After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Business Intelligence in the Cloud Presentation.

Moderator: Phil Wainewright, Procullux Ventures
Speakers: David Abramson (LogiXML), Eileen Boerger (CorSource Technology Group, Inc.), Vincent Lam (Information Builders), Roman Stanek (GoodData)

Discussion Points:

• There are benefits to the cloud and there are benefits to on-premise
• Cloud is not a zero sum game. If you go to cloud you do not have to lose out on-premise
• Cloud offers a new paradigm and there is an audience for Business Intelligence in the cloud, on the flip side there is an audience for Business Intelligence for on-premise.
• At the end of the both Cloud and on-premise here to stay. The challenge will be to how to make both cloud and on-premise to work together
• Roman disagrees with Vincent think it is zero sum game and he build his company with that notion and IT is generally moving in towards the cloud direction.
• How cloud is different:

1. Cloud based services can scale better and faster than the on premise services
2. Additionally cloud services can easily extend to different types of devices (mobile devices, laptops etc)
3. Enable collaboration

• Cloud provides real time data and Business Intelligence that was not easily available for on-premise system. For on-premise systems real time BI was available in the form of real time warehouse
• Cloud enables BI accessible to other members of the organization, not just the Business Analyst. BI is not just for the analyst.
• Two solutions to cloud BI:

1. If data is to tell story, it cannot be isolated, it has to be visual and cloud enable that. Standardizations are happening around data visualization so user can easily understand that data at various time spent.
2. Data should be measurable.

• Users are becoming data savvy and also consumerization of BI is happening.
• Important words to related to cloud BI Deployment:

1. Agility
2. Adoption
3. Planning and understanding
4. Success

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Power of the Customer presentation.

Moderator: Shubber Ali, Accenture
Speakers: Todd Bursey (FinancialForce.com), Dominique Levin (Totango), Jon Miller (Marketo), Jeff Yoshimura (Zuora)

Discussion Points:
The context of the discussion is how the power of customer is changing.

• Subscription Economy
  1. Focus changed from one-time transaction to subscription base meaning calculating the value for customer over lifetime
  2. Value of the customer is calculated based on monthly recurring revenue. Also based on influence revenue (is the customer a good referral source)
• Where is big gap in information and who is going to fill it?
  1. People’s action is lot louder than their words. People leave digital footprint all over, in their engagement, in their transaction. Measure what people do vs. what they say.
• How consumerization of IT changing customer’s behavior?
  1. The way people go about research and buy things have changed. People are different than they were very recently. Marketer need change their tactics to how they engage with customers.
  2. Customer know more about the companies that the companies though the customer knew.
• How do you retain and sustain customers?
  1. Pace of innovation is picking up. If a company is not paying attention the competition will be leap frogging. If no innovation then the company will fall behind.
• How do you build trust with customers?
  1. Trust is tied to emotion and emotion is heavily involved in B2B decision making. In B2C aspiration and positive emotion plays role is decision making.
  2. Companies are moving away from attending trade shows and creating more content to build trust with customers.
  3. The content are consumed by the customer without marketing shield, so with this process the companies can build relation and in turn build trust. Trust is super important as a marketer companies can encourage trust by building great content.
  4. Beyond content companies can build trust my giving away product
  • 44% offer free trial model
  • 14% offer freemium
  1. 3 dimension of stuffs that can be put out there
  • Expertise
  • Utilities – Free trial, freemium, free product
  • Affinity – Community, community affiliation will drive inbound marketing

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Boundary-Free Enterprise: The New Master Architecture Presentation.

Presenter: William McNee, Saugatuck Technology Inc.

Discussion Points:

• New Paradigm – mix of technology will define the new era
• Cloud can mean many things to many people (mobile/social/integration)
• Key trends -
  1. Industry leaders fully embracing cloud enabled business computing architecture
  2. Big CIOs fully accepted the cloud
  3. CIOs will tactically and strategically use the cloud
  4. Cloud is seen as catalyst for rapid innovation
• Sea-change in perspective about the use and value of the cloud has occurred
• Hybrid on-premise + Cloud architecture -
  1. European / Asian companies leap-frogging in adopting pure play cloud
  2. New role for IT is emerging
• Data integration and automated workflow remains critical to businesses
• Cloud provider will increase
• Among the CIOs/CTOs the level of importance increased from 2.2 to 3.7 from 2010 to 2012
• Based on a survey results of 225 respondent the on-premise solution remained 50% in 2012 and peaked on 2014; however cloud based solution increased dramatically from 2012 to 2016. On 2016 75% of new Enterprise IT spending will be on cloud based solution.
• eCommere/collaborative commerce solution will increase the most from 2012 to 2016
• Most long term benefit (65%) of cloud is greater business flexibility and agility vs. cost savings. Cloud provider lock-in also important (50%). Cloud based solution exceeded value expectation. 32% say cloud is costing more than what was anticipated.
• New Master Architecture is emerging not from single computing paradigm, but multiple technologies and platform working together. Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics (CMSA) plus the integration define the new Master Architecture and will make the boundary free enterprise.
• Evolution of IT
  1. Significant shrinkage of IT staff
  2. Shifting from client server architecture to boundary free architecture (CMSA plus integration). Intersection mobile and social. Intersection of cloud and analytics.
  3. Primary mission shifts from business operation to enabling business innovation.
  4. Mission of system development shifts from standardization for technologies to standardization of interfaces to enable the ecosystem of providers to work together. (both internal and external)
  5. Standard approach to IT development and delivery shift from buy build and adopt and outsource to vendor subscribe and may be to outsource.
  6. Integration of data to integration of data and process and processes
• We are in the midst of very significant sea-change

After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds Presentation

Speaker: Treb Ryan, CEO, Opsource

Key Topics covered: Private vs. Public Cloud – Pros & Cons; What is the answer?

Presentation – Summary Points:
• Choice of Rhino as our “masot” – A Rhino might not be able to see too far into the future but it certainly charges forward.
• Dimension Data takes on cloud announcement in Feb 2012.
• Why disdain for Private Cloud?
o Because it doesn’t offer….
-Immediacy
-Ubiquity & Mobile
-Collaboration – Info sharing, innovation
-Infinite (never a question of out of storage or other resources)
o Sold by hardware guys
-Designed to maximize hardware/software sales – Hardware sold whether they have ability to provide private clouds or not
-Capex, Capex, Capex – Upfront costs – You should be able to pay for something only when you use it
o Innovation and Compatibility Lags
-Private cloud providers software releases are on a different scale (a year vs. the “normal” of weeks/months)
• Issues with Public cloud
o Dave Sovereignty
-Some data cannot reside in anywhere we want…there are laws where data should reside
o Latency Issues
-7 ms latency times need
o Customization
-Someday we will get whatever we want in the public cloud in what is now available in the private cloud.
-Variety is lacking in the public cloud
-In private cloud – you can tweak cloud requirements for certain apps, etc
• Then what is the answer
o Give people private instances within the public cloud
o Always compatible with the public cloud environment
-In a private environment you need to be in perfect sync with your provider
o Disadvantage:
-Sometime you turn on the tap and there is nothing there and you need to find out where to find some.
• Audience Q:
o If you are my ISV,
-Critical things to think about are data sovereignty and latency issues
-Multi-tenant SaaS apps,
-When you write your app, think about future expansion – write your apps for regions and locations
-Important part is where the data sits in terms of data sovereignty and latency issues
o We offer two options – Private cloud within one of our centers, Private cloud in client’s own data center

Heard at the session (Interesting Quotes):
• “(With private clouds) once again, I see hardware turn to shelf-ware”
• “I have disdain for private clouds”

After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the Successful Cloud Managing Strategies Breakout Session.

Moderator: John Rowell – CTO OpSource
Speakers: Sven Hammar, Mat Ellis, Jamal Mazhar, Ray Solnik

Topics Covered: Definition of Cloud Management, Who wins, Cloud Management Approach (one vs. multi vendor), Lessons learned, and Success stories (Bonus: Any favorite apps to share).

Discussion Points:

• What does Cloud Management mean to you?
o Ultimately it is about delivering good customer experience; It is about performance and cost; It is about monitoring, deployment, scalability, security, flexibility and elasticity while producing business enhancing results. The baseline definition of what is “secure”, what is “flexibility”, etc could vary based on customer segment (large enterprise vs. SMB)

• Who wins?
o Some companies are doing too much (e.g. Rightscale) so those companies might not be winners but it does depend on how you define a “winner” – Different people might have different definitions. If you look at the data center market, would you say IBM won? Or Computer Associates?
o We are all winners in this thing can could – some of us win by providing predictive analytics or “early warning system” to our clients; Others have other means to “win”

• Approach for cloud management – Go with one vendor who is a generalist or a point solution that is more customized (but with more than 1 vendor)?
o It really depends on the customer and what is important to them. Most customers will likely multiple vendors since it is hard for one vendor to do all things well in cloud management; The key is even with multiple vendors is to get the point solutions that can integrate well with other point solutions.

• What are the things to watch out in public cloud infrastructures?
o Five things – Cost, Waste, Sprawl, Overages and Compliance.
o Cost – Cloud is more expensive in certain areas (storage for instance)
o Waste & Sprawl – Don’t use what you pay for; need for financial controls
o Overages – Watch out for overruns/overages that add up quickly
o Compliance – Ensure compliance to company policy

• Share any success stories
o Slideshare – With a cloud solution, we enabled them to grow very quickly – Place all presentations on the web – and turn on capacity as needed
o Mint.com is another good example – what we have accomplished there – the users are the beneficiaries

• Any Favorite Apps to share
o Ray – Evernote, Dropbox
o Jamal – LinkedIn
o Mat – mint.com, craigslist
o Sven – Spotify

Heard at the session (Interesting Quotes):
• “Cloud Management has become clearly fuzzy” – John Rowell
• “It is important to understand economies of scale vs. economies of acting quickly” – Mat Ellis

After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the Mobile a Must Breakout Session.

Moderator: Russell Hertzberg, Softserve
Speakers: Jan Aleman(Servoy), Roger Bottum(Spring CM), Lisa Reeves (Citrix), Nolan Wright (Appcelerator)

Key Topics Covered: Conundrum of ISVs (Mobile Web vs. Native App or both?), Local content storage, Mixing of Business and Personal more prevalent with mobility; Remotely manageable mobile devices, App Store model for Enterprise Deployment, Alternatives to Apple’s AppStore? A world beyond iPhone, iPAD, Android ?

Discussion Points:

• Classic Conundrum ISVs face – Mobile Web ? Native App ? Hybrid ?
o Half the panelists (Jan and Roger) indicated that they go mobile web (HTML 5) to allow the most flexibility and also avoid not having to code multi-platforms (Google SDK, Apple SDK, etc). The other 2 panelists (Lisa and Nolan) based on customer preference and nature of apps (highly interactive), they prefer native.

• Local content Storage an issue that will be solved?
o Jan – This can be done and we see more and more cases of this (Recent example: Inspection app for the German Railway)
o Lisa – Comes down to context. Expectation is “recent and relevant” is available on mobile devices

• Security requirements when building mobile apps for the cloud
o Roger – Security is more straightforward than you think (with local encryption, etc). It is governance that is hard
o Nolan – Last 15 years – We have moved from the Client-Server model to most mobile apps being client side with APIs in the cloud – Concept of security and where/what to security has changed drastically
Russell: What about BYOD and mixing of Business & Personal –Is this a problem? Or is there creative tension? Is there a need for resolution?
o Jan – Either you don’t store personal and business info on these devices or be ready for risk – Put everything in context
Russell – Should mobile devices have the ability to be remotely manageable/wiped if lost?
o Nolan – Matter of personal preference – especially BYOD devices
o Lisa – More and more this generation is expecting to miss work and personal
o Jan – In terms of security, I believe it is the SA ISV who is responsible for ensuring strong security in what they build

• Is the App store model extendable or even appropriate for enterprise deployment of apps in the future?
o Roger – Large organization are currently comfortable using the App Store model but I expect this to evolve
o Nolan – I second that – I see a world in which there will be 3rd party app management entities
o Lisa – There is a certain level of trust with the Apple store – but going with App Store versus not is just a series of tradeoffs
Russell – I believe the future will see a disintermediation of the Apple store concept; SPs and enterprises with private distribution – I see several alternatives evolving over a period of time.

Audience Q – You speak a lot about iPhone, iPAD, Android – What about Windows Mobile, Samsung., etc ?
o Russell – We are doing some work for Microsoft Mobile
o Jan – Android is going to be very cost effective. Microsoft should just kill their mobile platform and go make Azure better !
o Lisa – Purely customer preference but I am not counting on Microsoft

Heard at the session (Interesting Quotes):
• “If all information is set free, security becomes a secondary issue” Jan Aleman
• “45% of Enterprise CEOs use IPAD and the older demographic among them is using it much more than the younger group” Roger Bottum
• “With more mobility, the current generation (Gen Y) has a clear expectation of mixing personal and work in their devices” Lisa Reeves
• “If you use a traditional development cycle anymore, you are dead” Lisa Reeves

After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the New World Cloud Integration Breakout Session.

Moderator: George Collins, Deloitte Technology Practice
Speakers: Lou Guercia (Scribe Software), Ross Mason (Mulesoft), Lance Speck (Pervasive)

Key Topics Covered:
Key integration challenges, Standards for data quality and security, New breed of integration, Speed of integration, Impact of integration by 3rd party providers on the IT department

Discussion Points:

• A growing cloud market is both exciting and is fraught with challenges – Integration is key ?
o Ross – Rise of SAAS, rise of APIs means great opportunity for integration – Also, projection of SAAS market growth… Projection of SaaS market growth is the fastest growth market ever! So much is happening – It is hard for IT organizations to do it themselves. Good at point-to-point integration but not at broader, more complex integration.
o Lance – SaaS application have better APIs and hence easier to integrate compared to premise-based custom application and easier to integration in the ecosystem. When we say ecosystem, we think of more than the platform itself.
o Ross – We need to start enabling the long tail of integration since there are a lot more APIs and apps now than ever before

• Speed to value – Does integration become to enabler or inhibitor
o Lance – With M&A activity, multiple platforms will exist and crucial to integrate smoothly.
o Lou – New breed of integrators
-Pre-built integration with templates
-Order of magnitude more intelligent about the businesses they are serving
-Clever new business models

• What does the integration you do mean to internal IT department?
o Lou – You can’t trivialize work needed to get integration done – but IT organizations cannot act like they know app integration; The day is not far when there will be pre-built solutions for vertical markets
o Ross – Frankly –IT role changes from implementation to governance, oversight. IT organizations need the help with implementation – Also, line of business should realize they cannot do without involving IT
o Big shift in certain areas are moving away from owning infrastructure to governing IT

• What are the standards for data quality and security?
o Lou – I recently heard a great line recently…”The question is How do you know about the absolute security and resiliency of your own data center” in comparison to a cloud solution; Data is less complicated in the simpler cloud model. Interesting

Quotes heard at the session:
• “Integration has gone from being a necessary evil to one that is a competitive differentiator” Lance Speck
• “Projection of SaaS market growth is the fastest growth market ever” Ross Mason
• “Cloud forces not only value but also enables innovation” Ross Mason
• “Integration is a big chunk of friction and you need to find a way to address that”, Lance Speck
• “It is all about control – Who controls what” Lou Guercia