Episode 18: Did 2011 have a silver lining for the cloud in ireland?

2011 for the cloud in Ireland was a turning point. At the start of the year, there were but maybe two handfuls of cloud computing service providers in Ireland, & twelve months on, the choice has ballooned, with numerous IAAS & SAAS providers in the market place, pushing forward the commoditisation of the cloud away from preserve specialty services they have been in recent years.

One of the biggest complaints & criticisms levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive & accessible. They want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged & marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.

To an extent, 12 months on this is still the case, but as the Cloud pervades further in the consumer space, the innovations from this will drive into the enterprise solutions to address this. This is atypical of how the technology life cycle works. First, things become the preserve of a few innovators at the vanguard with early adopters. Then, the tech is adopted, moulded & shaped to find it's way into the biggest market where real cost-return scales can be achieved, to then eventually become more refined, powerful & resilient at the enterprise level.

Earlier this year, Microsoft & the IDA announced Ireland could become a global centre of excellence for the cloud. And this showed, with Irish Cloud companies taking in investment from VC funds, foreign cloud companies setting up shop here, like EngineYard, Marketo, & Tethras, to name but a few (although this had more to do with a low unchanged  Corporate Tax rate than Ireland's output from the cloud to date), the big players like EMC, IBM, HP & Dell furthered their investment in their cloud services from Ireland.

Cork Institute of Technology announced in May that it had under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, & SpringSource, developed a two year programme 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. This was heralded as proof of Ireland's ability to reshape & own its identity as a knowledge economy.

2011 was also the year where people realised the true impact of what happens when cloud can & does go wrong. None more so than the outages at Amazon, & the countless security breaches throughout the year. These incidents made news headlines, & had people jittery, reacting over the top, & discussions about how fragile the cloud was were made like they were children's fairytales. This could not have been farther from the truth, but the fallout in the media was plain to see, & not limited to specialist media.

Security, reliability, resiliency & data protection were all constant reoccurring themes. While Ireland was being positioned by its new Government  as a Cloud Computing/Digital Gaming/Life Sciences & Clean Tech place to do business.

Ireland itself was not engaging in areas such as helping to tighten up on areas of digital security, following up on EC court rulings about ISP content blocking, or its own Government moving towards cloud adoption the same way some of its European & global counterparts were.

All of this happened against a backdrop of increasing economic depression at home & globally. Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, and that leadership by year end despite sound bites, media ramblings, event appearances has still failed to reach out to  those in the Irish Cloud market, even despite the announced €5m centre of cloud excellence announced by that same Government.

2012 will require the indigenous cloud computing sector in Ireland to shout to have its voice heard above the noise of foreign multinationals whose first interest is in tax savings they can make here rather than fostering Irish industry to serve itself at home & abroad.

Episode 14: Happyslapped by a Cloud Marketeer

Cloud brokers & consultants like to talk alot about 'demistifying the cloud'. There's alot of whitepapers, case studies & cloud blogs on 'what is the cloud'. Marketing people almost soil themselves in delight at the prospects of how much money they can make from some of the cloud sales campaigns they design, complete with resplendent back slapping over well-earned cocktails on a Friday evening after work.

The I.T. industry is getting drunk & high of its own spin & the slap-happy tags of 'As A Service' onto things. But recently, I do believe this merriment has gotten to the stage of 'wasted'. That point of drunkeness where even the smallest task is nigh on impossible. I'm talking about the recent love affair with 'Bring Your Own Data' being slapped on as a marketing tag. Which usually comes now with a side order of 'all you can eat data'. Now sure, 'all you can eat data' is nothing new. Anyone who's worked in telecoms has had this phrase bandied about in meetings, internal memos etc..

But, this was never a phrase much seen in marketing. It would usually appear under 'unlimited data' with an asterisk pointing to small print telling you fair usage limits applied. The actual phrase 'all you can eat data' in the cloud is being used, & being used as its considered 'disruptive' & to make it stand out from the traditional straight-edged I.T./telecoms marketing speak of 'unlimited data'.

Okay, so disruptive marketing in the current I.T. services market is nothing new. But slapping 'Bring Your Own Data' on as a marketing piece frankly just shows both how desperately stupid marketing people are about the cloud, & also how incredibly badly those in the Cloud space have been about educating their customers, & also why the cloud space is so small right now. And this really shows in our nearest trading partner, the UK.

A new survey reveals that the current cloud computing services market for UK SMBs is worth £660m. According to the region-by-region reports done by the British Government that were published in October 2010, the total number of small to medium businesses in the UK is somewhere close to the order of 4.7 million. If you were to just take a pure average on that, the survey shows SME/SMB spend on cloud in the UK is currently valued at approx. £150 per year per small company. That's barely even the cost of a few Google premium mail accounts.

Stupidity such as 'Bring Your Own Data' is not marketing people being smart, or driving business into Cloud companies. In fact, the entire prospect of what the cloud offers, whether it is PAAS/SAAS/IAAS was always based on 'Bring Your Own Data'. It is in fact a fundamental of it. Calling it BYOD is stating the bloody obvious, & fooling no-one.

For example, in an IAAS scenario, you're asking people to bring their own data to your cloud facilities, otherwise they'd be bringing their own hardware & data & it would be classed as colocation. In the scenario of SAAS services, of course they're bringing their own data - whether they are a start-up, OR an established company. The same even goes for PAAS; you're bringing your own data to plug into a platform to generate systems in the cloud.

The marketeers in the Cloud have become too drunk off their own illusions of success that they can slap 'As A Service' on things, found a new cow to milk that upon inspection, even at possibly the biggest cross section of the potential market for Cloud, even just within the UK as an example they've made a cloud market worth roughly the same as the shared hosting market four years ago (i.e. pre recession/global market meltdown).

Success? I think not. Cloud marketeers need to get their heads out of the clouds, back onto a footing of reality, & actually engage with the prospective customers. The excuse of 'people won't pay' doesn't wash. They will. People look for cheap services because there's nothing to make them see beyond the value of the cheap services. And it's really a message that is crucial right now as the world still recovers; LOOK AFTER YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Slick marketing & corny chat-up lines like 'Bring Your Own Data' are like the prawn cocktail; dated, & no-one's really buying them. Return to basics, & bring your customers along with you, & give them the value they will pay for, & get rid of silly marketeers who are damaging the growth potential of the Cloud. You'll save yourself money too in the process that you can spend properly on your customers.

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.