Discussing cloudsourcing and corporate transformation with an "execution specialist" - Blogging for Computerworld

Ryan Nichols

I was excited to host Mark Newhall for a webinar last week on the "Path To Cloudsourcing." Mark is an expert at corporate transformation, often-times powered by cloud technology. He was a very early adopter of salesforce.com at Corporate Express, where he lead the global transformation of their customer-facing processes. As COO of Market Force Information, a customer intelligence firm, he charted out a 3 year roadmap to move entirely to the cloud, enabling a new growth strategy. He now leads Execution Specialists Group, advising C-level executives on business transformation strategies.

Our discussion focused on building, executing and measuring the success of a comprehensive cloud strategy. You can view the full webinar here-- below are some highlights from our conversation:

Tell us about your experience with Salesforce at Corporate Express. Was the adoption led by the business or by IT?

Back in 2002, our initial adoption was led by the business. It started with a couple of sales teams who adopted Salesforce and started getting fantastic results. Of course, because of this initial success, we wanted to roll out Salesforce more and that's when we started working with IT.

Read more here...

Mythbuster Monday (Part 2 of the Series) - Moving to the cloud is too hard (or too easy)

Ryan Nichols

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

• We have too many sunk costs in our existing systems to adopt new cloud technologies
• Our team doesn't have the right skills or expertise to develop or deploy on cloud platforms
• All the questions about cloud integration, security and availability make it too difficult to move to the cloud

You may have heard these (or variations of these) from people on your team, your boss and even your vendors trying to convince you that it's just too difficult to adopt public cloud platforms in your organization. "Just wait. See how things play out. It's always better to play it safe." Let's be clear - moving to the cloud isn't always easy - there's a myth about that as well (see recent Network World article by Jon Brodkin). But it's also not any more difficult than any other technology change. And since when does technology not change or progress? If you're hoping for that, this probably isn't the blog for you.

It's no secret that we at Appirio encourage people to think big about adopting the public cloud. We work with many enterprises who are pushing the envelope in their use of cloud platforms and applications, and we've heard most of the reasons why people drag their feet. We have also seen what's possible when people stop resisting and make the move. The ability to innovate faster than your competition. Move quicker and be more nimble. Get closer to your customers and serve them better. Enter new markets with less effort. The list goes on.

So why all the foot dragging? The book “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath presents a good philosophy on why there is hesitation when it comes to thinking about a move to the cloud. The premise of this book is “for things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently.” To get that one person to start the act of change can be difficult, especially when a company is tied to existing systems, specific skill sets and entrenched vendor relationships. The Heath brothers suggest a Switch Framework to break down the change until it no longer “spooks the elephant.”

We'd like to use this framework to lay out a few steps one can take to convince the skeptics in their organization that a little bit of change may be worth it in the long run.

• FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and duplicate it. Find a cloud application that's already being used successfully in your organization (we guarantee there are more than you think). Point out the reasons why it's so successful. Expand on that success in adjacent areas. For instance, our customer Genentech has talked publicly about how their switch from a heavy, outdated calendar application to Google Calendar contributed to other cloud successes. They've since moved thousands of employees onto Google Apps, and are always finding new applications they can build on and integrate into cloud platforms to improve productivity and compliance.
  

• SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Think about specific behaviors you want to see. Don't wait until every solution provider in your architecture becomes cloud-based before you decide to move to the cloud. Instead, take a more proactive approach and look at the specific applications in your portfolio that are most in need of modernization or best suited for the cloud and start there.

• POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. Most view a move to the cloud as a cost saving measure – and it is – but don’t forget about the other critical business benefits that the cloud enables - innovation, flexibility, etc. Understand the business' imperatives, and model out how cloud technologies and the surrounding ecosystem will help move those imperatives forward. Create a Cloud Adoption Plan for the next 1, 3, 5 years. Remember, the transition is not going to happen overnight but if you identify the end goal and show skeptics the path to get there, they can be part of the journey.

• FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. Part of motivating this feeling is finding the pain point (or the common enemy) and starting there. Many a Salesforce CRM deal happened because the sales team hated using Siebel and wanted something - anything - different. Find those people who are sick of the complexity and the overhead of Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, and show them why Google Apps is a better way.

• SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. Some organizations, especially those with a strong leadership who want a business transformation, can change by developing an overarching roadmap and forcing change through the organization. Mark Newhall from Execution Specialists Group talks about this in a recent cloudsourcing webinar. But many teams work better by breaking the problem into smaller chunks. Point to the destination, and like agile development, parse out the solution into more easily consumable chunks.

• GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. Yes, people may shy away from change but they also don't want to stay stagnant. Show them why incorporating cloud development or cloudsourcing skills into their repertoire will not only help the organization, but will better prepare them for the cloud-centric world of tomorrow.

• TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. If certain groups in your team are cloud-phobic, start your path to the cloud with another team that is more open to the journey. Or create a separate group inside your organization that has the charge of evaluating cloud technologies or platforms, and apply it to a specific problem.

• BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free” so look for ways to encourage habits. When you're evaluating new technologies or systems, make it a habit to ensure half (or more) of the options include SaaS or cloud-based technologies. For example, at Appirio we don't believe in reinventing the wheel (one of the biggest issues with traditional on-premise technology). So whenever we're developing a new solution, we always start with what we can tap in the open source community or the existing cloud ecosystem. If that won't suffice for our, and our customer's needs, then we build.

• RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. Once people have a taste of cloud innovation, it can be addicting. Remember to keep highlighting successes to keep up motivation. When a prototype is created in days rather than months, show it. When you get some new innovative features in your SaaS application without the cost of an upgrade, talk about it. When you can deploy in multiple languages because you built on a cloud platform, celebrate it.

It's an inherent human trait to fear change, but little in the world has been accomplished without it. If you can make that change palatable, then just maybe you won't stall progress.

Cloudforce 2 San Jose Wrap-up: Chatting from Salesforce's Cloudforce event - Blogging for Computerworld

Ryan Nichols

Yesterday I attended salesforce.com's "Cloudforce" event for the official launch of "Chatter," the company's new social networking functionality for the enterprise.

Salesforce kicked off the event with this context: To reach 50 million users, radio took 38 years. TV took 13 years. The Internet took 4 years. Facebook did it in 5 months. "This is how the world is communicating," said salesforce.com. "Someday the business world will too. Welcome to Someday."




There's no doubt that the way people collaborate in most companies could use some improvement (full inbox, anyone?) Marc Benioff, salesforce.com's CEO, bashes collaboration tools that were "conceived of before Mark Zuckerberg was." His response to this is Chatter, which he describes as "Facebook for the enterprise."

The general collaboration concept behind Chatter isn't new. After all, collaboration has been offered through software as a service ("SaaS") for years -- solutions like Jive, Yammer, and CubeTree have seen solid adoption, particularly in small and medium businesses.

But salesforce.com has a much different approach than other solutions -- they're making Chatter a core part of their cloud platform. Chatter moves collaboration from the SaaS "layer" of the cloud to the platform as a service layer ("PaaS"). This has a couple of implications for the enterprise...

Read more here...

Things Chatter Too

by Mark Koenig and Jeff Douglas

In the six months since Chatter was announced at Dreamforce 2009 most of the questions we’ve received about Chatter have been along the lines of “how do I use Chatter to improve about improving collaboration at my company?” And there is no question that Chatter can do that. As one of the first to begin using Chatter, Appirio has experienced how it can improve collaboration across teams, expose information real-time and in context and help build our community. No small feat for a company with only one physical office location and many of our 200 team members working at client sites or from their home offices. In short, Chatter matters - we’ve experienced it.

Yet these particular benefits only derive from a one-dimensional view of what Chatter is and what Chatter can do, and may in fact be overlooking a greater potential source of true business value: that applications, information and content can Chatter. With Chatter General Availability only a few weeks away we thought we would expand on the idea that, as we like to say, “Things Chatter Too.”

Of course, users can follow People, Accounts or Opportunities in the Sales Cloud, or cases in the Service Cloud. ISVs can build applications (like Appirio’s PS Enterprise - one of the first applications to incorporate Chatter) that enable users to follow, discuss, make decisions about and act upon key information about their business.

PS Enterprise is all about managing customers, projects, people and financials and Chatter makes this collaboration, especially on projects, more compelling, real-time and transparent. Having parts of PS Enterprise send project Chatter (e.g., project actuals, assignments, change orders, team members). Here is a set of use cases from a recent Chatter Energizer Workshop identifying ways that Chatter can be used in applications built on Force.com. No doubt there are many many more:

• People: New Employee created, Performance Review completed
• Customers: Customer Created, Primary Contact changed
• Financials: Invoice issued, Cash Received, Receivable passes terms date, Account Create
• Projects: Resource extended on project, Milestone date changed, Milestone Reached, Project Health changed
• Orders: Order shipped, order returned

But incorporating Chatter into Force.com is child’s play. The real fun comes when you start sending Chatter from applications outside of Force.com. Consider how the following could impact your company’s ability to deliver projects:

• Your external HR system could send Chatter to your project whenever a project team member has scheduled time off
• JIRA, Basecamp or some other project management tool could send daily Chatter on the status of the project, number of open tasks or upcoming milestone dates
• Bugzilla could send Chatter to the project when critical bugs are resolved or new ones are submitted
• Data integration services could send Chatter when integration jobs fail
• GoToMeeting could send Chatter when a new meeting has been scheduled with the date, time and phone number

Because Chatter is a platform, companies can build their own applications to take advantage of Chatter’s ability to provide status updates in a familiar and easy to comprehend user interface. Take this great example of a custom-built Facilities Management application built on Force.com in which a building Chatters. Consider all the different sensors in a building and imagine them connected to updates that would be meaningful. The potential business benefits add up quickly: better use of resources such as conference rooms that Chatter that they are empty, improved energy usage when HVAC systems Chatter in real time about their workload, safer work environment when doors and windows Chatter that they are left unlocked, or when sensors indicate that lighting or air quality has fallen below acceptable levels.

We’d like to hear from you. What applications in your business are or should be Chattering? What are the business benefits that you can derive?

Mythbusting Monday: Myth #1 - Cloud security is a reason to avoid the public cloud

Mark Tognetti

A quick search for cloud security in Google turns up hundreds of articles - many of which claim it is one of, if not THE, top reason to avoid cloud computing. You've probably seen the headlines - "Cloud is the real culprit for the iPad security hole", "Will the cloud have its own Deepwater Horizon disaster?," "Cloud computing risks outweigh rewards," and the list goes on. It is for this reason that cloud security leads off our Mythbusting Monday series.

Today cloud security tops almost every list of cloud computing concerns - partly because it's something that should be on the mind of any customer evaluating new technology. But it's also gaining steam because it's being used as a crutch for people skeptical about anything new or disruptive, and as a market stalling tactic by vendors who don't have a solution for this new paradigm. Cloud security isn't a new topic - I responded to some of the hype almost a year ago in this blog - but it has the potential to unnecessarily hinder adoption and innovation if it isn't addressed.

Look at Security through the Right Lens
One of the biggest issues is that cloud security is often compared with a company's ideal security scenario, not what they have in reality. The reality is that less than half of large companies (and very few small to medium companies) employ a CSO or CISO focused on security. Even with a CSO, how many IT organizations can ensure that every server, desktop, and mobile device in the company has the most updated security software and patches at all times? What about the data walking out of your company on laptops, phones or thumb drives? And then there's your people - some predict social engineering may actually be the greatest security risk of all.

Your world is changing - whether you like it or not - and so should your approach to security
Today's security mechanism in most companies is to create a moat around the castle - a difficult to navigate buffer zone that locks down access in and out and lets people roam freely once they're inside the building. That approach costs a lot of money and is getting less and less effective in a world that's becoming ever more "social" and interconnected. Think about the amount of your data that is stored and shared among your partners, suppliers and remote employees. Or the fact that IT organizations will have less and less control over the devices and applications their employees use at and for work.

For all these reasons, customers are finding security a reason TO move to the cloud, not away from it. For the vast majority of companies where security isn't a core competency, working with cloud vendors like salesforce.com, Google or Amazon strengthens the security of their data, and allows them to focus on the core aspects of their business. These vendors collectively spend billions on security every year. They hire the best and the brightest in the security industry to ensure their customers, their data and their brand remain untarnished. And they have a whole lot more to lose if a breach does happen - which is why they focus on every single one of the core areas of security that you see in the PwC "Global State of Information Security" graphic here.

Click Image to Enlarge
Plus the leading cloud vendors' security investment dollar goes further than most as a result of simple economies of scale. From a recent European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) cloud computing risk study... "Therefore the same amount of investment in security buys better protection. This includes all kinds of defensive measures such as filtering, patch management, hardening of virtual machine instances and hypervisors, etc. Other benefits of scale include: multiple locations, edge networks (content delivered or processed closer to its destination), timeliness of response, to incidents, threat management."

It's the same reason you trust your money to a bank who has more expertise, resources, insurance and reach than you do. It may make you feel better to put your money under your mattress, but there's a reason why banks are in business. It's an interesting analogy that my colleague, Ryan Nichols, recently made in his Cloudsourcing blog on Computerworld.

Security will always be important and it should be a topic for debate in this quickly evolving world of cloud computing. But keep in mind that it is also always evolving and will never be perfect (at least not in my lifetime). As such, it shouldn't be used a reason not to move forward.

A work in progress
Cloud security still has a lot of room for improvement - as does the world of managing security with on-premise systems. But here are some things that make me feel positive about the direction we're heading:

• The fact that more cloud application and platform providers are demonstrating they're SAS 70 Type II and ISO 27001 / 27002 compliant. Remember, not every cloud vendor is created equal so ask about these things!
• The work that's happening in "cloud specific" organizations like Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and CloudAudit/A6 to create cloud appropriate security standards
• Increasingly balanced perspectives on cloud computing security coming from security organizations such as ENISA and ISACA
• New cloud security products (real ones not re-labeled on-premise stuff) hitting the market every day from vendors like Tricipher, Conformity and Symplified

Mark Tognetti is an Enterprise Architect at Appirio, helping large companies develop and implement a business-driven roadmap to the cloud. Before joining Appirio he was VP of IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at a $2.6B fleet management company, and a former Certified Information Systems Auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers (formerly Coopers and Lybrand).

Mature conversations at the Cloud Leadership Forum - Blogging for Computerworld

Ryan Nichols

IDC and IDG brought together a couple hundred cloud practitioners and decision makers for 2 days of surprisingly intimate and sophisticated conversations about the benefits and challenges of doing more with public, private, and hybrid cloud computing technology. Appropriately, they called it the "Cloud Leadership Forum."

The breakout session on cloud security, for example, skipped the hype and dove right into an issue at the core of most conversations around cloud adoption -- the tension felt by IT organizations who are being asked to sign up for certain security and performance outcomes that they no longer feel in control over as they move to the public cloud.

Read more here...

The New Polymath: Q&A with Author Vinnie Mirchandani

One of our favorite bloggers, Vinnie Mirchandani (@dealarchitect), released his new book this month focused on technology and innovation - The New Polymath. Vinnie is probably best known for his Deal Architect blog covering waste in technology, but he also writes an intriguing innovation blog called New Florence. New Renaissance. Vinnie says he has cataloged more than 2,000 innovative technologies, companies and projects in 40 technology categories in this blog. This and interviews with 150+ innovators in infotech, cleantech, healthtech and biotech form the basis of his new book, which highlights Appirio extensively along with customers such as Avon, Starbucks, DeVry University. With his book out any day now, we asked him a few questions about it.

What is your book about?

The book is about a Polymath - a Renaissance person like Da Vinci who is good at many disciplines. The New Polymath in my book is an enterprise that is comfortable with a wide range of technologies and has learned to package 3, 5 or 10 strands of infotech, cleantech, nanotech, biotech, etc. into complex new solutions in order to solve some of the big and small problems we face.

A number of people know of my Deal Architect blog. But, the real joy for me has been my other innovation-focused blog, New Florence. New Renaissance. Over 5 years I have posted over 2,000 entries in 40 tech categories from mobile computing to nanotechnology. Many recent entries have focused on innovations in the consumer space and in social networks – as you know that’s where the buzz has been. Nice, but those are hardly complex problems compared to the some of the grand challenges the National Academy of Engineering has laid out, including ensuring plenty of clean water around the world and reverse engineering the brain.

Fortunately, as the database of posts grew year after year, I started to notice two patterns. I was seeing ever-more complex products and services that blended a variety of technologies. An example was General Electric’s plans for the Net Zero Home (as in zero annual energy costs), which plans to bring together solar, wind, next-gen battery, smart grid interface technology, and energy management software to make appliances, water heaters, and other devices a home more efficient. Or the BP CTO group, which effortlessly weaves sensory networks, predictive analytics, and other technologies to bring innovation to a variety of refineries, exploration sites, and other aspects of its global reach.

I was also seeing refugees from information technology increasingly move into cleantech and healthtech. Ray Lane (ex-Oracle) and Bill Joy (ex-Sun) are now key leaders at Kleiner Perkins, which has made 50+ investments in cleantech. Little in Kleiner’s past success as a venture capitalist in information technology (including blockbuster investments in Netscape, Amazon, eBay, and others) prepared it for a world of methane and selenium. Yet here the company is, reinventing itself by learning new sciences while investing in a new generation of entrepreneurs who are helping the United States catch up to other cleantech investors around the world such as the Germans, Chinese and Japanese. Similarly, Google, Microsoft, and others are increasingly offering products in the healthtech market.

Those are modern-day polymaths, I thought. That led to interviews and write-ups of eight Polymath organizations – GE, BP, salesforce.com and others who have shown the ability to effortlessly package multiple technologies. I then interviewed another 100+ innovators who are pushing the ball forward in specific areas like next-gen analytics and sustainability.

Why did you decide to include Appirio in your book?

One of the polymath case studies I did was salesforce.com. Over the last decade they have amalgamated data center operational knowledge (cooling, storage, etc.) with massively shared application management – tasks other software vendors expect hosting firms, systems integrators and offshore firms to provide to their customers. The more I saw of salesforce.com in the field the more I heard of this consulting firm called Appirio. Like an onion, Appirio turned out to have many layers. It writes software, not just provide services. It is adept at integrating a number of social and mobile technologies. Its clients and projects were much larger and more complex than I would have expected from a firm its size. In other words, it is a young polymath. In the book, I profile Appirio’s internal operations and the company's work with two of clients, Avon and Starbucks.

What can IT leaders learn from the innovators you profiled?

Think both bigger and smaller. Bigger - in defining your goals. The book talks about Grand Challenges that governments and companies and individuals need to sign up for. Bigger – in that there is such a wide palette of technologies – infotech, biotech, cleantech etc – to create Grand Solutions to meet those Grand Challenges. Think smaller - in delivery and budgets. Constraint-driven innovation teams can deliver value far greater than their size. There is way too much waste today in technology budgets. And also give smaller vendors like Appirio a fair shot at your business. Every CIO should aim to spend 25% of his/her budget with vendors born less than 5 years ago.

Also, as I describe in the book, there are huge opportunities for products in industry after industry to embed the infotech, biotech, etc. IT leaders have the opportunity – indeed, the obligation – to coach their business units and product groups on how to behave like technology vendors. There are IP issues, revenue recognition considerations, rapid obsolescence considerations and more that IT has learned from in dealing with its vendors, and it should be preparing business colleagues to deal with issues in these same areas.

Introducing Mythbusting Mondays

What's Your Favorite Cloud Computing Myth?
Balakrishna Narasimhan

• Sensitive data is safer in your data center than in the public cloud
• You can't customize cloud applications
• You have no control of your data if you move to a cloud service provider
• Platform lock-in is more of a problem with cloud services than on-premise systems

And those are only a few of the cloud computing myths that are running rampant these days. We're not surprised really - this happens every time an industry goes through some kind of dramatic (and to some, traumatic) change. It also means cloud computing is gaining more and more traction. While early adopters have been evangelizing the cloud's benefits for a while, mainstream adopters who are much more risk averse are now planning for their move to the cloud. That raises different issues.

Plus, the traction of cloud computing has piqued the interest of more vendors, many of whom have a lot to lose if things change too drastically and they can't keep up. It's the Fear, Uncertainly and Doubt being spread by this latter group that has us worried. If enough dollars are put behind FUD, it has the potential to stall the market and that's where people lose.

It's good to have debate, and important to ask tough questions before pulling the trigger on new models and technologies. But it's also important to separate perception from reality, and to know when vendor marketing starts to blur the line of truthfulness. Because without this, companies might miss out on an incredibly powerful trend that could really make benefit in their business.

As a company that has completed more than 700 cloud projects over the last four years, and is directly or peripherally involved with hundreds of vendors in the cloud computing ecosystem , we think Appirio has the breadth and expertise to address many of these myths from a foundation of fact. This is why we're introducing "Mythbusting Mondays" this summer. Hey, there's Taco Tuesdays, Follow Fridays and Supercar Saturdays. Why not Mythbusting Mondays?

Every other Monday, an Appirio expert will be busting one of the myths making headlines. We have our list to tackle, but if there's a myth you think we should address, please don't hesitate to let us know by either commenting on this blog or tweeting us @appirio.

Our first Mythbusting Monday post next week will address Cloud Security. Looking forward to the debate!

Friends don’t let friends get cloudwashed

Balakrishna Narasimhan

“Cloudwashing” is the currently rampant practice of taking an existing offering and labeling it a cloud offering, even if it’s not. The result is that there’s broad confusion and a dilution of the perceived benefits of true cloud offerings. The benefits of cloud applications and platforms are quantifiable cost savings, rapid time to value and innovation that drives the business. Many cloudwashed offerings cannot deliver these benefits and are merely a way for incumbent vendors to prolong their stranglehold over customers’ IT budgets.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at SIIA’s All About the Cloud conference, which was a great opportunity to connect with our peers in the industry. We decided to take the opportunity to ask these industry experts what they thought about “cloudwashing”.



The results were entertaining and illuminating. They ranged from bewilderment (”I have no idea what it is”) to supremely optimistic (”when you’ve been cloudwashed, you’re SAS70 compliant, have stable APIs...) to skeptical (”when a cloud vendor tells you that a project is going to take days and it take months you’ve been cloudwashed”) to IBM’s surprisingly honest response (”when you take an offering and get it ready for the cloud”).

If it’s this difficult even for industry experts to know when they’re being cloudwashed, it can’t be easy for customers. That’s why we’ve come up with a list of 3 simple questions to ask your “cloud” vendor to see if you’re in danger of being cloudwashed:

• Do all of your customers run on the same logical instance?
  
• Do I automatically get the benefits of new features or innovation without additional work (e.g. a physical upgrade)?
• Are your APIs stable from release to release preserving my customizations, extensions, and integrations?

If your “cloud” vendor can’t answer in the affirmative to each of these questions, you’re in danger of being cloudwashed. Time to grab your wallet and run!

P.S. Please share your favorite definitions or examples of cloudwashing with us in comments.

Five questions to help business and IT "think big" about cloud computing - Blogging for Computerworld

Ryan Nichols

Part of what I do on a day-to-day basis is educate business people who are interested in learning more about cloud computing. One executive asked me a great question last week that I wanted to share with the community.

After learning the basics of Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, he inquired, "This is interesting, but what questions should I use to spur the right conversation with my CIO about cloud computing? And which real-life examples will keep that conversation from getting academic?"

It was a great request, because too often I think we're focusing on the wrong questions about cloud computing. Today most of the questions around the cloud center on security, reliability and performance. Those are important questions - things that every enterprise needs to be completely satisfied with to make the move to the cloud -- but those conversations need to happen in the context of what the business can do with the cloud.

So here are five questions that have been useful in our work helping business and IT work together to "think big" about cloud computing. I've picked one real-life case study for each question from my experience working with clients at Appirio, but would love learn more about other examples (or counter-examples!) in the comments below:

Read more here...