Utility Computing Train is Coming, But It May Be Late to Your Station

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

The move to utility or “cloud” computing shows every sign of reaching critical mass over the next couple of years.  But it won’t be driven by corporate data centers.  The momentum, instead, is coming from two factors that increasingly dictate the pace of innovation: startups and fear.

In 1991, noted technology columnist Stewart Alsop wrote, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on 15 March 1996.”  Yet as of last year, there were still 10,000 mainframes running worldwide, according to IBM.  Was Alsop wrong? Technically, yes, but the shift that he foresaw is happening.  It’s just being driven by different factors than he expected.

Technology innovation today follows a strikingly consistent pattern. New companies with no legacy base make the switch first while the people with the most to lose are the last ones to change. Instead, they jump on board when they discover that new technology addresses a significant pain point.

Both forces are evident today in utility computing. Robert Scoble wrote persuasively last November about the “serverless” Internet company. His comments were prompted by a meeting with the CEO of Mogulus, a streaming video firm the claims not to own a single server.  What interested me most about Scoble’s remarks is the 65 comments that follow.  Many are from other small companies that are building IT infrastructure from the ground up without servers.  Some of these companies are offering high-bandwidth services on a very large scale, demonstrating scalability and reliability aren’t a problem. In fact, any startup business today should look first at outsourcing its IT infrastructure before investing in a single square foot of computer room space.

Meanwhile, utility services are actually achieving critical mass in a corner of the mainstream corporate IT market: storage. Services like Amazon’s S3 now have well over 300,000 customers.  EMC just joined the fray by launching an online backup service and hiring a top former Microsoft executive to lead its cloud computing initiative.

The storage industry has been a technology innovator recently because storage is a major pain point for many companies.  With capacity requirements expanding at 30% to 50% annually, people are desperate to do something to manage that growth.

The rapid adoption of utility computing seems likely to continue, but with a curve that looks like a landscape of the Himalayan mountains.  In some segments of the market — like startups — utility infrastructures will become the status quo.  In others — like corporate data centers — adoption will come only as the technology addresses specific pain points.

This jagged adoption curve is why there’s so much debate today over the future of the cloud.  Contrast Scoble’s observations, for example, with a recent CIO Insight article in which a CTO outlines his reservations about cloud computing or a CIO Insight reader forum where IT managers take issue with Nicholas Carr’s forecast that IT will increasingly become a central utility.

This debate is happening because the need for utility computing is not perceived to be compelling in all cases.  Perhaps this is why Gartner predicts that early technology adopters will purchase 40% of their IT infrastructure is a service by 2011. Which means that the other 60% will still be acquired conventionally.

The utility computing train is coming but its arrival won’t occur the same time for all organizations. Check your local schedule.

The New Influencers is in The Wall Street Journal – Again!

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Last July, The Wall Street Journal published a positive review of my book, The New Influencers. That was good, but I didn’t expect a second mention! Today, the Journal’s small business section has an interview with Scott Monty, whose Social Media Marketing Blog is one of the livelier and more readable efforts of its kind. Scott recommends New Influencers in addition to a couple of other books and several excellent blogs.

Daily reading 03/15/2008

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Is MySpace Good for Society?

A New York Times columnist asks six thought leaders a simple question: “Has social networking technology made us better or worse off as a society?” Their consensus: both.

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
ReadWriteWeb has a useful review of free tools that help you search the blogosphere and assess the influence of the bloggers you find.

Elliot Spitzer’s call girl has a MySpace page

The Inconvenient Truth About Social Media Marketing
Aaron wall offers a succinct and persuasive argument against link-baiting. We need more of this rational thinking. Link-baiting is a waste of time.

Corporate Blogging – How the Pros Do It
Scott Monty provides thorough coverage of an SXSW panel on corporate blogging. Includes some nice nuggets, such as Dell’s customer relations philosophy: “they’ve empowered every employee to apologize.”

Jeff Jarvis tells why you should reach out to the customers who say they hate you

What happens when 207 people freeze simultaneously for five minutes in Grand Central Station? Watch this…

Take this survey to help understand online community value

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The Society for New Communications Research needs help with a survey. The results should be pretty interesting. Go take it, please. Here’s the description:

If you’re involved in managing online communities for your organization, we invite you to participate in the 2008 Online Community Effectiveness Study, sponsored by Deloitte, the Society for New Communications Research and Beeline Labs. To take the online survey, go to: https://www.communityeffectiveness.com.
The survey takes only about six minutes. The purpose of the study is to assess the effectiveness of online communities and learn how organizations are measuring the success and progress of their online communities.
All participants who complete the survey will receive a copy of the executive summary of the study’s findings and a special discount to attend the Society’s annual conference, New Communications Forum, where the findings will be shared in a special presentation.

Social Network Wars are Over; Now the Fun Begins

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If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to pick winners in the social network race, you can stand up now. Hitwise data for 2007 shows that MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 88% of all visits to social network sites. The next closest competitor, Bebo , got a little more than 1% of the traffic.

There simply is no more competition in the general-purpose social network market. Other social media winners include LinkedIn (which wasn’t included in the Hitwise data), YouTube and Flickr. If you’re a big brand pursuing a broad strategy, you can safely place your bets on these services. For the next year or two, the also-rans will be busy finding buyers and merger partners.

Now is when it really gets interesting, because now the action shifts to vertical market sites. For many marketers, this is where the more interesting opportunity lies. For example, in the area of health, there’s CarePages.com, Wellsphere, Patientslikeme, RevolutionHealth.com and iMedix. Seniors can choose from Elder Wisdom Circle, Grandparents.com, Eons, TeeBeeDee and Multiply. Mothers can sign up for Cafemom, MothersGroups.com, MomJunction and MothersClick, among others.

And the action isn’t limited to consumer markets. Sermo is a social network for physicians, which now boasts more than 50,000 members. Doctors exchange information about serious medical issues and review cases in real time. Pairup connects business travelers for peer advice, networking and assistance. There’s a list of more than 350 social networks here.

Don’t let small membership numbers fool you. Many of these sites may be attractive marketing venues. Scan the groups, discussion topics and participants and look for content profiles that match your market. Prices are generally lower than those of the big social networks and the audience is far more targeted.

Marketing to vertical communities is very different from mass marketing, of course. If you’re interested in building a campaign on Facebook, have a look at what Southwest Airlines and Victoria’s Secret are doing, or the group started by Starbucks fans that has over 60,000 members. There’s nothing particularly high tech about their presence. They mainly provide a place where customers can keep in touch with the brand and have access to special offers and downloads.

When marketing to vertical communities, you need to dig deeply into the expertise in your organization. Members of a health-oriented network, for example, want to speak to people who have lots of expertise in nutrition and treatment. Discounts and promotions won’t work nearly as well in narrow markets as they do in broad ones. If you have articulate, interesting domain experts in your organization, now’s the time to pull them out of the shadows and engage them with knowledgeable communities. Live chats, webcasts and Q&A forums are particularly effective.

Much of the media attention in the last year has focused on the battle for social network supremacy. With that competition now over, the market will subdivide itself in interesting ways. This process will continue for years, presenting an ever-shifting landscape of new marketing opportunities.

Bloggers Get Social April 4-6

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Now here’s a classic Web 2.0-style event! Come and meet other marketing bloggers in NYC for a weekend of fun and socializing April 4-6. In the organizers’ words: “Neither summit nor seminar, Blogger Social is “a first-ever, one-of-a-kind event held by the online marketing community for the marketing community, completely funded and coordinated by community members. Neither summit nor seminar, nowhere near a trade show or conference, the intent is a social event…[It’s] founded upon the idea of time together to better get to know one another.” And no blogging all weekend, they say. You do enough of that, for goodness sake!

It’s co-organized by Christina Kerley, an early social media marketing adopter who gets it as well as any marketer I’ve met. I have to be on the west coast at that time and can’t attend, but for $350 (this is New York City, remember!) it looks well worth the cost.

Don't Let Tools Distract You

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I was presenting a social media seminar to a public-relations agency recently when the talk turned to uses of blogs. The people in the room were excited about blogging’s potential and were eager to apply the technology to new tasks.

I cautioned them that they were asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t what tool to use, but what problem to solve. Tool selection is secondary.

There’s nothing unusual about their attitude. People often start by choosing tools and work backwards to solve problems. Maybe management has just issued an order to start blogging, or the tool is seen as a tactic to improve search performance or it just seems like the thing to do.

But that’s like starting with a hammer and then figuring out what to build with it. If your objective is to make a house, then you’re off to a pretty good start. But if you want to craft a pearl necklace, you’ve got the wrong tool for the job.

I recently consulted with a client who wanted to build a social network for a defined customer group. It was an ambitious idea, but as we talked through it, we both realized that the process of getting it through internal and regulatory approvals could take a year or more. We finally settled on a more modest idea: Launch a relevant blog, try to build customer interest quickly and then take the results to management in hopes of getting fast-track approval for the social network.

Choose tools wisely
The building blocks of social media are simply tools and they’re not well-suited for every task. For example, if your objective is to alert visitors to a new category of products and provide detailed information on the specifics, a catalog page would be more effective than any interactive tool.

But it’s human nature for people to use the technologies they understand and figure out the application after the fact. Unfortunately, that can waste a lot of time and effort. E-mail is terrible for communicating between groups of more than about five recipients, yet people routinely organize massive projects with dozens of participants by e-mail. Even if the tool is poorly suited for the task, they reason, at least people know how to use it.

A better approach is to define business objectives and then search for tools that support them. For customer feedback, for example, blogs and social networks are a good choice. However, podcasts and video won’t do the trick. So if your objective is to improve customer relations, a podcast may not be a good place to start.

Technology vendors encourage the tool focus. Many of those firms are run by engineers who love to create cool new stuff. They’d much rather talk about features and functions than how to solve business problems. You need to block that tactic. Any vendor that won’t give you references to customers who are solving problems that are similar to yours is blowing smoke.

Social media tools are cool, but they’re always irrelevant if they don’t solve problems. Don’t let technology distract you.

The Connected Generation

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

The concept of “presence” is altering business communications. Will you be ready to speak to the next generation of professionals on their own terms?

The chart below should tell you a lot about the future of the workplace. For the past three years, the Associated Press and America Online have measured the use of e-mail and instant messaging (IM) by teens and adults.  In all three surveys, the results have been similar: usage patterns are nearly reversed between the two groups, with teens overwhelmingly preferring IM.

AP-AOL

Source: Associated Press/America Onlin, Nov., 2007

Why?  In part, teens admit, it’s to avoid confrontation and embarrassment by taking the face-to-face element out of awkward situations.  But equally important is that IM reflects teenagers’ always-connected lifestyles.  IM is instantaneous, requires little forethought and lends itself well to use with cell phones, the ubiquitous teen accessory.

Today’s young people expect that their friends will always be available to them, regardless of where they are. Teens are no less communicative than their parents; 50% of them use IM more than one hour a day, compared to 24% of adults, according to the poll. It’s that the nature of their communications is different.  They don’t have time to get to a computer or to carefully compose their thoughts before stating them.  When they have something to say, they want to just say it.

Experts call this “presence:”  our availability and our preferred communications media are a matter of record to the people who need to reach us, whether they’re family, colleagues or customers.  Presence reflects the fact that people are no longer anchored to their desks.  They work at home or on the road most of the time.  Location is a critical element of presence.  Increasingly, our online profiles will include up-to-date information on where we are and how available we want to be. Sophisticated cell phone tracking technology and global positioning systems may even make this transparent to us.

Presence will redefine workplace communications. The New York Times recently reported on the evolution of social networking to include cell phones, which are the primary Internet access points for most of the developed world.  Many of these services factor location into member profiles.  At work, we will need to broadcast our location constantly, since the hyperactive business world no longer tolerates delay.  Corporate directories are evolving to include rich information about people’s background and expertise, along with the means to tap into their knowledge whenever someone in the organization needs it.

The trick will be to balance our need for concentration with the requirement of availability.  I imagine many people blanch at the idea that they would be expected to turn on a dime anytime someone else in their organization needed a question answered. That’s a problem that will be addressed through standards of conduct that will emerge as the technology takes hold. However, the new rules are becoming clear. The next generation of business professionals won’t tolerate the delays that are inherent in business communications.  They are always online, and they expect their colleagues to be there as well.