An article in the LA Times talks about how Google is accusing the State of California of ‘rigging’ the choice of a replacement email system for the State.

In brief Arnie’s government is going to replace the hundreds of current email systems in use across the State with one, centralised system which everyone will use. The rationale is simple of course, one system = less costs.

But Google aren’t too happy with the bidding process as they claim their platform has been excluded based on unfair selection criteria – criteria which they were unable to either meet or change. This, you might say, is fair enough surely? The criteria are there to make sure that the system chosen meets the requirements of the organisation(s) and the users, no?

Well apparently not. Google’s position is that the requireemnts are based on the current email functionality which happens to be Exchange/Outlook and that, as such, newer and different approaches are being unfairly shut out.

I’m torn over this one, I have to admit. Part of me hates the attitude of “That’s the ways it’s always been, so that’s the way it should stay” but there’s also a strong element of “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it”.  Google are taking a pounding at the moment for the delays in delivering their solution into the City of LA. The LAPD have some strict data proection requirements which are causing some ‘issues’. But there’s one thing for sure… they’ll learn from that and be better prepared next time around.

On a purely personal note, I don’t like the GMail web interface at all. Yes I’ve become accustomed to the “Outlook” way of doing things, but as a Mac user I’m also very happy with the Mail.app and use Entourage (gasp) on an daily basis too. Outlook, both locally and as a web application, is a compelling application. It’s certainly got some bloat and some features I never use but it does do email pretty well. GMail is quirky and while some love it, its quirkiness still presents a barrier to adoption.

Small Businesses are very keen to move to the use of on-line services, “The Cloud”, to support their business. And it’s easy to understand why.

There’s an overhead to running IT, even if you’re only a 5-man outfit. There are applications to be bought and updated, there’s an email system to be maintained, there’s file-servers to be backed up (!) along with all of the other minutia which comes with the IT world. That overhead is a time and money sink and small businesses are sesitive to both – the easiest option then is to make it someone elses problem. A “Cloud” provider.

Getting document management, applications, email, web-sites et-al without needing to actually ‘buy’ anything is pretty cool, especially as you can be fairly sure – if you use a ‘name’ as your service provider – that the service is going to be there whenever and wherever you need it.

Google are leading the march on this, I’m afraid that they’ve got a full package of services which many small businesses find hard to ignore, especially as they can get them for free as part of the Standard Edition. Oh sure, they don’t get some facilities or an SLA but to be honest it’s not many small businesses who’ll have a need for private video streaming and the SLA is simply words as part of the decision-making process.

Microsoft are pitching BPOS as their alternative to Google, primarily because they believe that the communications side of the equations is the key, that email, instant messaging and collaboration are the keystone upon which organisations will build their “Cloud” services consumption. And in part they’re right… those things ARE very important and WILL form the key decision points for many organisations but for a small business they’re not necessarily important enough to pay for over the free alternative.

But wait! Microsoft themselves have a free online service for Small Businesses up to 5 users! Ahhh you didn’t know about that did you!

No… neither did I. And I think that’s the point. Office Live for Small Business is one of the Live suite of services which seems to float around in a perpetual Beta state with no real direction, marketing or strategy in place. For those who have used the Office Live service (similar name, different service) you’ll know that this service is being ‘updated’ in  move to Live SkyDrive. For some this will mean the loss of some functionality – web sites and specific Workspaces being a couple – as Skydrive is basically a document repository. But SkyDrive has one key and critical feature, it has Office Web Applications for free. Yes, as a SkyDrive subscriber you can create Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and OneNote notebooks all on-line and all for free.

Office Web Apps - on Skydrive for free.

Now let’s review, we have Office Live for Small Business which allows the creation of a Website, basic or premium (at a price) email services, document management using SharePoint and  contact management – as well as other functionality – all available for free (up to the aforementioned 5 users) and we have SkyDrive for individuals with Office Web Applications and a bunch of storage space also for free. 2 solutions both accessible via 1 authentication method – the Live ID.

I can’t be the only one who see’s a trick being missed here can I? There must be someone in Microsoft looking at 2 tabs in their browser and saying  ”You know what, if those things worked together that’d be really cool!”.

I may be pre-empting a great announcement but Small Businesses are ready for a move to “Cloud” services, all we need if for those services to be ready for the Small Businesses.

“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.