There are Six main conversations taking place now:

• Low cost computing in the enterprise. Maximize the efficiency of your IT (Server management, Desktop Management), Use technology to lower the cost of business (UC), Take advantage of technology delivery information.
• Business Insights. Solve the main two problems that BI faces: high costs and advanced skills. Empower people with business insights.
• Corporate environmental sustainability. Reduce energy demands. Manage energy and environmental footprint. Rethink business practices.
• Innovation for growth. Widen the idea pipeline, turns ideas into actions leveraging social tools. Optimize ROI and bussiness value.
• Consumerization of IT. Deliver IT flexibility while managing security on device demanded by users and not regulated by companies. Access your bank from a game console, mobile, kiosk, app or web browser.
• Cloud computing. Understand how to leverage SaaS, PaaS and IaaS effectively. Deliver consistent, connected experiences.

Are you prepared to leverage the 2010 business demands?

We all know that CRM and Collaboration are two workloads that have moved to the cloud. This article compares 10 hosted CRM solutions. The battle is now on the cloud.

• Productivity. Three years ago Microsoft Office was going to be killed by the browser. Today, startups are gone and Gorillas are there: Microsoft Office Web Apps and Google Apps are some of the strongest players. Look for full fidelity and editing from rich client, browser or mobile.
• Collaboration. Free e-mail has evolved to “collaboration”: IM, Office Originated phone calls from your device, audio conferencing, video conferencing, VoIP, Speech. Not only Google and Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are arriving. Evaluate:
• Off-line support. 100% web is not always good.
• Security. Who is responsible for data loss? Who validates the security at the datacenter?
• Maintenance. In what moments is it done: At the convenience of the provider?
• Interoperability. What LOB integration features are available?
• Support. 7x24? SLA covers all services?
• What collaboration level you need? Shared site, Portal, Content management, e-forms?
• Platform as a services. Software developers will see a big fight in this category. BTW, David Chappel has updated his Introduction to Azure.
• Applications. Exactly one month ago, the Us government announced a cloud portal. Emerging markets have similar offerings, e.g. Xertix on Mexico. Oracle announces 43 applications on the cloud (What a nonsense). Expect to see a lot more “software services” offerings arrive. Always remember that <Not all services are the same>. Are we ready to evaluate them?

Let me predict the growth of premium cloud services. Even for the larger companies, the free web has it’s limits. Expect to see the paid web to get more differentiation.

And always remember, the future is a combination of internal an external IT services: Software+Services.

I just realized that blogs will soon be obsolete artifacts. Let me explain why:

• For over 10 thousand years “writing, painting and talking” have been the most basic communication tools we use to describe our lives. In the early computing days storage was very limited; I remember tools like WinDirStat to understand how precious storage was managed. Toda on social networks we share Images, Video and we can expect to cover 3D data types in the mid term future. Released this month, “Total Recall:How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything” describe how we’ll be able to save all conversations, images, music, documents from our lives. $1000 will buy 250Tb of storage, we’ll eventually have real “full biography” from individuals reproducing exactly what was said and heard. The implications are probably at the same level of the arrival of the PC or the Internet. Clearly, Personal BI will need to evolve: Tools similar to TimeSnapper that help you understand how you currently use a single device. The Cloud will be an enabler to integrate information from other devices, e.g. FitBit that daylong habits.
• Now consider other dimension, you can clearly see a lot of activity on Public data and  Social networks mining (e.g. Planetary-scale views on a large instant messaging network) and Reality mining. Information Technology latest goals is to manage all the assets from our civilizations, as Carl Sagan described on the last chapter of Cosmos: we’ll need Civilization BI.

People will always appreciate a good writing without having to hear it directly from the author… but all artifacts including blogs will soon be obsolete because We’ll be able to share “full fidelity lifestreams”

Vote for your favorites before September 4. Register on SXSW panel picker before jumping to the links. There are over 2200 proposed panels. My selection:

• Come to my cloud: Supporting half a million visitors from day one.
• Social Media Interop: Emerging standards for portable contacts and life streaming standards.
• The future of mobile: surfing or applications?
• Digital distribution 10 years after Napster: The state of the entertainment industry
• Web mail: Is the innovation over?
• New web architecture: A lot of session on how to build web sites and user experiences
• Prototype creation using Sketchflow: If you don’t know this tool please jump to youtube.
• Internet of things: How far are we on connecting all devices?
• Screencasting lessons learned: Publishing your screen
• Silverlight accessibility: Supporting WCAG 2.0 standards
• Silverlight patterns: LOB and social best practices
• Mobil 2015: Data filtering for mobile overload and sophisticated communication algorithms.
• The realities of Augmented Reality: Macro-personalization
• Zero Waste: The future of green
• How Online Communities Impact Robotics.
• Interactive Infographics: Current state and future.
• Twitter-Sass: Promoting twitter with no ad budget, apps for volume handling.
• Cloud Technology: $2/month. 1M Connected African Teachers: Priceless: Opportunities from cloud computing
• Imagineering the Fully Digitized and Connected Future

Find out how the internet sees you using MIT’s Personas.

The world has changed, but does this means that customers have eliminated all critical IT projects? Quite the opposite. 18 opportunity areas and why databases continue to be big winners:

a) Reducing Cost. Some organizations cut IT up to 50% while expecting to keep their service levels. Five main projects: Reduce cost per Gb (Data warehousing), Reduce server costs (consolidation), Reduce solution portfolio (ROI), Reduce the number of steps (process integration) or increase transactions/hr (process optimization)

b) Grow the business. Five main projects: Increase customer service quality (data integration), Increase accuracy and response time (reporting and analysis), leverage the customer and partner communities (Social networks), Focus on the right KPIs (performance management) and focus on process visibility (BAM)

c) Help the users increase productivity. Four main projects: Increase customer satisfaction (multi-channel applications), Reduce transaction cost (Legacy wrappers), Increase output (UC/IM/VoIP), Increase developer productivity (ALM)

d) Never-ending regulations. Four clear areas: Management of privacy information (IRM), keeping up with fraud (new payment models), Sustainable manufacturing (green IT) and new national and International standards.

Get additional ideas on Journal 20: Architecture in turbulent times – only for technorati: rwtgv9n8kc

Why settle for just one project? Approach your customer with a combination of all elements.

As we evolve to a hybrid of internal and external IT Services, companies on developed markets have invested significantly on infrastructure, so they are not rushing to outsource operations.

Emerging markets have lower data center investments…Are they more fit to consume cloud services? Can we use the same tactics to reach them?

Over the last 18 months I’ve been working on enabling the "cloud software services” transformation for Microsoft Latin America. The journey has been harder than expected:

• Customers. As in any other region of the world, you will find early adopters, late majority and skeptics. Academic institutions are leveraging free e-mail offers faster than any other segment, but when provided to them as cost reduction only. The collaboration market for consumer is there, but for enterprises still focused on the interior.
• Latency. Most governments require that at least their data is kept in-Country… if you target private organizations, most US data centers can effectively cover Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. For all South America you will need to invest on a hoster partner to effectively deliver services. Be prepared to extremely low upload speeds.
• Local billing is simply not there. “Software services” can generate tax issues that make it a lot more expensive. Billing is a complex issue for small and medium size organizations that do not use international credit cards. They are also bad for SaaS providers, impacting 15-25% of the total “per user” cost.
• Marketing. The Social media is just starting to develop on emerging markets, you will need to promote using traditional media and existing partners or might not reach critical mass. Expect promotion cost to be higher than expected, because targeting is still limited.
• Partners. Business is conducted on different ways on each Country. Most customers are not ready to buy direct. This is a huge challenge because intermediaries expect to make a significant “traditional” margin. If your service is free then the problem you face is volume.
• Do you plan to use online support? Sorry, Latin America organizations demand phone support… The lower costs of HR make it possible and desirable.
• Internal Incubation. Most software organizations cannot afford the incubation process required to initiate the motion of software services sale, they rely on their existing workforces.

For Microsoft, 2007-2009 was a period to establish hundreds of partnerships that will make it possible to offer the choices to customers: internal, partner or vendor hosted mixed services. The vertical and horizontal application still need the “multi-headed” treatment so that they can be consumed by a smart client, browser or a mobile device.

The vision of getting access to your information from any device and on any place – including emerging markets – is becoming real, but will take at least 5-10 more years before it becomes truly global.

The Microsoft Disaster Response is an internal group that assists governments and organizations on global emergencies. The Mexican subsidiary and community volunteers are now working on developing emergency support systems for the Influenza A(H1N1) and H1N1, including:

• RSS, e-Mail, SMS delivery to the three screens. Notifications on the PC, phone and TV coming from news Web sites, Blogs, twitter, social networks and internal systems.
• Automated report agents can provide conversational style interactions over IM and answer question on preparedness, location of healt centers and general QA.
• Official sites might offer live translation widget that runs on multiple web platforms so that non-Spanish speakers can closely monitor new information
• The XBOX 360 can be leveraged to deliver alerts and health education material.
• Centralized notifications. Microsoft Vine is a new personal command center that receives notification from different services to be connected with the persons and places that are important to us.
• Remote work. As travel reduction is required and employees need to work from home, we expect increased use use on virtually collocated meeting tools like SharedView and Live Meeting. A lot of companies are still not keeping document repositories on the cloud. Software + Services is critical: offline is required on several locations.
• Social Media. Can misinform but is great to coordinate social activity. The “Profesionales Mexicanos en el extranjero”  LinkedIn group is a channel to receive ideas from abroad.
• Visualization and research. Can be as simple as GIS mashups, moving Health organization sites to redundant data centers up to full research systems. E.g. Microsoft Amalga that enables real time exchange of information between Emergency Rooms (video).

Emerging countries are discovering the real power of the web today, this in turn will produce new creative applications and increased technology use. Open up the internal communications channels and map the people/technology/locations to ensure business availability. The reduction of the physical human contact is critical until we develop vaccines: prepare yourself.

There is an extensive discussion on what the “cloud” definition and standards should be, benefits and risks, etc. Probably a distraction of really critical issues:

1. How the industry players will collaborate en deliver the software services is a complex discussion. We can expect hosters to get vertical expertise, and create alliances with distributors and resellers to increase software services sales capacity. 
2. How wull application frameworks enable the creation of a “new age era” of solutions?
   • Most software organizations can simply leverage virtualization technology on “existing solutions” by partnering with EC2 to deliver them. This has clear advantages but the “brute force” approach will never achieve the same levels that are possible of “cloud native” applications.
   • It’s very difficult to think that only with virtualization we’ll see Amazon performance levels: Software application frameworks can provide additional abstraction layers and the automatic systems management functionality on it’s inside. It’s not necessary to re-architect for multitenancy because the platform inherits elements to leverage the datacenter. Microsoft Azure is an example of this category.
   • The expectations for new solutions is that they can run on any of three “clouds”: Internet, Partner hosted or internally hosted. In fact, a key benefit of the cloud is moving the complex stack easily between those. Users can access using the three primary screens: PC/Mac, smartphone and TV. Later also secundary screens including Kiosks, Surface PCs and Videowalls.
3. I was amazed at the level of negative reactions on the McKinsey report “Clearing the air on cloud computing”… but the reality is that some organization will be able to run many software services internally at lower costs than those on the market.

Summary

Today 2/3 of the total IT Investment do not result on real differentiation. Depending on the value of each IT services, we’ll see a migration of those to any of the three clouds. IT will finally become transparent.

_________________________

Note: Six months after the “Windows Azure Launch”.

There is a false perception that Microsoft Azure might not be ready for production use BUT in fact several partners are already charging for solutions built on top of it... SLAs are required but we are a lot closer than what it seems.

Pricing will be announced: we should consider the present  a “free period”. Functionality and reliability will only improve. NOW It’s the time to build the “new era of solutions”.

Can you imagine involuntary mindcasting? Most likely all accounts would be protected; probably Twitter wouldn’t exist at all…

Recently I sent a mail to over 200 twitters inside Microsoft asking why we were using an e-mail alias instead of a protected account for sharing experiences. The first answer was Why would anyone use a Protected Updates?

Well, some of the discussed outcome:

• Context: Decrease Noise. People may not want to try to craft tweets to address different contexts and it’s easier to control the context than the interpretation.  Example: mommy-Tweeters who want to write about trials and tribulations of parenting and assume that everyone who is reading understands the dramas of new motherdom.
• Privacy. Wives of persons with high visibility on certain communities, e.g. Miguel de Icaza’s wife http://twitter.com/marialaura – to carefully validate access. This also effectively helps avoid spam bots. And clearly you can use it to share non-public information. Beware, because there are reports on a false sense of security.
• Automation. You can create a private account and set automated actions. While there are more reliable messaging systems the multi-channel or multi-headed model can be interesting for consumer oriented applications.
• Internal communications. For those that do not have e-mail culture, use the same tool for communication when a lot of the workforce is mobile. Going Where the People are at.
• Live training. where you want only to keep dialog with a group of probably less than 30 attendees during a specific time period. Enter the real time web.

I’m sure you can contribute more valid reasons for leveraging twitter unprotected updates. Can you?

@nishshah posted a tweet related to Disruptive Simplicity citing Netbooks and the Flip Mino. Let me add more examples on how a new customer category can be created by “returning to basics”:

• Netbook vs UMPC.
• Flip mino vs Camcorders
• Widgets vs Full software applications
• RIA vs Rich Client
• Twitter vs IM
• Cloud vs In-house datacenters
• PHP vs C++
• Mp3 vs DRM
• Recessionary living vs Robb Report
• Software modeling vs Software construction

I’m sure you can comment and provide more examples on other industries.

A Killer Application is a need of the user group that can be filled, and by filling it, create an acceptance of that tool and the supporting methods/results

Let’s not just focus on placing your applications on the Cloud. The just is in effect a whole game changer, but let’s move further away and define some criteria to seek on the cloud killer application. Note that there are persons that consider that the Cloud doesn’t lead to software innovation but just to hardware advances exemplified by NetBooks and Smartphones. For me a Cloud Killer App will have the following attributes:

• Going beyond limits of current transaction processing. IEEE Spectrum publihed an article proposing that consumers will demand intense user experiences and focuses on a single category: electronic gaming. It makes sense for the scalability of millions of concurrent users. It needs to be demonstratad from the peformance perspective. Load and performance testing have also been nominated as killer apps.
• Breadth reach. Apps for Democracy list interesting cases that go beyond publishing public data sets on the cloud on government services that are required by all citizens of a given nation. Dan Bricklin envisioned “public IT infrastructures” on May 2004.
• Benefits from new platforms. Ray Ozzie has been focused on Live mesh. It enables software developers to build applications that sync data between the cloud and all user devices. It’s common to hear 2009 complains on the users that want their home setting to match their works but the software installation are totally independent. A killer app would most likely leverage the new cloud platforms.
• Green algorithms. The sustainability story is pretty big almost everywhere. But current software design projects do not deeply consider energy consumption. Microsoft is measuring CO2, Water and other energy consumption metrics per applications (e.g. Hotmail) on global datacenters -  the operations perspective is available - but the current engineering and implementation is not explored at all. I envision the possibility of switching to different algorithms given external conditions.
• Has a real impact. The value of IT is and will always be the way it solves real world problems. I laugh when I hear a new PC Lab has been setup on a school. The real question is how the magic software is really changing the learning capacity of kids. View the first 15 minutes of this video.

There are few Killer applications patterns in existence: ‘mobile marketing’, ‘VoIP’ and other technologies have failed to be considered such. Worst case, the killer application is the existence of a large number of cloud applications helping us solve our personal and business problems. What do you think?