This is truly awesome and inspiring as a creative work.

Apr 6-12, 2010 edition

I’m glad Curt got my favourite line in there, courtesy of Vancouver’s world-famous sci-fi author, William Gibson: “the future is already here, it just isn’t widely distributed yet.” True in many domains, including cloud computing.

Not the best article I’ve had, not the worst. More accurately, when I worked at Business Objects, I worked on collaborative software, web 2.0 strategy, and also SUPPORTED the Saas business unit by providing additional market research capacity.

As usual, this article doesn’t clearly articulate the overlaps between Saas and cloud but I’m not surprised. That’s hard to do at the best of times. My version of that has always been that cloud is now being broadly defined in three columns and three layers so the whole grid is “cloud”, column 1 is “true public cloud” and the box in the upper left corner is “true Saas”.

In Curt’s defense, it was the middle of the Olympics and he was surrounded by much more interesting work.

Since Business in Vancouver doesn’t offer permalinks to their articles (see above line!), I’ve copied the whole article here below:

Cloud control growing for more businesses

Companies that service and use the shared computing model are growing in step with the technology

Curt Cherewayko

It’s probably been four years since Troy Angrignon last had a conversation about building a desktop-based application, let alone built one.

At that time, he was an emerging technology strategist with Business Objects, where he helped build the company’s first Software-as-a-service (SaaS) unit and do market analysis for the unit’s first product.

That Angrignon’s title included the word “emerging” reflects that SaaS and “cloud computing” are relatively new concepts.

But while SaaS and cloud computing aren’t ubiquitous in business yet and while there’s still confusion about what the cloud is, Angrignon and other IT professionals agree that the cloud is growing.

“The future is here,” said Angrignon. “It just isn’t widely distributed yet. All software should be built as SaaS. There’s no reason to do it otherwise.”

Angrignon, who co-chaired a day-long cloud computing conference in Vancouver last month, is now an independent IT consultant.

In its simplest form, the cloud is a mish-mash of remote applications, platforms and infrastructure connected to their users by an Internet connection.

Whereas enterprise or desktop-based software is housed in its user’s local hardware and servers, cloud computing applications are typically based in data centres that can be hundreds of miles away from the user.

And the businesses that manage and maintain cloud software can be hundreds of miles away from the data centre and their clients.

Businesses on either side of the cloud computing model – the providers and their customers – are growing in step with the cloud, as providers advance cloud technologies and more businesses adopt such technologies.

Sarah Morton, president of Backbone Systems, likens cloud computing to a co-op program in which member benefits increase as the co-op grows.

While many of Backbone’s clients are small and medium-sized businesses, they’re part of a cloud computing co-op that’s powered by thousands of other organizations.

Backbone clients use the same programs and computing power as some of the largest international corporations.

Morton added that “business are sharing a large enterprise infrastructure and paying a smaller price for it.”

And as they scale up, businesses can access more services and computing strength in the cloud as needed.

Discovery Parks retired its desktop software and internal network and moved to a SaaS model largely because it didn’t want to have to hire a dedicated IT professional to manage its IT as its real estate portfolio grew.

Mark Betteridge, Discovery’s executive director and CEO, estimated that such a professional would command an annual salary of roughly $50,000.

Instead of updating and maintaining its software, licences and firewalls itself, Discovery pays a monthly fee to Backbone to manage those tasks.

Previously, if Discovery had network or software complications, it would have to hire an outside IT troubleshooter and suffer through what could be days of downtime.

“With Backbone, they can diagnose it almost immediately and fix it almost immediately,” said Betteridge.

Backbone houses its customers’ servers and networks in a Vancouver-based data centre.

The company, which bundles and manages products for clients, launched its first product, a remote e-mail and business application offered by Microsoft Corp., in 2006.

With 10 employees, Backbone now manages software and applications for more than 1,000 employees in numerous organizations.

In 2008, Mono County, California, and the Town of Mammoth, which is in the county, were using enterprise systems to manage land development and sustainable growth.

The two governments’ small and aging in-house systems had become increasingly dysfunctional as the resort community’s population grew.

“We were faced with significant growing pains,” said Nate Greenberg, GIS co-ordinator for the town and county.

Last year, the two governments switched to web-based permitting platforms managed by BasicGov Systems Inc. after being referred to the Vancouver company by another government.

Greenberg said BasicGov’s platform has reduced government infrastructure and the number of staff hires needed to handle increased pressure on their permitting systems.

He added that staff can access the web-based platform from any location that has an Internet application.

As well, the single systems replaced a patchwork of in-house systems that often couldn’t communicate well with each other.

“That allows for really smart decision-making ability because people in one department can see what people in another department are doing,” said Greenberg.

Like Morton, Greenberg pointed to the strength-in-numbers benefits of cloud computing.

“With the power of all those people buying into it, we can leverage much larger functionality than we could have locally.” •

cgc@biv.com

This article from Business in Vancouver April 6-12, 2010; issue 1067

Business in Vancouver (www.biv.com) has been publishing in-depth local business news, analysis and commentary since 1989. The newspaper also produces a weekly ranked list of the biggest companies and players in a wide range of B.C. industries and commercial sectors, monthly features and industry-focused sections that arm its subscribers with a complete package of local business intelligence each week.

Firstly Apple announced that the whole iPad thing was just a big April Fool’s joke. Those crazy kids.

Kleiner Perkins doubled down by increasing their iFund from $100M to $200M. Clearly, they didn’t hear about the aforementioned joke.

Apple is getting ready to tour people through the iPad with the oddly named “Meet Your New iPad” sessions. Surprising nobody, the marketing communications people are gushing that it will be an close look at “the most amazing features of iPad.” I’m pretty sure there will be lots of talk about “amazing magic” and “magic amazingness” in there too.

At 8:19am this morning, CNet wrote about the big names unveiling iPad apps including Netflix and EA. Then at 10:47am, Google announced that the Gmail team had released an HTML5 Gmail web app for iPad. Then a couple of hours later, InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman bitterly complained that the entire software universe had not yet instantly released new updated apps, particularly calling out uhhh…Google for not doing so. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Continuing on the market-readiness theme, there are rumours that the iPad will launch with 1000 iPad-specific apps. Meanwhile Apple has begun to create a list of websites that are iPad-ready. So far there are four. That leaves only 75 zillion left to update/catalog. Take that Adobe.

Speaking of Adobe, since Apple hates Flash, they need to line up organizations on their side of the fight. Seems like so far, they’re getting some bruisers into the game. CBS ABC, NYT, CNN, Sports Illustrated, Reuters, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix, and MLB.com are all saying “screw you Adobe, we’re with Apple and HTML5.” Must be awkward at meetings when the NYT is asking for discounts on Adobe software.

The beleaguered magazine publishing industry launched their opening experimental salvos with a mix of free/freemium/paid offerings. Leading the pack in silliness was the Wall Street Journal with their offer of a $17.29/mo subscription. I’m not sure if that’s horrendous or brilliant. From a margin perspective, I suppose if they can get it, they’re laughing.

CNet finally beat the Onion news by writing the single best article on those creepy weird people who sleep in line-ups to buy first release products. Nice work CNet. Boo on you Onion News.

Mashable showed us how board games might be a killer app of sorts for the iPad. Finally, no need to dig those dusty boxes out of the top shelf in the spare room when the family comes over!

WordPress managed to build what I think might be the most useless app so far: a blogging app for iPad. I can’t imagine trying to build hypertext rich articles on the iPad. What a nightmare. I write my posts with 2 or 3 windows open and 2 monitors. Trying to do this in a single app with no multi-tasking would be horrific. Interestingly the almighty, ever-present and usually lucid Om Malik wrote a post titled “Why iPad will Change Blogging for me” in which he made the case that he wasn’t really sure it would and counted the many pains he could envision. Maybe he wrote that post on the iPad and that led to the cognitive dissonance.

Meanwhile in me-too land, a number of soon-to-be-forgotten players launched a number of indistingushable iPad alternatives. I’d give you the link, but really, why bother?

That’s the week that was on the eve of the launch of the iPad. Tomorrow a new era dawns.

Oh wait, there’s an iPad v2 coming with a camera? And multi-tasking? Okay, then maybe THAT’S the dawn of the new era.

Enjoy!

Vancouver’s First Cloud Camp is in two more days!

What will you do at Cloud Camp? You will learn how to take advantage of cloud computing to do things you could not do before, to save money, to be more flexible and agile. You can get your questions answered about security, privacy, and compliance. You can learn about and understand the differences between public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds. Hear from your peers who are building and developing on the cloud about how they have stopped buying and installing and maintaining physical servers.

CloudCamp is a free full-day “unconference” where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing.

End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to attend and participate.

We’d like to ask your help to spread the word. You can do that by:

• Sharing us on Facebook
• Letting your LinkedIn contacts know you’re attending the event
• Tweet about us using the hashtag #Cloudcamp or full phrase “#Cloudcamp Vancouver”
• Email your friends and invite them to come.

The URL for sign-ups is: http://www.cloudcamp.org/vancouver.

Sign-up closes Friday night at midnight

Details are below as a reminder:

DATE/TIME: This Saturday March 13, 2010, 9:00am

LOCATION: Discovery Park, 887 Great Northern Way (map)

COFFEE and LUNCH is provided and/or feel free to bring your own.

COST: FREE! (bring your friends!)

AGENDA: (this may change)
9:00-9:30am Registration
9:30-9:45am Welcome & Intros
9:45-10:00am Lightning Talk
10:00-10:30am Unpanel
10:30-11:00am Organize Unconference
11:15-12:00pm Session 1
1:00-1:15pm Lunch
1:15-2:00pm Breakout Session #2
2:00-3:00pm Breakout Session #3
3:00-3:30pm Wrap-up Session
Evening – ad-hoc dinner/drinks somewhere??? (at your own expense!)

We would like to thank our sponsors who have made this event possible.

Venue: Discovery Park
Gold: RightScale, Backbone Systems
Silver: Peer 1, Tropo, Agreement Express, Layer 7
Media/Promotion: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, BCTIA, TechVibes

Thanks from the Cloud Camp Vancouver team.

And if you’re interested in cloud computing, please remember to sign up to attend the full day Cloud Camp Vancouver being held on March 13 at Discovery Park on Great Northern Way. I’m co-hosting it with local cloudies Trevor Orzstynowicz and Jenny Yang, both of whom are building cloud companies here in Vancouver.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/how-to-optimize-your-saas-revenue-streams-rackspace-saas-cloud-2010/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/how-to-optimize-your-saas-revenue-streams-rackspace-saas-cloud-2010/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:18:40 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=970 I found an awesome PPT deck today called How to Optimize Your SaaS Revenue Streams – Rackspace SaaS & Cloud 2010.

Its authors Lincoln Murphy and Justin Pirie do a great job of articulating the high level difficulty of building a Saas play and explain it in simple terms. Great 100,000 foot view.

It really is THIS hard.

Earlier Schmidt used his first ever keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile phone trade show to give the industry a call to action, suggesting that telecommunications companies should embrace the new world of smartphones and cloud computing, not fear it.

He said high levels of connectivity and cloud computing – the idea that devices can be made smarter by relying on the computers on the internet to carry out complex tasks such as voice recognition – have brought the industry to a turning point.

“The confluence of these three factors mans something very fundamental is happening. A phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter-ego,” he said. “It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are. It can take pictures better than we can remember things.”

He said Google is switching to a ‘mobile first’ model, with more and more developers thinking first about how the applications and services they have created will work on a mobile device.

“Culturally it is time to figure out a way to say yes to the emergent new services and ideas that will not come from Google but from those literally millions of companies and programming shops that will be built on this new platform.”

“Now is the time for all of us to get behind it. What I would suggest to you here, right now, at Mobile World Congress is to understand that the new rule is ‘mobile first’; mobile first in everything.. it’s time for us to make mobile first the right answer.”

I like that phrase: “Mobile First”. I think I’ll use it.

Holy cow, did I ever call this one right back in March of this year. Scary right. Apple has reinvented the mobile industry…again.

Apple’s new iPad is a radical game-changer, a disruptive competitor to Amazon, a disruptor to the software business and a great leap forward in terms of user interface. It’s freaking awesome. This will be Steve Jobs’ legacy:

• Apple update:
  • they just had their larget quarter ever
  • their gross margins are up over 40% while the rest of the industry is collapsing while fighting it out in the netbook category
  • They have over 140,000 apps in the app store that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.
  • They’re now a > 50B company.
  • Apple is the world’s largest mobile product company: bigger than Nokia, Samsung, or Sony. Holy crap.
  • 125M credit cards that have downloaded over 12 Billion products.

• The iPad
  • “netbooks suck at everything”
  • we decided to create a tablet
  • 9.7″ diagonal
  • custom processor
  • <1/2″ thick; less than 1.5 pounds;
  • auto-rotation, GPS, compass, 3G, WIFI
  • all new iTunes
  • all new iPhoto
  • all new calendar
  • all new address book
  • It’s a full on replacement for the old “day-timer”
  • multi-touch everywhere
  • 10 hours of work time and a month of standby time
  • insanely fast graphics
  • run all 140,000 existing iPhone apps at regular 1x size or at 2x full-size;
  • new apps can be built to run at full screen
  • soft keyboard is almost the same size as a real keyboard
  • plugs into a projector and a portable keyboard and has its own cover

• iBooks
  • 5 major publishers on board, more coming
  • beautiful display
  • iTunes like bookstore built in
  • Editorial notes from me:
    • as a user of the Kindle DX, I can’t wait for this. I hate the low speed and crappy hardware of the DX but love having my books with me eveerywhere I go.
    • They have only said “we have 5 major publishers on board” but haven’t said anything about how many titles they have. Amazon has 400,000 and counting and content is king.
    • I would also be happy to use the “Kindle for iPhone” application from Amazon if they release one. I can see having my e-books split across the two libraries which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world.

• iWork – all new iPad apps for $9.99 each (WHOA).
  • brand new apps
  • multi-touch
  • incredible app for a portable device
  • Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations.
  • [I'm floored by this $9.99 pricing. They've just disrupted the entire personal productivity software pricing model.]

• Accessories:
  • we have built a dock so you can plug in and type and recharge
  • we have a great case built for it

• Pricing:
  • DATA PLAN
    • USA:
      • $14.99 = 250MB/mo (good for most people) with no contract; cancel anytime you want [this is great because so many people were so pissed off at AT&T)
      • $29.99 unlimited
      • Both include free use of AT&T wifi hotspots
      • Cancel anytime is a great feature
    • Rest of world:
      • July 2010 pricing coming soon
      • but you can use a micro SIM to run it on your own local carrier with our permission before July
  • IPAD (wifi only pricing / wifi + 3G) [kind of like the iPod Touch / iPhone]
    • 16GB: $499/$629
    • 32GB: $599/729
    • 64GB: $699/829

SUMMARY thoughts:

As usual, Apple has knocked it out of the park. They have built on their successes that came before: iPhone, app store, iPhone economy, app store, iTunes, and now iPad. This is the beginning of the next arc for Apple and will add another $50B/yr to their revenue. You can see their follow-on areas to add: video camera for skype/camming.

The price models illustrate the best pricing strategy I have seen. They chose the price to go to market with $499 and also had margin requirements (knowing Steve and team from a distance) and as evidenced by their increased margins from this last quarterly earnings call. They then engineered it to be producible at that margin and at that market price. It’s staggering.

This will cause yet another Cambrian explosion in application development and a (temporary?) bump in the publishing realm as all of the struggling newspapers move their content onto this platform.

Fan-boy glow aside, this is a technology and business game changer across mobile, netbooks, and laptops and will fundamentally restructure things AGAIN like the iPhone did.

I”m shocked at how well Apple has consistently executed on their business from the Macbooks to the iPhone/iPod Touches, the App Store, the iTunes store, and now the iPad. This is the beginning of something huge for Apple.

Nice work Steve and team!

Sign me up!

For more information see:

• iPad Main Page
• Features
• Design
• Gallery

The CIO blog post is here, the release notes are here, the press release is here and the map is here.

(By the way, I’d like to thank Felipe (at) Liquidbook.com for his kick butt work on the flash application. If you need any development done, call him. He was a treat to work with.)

As I look at two trends that I’ve been part of in the past couple of years, I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which was about reaching out beyond the firewall and interacting across boundaries, and I see cloud computing which is about moving systems and applications outside of the firewall into “the space in between.” Now we have both desire/intent (enterprise 2.0) and ability (cloud) to enable much broader and deeper integration of networks of actors, be those vendors, suppliers, partners, or press.

I laughed when I read this because it’s so true. I haven’t heard anybody say “DAMN IT, I can’t send email because my inbox is full!!!” since working at a prior company where we used Exchange where 5000 people exclaimed that almost daily. What a colossal waste of their time. Only about 1/10 of 1% of them knew how to set up auto-archiving so it was a huge drain on the organization’s resources.

Good on ya Google. Nice simple ad, straight to the point.

There are more but those have been the ones I have spent the most time immersed in this last couple of years. I have worked quite intensely in teams that have used all three of these modes:

• Phone (audio)
• Google Talk (live chat) and Phone (audio)
• Skype (live and persistent chat and audio and video)

The experiences are all very different and it has become more pronounced for me lately. I wonder if anybody has had similar experiences. First, it helps to set some context. Every tool addresses a slightly different X/Y where X is persistence and Y is dynamism.  Bob Serr has a slightly fuzzy but interesting graphic of this on his site that I’ll link here:

Phone and video and IM are highly transient and very dynamic in nature. Intranets (particularly old-school ones!) were very persistent and static. That’s changing with products like Google Sites, Microsoft Sharepoint, ThoughtFarmer and MindTouch. Documents are moving up the dynamic scale too as they move out of Microsoft Office and into Google and Zoho Docs where they can be more dynamically updated. But you’ll find something called “Persistent chat” up in the corner and it’s something that has been around in many applications for years but it’s not something that people think much about.

My point is this: your collaboration platform dictates your collaboration space – how much area you cover in this graph. More is better.

My experience in working with Group 1 (phone people) is that it’s okay but human English language is not that great at describing things so I often have to share documents or my screen out so that the people on the other end of the call can really understand clearly what I’m discussing. It’s okay but it’s very limited and I often try to move these people towards more collaborative tools.

My experience in working with teams that are using AIM, Gtalk,  or MSN (does anybody use MSN any more?) is that we can have great one-to-one communication (open channel, ping person, chat, optionally move to phone, close conversation, close channel). Moving from that to group chat is simple enough (add a person to the chat) but isn’t frequently done because group chat was only added recently, so users are not accustomed to it. Most of the GTalk users don’t know that there IS a group chat or that you can do audio and video because those features have been slowly rolled into the product but since it was always used as a one to one chat channel, it’s kind of hard to envision as anything but. It’s a chat tool trying to move upstream to become an audio/video tool and it’s not getting there very quickly from a user adoption perspective.

My experience working with teams living in Skype is materially and significantly different. It’s like going from 1940 dial phones to 2020 Star trek video phones. You might think of it as “the way to make free international phone calls” but it really is much, much more. Firstly, the whole company can have an open “watercooler” channel for trash-talking and cross-company live chatter. It’s like the kitchen of the virtual office. It’s always there and you can wander in anytime to see who’s around or even what was said hours ago. That is the power of persistent chat. Second, you can instantly set up and tear down group chat rooms, sort of like pulling four people away from their desks and ducking into a meeting room at a real office. Third, if there’s a reason to do so, you can just hit CALL and all of the attendees are now on speakerphone. Ta-da – instant voice conference without having everybody dial into a freeconference on-demand line. Fourth, you can leave those rooms open sort of like project “war rooms” so that people can have discussion in there about the project and it doesn’t have to pollute other group chats. This is really just another persistent chat, but this time narrowed to a subset of people in just this one project. The great thing about persistent chat rooms is that if you’re logged off when people are chatting, the next time you log in, all of the missed conversation will be replayed for you. This is powerful stuff. Sixth, because video is built in and works very well, people tend to set up their laptops (or purchase new ones) with cameras and actually USE them. In a prior company, we bought all employees new MacBook Pros so that everybody had instantaneous access to skype audio and video without saying “oh hang on a sec – I have to find my camera and headset and plug it in.” Heck, even the new base 13″ MacBooks have them for $1000 each! Seventh, Skype now offers one-way screen sharing which means one less application to fiddle with if you just want to jump on a screen to demo something. It actually works pretty well. That to me is a bonus because there are definitely better screen-sharing applications out there.

Running distributed project teams is hard but it’s becoming the norm. Buying centralized real estate doesn’t make sense for a whole team anymore, not when you’re hiring people all over the globe in order to get the best people for the job. My recommendation is this: if you’re running a distributed project team, figure out how to ensure that they all have machines with built-in mics and cameras and use Skype. Set up a company wide room and a room for every project team. Teach your team how to quickly assemble ad-hoc team rooms and how to make team audio calls. It will give your team a sense of connectedness and the ability to assemble ad-hoc teams that is really really hard to achieve using anything else out there at the moment.  It’s hard to run a distributed team at the best of times. the more barriers you can remove (time-wise, setup-wise, technology-wise, excuse-wise), the better the communication, and the better the business can run.

Please add your thoughts to the comments below. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences here.

Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google Apps, but there are several larger issues that need to be addressed before there is any kind of mass adoption.

Letting users use what they want to use (Outlook) while being able to use a back-end from Google that allows 25GB per user (and not the fantastically annoying 100 MEGA bytes offered up by most in-house Exchange admins because they want to make their lives easier and their users lives hellish) is absolutely brilliant. This is about lowering barriers to adoption and user behaviour change barriers are a big deal.

With this move, IT owners now get to provide better uptime (Gmail’s effective 99.9% uptime is frankly higher than many corporate email systems or at least close to par), more storage (250x more on average),  a much more functional web interface than Outlook Web Access, and native Blackberry push email all while saving 66% of their operational costs. I believe that enterprise adoption of Gmail will begin to increase rapidly.