The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) was formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Yesterday, at the Black Hat USA 2010 Conference, CSA announced industry's first certification program on secure cloud computing. CSA has been busy identifying top threats in cloud computing and developing best practices in the use of cloud computing. With this certification program, it will now certify that professionals with a responsibility related to cloud computing have a demonstrated awareness of the security threats and best practices for securing the cloud.
As cloud computing gains considerable traction in both government and enterprise sectors, it is necessary for these organizations to employ professionals who can guide them towards secure cloud computing. There is a clear need for training and certification of professionals to assure that cloud computing is implemented responsibly with the appropriate security controls. CSA's announcement about the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) is targeted to take care of this exact need of the industry. The examination is designed to test the professionals against their understanding of the key concepts of the CSA security guidance whitepaper and the ENISA whitepaper. 
This certification will come handy for organizations exploring to move to cloud. Already, eBay has announced that this certification is a requirement for their staff. Lockheed Martin also sees this certification as a great way to provide a consistent way of developing cloud security competency within the organization. Others like NG, Symantec, CA, Trend Micro and Zynga have already committed to CCSK. Pretty soon we will be seeing companies small and big requiring their employees to get get CCSK certified in order to help them with their cloud strategy.
enStratus , the company that offers tools for cloud governance, announced that CSA has selected enStratus cloud management platform for their new User Certification Program system. enStratus is a powerful platform with extensive support to many cloud providers including support for Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, The Rackspace Cloud, Windows Azure, Terremark, VMware's vCloud Express Service, cloud.com and Visi's ReliaCloud. According to Jim Reavis, Executive Director of CSA,The Cloud Security Alliance requires a cloud management platform that provides the critical cloud governance capabilities we know are important. For this reason, we selected enStratus and have deployed their cloud management platform to improve the resiliency and availability of our certification system.I have played around with enStratus platform a bit and it is packed with powerful functionalities necessary for any security conscious organization. The adoption of their platform by CSA for their certification program highlights the value of enStratus platform for enterprises with cloud plans.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

The noise surrounding Google App's City of LA deployment doesn't appear to be dying down anytime soon. Yesterday, another article highlighting Google's failure came up on the basis of a leaked email from the City of Los Angeles. The April 13 letter, addressed to L.A.'s information technology and government affairs committee from City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana, notes that during a pilot program testing the Google Apps system, which was deployed by Google implementation channel partner CSC, users voiced frustration over performance issues. The latter also notes that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) expressed concerned about the systems' level of security. The letter sheds an early light on some of the key reasons Google has missed the deadline to complete the project.In my opinion, there is a quite a bit of hype going on regarding the so called bungling by Google. Let me try to list out the criticisms in simple sentences based on my understanding of the issue.

• One of the biggest criticisms was about slow performance of Google Apps. It has been found that it was partly due to issues within their own network and issues associated with the browsers used by the employees, mostly Internet Explorer. In my opinion, this is not a Google problem.
• The second biggest complaint is lack of functionality in Google Apps. Looks like city employees were using Groupwise before they started the pilot with Google Apps. Many of the employees feel that Google Apps doesn't match with Groupwise on functionality. Such criticisms are natural when you move an organization from one platform to another. If anything, this is not a Google problem at all. It is the responsibility of City of LA IT to decide whether Google Apps matches their needs and then convince their employees about the merits of the system. Any criticism of Google on this is pretty naive. Such criticisms can occur whenever any IT moves their organization to a different platform.
• The third criticism, coming from LAPD about the security, might have some merit. However, without any details on this issue, it is just a case of my guess vs your guess. However, the recent announcement by Google to separate out the government data from its commercial customers and some security enhancements associated with this move should help Google convince LAPD.

The third point above brings into focus Google's recent announcement about Google Apps for Government. Going an extra mile to reach out to Government's requirement is a smart move by Google. President Obama's administration is serious about Government going cloud and opened up a marketplace where different vendors can offer services for Government agencies at all levels, federal, state and local. US Government being one of the biggest IT spender in the world, this will help Google in a big way.
Google Apps for government offers the following additional features that was not previously available with Google Apps Premier edition. 

• Government data will be segregated from the commercial customers' data on secure Google datacenters that are FISMA certified. All the government data is stored inside the US borders
• Google Apps is now FISMA certified. Google Apps is the first multi-tenant cloud application to get FISMA certification. It has received an authority to operate at the FISMA-Moderate level; an independent auditor assessed the level of operational risk as Low. This is a big coup for Google as it will help them not only secure government contracts but also help them convince enterprises that they can trust them with their data
• Best in class data recovery at no additional cost. This is crucial for government agencies as they cannot afford to have any downtime or loss of important data

While FISMA certification helps Google gain the trust of government agencies and, even, some enterprise customers, they also got a shot in arm when CA announced their new CA Identity Manager with support for provisioning user accounts on Google Apps. This will allow easy provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts. This has a potential to significantly boost Google Apps adoption in the enterprise market.Central to CA's cloud security strategy is the launch of new CA Identity Manager capabilities that bring identity management tools to cloud applications. Mann said CA Identity Manager now supports user provisioning to Google (NSDQ:GOOG) Apps, Google's widely popular suite of cloud-based productivity applications like Gmail and Google Docs. Mann said users can now automate identity management functions, like role-based user provisioning and de-provisioning or self-service access requests to a single system for managing identities, for Google Apps in the cloud as well as applications that reside in-house.While pundits and competitors are busy hyping up problems associated with the pilot at City of LA, Google is quietly taking steps to position Google Apps with both government and big enterprises. The next two years will show us whether Google is going to succeed in its efforts or not.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

This is the Week of Leaks: first and foremost Wikileaks, and now the iPhone Leak.  No, I’m not talking about the disappearing signal (aren’t we bored of the iPhone antenna stories yet?), this is leaking white light as reported by TheStreet.com:

Apparently, the back light from the iPhone display screen is leaking out around the edges of the glass and seeping through the back of the white phone, according to a person familiar with the manufacturing process.

So it appears Apple can’t make a white iPhone – for now.  I actually think the black one is more elegant, but of course it’s a matter of choice.  HTC can claim to be first, since their white EVO is now available – but is it really white?

Not really…this is a black phone with a white back – a rather tasteless combination, if you ask me.  If you want white, go for the true white, which is what the iPhone design is – if they can ever manufacture it.

All this white-mania makes my head spin, to the point I can’t pick to most fitting tune.  Is it:

• Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum or
• Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues

Both recorded before many of our readers were born. Enjoy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

• House of Lords on A Whiter Shade of Pale
• White iPhone 4 Delays Might Not be Because of Color 
• White iPhone 4 Delays Due to Light Leakage?
  

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When I wrote about Openstack last week, I talked about the disruptive potential of an Openstack.org and how it can make the market by empowering the smaller players.Many people who dismiss Openstack.org as a non-starter fail to understand that it is just a start. Openstack.org doesn't claim it has the miracle pill for all the ills in the cloud. It is a new initiative and it is just starting off. In fact, the compute code is not even ready. In my opinion, it is a start and any outright dismissal or claims of victory is not only premature but also amateurish. The only thing it offers is a potential to disrupt the cloud marketplace in the future. There are many factors in play before we can even see the results of this move. If they execute it right, it can stir up the marketplace. It may not destroy the leading players in the market. The best I expect from this initiative is that it will level the marketplace by making it easy for smaller players to jump in and try their chance.In my opinion, there is a strong need for competition in the marketplace because it is the only way we can ensure a continuous innovation. Yes, Amazon is innovating rapidly today even with its current runaway lead. However, if the market lacks strong competition against Amazon, soon they will stop innovating and focus on protecting their monopoly type lead using their muscle power. In my opinion, Openstack is a good alternative with tremendous potential to disrupt the market and make it competitive.
Looks like Simon Wardley, a researcher at the Leading Edge Forum at CSC, said the same thing after talking to executives at Amazon Web Services in July, 2007. From his blog post from 2007, he writesI met Jeff Barr some time ago. I told him that in my opinion the smart thing would be for Amazon to open source EC2 & S3, encourage competitors and compete on price and service - take first leader advantage, establish the market. If they don't, someone else could disrupt their market by doing this to them. I asked Werner the same thing at FOWA and he talked about their "secret sauce". I reckon all that is needed is an open sourced utility computing engine being adopted by small ISPs and they are going to have a fight on their hands.Well, all I can do is to admire Simon's forward thinking at a time when cloud computing was yet to gain attention beyond the geeks. I agree with Simon completely and hope that the folks at Openstack.org execute it well. If done right, Openstack will lure smaller players including many webhosts trying to position themselves to be an important player in the cloud world. Such an adoption will offer the much needed competition for Amazon Web Services and force them to keep innovating. Any marketplace where the major player continues to innovate consistently is a winning situation for the customers. Let us wait and see if Simon's words turns out to be prophetic. CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Last week when Twitter announced that they are building a datacenter I wrote a post wondering why companies move out of the cloud as they grow big. Even though I don't have many examples of startups building their own datacenters after growing big, many folks in the startup world told me that they wouldn't mind moving to their own DC if the situation demanded it. This justification can come from any company moving from the cloud to their own datacenter too. If every successful consumer focussed company is going to demand full control over network and system configuration and they want to be the person defining the SLAs, it is a big trouble for the public clouds. When consumer focussed companies are so obsessed with control and SLAs, there is no way enterprises are going to embrace public clouds anytime soon. Either we need a change in mindset of the companies in both the consumer space and the enterprise space or public cloud providers have to do more to lure them towards clouds.Recently, Larry Dignan wrote this post on CNET about Autodesk using Amazon EC2 to do heavy simulations in the background for their Inventer 3-D design applications.Grant Rochelle, director of digital simulation at Autodesk Manufacturing, says these tools will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the background. Engineers and designers are trying to ask key questions about their designs, notably whether they will bend or break and how they behave under certain conditions. “By designing Inventor into the cloud our users can consider many alternatives,” said Rochelle. “These compute simulations have been restricted on the desktop due to the hardware limitations.”This is an example from the other side of the "cloud situation" I discussed in the previous post. Well established companies from even the desktop era are considering cloud to push some of their workloads. This is the most logical approach and many enterprises are already doing it. Along with test and development, they are also pushing other non-mission critical workloads that are beyond the reach of regulations. 
I think cloud computing is at an interesting point where traditionally conservative enterprises are eager to explore but web 2.0 kids want to stay away. It is time we (evangelists, analysts, practitioners, etc.) should come together and think about it. Let us keep out the FUDs, spins and other noise from the discussions and explore why this is the case. What do you think? CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Bitrock, the company that provides tools and services to package, deploy and update software, has announced the release of Bitnami Studio, a self service GUI based platform to package and deploy applications to the clouds. It offers choice from the underlying operating systems to middleware/runtime to applications to the users so that they can easily assemble the stack they want and get it running on the cloud within minutes. I have already covered rPath several times in this blog and Bitrock claim that they offer more choice to the IT users than their competitors. Though I never got a chance to do a feature by feature comparison, I did notice that Bitnami studio offers more OS choices than rPath )rPath supports RHEL, SUSE, CentOS and Windows coming in Q3 of 2010).
Bitnami studio is well suited for organizations that are keen to push their applications (whether popular open source applications customized to their needs or their own custom built applications) to either the public clouds like Amazon EC2 or private clouds within their own datacenters. With Bitnami studio the whole process is seamless and saves lot of time which IT spends in packaging and deployment. Some of the interesting features of Bitnami studio include

• Cross platform - it is independent of OS. You can run any OS of your choice
• Multiple distribution -  even within Linux, you are free to use any distribution of your choice. Either you can take one from the diverse choices they offer or if you have a custom built Linux distro to suit your organizational needs, you can upload it too. This is one of the areas where they differentiate themselves from rPath
• Choice of Middleware and Applications - They have a wide variety of option for middleware/runtime components and applications. This allows you to package any type of stack you want
• Templates - Like other players in this space, they also support templates. As an user, you have a choice to either use one of the ready-made templates or use your custom ones
• Supports many virtualization platforms - Support for VMware and EC2 is already available and they are working with other providers to support their platforms
• SaaS or On-Premise - Bitnami studio is available as both a SaaS offering and a downloadable offering for on-premise installation
• Role based control - This is one feature that will be attractive to enterprises. They provide role based access controls to allow you to limit access to stacks and components for accountability and security purposes. IT will love this kind of fine grained control at the component level. You can do this by setting up the necessary username and password before packaging on the Bitnami Studio

During Glue Conference, I had a demo of Bitnami Studio and what I saw was a pretty good product offering a seamless way to package any open source or custom applications. It is definitely a powerful tool that will help organizations push their apps to the cloud easily. Even without a cloud strategy, Bitnami Studio will come handy for packaging and deploying applications in your own datacenters. Even though they have a solid product, it will be interesting to watch them come up in a market where established companies like rPath and others have already gained marketshare. When I spoke to Bitrock people, they told me that they are already seeing some solid interest for their product and they are confident that they can gain marketshare by offering more choice to their users. If you are someone in your organization's IT and you are looking for a way to easily package your custom built application, I strongly urge you to take a look at Bitnami Studio. I will also closely observe their progress and get back to update in this space in the future.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

The way we work has changed dramatically over the past few years.  I’m relatively young…turning 27 in a few weeks – yet even I can recall working for previous employers where there was just no way of getting things done without being present in the same location as my team (probably because for my first serious job I was occasionally asked to get coffee, can’t do that virtually…).   Today I think it’s safe to say that a majority of the tasks that an individual needs to complete can be done just as effectively sitting on a beach in Maui as they can sitting in a cubicle.  Furthermore, the traditional work hours of 9-5 are becoming more and more irrelevant.  One of the things that frustrated me the most when going into an office during a particular time was that just because someone told me that I needed to work from 9-5 doesn’t mean I that I could.  Like most people I have ideas and am more productive at various parts of the day; sometimes I get an idea at the gym, sometimes I get an idea in the shower, and sometimes I get an idea at 11pm at night – I don’t think 9-5 and neither do most people.  I also have a very interesting and dynamic workday.  Sometimes I like to go to the gym mid afternoon and sometimes I like to work late and sleep in during the morning.

According to an article from the Sunday Times in 2009, “Working nine to five, what an archaic way to make a living. Recent research by Microsoft shows that 78% of people believe that traditional office hours no longer exist — and some forward-thinking companies are even dispensing with the office itself.”

Current economic conditions are also propelling the virtual workforce initiative forward as it helps reduce overall operating costs.  An article on CNN also highlights the value of virtual meetings and discusses new initiatives by Second Life to service this new virtual workforce.  In my Enterprise 2.0 series on Intuit the organization mentioned that they are actively encouraging virtual work and are in fact now calling it “flexible work spaces.”

Tools such as Box.net, Yammer, Skype, and Gdocs (and probably hundreds of others) all allow you to do everything from host video conferences, to collaborate on documents, update the company on what you are working on, chat in real time (via text, voice, or video), share files – pretty much anything you can think of.  The challenge however is that while the tools are available, their successful use and adoption is ultimately what is going to drive and encourage a virtual or “flexible” workspace.  As Intuit puts it, the tools they have deployed allow employees to work from anywhere while still giving them the feeling that they are part of the team and collaborating – just as if they were sitting next to each other.

Most virtual technology solutions are also accessible via mobile devices, in fact many software solutions build specific apps so that employees can access all of their information via mobile phone.  Mobile phones are pretty much becoming small laptops and you can do almost anything on these devices. Here’s an interesting report by Pew which highlights some interesting internet, broadband, and mobile stats.

The reality is that today we have a very mobile and virtual workforce.

Working virtually is much easier for smaller organizations since there is just less to deal with in terms of adoption, employees, legal, and overall barriers.  Trust in a virtual workforce is also crucial.  If someone wants to work virtually from Maui then the expectations of that employee getting their work done, doesn’t change.  It only takes a few negative experiences to convince a large organization to disallow any type of virtual work.

I think there are a few things that are crucial for a successful virtual workforce.

Trust

As I mentioned above you have to feel confident that the guy in Maui is getting his job done and doing so just as if he were working at the office

Tools

The entire virtual workforce movement is supported by a host of technology platforms that all cater to a specific need.  For example Box.net is great at sharing files and information with employees.  Skype is perfect for 1-on-1 video or voice meetings.  Yammer is great at connecting an entire organization and updating employees on who is working on what.  The challenge around tools is making sure that they can be integrated with one another when relevant, that employees know which tools they have access to and how to use them.

Accountability/productivity

Employees have to remain accountable for the work that they need to do and productivity cannot suffer in the process.  Of course if an organization notices that accountability and productivity begins to decrease then you can kiss virtual work goodbye.

Governance

There need to be some rules and guidelines in place for this.  For example if a client proposal is due tomorrow is it still ok for the team to work from home?  Should employees be allowed to take conference calls from home?  Simple examples I know, but there need to be some sort of guidelines in place at least initially to make this work.

Security

This is a big one.  Making sure that information employees access from a remote location is secure and private is a huge concern for organizations.  Working from an office space, the organization has much more control over access so somehow this needs to be negotiated with IT.

Here’s a great post from Telecommuter on best practices for telecommuting for fortune 500 companies that I also recommend you read. For another interesting read check out Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game.  The point is that we are moving towards a mobile and virtual work force and we now have the tools and technologies in place to support that, but as we learned tools and technology only get you so far without having a solid strategy in place for making everything work.

Here’s a great example of a large organization (Cognizant) manages and encourages virtual work, thanks to Prem Kumar for the tip!

Ask yourself if your organization can be just as productive if it allowed for a virtual workforce and let me know what you think in the comments.

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter )



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Social Proof in Action …

Yesterday I wrote aboutthe benefits of using social proof and authority in raising venture capital .  If you didn’t read that yet it might be worth having a quick skim as a primer.

Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions” and is also one of the most important techniques in acquiring customers in your company.  Many of you have read or at least know the primary thesis of “Crossing the Chasm” the seminal book on marketing your products to mainstream consumers by Geoffrey Moore.  It influenced a generation of tech marketers.

The book popularized the technology adoption lifecycle curve that originally came out of Iowa State University shown below.  We all intuitively know this curve now but we don’t all market effectively to it.  Chris Dixon alluded heavily to it in his brilliant post on “Techies and Normals.”  People who are “innovators” or “early adopters” like to be at the cutting edge.  We like to use new product and gain benefits before our peers.  We are evangelists.  We check-in when we go to restaurants when everybody else is wondering when we’re going to put away our F***ing iPhones or Blackberries.  We have to be first (this image is worth a click, I promise).

In short, innovators and early adopters have faith that there will be benefits to using products that are unproven and even if they don’t they enjoy the process of using new stuff.  This applies to business users as much as to consumers.  Sometimes these markets never appeal to “normals” (Chris Dixon’s definition) and other times it needs to be more effectively marketed to normals.

So the early part of a technology company is about finding your hard core group of early adopters and making them passionate about your products.  You need to give them “back stage” passes to your company.  You need to give them advance notice of your product development or better yet let them help influence your direction.  Sure, they need a little social proof.  If they hear that Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington or Jason Calacanis loves your product they’re more likely to give it a try.

This is what drove early adoption at Twitter, FourSquare, Quora and is now driving people obsessively at FlipBoard.  I must be an early adopter rather than an innovator because I DO NOT have my knickers in a twist to get on FlipBoard.  It looks cool, but I can wait.

But here’s the thing – the early & late majority will never come without social proof.  These are the people who want to see ROI studies (business), read NY Times reviews by David Pogue or WSJ reviews by Walt Mossberg (consumer).  And the key to understand how to market to these people is to understand the point made in the book “Yes” by Robert Cialdini.  Regarding “social proof” he says,

“Earlier we described the importance of testimonials in trying to sway others’ opinions in your direction.  The results of this experiment [the one on hotels listed in my previous post] suggest that the more similar the person giving the testimonial is to the new target audience, the more persuasive the message becomes … You should begin not with the testimonial you’re most proud of, but with the one whose circumstances are most comparable to your audiences.”

This is where heroes come in.  Heroes are those every day users of your product who are not overly senior in ranks but are in charge of implementing your solution within their company.  If they’re consumers they’re just everyday people like you and me.

Salesforce.come is brilliant at marketing heroes and I think Marc learned it in turn from Oracle.  We would take every day users from our customer base and make them heroes.  Here are some examples of heroes in action:

• A testimonial / quote from a hero on the banner on the home page of your website with their image and a link to a case study on how they used the product
• Speaking at a “city tour” in which Salesforce.com sales reps and executive management were present.  Heroes told our success stories, not us.
• Leading breakout sessions at our annual conference – DreamForce
• Speaking to industry analysts at Gartner Group, Aberdeen, IDC, Yankee Group, etc.
• Taking reference calls from prospects considering using our products

Marketing heroes is brilliant and you should find ways to implement in your organization.  On the one hand the early & late majority are more apt to listen to the benefits of your products from their peers through social proof than from any corporate bumpf you can produce to convince them of the benefits of your product.

On the other hand, what better way to build strong relationships with your company’s strongest supporters.  How often do every day employees get to appear on the home page of a major website, speak at a conference or get to talk with market analysts?  You’re elevating them in ways their own organizations probably do not.  And in turn you get not only strong endorsements but even more loyal future supporters.

Think about this – what is more powerful – a VC who tells you how great he/she is or when you read your peers reviews on The Funded?

And heroes work on the consumer side, too.  Ever notice all those iPad billboards are just ordinary users like you and me sitting on a couch using a product that they know you’re going to love?  OK, I know Apples has an unfair advantage – but the emotion their going after is social proof.  People like you use this product.  It’s easy.  It’s what they do when their sitting on their couch watching TV.  Everybody is doing it.

How are you going to cultivate and gain the support of your company’s heroes?  How will you work with your heroes to gain more early adopters or to market the early majority more effectively?  We already know from Cialdini that this is even more important than your putting a link to a press articles yet how much time do you spend trying to market these to everybody?

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table )

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Today morning I wrote a post that pointed to a Gartner report that said SaaS revenues from enterprise application market has increased 14.1 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. Now the market research firm IDC has come out with a study that forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%.
The other key findings include

• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
• SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending.

Both this IDC study and Gartner study indicates that enterprises are embracing SaaS in a big way and the day when shrink wrapped software will enter the history books is not very far. There are many reasons for this large scale SaaS adoption. Chief among them are

• The prolonged economic downturn and the need for companies of all sizes to get their finances tight
• More widely distributed teams needing a robust collaborative environment
• Younger workforce wanting to use the latest technologies they are familiar with
• An IT environment having more mobile devices than anytime in the past

However, as I noted in my previous post, there are challenges that remain. We need to go a long way before SaaS becomes as ubiquitous as traditional shrink wrapped applications. CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

SaaS is slowly gaining adoption not just in the small and mid market range but also in big enterprises. According to a new Gartner report "Software as a Service 2009-2014", the SaaS revenues within the enterprise software market will grow in 2010 by 14.1 percent from the 2009 revenues. In 2009, the revenues were $7.5 billion and it is growing to $8.5 billion this year.Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue within the enterprise application software market is forecast to surpass $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1 percent from 2009 revenue of $7.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The rapid adoption of SaaS has contributed to growth in varying degrees across the enterprise software markets. There will be a shift in total SaaS revenue from just over 10 percent of the combined markets in 2009, to more than 16 percent of these combined markets in 2014.According to Sharon Mertz, Research Director at Gartner, the reason for this rapid growth is the leaner economic period. The difficult economic times sort of forced the businesses to adopt SaaS as a cost cutting option and they eventually got used to the SaaS way of doing things, leading to more SaaS and cloud computing adoption. I would like to add that increasing maturity of the SaaS applications combined with meeting some of the integration challenges has also played a role in the adoption. 
Sharon Mertz also pointed out Adoption varies between and within markets, and although use is expanding to a wider range of applications and solutions, the most widespread use is still characterized by horizontal applications with common processes, among distributed virtual workforce teams and within Web 2.0 initiatives.As the adoption grows, we are going to see more and more vendors moving to offering SaaS version of their products resulting in increased competition and more options to the customers. However, key challenges remain and we need to address them fast before we see a more ubiquitous adoption. Some of the challenges include

• Increased security and transparency in the process
• Better SLAs
• Open APIs to facilitate data portability
• Supporting open formats
• Ensuring that the software bloat from the traditional software era doesn't translate into browser bloat in the SaaS era. To do this, vendors need to adopt open technologies like HTML5 and, also, work with browser vendors to make browsers leaner. One way they can do this is by participating in the development process of some of the open source browsers.

The bottom line is that SaaS is growing big and it is just a matter of time before bloated desktop applications become part of the history.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

This is part five (and the final part) in a multi-part series on how Intuit is implementing Enterprise 2.0 within their organization.  Part one covered the business drivers of Enterprise 2.0, part two looked at some of the change management issues of Enterprise 2.0, part three explored cultural and organization shifts,  part 4 talked about technology adoption and encouraging use, and today we’re going to take a look at the operational impact and lessons learned within Intuit.

The largest operational impact that Intuit realized was the speed in which it was able to go from idea concept to putting something in the customers hands.  Prior to any type of E2.0 initiatives it took Intuit around 13 months to come up with a product idea, build it, and put it into the hands of the users.  After their E2.0 efforts Intuit was able to do this in 5 months, a 60% decrease.  In the 6 months after Brainstorm was released the rate of ideation went up by around 1000% and the amount of participation was up over 500%.  Intuit has also developed several solutions that came as a result of internal ideas, many of these products are now generating revenue for Intuit and solving real world customer problems.

Tools make it far easier for employees to collaborate and work together whether they are in an office or not.  If you are a remote worker it is easier to still to become a part of the company and stay together as opposed to feeling detached and isolated.  Instead of having “remote” employees Intuit has what it calls a flexible workplace and these new tools are helping make that happen.  Tools help reduce a lot of collaboration friction.

Employees are now asking one another for help and are reaching out to people that they have never met.  Here are some quotes from team members at Intuit:

“You have one team out in Texas, and 2 teams in San Diego who didn’t know each other.  Through Brainstorm, they realized that there were other teams out there and they joined forces.  Now just a few months later, there is a project fully resourced and in market.”

“I didn’t even know these individuals who “appeared” from various functions and across business units to lend support and help guide me along.  As a result, I was able to assemble an implementation strategy without a lot of background experience.  This helped foster the idea, move it to the point of pilot and now it is generating promising results.”

Intuit is using a host of tools and platforms in addition to Brainstorm.

Yammer (very recently sanctioned by Intuit so it’s not at scale yet)
Used as human powered search engine.  Employees ask questions and within around an hour or two they receive responses this is much easier and efficient than finding managers and asking them for information.  Yammer is great because it has a memory or in other words there is a record of interaction.  There are around 1,900 users and this is growing every day.  Many employees also use yammer to share information and content with each other.

Office communicator for IM (or Gchat) or any IM (available to everyone)
Used as a way to chat with people, integrated with calendar and corp directory.

Brainstorm, for ideation (about15-20% of employees using it in a given month).
Over 3800 ideas have been shared since it started.  Intuitlabs.com was also created which is a public facing website that highlights innovation (plays an important role in making sure teams know there’s an easy way to get their innovative work into the hands of customers to see whether they’re solving an important problem well).  Brainstorm is not only highly energizing for entrepreneurial employees, but also helps provide critical early feedback to guide further work and investment.

Mediawiki
Currently there are dozens of active installations storing information and process information.  Also used to keep track of meeting notes and projects.

Wordpress blogs
There are currently a couple dozen wordpress blogs active in any one week (the same with Joinin blog, another internal blogging platform on Lotus Connections).  Some blogs are used for teams to update information on what they (or the company) are working on.  They are also used for general communication and personal information.

Etherpad
Mostly used for small group meetings when people are not in the same room.  It’s deployed on an ad-hoc basis and is used only for meetings.  Employees  collaboratively take notes in etherpad and when the notes are closed the final version goes in media wiki.

Internal video
The CEO communicates with the company regularly to provide news and updates and leaders use it as a way to update the business units as to what is knew in that area, i.e. new payroll mandate from government or all hands meetings.

Lotus Connections
A few dozen active blogs are active and around 40% of employees have done some editing of their profile.  Rich profiles help people find subject matter experts.

Quickbase
Used for online customizable database for teams.  Heavily used by teams for workflow management and as document repository.  Any time you need structured data you can use this, i.e. reporting, customer list, etc.  process and notification management.

As far as future plans for enhancement go Intuit has a few ideas for things they want to do such as developing a “who knows what” section or a Q&A area.  If someone answers or asks a question that was already asked/answered they can automatically find a link or info.  When asked about “lessons learned” Intuit shared that it’s important to always answer the question of “what’s in it for me”.  You have to give employees a reason to care about what it is they are doing.  Focus on the users first and the company second and really understand how does it make their job easier and their life easier.  Another important lessons they learned is “no anonymity.”  Social media applications work best when supported by well designed programs that catalyze initial usage and give them ongoing purpose.  They’re also increasingly effective as they’re woven into the fabric of employees’ normal workflow.  Intuit admits that they still have work to do and that the challenge for them is broad based adoption because they are still trying to understand how to put value on productivity and engagement.

When I asked about any horror stories at Intuit, they replied…”no horror stories.”

Key Takeaways

• time to market with E2.0 decreased by over 60%
• rate of ideation increased by around 1000% and participation increased by 500%
• E2.0 made it easier for employees to feel like they are still a part of the company whether they are in the office or not, and allowed the work just as efficiently
• employees started connecting with and helping other employees even though they have never met
• employee values and benefits come before corporate benefits
• still hard to put value on engagement and productivity

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter)

 

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Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

(Cross-posted @ the BI Questions Blog )

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I recently read a book I’d highly recommend to every reader of this blog called “Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive” by Robert B. Cialdini who is also author of a very well received book called “Influence” (which I plan to read).

“Yes” was given to me by one of my favorite angel investor / seed VC’s to work with – John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners and author of the blog InfoChachkie that you should check out because it is filled with great info from a guy who has been a very successful operator.  Rincon is part of the new breed of Seed Stage VCs and with the leadership of Jim Andelman has charted out the most authentic early-stage investment strategy in Southern California.  Any SoCal entrepreneur raising early-stage money should put Rincon on their short list.

John gave me the book after I spoke at his entrepreneurship class at UCSB.  I was excited to read it because Robert Cialdini had been a speaker at Google when my wife worked there and she told me that many members of the senior management team at Google had been raving about his work.  I decided not to be bothered by the cheesy title and to read it anyhow.  You should, too. (no, I don’t take affiliate commissions!)

The book is a layman’s guide to understanding how we as humans make decisions and is underpinned by data-oriented studies to prove his claims.  He lists 6 principles of social influence that I’d like to cover in a series of posts: authority, social proof, reciprocity, commitment / consistency, scarcity and liking.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and was going to use AngelList by Nivi & Naval as the basis for my example and the perfect prompt came yesterday when I read Fred Wilson’s blog post on AngelList.

Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decision” and it can be both explicit and implicit.  We all want to think that we’re unique and original thinkers but we’re far more guided by others than we think.

In the book he talks about movement over the past decade to get us to reuse our towels more when we stay at hotels.  It is clearly a ploy by hotels to cut costs but it also benefits the environment.  No cookies for guessing which reason they use to market to us.  It turns out that more than 50% of us reuse towels at least once during our stay at a hotel because it appeals to our “commitment / consistency” value trait to want to be respectful of the environment.

But Cialdini knew they could do better.  He ran an experiment in a hotel in which he polled people on whether or not they reused towels during their stay and as expected just over 50% did.  He then put signs in some of the hotel rooms that said, “the majority of guests at this hotel reuse their towels at least once during their stay.”  26% more people reused their towels at least once during their stay when they had this sign versus the standard sign.  Classic social proof in decision making.

He went one step further.  He then put a sign saying, “people who stayed in this exact room reused their towels at least once during their stay.”  This increased the number of re-users to 33% above the control group.  We want to do what we believe others like us are doing.

While I feel that I tend to have a strong POV on many things I’ve always been aware of the social proof impact on my decisions.

The very first thing I do when deciding which movie I want to see next is check its rating on RottenTomatoes and if the film is North of 80% then it’s a “no brainer” for me to go and see.  If it’s below 50% I will almost never go and see it.  I suppose you could call this “The Wisdom of the Crowds” (another great book).  If you haven’t read it you should definitely buy it – other people just like you did

When I want to go to restaurants I check out Zagat and Yelp.  Before booking a hotel I always check out Trip Advisor and read reviews.  This is all explicit decision making.

So how does this apply to you?

First, no matter what anybody tells you (people don’t want to believe that we’re influenced by the crowd), social proof is hugely important in fund raising. Every angel, seed investor or VC  is influenced by who else is talking with you, who else is investing in you and they (we) are all influenced by who introduced us to you.

If you want to hear an entrepreneur talk about this topic listen to Farb Nivi tell the story of how he got Rob Lord to invest in Grockit and how that led to Reid Hoffman and in turn Benchmark Capital, Integral and Atlas – more than $15 million in total.  He covers this is the first 15 minutes or so of the video and he’s awesome to listen to (more than 25,000 people have listend to this video so far – mostly entrepreneurs ;-))

Nowhere is social proof more prevalent than in angel investing.  As Fred points out in his post:

“Angels love to share deals with each other. It is how angel rounds come together.”

Or put another way – angels look for social proof from other angels.  It’s hard for angels to assess whether or not to invest because they often have day jobs and can’t commit to the kind of due diligence that most VCs go through.  Angels are writing smaller checks so they typically don’t want the overhead of complex analysis in order to make their decision.

So what you really need to get an angel round together are your “anchor tenants.”  These are the people who make the early commitment to you to fund your round before having any social proof.  You should seek to get people who are respected by others in your field and who will therefore make it easier to raise the rest of your angel round.

In the video I linked to above Farb talks about how he got Rob Lord on board at Grockit.  He first worked hard to get him to be an advisor to the company.  From there Rob decided to make a small investment.  Often people don’t like to be the only person writing a check so they’ll try to find safety in numbers by investing other angels to look at the the deal and “see what they think.”  That’s social proof, too.

I was once thinking about writing a blog post called “Is Reid Hoffman the Kevin Bacon of Silicon Valley” because it seemed that every angel / seed investor I knew looking at deals was shopping their deal to Reid and everybody wanted Reid’s opinion before committing.  Maybe a more apt title would have been “Is Reid Hoffman the Yoda of Silicon Valley?”  When I met recently with Keith Rabois of Slide he called Reid, “the smartest thinker in consumer Internet in Silicon Valley.”  Chris Dixon called Keith (paraphrasing), “the new Reid Hoffman now that Reid works for Greylock.”  Social proof meets social proof meets social proof.

But what is at play with Reid is another principle called “authority.”  Again, even though VCs are populated by Stanford & Harvard MBAs who all seemed to graduate near the tops of their classes – we’re all in search of authorities we trust to help guide our decisions.  Because I built two SaaS companies and sold my second one to Salesforce.com (where I then took on the role of VP Products) I am often asked to look at SaaS and/or sales-oriented deals for others.

Whenever I see something in financial services I always ask my partner Brian McLoughlin who has spent more than a decade looking at Fin Services deals or I might send it through to Mark Goines who is a phenomenal angel investor (invested and on the board of Mint.com) and was previous SVP at Intuit.  Anything requiring lead generation and/or customer acquisition I call Matt Coffin.  We all want authorities who are smarter on specific topics than we are.

So you need to find anchor tenants who have authority in your field and who are respected by other angel investors in order to maximize the benefits of social proof.

Another successful strategy (in addition to bringing on people as advisors) that I’ve often recommended to people who don’t have a track record is to carve out a very small amount of seed investment (say $50,000) and offer 5 people to invest at $10,000 each at a $500,000 post-money valuation (which means you give up 10% of your company for very little money.  The key to this strategy is getting 5 people who form the social proof to help you get a bigger angel round done at a higher valuation by tons of industry insiders and thus offering the social proof you need attract great employees and ultimately venture capital investors.

Obviously I’m assuming that you have a great product and/or strategy.  Having the right angels in a round that is cheap won’t help you succeed if your product or strategy sucks.  But assuming those are sound, strangely I have found over the years that even the wealthiest people want to feel like “they got a deal.”  So if that is all it takes then it is a rounding error to your future success.  I’d far rather dilute 10% early and get some investor traction than to wither for another 3-6 months trying to get my seed round together.

And to echo what Fred Wilson said in his post about AngelList – it is social proof on steroids.  You often have to have your anchor tenants before Nivi will send around your deal.  The emails we all get on the AngelList get say something like, “New gaming platform invested in by Dave McClure, Chris Yeh and Jeff Clavier.  They’ve raised $200k and are looking for $500k in total.”

As an investor it’s hard to not be influenced by an email like that where you respect the early investors and at least want to read about the company.  So even if you’re not getting funded by everybody you’re instantly on the who’s who radar of the investment world.  In a way, it’s even more precision for the investment world that TechCrunch.

To finish with a quote from Fred,

“I am on AngelList. I see all the deals come together. I don’t personally invest in angel deals in the web/tech space because of potential conflict with USV down the road. But even so, I find it immensely useful to see what companies are getting traction in the angel market. It’s part of my radar/early warning system.”

Authority + Social Proof + Traction in getting rounds done quickly = perception that this is a company that should be on my radar screen / I should pay attention to.  So what are you waiting for?  Go get your anchors.

In my next post I’ll talk about using social proof in getting customer traction.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table )

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Simon Wardley, a researcher at the Leading Edge Forum at CSC, gave a phenomenal talk at OSCON 10 this week. Irrespective of whether you are associated with Open Source or Cloud Computing, you may find this talk extremely useful. Anyone interested in understanding the lifecycle of an organization and how they can surf the winds of continuous waves of change will also find this video very useful. 

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I arrived back from Tokyo to the news of a major DBS snafu, involving the loss of the entire ATM network, Internet and mobile banking services for 7 hours on the 5th July.

That's bad.

However, the unqualified apology by DBS' CEO, Mr Piyush Gupta, was truly a breath of fresh air. Not only was it devoid of the typical corporate hedging, but I believe it was the most frank and technically detailed account of a failure that I have ever read in the press.

Mr Gupta's response has actually increased my confidence and loyalty for the bank. Which is a rather unusual outcome for a screw-up.

NB: .. to the extent that I actually thought it rather mean-spirited and self-serving for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to step forward and emphasize the fact that it was actually the MAS who ".. instructed DBS to give a full account of the incident to the public, including the actions it will take to prevent future recurrence".

I can't help but compare and contrast this to Intuit's woes of late. On 15th June, Intuit experienced catastrophic failures of their Intuit.com, Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax services. Services were only restored more than a day later, and it wasn't until 7pm on the 16th of June that customers had any kind of detailed explanation.

In both cases, the organisations concerned were caught out in the short-term. Customers were affected and actively seeking answers within minutes. But the corporate responses can be measured in hours and days.

It is also worrisome that in both cases, the reported investigations point to failures in standard maintenance procedures: ".. during a routine maintenance procedure.." (Intuit) and ".. IT vendor IBM [..] had used an 'outdated procedure' to carry out the repair.." (DBS).

SaaS providers should take note! Better to learn the lessons from others rather than make our own mistakes. Two take-aways:

What is your realistic response time to a service issue? Can you identify a problem and open a communication channel with customers within minutes or the hour? And does this only really work during normal business hours, or is it 24x7? Prompt and open communication can avert a tsunami of customer complaints in a serious situation. Do you have that insurance in place?

Do you really have production change management under control? My natural assumption is that neither DBS nor Intuit have (a) the staging systems available, or (b) the procedures in place, to exactly and incontrovertibly test production changes. The nett of my years in enterprise computing: "never, ever, make a change in production that you haven't first tested and practised elsewhere". What is your situation, honestly?Of course, reality bites. Notwithstanding any and all preventative measures you put in place, there's a good chance that one day you will find yourself in a situation as dire as DBS or Intuit (let's not even mention BP, which is a whole different ballpark).

It may not be easy, but the DBS case in particular demonstrates that no matter how bad things are in the short-term, full and frank disclosure - and the balls to take unequivocal responsibility - are essential to getting you back on track. Transparency is not a gamble.

Blogarhythm: I think I must have written this post purely for the excuse of linking to Tell me, Tell me by S#arp, who are responsible for saving my sanity during a singular .com project back in the day.


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Amazon Web Services is on a roll lately. They have been announcing variety of features, both big and small, and they even announced their datacenters in Asia-Pacific. Being a runaway leader in marketshare and poster boy for cloud computing, AWS has been receiving lot of positive press and some flak. Usually, the criticism is about the lack of transparency on their side and lack of enterprise grade security and control they wanted. This lead to the mushrooming of Private Cloud providers who wanted to grab the market opportunity and make some money. Looks like Amazon is slowly understanding the market demands. At least, two of the recent announcements show that they are moving in the right direction to address the enterprise needs.
After launching Virtual Private Cloud in 2009, Amazon has been slowly improving their offering with some features enterprises will love to have including the ability to use your own kernel, a way to use your own IP address while launching VPC, etc.. But they remained somewhat silent on penetration testing. In fact, blogosphere was full of discussion on how cloud providers face difficulty in allowing vulnerability scanning and possible alternative approaches to the issue, etc.. The wait is finally over.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that AWS users can now request permission from Amazon in a straight forward manner. They have put up two pages in AWS Security Center, one about how they report vulnerabilities and the other is a page outlining the procedure to get Amazon's permission to do external penetration testing without violating AWS Acceptable Use policy.Security is a top priority for Amazon Web Services. Providing a trustworthy infrastructure for you to develop and deploy applications is a responsibility we take very seriously. One important aspect of gaining your trust is being open and transparent about our security processes and continually working toward achieving industry-recognized certifications. Other important aspects include providing you with mechanisms for contacting us about potential security issues and enabling you to conduct security tests of the applications you deploy on AWS. I'm pleased to announce today two new policies: one that outlines our vulnerability reporting process and one that describes how to receive permission to conduct penetration tests of the applications running on your EC2 instances.This is a good first step but they have to do more before they can become the darling of the enterprises. It will be interesting to watch where they go in the next year on the security front. CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

When Openstack project was announced on Monday, there were two reasons for my excitement. The foremost being its open source licensing with a potential to disrupt the industry. The second one was the tweets by Chris Hoff (@beaker) whose initial reaction was positive and his thinking that Openstack and CloudAudit can work together. Whether we like it or not, security is one of the biggest concerns for enterprises moving to cloud. As a first step to having a more secure cloud environment, a group of security gurus and people involved in the field of cloud computing came together to form CloudAudit.org. Their goal is to develop a common interface and namespace to help cloud computing vendors automate Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance of the cloud infrastructure.
Douglas Barbin, Director at SAS 70 Solutions, wrote a blog post highlighting the audit and compliance considerations vis a vis Openstack.

• With an increased number of providers not to mention open source itself, the need for transparency of controls is even greater.
• A by-product of OpenStack will be the increase of service provider to sub-service provider relationships (e.g. a SaaS company hosts at an IaaS co-lo and has their systems maintained by a managed service provider.   The most important thing for cloud providers is to be able to map out all their customers’ control and compliance requirements ensuring there are no “gaps” where on provider thinks the other is doing (and vice versa).
• Service providers need to carefully evaluate what assurance and compliance tools suit their customers best.  This involves doing a requirements and cost-benefit analysis of SAS 70 / SSAE 16 audits and assessments, PCI DSS validation, SysTrust, ISO 27001 certification, or any combination of those and more.

It didn't take long for the Openstack community to address this issue. Today Brett Piatt, a leading Openstacker and Rackspace employee, announced on Twitter that he has spoken with folks at CloudAudit and soon they will be working together to see how the recommendations by CloudAudit will be implemented in Openstack.Looking forward to working with #CloudAudit on #OpenStack, good blog post today by @DougBarbin -- talked to @Beaker early in the week.This is a very important first step. It not only helps Openstack gain further legitimacy, it will also lure enterprises looking for cloud based solutions to consider Openstack seriously. This is a pretty exciting news for those who have faith in the potential of Openstack. I will keep a close tab on the progress and come back to this space to update about their progress.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

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This is part four in a multi-part series on how Intuit is implementing Enterprise 2.0 within their organization.  Part one covered the business drivers of Enterprise 2.0 , part two looked at some of the change management issues of Enterprise 2.0 , part three explored cultural and organization shifts ,  and today we’re going to take a look at technology adoption within Intuit and how they were able to encourage use of E2.0 platforms and tools.

Although some education played a role in helping people use tools such as the blogs and the wikis, Brainstorm grew organically.  Brainstorm is much easier to use than the old database that Intuit used to store ideas and information.   It’s also important to note that Intuit itself is a technology company which probably helped with some of the adoption.  Intuit currently has a good piece of mainstream users and in fact some people use these social tools as core part of their day to day work (we will discuss all these tools in an upcoming post).  For some employees however it’s just an additional thing to add to their already busy day, so not everyone is FULLY on board…yet.  In order to make things easier Intuit synced Brainstorm with email so that employees don’t even need to log into the platform; they can see all information they need directly from their email (which can be customized via throttle notifications to come instantly, daily, or weekly.  For example, a user can set Brainstorm such that they receive a single daily digest of all activity across the enterprise related to their interests.

The tools that are the most successful within Intuit are the ones that don’t put up needless barriers.  SNAP (strategy news and performance and internal PR news stories) is a good example of a simple way for employees to share content or news with the rest of the company, it’s simply done on an intranet blog that employees can access.  Now compare that to Mediawiki which is slowly dying within Intuit because it is not that user friendly and actually a bit complex to use for people not familiar with it.  What’s interesting to note is that nothing is really mandated within Intuit and teams can also use their own tools/platforms if they chose to do so.  What about resistance?  Resistance takes the form of non-usage, if people don’t feel like what they are using can improve the way they work, then they won’t use the tools.  Sometimes it takes a little more work to make that value clear.

There is not a lot of E2.0 training that goes on within Intuit,  the SNAP and Brainstorm platforms are put on the intranet homepage and are quite intuitive to use.  Brainstorm for example has a giant button that says “add an idea,” it doesn’t get much simpler than that.  Leader boards in Brainstorm show who the top innovators within the organization are (click to enlarge image).

This serves as public peer-like praise; reputation is a more powerful motivator than rewards.  One of the interesting things about Brainstorm is that it measures the things that matter, such as comments, where people contribute their perspective expertise or tagging, where the community contributes labels that drive connections between ideas, related ideas and the people who can best move them forward. Intuit can then create visibility around those actions that keep a social system healthy and celebrate the behaviors they’d like to see more often.  SNAP is also used as a way to highlight things and contributions.  With ideation the chief motivator is causing change to happen and the contributor gets reputation and altruistic feeling from contributing and making the idea happen.

Around ideation Intuit has a specific series of jam sessions that follow a unique flow that are broken down into Problem Jam, Solution Jam, and Code Jam (they have been doing this for around 4 years).  This process takes around 6-8 weeks.  Employees start with the problem jam which seeks to identify a specific problem that needs to be solved, oftentimes customer facing.  Next up is the solution jam where employees get together to actually craft a possible solution that can be implemented to solve the problem, customers are actually involved in this part of the jam and actively participate in helping to solve the problem.  Finally we have code-jam sessions which actually involved building the particular solution and testing/iterating it with customers to solicit feedback (a great SCRM use case with the jam sessions).  It’s amazing to think that an organization with over 8,000 employees can go from concept to creation in just 6-8 weeks including user testing.  All these ideas are inputted into Brainstorm and senior managers have supported this and the jam sessions from the very beginning.  In fact, Brad Smith, the current CEO, has multiple ideas in the pipelines and says that Idea James are his “favorite day of the year.”

Intuit is still working on their E2.0 initiatives but one of the things they are really focusing on is highlighting employees that are doing things right.  Currently this is being done by news articles and updates on Intuit via the company intranet (highlighting innovators) and via “Innov8,” a recently launched a video series that also highlights innovators and innovation best practices.

Next time we are going to take a look at all the tools that Intuit is currently using as well as look at the operational impact that E2.0 has had upon Intuit.

Key takeaways

• education is important but so is using an intuitive platform
• use something that removes barriers and doesn’t add them
• recognition is more powerful than reward
• jam sessions have been a key component of innovation for Intuit
• customer collaboration has been an integral factor in solution and product development

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter)

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Here’s Part 1.  The reason I’m doing it again is that Michael Krigsman just published the Wailgum Hype Cycle:

Not bad.  Still a bit complex.  Me thinks the simplified,  geekified, scobleized, oprahized, too-oh-ized version of the Gartner Hype Cycle still works:

And if it doesn't - well, it's almost Friday. In fact for some of our readers it already is :-)

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