hadn't realised they have an ex-RAF nuclear bunker at Ash in Kent and an ex-USAF nuclear bunker that some would recognise as Greenham Common, Berkshire. Ash was the radar station and Cold War command centre, directly linked to Greenham Common which housed the missile silos for a nuclear response. During the tour we saw the actual Plessey terminal that would have initiated a retaliatory strike - I couldn't see any red button, but that's effectively what this piece of kit was.

Approaching and moving around the site is much like visiting any military site - fences, guard posts, and iron gates to negotiate with photo ID checks at various points and CCTV everywhere. A guy called Ben conducted the tour. The Ash bunker is inside a modest Kent hill, and Ben pointed out the two separate connections to the National Grid, one of which is dedicated to The Bunker so that no residential or other properties are on the same circuit. Backing up each grid connection is a generator - each chosen from a different manufacturer to minimise the chances of a common fault. Down inside the bunker we saw the UPSs that give them half an hour to switch over to generators if the grid power ever goes down. Ben told us the bunker was extended a few years before the radar station was decommissioned, and that extension holds the tanks for 250,000 litres of diesel. That gives them 80 days worth of power on generators to survive a major power outage or incident. Ben mentioned N+1 redundant air conditioning, but I didn't quite get what that was about. Then we went through the big green blast door, through a further manned security gate and a single person turnstile, to go down below and enter a world that felt rather like walking on to a James Bond or Bourne style movie set - Blofeld not included!

The concrete walls of the bunker are 3m thick and the main operational area is 30m underground - along corridors, down stair wells and through more blast doors. On the way Ben pointed out cabinets and cables for The Bunker's connections to the Internet and the outside world. They have a fully resilient self healing ring network with 10 Gb capacity. That provides multiple circuits meshed together. It's as redundant as you can get, as traffic can reroute so every individual client connection has multiple backups. Apparently they can also connect to clients via microwave or satellite too. Further in we went through a double door "air lock" to go in to one of the co location server rooms. These were blast doors that had both an airtight seal to keep gas out, and an interlocking tongue and groove to maintain a complete Faraday Cage circuit around the server room. That means that the kit inside would be protected from both an EMP event (an electromagnetic pulse designed to knock out all electronics) or a sophisticated cyber attack using radio signals. Inside the server room there were the usual racks of kit. I like them, although I realise some would find that a bit boring. However, I was impressed by their fire suppression system, with separate controls and feeds to each individual rack. If a fire occurred in a particular rack, the system would deal with it locally, and so keep as much of the rest of the installation protected and running as possible. Actually this was as far as we could go. Deeper in to the bunker through more blast doors there are other co location rooms, the main server room, and other managed service rooms. Visitors like us, and The Bunker's own general staff aren't allowed in, even if escorted. Only a specific short list of personnel have that level of security clearance.

Back out through the airlock and along the corridors, we didn't pass any of Blofeld's henchmen in their uniforms. We were, however, shown the last remaining Plessey radar terminal and 70s style phone to show off a bit of Ash's history as a missile command and control centre. Awesome, although I wasn't allowed to touch any buttons (and none of them appeared to be red)! As we moved out Ben explained how, on the software side of things, The Bunker are PCI DSS compliant (that's the stringent payment card processing security standard) across all of the 12 levels of that accreditation. Ben also explained about how all personnel are vetted, CRB checked, and certified annually in line with their ISO27001 status. It's quite clear they have the most comprehensive set of physical, human and digital security systems in place that I've ever experienced.

I found it quite inspiring - partly because of the experience of going behind the scenes at this kind of ex-military facility, and partly because because of the attitude and commitment of all of the people I met there - they live and breathe security. And then there was the "red" button! Now I need to find an excuse to visit Berkshire.

photos courtesy The Bunker

Connecting Appian, Rinde and Wardley with the intersection of process and social

David Terrar — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:11:00 GMT

I've been pushing the concept of using social technologies for collaboration and connections both inside and outside of business to make companies more effective since early 2006. The naming has changed from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 to social business, but the concept is the same. However, when some areas of technology like smart phones or tablets have made such an impact on business in such a short space of time, why is the potential of social media in business, apart from use in external marketing and customer support, still largely unrealized? I believe it's the C word (and that's context). To explain that, three things came together over the last few weeks - a briefing session with Appian CEO Matthew Calkins, a blog post from Sigurd Rinde about the fallacy of the Information Age and the need to move to a better framework, and one from Simon Wardley on flow structures and what he explains as the move from Pioneer, to Settler, to Town Planner.

First, let me set the scene by reminding you that we've been running businesses with incomplete ERP systems for decades - they usually cover a company's core processes but leave plenty of gaps. I was reminded of some of the long forgotten vendor names watching the Workday Rising keynote and tweets from Dennis Howlett and Vinnie Mirchandai last week - McCormack & Dodge, MSA, D & B, Pansophic, ASK, Baan (I'll stop there, it's a long list!). From the advent of personal computers, even back at the start with the Apple II and Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc, companies have been using spreadsheets on PCs to fill in the gaps. After that Apple II came IBM PCs and Lotus 1-2-3, but then Microsoft Excel took over and became pervasive, and we all got used to building mini systems and processes using spreadsheets and email. How did accountants and business people end up as programmers? However, it was a real jump in personal productivity back then, but 30 years on and we're still doing it - there has to be a better way!

With the advent of social tools I was convinced we could break the spreadsheet and email habit and make businesses more effective. At very least the document or spreadsheet is shared, and we don't have a copy for every email recipient's inbox - who's got the latest version? Wikis meant we could collaborate on content in real time. Blogs and forums meant we could capture meaningful conversations around any topic. Twitter style functionality brought micro-blogging for team communication and all of these tools and their profile information made it much easier to search, discover and connect with the right expert, or watch for conversations that could help my particular project. Implemented well, with the right company culture to facilitate employee engagement, these social tools can really make a difference in ways that knowledge management systems or intranets never quite managed. Tools like Yammer or Jive or Telligent have made headway, presenting a horizontal solution laying across the departments and processes of the organisation, but like the spreadsheets before them, the connections between these productivity tools and the core business processes they are trying to supplement are almost always human.

When micro-blogging came to the fore less than 5 years ago, I expected most forward thinking business application vendors to do what Salesforce have subsequently done. They built Chatter and integrated it in their product's business processes. This gives the collaboration mechanisms explained above but they are connected "in context" where they can help directly with the business process. TIBCO came out with tibbr, and promised to make use of their encyclopaedic integration expertise to connect collaboration in context to a variety of different enterprise business apps. Microsoft bought Yammer, but they haven't really done anything with it yet, although as I write this I understand they are announcing integration with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365.

Two weeks ago I discussed these topics with Appian CEO Matthew Calkins. They are aiming their solution at this same place, the interstices between process and social. They are connecting enterprise social functionality with their business process management (BPM) tools or what they call work automation - together they call it Worksocial. Mathew's argument is that BPM tools do a job, but usually only for a small group, and they are often too complicated and difficult to learn. Adding a social layer with emphasis on ease of use allows the approach to be picked up and used easily, and gives it the chance to become ubiquitous. No one needs to be trained because the tool is intuitive. He argues you can catch people on the road, include people and accelerate their responsiveness. Work automation gets elevated to changing the way an organisation works, but he says:

"This doesn't add up to anything unless work gets done, otherwise it's just a distraction."

He explains that the tools need to be wired in to the company's databases to pass back decisions and delegations. He talks about the relationship between everyone who contributes to making a decision and the need to to translate that state in to behaviour, to have awareness. This is where social tools on their own can fall down, in not being able to turn good communication in to real action.

I asked Mathew specifically about Salesforce and TIBCO as potential competition for Appian. He admitted these are two companies he watches. He thought Chatter was closest in term of their core idea, but wasn't so impressed with their workflow as it doesn't have the rigour to handle more complex business rules. He didn't think TIBCO was as close to them in philosophy, and speculated on how they might put tibbr and webMethods together in the future. He talked of Microsoft as a possible worthy contender at some future stage.

He explained how they have 3.5m paid users and started to talk about customers. Every Starbucks is inspected using Appian on iPads. They use GPS to pick up the store location, take photos, upload forms, add voice notes and collaborate in real time on tracking shipments, arranging repairs, making decisions from the communal observations. Because of this they feel they are 5 times faster than McDonalds at rolling out new products or store changes. He talked about the US Veterans Administration running job fairs. Attendees are met by volunteers with an iPad who take them through a questionnaire which provides them with a schedule for their visit. In 2 fairs they've made 16,000 job offers - a very effective outcome, and the software only takes 20 minutes for the volunteer to learn.

Mathew went on to talk about how processes can be invented on the spot or improvised, with a task being assigned and given accountability alongside formal tasks. He said:

"The key to automating is to automate the way it really is."

This connects me to Sig Rinde's post where he worries that Information Technology has mostly produced faster ways to do the same thing. There are only marginal gains from upgrading to the next version of your ERP. He argues that:

"Now is the time for IT to refocus on the effectiveness of the whole value creation chain and "what" we do."

Around the same time Simon Wardley was explaining an effective organisational structure that he refers to as Pioneer, Settler and Town Planner and goes on to worry that he's tired of being told you can be innovative or customer focussed or efficient, but you can't be all of them. He believes you can, and I do too if you've got the right tools.

The common thread here is the flow of business tasks from innovation to commoditisation and back again. Those traditional ERP solutions we created were too rigid and incomplete and were designed for the easily repeatable stuff, and we ended up needing something else to fill the gaps not covered or to handle the barely repeatable tasks - the exceptions that happen on a regular basis, to a lesser or greater extent, in every organisation. Social tools can do a better job at these than email and spreadsheets, but actually we need joined up thinking and a properly connected solutions. Appian, Salesforce and TIBCO are doing something different by integrating social in context with the associated business process to handle the exceptions as well as the standard flows.

As I publish this I'm just heading to SAP's SAPPHIRE NOW and TechEd in Madrid. One of the sessions I'm most looking forward to is a briefing with Sameer Patel to find out more about SAP Jam - their new social platform aimed at solving discrete business problems - exactly what we are taking about here. There's no doubt in my mind that business process and social tools connected in context is the next wave for enterprise software. Hopefully social media applied to business will achieve it's potential this time.

Apple's flanking move with iPad Mini and life after Steve

David Terrar — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:47:48 GMT

Last week's Apple event has been widely reported in detail, but with a minimum of real analysis on the importance of the why, the how and the what being communicated. For me there were three significant aspects:

Apple improving their leading position in the tablet business by making the leading product even better, as well as opening up a new sub segment of the market to flank the low end competition.
The whole event demonstrating that design is still at the heart of the Apple vision.
Showing there is life after Steve Jobs - the vision, culture and team he put in place are carrying the torch and keeping up the pace. (I wish I'd bought shares around about the time the iPod was first announced or before!)

Plenty of reporters and commentators presented most of the facts and the numbers corectly, misunderstood the pricing of the new iPad Mini thinking it too high, and then made the mistake of missing the .9 after the 7 in the size of its screen. So much technlogy reporting these days seems repetitive, regurgitating the technical specifications and processor chip models in the press release with little analysis and thought of what the technology is for, how well it will work and how people will use. That's a topic for another post. Let's talk through the announcements.

Tim Cook (CEO and the man Jobs hired in 1998 to clean up Apple's manufacturing and supply chain) and Phil Schiller (SVP World Wide Marketing and the guy who had the idea to use a scroll wheel on the iPod) did the talking on stage, with (Sir) Jony Ives (SVP Industrial Design and a key influence from the iPod project onwards) appearing on video. No one was wearing a black turtleneck, but there is no doubting who set the scene and the tone. Tim told us that the iPhone 5 is the fastest selling phone ever, and then went on to tell us one of the most important, but little discussed, aspects of Apple's success in the mobile device market. They try hard to make it possible that as many devices as possible run the latest version of their operating system. They told us there are 200 million iOS 6 devices already - an operating system that had only been available for 34 days! This is a powerful message and a big number. Even someone with an iPhone 3GS, 3 generations of hardware back from the 5, gets to run the current software. It's the same for my iPad 2. Of course the processors on these earlier devices aren't fast enough to do absolutely everything, but other device manufacturers build in redundancy, even when using Android, and force their users to continually upgrade to the next handset (or tablet) in a way that Apple does not.

They explained that the Mac is the #1 desktop in the USA and the #1 notebook in the USA and went on to announce new thinner versions of the iMac and and a 13 inch version of the MacBook Pro with retina display. These don't bother with CD drives in this new world of the Cloud and the download. They went on to talk about a new hybrid flash/hard disk - the "fusion drive'. All well and good for the desktop and laptop market, but I was really interested in what was coming next.

You have to remind yourself that the iPad was only announced in April 2010. 100 million iPads have been sold in just 2.5 years. There are 275,000 apps available now in the app store - that's quite an ecosystem. They explained that more iPads were sold in Q2/2012 than PCs from Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and HP. There are other tablets, but what are they being used for? Apple have looked at the overall tablet web traffic - iPad has a 91% share, with only 9% for all of the rest (all manufacturers in all sizes). That's consumers, what about use in business though? They explained 94% of Fortune 500 companies are either testing or using iPad. That's what you might call a market leading product!

What do you do when you've got a fantastically successful product that's in the lead? You make it a bit better to extend that lead. Only 6 months after the announcement of the 3rd generation iPad with retina display they announced the 4th generation. They doubled the speed of the processor, improved the front camera, expanded LTE so the device supports 4G here in the UK, and added the new lightening connector to replace the 30 pin connector, but all maintaining the same 10 hour battery life AND the same price. Now the timing of this update has been criticised by some people who only just got the 3rd generation device. They feel cheated somehow. I sort of get that, but not really. My wife is using my iPad 1 - it's still a great device. My daughter and I are ecstatic with our iPad 2s (except for maps!). The 3rd gen iPad was announced back in March. In June a CIRP report found that iPad 2, which Apple continues to sell even now, comprised 41% of all of Apple's iPad sales. The report also indicates that previous iPhone models are still strong as well. 27% of all iPhone sales were for models other than the then current model iPhone 4S. If you really want the latest version, you'll be able to get a pretty good price for your 3rd generation iPad device, because it's still pretty awesome even though a slightly better one has come along.

At this point in the presentation the new iPad Mini slowly appeared from behind a full size iPad. Apple do this kind of reveal so well. The Mini is 7.2 mm thin, weighs .68 Ibs which is 53% lighter than the iPad and has a 7.9 inch screen. Most of the pundits seemed to have missed that .9 after the 7. This is an "8 inch" tablet, not a "7 inch". There is a reason for the size difference and this is Darwin's theory of evolution applied to product categories (read The Origin of Brands by Al & Laura Ries). Product categories don't converge, they diverge. Apple are actually flanking the low cost 7 inch tablet market that Samsung, Google and Amazon are playing in with a premium product in a new sub-category just next door to their battleground. Schiller explained the reasons for the size difference:

It runs existing iPad apps in portrait and landscape without the need for any further development.
They could engineer a screen this size that was the same 1024x768 resolution of the iPad 2.
The same user experience as an iPad 2 but it fits in one hand.

He went on to compare it to one of the current 7 inch Android based tablets. The Mini is made of aluminium versus plastic. Even though this other device has a smaller screen it's thicker and heavier than the Mini. He compared the Android's screen size of 21.9 square inches versus 29.6 - that's 35% larger for the Mini. What about surfing the web? They showed the actual real estate of a visible web page without the surrounding framing, tabs and noise - the Mini was 49% larger for surfing portrait, and 67% larger in landscape. He suggested these other (Android) apps were phone apps stretched out, not specifically designed for a tablet and demonstrated that by comparing the user experience for Ebay, Pandora, and Trip Advisor across the two. It highlighted that this "8 inch" tablet really is a different form factor and category of device.

I've seen some pundits suggest the screen display "lacks Apple's crystal clarity" or is "noticeably worse than its rivals". Rubbish (although I would have preffered a word beginning with B)! These commentators are calculating the number of pixels per inch and focussing on the arithmetic. The iPad 2 screen experience had a wow factor when it was announced such a short while ago. This new device has the same resolution on a smaller screen and so characters will be a bit sharper. It's the user experience in practice that is much more important than the numbers and specifications that the average technology journalist and blogger seems to fixate on.

They showed a video of Jony Ives talking through the design of the new device. He suggested there is an inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. He explained the new iPad Mini is a ground up internal redesign of all components to make it a concentration of, and not a reduction of the original (iPad 2). They decided that 7.9 was the right screen size (in other words the lowest they could go to achieve the equivalent user experience) but they needed to reduce the borders so you can pick it up in one hand. They have produced their largest and thinnest single cell battery so that it still has the 10 hour life of the rest of the range. They've made it "incredibly thin and light with remarkable levels of fit and finish". It looks gorgeous.

Lastly, the price - the entry level model is $329 in the USA and £269 in the UK with the same capacity, wifi and cellular options as its 9.7 inch big brother. It fits well in to a range where the larger iPad 2 (which still sells well) starts at £329($399) and the iPad 4th generation starts at £399($499). Some pundits have suggested it's too expensive compared to the Kindle Fire HD or the Google Nexus 7. It's a different category to these devices. Some pundits have suggested that they should have priced it lower to kill the competition. They're missing the point. Pricing it lower would kill Apple's margins and profitability, they're leaving that low cost space to somebody else. Jobs said that the 7 inch form factor is not a good size for tablet applications and you would need sandpaper to file your fingers. Of course he has misdirected before, when he suggested video wouldn't come to the iPod, and then it did. Actually Apple are saying this new "8 inch" category is the smallest they can go whilst keeping the iPad experience that customers love and have got used to. They are flanking the low cost products on a new front, and maintaining their strategy of beautifully designed products at a premium price.

I'm reminded of a Steve Jobs sentence from a Wired article from 1996 when he said:

"My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff in all the details"

That spirit shows in the new iPad Mini. When I look at recent Android tablets some of them look great, they feel a little too complicated and geeky, but many of them fall down in the details. When I look at the various Chrome Books that Google have launched, the concept is great but it doesn't feel like a completely finished product. When I look at the current Samsung range of products, from the 5.3 inch Note 2 to the Tab 2 10.1 I see a much more coherent range with a greater attention to detail - they are the real challenger. But the Apple experience in design and attention to detail is a level above these competitors. These new iPads will be hugely successful, very profitable and maintain Apple's stamp of authority and lead on the tablet market. When you see analysts talking about total tablet market share percentages, please take care with these raw numbers and look to the growth in actual numbers of units and profitability There is an area of the battlefield which Apple is avoiding strategically because they are sticking to higher ground.

Why I've defected from BlackBerry to the Apple iPhone

David Terrar — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:47:09 GMT

After 6 years happily thumb tapping my way around my email and messages with the real keyboard of the BlackBerry smart phone platform I defected to the Apple iPhone back in July (even though the new iPhone 5 was imminent). It's such a shame - I've been a big fan of Research In Motion's BlackBerry approach and the integrated nature of their software, but to me this highlights how even strong and successful technology companies can lose their way and loyal customers with the wrong strategy and end user experience in a very short space of time. In today's technolgy landscape, if you aren't always challenging your current product range and reinventing yourself, your toast!

Things were so different back in April 2006 when I followed Ross Mayfield's advice and replaced my Treo PDA and Sony Ericcson K700i phone with a BlackBerry 8700v smart phone, instead of the HP iPaq and Sony Ericsson P990i I had been looking at. It was great advice! I loved the simplicity of the click wheel interface and the way the email, messaging, contacts and phone functions were so elegantly integrated. It actually worked well as a phone too. Along the way I upgraded to an 8300 Curve, then a Bold 9000, and then a Torch 9700 with touchscreen, but still a real keyboard. When the iPhone first came out in 2007 I went to play at the Apple Store, but I could never get on with the soft keyboard. Way too many mistakes compared to my real BB keyboard - you get pretty dexterous with those thumbs. The fact that the BB browser never worked well up until when the Torch came out didn't particularly bother me too much - email and messaging integrated with contacts and phone were the key apps. Things got better with BlackBerry's Webkit based browser on the Torch, but still weren't near good enough. Compared to the iPhone or the Android devices that have come on the scene in recent years it was too too slow, and BlackBerry have never reacted properly to get alongside, or even better, ahead of their friends at Apple (or Google).

I'm loyal to the brands I like, but BlackBerry have managed to push me away. They made a complete mess of their foray in to the Tablet market. They have a great reputation as the enterprise friendly device, but managed to misshandle their problems with outages. They have a fantastic following with young people who love the keyboard for SMS, updating social networks, and using the "free" BB Messenger to keep in touch with their friends, all done on a tight budget. You can see Will.I.Am tweeting from his Torch standing on his chair on TV programmes like The Voice, and even with all this BlackBerry haven't capitalised on being "for the cool kids" as well as Enterprise. But the real problem is in not helping me want to stay on the platform, and instead trying to make money from me on incremental upgrades. My Torch is on the BlackBerry 6 operating system. If I want the features in the BB 7 operating system I have to pay to swap my 9700 for an almost identical Torch 9710 to run it - crazy! The next, even better, operating system BB 10, which combines the best of BB and the QNX operating software they aquired and which is used on that failed Tablet, was going to arrive this autumn, but will now be sometime next year. Need a new handset for that too. And did I mention web browsing is too slow? This is not the way you treat your existing customer base - other people do it better.

A few months out from my Vodafone contract renewal (which was around this day in September) I started to look at upgrade alternatives. I was reasonably certain I would go Android, even though I've been using an iPad since May 2010. My son replaced his beloved Google Nexus One with an HTC One X in May. Initially I loved that big screen, and I started to try out available soft keyboards like Swiftkey and Swype. I had a serious look at the Samsung Galaxy S III - the phone that has supposedly been hitting sales of the iPhone 4S. It's a tough choice between the HTC and Samsung that probably comes down to whether you prefer HTC's Sense add ons or Samsung's smart overlays and apps. Then my daughter's original Galaxy S came up for renewal in June and she looked at these two alongside the iPhone 4S. She decided for iPhone on three issues - usability vs the Android she'd been living with for the last 2 years, the Apple cool factor, and the fact she has an iPad 2. I think there was another, less conscious aspect - the form factor. Are these big screens making the phone too unwieldy in the hand, trying to be a mini tablet as well as a smart phone?

I started to play around with her 4S, much to her annoyance, to see how much the soft keyboard has improved on this small device since that first iPhone - the answer, a lot! Even accounting for the smaller 3.5 inch screen of the Apple compared to the 4.7 inch screens of the One X and S III, I was doing a more accurate job of typing. This is down to two factors - the auto correct suggestions, but more importantly the fact that the iOS keyboard predicts what you might type next and makes the sensor area for that key bigger to improve your chances of hitting it. The software even picks up names from your contacts, learns from what you regularly type, and there is a work around for you to be able to add your own auto correct suggestions. Once I was over that major usability hurdle the choice to move to iPhone was easy - more and more useful apps compared to Android (700,000 with 250,000 optimised for iPad), slick user interface that I already know from the iPad, the Siri intelligent assistant and iCloud. If you add a contact or make a change on the phone, within a second or two the iPad has been updated, and vice versa. But should I switch now or wait for the iPhone 5 to come out?

Two months ago when I was considering this puzzle the Internet was awash with iPhone 5 rumours and leaked photos of what the case might look like, screen size and the like. There was enough evidence to be reasonably certain of key things Apple would announce. It seemed like the launch was going to be in early September. It looked like the device wasn't going to be radically different from iPhone 4S with a screen that was bigger, but not as big as the 4.7 inch screens of the opposition. It was highly likely that the 30 pin connector would be dropped for something smaller - I've already got lots of 30 pin connector accessories and using them with an adapter would be a pain. It will handle 4G, but that won't be available in the UK on my provider's network for a while. Even if the phone was released almost immediately in the US, it always takes longer to arrive in the UK. Demand would be high, and actually getting hold of a phone before Christmas would probably be a struggle. Two weeks in to July the smart people at Vodafone rang me and offered me the chance to upgrade my contract early - that tipped me over the edge and I picked an iPhone 4S without hesitation which duly arrived on 20th July. It's a brilliant little device, but there is one killer feature that Apple get right, that so many other manufacturers get wrong.

As well as all of the great things about the handset, it doesn't have the redundancy that is built in to so much of the opposition's handsets. There are some really cool new things in iOS 6 (new Maps, Facebook integration, shared photo streams, Passbook for boarding passes and cards, extra phone features) that I get on my "old" Apple phone for free when the new one comes out. Even users of the iPhone 3GS two generations back from me and three generations back from the iPhone 5 get the new operating software as a free upgrade. It's available tomorrow - awesome, can't wait. This is how you keep your customers loyal. This is why BlackBerry is on the ropes.

As you know the iPhone 5 was announced last week with some availability in many countries before the end of this month. As you know the reaction from journalists and analysts has been mixed - some of them don't quite get it and expected something "Earth shattering". The reaction from customers though is different - they get it. The phone is pretty much sold out everywhere and there's a waiting list. The biggest risk Apple have taken is in re-engineering the connector from the 30 pin that we've used with our Apple gadgets for the last 9 years. It's a logical, necessary and painful move to save internal space and external size across the whole iPhone, iPod, iPad range, and to improve the platform for the next 9 or 10 years. All products need to attack themselves with the new version to improve. It's one of the factors that helped me decide to go settle the 4S over waiting for the 5. The new iPhone has a 4 inch screen, a faster processor, is a bit longer, a bit thinner, but the same width and definitely lighter. I'm surprised they didn't cram in NFC (Near Field Communication) for mobile payments and information exchange too but I'm sure that will come next year. I wouldn't be at all suprized if the timing is related to the availability of more real World apps to use it effectively so that when it reaches iPhone it has a bigger, practical impact. In any case, you have to be impressed with the beauty of the engineering job they have done. The Apple keynote announcement itself is well worth watching. The difference between an Apple launch and most other technology companies comes down to two things - a proper explanation of why they do what they do (start with why!), and real emphasis on what the product can actually do for you and how you use it. Features and specifications get a mention but in the context of faster, easier, better ways of doing things and not just a list of numbers. Apple have done enough to to make the best smart phone better and to lay the foundations for where they go next. They have also made available some of the most significant new functionality to owners of 3 of the previous generations of handset owners making us even happier Apple users.

I wonder where next for BlackBerry and whether they are heading for acquisition. Nokia haven't done enough with their recent Windows 8 announcement to even start to reclaim the smart phone ground they've lost. HTC make good hardware, I wonder what Google will do with Motorola and Samsung are doing the best of the Android based opposition, but nobody has the coherent strategy, developer ecosystem, direct route to market through their retail chain, loyal customer set and execution skills of Apple. The iPhone 5 is out and is roughly what I expected. I'm still delighted with my 4S choice and I'll be happy to live with it for the next 18-24 months safe in the knowledge that I'll get new goodies from new iOS versions every year or so. And last, but not least, if some company, organisation, school, college, or service produces a mobile app for what they do, it almost always comes out on iPhone first. I was walking round Goldsmiths, London as a prospective University for my son on Saturday - signs up promoting their iPhone app everywhere. The recent combined Android market share numbers look good, but they're spread across many manufacturers with differing strategies and they don't yet reflect the impact of iPhone 5. I just can't see Apple losing their smart phone supremacy for the foreseeable future.

Inspiration from British Cycling at London 2012

David Terrar — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:43:40 GMT

We're gripped with Olympic fever here in the UK during London 2012 as you might expect. Today has been a particularly special day (4 golds, 2 silvers and a bronze so far) for Team GB taking us to our best result in over a century, but one of the highlights was a brilliant interview on BBC Breakfast TV this morning with Dave Brailsford, the Performance Director who has revolutionised British Cycling, the team that's leading our medal charge. It has some great messages for any business that I wanted to share, so I transcribed his words with some help from my new iPhone's voice recognition.

Dave masterminded the Cycling team's amazing success in Beijing, and put together a plan to win the Tour de France in 5 years, but actually did it in 2 and a half, when Bradley Wiggins won in such emphatic style just days before these games started. Even though the rules were changed, seemingly to make it more difficult to win as many medals, in this Olympics on road the British team has won 1 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze, and on track 7 golds, 1 silver and 1 bronze. An amazing performance. On the BBC News this morning Sally Nugent asked Dave - how do you do it?

"Well essentially I think, you know, you've got to have great riders with the talents, but more importantly with the commitment - there's no point in having the talent and not the commitment and if you've got the commitment but not the talent it doesn't work either, so you need both of those and then fundamentally it's all about coaching, and very good coaching - we work very hard. We always start start by analysing the demands of the event we want to win, so we really figure out what would it take to win whatever it is we want to win, then we prioritise because you know you can't win everything, you know you will lose more than you win, that's for sure, so you decide what you want to win, and then we work back to where we are today and look at the gap between where we are today and what we want to win, and create a plan and execute it."

Sally then asked Dave about "marginal gains":

"Well the whole principal of marginal gains came from the idea that if you broke down everything that could impact on a cycling performance, absolutely everything you could think of, and then you improved every little thing by 1%, when you clump it all together you get quite a significant increase in performance, so we set about looking at everything we could. Some things are fundamental like fitness, nutrition, biomechanics etc, but there are other things which might seem right on the periphery, but very very important, so posture when you sleep, having the right pillow, having the same pillow so you don't sleep on different pillows all the time when you move from hotel to hotel in training, hygiene is extremely important, how do you really know how to clean your hands. When you wash your hands, when you ask people to wash their hands, if you put dye on their hands there are always bits between their hands or at the base of their thumb which people don't wash, if you do all those things you are going to get ill a little bit less - they're little things but if you clump them all together you improve."

He went on to describe himself as a conductor of a talented orchestra, but then Nugent had heard of the team's secret squirrels and asked about them:

"The secret squirrels are a little bit different. They're more like R&D and innovation - they're a small group of people led by Chris Boardman who look outside of cycling in to industry, in to the military, in to all aspects of industry, and trying to find where latest innovations are happening and see if there's anything that is applicable to cycling - they do a great job."

There are key lessons for the performance of any business, any team, any endeavour here. Inspirational. Dave Brailsford - remember that name.

(Sadly, Dave's interview isn't up on the BBC News or Olympics website yet - I'll keep checking and post a link if it appears.)

The Cloud's 5 Key Challenges for the ISV CTO

David Terrar — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 10:35:20 GMT

Back on 26 April I was asked to present "5 Key Challenges for the ISV CTO and How to Beat Them!" at a Ciklum seminar for ISVs that intended to deliver a hype-free conversation among CTOs, Chief Technical Architects and other key executives grappling with the journey to the cloud. My slides for the session (see below) are already on Slideshare, but they are mostly visual, so I decided to do this comprehensive (that means long right? - Ed) blog write up following the slide sequence as a companion piece. I was in good company, because the other speakers were Jimmy Gasteen of Precursive, Liam Hogan of OpenText and Melissa di Donato of Salesforce.com. My pitch was intended to do three things:

Give my perspective on the current state of the Cloud landscape
Offer my 5 key challenges for the ISV CTO in moving to the Cloud
Leave the audience with some practical ideas to take action straight away

5 key challenges for the cloud isv cto and how to beat them!

View more presentations from David Terrar

The current IT landscape is pretty cloudy. IT providers are branding whatever product they have that happens to run in a datacentre somewhe as "Cloud" irrespective of whether it's conventional IT but hosted, a (hosted or shared) managed service, or an actual cloud computing implementation of some kind. It feels a bit like the Wild West out there. I'm a great proponent of Geoffrey Moore's books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. If you look at his life cycle graph, Cloud is definitely over the chasm, in to the bowling alley and heading for, or arguably well in to, the mainstream. However, the average buyer trying to find out about It is met with too many mixed messages, unclear definitions and not enough clarity on the real business benefits - just type Cloud Computing in to Google and see what you get! Another concern I have is that a buyer heading to any of the general Cloud trade shows to investigate and learn about the topic might be left with the impression that Cloud Computing is all about Infrastructure - they're generally wall to wall with booths selling hosting, virtualisation and compute capacity in various Cloud forms. Where are the business apps? Well, if you look at Forrester's projections out to 2015 published last year, their picture tells the story. Steady growth in Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and they separated out Business Process as a Service, but the biggest share of the Cloud market is Software as a Service growing from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. I found a US oriented slide from Bessemer Analysts that paints the picture in product logos. Within the SaaS space there are a host of suppliers (pun intended) from large, but mostly small which is why you don't see them taking big expensive stands at generic Cloud Computing shows. They have a more direct route to their market niche through the web, social media and word of mouth.

Have you read Douglas Adams great book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency? like Dirk I believ in the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things.". Moving on to a different fantasy story, in terms of the usual evolution of IT architectures, we're not in Kansas anymore. I've lived through several major disruptions In my 30 plus years in the industry. From mainframes to minicomputers, to the birth of the IBM PC. Networked PCs and open systems (and by that I really mean UNIX) evolving in to client/server and then the first wave of the Internet and web 1.0. This time "now" is special because we have three significant disruptions happening at the same time. The shift to Cloud is happening at the same time as the rise in Mobile, is happening at the same time as the move to Social. Each one of these alone is as big a challenge to conventional IT as those previous shifts to a new computing paradigm. We've never had 3 such shifts happening simultaneously before, and it presents a huge opportunity (and threat!). Getting back to that Wizard of Oz metaphor, the tornado really has taken us to a different World. You only have to look around at people in the street, the classroom, on the way tothe office - all glued to the web and each virtual other through hand held technology. It's happening in Nairobi, Beijing and Lagos just as much as New York, Berlin and London. People are connected through their smart phones and their iPads. Music, TV, movies, news, publishing have all been disrupted, but actually every industry is being affected by the new, flat world of instant communication and the long tail. We're following the Yellow Brick Road of the digital information economy.

With Cloud we can also see two tracks of development happening. One is retrofitting existing IT solutions in to the Cloud. That's fine, but it's still the same old software, just as a service. You get some of the benefits and you at least make a start. The other approach is to chose solutions that brace the Cloud fully. Pure-play Public Cloud solutions that help you change your business model, make new connections with customers and partners, and allow you or the provider to use the underlying data in innovative ways that would never have been possible or practical with on premise solutions. This is where the Cloud can really make a huge difference, add value and create jobs rather than just give incremental cost savings.

So what are the five challenges for a CTO in an ISV thinking about shifting their traditional software products to the Cloud?

Your business model needs to change from end to end. As a software provider, every aspect of the way you do business needs to change in the shift from selling up front licences to a subscription based model. You'll find your customers in a different way - from classic direct sales to more use of marketing, the web and word of mouth. You'll have to compensate the sales team a different way. You'll service your customers differently - more self help, better documentation, more training online in place of onsite. The projects will work differently - less big bang mega projects, but instead more of them, but smaller - lean trials of a solution with a few users that subsequently get rolled out in stages to the whole customer community, but only after they've been proven to work. Before the customer took the risk with big up front licence fees and hardware costs. Now the provider takes the risk and the emphasis shifts to better customer service and help for the customer to expand their user population. That's why the old guard providers are struggling to make the shift, and why new players like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Huddle, Xero and Twinfield can come in make and inroads. There is no other solution than recognising what needs to be done and changing all of your processes to suit.

Don't make me think! (Which is the name of the best book on website usability, authored by Steve Krug way back on 1999.) Your solution needs to have the user experience front and centre. Your users can go and buy a book on Amazon without going on a training course, and they'll expect your software to be just as easy and intuitive. In any case, you can't afford to do the consulting and training you once did with on premise. You need to understand this and design your solution accordingly. Back in 2007 I met Richard Moross of Moo.com at an OpenCoffee meet up. I asked him what was the most significant investment he made in setting up the company, and he replied "the £10,000 I spent with Flow Interactive to improve the user experience of the website", (sadly Flow charge a hell of a lot more these days!). It worked, because creating cards with Moo is a real joy, and you have so much fun you tell your friends. Go and buy Steve's book, put user trials and testing as an integral step at the start of your design process and focus a lot more attention on the actual user experience.

Go agile! Your development approach needs to change to an agile, lean approach using SCRUM or something similar. Instead of the dinosaur style 18 month new release cycle you need to have smaller, incremental releases, at minimum quarterly but aiming down to weekly. You need a feedback loop and multiple iterations so customer requirements are met regularly. Involve them in the processs and crowd source new product ideas.

Go moblie! Back in the time of client/server I used to work for a company that supported their enterprise accounting software on 26 different platform combinations of operating system, database and hardware platform. It was a nightmare. More time was spent testing technology glitches in an operating environment than on testing the actual, useful functionality we had added to a release. When we moved in to the SaaS world we were in total control of our own environment and testing got SO MUCH easier with only a few different browsers to worry about. We are still in much better shape than that old world, but suddenly everyone is holding the Internet in their hands, and they want access from as many places as possible. Bring Your Own Device is becoming common in many copanies. Smart phones are the norm and their screens are getting larger and more usable. How many iPads will there be in the iroom at your next meeting? We're back to supporting multiple platforms again, but so be it. You have to have mobile on the roadmap and an iPad app on your horizon.

Go social! The smart companies are using social networks and social tools to find and engage their customers in direct conversations. The smarter companies are using social tools inside their company to communicate and collaborate and get their work done more effectively. What I used to call web 2.0 for the enterprise and then enterprise 2.0 has now become social business. You need to be encouraging this approach inside your company along wit adding the social dimension to your product itself. Companies like Saleforce with Chatter and acquisition like Solution 6 for social media monitoring are leading the way. Whether you add micro-blogging in to your product yourself, or integrate a third party tool like Tibbr or Yammer to overlay your process flows, it is an essential direction you should be taking.

So those are the 5 challenges, but I'd like to add 2 more thoughts. First, don't develop everything yourself. In the past a traditional software company developed too many generic tools to handle things like support or eCommerce rather than buying off the shelf. You need to focus on the expertise that makes your company special. You can buy support functionality from Get Satisfaction or Zendesk. You can buy subscription handling from Zuora. There is a host of options you can use to help spend the time of your development team wisely, on the stuff that really matters.

And lastly, don't forget to worry about all aspects of security, from data protection, to your internal security procedures to backup and business continuity. This will be one of the first and most important questions you get asked by the prospect. Make sure you have a World Class answer - The Cloud approach means even the smallest of software start ups can piggy back on best in class Cloud platforms and infrastructure.

Trash talk and FUD harms the Cloud industry

David Terrar — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 21:36:24 GMT

Over here we are anticipating this year's Cloud Computing World Forum in London, but over in the US Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder and CEO since 1977, has pivoted his position on the Cloud along with "crossing a line" to trash key competitors. Elsewhere old guard software giants like IBM are mis-communicating the Cloud messages. How does this help the the industry, the typical buyer in an SME, or the average CIO in a larger enterprise? Actually this noise generated by the old guard of IT is significant in positioning the current status of the Cloud landscape, but what we really need is some clarity of vision on the Cloud topic from the big players rather than messaging crafted at protection of their existing customer base and revenue streams.

Last Wednesday Larry announced what the Oracle press release claimed as "the "industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy", although on the day he actually said, "we are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth". This is an interesting turn around considering Larry has regularly lambasted the Cloud term. Take a look at this interview some of you may remember from September 2009 at the Churchill Club where he's vitriolic about Cloud because after all it's just networks and computers and the Internet. He talks about Salesforce.com starting as a SaaS product and then becoming Cloud as just a change in fashion - "Chanel last year was fuchsia this year you have puce" or "they just change a term and they think they've invented technology" or "let's call that Cloud, it sure beats innovation". All these comments are more ironic considering Larry is personally still a major shareholder in Cloud ERP provider NetSuite, and one of the initial investors in Salesforce.com. At the end of that interview Ed Zander rather prophetically says "I'm going to check back with you in a couple of years". Here we are in 2012 and you can read Oracle Cloud: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons Why You'll Want It. You can't help but smile at how far he has come.

Let's look at this announcement of the "most advanced Cloud Strategy" - is there actually anything new? Well if you read Frank Scavo's excellent analysis he says "nearly everything presented had been previously been presented at Oracle Open World in 2011", and there are only a couple of new things - some new Oracle Fusion applications and social marketing functionality from Vitrue who they acquired in March. Putting aside the substance, that's a lot of sound and fury.

In the session Larry claimed they have over 100 Oracle Fusion Cloud services. This was even the subject of his first ever Tweet. Frank says "seeing that Oracle announced five during Open World, it’s difficult to understand how it is now claiming 100". in Dennis Howlett's equally great contribution to the controversy he says "I don’t see how this all adds up to 100 applications and none of them are available now". Many of my analyst friends are calling out Oracle to give a list - let's see what happens but I'm intrigued as to how Oracle's communications team will spin this.

Larry explained that Oracle Fusion applications were built "from the ground up for the Cloud". Ray Wang of Constellation Research says "My POV: you can't rewrite history". Frank says:

"At the beginning of his presentation, Ellison claimed that Oracle began to rebuild all of Oracle's applications for the cloud, calling it Project Fusion. But some of us have a long memory, and we've written blog posts on Oracle's Fusion program over the years."

Frank goes on to link to several of his own posts around the Fusion roadmap over the years, highlighting Cloud was never mentioned before.

How about trashing the competitors then? Ellison claims that SAP have done nothing in the Cloud except for acquiring SuccessFactors, and they "won't have anything "for real" in the cloud until 2020". This is just ridiculous. Whatever your views are on the merits or evolution of SAP's Cloud solutions, it can't be denied that Business ByDesign™ has been around since 2007 and they have a selection of line of business Cloud solutions too.

SAP wasn't the only competitor Ellison aimed at. He said "most cloud vendors only have niche assets", obviously referring to the likes of Salesforce.com. “Some people built their system with a Flash UI,” he remarked. “I won’t mention Workday by name.” Workday do use Flash, but you couldn't possibly characterise it as a Flash UI. He also suggested that "Workday doesn’t use a database". That's preposterous - they just don't use Larry's Oracle database.

Another key aspect of these announcements is best described in Phil Wainewright's post Does Larry believe in Oracle's middle-rung cloud? Oracle's Cloud uses a hybrid approach where applications can be deployed for each customer on premise or in Oracle's Cloud. Pure-play Cloud providers like Salesforce or Twinfield use a multi-tenant architecture where one version of the software and associated database are shared by all users to maximise efficiency and cost savings and to reduce maintenance overhead. Oracle's approach uses individual databases for each Customer. Phil explains that's "half baked" and good for protecting or selling more Oracle licence revenue. In the announcement Larry used the term "co-mingling" of data with the implication that isn't safe. Phil explains eloquently:

“Do you worry about your data co-mingling with others when the packets pass through the network’s routers? You know that the headers on the packets make sure that your data won’t accidentally go to someone else’s endpoint. Cloud vendors use exactly the same logical separation to keep your data from ‘co-mingling’ with anyone else’s. The fact that it may be stored on the same disk or go through the same processor chip is as irrelevant as worrying about sending your physical mail through the same postal system as your competitors.”

Oracle aren't the only ones. In another post a week ago Phil summarised as follows - "Big systems vendors are spreading misconceptions about the cloud because it helps them sell more kit." In this case he was responding to a guest post from Gery Menegaz of IBM on ZDNet and went on:

"Sadly, this is typical of the ill-informed conventional wisdom you’ll hear from the likes of IBM, HP, Oracle and most parts of Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte and the rest when discussing cloud computing."

Phil's post then takes Gery's arguments apart one by one, highlighting his emphasis on the infrastructure and services required to set up a secure, Cloud data centre or the risks of trusting your data to a public Cloud service. Just like Larry's stance it trots out the same argument - "The last thing you want is your data to co-mingle with someone else’s." This view of Cloud conveniently avoids a true analysis of multi-tenant architecture or any mention of the many Cloud applications that are available. It doesn't explain how you can try and buy and test them out with minimum of risk compared to the old on premise approach, even when the same old software is retrofitted in to Cloud infrastructure. Please read both posts as they highlight the way the old style IT companies and systems integrators position Cloud by not telling the whole story.

Larry is a very entertaining and charismatic speaker, but I agree with Dennis that he's gone way over a line. This kind of trashing of competitors and misrepresentation of the facts is bad for business and bad for our industry. In the run up to Cloud Computing World Forum these events tell me three things:

If Oracle are "announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth" then we can stop discussing if Cloud is mainstream or not.
If Larry is aiming these kinds of barbs against the likes of Salesforce, SAP and Workday then he must be worried, and the effect will backfire.
Even this late in the development of the Cloud topic we need some clarity and sensible definitions - the miss-information and FUD is bad for all of us.

photo courtesy Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2009 on Flickr

Social Learning In A Dialogic Way

David Terrar — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:27:42 GMT

Earlier this week I joined a discussion group improvising on a theme around Richard Sennett's book Together and his recent RSA talk. I understand the book explores the nature of cooperation, the evolution of cooperative rituals through history and the politics of the tribe versus the complexity of modern society. Haven't read it - it's now on the long list. The Everything Unplugged: Learning Conversation group meets in London every Wednesday at 10:00 at the RFH Level 5 to discuss wide ranging topics from creativity to the learning process. This week's discussion on Sennett was titled "In a Dialogic Way" echoing Miles Davis. I was intrigued on three counts:

I miss the kind of wide ranging conversations we used to have several years back at London's CreativeCoffee Club (which I founded with Toby Moores) or when the London Social Media Cafe/Tuttle Club was in its energetic heyday at the Coach and Horses or the ICA.
The topic of cooperation is vital to the the collaboration solutions I work with and I wanted to learn more about Sennett's take.
I don't often have philosophical discussions about dialectic argument versus the dialogic approach and I figured I could learn something.

I joined a group which included Tony Hall, Fred Garnett, David Jennings, Annie Weeks, Patrick Hadfield, Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer, Mark Narayn, Paul Wilson , and Ian McCleave. The discussion ebbed and flowed and broke in to groups with no formal pattern or organisation - that's the way they do it. Here's what I picked up:

As preparation I read Patrick Hadfield's post on the RSA talk, then went to read a recommended Guardian Article which I discovered had been removed for copyright reasons (how ironic), and should have watched this video from The RSA.
At the other end of our 3 tables I heard David J, Patrick and Annie complaining about the Wikipedia definition of Dialogic Learning being all over the place and David thought it could be condensed in to a paragraph - symptomatic of Wikipedia I'm afraid- a lot of good content, mixed with the less good and the strangely edited.
There was some serious discussion about how debating in schools leading in to the University structure trains our politicians, business people and journalists in to the adversarial, dialectic approach - it's there from Parliamentary question time to interviews on TV.
There was a general frustration that a more dialogic approach wasn't considered more regularly.
Paul suggested that the complication was that even in a small group our size things break down too easily and it would get worse if we invited that large, noisy group in a neighbouring RFH session to join in.
I suggested that it didn't need to be that way, and that the social tools, that we are all fans of using, subvert the old hierarchies to help organise in a different way - there are examples of effective non-hieararchical organisations that work in self organised teams, like WL Gore where a group like ours would evolve a natural leader (who you would spot because she/he had followers), but that only works where everyone understands the vision and a common purpose (so I squeezed in a mention for Simon Sinek and "Start With Why").
Patrick complained that Gore always comes up but there aren't enough other examples - I agreed, but said there are a few such as Semco in Brazil, and Fred chipped in with Mondragon.
I learned a new word - Rhizomatic! Apparently Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. Cool!
I had to run away to another meeting at 11:45 just when the discussion got exciting.

This all triggered some great thinking about the learning process itself and how important it is to teach our kids about dialogue as well as dialectic, cooperation as well as competition. Our education system is in such need of a complete overhaul for the 21st Century Inormation Age, rather than the 19th Century Industrial Age for which it was originally designed. We need to break away from traditional thinking and hierarchical structures and embrace the network, in our physical interactions as well as on the web. I'm glad I dropped by for some serious provocation.

Photo courtesy Fred Garnett

Social Business

David Terrar — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:25:18 GMT

After some soul searching I've just started updating my various personal profiles around the web to say I'm a social business evangelist rather than saying enterprise 2.0. I've got close to this before. I wanted to explain why now. For me that terminology change is a big deal because I'm not 100% comfortable with "social business", but it's not me rather the market that decides. If we move the clock forwards 5 years I'm sure we'll be using different language again, and I believe the way the smart companies use social media and social tools in their businesses today will be as natural and essential to any organisation as a website, email, phones or mobiles (cell phones for my US friends, handys for the Germans - language is so crucial!). I actually prefer the term "amplified enterprise" because the terms "social business" (as used by the likes of Dachis, Altimeter Group and IBM) or "social enterprise" (as used by Salesforce) are already occupied by a very different idea. Go ask the average, non-technology oriented bushiness person in the street and see what they say. Actually my perspective on this topic has 4 dimensions:

The social term applied to business is already occupied by something else
Business has always been social, right back to trading around the tribal camp fire
Use of today's social networking and social media tools inside and outside business is vital
It's not about specific technology or a particular platform (a tough thing for a software guy to say!)

The Social term
If I type social business in to the Wikipedia search box, the relevant page says this:

"This article is about a business with a social objective. For organization designed around social tools, social media, and social networks, see Social media."

If you go to the excellent ZDNet online debate from a few weeks ago titled "Social enterprise: Real or fiction?" between Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett, in one of the first exchanges Dennis says:

"The notion of a social enterprise is at best laughable and at worst ridiculous. Enterprises are artificial constructs designed with one purpose - the creation of wealth for the benefit of shareholders. The fact that such enterprises may employ people doesn't distract from the primary purpose. That's why we have hierarchies, rules, command and control. They serve to constrain people into behaving rationally and only for the benefit of the enterprise."

he goes on:

"The notion of a social enterprise is merely the latest in a long line of fashion-driven management constructs designed to make employees believe that the enterprise cares."

Pretty cynical, and even back in 2009 Dennis was saying "Enterprise 2.0: what a crock". But there is a confusion that comes from the social word and the fact that the term was first coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus and he was talking about businesses built around a social purpose or a cause. Social media marketing is hijacking an existing term to make it become something different. It's a shame, because the principles behind this new version of "social business" are actually vital for all business.

The shift to using the term goes back to 2009. I guess it was probably Dachis and Altimeter that started using it around then, and I particularly remember Stowe Boyd's September 2009 post "Social Business: Why The ‘Enterprise 2.0′ Moniker Is Wrong", followed on the same day by Euan Semple talking "Social Business". The term has steadily got more usage in the intervening time, and then when I arrived at last September's Cloudforce event at the Royal Festival Hall, Salesforce greeted me with a sign over the entrance that said "welcome to the Social Enterprise". Two weeks ago I was one of IBM and Collaboration Matters contributors to the debates on their stand within the Social Business Expo strand of the Unified Communications Expo at London, Olympia. That pushed me over the edge in to realising explaining enterprise 2.0 to people just wasn't sensible any more.

Business has always been social
The best session by far a year ago at the March 2011 Dachis Social Business Summit in London was from JP Rangaswami, now Chief Scientist at Salesforce. He started by raising concerns over the term "social business". Why do we need business to be social? If it isn't social, what is it? Anti-social? He suggested that we need to rediscover a social dimension we've lost, and worried that people his age (and my age) might be remembered as the generation that gave us Excel and management by spreadsheet. I'm delighted that he talked about the importance of The Cluetrain Manifesto helping us realize that marketing has moved from one directional broadcast to two way conversations. He talked about how work is changing. Business used to run with a financial system largely to do with product and customer and largely hierarchical, with planning based on historical snapshots predicting the future. But business is morphing in to a network of relationships and capabilities. Investment related to human capital and knowledge capital were the kind of projects that used to get cut because we couldn't quantify their value, but today relationships and capabilities MUST have metrics so we can justify these resources. He talked about the transition from the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to today's information age, or knowledge worker age, but he worried that we:

"Insist on taking the detritus of the industrial age along with us!"

He's right. Business has and always will be social. That's why the social business term is a bit suspect.

Use of today's social networking and social media tools
Way back in August/September 2005 when Dennis Howlett convinced me I should be writing a blog we talked about this stuff as "web 2.0" - the web goes interactive and becomes conversational instead of broadcast. When I started to use blogs, wikis, forums and instant messaging in an around companies, the way of differentiating the "business" use of the tools from the "consumer" oriented web 2.0 term came when Andrew McAfee defined then refined the "enterprise 2.0" term. Wikipedia still didn't like it and redirected to "enterprise social software". That E20 term worked for me, but it always needs explaining, which has to be counter-productive. However, to hell with what we call this stuff, it's actually really useful. IBM used forum technology back in 2003 over a 72 hour period to get 10s of thousands of their employees engaged giving them the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values - ValuesJam. Around about that time Euan Semple was using a social networking tool, blogs and wikis inside the BBC as one of the early case studies of how this can work. Twitter only really took off at the SXSW conference in 2007, but today every news channel, most TV programmes, and every radio station will tell you how to follow them on Twitter or which hashtag to use to join the conversation. It's only in the last few years that organisations like Salesforce have been integrating Twitter style micro-blogging (Chatter), social media monitoring (Radian6) and web content management (Site.com) in to the business process flow of the business software (as a Service) that they sell. Pretty soon everybody will be doing it. At this moment in time terms like Social CRM are hot property. The reality is that every business solutions provider needs to be thinking about how to provide or link to this functionality to keep up with their competition. People need help and advice on this, and the social business term is the best we've got to describe the issues at the moment.

It's not about specific technology
As much as it pains me to say it as a software guy - it's not about particular technologies or platforms. There are some platforms that relate to social business that are significant and need to be part of your strategy and tactics, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but we need to remember there have been major casualties within the "social" world like MySpace - too big to fail is a dangerous idea. Something like Tumblr or Pinterest can come up and become a big deal in a relatively short space of time. You need to watch these trends, because your target market may well be hanging out in these places - if they are, then you need to be there too. To run your business day to day you might consider business solutions that already cater for the kinds of social collaboration we are talking about, or you might overlay your business systems with products like Yammer or Jive or Google Apps. You might build communities for your people, customers and partners using something like WordFrame or IBM Connections. Somebody asked me on Friday which product I thought would be the winner in the Social Business space - Connections, Jive, Lithium - I really don't know, and that's the wrong question. Every business is different. Every business has pain points and social tools can often help with those pain points. If they can help us break out of the cycle of living inside our email in-box and management by spreadsheet, that has to be a good thing. But the most important word in the phrase is business, not social. Start with the quantifiable business objectives first. Then you can think on the ingredients that make social tools work more effectively, and how you encourage people to use them in the first place - answer the question "what's in it for me?" for your staff, partners, customers who are going to be using these social tools. It's all about changing people's behaviour, to think differently and work smarter.

So I'm dropping enterprise 2.0 from my vocabulary and running with social business. That won't stop me triggering some debate and suggesting the amplified enterprise term might be better.

Update:

Luis Saurez just reminded me that he posted his "Social Business, Where Do You Stand?" a week ago on the 12th. I'd read that, and should have linked in his views, which also reference Sameer Patel's “Social Business Facts and Fiction”. Sameer recognizes that CIO's will consider social business "Mickey Mouse" until they can see it add to the bottom line (and hence my suggestion above that measurable business objectives come first). Luis is very definitely in the "social business is important" camp.

And in addition, this post triggered a great Sunday rant on ZDnet from my good friend Dennis Howlett, who I quote above. He says "Sunday rant: social business? I'm still not buying it". I understand where he is coming from, but I'm with Marc Benioff, who says Salesforce has been "reborn social", along with JP, Dion, Luis, Jeff Dachis et al who believe social business is on the edge of the mainstream and important for organizations in their business models going forward.

Complicated Social Business landscape 2010 diagram courtesy Dachis/Dion Hinchcliffe

The cultural divide on data protection - USA vs EU

David Terrar — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:35:55 GMT

We are several months past the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 (9/11) attacks, but one of the significant consequences of that event a decade ago highlights the cultural divide between the USA and Europe on data protection. Data privacy has been hitting the news recently because of Google's changes in their terms and condition. Frank Jennings of DMH Stallard, who chairs the Governace Board for the CIF Code of Practice on which I sit, has just published a good analysis of the proposed reforms to the EU's data protection laws, and that triggered me to visit the topic here. Data in terms of security, privacy and sovereignty is still the number 1 issue for companies who are first considering Cloud Computing. As a buyer, you need to carry out your due diligence for any software, platform or infrastructure as a service - you should be checking how and where the provider will be storing your data, and how YOU will comply with legislation like the Data Protection Act.

Here in the UK, if your systems handle personal information about individuals you have a number of legal obligations to protect that information under the Data Protection Act 1998. That UK law was enacted to fall in line with the European Directive of 1995 which required EU Member States to protect people's fundamental rights and freedoms. If you read Frank's analysis of the proposed reforms you'll see that the act has resulted in 27 different interpretations and too much red tape, hence the need for reform. The current act protects a persons right to privacy including how their personal data is processed. With a Cloud service you have to ask the question - where is my data? That becomes important when you check the Information Commissioner's website which tells you:

"You may transfer personal data to countries within the European Economic Area on the same basis as you may transfer it within the UK. However, you may only send it to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area if that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of individuals in relation to processing personal data."

So in the EU we're all about regulation and compliance protecting the rights of the individual. In the USA things are very different. The attitude to data is more governed by market forces along with the heightened attention on security issues rising out of those attacks 10 years ago. Just six weeks after the attacks "The Patriot Act" was enacted, or to give its full title "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001". It dramatically reduced restrictions on the various US law enforcement agencies in their ability to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records including foreign intelligence gathering within the United States. It expands the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities. Search warrants can be executed without immediately informing their targets. There has been plenty of debate on the topic, and some would say the law has done more damage than good to the reputation of the United States. There is worry in terms of civil liberties and whether the Act is really good for peace and national security. Sadly back last year some of the powers were extended to June 2015. But what actually happens in practice? A New York Magazine feature last year highlights that the act had been used 1,618 times investigating Drug offences, 122 times for fraud, but only 15 times for the terrorism that it was intended for. The result is that any data stored in the US can be handed over to the US government without so much as a court order or even notice to the owner. But what about US companies operating over here?

I know this is hot topic with John Patterson, CEO of Europe's most successful Cloud based CRM provider Really Simple Systems. He told me:

"There is already enough confusion over whether UK companies are complying with EC data laws by storing their data on servers in the USA, even with companies who say that they comply with "Safe Harbor", an unregulated and fairly meaningless cop-out. But does the Patriot Act make Safe Harbor totally redundant? Nobody knows for sure, but it is safe to assume that US authorities won't be shy in assuming that the Patriot Act overrules any EC law."

The Safe Harbor John mentions is a framework under which US companies can self-certify that they comply with the obligations under EU data protection regulations. The framework allows for the sharing of data between the EU and self-certified US companies under certain restrictions, such as the promise of reasonable data security and informing the EU of the request for access to the data in question.

John's fears have been corroborated by two major US corporations. Back in June 2011 at the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that data stored in their Cloud, regardless of where it is in the world, is not protected from the Patriot Act. In August of 2011 Google also confirmed to Germany's WirtschaftsWoche that their servers in Europe have no protection from it. That means that some UK and European Cloud companies might spread some FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) and get a short term advantage over their US competitors. I've already heard of one UK government project being shelved 3 months in to development on a well known US PaaS once this issue came to light.

This highlights the need for Cloud providers to be transparent about the supply chain that underpins their service. For my own part, we use Google Apps and we are happy to trust our documents and data to that provider and the potential risk of The Patriot Act, but not everyone will be that comfortable. As a buyer you need to go in with your eyes open and check how and where your data is stored, consider the data protection implications and decide your own position on The Patriot Act. This is a big topic that, up to now, hasn't got the attention it deserves.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking and then on Business Cloud News.

Photo reproduced from Blame It On The Voices.

Using the Cloud for personal productivity with Evernote

David Terrar — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:53:36 GMT

I've just made a significant switch in one of the main tools I use for my own personal productivity which highlights a key trend for the industry and all of us - the personal cloud. Whether it is for work or our personal lives we use desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, media players and tablets and a lot of the time we need to get at the same stuff from each device. For some time we've been used to setting up our smart phones so we can sync and access the same email as on the computer or the web, and the early adopters and geeky types have been sharing photos and documents too. The personal cloud will make that easy and more pervasive for everyone.

Let me explain more with the key tool that I use for all my writing, note taking, project documentation and capturing of ideas. Since January 2005 I've been using what I believe is Microsoft's best and most undervalued product - OneNote. OneNote is a free form note taking application with a user interface that looks like the Windows equivalent of a cool Moleskin notebook. I can type, draw, insert pictures or make screen clippings and capture my thoughts in multiple notebooks. Each notebook is organised in to sections by horizontal tabs across the top, and individual pages are tabbed vertically down the side. Each page is date and time stamped as I create it - in the days of paper note taking (and some like Euan still do that - from his latest newsletter he uses a Moleskin Squared Cahier and a mechanical pencil) I always used to envy those people who used notebooks that gave them a chronological view, but it was more important to me to file loose leaf by topic. With OneNote I get both. OneNote has far superior editing functionality for things like layout and tables compared to Microsoft Word, and can do really clever things like optical character reading of scanned images. It's also a fantastic collaboration tool too. If you've set up a notebook on your network or the web to be shared by a group of users, they can all work together simultaneously in real time. OneNote shows you what each person is adding or changing as they type and, like a wiki, makes it easy for you to have one version with all the revision history rather than tracking the changes made to multiple versions of an emailed doc trapped in multiple inboxes - who's got the latest version? By the way, exactly that same simultaneous, real time collaboration functionality is now available to anyone using Google Docs.

What triggered me to look at alternatives was the need to use OneNote across multiple PCs and my iPad. When a product called MobileNoter became available on the iPad a while back, which synced to my OneNote notepads via wifi or the cloud, that triggered my first iPad 1 purchase back in in 2010. Microsoft have come out with their own OneNote version on the iPad now, but haven't yet bothered to create a Mac version. I needed to share OneNote across two laptops and the iPad (as well as using cloud as my backup), and you can do that by upgrading to OneNote 2010 (I started on 2003 then upgraded to 2007) and using shared cloud storage like Microsoft's Skydrive, which gives you 25Gb of space for free. By the way you could use alternatives like Dropbox, Box.net or Sugarsync. I plan to do a comparison of these services in an upcoming article. The cost of the upgrade and the work involved in set up made me look around and revisit a product I'd tried back in 2009 called Evernote.

Evernote is a free or premium web based note taking service which they say helps you "remember everything". I can capture notes, screen clippings or save any web page I like. I can snap photos (of white boards, flip charts, anything), save voice notes or video from my smart phone, android tablet or iPad. The key to Evernote's success is that it is available as a web app, a Windows Desktop client, a Mac client, a BlackBerry app, an Android app, an iPhone app and on iPad too. There is no fiddly set up and sharing the right folders in Skydrive - I simply install the app on the particular device and log in to my account. Everything syncs across all devices and the web without you needing to think about it. For offline use, the free service allows sync of up to 500 notes. If you go Premium for £31.99 a year that becomes unlimited and you get a big increase in the amount you can upload each month and more. You'll end up using Evernote as your repository for anything you need to remember for later.

The Windows and Mac client's user interface has the list and detailed view "look" of an email client. It's not as elegant as the Moleskin style OneNote, but it works. I can store notes in notebooks and stacks of notebooks. Each note is dated and time stamped and can even pick up the location where I'm creating it. Each note can be tagged. Tags are much more powerful than OneNote's tabbed sections. Now I can tag the same note to appear in any section or topic I like. Searching is incredibly fast and starts as I type. Evernote does the OCR thing on scanned images reading text or even hand writing, but only for searching of that text, rather than the ability to copy it like in OneNote. I can also email content in to Evernote and send from Twitter - great for forwarding an email with attached documents that's the starting point for a new project. Notebooks can be shared with another user or made public. Each note has an individual URL which you can use for sharing (and the other person doesn't need to have an Evernote account). That's a particularly cool feature for connecting Evernote to other services. I use Remember The Milk for personal task management. RTM allows me to add a relevant URL to a task. Now I can drop in an Evernote URL and connect alll of the relevant content and notes for that task or project directly from RTM.

In terms of actual writing, the note text editor isn't anywhere near as powerful as OneNote, but I can choose font, highlight, indent, use bullet points, numbered lists, todos and create tables. It's got what I need for more than 95% of the time, so I'll live with those deficiencies and hope for future enhancements. That's more than balanced by the extra flexibility, functions and access I get. Evernote has a large, growing and loyal user base, so the product is definitely evolving and the future looks solid. There is a knowledge base, good documentation, how to videos, forums, and premium users get online chat support and faster answers through the online ticket system. Conversion from OneNote is a breeze, provided you are on OneNote 2007 - there is a wizard which allows you to select which notebook and which sections to convert, and notes just get copied in to an Evernote notebook of the same name with the section converted to a tag and the creation date retained. I still have my chronological view, but I can add as many new tags as I want to make classification as easy or as complex as I need.

I've only been using Evernote for two weeks but I think it's awesome! This is the way the personal cloud needs to work. I can store all of my writing, ideas, project documentation, anything and get to it securely in a choice of ways from whichever device I'm using or anywhere I can get web access through a browser. When I need to work offline on the PC or the iPad I can, and everything just syncs the next time I'm connected without me having to think about it. Apple's iCloud covers the same concept across the Apple family of devices and iTunes, and it's going to be big! You only have to look at the $1 billion investment Apple have made in their iDataCenter in Maiden, North Carolina. to see how serious they are about personal cloud. It covers 500,000 square feet and a second one is planned alongside! Evernote and iCloud show the way forward, but as well as access the vital component that so many software authors (coming out of the old world of conventional IT) don't pay enough attention to is the user experience of set up. For the consumer or general business user, rather than the early adopter and geek, you need to to be able to sign up, download and just start using the service with all that technical stuff hidden underneath!

If you're using Evernote, OneNote or some other personal cloud product, I'd love to hear from you.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking.

Social Business - use cases and best practice are pants!

David Terrar — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:15:50 GMT

At the IBM Collaboration Diner at the Social Business Expo we had a long conversation with my old friend Luis Suarez about use cases and best practice - he doesn't believe in them! Luis was there to do Wednesday's keynote address on the topic he is famous for - Thinking Outside the Inbox - There is no We in email. I was there as one of the invited thought leaders contributing to the cafe style debates IBM and Collaobration Matters had organised inside a 1940s American Diner styled after Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks. One of my customers, Janet Parkinson of The Smart Work Company, was there joining in the discussion with Luis, triggered by our belief that there aren't enough good case studies of businesses using social tools inside their organisations to show how Social Business can work. I commented that part of the reason for that is the difficulty of getting enterprises to share something that can be a competitive advantage, but Luis immediately declared that use cases are useless!

His view is that every business is different, every business is unique. Having a use case for some other firm doesn't really help much. He wants to go in to each company and find out about their specific ways of working. What is it that adds value? What do they really do? Then he'll ask about their issues and pain points, and see where social tools could be deployed to address those specific problems. Use cases deal with somebody elses problems, not theirs. He has a point, and I agree whole heartedly with starting with a deep dive in to what the business is all about, understanding their real processes. Luis added:

"Use cases and best practices seem to accelerate that process without doing much work along the way, and, eventually, in the long term, they are a huge time waster, because the business may eventually fail if the homework that needed to be done didn't happen and if the core needs of the business were not addressed we go back to square one, with all of that time, energy and effort gone by and still stuck on step #1. That's the issue with use cases and best practices that I have, that they just don't allow you to move on further along with your own ideas, mindset, experimentation, play and research whether they could work out for you or not."

I had guessed he would have the same kind of views about best practices. On questioning, he doesn't see the value in a generic, ones size fits all approach - I get that, but we began to disagree over the usefulness of a toolkit or a methodology of approach that will help improve the chances of success of getting the tools adopted inside the enterprise. We came down to specifics on blogging. I was wondering whether he believed, like me, that every business needs a blog and you need to look at how you make that blog work successfully for you. He thinks bogging is vital to get yor message across, either internally, like with IBM's new CEO Ginni Rommetty, or externally to connect with your customers. However, blogging isn't for everybody, so you need to find the right person to do it. Luis went on:

"Blogging is about sharing a passion, your ideas, your interests, your opinions, your thoughts on particular things that are happening around you and your passion, and no matter what methodology you may be using if you lack that personal, passionate view on blogging, you are just basically publishing on a specific platform 'without a heart'."

I have a softer view on some of this than Luis. A methodology, and a toolkit of different approaches and techniques to help behavioural change can definitely improve your chances of success. Case studies have a value in starting the conversation with the organisation that needs help, but I completely agree that the conversation needs to be around the unique things that the business is all about. However, Luis is making an important point that, used unwisely, use cases and best practices are pants!

The Cloud needs some standards (or a Code of Practice)

David Terrar — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:12:34 GMT

One of the big issues for a buyer today considering Cloud Computing is how do you choose a good Cloud provider from a bad one? Who do you trust? Maybe the Cloud Topic needs some standards? Well actually there are so many standards bodies and vendor groups that the picture is confused - something that I try to demystify with my company and with the various cloud groups that I'm involved with. If you type "cloud standards" in to Google, you'll find an alphabet soup of acronyms, and even the first entry in the list - a "Wiki site for Cloud Standards Coordination" - initially looks promising, but doesn't yet mention some of the key organizations that have something worthwhile to contribute to this topic.

When you do some research you find the International Organization for Standardization (their ISO 27001 on IT security is relevant for the data centre) or the IBM backed Open Cloud Manifesto or The Open Data Center Alliance, and many others, but most of their output seems to be about technical standards for set up, programming and interoperability of services - good for the industry as a whole, but not necessarily relevant to the average business trying to decide on a cloud alternative for email management or accounting or project management. Another issue is that some of these standards have a high barrier to entry for the small software provider. If it's going to cost tens of thousands of pounds (or more) to get a product ISO (or whatever) certified, that guarantees that only the big players will be able to afford it. The smaller, more innovative software developers might have great products, and deploy them on a safe and secure infrastructure making use of the benefits of Cloud architecture, but they'll be precluded from the shortlist because they don't have the accepted "quality mark". We need something that's focussed on helping the buyer rather than the developer, and which helps the innovative entrepreneur at the S end of SME just as much as helping one of the Enterprise level IT players.

That's where the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) comes in - an organization that Business Two Zero and D2C wholeheartedly supports (disclosure - actually I'm on their governance board - see below). CIF, a not for profit organization, was established in 2009 to provide transparency for the industry through certification to a Code of Practice for credible online Cloud Service Providers. The emphasis within the code is on best practice in the approach to service provision, rather than technical standards of programming. The code covers areas like contract terms, Service Level Agreements, data protection, data location, or transparency of the cloud service supply chain. These are the practical things that a buyer needs to know about the service they are signing up for. Organizations that apply for and conform to the Code of Practice get a "CIF Certified" quality mark. The process itself allows for a self-certification approach, although a full external audit can also be done if you want to pay for that. Self-certification brings the cost down to an affordable level (starts at £200 a year) for the smaller Cloud players, but it's still properly policed by an independent organisation.

Members of the Cloud Industry Forum include Microsoft, Dell, VMware, Rackspace, Fasthosts, Claranet, Ingram Micro, Interxion, Memset, Nominet, Star, Mamut, FrontRange, Unit 4 (Agresso, FinancialForce), UKFast, Webroot, and is supported by vendor organizations like Intellect, EuroCloud UK, the British Application Software Developers Association and the UK Cloud Alliance. The Code of Practice was agreed in 2011, and the first wave of Cloud companies have just gone through the accreditation process. One of those is NexusAB, a 10 person SaaS company - they provide integrated quality assurance and technical inspection services for sub-surface drilling and completion departments. They work with oil field asset data, the most precious data that an oil company has. Their customers trust that precious data to the cloud and to a small company like NexusAB, but if you speak to them you'll find that having CIF certification was instrumental in providing the level of comfort required to win their recent big deal with BP. That is exactly what the CIF Code of Practice is all about. Go here if you want to find out more. And please tell me if you think there is anything similar that companies should be considering.

Disclosure: I am on the Governance Board for the Code of Practice of the Cloud Industry Forum, a not for profit organisation, and I regularly speak on their behalf. In addition I chair Intellect's Software as a Service Group, and I am a Director of EuroCloud UK.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking.