Episode 9: It's a bird, It's a plane, no it's my office .... in the sky?

Last week I was at a presentation given by Paul McEvoy from Baker Security (better known as Go Oodles) where it was discussed how the Cloud for business can best be started with by moving the easier officeware into the Cloud. With Go Oodles being Google's premier partner here in Ireland, that for them means helping to get you into Google's GMail system, perhaps even Google Docs, & in the future, for start-up businesses, or even established ones. They will soo be offering Google's Chromebooks, whcih I understand can be leased on a monthly basis.

For a long time, I have been a proponent of businesses keeping I.T. costs low by using alot of Cloud based systems, or internally deploying desktops using older machines with some flavour of Ubuntu, even REALLY old machines usign Kubuntu where the employee in question would only ever be using web-based systems, or simple desktop work such as spreadsheets, or creating the usual familiar documents in the usual suspect formats. I've never been fond of the idea of businesses who are trying to keep costs low splashing out money on brand new desktop hardware, expensive operating systems, or officeware licenses.

I'm even less enthused about the idea of still relying heavily on local storage. So it's pretty clear where my love for the Cloud comes from. In saying that, when Microsoft first broached the idea about creating Office documents online or the user desktop being online, personally - I was unconvinced truth being told. Despite the fact I was involved in Cloud computing at the time, I thought it was another one of those Microsoft-jumping-on-the-bandwagon ideas, much like Zune, which was eaten alive by Apple's iPod in the market.

Even in 2006, Bill Gates knew the value of working online, making sure that he could even work on the move with his tablet PC. In Ireland, we've had a few really attrocious winter seasons due to poor infrastructure management & planning from our authorities, & alot of working days were lost. I myself living amongst the countryside fell victim, but working days were not lost. I was able to work remotely. Even my office phones I had easy access to thanks to some smart VOIP systems.

Even that aside, alot of people around the world don;t work in a central office, & rely on centrally hosted systems to work, or cloud-based systems to work so geographic location doesn't matter. Google themselves said during the ash-cloud travel restrictions in Europe in 2010, they were able to have employees stuck in countries just turn up in Google offices, & log into their own systems from terminals there.

Right now we're in the middle of a recession, & it is said that times like these are the best to start a business as costs are really low. So right now, the idea of a completely cloud-based office makes absolute sense. It's also why companies like Dublin Mail Drop are doing so well in the current climate offering virtual offices to people. Companies can even open up 'international' offices remotely using companies like them. Have a central post-box address, localised contact number, & have sales guys or service guys on the road with laptops/tablets/Chromebooks with 3G access to office systems.

This really does champion the best use of the cloud, & really show a great way forward for alot of start-up businesses, & an even better way fo existing businesses looking at their own overheads etc.. Do you REALLY need an office? Do you REALLY need internal systems? Would it be better to have your small company of people work from home, & if a meeting room is required, take advantage of virtual office services, who often offer meeting room use for hourly costs.

Suddenly when you step back, think about that, the costs to be saved & the absolute control, maintenance, the complete freedom & agility this idea gives to a start-up company who is trying to make it past the first year, so it can hopefully also pass year two & onto the hopefully profitable year three.

If you are a business who right now is wondering how to take advantage of the cloud & are wonering where you can even start, e-mail is your best place to start. After that, looking at things like your accounts packages, or payroll using things like Sage or Big Red Book. Even your CRM software, making use of things like SugarCRM or SalesForce will also move you away from expensive desktop licensing, the need for nightly back-ups of hard-disks for data from these, or versioning issues.

I know of one company who once a week still go around & manually back up a different version of the CRM from each person's dekstop machine & then go through a manual integration process, for a redistribution on a Monday morning. That's just insane when you think about it.

Another example in mind is a business who have a single server in their office for all their data, which has persistent problems & there are online alternatives for their requirements, but won't use them as they & I quote here "won't in any way, shape, or form let our data outside the front door." The server in question also has a single hard drive inside. A manual tape back-up is done every one or two weeks on it. If this company is unable to access that server for an hour, all hell breaks loose & they can & have lost customers due to systems outages.

Strip away alot of the hype, the B.S., the marketing & look at the logic to the Cloud. If businesses in start-up mode are in heavy risk during the first three years, why would you not leverage off systems designed to mitigate risks in multiple areas to give your baby a better chance of survival? If your business is currently at risk,  why would you not take all & any precautions to minimise against failure?

The difference right now between staying alive & dying as a business while the economy rights itself, & our politicians tinker with very fine balances is absolutely on a knife edge. Maximising the opportunity while reducing the risks where possible is absolutely crucial. Using things like Google's GMail, or GoogleDocs, or Office365, or Azure, SalesForce, SugarCRM online, SageOne Online, or Big Red Cloud may just save your business not only money, but heartache.

The Cloud allows you to focus on the core of your business, & if you have I.T. staff have them helping to grow & secure your business instead of being fire-stokers. You don't pay I.T. staff to keep the wheels greased, you pay them to help drive your business through better enablement, & management OF that enablement. They are not janitors, & even those who manage I.T. sections of non-I.T. businesses need to understand that & become more pro-active in showing their value to their companies so the full benefits can in turn be passed on to the end customer, who will value any 'wins' they can get amidst their own troubles.

Episode 8: A guy walks into a bar & orders a beer with his Cloud

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Go-Oodles at one of the Google offices in Dublin, where I was also introduced to the Chromebook, which is due to hit our shores in July through the guys at Go Oodles. The Chromebook is Google's chosen fighter to enter the ring against Apple's leviathan iPad, which has decimated the competition in the tablet market after initially being scorned by some upon its introduction, & sold like crazy, where you can't even get one in a PC World outlet unless you're there on a Tuesday morning when they get their fresh deliveries of them!

Some have asked why Google are even going down this road considering the spectacular problems facing their Android platform. The issues facing Android are in fact absolutely no fault of Google's, but the poor exposition of Android by handset makers, carriers & what those aforementioned pair have done with their own respective implementations of Android, & also that there's less choice in the way of Apps as a result, as application developers make more money per App from iOS apps than Android ones.

Even in my own experience with my own Android tablet, saw me unable to load a great deal many applications from the official Android Market, because the applications were meant for Android Phones, not tablets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've actually never used a full unmolested version of Android from Google. Yet I know when I pick up an iOS device; I can have any flavour I want, as long as it's Apple.

But, I'll digress at this point about that as this is not a blog about tablet computing, or Android VS iOS, but how tablet computing is in fact going to lead the march into the cloud, lemming style. While the enterprise is slowly moving into the Cloud, the consumer market is there, front & centre, & the push is persistent, kept simple & enabled by peple like Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon.

Each of these players is involved with some consumer hardware that pushes people with ease into the Cloud & the use of cloud services. I pick up an iPad now, I no longer need a computer to activate it, & I can get straight into the iTunes Cloud to consume as much or as little as I like, & then shove what I want back up into iCloud.

I open up a Chromebook, find a wifi connection, I can work in Google Docs, check my Gmail, & listen to my music up in Amazon's Sound Drive, even watch videos out of YouTube. I can lose my Chromebook, or it break, I can contact Google, or a designated Google partner, & I'm right back there, no data lost, no more 'ah crap, I forgot to back X or Y up!'

Budweiser recently introduced an iPhone app that will track then temperature near where I am & give me cut-price beer in a local bar, or a free drink should it reach a certain temperature. The Cloud is bringing me cheap, or free beer. WOW!  If you stood up at a Cloud Computing conference, or talk & made the statement of 'Cloud can even bring free beer to the masses' you would not only be laughed at, but questioned as to whether you yourself perhaps had too much beer.

Within every 'Cloud' company right now there is a drive to push adoption & sales like crazy. Executives are demanding numbers. Sales guys are hitting the market hard & aggressively. In some cases, the numbers are coming up short. Routes to market are being reviewed, messages being tweaked, even the offerings are getting changed, or re-imagined for re-marketing.

The successes in enterprise cloud right now are coming hard & fast in areas of software as a service, like e-mail, officeware or CRM's. These are the real fast quick wins for business consumer and service provider. Large complex migrations are never going to shorten down into exec-friendly boardroom pleasing sales cycles.

People are looking at companies like Google, SalesForce, Marketo, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Apple & wondering why their Cloud offerings are not beating the paths to revenue like these guys are. These guys defined cloud. They were not only born from it, but pretty much defined it respectively. They fulfill the basic needs immediately, don't require much action in terms of market persuasion for people to beat a path to their door, & allow easy, non-fussy consumption of their services.

When you think of them you don't think 'Cloud service'. You don't find yourself asking 'okay, how does their cloud work'. 'How do I benefit from them?' You don't even find yourself really having to do much thinking at all to be on their cloud. And yet each of these guys despite being very active in the enterprise market, is exponentially more active in the average joe's life.

Countless droves of your every-man or every-woman has a G-mail or Hotmail account. Hundreds of millions of us have Apple iPods, or iPhones, or iPads (indications are a huge number have one or more of these devices or even all three!). Alot of us have bought products via Amazon's store, & alot of use SalesForce at our work. And as for Google, a billion unique visits per month across their services says it all.

Amazon are even in the process of introducing their own low-cost tablet computer, which some  seem to think will deliberately be sold at or below cost so they can storm into the market & east into Apple's share, & grab those who are still unconvinced by Apple's pricing. This tablet is also believed to also tie neatly into Amazon's AppStore, Cloud Drive & own online store with ease. Further making the push into cloud via consumer devices.

Episode 7: Hello cloud, I'm a business - who are you?

Over sixty percent of Irish businesses cited the cost savings as an imperative for cloud adoption in Ireland according to a very recent survey commissioned for Cloud Arena by Seefin Data Management. Now while that may be pretty much par for the course & pretty much part of the standard message of Cloud Computing, others findings from this survey for most Irish cloud companies are of greater concern.

"The biggest challenge is that we need to learn more about Cloud & how it works"

"Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert"

"Limited knowledge of cloud systems"

These were some of the comments that came back as part of the survey, accompanied by the statistic that over 20% of respondents said that overall understanding of the Cloud within their companies was low & they felt there was a need to educate their staff about the effectiveness of the Cloud. Cloud right now is THE buzzword in I.T., & Irish companies appear to be grasping it quite well when it comes to calling their products 'Cloud', but many of them seem to be very poor at actually using it to present better levels of infrastructural & I.S. cost economics to their business.

The comments about education are in some-ways almost a catch-22. For alot of these companies, if you were to suggest to them that to better educate their staff on the benefits/effectiveness that some form of training needed to be invested in, red flags would appear & a look of panic would befall the CFO in the business. There is also the flip side that in some of these companies that they continue to used aged technology because 'it's what they know', & no matter how great a new piece of tech might be for the business, there may be that I.T. manager who will find a way to shoot it down because it means he/she has to re-train, re-learn new things.

There is a perception that people who work in I.T. always want to learn the newest technologies, always keen to be dynamic, motivated to get to 'play' with new things. This is not always the case. People who work at the cutting edge will always remain there. People who work with older technology, from my own experience have generally tended to stay there, age with the tech they oversee & go through the motions to pick up the paycheck.

Another issue with the cloud is the absolute muddy-ness of the term itself. For companies who are trying to understand how they can harness the cost savings Cloud purports, tell them there's IAAS, PAAS & SAAS & their heads auto-explode instantly. This also is in line with the comments from the Cloud Arena survey of "Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert".

The muddy-ness doesn;t end there. There's companies who are engaging in re branding services as 'Cloud' for a cash-in, who won't be challenged on it by their industry peers. The entire idea of Cloud following the spectacular collapse of the global economy has helped increase the buy & sell opportunities for cloud off the back of 'cloud saves you money' will not be placed in jeopardy by any kind of internal squabbles in the industry over whose products/services are/are not Cloud, or the industry self-examining. There are some minor indications of this where you'll often see some IAAS providers use statements like 'we are true cloud', but won't then follow-up by saying what is 'not cloud'.

How is any of this supposed to help get those who want to actually help their businesses engage in some obvious wins for their business in terms of costs, redundancy gains, & provider diversity to secure their business futures? It doesn't. All it does is prolong the sales cycles for cloud service providers, leave  the issues facing buyers completely unaddressed & ultimately see the industry around the Cloud self-sabotage the opportunities. If you want passengers on your ship, you need to give them clear reasons to come aboard & stay - the idea of 'saves you money' or 'a great deal' is not enough anymore. There has to be an absolutely crystal clear value proposition that is plain as day, as money & credit even more so, is hard to come by these days. Pennies are being watched like they are large denomination notes.

Clarity & transparency about the cloud in the way the bottom part of the cloud food chain needs it to be to give full end-to-end adaptation, & growth I fear will be procrastinated upon the same way migration to IPV6 has been done. I remember discussing about migration & implementation of IPV6 over 6 years ago with some acquaintances of mine who were senior network engineers, & in recent conversations with them, they said they still hadn't moved into IPV6 because there was an argument about cost & the benefits still going on despite the imminent day zero scenario approaching.

Right now, as much as Cloud is the meal ticket for the technology industry, & those who leverage off it heavily to in turn provide services/businesses using it, even the lack of interoperability between various cloud systems/services/products is something that the industry itself won't address because there is too much at stake. It is pretty much an unspoken state of 'hold-fire' that in the near future will come to a crunch-time the same way IPV4 has. All this does is continue to leave the Cloud as an aspiration that people who want it will never reach, much like the white fluffy counterparts in the sky.

Episode 6: The one where the cloud went to school

The I.T. industry in Ireland has a near-100% employment rate right now, yet there are so many jobs are out there being advertised that have few takers. A growing area in the jobs market is the search for cloud-savvy employees.

Recruitment agencies are scouring LinkedIn for people with 'cloud' experience. Anyone with 'cloud' in their details is getting contacted several times a week for opportunities from various recruiters up and down the country, and if you're lucky, one or two from further afield. My LinkedIn inbox for the last month has been brimming with contacts from various recruiters wanting to talk to me about cloud opportunities, because I am listed as someone who has worked in the sector.

One thing that struck me was that many of these recruiters didn'tt seem to even understand the concept of cloud themselves, or that there are sectors within the cloud such as IaaS, SaaS and PaaS. The perception placed in the media about cloud also doesn't make any real distinction. I recently had the pleasure of being invited to a chamber of commerce B2B meeting, and despite cloud being a relevant buzzword and hyped as the saviour of our woes, many came to me afterwards and admitted that they still didn't know what the cloud was. In many encounters with people interested in the cloud, the same sentiment was often expressed; 'what exactly is the cloud?'

Enter Cork Institute of Technology (CIT). It was announced on Tuesday that CIT had, under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, and SpringSource, developed a two year programme (which I am assuming is a national certificate course based on length and it being CIT) to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc.

Recruiters up and down the country, along with people seeking to see if they can join the cloud-train professionally, will have welcomed this announcement, just like the political bandwagon-jumpers who instantly latched themselves onto it.

Some people viewed this pairing of the IT industry and third level education as a first step towards Ireland building our much touted 'knowledge economy'. But like many things in Ireland within our education system, we're late adopters. A school in Mayo recently announced the option of children using iPads instead of books. This has been done since the iPad turned up in the U.S. in some school districts there.

To give an example closer to home-fields, heavy industry involvement in education has been done for several years successfully in Sweden, home to the ultimate award in educational fields; the Nobel prize. Academia is taken very seriously there, and for years its academic leanings have been treated like a business sector; being innovative, very closely tied to business to deliver the kinds of graduates businesses really need, and all courses are constructed and operated with rigorous quality control.

Sweden also heavily subsidises it's third level education programme to the point where even foreign students can go and study almost for free, so they offer the best courses at all levels to ensure they have the best people educated in the best way to better serve Swedish industry needs regardless of industry.
For too long in Ireland the IT courses have served the IT industry poorly.
Our education system must come to meet with the people investing in our country if they are to stay in our country. It cannot be left to these large multinationals to train people in skills they should already have while trying to grow their businesses – it's just not viable, especially given the speed IT moves at.

The flip side of this is Irish IT businesses are generally extremely poor at up-skilling, providing training and bringing people along in their education through their professional career. Yes, some request you keep your Cisco certification up-to-date, or your MSCE in-date, but in general they're not pro-active about training staff or doing in-house uptraining. Large U.S. Multinationals in general are almost obsessive about this, and understand the value of training their people, keeping their education in their field refreshed, and actively investing in their staff's educational needs.

Once upon a time, biotechnology was hailed as the next big thing and the hype failed to deliver in Ireland from a few years ago when it was billed as 'the next big thing to generate thousands of jobs' that ultimately never materialised. Is this course welcome? Yes it is. Is it overdue? Very much so. The real test will be what it delivers, what the uptake is, and whether it actually delivers value to businesses outside its progenitors.