Our crowd in the cloud is growing - 11,500+ strong

Narinder Singh

A little more than 100 days ago, we launched CloudSpokes - a cloud development community where businesses can tap specialized development talent and pay for results, and where developers can cultivate their talents and compete for cash and recognition.  A few months ago we talked about CloudSpokes’ initial momentum and some of the early output from this community. The early results we saw encouraged us that our initiative to bring crowdsourcing to cloud development had legs and we’re even more impressed with what it’s done more recently.

Today, we’re excited to share this graphic to communicate our public 100 day check-up for CloudSpokes, highlighting four major areas - community, contests, code and cash. Most notable is the community’s achievement to hit 10,000+ members in only 100 days. In the weeks after we took this 100 day snapshot, the community continued to grow, picking up more than 1,500 new members.

The early success we’re seeing bringing the cloud and crowd together is just that.  We have high expectations to move forward with new tools, means of collaboration and developer initiatives to exponentially expand the breadth and breadth our growing group. In addition CloudSpokes is attracting participation from the likes of VMware, Twilio, Docusign, Isidorey, with even more coming soon.  We’re also using it to run challenges on behalf of some of our customers, and are seeing great results.

For those of you who are unsure about what exactly CloudSpokes is, take a look at the introductory video that we crowdsourced via Tongal. Thank you to all of those who have joined us, and for those who haven’t, it’s never too late.  Go to www.cloudspokes.com to get started!

Enterprise 2.0 - The 7 year itch

Steve Elmore

Last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference marked its 7 year anniversary, a critical milestone to be sure. The Boston session moved to the Hynes Convention Center and some of the biggest players in technology made their presence felt: Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, & Avaya. I had the opportunity to speak at the conference (representing Appirio's Social Enterprise practice), as did Yahoo's Kristen Sanders (recognized by Appirio as the first "Cloud Pioneer" of 2011). I wanted to share my thoughts on a common theme from the event: what "itch" is the social enterprise trying to scratch?

At its core, collaboration feeds the deep human need to be connected and have a voice. And since passionate employees tend to be twice as connected, can the promise of social enterprise’s greater connectivity begin to restore passion in the workplace? And what kind of technologies and leaders do we need to make this happen?

MIT's Andrew McAfee explained in his keynote address that old-fashioned bosses are still the biggest threat to social enterprise advances. To make social enterprise software effective, we need to focus on what computers are bad at: the "eureka" moments. How do we take the flow of information passing through our organizations, and develop those differentiating insights that become our future value proposition? The danger, at the end of the day, is not that computers will think like people, but rather, people will start to think like computers and we will lose organizational creativity.

This was certainly echoed later during the Business Leadership Roundtable by Marcia Conner, Fellow, Enterprise Collaboration at Altimeter Group: She argues that enterprise culture has caused us to check our personalities at the door. Those people were just alive a few moments ago when they were outside the door. What happened? We need to bring our full selves to work! The Dachis Group’s Lee Bryant added during his keynote that social business isn't just about direct collaboration. It's about dynamic signal and ambient sharing around the enterprise. Organizations must refine the way they interpret data for maximum effect.

Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden pointed out that we can't incentivize employees to horde knowledge and then expect them to share, and the pervasive culture of many organizations has everyone but top management acting as choice-less doers. The reality is that line employees are building mental models for the customer segment, but those insights are often not valued or captured by the organization. And when employees leave the organization, they are taking their best ideas with them if the culture and technology has not been put in place to create an information legacy. A strong case for the value of social CRM.

Successful social enterprise software deployments begin with a simple problem, relevancy and immediacy. Yahoo's Kristen Sanders (recognized by Appirio as the first "Cloud Pioneer" of 2011) discussed building "The Source,", a replacement for Yahoo’s “stinky, dirty information landfills.” She discussed the importance of both creating a governance model to avoid creating yet more digital landfills, and thoroughly understanding user requirements in order to build a healthy environment. Yahoo’s successful implementation of Salesforce.com Chatter was based on two key factors: the initiative was business led and addressed real pain points. Kristen pointed out that a platform must be agile, mobile and integrated, and the technology must keep up with the conversation and solve globally, something Yahoo was able to achieve with Appirio in implementing Salesforce Chatter.

I spoke on a panel with Sovos Group co-founder Oliver Marks, Moxie’s Megan Murray and Saba’s (and The Career Within You author) Ingrid Stabb on Balancing Business Leadership with Governance, Regulatory and Compliance Realities. Two key takeaways from the session: First, engage compliance early and often when implementing collaborative technologies-- the future of HR is to take a stronger, leading roll in designing the employee experience. Second, design an employee experience that embraces social enterprise software to not only understand what is driving employee behavior, but to direct behaviors in ways that are mutually beneficial to the individual and the organization.

Jive’s Chris Morace reminded us that 70% of enterprise employees are using unsanctioned cloud apps. In fact, evidence shows 35% of employees are spending their own money on social software at work so they can get things done when corporate systems fail to deliver. People want the same tools they have access to outside of work inside of work, and so they will find a way to get them even when it violates policy. This creates a huge compliance headache and ultimately impacts HR’s ability to recruit and retain employees when these tools and behaviors are absent.

EA’s Bert Sandi identified three elements critical to collaboration: head, hearts & hands. He challenged the audience: is your physical environment collaborative? And once you are more than 35ft. apart, you might as well be in a different building, so what does social enterprise collaboration look like in your organization?

And that, at the end of the day, is the real "itch" behind the social enterprise: Can we access the tacit knowledge contained in the heads of employees, engage their hearts and make them passionate once again about walking through the door, and can we put in their hands the tools necessary to get the job done and create institutional memory? After seven years the E2.0 Conference is showing us how to scratch that itch.

Dr. Steve Elmore is Business Architect for Collaboration at Appirio and develops organizational blueprints for the launch of collaborative initiatives. Steve serves on the faculties of University of Phoenix and Grand Canyon University and sits on the board of the Central Texas SPCA. In addition to a Doctor of Business Administration, Steve holds an MBA in Global Management and a BS in Business Management. Steve has been published in the Journal of Leadership Studies, co-authored with best-selling business writer Don Tapscott, and is a regular conference speaker. You can follow him on Twitter @steveelmore.

Four steps to sustain the U.S. government's IT strategy in the post-Kundra era - Blogging for Computerworld

Glenn Weinstein

Big enterprises, with their deep pockets and hefty IT departments, have historically served as testing grounds for new technologies. And recently we've watched the "consumerization of IT" where innovation begins with consumers and trickles down to the enterprise. But government was probably considered the last place to look for an aggressive IT strategy.

That image was was shattered when Vivek Kundra took the IT reins of the U.S. federal government in 2009. Kundra is well known for implementing a "cloud-first" policy for all federal agencies. His departure announcement casts doubt over whether agencies will sustain the momentum required for this sort of sweeping change. Kundra's announcement comes as the White House is expected to spend roughly $80 billion this year on technology, funding that includes upgrading thousands of federal programs, including email and collaboration systems, to cloud-based technologies.

Read more...

Accelerating Enterprise Adoption of the Mobile Cloud

Mark Tognetti and Kevin Dodson

Today, Appirio’s mobile cloud practice is excited to announce our Mobile App Dev framework for Force.com and iOS, and we wanted to use the occasion to explain why we (and more importantly, our customers) see so much potential in the mobile cloud.

To gain insight into this important topic, we partnered with TechValidate to independently survey our customer base on their plans for mobile cloud adoption. The results are still coming in but the first wave of responses are clear: the potential for the mobile cloud in the enterprise is enormous. Convenient access to information is the main benefit our customers expect, but that’s just the beginning:

• 56% say mobile apps will provide real-time visibility into the business
• 46% say mobile apps will help employees make better decisions on the go
• And most of exciting of all: 44% say that mobile apps will help enable entire new business processes. (Results here)

TechValidate » Appirio Cloud Solutions

Enabling new business processes is certainly the main benefit at our customer RehabCare (recently acquired by Kindred Healthcare). The deployment of 10,000 cloud-powered mobile devices to their national network of therapists has meant “nothing less than the transformation of our business,” according to former CIO Dick Escue. (Check out Apple’s case study on Rehabcare’s success here.)

Other customers agree: according to TechValidate, one Global 500 retail customer of ours estimates that mobile apps will make their field service employees 25-50% more productive. That type of productivity improvement drops straight to the bottom line.

The benefits are there but right now, two thirds of our customers aren’t doing ANY mobile cloud development -- they’re either using out-of-the-box mobile apps from their enterprise application vendors, or are still figuring out their approach. What’s holding these enterprise’s back? 33% of them cite lack of internal resources. The fact is that today, enterprise application development is expensive, time consuming, and requires specialized resources that are in short supply due to the booming marketing for consumer apps.

That’s why we’re so excited about our new Mobile Application Development Framework for iOS and Force.com -- it makes opens up the world of enterprise mobile apps to enterprise developers without any iOS experience. The framework consists of generic app components and management capabilities, all running on Salesforce’s database.com. Our developers have built app templates using this framework to support the type of simple mobile apps that enterprises need to keep their employees productive -- survey apps, search/display apps, hotspot apps, and mapping apps for example. Our cloud consultants have already created dozens of native iOS apps using these templates -- it’s as simple as configuring Force.com. And these apps can be changed just as quickly, without any re-deploying. This is a great step forward in bringing the power of a cloud platform closer to mobile application development.

Here’s a 5 minute overview, with examples of the type of apps that we’ve created already. But this is just the beginning. We’re planning to open up the framework to the 10,000 independent cloud developers on CloudSpokes, and can’t wait to see the sort of innovation that will come from the broader cloud community.

But most of all, we look forward to reporting back when the vast majority of our customers are using their own enterprise mobile cloud apps to fully support how their people work. We have our work cut out for us...

Chatter, Tweet and Connect With Your Actual Network - A Customer Q&A with Enterasys

By Sara Campbell

We’re always looking to tell the world how our customers have made use of Chatter. Many companies see social media as a way for people to communicate better with each other. But what if you could use that same social media to communicate with your IT infrastructure? We already know one of the great benefits of Chatter is that “things”, not just people can chatter but Enterasys Networks has taken this concept to a whole new level. They have integrated their network technology with Salesforce Chatter, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to humanize the enterprise and open up network communication beyond the language of machines.

Today, I’m eager to share an interview with Vala Afshar, chief customer officer for Enterasys Networks, a Siemens Enterprise Communications Company and Appirio customer, about what they’re doing with Chatter and other social tools.

GigaOM’s Top 50 Cloud Innovators List—the good, the bad and the muddy

Michelle Swan

A couple weeks ago GigaOM posted its pick of the Top 50 Cloud Innovators, a list that was compiled from the site’s Structure conference. There’s quite an assortment of companies included in the list from social networking companies to infrastructure apps, and not surprisingly it garnered almost 15 pages of comments—most of which were disgruntled companies not included on the list.

In a space as fast moving and buzzworthy as cloud computing, it’s practically impossible to compile a list like this - much less a list on which everyone agrees. To help businesses and IT executives navigate the cloud, we went through a similar exercise a few years ago to create our own cloud ecosystem map. We revamped it last September, but it’s already well past time for another update. Trying to maintain this ecosystem map has given us first-hand knowledge into how difficult it is to create and keep something like this fresh in a landscape where every day some new cloud company pops up or some traditional technology company cloudwashes their existing hosted or on-premise offerings.

Our map focuses on the cloud “leaders”, those we’re seeing most often in our customer base. Focusing on the leaders is relatively easy compared to designating the “innovators”, so we don’t envy GigaOM’s task in compiling this list and we’re happy to see our strategic partners salesforce.com, Amazon and Google on GigaOM’s list. But what about all the other companies doing innovative things in the cloud? SaaS providers like Concur, Workday, Box.net or Jive? Or the customers who are using cloud services to transform their organizations like Ford (using Google) or RehabCare (using Salesforce and Apple)?

The problem with lists is they can’t possibly cover every company and still be useful, and they become muddied when you don’t adequately define the criteria for the list. GigaOM’s Top Cloud Innovator list focuses only on infrastructure which is only a fraction of the cloud market (and we’d argue probably not the most innovative), but the blog title just says “cloud innovators.” No wonder everyone wants on the list. It’s similar to how the Twittersphere blew up when Gartner published its Magic Quadrant on IaaS and web hosting. The purists had major issues with those two categories being lumped together, which actually led Gartner to introduce a new and separate Magic Quadrant on public cloud IaaS. And people are still confused.

Is the answer not to do these lists? Not at all. People just need to look at these lists for what they are - one group’s opinion, at one point in time, on a particular topic. Cloud computing is such a fast moving and nebulous (pardon the pun) space right now, that lists like these are needed. But what’s even more needed are partners, providers, brokers (call them what you will) who can help customers navigate the choppy waters and find the right path. And yes, by partner, we mean us. Sorry, had to say it. Because we weren’t on GigaOM’s list either.

The Real Future of the Cloud

Narinder Singh

• Appirio and Silver Lining
• Our Inspiration to Be Public
• Appirio and Dreamforce 2011 – The USCF Beniof Childrens Hospital

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
~Dr. Seuss

Appirio and Silver Lining
We do an annual employee survey here at Appirio, and the most highly rated part consistently centers around our people, their co-workers. It’s a group that’s self-described to be passionate and unified in wanting to dramatically change the world of IT and business through cloud computing. An unexpected but welcome corollary is they’re just as passionate about changing the world.

That passion to change the world is often an understated part of their personas, one that you often learn about in a roundabout way – their work with an impoverished school, a commitment to being foster parents, a passion for fighting diseases that affect children, starting their own local non-profits in their minimal free time along with many, many others. They quietly support causes and people that are making the world better.

As a result, when we began to formalize the Appirio Silver Lining program almost two years ago, it was met with widespread support and excitement. The ideas flowed for what we could do with our talents, the people and causes we could support, and the ideas for how we could weave this program into the fabric of Appirio’s culture. We kicked off the initiative in January of 2010, using part of our annual company offsite to put 150 highly competitive people to work cleaning up a nature preserve. We continued our philanthropy efforts throughout the year at local food banks, working with the Special Olympics, contributing our professional talents to Architecture for Humanity, organizing Light the Night walks and much more.

This year we decided to focus on children, the real “Future of the Cloud”. Every year, Appirio gives each employee 8 hours of paid volunteer time off to assist the causes they choose. This year, we supplemented that with a community service day on April 8th, where the entire company simultaneously took one day to give back to nearly 40 different causes across the world. All these efforts focused on helping our youth, whether that was making blankets for traumatized children, volunteering at underprivileged schools, building houses for families or providing technical expertise to global organizations who help families.

Our Inspiration to Be Public with Silver Lining
No one has ever accused Appirio’s commercial business from being shy, but with Silver Lining, we initially thought it would reflect our own employees approach to giving back in relative anonymity, else we feared it might look or feel less genuine.

Yet, much of our inspiration for Silver Lining came from salesforce.com. One of the most inspiring business memories I have was the first time I ever went to a salesforce.com event (before starting Appirio) and watching Marc Benioff take time from the big announcement of the day to highlight the Salesforce.com Foundation and their commitment to giving back. He brought up a particular non-profit executive director who had turned away from a lucrative business career to dedicate all of his efforts to making the world better. It was the kind of thing that left you both inspired and feeling a little guilty you weren’t doing more yourself.

But what left me absolutely awestruck was that this was just part of how salesforce.com did business. Every single major salesforce.com event replays this commitment to the world and the people that are trying to change it. Every year at least one Dreamforce keynote is dedicated exclusively to making the world better. I distinctly remember one off hand comment Marc once made to a small group after an event that “I wish our competitors would more aggressively copy that part of our business.”

One of the most inspiring parts of Salesforce’s efforts to give back is the attention they bring to the importance of giving back as both individuals and companies. It’s clear this isn’t about looking like they are doing the right thing, it’s about inspiring every company to do their part to advance more than their corporate profits – and it’s inspired us in many ways.

Appirio and Dreamforce 2011 – The USCF Benioff Children’s Hospital
It is this context -combined with the dramatic year we have seen the world experience - that caused us to approach Dreamforce differently this year. We are proud to be a Gold Sponsor of Dreamforce, but we are beyond thrilled and humbled to be a “Rock Idol” sponsor for the concert benefit that last year raised $3M for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

The commitment is our second largest investment in sponsoring an event in 2011 (the first being Dreamforce itself). It comes from the same pool of resources we use to invest in growing our commercial business and like all investments has an impact on profitability. But this and our general expansion of Silver Lining is already one of the things we are most proud of as a company and as individuals. It’s a reflection of the kind of company we strive to be.

One of the things businesses excel at is competing. What if for once, we competed on something whose output gave back more than dollars for our balance sheet? What if our employees, our customers, and our communities evaluated our worthiness based partly on giving back? It’s a competition we would be glad to face every day. We’d even be excited to see others surpassing and inspiring us to do more. It’s with that motivation we proudly and publicly support a Dreamforce event that has always focused on giving back more.

If you are reading this blog from the U.S., you are likely amongst the top 10 percent of the world’s wealthiest and most fortunate. You have enough to eat every day, a place to sleep and the time and energy to pursue things that aren’t vital to your survival, but make you happy. You expect your family will be safe and free. Your children can go to school, get basic medical care, and have hope that with hard work they can have an even better future. It’s a blessing and a responsibility to have such fortune.

There are a world of people who have dedicated their whole lives to giving back to those who don’t have all of these luxuries. We have worked with everyday heroes at organizations like the American Red Cross, Project Linus, Architecture for Humanity, JDRF, the Second Harvest Food Bank, Empact Africa, PlayWorks, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Aspiranet and the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital - and there are thousands of more like them. It is their commitment that inspires us to do our part.

It is upon us to live up to the responsibility of our good fortune and take small steps that hold ourselves and the organizations we work for accountable to do more to help. In the words of Winston Churchill, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”