Mobility — the cloud’s partner in crime

As I mentioned last week, a reliance on cloud computing technologies made it very easy to move my office from point A to point B.

One aspect I intentionally skipped was our network infrastructure. The cloud is pretty useless if you don’t have Internet access.

For most businesses with more than a couple employees, Internet access means getting a service provider to run a line to your business. It means a wiring closet and a router, and it means enabling connections throughout your office space.

And if you want wireless, it means setting up all access points and security, and then managing that.

Your network infrastructure is not something that lives in the cloud. It is a manual process that requires someone with some skill and it takes time. It takes phone calls to the provider, arranging times for them to come in, and then coordinating the timing such that your staff doesn’t have downtime.

And, of course, the wise business manager knows ahead of time that it’s flat out not going to work right the first — or even second — time around.

But what if even your network infrastructure, including Internet access, also was highly portable? If your key systems are all cloud computing based and if your network infrastructure was something that could easily be unplugged from point A and then immediately plugged back in and functional at point B, that would make your move even more painless.

We’ve been dabbling with Clear, an Internet service provider that broadcasts via 4G cellular technology at speeds that can approach traditional business-class cable or other providers.

With a service like Clear, you simply plug its box into a power outlet and instantly have an Internet connection. If your building already is wired for ethernet, you run an ethernet cable from your Clear box into the router.

And the neat thing about this particular service is that it offers personal wireless hot spot boxes at a very small incremental cost so you can bring Internet with you wherever you go. You can even share it with up to five other people.

For a small business, adding mobility to cloud computing services is not only very powerful, it also can save you a lot of frustration, downtime and — most importantly — money.

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Harrisburg-based WorkXpress.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

Hats Off to the Cloud

Whenever the issue of cloud computing is brought up in business circles, I get a range of responses.

There are the eyes-wide-with-wonder folks, the people who truly enjoy and embrace new technology and for whom the cloud is the next great mystery they are waiting to see revealed.

Then, there are the middle-of-the-roaders, the people who see cloud computing as an extension of the Web and software-as-a-service, and are willing to take the marketing buzzwords in stride to realize new benefits.

Finally, there are the scrooges. These are the people for whom cloud computing is nothing more than an extension of the Web, which in turn is nothing more then an extension of whatever was before, and therefore all of this has been around for years and the only thing new is the marketing.

I’m not going to place a value judgment on who is wrong and who is right. There is no need for that simply because there is enough case study and actual value realizations by companies to have a solid sense of the value of cloud computing.

In the past, I’ve always re-told my customers stories to explain the value. These customers have quickly deployed great business software customized heavily to their needs and at an affordable price.

However, I received a one-two punch recently that could have set back some other business executive who wasn’t cloud-enabled. Here is my personal cloud success story:

First, we made the decision to move our office; I signed the lease last week. I sat down to think about how we will migrate our business from point A to point B. I thought of all the services that could create problems or cause us to incur downtime: e-mail, telephone, data center, accounting, files, shared files, customer relationship management software, project management software, fax capabilities, among other things.

But as I went through each of those critical functions I came to a startling realization: Because we’re a cloud-enabled company, there was literally zero work to do for any of those systems. They are all cloud-enabled, which means that after we move, we will continue to use them just like any other service. We access all of these things via the Internet.

And that’s when I got hit with the second part of the one-two punch. My laptop died. So here I am moving my office, and my laptop on which I do all of my work was gone.

That should have been the nail in my productivity coffin. But, again, the cloud came to the rescue. My e-mail, many of my critical files, projects, schedules and much more are all available simply by logging in via a different computer. I can access my accounting records, my bank files, our research and development schedule, my personal calendar and so much more simply by using a different Web browser.

In fact, I’m sitting here writing this blog with one foot in the old office, one foot in the new office and with my laptop being serviced somewhere else. And quite honestly, I’m not feeling concerned or impeded in any way.

Thanks to the cloud, what should have been a knockout punch didn’t faze me, and therein is real value.

How do you use the cloud?

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

Everyone is a software developer

For years, everything has been moving to computers. But it hasn’t always been easy.

Many things about computers are highly technical, densely interrelated and generally frustrating. For businesses, it takes a lot of money to dive deeply into technology. Companies spend a material percentage of their budgets on IT-related products and services.

The way the process works, you have business people who know what they want to accomplish, you have analysts who translate that into something systematic, and then highly trained developers labor for hours producing it.

But that’s all changing.

Remember when there used to be secretaries and typists? Today, word processors and e-mail empower everyone to type their own correspondence and documents.

The same thing is happening with software.

I talk to people almost every day who are neither trained programmers, nor can they afford a team of trained programmers. But they might be a great sales person or a great business person, or just work in a company where there is a huge need for a programmer.

Those folks want to develop a web application. They may want to deploy it for their department, for their boss or because they think they can make money from it.

In five years, almost everyone will be able to build a decent web application.

How will that change the world?

It will make businesses radically more efficient. It will make people’s jobs more fulfilling because they won’t have to do as much drudge work. And it will free a larger percentage of business profit and loss for things like marketing or sales.

And it will allow businesses to explore their own uniqueness, rather than having to conform to the middle of the bell curve sold by today’s software vendors.

The future is going to be much more diverse, and much more interesting.

What do you think?

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

What’s Your Innovation

There’s a reasonably famous book in technology circles called “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” It basically says there are two types of innovations: those that appeal to existing markets by improving products, and those that appeal to new markets by offering new capabilities.

I don’t think it’s particularly hard to be innovative. All one has to do is walk down the street and identify any single thing that is causing some form of discomfort or irritation or challenge. Then just think of a way to do it better. It really is that easy. And it’s a fun exercise.

Keep in mind we don’t always realize we are discomforted by something until we are shown a better way of doing it. For example, before mobile phones, people didn’t realize that using a pay phone was inconvenient. There were many times when I needed a pay phone and was very happy to have found one. But today, few would even consider using a pay phone; in fact, most of them have disappeared.

Here’s an example of how the innovation exercise works: I’m looking out my window right now. I see a fire hydrant. Isn’t it irritating that you can’t park in front of a fire hydrant? How much valuable parking space is wasted because a fire hydrant happens to be sitting there? What is the dollar value of a parking space over a three-year period?

Perhaps if we could build an extension for fire hydrants such that they delivered water above the level of cars, we could recover that space.

And voila, a new business is born. Or at least that is the general idea. You can try that exercise all day, and you will soon come across something that has merit.

This is where it actually does get difficult, though.

Bringing your innovation to market usually requires knowledge, experience and connections in multiple industries. On that subject you can find thousands of books, many failed examples and only a few successes.

As a CEO, I’ve come to see the need for two key characteristics if you want to be successful. If you don’t have one or both of these, then just know that you still have some work ahead of you.

First, you need a market. A market is not a general concept, and it’s definitely not a “need.” It is a specific set of people who are willing and able to buy. If you can’t provide a lot of examples of actual people who would purchase your product, then you don’t have a market.

Second, you need a product. In my 20-plus years of software rapid application development experience, I’ve sold some vapor ware. It’s not fun. And while it seems necessary at the time, you can’t build a business that way. You may survive another day, but you need to have a plan to finish your product. Generally speaking, people don’t want to give up their hard-earned money on an unfinished product.

The bottom line is this: If you are appealing to an existing market with some type of understandable improvement on an existing product, you are going to have an easier time launching your business. But your upside may not be as strong.

However, if you are creating a new type of product to sell to a heretofore undefined market, you may have a really tough road ahead of you. But if you pull it off, you can have a tremendous upside.

I believe the innovator’s dilemma is simply that it is nearly impossible to be successful with true innovation because, by its very nature, innovation is a foreign concept to most people.

Still, there’s one way to find out …

How will you innovate? Ours is in rapid application development.

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This post was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

Mobile access becoming required

Most new technologies go through a fairly well understood adoption cycle.

The cycle suggests that, in the beginning, only a small group of adopters are interested in and willing to take a risk on the technology. Later, the middle adopters begin using it on a massive scale. Finally, a small population of late adopters begin using it before it fades into obscurity.

A couple of years ago, any practical use of mobile phones as a credible gateway to an enterprise database software application was viewed as a fantasy.

Sure, some very early adopters did successfully deploy this capability; but for the most part it was out of the reach of most businesses as something that could actually enhance operations.

When I talked with business leaders then, they typically spoke of mobile access as “something that would be nice to have,” not as “something we are requiring.”

That attitude toward mobile technology is exactly what seems to be changing.

We recently brought on several new customers for whom mobile database software access was not a “nice to have,” it was a key feature required to adopt the technology. And these weren’t large companies with bottomless budgets. In one case, it was a company with fewer than 10 employees.

What’s happening is that the middle adopters are beginning to look at mobile access as a required component of their database software application architecture. Their attitudes toward the technology are rapidly evolving.

Why this is happening is because of wide-scale adoption of smart phones and the general convergence of capabilities around those mobile platforms.

Last week, I proposed to a client that she consider getting iPads for her staff because that screen size best suited her unique mobile interface needs. She replied, “Oh, I already have one.” Later, I talked with a very small sales organization that made it clear that all its employees had BlackBerry devices, and that the next platform they adopt would be required to be accessible by them.

What that means is, we are going to begin to see an explosion in mobile access to corporate software systems in the small and mid-sized business space. Within just a few years, if you aren’t mobile-browser enabled, you won’t be competitive.

What do you think?

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

How do “Clouds” actually work? Few vendors are saying

When we speak of “cloud computing” we are typically referring to some sort of service which we use through the internet. However to most technologists a cloud tends to mean something a little bit more specific and more closely tied to a server.

Up until a few years ago, you would buy a special type of computer called a “server” and install your operating system or other software on it.

But today you can procure a “virtual server” without having to purchase any hardware at all. These virtual servers typically reside across multiple physical servers, and can even be moved quite easily from server to server.

In other words, yesterday’s concept of a server as a piece of hardware is now being replaced by the increasingly common concept of a server as a piece of software, aka a virtual server. In fact, the actual hardware you used to be required to purchase is becoming less relevant.

Cloud computing then is often thought of as the procurement of these types of virtual servers through the internet.

There are a number of providers of these virtual servers and some of them are even quite large. Amazon Web Services is said to be generating close to a Billion dollars a year in revenue by selling use of these virtual servers. Companies like CloudSigma, GoGrid and Rackspace are all also very well known. And, of course, everyone has heard of Microsoft; they offer this same service, and they call it Azure.

One thing that has become painfully clear to a lot of people is that the details of each service matters. How each of these companies set up their hardware, how they provision operating systems, how they provide secure access to the server, and what tools they provide to remote manage the systems; these issues and more vary greatly between vendors, and make a significant difference when you are looking to purchase a cloud server.

In fact, few of these companies disclose the mechanisms that underly their cloud services for a variety of good reasons. Recently, an executive at Microsoft gave a presentation describing at a high level how their Azure service actually works.

This talk gives a fascinating look into the layers of software that need to be created by a provider to credibly provide a flexible cloud service.

But still a lot of details are left to question.

In the long run, the reality is that as consumers we probably don’t need the details. We need guarantees of performance and stability, and we need control over key routing and transport issues, or at least some guaranteed acceptable service assurances.

However, until cloud servers are commonplace, and until the space matures, any heavy consumer of one of these cloud providers needs to take some time to understand the mechanics and corresponding limitations imposed by the provider. Otherwise, you may get an unwelcome surprise.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

Jurisdiction, regulation and pirates

Lately, it seems like avoiding something or borrowing something without permission or just flat out stealing something is the key to get ahead in the world of technology.

Bloomberg today published an article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html) describing how Google pays only a 2.4% income tax in this country thanks to various schemes called the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich”. As a result, most of their profits end up parked in Bermuda behind a corporation that is not required to disclose where it’s money then flows.

To be fair, they are just using the same transfer pricing loopholes that many others do. In fact, their transfer pricing agreement was approved by the IRS.

Separately, InfoWorld is making some hubbub about Facebook’s blatant skirting of its own posted privacy protection rules (http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/why-facebook-selling-you-out-and-wont-stop-322?source=footer).

The way this works, Facebook tags your clicks with your ID, and gives its partners access to that information.  These guys may match your ID up with whatever information they are collecting, and sell that off to advertisers or data aggregators.

As it turns out, the Facebook community makes quite a bit of money by selling your usage habits to third parties. Even though Facebook say’s this is a violation of their terms of service, they apparently provide loopholes allowing it anyway.

And on a final note, many of you may remember the various file sharing sites that have been shut down over the last decade for copyright law violations. These sites allowed people to share music and videos, or anything else, without actually having to pay for it.  As long as one person uploaded the protected material, such as a song, anyone else could download it at no cost.

Well, these guys haven’t stopped trying (http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-parties-plan-to-shoot-torrent-site-into-orbit-101020/).  They looked into buying the micro nation of Sealand, hoping to skirt copyright protection laws, but couldn’t afford it. The contemplated leveraging a ship at sea, or a balloon floating high in the sky.

Allegedly, they are now evaluating whether a satellite would serve the purpose of defeating copyright laws on a global…and now I suppose even on a cosmic scale.

While it’s hard to imagine why anyone would consider it okay to avoid legitimate taxes, secretly violate your own terms of service, or steal someone else’s intellectual property the truth is that nothing illegal is being done here. In fact, in some of these examples it could be considered ethically correct to do exactly what they are doing; maximizing shareholder return within the confines of the law.

So if it’s clearly wrong, and yet entirely correct, where does the problem lie? Google promises to “do no evil” while they dole out free products. Facebook promises to help you “connect and share with the people in your life”, now over 500 million of them, at no charge. The Pirate Parties want to give you all the free music you can handle.

And we all love free products. But there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Something has to give. For now it will have to be the gray areas in the law.

Check out WorkXpress database software.

Pay-as-you-go services poised to explode

In the course of building custom software to manage a business process, you’ll frequently find the need for functionality another company has produced and is impractical for you to build.

You would never want to recreate a credit card processing gateway, a database of satellite imagery or a language translation system, for example. Instead, you would adopt the technology and absorb it into your application.

Traditionally, this has been expensive and time consuming.

First, you have to license the functionality. Then you have to pay developers to tightly integrate it into your application. And, if you are reselling the application, you need to pay royalties over time for each customer you bring on board, eating into your margins and increasing the costs at which you must sell.

But recently there has been an explosion of inexpensive, third-party pay-as-you-go services. You don’t absorb them into your application, you use them whenever necessary.

E-mail blasting is one example. For a very small fee, your application can give to a service a series of e-mail addresses and an e-mail template; the service will handle all aspects of getting e-mail properly delivered. In this way, you can mitigate risks of improperly managing your mail servers and subsequently getting banned from major e-mail providers like Comcast or Yahoo.

This is money well spent. And it’s much less expensive than hiring a systems administrator knowledgeable in bulk e-mail management.

Another example is text messaging and integrated voice response, or IVR. Together, these tools allow a computer to send and receive text messages or phone calls, and to collect or route information from either source without human intervention. With the prevalence of mobile devices and text messaging, you are going to see more of this.

AT&T efficiently uses text messaging. The company sends a text message once a month, telling customers how much they owe on their bill and inviting them to reply with the word “total” to pay in full. I’ve typed it in, sent the text and received immediate text-message confirmation.

Just a few years ago, this technology was exceedingly expensive. I’m sure AT&T spent millions on it.

Today, however, with the explosion of pay-as-you-go services, the technology is becoming accessible to even small businesses. Twilio is one example. With just a few simple programming calls and a small fee for each text or phone call, your application can interact with people via text or call.

This revolution is only the beginning.

Within five years, your custom software will be affordable, highly customized and leverage a range of third-party services to properly function.

How have you used third-party pay-as-you-go services to operate more efficiently?

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This was originally post on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

Oracle founder right about Salesforce.com

The Oracle founder isn’t afraid to say and do what he wants. Sometimes it takes a guy like him to say what needs to be said.

Ellison famously lambasted Salesforce.com — which offers customer relationship management software and enterprise cloud computing — in a video a year ago. He pointed out with no small sense of bombast that there is a big difference between inventing new technology and simply adopting a new name that makes it seem like you’ve invented technology. In Salesforce’s case, it took its software-as-a-service and began calling it cloud computing, seemingly ignoring the other critical elements of the cloud.

Nothing about Salesforce’s technology, its delivery or its customers’ experience changed. The only thing that changed at Salesforce was its website. And it wasn’t the only company. It’s startling to consider the range of products now referred to as “cloud computing” because that’s what is trendy in today’s technology industry.

That so many providers are willing to so significantly change their brand image points to the fact that the industry isn’t stable. And the reason it’s not stable is because customers aren’t being satisfied. I see this dissatisfaction every day when talking to potential customers, and I also see it when I speak with the IT channel. I see it when I talk to Salesforce customers quite frequently.

Particularly with small- and mid-sized businesses, technology remains a half-hearted and often broken offering.

True cloud computing is addressing this problem. Businesses adopting cloud solutions are enjoying remarkable productivity gains, cost savings, revenue increases — all on a budget they can afford. And IT product and service providers delivering cloud solutions are enjoying not just happy customers but sizable profit margins.

You’ve got to hand it to Ellison because he isn’t one to let things go. Today, he’s touting Oracle’s latest cloud innovations. And even as he does so, he continues to lambaste the pseudo-cloud providers.

“We believe cloud computing is a platform,” Ellison said. “It must be elastic and it must include hardware and software; not just applications on the Net like Salesforce.com.”

In time, the market is going to realize this, and for those offenders, I believe there will be backlash.

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.

URLs:

Oracle

http://www.oracle.com/index.html

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmXJSeMaoTY&feature=related

cloud innovations

http://www.cloudcomputingzone.com/2010/09/27/oracle-cloud-hardware-does-incredible-numbers/

Internet Explorer 9’s standards compliance starts new Web experience

Microsoft recently released the beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9). The company is tying the launch into a website called “Beauty of the Web,” which serves to propagate its message about IE 9’s many benefits.

There are two things going on with this version of IE that make it a pivotal moment in the history of computing.

First, this version will be Microsoft’s first browser to be completely standards compliant. This means that developers for the first time will no longer have to write two sets of code, one that works on Internet Explorer and another that works on “all other browsers.” As someone who watches a lot of Web code, I can tell you that Microsoft’s previous non-compliance has been a material source of wasted productivity and headaches.

Second, this browser embraces the next generation of Web standards, opening the door for the widespread deployment of applications based on them. Although most browsers now support standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3, developers had been slow to leverage them in part because of the large number of users of Microsoft browsers for whom that work would not apply.

With the release of IE 9, that work now will apply universally, and because these new standards are so much more powerful, you are going to start seeing tremendous advancement in Web-based application quality and interface.

But here is why this release is truly important: It marks the death knell for a range of technologies that many of us have warmed up to and grown to accept, but to which we are going to have to start saying our goodbyes: desktop applications, Flash, plug-ins.

This release is the final capitulation from the last major industry player about what the future of cloud computing is really going to look like.

And if you haven’t figured it out already, it’s going to be about the browser and it’s going to be about standards-compliant, Web-focused technologies.

In a browser, you are going to begin seeing more interactive interfaces, more 3D rendering, faster responses and generally just a lot more functionality.

And because it is all Web cloud computing based, you are going to being enjoying a lot tighter integrations between the various sites or applications you leverage.

2011 and beyond is going to be experienced in a browser.

Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.

This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.