Joel Dietz: VMForce – Battling for the Cloud

I just came across a nice post from a Force.com developer on his blog, d3developer.com,  that touches on many of the concerns that are being felt throughout the salesforce.com partner and developer ecosystem regarding the company’s recent VMForce announcement.

Three key points:

(VMForce) raises the question of just who Salesforce is competing with.

Salesforce can no longer simply compete with Oracle business applications, can it realistically think to match Amazon or Google to be a leader in a PaaS (Platform as Service) race?

(Salesforce needs to) Articulate more clearly the gameplan to the developer community.

I came across Jeff Kaplan’s recent post, Welcome to Cloud 2.0, and realized that the moniker has moved beyond just Marc Benioff and salesforce.com trying to own a new term and will probably start to stick over the summer as more cloud pundits and vendors begin to use it freely.  My own thoughts:

• Was there ever a Cloud 1.0 to begin with?  I don’t even think we’ve been able to agree on a taxonomy or definition for the cloud, but I do agree with Jeff’s assertion that the initial driver of cloud services was price and cost savings.  Thankfully we’ve all become more creative in setting forth our value propositions.
• Does anything ever move beyond version 2.0 in the evolution of overarching technology terms and principles?  As much as we joke about being somewhere around “Web 8.64″ in the versioning of the concept and term, “Web 2.0″ is still the nom de guerre for the once-new way of looking at web content and media…and it’s sounding extremely dated.  Are we going to be stuck in “Cloud 2.0″ until the next seismic shift in technology, or can we work on a roadmap to get us to “Cloud 2.5″ or “Cloud 3.0?”
• Will “Cloud 1.0″ be considered a sort of purgatory for firms that haven’t made the shift even to the commodity cloud services that Jeff references?  Do you have to go through “Cloud 1.0″ to get to “Cloud 2.0,” or will there be a sort of “catch-up effect” that allows slower adopters to leapfrog the 1.0 paradigm?

Thoughts?

Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent

Mr. Gruber makes a number of good points in this post regarding the general tendency in IT to try to commoditize talent within the software development space. While we at Delivered Innovation employ a “factory approach” to development, our philosophy regards the standardization of the delivery process itself, and not the application of tacit knowledge to the process of creating value, as the ultimate candidate for standardization. Glenn is spot on in his assessment that many firms within the outsourcing world try and apply a factory model for the purpose of reducing development expertise to the least common denominator, and this comes at the expense of quality design…and ultimately of quality output.  DI has been brought on to a number of large “cleanup” projects in the Force.com space this year to untangle messes created by these so-called software factories where developers are routinely referred to as “bodies” (as in, “We’re behind schedule, so let’s throw a few more bodies at this”), and in every case the customer ended up spending significantly more on the project using resources that may have cost less on a per-hour basis, but ended up costing more in the long run due to the watered-down skill levels and lack of insight into the big picture design and architecture.

Three key points:

…under the traditional outsourcing model success (i.e. margins) is achieved by trying to break any task down into its most basic components so that those activities can be completed by the most junior and cheapest resources.

Tools and methodologies are more like guiderails to reduce mistakes and help less-seasoned developers accomplish more advanced tasks, but don’t necessarily guarantee well written, high-performance software.

Architecting, designing, building and testing products that are tied to revenue, that require high levels of performance, scalability and resiliency is not a task to be done by lowest-common-denominator individuals.

Tom Davenport: Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?

Delivered Innovation has been doing a lot of work in the area of incorporating analytics into the systems and business processes that we design for the Force.com platform, so Mr. Davenport’s insights into how organizations consume and process information are interesting.  The first question of this recent post is indicative of a common issue we see in organizations: “How fast do you really need your information?” While the mantra may be, “More, more, more,” it’s important to take a step back and really think through how we need to be prioritizing our data streams in this age of information bombardment.

Five key points:

There are many reasons why information comes slowly and inflexibly. Some involve valid business reasons…others are less defensible, including technologies that don’t allow for rapid information access and display.

Not surprisingly, the state of the economy (as well as whether the company is experiencing a crisis or not) is a major determining factor in organizations’ information needs.

…survey respondents across industries clearly stated that some types of information are required more quickly than others. In terms of what information executives currently receive, the fastest to arrive (combining real time and daily frequencies) are sales and news on competitors and customers. The slowest to arrive (i.e., the information is received annually or quarterly) are employee satisfaction, market share, customer satisfaction, and planning scenarios or simulations.

In terms of the information that survey respondents wanted (as opposed to what they currently receive), the categories desired at the highest frequency are competitor news, sales, and news about customers. The information types needed least fast are market share, employee satisfaction, planning simulations or scenarios, and employee productivity and performance.

These results suggest that it is not desirable — even if it were feasible — to make all information available in real time.

Delivered Innovation CTO Michael Topalovich recently provided his take on the ebizQ Forum question: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing?  From the Forum:

I’ll substitute “downsides” with “risks” because some of these may be viewed as half empty / half full arguments, but I see the biggest current risks as:

1. Market confusion. As Peter mentioned, it is a mad dash to the cloud right now. And since nobody wants to feel left out, just about every company in the B2B tech space has re-branded itself as a cloud computing company. I’ve heard this referred to as “cloudwashing,” and the result is that companies will find it more difficult to find services specific to their needs, because of the tendency of providers to water down messaging into cloud buzzwords and ignore basic positioning and value statements.
2. Cloud sprawl. With the rapid proliferation of cloud services, IT is struggling to adapt corporate service delivery strategies. The results that we have seen have included duplication and overlap of processes and functions due to services being provisioned directly by business units; loss of control of the billing for services because no single entity within the company is responsible for the procurement and management of them; and the equivalent of “shelfware,” a situation where cloud services are orphaned after the champion leaves the company or the business shifts focus.
3. Lack of cohesive integration strategy. There is no doubt in my mind that the cloud model of service delivery is the one that we will adopt for at least the next 10-15 years of technology cycles, but until the integration of all of the pieces is thought through, the sum of the parts will never add up. My company has standardized our core service offerings around the Force.com platform from salesforce.com to provide the “glue” that holds all of the pieces together, and we “mash up” other cloud services into composite enterprise business systems through API integration, business process orchestration, and data integration using services such as Boomi. But if companies just provision cloud services for siloed requirements up and down the cloud stack (from infrastructure to SaaS), the disaggregation of these services will prove to be a value destroyer.

You will see a direct correlation between the decline in Delivered Innovation’s blog posting frequency and our participation in conversations on social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook…and it isn’t intentional.  We knew that despite our reluctance to jump into the social media fray, it would happen sooner or later.  But now that it has, it seems like our already frantic pace of processing information has increased by an order of magnitude.  And that has changed our entire approach to communicating.

The problem falls squarely on the shoulders of Twitter…I mean me.  When I was first turned onto the concept of Twitter by a friend that I consider to be an even earlier adopter of technology than myself, I thought it was the most asinine idea I had heard of, even after having lived in San Francisco and hearing some outrageous pitches during the dot com bust.  But then a funny thing happened…our sales and ops director Ed came onboard, we starting working on our obligatory “social media strategy,” and we both got sucked into the Twitter stream.  And even though we’re not exactly the next Robert Scobel when it comes to Tweet frequency, I have noticed that using Twitter has forced me to embrace brevity – something that had been a sort of Achilles’ Heel of mine in the past – and as an unintended consequence, has limited my attention span to the point where writing a blog post seemed like it was the equivalent of writing a 400-page novel.  Just a bizarre feeling…it makes me wonder how the real time stream is changing our brains, our social behavior, and the English language.

What are your thoughts?  Has Twitter limited our attention span?  How quickly does information lose value in our real-time reality? Will patterns emerge in the stream that architects like myself can recognize and apply to business challenges?  It’s all fascinating.

Mike