I liked this blog entry on 15 ways to tell it is not cloud. Among them, I liked these the most:

• If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.
• If there is no API… its not a cloud.
• If you need to re-architect your systems for it… Its not a cloud.
• If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.
• If it only runs one operating system… its not a cloud.

One thing, I would have added to the list and see cloud succeed:

• If you can’t transfer your existing software licence… its not a cloud.

Cloud computing is maturing and progressing well. It continues to become reliable and available at cheaper cost than businesses otherwise would spend. Time will tell its success. One trend to observe will be small-mid businesses broadly adopting cloud to run businesses-critical core applications beyond adjacency services.

Cloud computing is the buzz.

Cloud computing is on the rise.

Cloud infrastructure is becoming cheap and broadly available. Just check out the Amazon EC2 pricing.

Cloud grows (or shrinks) with my need. Infect there is a term for this aka “elastic cloud“. 

Cloud can support my on premise license software copy. 

Cloud computing has lot of cool acronyms – Saas, PaaS, HaaS, S+S, etc.

Moore’s law will continue to drive the cloud cheaper, reliable and readily available.

Some say – Cloud – like other essential services – is recession proof.

Only computer hardware that I need (someday) should be some plug on the wall.

So why buy my own hardware? when I can rely on the professionally managed, well administered, and reliable computing infrastructure for my personal or business use?

I want total control over my little cloud – including pulling it back on premise as and when I deem right.

I want computing infrastructure to be a matter of personal choice – whether I want it on premise or I want it on my cloud.

I want my cloud – mine…and good thing it is getting there.

We live in a time of convergence where examples are littered show casing various technologies or products converging to enhance end user experience. One case in point digital media and home entertainment serving to improve everyday experience. Just pick one category of your liking and you will soon find someone is pushing the envelope either bringing adjacency services closer or building one if it doesn’t already exist.

Same is true for the business software community. It remains an emerging trend to converge and deliver enhanced experience for business users.

I usually put the convergence in three categories that overtime gets delivered as one unified solution. These are:

1. Improve a person’s productivity in the workplace.

2. Improve the ability to make decision easier based on historical or projection based heuristics

3. Improve an individual social standing in the peer community

There are multiple ways this convergence is getting accomplished. People who observe business software see how the dots are getting connected – be it through an acquisition in the marketplace or the kind of releases introduced in the marketplace.

One big plus is the maturity (and availability) of technology infrastructure – particularly around web based computing model – which helps converge and deliver combined user experience feasible.

It is an exciting time being in this space and next decade is going to be much better than the past decade – as far as the overall business solutions are concerned.

NYTimes published this interactive chart showing statewide voting trends of democratic primary.

Just plain simple and easy chart - allowing information to dice and slice; form individual opinion and navigate the trend.

Consider the amount of multi-dimensional data that this chart shows. It consists of 16 dimensions; 50 data points; each data point suggesting additional attribute of %age point gain; etc. times 2 – one for each candidate. This easily require decent amount of data crunching to capture the information.

Also, consider how many ways this information could have been rendered to show various scenarios effectively.

Isn’t this chart easy? Instead of getting drowned in the whole bunch of statistics and data – this chart allows connecting dots and seeing the trend otherwise not visible.

Similar opportunities exist for browser based business applications in improving user experience that enables an individual to be informed; help make decisions; manage individual relationships and network along with the variety of tasks he or she need to get done.

Bob Bennett from Sage Payment Solution Division recommended “The Future of Management” and also send me a copy to read. It is an interesting read and the book compares the management practices of the yesteryears to what is needed now to build an innovative/high performance organization. Management Innovation is called out repeatedly touting empowered employees in a self managed, transparent organization where peers hold each other accountable to build a high performing organization.

Truly, at the end of the day an organization success is a direct product of the people it employs. I like the example of Toyota’s TPS (Toyota Production System) fondly known as “Thinking People System” is a good example of how it can be a differentiator in tough industry environment. It is keeping Toyota healthy despite all the challenges within the automobile industry.

A team from Detroit once took the tour to Toyota to find out the difference. Initially, success was attributed due to the Japenese culture and different work ethics resulting in Toyota (and similar other Japanese auto marker) an edge over its Detroit counterparts. It soon got belied as Toyota expanded its manufacturing base in US. Now, even within the same cultural context and country Toyota continues to make the difference that has made it famous.

The key to the success, as people find out, is the constant change that happens at Toyota – mostly driven by its employees who are always looking to optimize or making things better. It is widely touted as “Kaizen“. Contrast this with other companies where change is induced from the top when the need is drastic and employees resist change resulting in half hearted adoption akin to too little too late. Thus companies struggle to remain agile and difficult to keep up with the market need.

In mature market and competitive industry landscape where margins are hard to acheive and average growth remains minimal - it is such a boon for Toyota where employees bring gradual change among themselves ensuring organization to remain current with the need. Also, it fosters a culture of team work, collaboration, and change that thrive to remain agile. Essentially, Toyota is successfully reaping on the bright brains it employs.

Learning here is no different for other industries including enterprise software. Key to success remains empowering employees who regularly reflect on day’s work and adapt; fostering a cross functional team environment; and an environment where peers hold each other accountable for the joint success.

Recently, a blog post on Sandhill suggested how Simplicity is the next frontier for Enterprise Software.

This topic usually gets its share of debate – particularly what it means in the enterprise space. I tend to agree that Simplicity need to be on the cross-hair of an enterprise development organization. I will venture and suggest Simplicity to augement the definition of “Quality” and make it measurable while product is in development. To continue to differentiate in the market place, enterprise software simply need to go beyond functional and be usable as well.

There are various studies/surveys that suggest enterprise software functionality usage (or lack of usage) due to the end users challenges working with the applications. Functionality already in the product that gets overlooked and don’t get to see the light of the day…

Good news is much of the enterprise industry is investing in usability and developing best practices for wider adoption. The real gains though start to happen as Simplicity becomes part of the culture; grooming champions within the organization; including it as part of the software development process; encouraging indivduals to address Usability issues with the same sense of urgency as it would to the Quality/functional issues. Of course, sooner in the release cycle the better.

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.

As Facebook evolves so does the promise of Facebook applications helping business users. This is the chasm Facebook need to cross as it attracts business users. CIO magazine recently published its list of 5 such widgets for business users.  

I like Wiki mono (think ability to collaborate and generate some kind of document say quote, proposal, etc. together) and Sticky notes (think on your face message as a way to follow up). I am excited about the potential here and what it means to the future of enterprise applications as these trends starts to unleash new wave of productivity and collaboration within the organization.

While I am on the Social communities topic, I landed on this humorous youtube clip describing what is “Web 2.0″. Although the picturaization is funny but the punch line remains what Web 2.0 stands for. Check it out…

As enterprise software continues to evolve from automating paper/pen/fax based tasks to business processes/workflows – next frontier remains to tap the collective intellect of the organization and harnessing social power of its workforce to find the competitive edge.

The trend continues as personal web and enterprise web converge. As the next generation of workforce joins the rank it is increasingly important to carry forward the expectation of personal web into an enterprise. Individual experiences of managing various social interactions, relationships and personal preferences define the corner stone of various personal web phenomena. These set of technologies enable targeted communication and mass scale collaboration needed to unleash huge productivity potential in an enterprise.

Enterprise applications remains an exciting space to watch for as several upcoming web technologies makes inroad providing either make over to the current set of products or helping evolve new type of applications.

Last month or two, blogsphere is abuzz about Facebook. Particularly, after Mark Zuckerberg, wonderboy CEO of Facebook, announced F8. For those who missed F8 announcement - this is Facebook launching a development platform to building applications leveraging social networks. A very good analysis of Facebook and its new social platform is done by Marc Andreessen at his blog here. I will recommend reading it.

F8 platform provides a good extensibility model around Facebook at interfaces/API, data access and user interface level. I also like the fact how it makes a close system – Facebook site in itself, open to building and extending the system – like building other applications on top of Facebook plus the governance model around it.

This move towards providing a platform for build social applications and access to its social network is fuelling speculation on how Facebook is going to be the next big thing. Pundits are already putting Facebook in a different league than MySpace given its open platform and ability to attract and build healthy and bigger ecosystem.

Personally, I like the move as it continues to influence and challenge traditional development thought processes by opening up the development paradigms necessary to embrace social style of development. An approach that embrace opening up development paradigm to foster healthy eco systems required to serve products and services necessary to deliver unique customer experiences. I have covered this topic in different contexts here, here, here and here.