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What is Cloud Computing and how can it help my company?

Presented by Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems

Overview

Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems are teaming up to provide business executives with an informative overview and peer-to-peer roundtable discussion of Cloud Computing and how this leading-edge technology can be leveraged to achieve breakthrough business results. Topics to be discussed include:

• What Is Cloud Computing? How did we get here?
  • How does “The Cloud” help me?
  • Benefits
• Risks and Mitigation Strategies
• How does Cloud Computing change the way we do business?
  • Time to market acceleration
  • Business model enablement
• Who are the players in Cloud Computing?
  • Amazon
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Salesforce.com
• How do I determine my Cloud strategy?
• Customer case studies
  • Adobe Systems
  • Polycom
  • School of Rock
• How do I get started?

All attendees receive a copy of Jonathan Sapir’s book, Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Seating is limited to 12 business executives, so order your ticket today to reserve your place at the table.

Agenda

Friday, February 19

8:00 – 8:30 Continental breakfast and networking
8:30 – 9:10 Michael Topalovich, Delivered Innovation
9:20 – 10:00 Jonathan Sapir, SilverTree Systems

Location

Regus Park Ridge Plaza
350 S. Northwest Hwy.
Suite 300
Park Ridge, IL 60068

About the Presenters

Jonathan Sapir is the CEO of SilverTree Systems and the author of Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Michael Topalovich is the founder and CTO of Delivered Innovation. Prior to Delivered Innovation, Michael was a senior IT leader with Siebel Systems where in 2003 he spearheaded the systems management team for Siebel CRM OnDemand, one of the first enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

While there has been significant focus on trying to figure out what the implications of Google’s recent confrontation with the Chinese government will be for the company and its bottom line, Nicholas Carr was quick to pen an article in The New Republic about the ulterior motives behind Google’s actions. Carr has been close enough to and written enough about Google over the past few years to take an authoritative position on the matter, which is what grabbed our attention. His position that Google’s potential decision to pull out of China may have less to do with ethical posturing and more to do with the the company’s image of integrity and trust with its customer base is an interesting one, and makes much more sense than a sudden change of heart over censorship or the targeting of dissidents by government-sponsored hackers.

Three key points:

It was the attack, not a sudden burst of righteousness, that spurred Google’s action.

If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we’ll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data.

However important the Chinese market may be to Google, in either the short or the long term, it is less important than maintaining the integrity of the Net as a popular medium for information exchange.

The Question Without an Answer

What exactly is “Cloud Computing?”  The term will probably never be fully fleshed out in terms of a common definition, and at the end of the day that’s fine with me. Yes, we need to put structure around the term and the industry, but as we noted earlier in the year with a post about cloud maturity models, we run the risk of painting ourselves into a corner if we try too hard to make things fit neatly into buckets that we can easily classify and categorize. Taxonomy will be key to understanding and adopting cloud computing, but I’ve become convinced that in order to truly embrace the cloud, we must…

Embrace the Abstract

I had the opportunity to speak at Interop Las Vegas this year with Rick Nucci of Boomi and R. “Ray” Wang of Forrester Research, and when I made the statement that “cloud computing is the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture,” I realized that I had found the unifying principle of cloud-based solution design; unifying both in the sense that the promise of SOA finally has the technology behind it to transform it from philosophy to practical design pattern, as well as in the sense that the term “cloud computing” itself was being co-opted in much the same way that traditional software vendors co-opted the entire concept of Service Oriented Architecture to sell middleware throughout the decade.

Cloud computing may mean many things to many people, but in the end its full potential can only be realized if we stop trying to think of it in terms of the “known known” and embrace the the “known unknown.”  More importantly, when we think about the cloud and applying SOA design principles, we cannot continuously innovate and drive value if we are traversing connections inward to rationalize patterns and explain the abstract with the known; we must restructure our patterns and embrace the abstract in an attempt to forge new connections by moving outward beyond our comfort zones. The next generation of system design is less about creating code, and more about assembling services – innovation through extending value in what already exists rather than inventing new sources of value.  In terms of practical application, this means moving up the stack and…

Learning to Describe Rather Than Prescribe

An interesting pattern that I observed throughout 2009 is the continuing tendency to try and reinvent the wheel despite the fact that not only has the wheel already been invented, but it’s right in front of our eyes and meets our needs 99 times out of 100.  I saw this over and over with Salesforce CRM and Force.com projects; the value of using Platform-as-a-Service is that someone else (or more accurately, thousands of other people) has already thought about just about everything you could possibly need in a data model, user interface, and business rules.  And not only have they published just about everything you could possibly want in an easily configurable platform, they host it and manage all of the operational details such as backups, upgrades, and security. Yet time and again I encountered teams that thought that their way of doing things was better, and would go down the path of trying to build Salesforce on Salesforce before realizing that the same outcomes could have been achieved by spending a little more time upfront optimizing business processes and making minor configuration changes than going down the path of creating complex custom workflows, classes, and user interfaces to achieve the same end.

Some case studies are extreme, such as the support manager that duplicated Contacts across multiple accounts and assigned multiple portal logins to customers – in one extreme case 101 times – rather than setting up sharing rules properly; I don’t have to tell you what a data quality nightmare that ended up being.  In other cases, it’s simply a matter of building rather than reusing what’s already there, resulting in hard-coding of attributes and logic that should be dynamic and extensible.

What I’ve come to realize is that there is a conceptual barrier that we need to overcome when it comes to metadata and other abstracted entities; because multitenancy architecture and SOA are reaching such a pervasive state, we must shift our thinking to describe what already exists rather than trying to recreate it.  Entities exist once and in perpetuity – for example, there is only one of you in the entire world and you cannot be recreated on demand – thus our ability to provide context necessarily requires us to describe the entity in a manner that provides value to the application; the ability to describe entities with deep domain knowledge and create relationships to other entities that enrich the value of the data set will become an important competitive differentiator.

This will take time and a great deal of trial-and-error until we get it right, but in the end it is the only way to leverage the tremendous potential of core cloud computing architecture patterns; our entire concept of producing and consuming services has to change, which leads me to the conclusion that…

SaaS is Dead…Long Live SaaS

Granted, the title of this blog predicates from the acronym for Software-as-a-Service, but as cloud services mature and the traditional technology stack gets blown up and reassembled, the entire concept of “software” shifts from the self-contained, monolithic packaged application to that of a delivery framework. Software was invented to make hardware useful; hardware is abstracted in the cloud and we no longer write code down to the kernel level – we assemble, configure, and code to the layer of abstraction of the specific cloud platform.  The term “software” will gradually fade from our lexicon.

This was the philosophy that drove the Java language and multi-platform virtual machine concept, and will continue to evolve with next generation rich Internet application frameworks such as Adobe Flex / AIR.  What we will see moving forward is the continuing shift from desktop software that interacts with the cloud, to ubiquitous frameworks that consume data and logic services from the cloud and leverage the processing capacity of the local machine to enhance the user experience.

2009 and its economic and sociopolitical malaise are now behind us, and by all accounts 2010 will be the year of the cloud. While the technology and the terminology of the cloud have permeated the mainstream, it will take significant shifts in thought processes and design patterns before the cloud can be fully leveraged.  Here’s to a great New Year and the hopes that the likes of Microsoft and other relics will accelerate their fade into obscurity and stop trying to steer the cloud discussion back into a box.  Until next time, here are some…

Other 2009 Wrap-ups and 2010 Predictions

Jeff Kaplan: Key Challenges Facing Cloud Computing in 2010 and Beyond
Phil Wainewright: Tips from 2009 for a prosperous 2010
Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009 (Humorous, non-cloud related)

• The “big announcement” revealed during Marc Benioff’s first of several lengthy keynotes was Salesforce Chatter, a social platform designed to drive collaboration within the Salesforce CRM environment. I can’t say I was all that excited about Chatter until I went to the salesforce.com area of the Expo Hall and got a first-hand look at it. Even though we won’t see it generally available until mid or late 2010, the deep-dive demo that I got helped me to understand the business value of Chatter and how Delivered Innovation will be able to design next generation Salesforce and Force.com systems around a real-time social and collaborative paradigm.
• The session that I was most looking forward to was the discussion on integrating Google Wave with Salesforce.  Unfortunately the Google Product Manager was unavailable, and despite the best efforts of his replacement the session was a disappointment. I’m still trying to wrap my head around whether Wave will be able to provide business value or if it’s just a new toy with a lot of buzz around it.
• The best session that I attended gave a sneak peek of new packaging and patch management tools for commercial applications.  Today, any customer that downloads a package from the AppExchange has to explicitly download and install updated packages in order to upgrade a commercial application; in the near future it will be possible to push patches and version upgrades to customers directly and instantaneously.  The other impressive feature that I did not realize was already available was the ability to apply conditional logic within Apex classes to create branching based on the installed package version in a customer Salesforce org…for all intents and purposes this creates an in-line code branching solution that avoids the complexity of managing multiple class instances within a package.  But for when a situation does call for a code branch to address critical issues and distribute patches, salesforce.com has created a paradigm of parallel development orgs that can be used to branch code and merge it back into the core code base of the original development org for version releases.
• I will chalk it up to growing pains and West Coast time management, but almost nothing ran on schedule during Dreamforce, and I found that to be frustrating at times. Lesson learned – leave some flexibility in your itinerary and be prepared to make choices regarding sessions because Dreamforce was pretty chaotic at times.  And if you’re planning on grabbing some food from a sponsored lunch, get there early.
• I realize that events are huge marketing opportunities, but I walked out of a couple of sessions because I felt like I was being hard sold on messaging that I had long bought into. There may be a fine line between education and indoctrination, but let people drink the Kool Aid by choice…not brute force.
• My biggest takeaway was the genuine enthusiasm that I got from current and potential Salesforce customers that had “found religion” in cloud computing.  It was very exciting to have the opportunity to talk to so many people that had made the conceptual leap and understood the importance of the cloud.

In a broader context, the energy that I felt in San Francisco last week was like nothing that I had experienced since I lived and worked there almost ten years ago.  There were times when I felt as if I had stuck my finger directly into an electrical outlet and kept it there until I boarded the plane home. 2010 is going to be an explosive year, and whether it was Dreamforce itself or just the timing of the event, many of us will look back at this week in San Francisco as the start of a golden era of technology.

Additional speakers will discuss cloud computing technologies such as: Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.

For more information, visit http://www.dayofcloud.com

About Chicago TechExpo

The Chicago TechExpo introduces and connects small business owners to technology solutions to grow and evolve their businesses. The one–day conference and exposition provides relevant, training and education, to allow business owners to learn how technology can improve operations, minimize time spent on administrative tasks, market their business and increase sales by using a very powerful tool: technology.

For more information, visit http://www.chicagotechexpo.net

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