Time to Nominate Your Favorite Cloudwasher for the Upcoming “Washies Award”

By Narinder Singh

"My game change but my mindframe remains the same, I gotta protect what's mine"
- JayZ, Come and Get Me

A few weeks ago we announced the first ever “Washies Award,” an annual award given to the worst offenders of painting over traditional technology with the word cloud... even if it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings.

There’s no question that the hype around cloud is high. With investment bankers and analysts pointing to the huge market opportunity and growth in cloud computing, and CIOs listing it as their top strategic priority, it’s not surprising that every technology vendor in the world would want a piece of the pie. Who cares if that means contradicting statements they made years or months earlier, or putting lipstick on a pig.

The response to our initial announcement of The Washies was pretty outstanding - we’re still getting tweets about it and early nominations for who should top the award list. Now it’s time to officially nominate your own favorite Washer!

Today on www.cloudwashies.com we opened up nominations for five award categories:

    Biggest cloud washer (overall company) - think of this as the people’s choice award!
    Biggest personal washer (individual)
    Worst case of washed advertising (company)
    Most cloud washed public statement (individual and quote)
    Most enthusiastic use of the word cloud (company)

We’ll be taking nominations through Monday, November 28, at which time we’ll take the top candidates in each category and make them the official nominees. Nominations are confidential, so if you work for a Washer and are just as frustrated as we are by this questionable marketing tactic, feel free to express yourself!

Final voting will begin December 1-12.  We’ll be naming the overall category winners on December 14 at a Cloudwashing Award Ceremony at the Cigar Bar in San Francisco.  Space is limited but if you’re interested in attending, poking some fun at people who clearly deserve it, and drinking for free, sign up here.

We’ll be sending out more details about the award ceremony in early December.

Mobile and Social: Unrelated Buzzwords or Hydrogen and Oxygen for Thirsty Enterprises

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Today, I was excited to be part of a panel at SIIA’s All About Mobile conference focused on the intersection of cloud computing and mobility. This opportunity led us to reflect back on our experiences with customers during the past ten months since Appirio established its mobile practice and launched a mobile framework.

One thing that has become clear is that mobile is no longer optional, or an afterthought. For almost every one of our new customer engagements, mobility is a critical value driver and often a key reason enterprises are moving away from existing systems. As we looked back to hundreds of customer discussions, we found 4 distinct use cases that our mobile apps often target:

• Apps that bring relevant CRM data to the user: For example, for a medical device manufacturer, we’re building a location-specific account dashboard for field sales and service personnel that aggregates information on nearby accounts including Chatter, recent orders, payment status and recent incidents. 
• Apps that bring better data into CRM: For example, for a large high-tech company, we built a mobile survey application to bring real-time customer feedback into their CRM system. For another company, we’re building a mobile application that gives sales people the ability to “check-in” to an account. 
• Apps that automate manual processes: For example, for a national provider of post-acute care services, we built a mobile time and treatment tracking application that enables 10,000+ physical therapists to track their time efficiently and accurately, eliminating hours spent on paperwork. 
• Social apps to do fundamentally new things: For example, for a consumer packaged goods company, we’re prototyping a mobile app that encourages employees to take and submit pictures showing where the company’s products are placed in local retail outlets. The pictures are geo-tagged to the store and automatically posted to a Chatter group for that area. The app engages employees directly in the company’s brand and gives the company an additional source of information on retail placement. 

 A common thread across many of the mobile apps we’re building is to bring in a social component, bringing together employees, connecting employees and customers/partners, improving customer interaction and every permutation. Salesforce’s platform helps enable these social features in many ways - for example, a contextual Chatter feed, an account check-in, or pictures posted to a Chatter group. Customers are also demanding more of these social features in their mobile apps. The reason for this is that social and mobile are not just the two buzzwords of the day but are in fact two trends that reinforce each other. There are a few reasons why:

• Unlike traditional apps, social apps are well suited for mobile: Social apps, like Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce Chatter, are well suited to touch interfaces. Their primary interface is a feed with simple inputs - “likes”, short comments, tagging, photos or video - and they focus on bringing relevant information to the user. This is perfectly aligned with what users want to do on mobile devices and what they can do with touch interfaces. Traditional enterprise apps are data-intensive and optimized for keyboard-based interaction which does not translate well even to larger mobile devices like tablets. 
• Mobile apps reach users who want to interact differently: Mobile apps that extend enterprise apps are most often designed to engage a new user, e.g., an executive, or engage a current user in a new context, e.g., a field sales person at a customer site. These users don’t want interact with the application in the old ways, by entering data, running reports, creating activities, etc. They want relevant information that’ll help them do their jobs and they want to be able to share information efficiently. Again, something that a social application with feeds, comments and tagging is well suited for. 
• Collaboration and information access are high on a mobile users’ priorities: When we talked to our customers about the potential impact of mobile apps, their top 2 reasons were around better access to information on the go. Taking a cue from the most used enterprise mobile app - email - collaboration is also a critical priority on the road. Social apps address both these priorities with a single newsfeed that provides a convenient way to access critical information and people. By building integrations with other enterprise applications, social platforms like Salesforce Chatter or Google+ could become the primary mobile interface for all your enterprise apps. 

 So what’s next? We’re in the early days of a major shift in enterprise computing. Social and mobile are transforming enterprise applications from pure systems of record to applications that truly empower employees. As a CIO, the key is to make sure that you are powering your business with cloud applications and platforms. That means making public cloud applications like Salesforce, Google and Workday the backbone of your enterprise and rethinking your business processes to take advantage of what’s now possible.

Social HCM: Why Workday’s Chatter Integration Isn’t About Easy Approvals

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75) 

Since Salesforce made the Social Enterprise its rallying cry and company-wide message early this year, a lot has been written about this topic. However, until now much of the conversation has focused on what social enterprise means for front-office processes like PR, marketing, sales, and customer service. But what does social mean for rest of your business including finance, HR, supply chain and more?

A recent survey of 103 social business early adopters by Ray Wang (@rwang0) provides some clues. According to Ray’s research, while CRM still accounts for the top three use cases, the next three use cases are internal project workspaces, recruiting and employee feedback.

Salesforce Buys Model Metrics - What Does it Mean ?

Narinder Singh 

Today, salesforce.com announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Model Metrics. When we started Appirio in 2006, Model was one of the leaders in the space and the company we most respected in the ecosystem for their approach. Since then Appirio has grown into the largest independent cloud services provider competing regularly with Model Metrics. While we offer our sincerest congratulations to Adam and the entire team at Model on the acquisition, admittedly, we are somewhat relieved to know they will be focused on driving the social enterprise and mobility for Salesforce (and therefore with us), instead of being our most worthy competitor.

At Appirio, we’ve felt for some time that we are in a perfect storm. Our cloud focus, our investments in technology and community, and our incorporation of social and mobile capabilities into our core offerings have enabled us to be one of the few providers innovative enough to help global companies use the cloud to transform their businesses. At the same time, we have become the only pure play cloud solutions provider with global scale. With the acquisition of Model Metrics, salesforce.com further highlights the growing importance of cloud, social and mobile among customers and removes one of the leading services competitors from the ecosystem.

So why is Salesforce doing this, how does it relate to their previous actions (e.g. investing in Appirio in 2008 and before Dreamforce 2011), and how will it impact their ecosystem?

1. The social enterprise opportunity is just that big
Since early this year, Salesforce has aligned their entire company and all of their considerable marketing might around the social enterprise. The social enterprise was the theme of Dreamforce this year, and is the theme for almost every event that Salesforce puts on. Salesforce sees social as a way to change the conversation from providing very good technology for CRM and related processes to being a part of a strategic discussion about a company’s future. While many have admired Marc’s leadership in doing this, they have missed the point that Salesforce believes this is transformative and the key to their becoming the dominant player in all of enterprise IT. It’s more than just an extension of their product strategy, it’s key to redefining the entire marketplace. By adding Model’s mobile development and UI capabilities to their team, Salesforce will be able to make the social enterprise vision tangible for customers.

2. Appirio (and the ecosystem) are pragmatic vs. evangelical about the social enterprise
Here is where it gets tricky. On the one hand, Appirio (and companies like us) are incredibly excited about the social enterprise. We believe in the vision and have seen the impact it can have on companies. We love how strategic it can be for businesses and how it helps us uplevel our conversations with customers.

At the same time, we gravitate towards customers who are already somewhat bought in to the ideas of the social enterprise. Those customers are willing to engage and ready to push forward initiatives that make the social enterprise a reality for their companies. But, this is still a relatively small part of the market.

For the majority of enterprises, there are a few steps before building a broad social enterprise vision. At this point, the mainstream has bought into the power of cloud applications and are starting to see the results. For most companies, there’s a substantive benefit from adopting cloud applications and replacing inflexible on-premise applications with modern, cloud applications. So, Appirio (and others like us) are working hard to satisfy that demand now - creating commercial value for both us and the customer. But, this often defers the more difficult task of investing heavily to help them see and experience the broader social enterprise vision.

With Model Metrics, Salesforce has the ability to invest proactively in helping customers “see their future” because it will drive longer term license revenue and position them as a strategic vendor for the forseeable future. It lets them further accelerate their next wave of growth even as a broad base of customers are just beginning to experience the benefits of the previous one.

3. The Global SIs need help with social enterprise enablement
While we continue to see Salesforce more aggressively highlighting Global SIs like Accenture, Deloitte, and Cap Gemini (at Dreamforce and regional Cloudforce events) in the marketplace, the Global SIs’ business models compel them to focus on their much more profitable services related to on-premise software. They are too vested in their massive on-premise relationships to want real change. While GSIs have been more vocal and committed to the social enterprise, it’s only because they see a massive opportunity for a return to the eight and nine figure transactions of the past (let me re-engineer your whole company) - yet most still have a hard time spelling Twitter. In fact, in the short term GSIs may benefit by being able to lean on Salesforce (Model Metrics) to help them gain the skills and model necessary to rapidly deliver social enterprise results for customers.

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At Appirio, our collaboration with Salesforce has always worked because we are aligned on our vision for the future of enterprise IT and hopes of transforming an entire industry. Their investment in Appirio in August was a testament to that collaboration and a desire to accelerate our strategy of consolidating smaller cloud providers across the globe. We look forward to the same, deep relationship with the latest addition to Salesforce and in continuing our path to being the leading, global, next generation cloud services provider.

Green Light, Red Light: IT’s Dilemma After The Cloud Goes Live

Jason Ambrose (@jasonambrose)

We talk a lot about the benefits of cloud apps in this blog but taking full advantage of the cloud takes more than just a successful roll-out. What happens after go-live is just as important. We've noticed a curious - and, in hindsight, unsurprising - trend among some customers and the industry overall when it comes to cloud applications going live in production. The story goes something like this:

• Company buys in (literally) to the idea that the rate of change for multi-tenant cloud platforms will deliver more innovation over time 
• Migrates their first major business application to the cloud, their breath taken away by a steady diet of green status reports, weekly changes during sprints, and an implementation five times faster and half the cost of traditional implementations 
• Experiences an enormously successful launch, resulting in many dogs or children being named Marc and/or Benioff 
• The good times come to a screeching halt when the app hits production and IT’s governance takes over 

This reminds me of the “Red Light, Green Light” game where kids gleefully run at full speed until the person playing the role of Stoplight says, “Red light!” (Guess which one is IT in this case?) In this game, one of three things happens:

1. The kids ignore the Stoplight (“Green light! Green light! Green light!”). Usually, it’s all fun until someone falls and scrapes their knee. 
2. The Stoplight stays red to keep the kids from running so fast. The Stoplight usually doesn’t last long in this scenario. 
3. Everyone works together to follow the rules (or figure out new ones) and keep the game going. Punch and cookies for everyone! 

The last part is a hard challenge. In the Red Light, Green Light game, the rules are simple and don’t change all that often (depending on who the players are). But it’s different in the fast moving world of enterprise IT, and unfortunately today there are too many “Red Light” moments. Supporting enterprise applications is no kid’s game, and both sides have very legitimate reasons for their behavior. Business users need to sustain a rapid pace of change to adapt to rapidly changing markets. IT needs to ensure that changes don’t do more harm than good.

So what’s behind the challenge, and how can companies adjust?

If you look at how most production applications are still governed, not much has been adapted to the world of cloud applications. Things are still optimized to assume a negligible pace of change punctuated by major changes in keeping with waterfall releases. Consider this list:

• User Support - Support teams follow detailed, exhaustive scripts and procedures (known as Runbooks). But what good is a runbook if the system changes every 2-4 weeks?
• Knowledgebase/Documentation - Instead of relying on community knowledge, most companies depend on heavy conceptual documentation which takes a long time to write, update, read and understand. 
• Change control - Rigorous change control processes borne of fragile legacy apps in complex environments tend to treat all change as equal - adding a field is given the same level of scrutiny as implementing a significant new module. 
• Data governance - Business logic can change quickly, but it can take time to think through how the data should or shouldn’t change and how users should be educated to consume the changes. Integrations - Teams supporting integration layers or legacy systems cannot keep pace with a cloud platform’s rate of change. 
• Release management - Blackout periods and boundary system release windows leave limited opportunities to promote changes even if the platform can support frequent deployment cycles. 

That’s enough change to send anyone crying to their parents. Here are some suggestions on how to get started:

Re-think your approach - Rule #1: There is no such thing as steady state. Embed change in the approach itself. Creative destruction within your processes should be mandatory. Leave room in your development planning to simplify your app and the architecture. Create a dynamic where your teams seek the minimum viable level of governance. Simplify.

Not all changes are equal - You need an express lane for changes that can occur with minimal risk. Tier your release schedule to account for light, medium and heavy changes. Heavily favor changes that have a high emotional impact with users - a big reward in relieving pain or thrilling users can overcome a lot of deployment risks.

Don’t be satisfied with the same old support - The good news is there are a lot of risks you no longer have to manage in this new world. With on-premise apps, you are stuck with a model involving heavy triage and oversight because you’re dealing with complex technical environments with siloed expertise. With cloud apps, much of that underlying complexity rests with the cloud provider freeing up teams to think more about the user and what makes them productive. Don’t be afraid to throw out Managed Service Providers who haven’t adapted to the new world and simply want to get paid for showing up and forcing you to live by their rules. Don’t trade low-value hours (commodity support labor) for high-value hours through the inconvenience of deceptively named “self-service” practices.

It can seem daunting to accept these challenges but it can be liberating with the right approach and focus. The very premise of adopting cloud computing is to relieve your team from the burden of managing hardware and systems. With that relief comes the opportunity to think about how to focus more on your users and on finding compromises with the business and less on outdated processes to manage. If you do open yourself up to change, you and the other kids may find yourselves having fun again.

Ways to use crowdsourcing to increase innovation

By Sal Partovi

A fascinating article made the rounds last month, describing a crowdsourcing success story involving teams of international gamers, AIDS, and a specific protein's structure.

For about a decade, scientists from all over the globe have been stumped to figure out how a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys folds.  When an attempt to use “Rosetta”, a protein-folding application, failed to solve the problem, researchers turned to a last resort - a unique gaming platform called Fold.it.  To everyone’s surprise, a team of 15 gamers calling themselves the “Contenders” solved a riddle in 10 days that had stumped scientists for years - “an accomplishment that could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases” according to this MSNBC article.

So what does a protein structure have to do with cloud computing?

While the concept of crowdsourcing is still in its relative infancy (the term itself wasn’t coined until 2006), it seems like every day there’s a new company or service using crowdsourcing to create assets, solve problems, recommend things or even outsource microtasks.

The real question is no longer whether crowdsourcing is here to stay or whether it can provide value - the questions lay more around the model itself.  What problems can crowdsourcing be applied to next? How should a provider structure the community to promote collaboration and ensure the best ideas rise to the top? How do people effectively use the model and the results?

These were all questions Appirio asked when we created CloudSpokes - a crowdsourcing community for cloud development - earlier this year.  As a cloud service broker, Appirio is focused on helping enterprises successfully adopt, connect and extend public cloud platforms.  Over the last five years, we’ve built an internal team of 400 cloud experts to do this, but early on saw the need to foster and tap into a broader community of developers to create solutions for ourselves, our customers and the industry overall.  The community has since grown to 25,000+ members and we’re constantly surprised at the different ways it’s being used.

CloudSpokes was not created to just address our needs. Like the protein enzyme challenge mentioned above, crowdsourcing a solution is about effectively engaging and fostering a broader community of people to solve tough, interesting or even fun challenges - whether those challenges are presented by us or others in the industry.

How can a CIO use crowdsourcing to increase innovation?

Understanding the myriad of crowdsourcing services available is just the tip of the iceberg. Crowdsourcing simplifies certain parts of a process - similar to how cloud computing pushes certain responsibilities to a specialized provider - but with that simplicity there’s a cost.  Not everything fits the model.  In the cloud development space specifically, there’s a certain type of project that fits and a certain way to define that project in a digestible way.  Here are a few recommendations on how to use this new model effectively:

• Look for the Long-tail
• Non-core elements of a project or bite-sized additions that would have a significant impact are great opportunities for crowdsourcing.  For one customer that we’re working with on a large sales process transformation, we used CloudSpokes to crowdsource a Sales Leadership Dashboard.  During the project, the customer had an idea that a leaderboard would encourage adoption by appealing to the natural competitiveness of the sales team.  This dashboard wasn’t in the specifications for the original project but is likely to have a significant impact on adoption.


• Crowdsource Creativity
• Certain problems, by their very nature, can be solved in a number of ways, but it’s the creativity of that solution that will separate success from failure.  Unlike traditional waterfall build and iterate projects (some of which never come to fruition), crowdsourcing seeks multiple solutions to a given problem instead of just one interpretation.  For example, creating engaging mobile and social apps requires creative thinking and new ideas in order to achieve the best user experience.  This is why Appirio turned to CloudSpokes to crowdsource the 2011 Dreamforce Mobile Party App which was used by 10K+ attendees at Dreamforce.


• When the "Whole > Sum + of + Parts"
• We’ve seen our share of technology projects which would be a fantastic fit for crowdsourcing, but not in their traditional framing.  Certain projects can be broken down into a handful of key pieces that when slotted together complete a much larger puzzle.  With the right guidance, we've helped a few clients deconstruct a problem and crowdsource the solutions.  A prime example of this was a client's need for a Mobile Account Check-In App - an app that would allow a sales rep to "check-in" via an iPad at an account's physical location, and have that record tracked in their CRM system.  The final solution was crowdsourced as (1) a Geolocation Toolkit challenge for the map functionality, and (2) an Account Check-In UI challenge which used that geolocation toolkit to construct the app front-end.

These recommendations only scratch the surface for what’s possible, but hopefully provide some food for thought on what problems a community of experts could help you solve in your organization.  In the Foldit example, researchers tried for 10 years to achieve what was done in 10 days with a new perspective and a new model - can you afford that level of ROI (Risk of Ignoring)?