LinkedIn, the professional networking site with 90 million users, announced a new product today that aims to transform the site from an occasional directory into a daily social destination.
LinkedIn Today is a new platform that aggregates news stories by industry based on what people are sharing on the network. Users can see what their contacts are reading and what other people in their industry are reading and saying about different articles. They can choose from 22 industries, including banking, entertainment and nonprofits, and sort by geography and job title.
“What are CEOs reading? What are health care professionals in India reading?” said Liz Walker, LinkedIn’s product manager. “We think that can deliver relevant content to people.”
Facebook and Twitter garner huge traffic from people sharing news. And other aggregators that filter news according to specific industries, like TechMeme or MediaGazer, have proven themselves to be quite successful. LinkedIn Today puts the business spin on news sharing, and the social spin on business news aggregation. As former LinkedIn employee Mrinal Desai put it, the network wants to become the Wall Street Journal of social news.
Though LinkedIn has 90 million registered users as of January 2011, the site has struggled to get them to visit regularly, instead getting most of its traffic from recruiters looking for prospects. While other recent products like InMaps, a visualization of each user’s professional network, and Skills, a search function that illustrates popular skills in particular industries and companies, seem most helpful to recruiters, LinkedIn is indicating that its social news filter is just one of many efforts to come geared toward building relationships among everyday users.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Misconceptions about cloud computing
Misconceptions about cloud computing
By Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson
Published: March 3 2011 17:53 | Last updated: March 3 2011 17:53
As the market for cloud computing matures, there is growing awareness of its potential among chief executives and finance directors. However, that awareness tends to be based on three misconceptions: firstly, that the CIO should lead the organisation’s approach to cloud; secondly, that there will be significant legal, security and regulatory obstacles; and thirdly, that the cloud is only about IT cost savings. Each of these is wrong.
First, CIOs cannot give impartial advice on cloud. A business that transfers its IT to the cloud will receive those services in a very different way, and that will almost certainly require a smaller IT department. Speaking recently at the London School of Economics, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that increased use of cloud services could lead to job losses of 10 to15 per cent across the worldwide IT industry.
The shift towards cloud is also creating concern for traditional enterprise IT hardware vendors. Big players are hearing some of their clients talk about adoption of cloud-based IT services at a pace that would devastate their existing hardware revenue streams.
They are responding by offering ‘private cloud’ solutions that play perfectly to typical CIO sensitivities. These private clouds, or pre-integrated units of hardware and software from the same vendor, are very attractive at first glance as they address perceived security and confidentiality risks by keeping the hardware and its management on site. This approach creates the illusion to casual observers that cloud is being adopted but preserves the complexity, and size, of the in-house IT organisation.
Ultimately, however, private cloud deployments do not make any significant impact on how IT services are delivered. These rebranded legacy vendor services only lock the organisation further into proprietary standards and expensive service contracts.
This means CIOs need help to challenge the status quo if they are to secure the full benefits of cloud for their organisations. Unfortunately, that support is unlikely to be provided by the leaders of the security, legal and regulatory departments. These groups will find many reasons why cloud is unlikely to be suitable for their particular needs. Here again the problem is that they cannot give an unbiased perspective. They will know that handing over compliance monitoring or regulatory liaison to an external provider risks their own jobs.
Indeed, solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com, are already eliminating some in-house assurance processes as they are automatically pre-approved. This reflects the efforts of SaaS vendors to acquire independently audited third-party certifications, such as ISO27001, as well as increasing customer maturity and willingness to focus on the particular needs of their business rather than the routine mechanics of information systems.
This does not mean that vendors have all the answers yet. Organisations need to secure assurances about the ability of their cloud suppliers to meet standards and remedy failures but also seek expert guidance to understand the laws and regulations that apply to any service moved to the cloud. This is particularly important for multinationals, those working in regulated industries and those dealing with sensitive data. A careful examination of these requirements will highlight the genuinely difficult areas which may need to be dealt with separately from the main cloud provision.
However, the evidence is that obstacles in these areas can be overcome cost effectively, either by providing a mix of services at different price points or by deferring transfers until vendors and regulatory bodies develop ways of managing the issue.
Having challenged that misconception, business leaders considering moving to the cloud need to challenge the view that it is just about IT cost savings. As Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, said at a recent IT professional cloud computing conference: “If we talk about cost reduction, the most I can do for you is cut your IT spending by 100 per cent. Then we’re done. If we talk about value creation, I can keep on delivering value with no upper bound. That’s a much more interesting conversation.”
The key strategic driver for cloud cannot be cost alone. Like all IT initiatives, the success of cloud depends not only on getting the technical aspects right, though that is important, it lies in securing the engagement from the business. Cloud can transform the way a business operates, it can stimulate innovation and provide a real competitive edge – but it can only do this if everyone is willing and able to use IT in a different way.
This requires business leaders to reconsider what they need to deliver improvements for their customers. That means going beyond generalities such as greater flexibility or lower cost services. The business needs to focus on more specific requirements, such as how to provide self service customer access to processes buried within complex legacy applications, or how to improve the management of customer relationships through more joined-up access to data that is spread across existing systems.
Companies such as Starbucks have taken this approach and used cloud to drive transformation in customer engagement. They built an online platform in six weeks to facilitate conversations with customers and to generate ‘crowd-sourced’ ideas as to how they could improve services. They received 77,000 ideas and 150,000 comments and are now implementing those with the most votes, including new smoothie flavours and the reintroduction of old biscotti favourites, with the confidence that they have the support of their most loyal customers. A traditional IT-driven approach for a worldwide customer collaboration website would undoubtedly have failed at the business case stage by being prohibitively expensive. However, by leveraging the power of the cloud they enabled a successful, cost effective engagement with their customers.
So it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay and that it can deliver significant IT cost savings and improve the efficiency of IT operations. In order to realise those benefits CIOs will need to go beyond the status-quo and understand their IT organisation will be smaller and more focused. Yet cloud’s true potential lies in its capacity to transform business models and help companies respond to an ever more competitive, fast moving world. It will only do this if business leaders understand that cloud is too important to be left to IT and that it has to excite and engage everyone across the organisation.
Chris Burn is an expert in cloud computing, PA Consulting Group and Conrad Thompson is an expert in IT enabled business change, PA Consulting Group.
For more information visit www.paconsulting.com/smart
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson
Published: March 3 2011 17:53 | Last updated: March 3 2011 17:53
As the market for cloud computing matures, there is growing awareness of its potential among chief executives and finance directors. However, that awareness tends to be based on three misconceptions: firstly, that the CIO should lead the organisation’s approach to cloud; secondly, that there will be significant legal, security and regulatory obstacles; and thirdly, that the cloud is only about IT cost savings. Each of these is wrong.
First, CIOs cannot give impartial advice on cloud. A business that transfers its IT to the cloud will receive those services in a very different way, and that will almost certainly require a smaller IT department. Speaking recently at the London School of Economics, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that increased use of cloud services could lead to job losses of 10 to15 per cent across the worldwide IT industry.
The shift towards cloud is also creating concern for traditional enterprise IT hardware vendors. Big players are hearing some of their clients talk about adoption of cloud-based IT services at a pace that would devastate their existing hardware revenue streams.
They are responding by offering ‘private cloud’ solutions that play perfectly to typical CIO sensitivities. These private clouds, or pre-integrated units of hardware and software from the same vendor, are very attractive at first glance as they address perceived security and confidentiality risks by keeping the hardware and its management on site. This approach creates the illusion to casual observers that cloud is being adopted but preserves the complexity, and size, of the in-house IT organisation.
Ultimately, however, private cloud deployments do not make any significant impact on how IT services are delivered. These rebranded legacy vendor services only lock the organisation further into proprietary standards and expensive service contracts.
This means CIOs need help to challenge the status quo if they are to secure the full benefits of cloud for their organisations. Unfortunately, that support is unlikely to be provided by the leaders of the security, legal and regulatory departments. These groups will find many reasons why cloud is unlikely to be suitable for their particular needs. Here again the problem is that they cannot give an unbiased perspective. They will know that handing over compliance monitoring or regulatory liaison to an external provider risks their own jobs.
Indeed, solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com, are already eliminating some in-house assurance processes as they are automatically pre-approved. This reflects the efforts of SaaS vendors to acquire independently audited third-party certifications, such as ISO27001, as well as increasing customer maturity and willingness to focus on the particular needs of their business rather than the routine mechanics of information systems.
This does not mean that vendors have all the answers yet. Organisations need to secure assurances about the ability of their cloud suppliers to meet standards and remedy failures but also seek expert guidance to understand the laws and regulations that apply to any service moved to the cloud. This is particularly important for multinationals, those working in regulated industries and those dealing with sensitive data. A careful examination of these requirements will highlight the genuinely difficult areas which may need to be dealt with separately from the main cloud provision.
However, the evidence is that obstacles in these areas can be overcome cost effectively, either by providing a mix of services at different price points or by deferring transfers until vendors and regulatory bodies develop ways of managing the issue.
Having challenged that misconception, business leaders considering moving to the cloud need to challenge the view that it is just about IT cost savings. As Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, said at a recent IT professional cloud computing conference: “If we talk about cost reduction, the most I can do for you is cut your IT spending by 100 per cent. Then we’re done. If we talk about value creation, I can keep on delivering value with no upper bound. That’s a much more interesting conversation.”
The key strategic driver for cloud cannot be cost alone. Like all IT initiatives, the success of cloud depends not only on getting the technical aspects right, though that is important, it lies in securing the engagement from the business. Cloud can transform the way a business operates, it can stimulate innovation and provide a real competitive edge – but it can only do this if everyone is willing and able to use IT in a different way.
This requires business leaders to reconsider what they need to deliver improvements for their customers. That means going beyond generalities such as greater flexibility or lower cost services. The business needs to focus on more specific requirements, such as how to provide self service customer access to processes buried within complex legacy applications, or how to improve the management of customer relationships through more joined-up access to data that is spread across existing systems.
Companies such as Starbucks have taken this approach and used cloud to drive transformation in customer engagement. They built an online platform in six weeks to facilitate conversations with customers and to generate ‘crowd-sourced’ ideas as to how they could improve services. They received 77,000 ideas and 150,000 comments and are now implementing those with the most votes, including new smoothie flavours and the reintroduction of old biscotti favourites, with the confidence that they have the support of their most loyal customers. A traditional IT-driven approach for a worldwide customer collaboration website would undoubtedly have failed at the business case stage by being prohibitively expensive. However, by leveraging the power of the cloud they enabled a successful, cost effective engagement with their customers.
So it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay and that it can deliver significant IT cost savings and improve the efficiency of IT operations. In order to realise those benefits CIOs will need to go beyond the status-quo and understand their IT organisation will be smaller and more focused. Yet cloud’s true potential lies in its capacity to transform business models and help companies respond to an ever more competitive, fast moving world. It will only do this if business leaders understand that cloud is too important to be left to IT and that it has to excite and engage everyone across the organisation.
Chris Burn is an expert in cloud computing, PA Consulting Group and Conrad Thompson is an expert in IT enabled business change, PA Consulting Group.
For more information visit www.paconsulting.com/smart
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Guest column: Top issues related to cloud
By Tom DeGarmo
Published: March 1 2011 15:55 | Last updated: March 1 2011 15:55
All the hype that cloud computing has got over the past few years tends to push business leaders into one of two camps: those who love the simplicity and convenience of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, like those supporting sales force automation (let’s put everything in the cloud!) and those who do not believe the false promises from vendors and think cloud computing is not ready for enterprise-class security and business continuity requirements.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, and the most rewarding adoption patterns will vary considerably depending on the market and competitive situation individual enterprises are dealing with.
The list below offers a set of issues many enterprises are discovering as they engage with cloud computing. We recommend senior leaders spend a little time “in front of the mirror” and make sure they have not fallen prey to them.
1) Thinking cloud computing is only about public cloud services, or only about transforming internal IT into private clouds.
All the great stories about companies taking advantage of public cloud services leads some enterprises to think the cloud computing opportunity is only about external service providers. But much of the medium term value to be harvested from clouds will come from transforming internal IT by emulating the style of computing defined by these types of external services. This requires a deep appreciation for their differences in architecture, technologies, processes, and differentiating roles for IT staff. In other words, by creating private clouds. But putting all your efforts into private clouds ignores the real value that can be found from the on-demand, limitless capacity of public cloud services and the instant-on availability of applications. The best use of cloud computing is derived by adopting an integrated model, one that transforms internal data centers into private clouds and makes use of external clouds where their value proposition is distinctive.
2) Not anticipating the new challenges created by integrated clouds.
Acknowledging the disruptive opportunity of the integrated cloud model is only the start. Companies that adopt the technologies and external cloud services willy nilly end up recreating a complexity and maintenance challenge that defeats two of the biggest paybacks from cloud investments: business agility and business alignment.
Virtualisation technologies, for example, have already recreated “server sprawl” in its virtual form in situations where staff are able to request new instances of virtual servers without guidance from IT policies or “cleanup” systems in place. Enterprises also need to anticipate the scalability and security challenges of systems integration in cloud environments and the impact that rapid introduction of new metadata from SaaS vendors will have on data management in integrated cloud computing environments.
3) Moving forward without a strategy.
Many companies already have elements of this emerging integrated cloud model in place; they use server and storage virtualisation, they have partially automated the management of the data centre and they use SaaS offerings. Few companies have laid out a vision and strategy for moving to a defined future of integrated clouds. A leading practice is to use a cloud maturity framework so you can proceed logically from assessment of current state to realisation of desired future state. This includes important delineations of the core component parts of this future state. PwC has established a conceptual model of exactly this architecture comprising 7 categories of technology types. By establishing this reference architecture it is possible to define your road map, avoid wasteful spending on solutions that promise “instant clouds” but introduce proprietary technologies that will not fit into the architecture, and establish an order for what comes first. Without a strategic plan of this type it is not obvious whether an individual decision to use a service or technology will get you closer to real benefits of cloud computing — agility and business alignment.
4) Failure to recognise the transformative value of cloud to the business — cloud computing is not just a better way to deliver IT.
The openness and architecture of cloud infrastructure establishes a disruptively powerful business collaboration platform that empowers companies to deeply integrate their business processes with partners. We see this already with Web-centric businesses, such as those in retail and hospitality industries. Without leaving, say, a convention Website, customers can make restaurant reservations or purchase tickets to events. The user has an integrated experience even though the convention, restaurant, and ticket service providers are separate companies. And traditional “bricks and mortar” companies, such as those in financial services, are unbundling functions like risk exposure management that were formerly parts of an integrated offerings and making them available in the cloud as “e-services.” As a result cloud is positioned to transform how we integrate and communicate between businesses. However cloud puts new demands on strategy and governance with its agile applications and infrastructure, far more so than previous generations of IT. Although ERP and CRM have had major impacts on the enterprise the focus has been almost entirely on internal processes. Cloud moves that focus to external business collaboration and integration.
Tom DeGarmo is a principal in PwC’s Advisory Practice and leader of the firm’s U.S. Technology Consulting Solutions Practice
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: March 1 2011 15:55 | Last updated: March 1 2011 15:55
All the hype that cloud computing has got over the past few years tends to push business leaders into one of two camps: those who love the simplicity and convenience of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, like those supporting sales force automation (let’s put everything in the cloud!) and those who do not believe the false promises from vendors and think cloud computing is not ready for enterprise-class security and business continuity requirements.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, and the most rewarding adoption patterns will vary considerably depending on the market and competitive situation individual enterprises are dealing with.
The list below offers a set of issues many enterprises are discovering as they engage with cloud computing. We recommend senior leaders spend a little time “in front of the mirror” and make sure they have not fallen prey to them.
1) Thinking cloud computing is only about public cloud services, or only about transforming internal IT into private clouds.
All the great stories about companies taking advantage of public cloud services leads some enterprises to think the cloud computing opportunity is only about external service providers. But much of the medium term value to be harvested from clouds will come from transforming internal IT by emulating the style of computing defined by these types of external services. This requires a deep appreciation for their differences in architecture, technologies, processes, and differentiating roles for IT staff. In other words, by creating private clouds. But putting all your efforts into private clouds ignores the real value that can be found from the on-demand, limitless capacity of public cloud services and the instant-on availability of applications. The best use of cloud computing is derived by adopting an integrated model, one that transforms internal data centers into private clouds and makes use of external clouds where their value proposition is distinctive.
2) Not anticipating the new challenges created by integrated clouds.
Acknowledging the disruptive opportunity of the integrated cloud model is only the start. Companies that adopt the technologies and external cloud services willy nilly end up recreating a complexity and maintenance challenge that defeats two of the biggest paybacks from cloud investments: business agility and business alignment.
Virtualisation technologies, for example, have already recreated “server sprawl” in its virtual form in situations where staff are able to request new instances of virtual servers without guidance from IT policies or “cleanup” systems in place. Enterprises also need to anticipate the scalability and security challenges of systems integration in cloud environments and the impact that rapid introduction of new metadata from SaaS vendors will have on data management in integrated cloud computing environments.
3) Moving forward without a strategy.
Many companies already have elements of this emerging integrated cloud model in place; they use server and storage virtualisation, they have partially automated the management of the data centre and they use SaaS offerings. Few companies have laid out a vision and strategy for moving to a defined future of integrated clouds. A leading practice is to use a cloud maturity framework so you can proceed logically from assessment of current state to realisation of desired future state. This includes important delineations of the core component parts of this future state. PwC has established a conceptual model of exactly this architecture comprising 7 categories of technology types. By establishing this reference architecture it is possible to define your road map, avoid wasteful spending on solutions that promise “instant clouds” but introduce proprietary technologies that will not fit into the architecture, and establish an order for what comes first. Without a strategic plan of this type it is not obvious whether an individual decision to use a service or technology will get you closer to real benefits of cloud computing — agility and business alignment.
4) Failure to recognise the transformative value of cloud to the business — cloud computing is not just a better way to deliver IT.
The openness and architecture of cloud infrastructure establishes a disruptively powerful business collaboration platform that empowers companies to deeply integrate their business processes with partners. We see this already with Web-centric businesses, such as those in retail and hospitality industries. Without leaving, say, a convention Website, customers can make restaurant reservations or purchase tickets to events. The user has an integrated experience even though the convention, restaurant, and ticket service providers are separate companies. And traditional “bricks and mortar” companies, such as those in financial services, are unbundling functions like risk exposure management that were formerly parts of an integrated offerings and making them available in the cloud as “e-services.” As a result cloud is positioned to transform how we integrate and communicate between businesses. However cloud puts new demands on strategy and governance with its agile applications and infrastructure, far more so than previous generations of IT. Although ERP and CRM have had major impacts on the enterprise the focus has been almost entirely on internal processes. Cloud moves that focus to external business collaboration and integration.
Tom DeGarmo is a principal in PwC’s Advisory Practice and leader of the firm’s U.S. Technology Consulting Solutions Practice
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
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