A Cloud Computing Epiphany

May 22, 2010 Leave a comment

One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a “black” art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation “Y-ers,” Millennials, and Gen “Z-ers.” The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.

But, when the “users” suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become “virtual” data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.

The Changing Role of IT Managers

IT managers normally make marginal business planners. While none of us like to admit it, we usually start an IT refresh project with thoughts like, “what kind of computers should we request budget to buy?” Or “that new “FuzzPort 2000″ is a fantastic switch, we need to buy some of those…” And then spend the next fiscal year making excuses why the IT division cannot meet the needs and requests of users.

The time is changing. The IT manager can no longer think about control, but rather must think about capacity and standards. Setting parameters and process, not limitations.

Think about topics such as cloud computing, and how they can build an infrastructure which meets the creativity, processing, management, scaling, and disaster recovery needs of the organization. Think of gaining greater business efficiencies and agility through data center consolidation, education, and breaking down ICT barriers.

The IT manager of the future is not only a person concerned about the basic ICT food groups of concrete, power, air conditioning, and communications, but also concerns himself with capacity planning and thought leadership.

The Changing Role of Users

There is an old story of the astronomer and the programmer. Both are pursuing graduate degrees at a prestigious university, but from different tracks. By the end of their studies (this is a very old story), the computer science major focusing on software development found his FORTRAN skills were actually below the FORTRAN skills of the astronomer.

“How can this be” cried the programmer? “I have been studying software development for years, and you studying the stars?”

The astronomer replied “you have been studying FORTRAN as a major for the past three years. I have needed to learn FORTRAN and apply it in real application to my major, studying the solar system, and needed to learn code better than you just to do my job.”

There will be a point when the Millenials, with their deep-rooted appreciation for all things network and computer, will be able to take our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and use this as their tool for developing great applications driving their business into a globally wired economy and community. Loading a LINUX image and suite of standard applications will give the average person no more intellectual stress than a “Boomer” sending a fax.

Revisiting the “4th” Utility

Yes, it is possible IT managers may be the road construction and maintenance crews of the Internet age, but that is not a bad thing. We have given the Gen Y-ers the tools they need to be great, and we should be proud of our accomplishments. Now is the time to build better tools to make them even more capable. Tools like the 4th utility which marries broadband communications with on-demand compute and storage utility.

The cloud computing epiphany awakens both IT managers and users. It stimulates an intellectual and organizational freedom that lets creative people and productive people explore more possibilities, with more resources, with little risk of failure (keep in mind with cloud computing your are potentially just renting your space).

If we look at other utilities as a tool, such as a road, water, or electricity – there are far more possibilities to use those utilities than the original intent. As a road may be considered a place to drive a car from point “A” to point “B,” it can also be used for motorcycles, trucks, bicycles, walking, a temporary hard stand, a temporary runway for airplanes, a stick ball field, a street hockey rink – at the end of the day it is a slab of concrete or asphalt that serves an open-ended scope of use – with only structural limitations.

Cloud computing and the 4th utility are the same. Once we have reached that cloud computing epiphany, our next generations of tremendously smart people will find those creative uses for the utility, and we will continue to develop and grow closer as a global community.

Filed under Cloud Computing, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Issues, Social Networking, Virtualization

Communities in the Cloud

May 8, 2010 Leave a comment

In the 1990s community of interest networks (COINs) emerged to take advantage of rapidly developing Internet protocol technologies. A small startup named BizNet on London’s Chiswell Street developed an idea to build a secure, closed network to support only companies operating within the securities and financial industries.

BizNet had some reasonable traction in London, with more than 100 individual companies connecting within the secure COIN. Somewhat revolutionary at the time, and it did serve the needs of their target market. Management was also simple, using software from a small company called IPSwitch and their soon to be globally popular “What’s Up” network management and monitoring utility.

However simplicity was the strength of BizNet. While other companies favored strong marketing campaigns and a lot of flash to attract companies to the Internet age, BizNet’s thought leaders (Jez Lloyd and Nick Holland) relied on a strong commitment to service delivery and excellence, and their success became viral within the financial community based on the confidence they built among COIN members.

As networks go, so did BizNet, which was purchased by Level 3 Communications in 1999 and subsequently the COIN network was dismantled in favor of integrating the individual customers into the Level 3 community.

Cloud Communities

Cloud computing supports the idea of a COIN, as companies can not only build their “virtual data center” within a Platform as a Service/PaaS model, but also develop secure virtual interconnections among companies within a business community – not only within the same cloud service provider (CSP), but also among cloud service providers.

In the “BizNet” version of a COIN, dedicated connections (circuits) were needed to connect routers and switches to a central exchange point run by BizNet. BizNet monitored all connections, reinforcing internal operations centers run by individual companies, and added an additional layer of confidence that helped a “viral” growth of their community.

Gerard Briscoe and Alexandros Marinos delivered a paper in 2009 entitled “Digital Ecosystems in the Clouds: Towards Community Cloud Computing.” In addition to discussing the idea of using cloud computing to support an outsourced model of the COIN, the paper also drills deeper into additional areas such as the environmental sustainability of a cloud community.

As each member of the cloud community COIN begins to outsource their virtual data center into the cloud, they are able to begin shutting down inefficient servers while migrating processing requirements into a managed virtual architecture. Even the requirement for managing high performance switching equipment supporting fiber channel and SAN systems is eliminated, with the overall result allowing a significant percentage of costs associated with equipment purchase, software licenses, and support agreements to be rechanneled to customer or business-facing activities.

Perhaps the most compelling potential feature of community clouds is the idea that we can bring processing between business or trading partners within the COIN to near zero, as the interaction between members is on the same system, and will not lose any velocity due to delays induced by going through switching, routing, or short/long distance transmission through the Internet or dedicated circuits.

Standards and a Community Applications Library

Most trading communities and supply chains have a common standard for data representation, process, and interconnection between systems. This may be a system such as RosettaNet for the manufacturing industry, or other similar industry specifications. Within the COIN there should also be a central function that provides the APIs, specifications, and other configurations such as security and web services/interconnection interface specs.

As a function of developing a virtual data center within the PaaS model, standard components supporting the COIN such as firewalls, APIs, and other common applications should be easily accessible for any member, ensuring from the point of implementation that joining the community is a painless experience, and a very rapid method of becoming a full member of the community.

A Marriage of Community GRIDs and Cloud Computing?

Many people are very familiar with project such as Seti At Home, and the World Community GRID. Your desktop computer, servers, or even storage equipment can contribute idle compute and storage capacity to batch jobs supporting everything from searching for extraterrestrial life to AIDS research. You simply register your computer with the target project, download a bit of client software, and the client communicates with a project site to coordinate batch processing of work units/packets.

Now we know our COIN is trying to relieve members from the burden of operating their own data centers – at least those portions of the data center focusing on support of a supply chain or trading community of interest. And some companies are more suited to outsourcing their data center requirements than others. So if we have a mix of companies still operating large data centers with potential sources of unused capacity, and other members in the community cloud with little or no onsite data center capacity, maybe there is a way the community can support itself further by developing the concept of processing capacity as a currency.

As all individual data centers and office LAN/MAN/WANs will have physical connections to the cloud service provider (IaaS provider) through an Internet service provider or dedicated metro Ethernet connection, the virtual data centers being produced within the PaaS portion of the CSP’s will be inherently connectable to any user, or any facility within the COIN. Of course that is accepting that security management will protect non-COIN connected portions of the community.

Virtually, those members of the community with excess capacity within their own networks could then easily further contribute their spare capacity to the community for use as non-time critical compute resource, or for supporting “batch” processing. Some CSPs may even consider buying that capacity to provide members either in the COIN, or outside of the COIN, and additional resource available to their virtual customers as low cost, low performance, batch capacity much like SETI at Home or the Protein Folding Project uses spare capacity on an as-available basis. Much like selling your locally produced energy back into a power GRID.

We Have a New, Blank Cloud White Board to Play With

The BizNet COIN was good. Eleven years after BizNet was dissolved, the concept remains valid, and we now have additional infrastructure that will support COINs through community clouds, with enabling features that extend far beyond the initial vision of BizNet. CSPs such as ScaleUp have built IaaS and PaaS empowerment for COINs within their data center.

Cloud computing is an infant. Well, maybe in Internet years it is rapidly heading to adolescence, but it is still pretty young. Like an adolescent, we know it is powerful, getting more powerful by the day, but few people have the vision to wrap their head around what broadband, cloud computing, diffusion of network-enabled knowledge into the basic education system, and the continuation of Moore’s, Metcalf’s, and other laws of industry and physics.

COINs and community clouds may not have been in the initial discussions of cloud computing, but they are here now. Watching a Slingbox feed in a Jakarta hotel room connected to a television in Burbank was probably not a vision shared by the early adopters of the Internet – and cloud computing will make similar un-thought of leaps in utility and capabilities over the next few years.

However, in the near term, do not be surprised if you see the entire membership of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ operating from a shared cloud COIN. It will work.

Filed under Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , ,

Expanding the 4th Utility to Include Cloud Computing

April 17, 2010 1 Comment

A lot has been said the past couple months about broadband as the fourth utility. The same status as roads, water, and electricity. As an American, the next generation will have broadband network access as an entitlement. But is it enough?

Carr, in “the Big Switch” discusses cloud computing being analogous to the power grid. The only difference is for cloud computing to be really useful, it has to be connected. Connected to networks, homes, businesses, SaaS, and people. So the next logical extension for a fourth utility, beyond simply referring to broadband network access as a basic right for Americans (and others around the world – it just happens as an American for purposes of this article I’ll refer to my own country’s situation), should include additional resources beyond simply delivering bits.

The “New” 4th Utility

So the next logical step is to marry cloud computing resources, including processing capacity, storage, and software as a service, to the broadband infrastructure. SaaS doesn’t mean you are owned by Google, it simply means you have access to those applications and resources needed to fulfill your personal or community objectives, such as having access to centralized e-Learning resources to the classroom, or home, or your favorite coffee shop. The network should simply be there, as should the applications needed to run your life in a wired world.

The data center and network industry will need to develop a joint vision that allows this environment to develop. Data centers house compute utility, networks deliver the bits to and from the compute utility and users. The data center should also be the interconnection point between networks, which at some point in the future, if following the idea of contributing to the 4th utility, will finally focus their construction and investments in delivering big pipes to users and applications.

Relieving the User from the Burden of Big Processing Power

As we continue to look at new home and laptop computers with quad-core processors, more than 8 gigs of memory, and terabyte hard drives, it is hard to believe we actually need that much compute power resting on our knees to accomplish the day-to-day activities we perform online. Do we need a quad core computer to check Gmail or our presentation on Microsoft Live Office?

In reality, very few users have applications that require the amounts of processing and storage we find in our personal computers. Yes, there are some applications such as gaming and very high end rendering which burn processing calories, but for most of the world all we really need is a keyboard and screen. This is what the 4th utility may bring us in the future. All we’ll really need is an interface device connecting to the network, and the processing “magic” will take place in a cloud computing center with processing done on a SaaS application.

The interface device is a desktop terminal, intelligent phone (such as an Android, iPhone, or other wired PDA device), laptop, or anything else that can display and input data.

We won’t really care where the actual storage or processing of our application occurs, as long as the application’s latency is near zero.

The “Network is the Computer” Edges Closer to Reality

Since John Gage coined those famous words while working at Sun Microsystems, we’ve been edging closer to that reality. Through the early days of GRID computing, software as a service, and virtualization – added to the rapid development of the Internet over the past 20 years, technology has finally moved compute resource into the network.

If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that for 95% of computer users, a server-based application meets nearly all our daily office automation, social media, and entertainment needs. Twitter is not a computer-based application, it is a network-enabled server-based application. Ditto for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIN, and most other services.

Now the “Network is the Computer” has finally matured into a utility, and at least in the United States, will soon be an entitlement for every resident. It is also another step in the globalization of our communities, as within time no person, country, or point on the earth will be beyond our terminal or input device.

That is good

Filed under Cloud Computing, Government Regulatory, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Issues, Social Networking, Virtualization Tagged with , , , ,

Digital Africa 2010 and Cloud Computing in Developing Countries

March 9, 2010 1 Comment

At the Digital Africa Summit 2010 in Kampala, Uganda, discussion is rightly focused on both telecommunications policy and economic development. Cloud computing is a topic heard among sidebar Near Kampala Uganda and Digital Africa 2010discussions, although it has yet to hit the mainstream of conference programming.

We will bring a series of reports from Digital Africa – it is a very exciting group of people who truly have the best interests of Africa as their key objective. Kicked off by Dr. Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya, Vice President of Uganda, the conference also included ministers of communications from Uganda, Niger, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso. Other nations are well represented with representatives from the private sector, government, and education.

With that many politicians, you would think protocol would prevent any level of innovation or open discussion. Not the case, it was a very cooperative environment.

Why is cloud important in developing countries?

It is a reasonable question, and a reasonable answer. The basic requirements in developing countries (beyond clean water and food) are infrastructure, education, jobs, and eGovernment (including banking). Nothing works without the infrastructure in place. In countries without stable electricity and limited telecom infrastructure, this has to be a high priority.

When building out the basic infrastructure in countries with a tremendous amount of sunlight, wind or solar energy makes a lot of sense. A lot more sustainable than running diesel generators, and as an unfortunate byproduct of global warming, more sunny days each year are available to provide power.

In rural areas we are talking about enough power to provide electricity for schools, internet kiosks or cafes, and wireless access points in city centers. 15kW would do it, and that is not unreasonable. It is not unreasonable if we are looking at low-powered NetBooks and terminals that do not have a large burden of local resources for processing power, memory, storage, and high performance video applications.

According to several presentations at Digital Africa, there is strong evidence that with each 10% of any population in Africa having access to mobile or Internet technologies, there is a corresponding 1.8% increase in that nation’s GDP. Evidence that simply bringing Internet and education to the rural and unwired population will increase the national wealth, and quality of life, by a an annual increase of 1.8%

Bring the cable to the school, wire up a NetBook-based LAN, connect via wireless to a local access point, and you have an entry-level connected school. An entry-level school that can access Stanford classes online, from rural areas of Niger. Once that is available, and children are able to diffuse wired intellectual exposure into their intellectual tacit knowledge library, and we are creating a much more level playing field.

OK, let’s drop the physical fiber runs and electricity planning for just a moment. We’ll save that for a future article.

Cloud Computing Driving the Community

If we can build a data center in a couple of national locations with stable power, and with international or local funding build out a basic data center infrastructure, then with a bit of creativity and planning we will expect Infrastructure virtualization (IaaS) as a basic component of the data center.

Utility processing, storage, and memory available for the community. With a bit of further planning, adding one or more good PaaS models on the infrastructure, and we have a resource that can be used to host academic applications, business applications, and government applications. Remember this is the early days of development – in most cases there is no infrastructure to start with, so we can design this as a best practice from Day 1.

Take the burden of infrastructure away from the schools, startup companies, and existing SMEs and offer a virtual data center utility to server both their office automation and IT needs, as well as granting access to the global marketplace.

A Novel Idea – the Mobile Data Center

Bringing education to the students in UgandaUConnect is a project run by several independent souls who want to bring education to the small rural school children in Uganda. A panel truck, lined with computers, and a server hosting a wide variety of eLearning applications, UConnect drives to schools and lets the children work on computers for a couple hours each week. A project bringing education to areas where just a year ago there would be no opportunity for children to be exposed to either computer technologies, or formal education materials.

Hero bringing education to children in rural UgandaThis is creativity, and a refusal to let the children grow up in a world where they are completely out of touch with their global community counterparts. A technology baby step for us, a giant leap for Ugandan children. But not good enough. We need to inspire children to succeed, and to do that children need exposure to the same intellectual tools as a child in Calabasas, California.

Cloud computing can, should, and will be part of that plan. It makes sense.

Filed under citizen journalism, Cloud Computing, environment, Government Regulatory, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Networking, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Developing Disaster Recovery Models with Cloud Computing

February 27, 2010 Leave a comment

How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.

Disaster Recovery Point and Time ObjectivesDisaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites – it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company’s data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

“In a traditional disaster recovery model the organization must have an exact duplicate of their hardware, applications, and data in the disaster recovery location” explains Christoph. “With cloud computing models it is possible to replicate applications virtually, spinning up capacity as needed to meet the processing requirements of the organization in the event a primary processing location becomes unavailable.”

ScaleUp did in fact demonstrate their ability to replicate databases between data centers in an October 2009 test with Cari.net, where ScaleUp was able to bring up a VPN appliance and replicate data and applications between Germany and Cari.net’s data center in San Diego, California.

While there may be issues with personal data being in compliance with European Data Protection Laws, nearly every company and organization around the world participates in a global market place. This means applications and data serving the global market cannot be considered local, and the next logical step is to extend access and presentation of the company’s network presence as close to the network edge (customers) as possible.

Some companies may have physical network capacity in multiple geographies, others may look to companies such as ScaleUp to develop relationships with other cloud service providers to allow “federated” relationships.

Until a true industry standard is determined to define data structures and protocols to use between cloud infrastructure and platform providers, it is probably easiest for relationships to develop between companies using the same cloud platform as a service (PaaS) application. Such is the case with ScaleUp and Cari.net, who used a common platform provided by 3Tera’s AppLogic.

The cloud service provider industry will provide a tremendous service to small and medium businesses which normally cannot afford near zero recovery time and recovery point objectives. Whether it is real-time replication of entire data bases, subsets of data bases, or simply parsing correlated data from edge locations at regular intervals, disaster recovery modeling is changing.

A backup location can be made in some cases by logging into a cloud service provider and opening an account with a credit card – or through a very fast negotiation with the service provider. Certainly not without cost, but potentially at a much lower cost of operation than in models requiring physical data center space, hardware, and operations staff at each location.

The important lesson for small companies is that both disaster recovery and a company’s ability to recover from either a physical disaster such as a fire in their data center, or data corruption, may limit or prevent a company’s ability to continue operations. Adding cloud services to the disaster recovery model may provide a very powerful, simplified, and cost-effective model to protect your business.

Filed under Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

3tera and AppLogic SWAG Moves to the Cloud Computing Retro Collection

February 24, 2010 Leave a comment

CA and 3tera have announced CA’s acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera’s Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering – just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

Bert, Peter, Sean, and the rest of 3tera’s public face spent a tremendous amount of time supporting the community through participation in training events, community organizations such as the Convergence Technology Council of California, the Any2 Exchange Community – all with not only good community spirit, but also providing strong thought leadership to motivate the community into learning more about cloud computing and the future of information technology.

We will deeply miss 3tera, and hope the team will eventually regroup with a new set of ideas, and lead us into another generation of technology that will further enhance the industry’s ability to deliver a true, global, massively distributed cloud computing reality.

Computer Associates will bring value to the cloud community as well. With the power of CA’s organization behind recent acquisitions such as 3tera, Oblicore, NetQoS, Orchestria, Platinum Technology, Netreon, and others related to process, database and large data set management, the stage is set for increased competition in the cloud service industry. CA has the ability to provide a broad understanding of all aspects of enterprise and Internet-facing tools equal or better than IBM, Microsoft, or any other full-service integrator.

We will look forward to seeing the product of 3tera integration into the CA family, and hope the innovation and enthusiasm 3tera’s team brought to the cloud community is not swallowed up into a large company bureaucracy.

Filed under Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurs, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, startup business, Virtualization Tagged with , , ,

Southern California Tech Jobs Make a Comeback

January 27, 2010 1 Comment

2009 was a horrible year for job seekers, and even those holding on to existing jobs. No bonuses, no promotions, layoffs, and nobody hiring. And SoCal successfully beat most of the United States in unemployment claims, by several percentage points, attaching painful and empirical fact to the grim situation.

But that does appear to be changing. Slowly changing, but it is looking better for job seekers in the region. A recent scrape of job openings for Los Angeles and Orange Counties yielded some pretty strong job titles:

  • Director of Engineering – Marina Del Rey
  • Chief Integration Engineer – El Segundo
  • Director, information technology – San Clemente
  • VP Global Services – Los Angeles
  • Customer Services Director – El Segundo
  • Lead Systems Engineer – Los Angeles
  • Senior Industrial Director – Irvine
  • Smart GRID Architect – Rosemead
  • HL7 Integrator – Los Angeles
  • Disaster Recovery Manager – Irvine
  • Manager, Operations Systems – Van Nuys, CA
  • Systems Architecture Engineer – Huntington Beach, CA

And the list goes on… About 350 good positions listed in my 25 January search.

Tech Jobs are Out There in SoCalOne additional exciting trend in the job stack is the high number of positions in manufacturing industries. While the services market is great, manufacturing spawns input into the supply chain, which adds a lot of downstream value to those companies increasing or expanding their business operations.

Dust Off that Resume

The time is near, and technology-savvy job seekers will reap rewards if they are prepared for the next boom in business expansion. Cloud computing, unified messaging, IT operations, data center consolidation, process automation, green technologies – corporate jargon to some, but areas with increasing demand for qualified candidates.

Cloud computing and data center consolidation are quite interesting, admittedly because they are new and exciting trends in the IT community.

The Dot.Com era taught us painful lessons on the value of investment money. The venture community sat back after 2002 and made a decision to actually perform a bit of due-diligence prior to throwing money at PowerPoint companies and paper ideas. At least those which were not using private equity with large investments in real estate.

The Dot.OMG era is now just about at an end, and some of the lessons learned are focused on the execution of business plans and intelligent use of capital and operational expenses – while building business.

IT has gone from being a “darling” of the internet age, to a very powerful means of adding tremendous business value through globalization of markets, and real-time transaction processing to support the global economy and marketplace. The only problem was to support that IT engine, technical managers tried to solve their processing challenges by throwing more disk, processors, and bandwidth at their requirements.

The next age will be one where companies refocus their energy on developing their business, and begin to expect processing and IT to be more of a utility than an exceptional part of their business. Welcome to data center outsourcing, virtualization, cloud computing, and Software as a Service/SaaS. Recover the costs of expensive and inefficient data centers.

So those engineers and sales staff still hanging out in the Communicator’s Bar, get ready to get sized for your next retro-logo polo shirt. The time is now for those who can put their fantasy of re-entering the telecom community to deal in bilateral telephone minutes aside and get ready to support thought leadership strategies to bring customers into commercial data center outsourcing models – or go sell them on consolidating their in-house operations into enterprise clouds.

Look at the tech job listings again. Companies are begging for IT and tech visionary managers to solve their growth and development pain. Begging.

2010 is going to be a great year in SoCal, so let’s get out there and make sure it does not pass us by, and does not require our companies to go elsewhere to attract talent. We’ve got the talent right here, and we need to put it back to work.

Filed under Cloud Computing, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, LA Life, Social Issues, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , ,

Maintain or Refresh – the IT Dilemma Meets Cloud Computing

January 18, 2010 Leave a comment

Emerging technologies have always forced business decision-makers to decide if they will embrace a new technology as a first-mover, or if they will maintain their existing technologies. Technology refresh and the law of plentitiudeEach brings a risk – does the cost of maintaining existing technology result in higher maintenance and operational expenses, or does the cost of embracing and acquiring new technology put an unwarranted capital and process change burden on the organization?

Many years ago (~15) the Northern Telecom (Nortel) DMS 100/250/300/500 line of digital telephone switches represented one of the finest technologies for digital communications. The cost was high, but the technology promised telecom carriers everything they would need to operate their networks well into the next generation, which was not yet associated with a real time horizon. At least in marketing PowerPoint slides. Buy a DMS 500, and you will be running that for a couple decades.

Then seemingly overnight the Internet matured, with communications applications such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Skype, Vonage, and other Internet-enabled utilities. Suddenly the DMS, 5ESS, 4ESS, NEAC, DSC – all became obsolete almost overnight, replaced by simple Internet-friendly communication applications or Internet Protocol-based “soft switches” which managed telephony over the Internet protocol with a form factor about the size of a mini-refrigerator, And 100 times the switching capacity.

And, as with all soon-to-be-obsolete technologies, the cost of maintaining the legacy system, finding spare parts for the legacy system, and even finding operators for the legacy system may be rapidly hitting a point of extreme risk. The old telephone switches are now most often found in landfills, gone forever.

Traditional telecommunication transmission protocols such as SDH and SONET began falling to Ethernet, and within a period of about 5 years from 2003~2008 the “legacy” telephone technologies began to quickly fade to historical Wikipedia entries.

The Cloud Computing Analogy

We are entering a period of “plentitude” in cloud computing. The “Law of Plentitude” is loosely defined as a threshold of acceptance (of a process, technology, system, etc) that if not adopted will put an entity at a greater risk of non-participation than if they participate at the point of emergence. In technology we normally place the “Law of Plentitude” at around 15~20% diffusion into a selected environment, community, industry, or organization.

For example, when the fax was first introduced there was a single machine. By itself it is not useful, as you have nobody to fax images to on a distant end. With two fax machines it is more useful, with a community of two. The law of exponents begins at 4 users (N*N-1/2) and you end up with an addressable community of 6 potential relationships. And it continues growing.

At “plentitude,” you are at risk of not acquiring a fax machine, because your community has now adopted fax machines at a level that you need to be able to communicate with fax, or find yourself in jeopardy of losing your place in the community.

It can now be argued that cloud computing is quickly starting to reach a level of “plentitude.” Communities of interest are emerging within clouds, allowing near zero-latency in user-to-user transaction time. Think of a financial trading community. Zero-latency means zero transaction delays. At some point if you are not in the zero-latency community, your operation is at risk of either losing business, or being expelled by other members of the community who do not want to deal with your latency.

Think of companies outsourcing their IT infrastructure into a commercial cloud service provider, or even building their own internal enterprise cloud infrastructure. If all things are equal, and the cloud-enabled company is able to recover the cost of building their own data center, reducing operational expenses, and potentially greatly increasing their ability to expand and reduce their processing capacity, then they may have more resources left over to increase research and development or product production.

Think of the guys who were running DMS 500s in 2009, vs. their competitors who were running much more powerful, and cheaper soft switches. We can produce a roll call of regional telephone companies who closed their doors over the past few years because they simply did not have the ability to compete with next generation technology.

The Cloud Computing “Plentitude” Target

The trick of course is to try and plan your refresh, through a well-managed business case and review, to as close to the plentitude “risk threshold” as possible. This will ensure you do not fall prey to a bad technology, are able to see the industry trend towards adopting a new technology, and that your competition does not leave you suffering through a last minute technology refresh.

Cloud computing and data center outsourcing may not be the ultimate technology refresh, and still has a number of issues to resolve (security, compliance, data center stability, etc). However, the trend is clear, companies are outsourcing into commercial cloud service providers, and enterprise virtualization is on the mind of every IT manager and CFO in the business community.

We hope

If your company or organization has not yet started the review process, the technology refresh process, and the planning process to determine if/when cloud adoption is the right thing for you company, we would strongly encourage that process to begin. Now.

If nothing else, you owe it to yourself and your organization to ensure they are not caught on the bad side of plentitude.

Filed under Cloud Computing, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Virtualization Tagged with , , , ,

Trouble at the Telecom and Communicator’s Bar

January 3, 2010 Leave a comment

Have you heard the news? Unemployment is skyrocketing, companies are closing, there’s no investment money for startups, and the sky is falling, the sky is falling? Don’t I know, as the layoff frenzy hit my own Hanging out at the communicator's barhome, that it is a scary economic place to take a swim… Sharks, really hungry sharks, circling with an eye to take every last cent you have been able to hide.

And the outlook remains bleak. The New York Times reports that Europe is suffering in youth unemployment – even more than the US. 42.9% unemployment is Spain, 28% unemployment in Ireland, an EU average of 20.7% Makes California look like the “promised land.”

And, California may actually be the “promised land.” California still attracts the best of global engineering to the Silicon Valley, and the most creative minds in communications and entertainment to Los Angeles. Whether you are a European, Chinese, Indian, or even Canadian, Silicon Valley and LA offer an environment that is unsurpassed around the world. Our universities embrace people from other cultures and countries, and our ability to support entrepreneurs draws not only students, but the best engineers and thought leaders from around the world.

Back at the Communicator’s Bar

There are still tables with discussions reviewing the indignities of being laid off by struggling companies. There are still discussions with the whine of people talking about the “damn foreigners” who are here stealing our jobs. Still “barflys” slopped over the bar worrying about their Audi payments and how their ARM mortgage has put them under water.

Then there are other bars with tables full of Americans, And A scatter shot of foreigners talking about fun stuff. Fun stuff like cloud computing, virtualization, globalization, distributing computing, “the network is the computer,” “the computer is the network,” and how the carriers will return to their roots of providing high quality “big, fat, dumb” telecom pipes. The talk is of how we can finally start putting all this intellectual property that we’ve spent billions n producing Powerpoint slides into reality.

Green is here

Virtualization is here

Data Center outsourcing is here

2010 is a blank whiteboard set up to codify the thought leadership and technology spawned in the waning years of the 200x decade and put it into business plans and CAPEX budgets.

2010 is the year we aggressively deliver Internet-enabled technology to every man, woman, and child in the world who has a desire to live a life beyond killing their own food for dinner. Here is a funny though – if a radical 8 year old in one currently scary country is able to Yahoo chat or Facebook their way into discussions and relationships with kids in California and Beijing, doesn’t it make just a little sense the desire to blow each other up would be diluted, even just a little?

If the guy living next to me is producing a telecom switch that is head and shoulders above what is currently on the market, do I really care if his brain was conceived in Hanoi?

2010 is also the beginning of a true period of globalization. That doesn’t mean out hillbilly friends in Duluth, Minnesota have to quit drinking 3.2 beer and hanging out at setup bars watching Vikings reruns, it means that the hillbilly’s kid can participate in a lecture series online from Stanford or MIT. The kid might eventually invent a pickup truck that runs on pine cones, and a 3.2 beer that is actually palatable.

Embrace 2010

If not for the simple fact you have no other choice, consider all the great ideas being pumped out by companies like 3tera, the Google borg, Microsoft, VM Ware, and all the other companies with tremendous innovative ideas. Never before in our history have some many new intellectual and business tools been put on the shelf at the same time. Never before have we had such good reason to consider implanting those ideas (yes, I am a tree hugger and do believe in global warming).

So, even if you are currently living in a car under a bridge near you former upscale Orange County community – shave, wash your car, take a shower at the beach, and let’s get our depression, anger, tacit knowledge back into the business saddle. The young guys still need our experience to get their feet on the ground, and we need them to ensure we will have social security in the future.

Welcome 2010 – you have taken a long time to arrive

John Savageau, Honolulu

Filed under Cloud Computing, Consulting, Entrepreneurs, environment, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, LA Life, Social Issues, Social Networking, startup business, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Business and Social Frog Soup – are we ready for the next decade?

December 31, 2009 Leave a comment

Over the past couple years I have written several stories with “frog soup” as a main theme. The idea of being in cold water, and not recognizing the degree by degree Frog soup concerns for the American economyincrease of heat in the water, till at some point we are cooked, is the danger of being a cold-blooded animal. Business may follow a similar course.

In business we can follow the route of “this is the way we’ve always done it, and it works, so there is no reason to change our processes or strategies.” Innovations like virtualization or cloud computing hit the headlines, and many say “it is a cool idea, but we want the security and hands-on confidence of running our own servers and applications.”

In the United States many telecom companies continue to build business cases based on “milking” telephone settlement minutes, bilateral relationships, and controlling telecom “pipes.” Internet service providers (ISPs) continue holding on to traditional peering relationships, holding out for “paid peering,” doing everything possible to attain market advantage based on traffic ratios.

Nothing new, same ideas, different decade.

It is international frog soup.

In Vietnam the government is currently planning to build an entirely new information infrastructure, from the ground up, based on the most cutting edge telecom and data/content infrastructure. Children in Hanoi go to school at 7 a.m., take a quick lunch break, hit the books till around 5 p.m., take another break, and finish their day at study sessions till around 9 p.m.

Concentration – mathematics, physics, and language.

The children are being exposed to Internet-based technologies, combining their tacit experience and knowledge of global interconnected people with a high degree of academic sophistication.

In the United States children go to school for, at most, 6 hours a day, graduating with (on average) little capabilities in math or language – although we do have deep knowledge of metal detectors and how to smoke cigarettes in the restrooms without being caught. In Los Angeles, some locations cannot even hit a 50% graduation rate among high school students.

And oddly enough, we appear to be comfortable with that statistic.

Perhaps our approach to business is following a similar pattern. We become used to approaching our industry, jobs, and relationships on a level of survival, rather than innovation. We may not in some cases even have the intellectual tools to apply existing technology to the potential of functioning in a global economy. Then we are surprised when an immigrant takes our job or business.

Some universities, such as Stanford, aggressively recruit students from foreign countries, as they cannot attract enough qualified student s from the United States to meet their desired academic threshold. And once they graduate from Stanford, they find their way into Silicon Valley startups, with an entrepreneurial spirit that is beyond the scope of many American graduates.

Those startups have the intellectual and entrepreneurial tools to compete in a global economy, using innovative thinking, unbound by traditional processes and relationships, and are driving the center of what used to be America’s center of the global innovation world. Except that it is only based in Silicon Valley, and now represents the center of a global innovative community. Possibly due to the availability of increasingly cheaper American labor?

Frog Soup

Us Americans – we are getting lazy. Innovation to us may mean how we manipulate paper, and has nothing to do with manufacturing and business innovation. We are starting to miss the value of new products, new concepts, and execution of business plans which end up in production of goods for export and domestic use. We believe concentration on services industries will drive our economy into the future, based on products and other commercial goods imported into our country.

Except for the painful fact and reality we do not have a young generation with the intellectual tools to compete with kids in Hanoi who are on a near religious quest to learn.

The temperature is rising, and we as a country and economic factor in the global community is being diluted every day.

Time to put away the video games and get back to work. No more “time outs,” only time to roll up our sleeves and learn, innovate, learn, innovate, and innovate some more. Forget comfort, we are nearly soup.

Filed under Entrepreneurs, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, LA Life, Social Issues, Social Networking, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

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