Spain's soccer team celebrating its first World Cup

In sports we’ve seen several significant transitions in the past few weeks: Spain won its first World Cup against the Netherlands, which was also competing for its first World Cup. At the British Open Tom Watson crossed the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th hole of St. Andrews Golf Course, signifying the last time he would play St. Andrews in the British Open. Louis Oosthuizen from South Africa, where the World Cup was held, won his first major golf tournament at the British Open. Lebron James moved to Miami. George Steinbrenner passed away.

Louis Oosthuizen accepting the British Open trophy

There is a similar wave of transitions in enterprise computing, although the stories are about business and technical trends rather than individuals. I compiled several articles that illustrate the current transitions to enterprise cloud computing:

• Yankee Group press release: Cloud Proponents Outnumber Skeptics for First Time, Yankee Group Finds
• Gartner press release: Gartner Says Worldwide SaaS Revenue Within the Enterprise Application Software Market to Surpass $8.5 Billion in 2010
• IDC press release: SaaS Revenue to Grow Five Times Faster Than Traditional Packaged Software Through 2014, IDC Finds
• The Huffington Post: Google Wins Security Clearance, Launches Apps for Government
• GigaOm: Emerging Markets Will Bring A Third of Global Mobile Data Revenues by 2014
• TechCrunch: Report: Mobile App Store Downloads to hit 25 billion by 2015
• TechCrunch: Enterprise Software is Sexy Again
• ReadWriteEnterprise: Enterprises Leading the Point-and-Click App Creation Revolution
• InformationWeek: InformationWeek Analytics New Research Finds 56% of Companies Taking Steps to Lock Down Their Web 2.0 Applications
• Wall Street Journal: Spending Soars on Internet’s Plumbing
• CNNMoney: The End of the Desktop PC (Seriously)
• Infoworld: End-times for Server Virtualization?

Tom Watson on the Swilcan Bridge

It is exciting to watch new sports heroes like Louis Oosthuizen win, while respecting the achievements of greats such as Tom Watson. I think a similar excitement for new achievements is occurring with cloud computing, while we respect the earlier achievements in computer science, IT, and business that brought us to this point.

On Independence Day weekend I attended an excellent performance of patriotic and country music at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vince Gill, the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, and a dazzling fireworks display at the end. It was a great opportunity to commemorate the birth and history of the United States in a venue that, throughout its history, featured so many legendary performers of the many types of music that enrich our lives and express our diversity.

The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, August 23rd, 1964

The Hollywood Bowl website presents a pictorial history of the venue and lists some of the legendary performers who graced its stage. Probably the most famous rock concerts there were The Beatles in 1964 and 1965. Here is a video clip from one of the performances. This weekend, the Hollywood Bowl commemorates The Beatles with “A Beatles Celebration,” while Ringo Starr celebrates his 70^th birthday this week. The Independence Day and Beatles concerts on successive weekends illustrate the interdependencies of strong cultural, political, and commercial ties between the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Hollywood Bowl and The Beatles changed over time. The Hollywood Bowl was modified several times with various acoustic shells above the stage; The Beatles began their career sounding similar to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and ended within a decade incorporating many styles, traditions, and innovations, including Indian and Western classical music, jazz, hard rock, and progressive rock.

As this timeline shows, the history of computing is also very rich, diverse, and complex. There’s a big gap at the beginning of the timeline between 500 B.C. and 1614 A.D., but I’m sure we all would have no problem filling in all that occurred in computing during that time. The timeline ends on December 31, 2003, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted for creating the World Wide Web. That event provides a segue to the main development of the following years that I’m sure we all could fill in with details: cloud computing.

The Beatles exemplify the cultural transformation of the 1960s, which included an unprecedented popular interest in diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, all pillars that inspired the foundation of the United States. While music was and still is an important vehicle for diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, cloud computing is now carrying us to a new level and era of exploration and understanding like those that occurred in the 1960s; the Age of Enlightenment when the United States was born; the Renaissance; and the ancient civilizations worldwide that launched our traditions of inquiry and exploration that remain today.

The consumer and business application stores at Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, VMWare, and others illustrate the new renaissance and enlightenment that we now have available on small devices almost everywhere. They provide the stages, or platforms, that display and run the innovations of today. The hundreds of thousands of applications available through these stores also illustrate how much easier it is to create software applications today than ever before, because the platforms that developers and users need are inexpensive and always available in the cloud.

Since the 1960s many rock bands have come and gone, but few actually made it big. We now have a similar situation with so many excellent applications available online. How will your application get the exposure and visibility it needs to succeed and become a rock star of innovation? If you build it and upload it, users won’t necessarily find it. Like The Beatles, you may need an agent to help you see the limelight.

As most business and IT professionals know, a big shift is occurring in enterprise computing toward cloud computing. Here are several articles, surveys, and reports that illustrate where we currently are and where we are headed:

• GigaOM: “The Big Shift: The Rise of Cloud Computing” cites trends such as job, investment, and data growth in the cloud.
• Pew Research Center, Future of the Internet survey, “Some 71% agreed with the statement: By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”
• R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group: “Research Report: How SaaS Adoption Trends Show New Shifts in Technology Purchasing Power” documents that business users are increasingly the decision-makers and purchasers of cloud products, rather than IT.
• Gartner press release: “Gartner Says Worldwide Cloud Services Market to Surpass $68 Billion in 2010“
• IDC press release: “Through 2014 Public IT Cloud Services Will Grow at More Than Five Times the Rate of Traditional IT Products, New IDC Research Finds”
• John Soat, InformationWeek: “Five Reasons for the Cloud Computing Boom”
• Larry Marion, Datamation: “Business Intelligence Software and Post-Crash Strategy” reports the results of a Bloomberg Businessweek Research survey about the business changes during the recession and the increasing focus on business intelligence and cloud computing to support current business requirements.
• InformationWeek Analytics press release: “InformationWeek Analytics New Research Finds IT Pros Expect Public Cloud Services Will Have Limited Impact on Employment” presents the results of a poll of 828 information technology professionals at North American companies regarding the current and anticipated impact of cloud computing on IT staffing levels, required job skills, and specialties.
• IBM survey press release: “Wall Street Firms Set to Increase IT Spend Through 2011 on Transformation Initiatives” “Despite the positive technology investment outlook, Wall Street professionals cite lack of IT staff and high implementation costs as the biggest inhibitors for technology implementation – which remains consistent with findings obtained in 2009. To overcome some of these challenges, the industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing (61 percent) to force business model change.”
• Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek: “Healthcare Taking Computing to the Cloud” “Nearly one-third of healthcare sector decision makers said they are using cloud applications, and 73% said they are planning to move more applications to the cloud, according to a recent report by Accenture.”

How do you plan to participate in the shift to cloud computing, to help your organization meet its business goals with flexible, cost-effective, and scalable cloud-based systems?

If we could travel to the past, maybe we all would like a trip to fix a few things. However, on his Into the Universe series on the Discovery Channel, physicist Stephen Hawking argues that time travel to the past is impossible. Hawking was just about to address time travel to the future when I paused the recording from the past to watch the NBA final game that I had also recorded in the past. That game was an exciting and interesting journey through time.

Although Hawking argues that we can’t really travel to the past, the incredible amount of on-demand video content now available allows us to review past events more than ever before. For example, I used to know musicians like Wes Montgomery only from their recordings, but now I can watch them play and learn from them all I want. This video of Wes Montgomery is a nice example of that luxury. We can now easily record many events that will only make it easier for future time travelers to come back to our world.

If we also can’t travel to the future through a wormhole in space-time, we can at least learn about what may happen from organizations like the Pew Research Center, which just published its fourth Future of the Internet survey. 71 percent of the expert respondents agreed with the statement:

“By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”

The study also found that 81 percent agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices.” See slide 13 of this deck.

Just as we can learn from the past through videos and other content, businesses can learn from the past and predict the future from data. Business intelligence is one of the hottest trends in business and IT, because it helps companies understand their business and remain competitive by analyzing and visualizing past results and predicting future results based on data.

Analyst Howard Dresner takes us on a journey through time with this excellent survey and slide deck about enterprise business intelligence adoption, “The Wisdom of BI Crowds.” The slides show that SaaS BI is growing among business users because of its affordable price point and its ease of use, configuration, and deployment. Business users are increasingly implementing a departmental SaaS BI solution to augment the enterprise system already in place. Dresner’s survey is another way to journey through time and see historical use of enterprise BI and where it’s heading today and in the future.

In another post, Chuck Hollis, VP — Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation, writes about a coming revolution in business analytics where business users access self-service business analytics environments, select their preferred data sources and tools, and drive their own analytics, rather than requesting and waiting for reports from IT. Hollis also writes about new enabling technologies, such as flash drives, terabyte-class memory spaces for in-memory processing, and columnar databases.

The above surveys and posts indicate that business intelligence and cloud computing are heading toward a high point, like the summer solstice today in the northern hemisphere.

For a humorous look at time travel, check out these advertisements for current digital devices written as if they had been launched in 1977 by time travelers from today.

With so much information and insights at our fingertips, we can indeed travel through time. With time travel via content, data, information, and surveys, we have never been better equipped to succeed.

I was very interested to read that J. Craig Venter and his colleagues created the first synthetic cell a couple weeks ago. It is the seed of a new and second Tree of Life. Dr. Venter described the cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” According to articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Science, synthetic cells open many possibilities for creating biofuels and vaccines.  I think we are entering a new “golden age” of scientific research and products with this discovery. I think we are also entering a “golden age” of computing, as our devices and web-based services change our lives for the better.

Bob Evans, senior VP and director of InformationWeek’s Global CIO unit, thinks a golden age of IT has begun. In this excellent article, he lists six reasons:

• IT vendors are delivering new capabilities that streamline IT and provide new opportunities in analytics, real-time operations and decision-making, mobility, and cloud computing.
• The age of CIO as “high priest” is over.
• In the past few months, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP have launched specific programs aimed at helping CIOs build their way out of the old, brittle, inflexible, and expensive IT infrastructures they’ve cobbled together over the past 10-20 years.
• The rise of predictive analytics: never before in the history of the tech business has so much predictive power been brought to bear on business problems, operational dilemmas, customer behavior and preferences, supply-chain optimization, and more.
• The rise of real-time computing that will in turn fuel real-time production planning and real-time decisions on pricing, merchandising, routing, inventory optimization, and financial operations.
• Mobile is the new desktop.

For a deeper dive on the way analytics is transforming business and IT decision-making, read Rob Preston’s related article, “Down to Business: Analytics for Every Action.”

It is exciting to watch so many improvements occurring at this time in biotech and in IT. These products are helping CIOs and line-of-business managers improve their operations and their decision-making to usher in the golden age of IT:

What do you plan to do with cloud-based systems to create a golden age of IT and decision-making at your organization?

Today I’m working from home. Yes, I’m really working, and this post is evidence. I actually write most of my posts at home, where I can more easily think and concentrate with no distractions. Some people can listen to music in the office to tune out distractions, but I am a musician with two degrees in music, so I analyze the scales, harmonies, rhythm, instrumentation, structure, and influence, or just enjoy listening to some of my favorite music, to a point where listening to music is as distracting as any other activity.

According to an excellent report published this week, “Workshifting Benefits: The Bottom Line,” compiled by the Telework Research Network (TRN) and sponsored by Citrix Online, there are many benefits to working at home in addition to optimal productivity for certain tasks. The press release announcing the report states that “virtual work policies could save U.S. businesses over $400 billion per year in increased productivity, lower office costs, and reduced absenteeism and staff turnover.”

Here are the key findings of the report, from the press release:

TRN’s Savings Calculator is based on data that shows 40% of American workers could work from home at least some of the time and of those, 79% would choose to if given the opportunity. If those people worked from home just half of the time:

• A company of 100 people could gain approx. $576,000 per year and the U.S. economy as a whole would gain $235 billion in increased productivity.
• U.S. business would save an additional $124 billion in office costs, $46 billion in reduced absenteeism and $31 billion in reduced employee turnover.
• Each employee could save an average of $362 on gas per year, plus $3,840 on related expenses such as parking, food and clothing.
• Individuals could recoup approx. 2 weeks of free time per year otherwise spent commuting.
• Employee gas savings would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 53 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking over 9.6 million cars off the road – and it would save $23 billion a year in imported oil, which equates to approx. 288 million barrels of oil.
• U.S. taxpayers could save $2 billion in highway maintenance costs.
• As a nation, the U.S. would save $11 billion in traffic accident costs.

Here’s a great post on workshifting.com with graphs of the above statistics from the report.

Enterprise cloud-based systems play perfectly in the above advantages of workshifting. With cloud-based systems, you don’t need to install software on specific machines or be in the office to complete your work. You can do your work from anywhere, to optimize your productivity and to support changes or other requirements you may have.

Consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented quickly and that support our innate desire for flexibility and work-life balance:

How do you plan to use cloud-based systems to support your modern organization to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud?

She’s everywhere. Just like Madonna in the ‘80s, Lady Gaga is almost ubiquitous. She was on the Grammy Awards broadcast; on American Idol; she’s all over YouTube and in so many photos, magazine and television interviews; and, she’s on tour. Even I am writing about her in a cloud-computing blog.

Lady Gaga is among a new generation of pop artists who carry on a tradition of blending music, fashion, theatrical performances, and multimedia that blossomed with artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Queen, David Bowie, KISS, and Alice Cooper. You can see her on demand from anywhere, and she probably has a long career ahead.

She reminds me a lot of cloud computing: still new on the scene; gaining a lot of momentum and attention; a bit controversial; strong initial following and success; a bright future ahead; on demand from anywhere; and carrying on an earlier tradition. With cloud computing, that tradition is metered, pay-as-you-go computing where processing occurs on servers accessed by thin-client terminals.

Social media analysis of Lady Gaga - click to enlarge

Just to see if my comparison holds true, I performed a social-media analysis of Lady Gaga and cloud computing, using social media monitoring software as a service Attensity360. Not surprisingly, Lady Gaga trounces cloud computing in social media. Over the last 30 days, Lady Gaga was mentioned 232,958 times in social media. Her topic is gaining this month over last month, and Facebook leads the list of sources with 884 mentions. She is normally mentioned around 8,000 times per day, but, on April 30 and May 5, her mentions soared to 14,000.

Social media analysis of cloud computing - click to enlarge

In an earlier post, I did a social-media analysis of cloud computing, and found that the topic was declining in social media. Cloud computing only received 19,781 mentions in March, so cloud computing promoters like me have a lot of work to do to catch up to Lady Gaga! Actually, fewer mentions of a new and promising technology is a good thing; it means that cloud computing is now beginning to mature, just like Lady Gaga.

Gartner and cloud expert David Linthicum confirm that cloud computing is ending its initial peak of inquiry and thought leadership, and is now moving toward mainstream adoption. In this press release Gartner indicates that cloud computing has now reached its peak of inflated expectations and will enter mainstream adoption over the next two to five years. In this post, “The cloud computing hype is beginning to die,” David Linthicum noted a perceived decline in hype and information about cloud computing, which he thinks is “a good sign that cloud computing is about to enter the mature stage of actual usage.”

No company can afford to ignore social media and the insights that SaaS social media monitoring products like Attensity360 provide. With social media you have the largest focus group in history that you can monitor and engage. This video illustrates the staggering adoption of social media over the last several years.

There are stellar SaaS products that you can quickly implement to analyze, forecast, and improve your business performance and insights. Here are the stellar products from Appregatta, which kind of rhymes with Lady Gaga, and is introducing a new business model to computing:

Lady Gaga and cloud computing are on a similar trajectory, moving to wide adoption after their initial splash. I think Lady Gaga should cross another boundary and add a venture capital fund for cloud computing companies to her empire.

History of the Universe - click to expand

I’ve been watching two excellent series on the Discovery Channel: Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, and Life with Oprah Winfrey. They complement each other very well and do a great job explaining our current understanding of the universe and the various categories of life on Earth. I was reminded that the universe is 14 billion years old and probably has a life span of 28 billion years ahead. That will give us plenty of time to figure out what to do with all the data we’re creating. The universe is expanding and so is our love affair with creating and disseminating data.

History of the Universe

According to an EMC-sponsored IDC study published yesterday, “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” the digital universe is expanding at an almost unimaginable rate. That may be no surprise, but consider these statistics compiled from: the news release announcing the study; the EMC Digital Universe page; and the multimedia presentation of the study:

• The creation and replication of new digital information set a record in 2009 by growing to 800 billion gigabytes, 62 percent over 2008. Try to picture a stack of DVDs reaching 240,000 miles to the Moon and back.
• The amount of digital information created in 2010 is projected to be 1.2 zettabytes (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). That equals 707 trillion copies of the more than 2,000-page U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into Law in March 2010. Stacked end to end, the documents would stretch from Earth to Pluto and back 16 times or cover every inch of the United States in paper 3 feet deep. The distance between Earth and Pluto is between 2.6 billion and 4.6 billion miles, depending on where Earth and Pluto are in their respective orbits.
• The expansion of the digital universe is expected to gain further momentum over the next decade, increasing 44-fold to 35 trillion gigabytes (35 zettabytes) by the year 2020. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars. That’s between 17 million and 125 million miles, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits.

The view from Earth; click on image to enlarge it.

I think it’s clear that the expanding digital universe can only be managed in the cloud, with its elastic ability to rapidly scale to meet varying levels of demand. Here’s a good piece of information for cloud computing vendors from the study:

• Based on the use of cloud computing services by companies to reduce the portion of their IT budget devoted to legacy system maintenance, IDC estimates that the increase in IT dollars spent on innovation could drive more than $1 trillion in increased business revenues between now and the end of 2014. This projection will increase substantially as private cloud and other cloud computing models move into mainstream adoption.

If you are a vendor that could benefit from the $1 trillion that IDC estimates will expand into cloud computing by 2014, you may want to examine your pricing strategy. Price optimization ensures that you are pricing your products appropriately for each of your customer segments. Price optimization SaaS solution Mimiran was just profiled by Inc. magazine as one of four killer sales apps that could help you succeed in monetizing the expanding digital universe.

Consider these scalable cloud-based systems that are very capable of managing and interpreting the increasing amount of data that your organization will create and access during this decade of the rapidly expanding digital universe:

Universe collage - click to enlarge

How do you plan to manage your expanding digital universe with cloud-based systems?

Audiotool application - click to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

How do you plan to use cloud-based systems to compose solutions that will be a hit with your customers?

Recently a friend of mine accepted a teaching position at a nearby community college. As with any new job, much time is spent learning the ropes.  In this case, it is the campus, the classrooms, and the curriculum; and, of course, all her new colleagues.  She spent the first few days making the rounds introducing herself to the other members on staff and getting to know everyone.  As a very outgoing person and engaging personality, it was no surprise that people were drawn to her and opened up quite readily.  Among the first comments made to her were in regards to her classes and her experience.  But, inevitably many asked where her office was.  Upon learning that she would be sharing an office with a certain co-worker, she received feedback that the other instructor is rather disorganized.

However, my friend had already met her office partner and knew she is disorganized; she is simply a “stacker” and my friend happens to be one as well.  I’m not sure the term “stacker” is correct but there are people who simply pile paperwork based on some personal filing method.  It could be by order of importance or similarity but stacking papers seems to be a common practice.  The problem is, depending on the method employed, retrieving needed information can lead to moments of concern or perhaps panic as a person digs through one pile after another looking for that last elusive bit of data needed.  It always seems that the greater the urgency, the more likely the data is found closer to the bottom of a stack; and, there’s always the concern of whether or not the data is the most current.  While it should go without saying, I’m going to mention it anyway: there is no security to prevent loss or theft of the information.

Many organizations seem to operate on similar processes.  They trust part of their decision process to spreadsheets and databases that can easily lack current data, be corrupted, compromised, or otherwise damaged.   And, it becomes one person’s or group’s function to pull all this data together and make some reasonable sense of what they have.  Not only do they have to make sure they are working with the most current set of numbers; they need to combine and analyze data, exclude the not-so-relevant data, and then make some forward-looking decisions based on the information.  Wouldn’t it be easier to simply start with a better process?

Appregatta Technologies has solutions that can bring disparate data together, analyze it and report it either through pdfs or dashboards.  Using predictive analytics, forward looking-decisions are made with current, relevant data which assures our clients of a more accurate perspective.  Consider these cloud-based solutions from Appregatta that help ensure a single version of the truth, drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud: