Is this months conversation, Dan and I talk about email and collaboration solutions – HMC, BPOS, Google Apps etc – the technical focus of hosters and how businesses look at products. There’s also a glance to the future of communications and service consumption in light of the ( alleged ) Apple Tablet device launch. Are devices once again driving the services?
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Last week there were a bunch of stories floating about covering ‘Cloud’ and it’s related technologies and thinking. By no means all-encompassing, here are the stories which caught my attention.
Apparently more CIOs than ever are now thinking about Cloud-based technologies and how they can be adopted to provide benefits to their organisations.
This hit me on a couple of levels, the first was ‘Great, this means that all of the cool stuff we’ve been hammering on about for ages is finally being taken seriously’ the second was ‘Great the CIOs are doing what they’re being paid for.’ The second was, of course, dripping in irony!
So CIOs are examining emerging technology solutions and judging their applicability for their businesses huh? Wow, shock-horror!
But on a more serious note, is IS important for online services – the ‘Cloud’ – to be taken as a serious alternative by businesses and built in to any technical strategy which might be being designed or brought under review.
WHO?! Yes that’s what I thought.. aren’t they the printer people? Well it turns out that imaging specialists (that’s a ‘Yes’ they are the camera people) Ricoh have continued to roll out their online storage solution, Quanp, with the strap-line “A fresh new way to store, manage and share your digital life memories”.
Now on-line picture storage and access is nothing new, but here’s the thing it’s not so much about the number of gigabytes of storage, it’s about the reliability, uptime and trust you have in the storage provider. Does your current picture store have multiple, geographically redundant data stores? This one does – quality in service delivers customer satisfaction.
But the bottom line when dealing with mass consumers is this, is it easy, is it cheap (or free) and do I trust it. Get these three right and you’re on to a winner. The problem I think Ricoh and Quanp has is that people will simply say “Who?”
And while we’re on the subject of storage…
It seems that Google has opened up it’s Docs storage to non-Docs format files now. Consumers can store up to 1GB of non Google Docs files free of charge with a nominal fee of $0.25 per GB per year (!) thereafter. This is significant in a couple of ways I think. Firstly it’s a direct poke in the eye to Microsoft (no real surprise there) and second it’s also a swipe at Apple’s MobileMe service.
Now both the MS and the Apple services have other aspects to them, MobileMe allows for a whole bunch of other stuff, as well as files, to be synchronised between your Apple devices. Microsoft still has a number of products out in the space providing Cloud storage (perhaps a confusing number), I use the Live Mesh solution for my file sharing and collaboration work it’s good, free and cross platform (Windows and OS-X) and it’s incredibly easy to set up and use both on- and off-line. But the more direct comparison is SkyDrive – 25GB for free, simply sign-up.
The trick with Google though is that they suddenly arrive with a solution which eclipses others, the Google Apps suite has significant potential, is all in one place, is gaining thought space so could easily steal functionally integrated remote storage too.
Research body EMA (Enterprise Management Associates) has been busy beavering away at the issues no being seen with ‘Cloud’ services. Principally those being that there are an awful lot of cowboys out there advocating a ‘do it now, planning is for wimps!’ approach to adoption. Yes this is a fast moving world and yes delay can sometimes be detrimental to an organisation but still, care need to be taken.
EMA’s finding show
Useful stuff, I’m sure you will agree. But further underlining the real and genuine need to a solid strategy and a planned approach to the adoption of ‘Cloud’ services.
This one caught my eye for a number of reasons. I’m a Mac user and use iTunes – a lot! I’m an Android user thanks to my LG BL40 and I also carry around an iPod Classic 80GB, because I like my tunes/podcasts/audiobooks on-tap.
So it seems that this little applications – Nutsie (anag. iTunes, do you see what they did there?!) allows you to put your collection of music up onto the Nutsie servers, from which the little app streams them and stores them for playback from your Android equipped device. Sounds pretty cool, my music available to me, wherever I am and I only need to carry one device around with me.
This is actually making some simple even more simple. My iPod syncs up when it’s connected and I drop it in my pocket. My phone is (almost) surgically attached to me anyway so for my life there’s little of no impact for this application. If you’ve got an Android and do want access to you music stash however I guess this means something. I still can’t help but have the, mildly paranoid, feeling that 1) they’re nicking my tunes! and 2) They’ll sell / use my ‘most played’ as some sort of metric for nefarious marketing purposes. I’m sure that neither of these are the case of course and the the Nutsie people are all good and true. Still It’ll be interesting to see what Google do along these lines, after all they are all about Cloud ad mobile devices these days!
I love research companies and the figures which are quoted. A while ago the following numbers were trotted out to a, very receptive, audience of hosters “Revenue opportunity in excess of $1bn per year for Hosted Business-class Email”. Of course the reality in the following year was substantially less that this and the landscape has changed substantially as a result.
My point here is that research is only ever valid for the individual giving the answers. Anything beyond this is statistics and a best guess. Really.
I’ve no doubt that the usage of enterprise-class Cloud services will rise significantly over the next 5 years, but the revenues? The more likely reality is the the usage will increase, the applications and services will become more functionally rich and the payment models will change, but I think we’ll see that more of the revenue stream will be discounted and rolled up into overall subscription models. I wouldn’t pay extra to use my on-line service from my mobile, if I’m paying to access it on-line the method is my choice surely?
There is a famous quote, now over 100 years old, which states: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”.
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Congratulations to IBM for landing a major deal with Panasonic for it’s LotusLive online collaboration suite. Seriously, well done!
I’ve never been a huge fan of Notes as an application or environment, I found it clunky and strange and somehow not fitting in with my PC look and feel – hieroglyphs in the logon box(!). It’s been a few years of course, but I think that the look and feel are along the same lines.
But a 300,000 user win over Microsoft is significant in a couple of ways. For a long time we’ve been led to believe that Exchange server is the best way to deliver Enterprise-class collaboration and anything else was simply niche. We’ve also been told that, in terms of SaaS, the Microsoft platform is simply superior to others at it enables access from anywhere at any time. The other thing here is that there SHOULD be competition and I’m pleased that there is.
Without the challenge of competition and the occasional significant loss, all of the vendors would lapse pretty quickly into lotus-eater status (no pun intended!). Competition drives innovation and progress and this is vital for us all as consumers.
Microsoft have seen erosion of their desktop dominance over the last couple of years, and not from tech-centric Linux users either. Apple have been taking big bites out of the consumer market space with the ‘it just works’ model of product delivery. The result is that Microsoft have put some significant effort into Windows 7 and it shows. Vista was truly awful and cost them dear, ’7′ as a refresh of that Vista core is a breath of fresh air – albeit with a subtle scent of Cupertino underneath!
The online service space is currently host to a bunch of Email+ solutions and it’s sometimes a bit difficult to look beyond the brand elements to see what meets your requirements. It’s with good historic reason that Microsoft = enterprise quality, Lotus = legacy and Google = cheap (in the not-so-good sense of the word). But the game is changing and everyone is stepping up their approach and there are the new players too, Cisco have a solution, Postini and Open Exchange are gaining ground with the Hosters and therefore growing in the market.
For a number of reasons I’ve had to take a genuine look at online email+ services over the last couple of weeks, examining what I wanted from a system as well as what I actually needed and how much (if anything) I would pay for such a solution. The results were interesting to me and I’ve moved in a direction which, 12 months ago, I’d never have considered. That’s how munch things have changed and it’s all down to one thing, competition.
There are going to be casualties along the way and that’s always unfortunate, people and organisations will make wrong (but never bad) decisions because they didn’t take the time to actually understand what they needed or bought based on a brand or predjudice, rather than getting the best technical and business fit. There’ll also be a thinning of the ranks of the vendors too, perhaps not fatally for anyone but certainly the initial shortlist will be shorter. That shortlist should always have 2-3 solutions on at least and it’s my hope that those solution will continue to push the levels of service and functionality forward.
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Most, if not all, organisations have in some form an “Internet Policy” which would typically describe what is acceptable to do with your browser during office hours. I’ve seen these range from ‘anything as long as it’s legal and you don’t waste time’ to ‘these 3 sites for these 5 people ONLY’.
And this is fine if you expect people to leave their brains at the door on the way out of the building and their mobile devices at the door on their way in. The problem is that neither of these are practical in the world today (OK certain security-sensitive organisations do actually require that you NOT bring mobile devices into the building but they kind of fall outside of my scope of general business here). So even if the strict policies of the organisation are enforced at the desktop, folks are still able to access Facebook, twitter, blog-spaces and the like from their “mobile phones”. I’m quoting here because as time passes these devices have become so much more than phones and the name increasingly doesn’t fit. These are the the small screens which make up the screen triumvirate of most of our lives; small screens = mobile devices, mid-screens = desktop systems (PCs, Macs etc) and large screens being our TVs which are also becoming a source of rich media and not just TV broadcast.
But I digress, the point here is that very few organisations have put in place policies and guidelines to help the individual employees understand what they should and should not share outside of the company, how they communicate what they are doing and who that communication is available too. An example of this would be the Facebook invitation to ‘Friends’ to attend a party. The intent was honest but the method and audience hadn’t been properly considered, the result was several hundred people turning up and a seriously wrecked house. Translate that into Business terms and you get my point.
I’m not any sort of advocate of nannying at all, and I believe that in the majority of cases common sense prevails and individuals are reasonable sensible. HOWEVER, we live in a statistical universe and given enough people, someone will do something stupid and potentially damaging unless strongly advised otherwise, simply out of ignorance or lack of thought.
So policies ARE necessary to help to mitigate these statistical certainties and to enable businesses to protect themselves. As an employer, ask yourself these simple questions:
* If someone blogged about their working day, could they unintentionally reveal sensitive information?
* Could someone updating their Facebook status as “This place sucks, no-one EVER listens!” reflect poorly on you as an employer?
* Could a twitter update of “Another meeting, I wonder what bad news is coming now?!” impact your business confidence?
While it’s true that the comments of one person may not even register, it’s also true that it only takes one person to start a rumor.
Being able to identify and address ANY sort of communications channel and how it could be used or mis-used is vital. Those forward thinking businesses have adopted social media as a marketing medium and done so with great success, so it MUST hold true that bad news has the same, if not greater, impact.
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