cloud computing

Pervasive BI scenarios, from search technology to the cloud

Whenever I go to a show related to business intelligence or speak with an expert in the field of BI, there are endless opinions on how to get more out of BI and get that data out to more users. One answer that keeps coming up is search technology; another is cloud computing.

Back in June at BI vendor Information Builders’ user show, many attendees spoke of the benefits of marrying search technology and business intelligence. At the time, the Royal Bank of Canada was beginning to look at search technology to mine unstructured data in dead repositories. The 70,000-plus-employee company has unstructured data all over its enterprise, but the main target for now is archived enterprise content management repositories. Continued »

With PPM software, don’t always throw in the kitchen sink

Project and portfolio management (PPM) software is definitely not overlooked in the midmarket. According to a recent SearchCIO-Midmarket.com survey, 17% use some form of PPM software. But how many of those organizations are actually using all of what they paid for?

Time and time again, I hear the stories of the initial implementation process: Company purchases software, company implements relevant parts of the software in stages, company stops the process once it has implemented what it needs.

I once bought a 160-piece kitchen set. Out of the 160 “useful” kitchen tools, I use about 10 of them — the rest sit in my cabinets, waiting for the day I decide to make eight individual servings of crème brûlée or require a tool for removing my strawberry stem. At the time, I had big plans for my cooking skills and thought the new tools would inspire me to learn a bit more in the kitchen — maybe I really will try my hand at beef Wellington, I thought.

Nope.
Continued »

Five key questions about cloud computing

It seems every time I ask someone what they think about cloud computing, I’m asked five or more questions in return:

Isn’t what cloud providers offer pretty cookie cutter? Translate that as, “They might not support the particular platforms and configurations I have.”

What about licensing? Just the other day, someone at a business intelligence show said it wasn’t clear how database licensing would be handled. Would he license the database, or would the cloud computing provider?

Which led to a question many people have: If I host an application, such as a business intelligence application with a cloud provider, it would have to connect to my data sources. Wouldn’t that be a security risk?

How will that impact compliance with regulations?

And the most popular concern: Why would I want to expose my data sources like that? Continued »

Can startups get to market quicker via Amazon’s cloud computing model?

Amazon’s cloud computing model is allowing startup companies like Confidela to bring their products to market quicker and cheaper.

The company of 15, which recently launched WatchDox, a document and permissions product, decided to utilize Amazon’s Elastic Compute cloud infrastructure (EC2) rather than to invest time and money in a new data center.

“For a startup just launching, we get huge data center capabilities,” said Confidela CEO and co-founder Moti Rafalin. “It’s one of the benefits of this era.”

Previously, a small startup company like Confidela would need to invest tens of thousands of dollars into a data center. Now, Confidela and other small businesses can take advantage of the scalability and “buy as you grow” option available with public clouds like Amazon’s – a natural way to grow and progress over time. Continued »

Update on move to Gmail: Cost-cutting measure a mix of sun and clouds

I checked in with early cloud adopter Jerry Hodge, CIO of Hamilton Beach Brands Inc., for an update on his pioneering migration from Lotus Notes to Gmail — the quintessential cloud app. The company, which started the project in January, is among the first ever to move to Gmail from Lotus, according to Hodge.

The backstory: Hamilton Beach was facing a mandatory upgrade of Lotus Notes that would have required not only the expense of the software upgrade, but also additional hardware and considerable staff effort. Hodge realized he could save about $500,000 in capital and operating costs over five years, and another $400,000 in labor if he went with the enterprise edition of Gmail.

In a year when his capital budget request was cut 60%, saving a million bucks seemed like a great idea, despite some trepidation on the part of his staff. He made the big switch the right way– gradually. He lined up a test group in the company’s Mexico City and China offices to try it first to work out the kinks, and he smartly waited until everything was working before the C-suite got it. People’s email would be maintained as @hamiltonbeach.com, which was important to the company.

So how did it go? Continued »

Open source cloud computing: The future midmarket sweet spot?

What happens when open source and cloud computing collide? Cost savings, flexibility and (at least one open source vendor hopes) midmarket CIOs checking it out.

Open source CRM provider SugarCRM has launched an on-demand version of its software that is included free with an on-premise license.

Subscribers can switch back and forth between the local server and the cloud version, called Open Cloud. They can make one version a hot backup for disaster recovery, or use one version for testing and the other in production if they like. “There’s no one asking you if you want on-demand or on-site; you get both,” said Martin Schneider, director of product marketing at SugarCRM Inc.

Jay Lyman, an open source analyst at The 451 Group, said the number of startups emerging pairing open source with cloud computing is a clear indication of a growing trend. “Open source is a good fit for cloud computing because of the interoperability and the portability,” he said. “We’re going to see rapid experimentation, testing and vendors using this as an opportunity to learn customer pain points and match the right apps in with the clouds.”

In many cases, small and midsized businesses will investigate cloud computing the same way they checked out open source – by experimenting with and investigating minimal fees. “[CIOs] can’t revamp their entire systems in the down economy, but they can look into trying new things while still leveraging their existing applications with open source cloud offerings,” Lyman said.

Is cloud computing a platform or a stage?

Cloud computing is at that early stage where there’s much discussion of taxonomy: Is it infrastructure? Is it Software as a Service? Is it a platform? All well and good, but little discussed so far is “Whatever it is, where does it fit in the lifecycle of corporate IT?”

Talking to IT folks who attended last night’s MIT Innovation Series forum on cloud computing, I got much more of a sense that some see cloud computing more as a staging area for new projects or businesses than as a permanent platform. Startup companies, which spend most of their first years as small to midmarket firms, are being touted as one of the early markets for cloud computing. Speaking to one startup technology director, his view of cloud computing was instructive. He is trying to walk between a rock and a hard place: provision too few servers and his company’s customers will have a bad experience online and never come back; provision too many servers and the company will run out of funding too soon.

His interest in cloud was as a prototype environment, therefore. He can find the right amount of capacity for a given number of users of his website without heavy capital investment. Later, he is likely to bring the operation in-house. He’s more impressed by the flexibility of cloud computing then by the cost: He says cloud capacity costs about 30% more than owning it, but that’s just comparing raw capacity costs, not including labor or real estate.

Still, it was evident at the forum that a lot of midmarket service providers in the technology space — development tools and middleware companies, contract developers and integrators and Web design firms, to name a few — are likely to convert their offerings to cloud offerings. Instead of buying a boutique tool vendor’s product, you’ll use it in the cloud as part of a whole stack. Hundreds of companies, literally, are lining up to offer such services on top of Amazon, and ultimately on top of other providers as they emerge. Their goal is to get you to stay in the cloud, using (and paying for) their portion of the stack indefinitely.