I attended the Microsoft UK Hosting Event this week and it was interesting in a number of ways.

Firstly, Microsoft have committed themselves to “The Cloud” – whatever that means – with a new logo and a new internal mindset: “We’re all in”. Given what I know of Microsoft this means that everything, absolutely everything will be looked at through an online services looking glass to see if it a) works, b) can/could work, c) should work and d) can be commoditised and layered onto the BPOS / Online investment. After that, there’ll be the discussions about designing boxes and signing up factories. OK maybe that’s a little extreme, but I’ll bet that those conversation are taking place in at least some of the product teams.

Of course this means that the Comms Sector team have some work to do in getting the Telcos and other Service Providers on-side to help delivery. The current UK Team Manager, Bernie Frankel, introduced the day pretty much along those lines with the encouragement that partner hosted solutions are key to the success of this new policy. He then gave the stage over to Laurent Lachel from Ovum who provided a great overview of why online solutions are great and why they’ll continue to get better and also why everyone IN the industry should stop using “The Cloud” to describe their services and used proper, meaningful terms instead; Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. I felt not a little smug at this point, it’s great to be vindicated!

The future of services consumption is in the combination and integration of local services and systems with those consumed on-line. Purely on-line solutions and purely private “Clouds” are merely starting points and represent the two extremes of position from which the eventual solutions will be born. Are on-line services suitable for all? No, not today there is still too much unknown, undiscovered and not yet created for ubiquity to occur. Will it happen – yes, absolutely. In my professional lifetime I have seem organisations move from communication based on phone, post and fax to those based on email, VoIP and instant messenger. The mobile phone has become an extension of ourselves bringing services, work, leisure and our social life to us and this will also continue to grow.

Ultimately online services – The Cloud – will be suitable for all and for all occasions, the example used was Coco Chanel’s “Little Black Dress”, starting as THE fashion statement and moving into place as always relevant, always a good choice. The transition will not be hugely fast though, experts predict the length of the adoption curve between 10 and 30 years, but remember in some areas we’re already 10+ years into that curve, the pace is growing and the technology is only ever going to accelerate this.

We’ll also see a broadening of service providers with organisations being able to leverage their private solutions out into public ones, businesses become services providers to each other and sector-specific environments being created. Amazon did this, they had a fulfillment system in-house which they chose to make available to external parties, they had a billing and customer management system which they provide in the same way. These things are not new, they’ve just not placed under the glare of the “Cloud” spotlight before.

Of course Microsoft itself has stepped into the fray most significantly with BPOS. Last years price-drop and feature-hike caused some considerable consternation for the service providers out there – and with good reason as it effectively undercut the cost price most were paying through SPLA. Bernie acknowledged this too, saying it had been done without full consideration and that steps had been taken to ensure that such a move would not happen again. He was unable to confirm however that should Microsoft choose to lower BPOS pricing, that SPLA prices would also be lowered to maintain parity. The phrase “Co-opetition” was applied to Microsoft’s position as supplier of solutions and services to both sides – it’ll certainly be interesting to see how things work out.

“With a bit over here and a bit over there, how do I get my “Cloud” applications to give me the data I need?”

Cloud Services, SaaS, Applications on demand – whatever you’d like to call them – are starting to enable businesses to concentrate on business rather than their IT infrastructures. This is a wholly good thing, as a reduction in costs means healthier profit margins, happier bosses and general good times for all.

There is the risk however that the “IT Server Guy” will need to be replaced by “Data Analysis Guy” as the organizations information is spread across systems both on and off site. Historically, Business Intelligence (BI) and Management Information (MI) were the aspirational goals of most organizations and the bugbear of many others who’d not had the right advice when implementing. But BI and MI are good things, they allow an organization to see not only how they are doing but also understand why.

But if BI and MI solutions were difficult enough to implement and manage internally, where all of the feeder systems and data are relatively local how much more difficult is it going to be for your average business to achieve this when they have their data “out there”?

There are a bunch of Cloud BI vendors springing up now, some are proud to wave the “We’re on the Cloud” flag as they sport their Amazon Web Services credentials for the appreciative ooh’s and ahh’s they must surely be expecting. Some are keen to point out the ease at which you can derive value from your $1000 per month (plus storage) data analysis “projects” with graphs and charts and drill-down and all of that other good stuff. But very few are able to demonstrate the ease at which they can access data feeds from both on-line services (such as Salesforce.com) alongside locally held data items – there are a few, but they are rare.

The importance of this is critical for any organization who has a mandated, regulatory or even personal need to maintain certain data elements within known, secure systems. Cross border data-flow is becoming a hot topic on the back of Cloud Services with major players unwilling or simply unable to guarantee the location of a particular customer of client data-set.

It will be interesting to see then, how the major Cloud providers, the smaller local service providers growing their own Cloud platforms, the Application developers and the BI/MI folks are able to deliver solutions which tick the boxes of:

1)    Costs – if small business is to be interested, costs must be acceptable
2)    Security – data access and storage MUST be definable and subject to agreed, cross-discipline standards
3)    Data sources – must be location agnostic with connectors or interfaces able to perform both discreet queries and general data searches

The big Cloud providers have been talking about interoperability standards which may well address this kind of thing, but there is also a case for supporting the little guys too. The monoliths will provide a very good, general service but the specialist vendors, the value-add businesses and the niche-market providers also need to be able to play in this particular fun-park as without them, everyone will get a lesser experience.

Spending on Cloud-based services – in  whatever flavour you choose to adopt – is set to rise appreciably over the next few years with Enterprise-class organisations either adopting or moving up to 20% of their applications to an on-line model.

The drive to do so comes from multiple directions, cost – the key element being the removal of the capital heavy hardware renewal cycle, control – scale-up and back plus the ability to really ‘see’ who’s using the systems and speed.

Speed of access, deployment, update and development are all markers which are being used to show benefits from on-line or Cloud sevice adoption. Development through the use of tool-sets and frameworks such as Force.com, Azure and the like is once again allowing true innovation to be shown in IT. With concerns no longer being centered around the setup of development environments, coding standards and API upskilling, projects are now once again being ‘hacked’ into place with a speed which simply stuns management.

Through a flexible, dynamic, innovating environment great things can and do happen and should be encouraged in – almost – every respect. With power being delivered at a higher level, it will become easier to access and interpret data in real time, enabling organisations themselves to become more real time – something I’ve been promoting for a little while. Through an understanding of what’s happening now, we can plan tomorrow instead of figuring out what happened last month so we can try and fix it next month – even though the landscape may have changed this month and we don’t know it yet!

But here’s the rub, this is all very much “Jam tomorrow” for a lot of folks, purely because the mindset of many individuals and oragnisations is still “see that it’s broken, fix the break and wait for the next one”. This means that strategy is simply never considered and if it is, it’s usually in the form of “Cloud will mean the death in internal IT”, this is utterly wrong of course – who said that ‘The cloud’ needs to be outside the business??

Working out what happens afterward is a key and major part of the consideration process for any change and no better than a change in systems and infrastructure. To use a current analogy, when you set out to win a war, very little thought is given to what happens the day after you do. The proper thing to do is to throw up a wish list of everything that is going to make your life easier and see how they could be achieved after the adoption of online or cloud services. This isn’t a business case FOR the adoption, but subsequent benefits which could be derived. Then see which you could do today given the same level of investment, look at the skills and services you’d need to employ to bring them to being and also the time-lines for delivery.

Now save them somewhere safe and set a date to review them, not too far into the future, but far enough that you’ll see and feel a difference. If you can tick some off as “Yep, we did that” your strategy for adoption was good, if not, you’ve not realised the potential or limited your scope. Don’t feel bad, most people do this, and it makes my life quite complicated at times. Systems are vary rarely isolated now and to treat the implementation, change or adoption of one in an isolated way automatically limits the benefits which can be derived or, even worse, creates the circumstances where the wrong decision is made for the right reasons.

So think about these two things:

1. Get a strategy in place,if you don’t know how, ask me to help you.. really. It’s quite simple if nothing else let’s you know what you don’t know and change what you do.
2. Get enabled with knowledge. Know what a ‘Private cloud’ could deliver? Know what integration and the delivery of Business Intelligence can do for you r business? If not then you should find out.

And don’t be afraid to do a little un-structured thinking, just because you don’t think you can’t have it, doesn’t mean you should dismiss it as a goal.