Memia Cloud Services Blog

Blog moved to http://memia.com/blog

2011-02-26T16:48:00.002+13:00

Thanks for arriving at Memia's Cloud Services Blog.

As of 18th February 2011, this blog can now be found as part of our updated website at http://memia.com/blog

February 7th-11th 2011: A momentous week in Mobile

2011-02-15T18:30:00.005+13:00

Last week was a momentous week in the field of mobile technology, with major strategy and product announcements from all the main contenders. Android and iPhone are now 1 and 2 as the go-forward mobile app ecosystems of scale: this week's announcements set the scene for an exciting battle for who will be the "3rd ecosystem": Microsoft/Nokia, HP WebOS or RIM?

See below for the choicest links:

Gartner 2010 Mobile Device Sales stats

Gartner released their 2010 end-user device sales stats: smartphone device sales grew 72%!!! Symbian had top spot still but lost 8% market share (see Nokia announcement below), and Android went from 3.9% to 22.7% in 1 year!!!. RIM and iOS (iPhone) entered the top 5, knocking Microsoft back to a morale-sapping 6th place.

Gartner end-user device sales stats:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1543014

Nokia/Microsoft announcement:

On Friday Nokia announced that they would are effectively end-of-lifing Symbian, pulling back from their JV with Intel in the Meego operating system and going forward as a (the?) major strategic partner for Microsoft Windows Phone:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/how-nokias-risky-bet-could-pay-off/19841122/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704657104576142333949999402.html

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is a brave man, and if this works it will be the biggest turnaround since Mark Hurd took over at HP. Speaking of which...

HP WebOS Product Launches:

Earlier in the week, HP launched their three new WebOS Products, including a mini-smartphone the "Veer", a business smartphone the Pre3 and their long awaited tablet the TouchPad which will compete direct with Apple's iPad. Watch the CNET video below all the way to see the product demos: WebOS looks REALLY slick! In particular the NFC (near field communication) "ripple" between the TouchPad and a Pre3 is neat.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20031203-94.html

Android 3.0 Galaxy 10.1 - Honeycomb demo video
We're all waiting to know when Android 3.0 - Honeycomb - which is designed for Tablet support will be out. Here's a first preview of Samsung's forthcoming 10.1-inch tablet running Honeycomb!

http://www.mobileburn.com/youtube_video2.jsp?Id=12961

Apple rumours abound as to the expected date for the iPhone 5 launch
iPhone 5 slated for June 6 WWDC - analyst: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9208521/Expect_iPhone_5_intro_on_June_6_says_analyst

RIM working to ensure Blackberry Playbook can support Google Android Apps

...and in a surprising move, apparently Blackberry's Playbook will be supporting the Android App Market?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/blackberry-playbook-will-reportedly-support-google-android-apps/22318

All change until next week....

Season's Greetings from Memia to all our customers, partners and friends

2010-12-19T12:40:00.007+13:00

Well it's the end of 2010 already!

It's been a busy year at Memia: Our software consulting practice has worked with growing number of New Zealand software businesses providing architecture, technology strategy, software development management and board advisory services. Meanwhile our Google Apps and SaaS implementation practice continues to provide a one-stop shop for SaaS implementation and customisation services for diverse businesses throughout the region. Sincere thanks to all of our customers for your business during 2010 - we look forward to continuing to work with you during 2011 and beyond!

2010 has seen continued major changes in the information technology landscape: key themes of this year have included:

The continued growth and acceptance of the cloud computing IT model
The increasing capabilities and sophistication of cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions available to businesses of all sizes
The amazing uptake and fragmentation of smartphone operating systems amongst many different vendors and toolsets: Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, RIM (Blackberry) and Symbian are the leaders - with HP's Palm WebOS and Nokia/Intel Meego planned to hit the big time next year
In particular, Google's Android smartphone operating system going from nowhere to over 300,000 device registrations per day! Who saw that coming?
The emergence of new business models based around social media, and the major growth of sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

The next year is looking like producing even more change, and at Memia this thinking has really permeated how we look at technolology strategy. We have come to feel at ease with exponential technological change, and in 2011 we will be re-focussing our work with our customers to develop robust strategies which take account of the dynamic and ever-faster-changing technology landscape. (See my recent blog post for more details).

It's also been an eventful year in terms of natural disasters as well: in April, I became stranded in the UK due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland, and ended up being (I think!) the first Kiwi to make it back home after flying the long way back via Vancouver (and directly over Iceland). Then at the beginning of September we, along with the rest of Canterbury, were amazingly fortunate to come through the 7.1 Earthquake unscathed. As I said in my email around the time, Christchurch can be very optimistic about the future - but let's hope for a quieter time next year.

So.... as it's this time of year, I thought I would share with you some of the books and other media that I have enjoyed this year - both at work and personally. All of these are recommended gift ideas - either for yourself or a friend! Click here to see the list on Amazon.

I also invite you to download our 2010 Christmas Card PDF (previewed above) and print out if you are so inclined - this way saves on postage stamps, carbon emissions, ink and trees! (And no, we haven't yet reached the stage where we just Tweet "Happy Xmas Everyone!" and be done with it, but it's not far off...)

Memia's offices will be closing down over the holiday period from next Friday 24th Dec, returning to work on Wednesday 5th January 2011. During this period we will be running a skeleton support operation via the usual email and mobile contacts.

Best wishes for Christmas holidays, Happy New Year and we look forward to catching up in 2011!

Best regards

Ben, Rob and the Memia team

Thoughts on recent NZ IRD advice on using Cloud Computing services

2010-12-13T20:33:00.011+13:00

My Twitter trigger finger went off at record speed earlier today:

NZ IRD gets Cloud Computing WRONG WRONG WRONG http://bit.ly/e1d8s0

...this in reaction to an open advisory notice from the New Zealand IRD (Inland Revenue Department) on using New Zealand businesses "using Cloud computing services to store business records in electronic form".

The key phrase in this advisory is:

"It is the Commissioner's view that only business records stored in data centres physically located in New Zealand will comply with the record keeping obligations in the Inland Revenue Acts. Taxpayers are responsible for ensuring they comply with their record keeping obligations. Therefore, taxpayers using a cloud computing service will need to be satisfied that all their business records will be stored in data centres located in New Zealand.

The failure to keep the books and documents in New Zealand as required by the Inland Revenue Acts is an absolute offence under section 143 of the TAA. A person convicted of this offence is liable to a fine."

In my opinion, although the advisory does raise some serious issues about disaster recovery, business continuity and data sovereignty, it's clear to me that the law - or at least this interpretation - needs to change urgently. Otherwise NZ inc. will be unable to reap the substantial economic benefits of a 21st Century IT model, and will carry this backward-looking legislation like a dead weight while everyone else in the world runs on ahead...

It seems to me that the IRD's position boils down to a largely mistaken understanding of technology risk: it assumes that data placed in trust with an (almost inevitably higher priced) on-shore provider is less at risk of loss or security leakage than data placed in trust with an industry-leading international vendor. As a technologist who has been working in the cloud space for over 4 years, my professional opinion is that this is plain wrong: the IT and security maturity of international scale vendors far exceeds the capabilities of our domestic players, who even now sometimes have extremely scary moments. I also think that these international vendors are far better at understanding their own commercial risks around reputation management and know that if they screw up, they're dog food.

Therefore, any risks that the IRD is thinking of must be non-technical, non-commercial and hence political in character:

Yes, NZ Inc. would be at high risk if both (sigh...) the internet pipes were shut off by overseas governments / terrorist organisations. But then so would NZ Inc if there was a shipping blockade or international sea pirates. At a base level, what fundamental difference is there between shipping containerloads of milk powder internationally (subject to shipping and customs inspections) and shipping cable fibre loads of data back and forth (subject to CIA inspections, natch...)? - other than the value of the items being shipped, carbon emissions involved and ongoing ecological vandalism caused by intensive farming, but hey....

(See also recent commentary from IDC on how this DIY IT position is unsustainable even in the public sector, the NZ Government's own open-ended advice on using offshore ICT providers and a recent article that quotes a DIA manager saying "the government may have to make sacrifices in such treasured concepts as privacy and sovereignty, so that public sector organisations can take advantage of the “convenience” of the cloud" Some consistency is required!)

Several other counterarguments spring to mind immediately:

- Firstly: precedent - I seem to remember from my time working for a large multinational that all of their primary financial record keeping systems for all of Asia Pacific (including NZ) were certainly not based in NZ - in fact, their superstar CIO was proud of trumpeting the cost reductions from globalization of their IT consolidation from 90 datacentres down to only 6 worldwide.
How does a small NZ business renting a SaaS solution to get the same economies of scale as a major multinational differ from that multinational in terms of data domicile? Not a lot.

- Secondly: With hardly a week going by without NZ's new government signing another free trade agreement, this is surely a directly discriminatory policy against NZ businesses getting the best value service from offshore.

Rod Drury and co at Xero were onto it immediately (impressive internet media management as always) with this delicately worded blog post: Working with the IRD on cloud computing. Given that Xero are market leaders in this space, and also that they host with Rackspace in the USA, their whole business model (and that of all c.20,000 of their NZ customers) was suddenly deemed illegal by some bureaucrat, no wonder.

"New Zealand legislation hasn’t kept up with developments in technology compared to other countries. We are working towards certification of our current customers and in the longer term expect to see the legislation amended to better reflect contemporary technology. We’d expect this to end up in a similar position to Australia where there is no onshore storage requirement, only that your records are available if requested. There are a number of fall back positions if the industry doesn’t get there."

Fundamentally: IT and data management risk are just normal business risks to be managed by commercial businesses. The IRD seems to be saying that in fact, they know how to manage IT risk better than business owners and professional IT managers. That is wrong.

Prevailing theme from 2010: The accelerating rate of technology change becomes clear

2010-12-02T16:03:00.022+13:00

It's nearly the end of 2010 (2010!) and I've just returned from a short break tramping (hiking) in the beautiful Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand - great weather and nothing but sunshine, nature, sea and a 20kg+ backpack for company for 3 days. (OK, there were quite a few German tourists on the trail as well but other than that...) Highly recommended part of the world if you've never been.

Anyway, getting away out of it is a great opportunity to take the mind up out of the day-to-day and reflect on the bigger picture. I managed to spend a fair bit of time thinking about the wider trends behind what's we've been seeing in our business over the last year, what our customers have been seeing, and what the implications are likely to be going forward.

Cloud uptake by in-house IT

When I set up Memia in mid-2008, I was pretty convinced that cloud technology was on the cusp of rapid mainstream commercial uptake by in-house IT departments. However, as it turns out - in our home market at least - the inertia of the embedded on-premise model and residual concerns on security, reliability and usability have slowed down the pace of adoption I expected. Whereas we've seen our early adopter customers gain major improvements in reliability, productivity and collaboration - all at a fraction of the cost of traditional do-it-yourself IT - they are still the minority who have dipped their toe in the water. CIOs, generally a risk-averse bunch, are still waiting for greater industry uptake - and, dare I say it, have a vested political interest in keeping an army of "IT guys" feeding and watering servers rather than culling their empire. Plus, many larger IT organisations have 3-year-plus sunk investments in IT infrastructure which they're not going to write off immediately due to accounting rules. As a result, my experience over the last year has been that SaaS and cloud have only really been compelling for micro and small businesses where there is a compelling focus on cost. That said, the impression I'm getting now (coming out of the recession) is that cloud computing and SaaS is now a broadly accepted paradigm in many medium-sized organisations and next year will see many more CIOs taking the plunge - whether they are pushed into it by their boards or not.

Cloud impact on Systems Integrators

Meanwhile we are observing many of the "Services 2.0" predictions made by Narinder Singh of Appirio (2 years ago!) back in Dec 2008 coming true with uncanny accuracy: where previously on-premise Systems Integrators would have aimed for $10-$15 of services revenues for every $1 of software licences, the new model allows for only $2-$4 - if that. The old labour-intensive, sales-intensive one-off custom integration model just won't be sustainable going forward. SIs have to turn into scalable SaaS businesses themselves selling "integration as a service" if they're going to survive. Again, my impression is that today's established SI's are sleepwalking towards a revenue cliff and haven't quite understood the new disruptive cost models and capabilities of the competition. I'm constantly amazed hearing about local organisations who are building their own data centres and server farms even NOW! Guys, have you *seen* Amazon's pricing? What is it that you can do better??? The infrastructure game is a race to the bottom which will be won by the players with the biggest economies of scale and the best technology. The only question is when, not if. I give it 3 years max.

ISV Migration to the Cloud

Meanwhile in the ISV space again we're seeing a considerable interest now in the SaaS model. Working with our ISV customers over the last year has given us a detailed understanding of the new risks, challenges, pitfalls and yet major opportunities of moving to the SaaS model. Basically, if you want to run a long-term, scalable software business then you *must* offer a multi-tenanted SaaS offering as soon as possible, period. However, the trick is to know how to do this while keeping your existing on-premise customers and without cannibalizing your existing market.

The key "table stake" of playing in this space is to get your technology strategy right: to support both on-premise and multi-tenant SaaS simultaneously using the same codebase, to support multi-channel mobile access, and to build a new 24/7 IT operations capability. And yet this is really difficult to achieve. CTOs are increasingly nonplussed as the landscape is changing so dynamically and at an ever faster rate, with technology adoption cycles and investment lifespans getting ever shorter. A year ago, who would have anticipated the rise of Android to shipping over 200,000 units per day? The trend for bring-your-own consumer devices (iPads, iPhones) into the Enterprise? Microsoft's apparent dead-ending of Windows Mobile and Silverlight? (Where IS Microsoft going, anyway...?). Perpetual "nearly there" HTML5 support? Google's lurking in the background of the Enterprise space and who knows what they're doing either...

Just how does a CTO in 2011 correctly understand what's going on out there, and then plan technology strategy accordingly?

The Accelerating Rate of Technology Change

The biggest impact on my thinking this year was reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near back in May. Even though it was written back in 2005, and in many ways should now be superceded, it is an extraordinary, outspoken, visionary book which is highly relevant to today's technologists. The key theme underlying the book is simply this: technology change - according to many objective measurements - is not linear but accelerating exponentially. Just because our cultural inheritance brings us up to assume that things will continue to change at the same rate as currently, the fact is that they are getting faster. And faster. Put another way, there will be as much technological change between 2000 and 2014 as during the whole of the 20th Century. There will be the same amount again within the next 7 years after that.

Absorbing this fundamental understanding has a profound effect on how one thinks about the future. Whether or not you can bring yourself to agree with Kurzweil's extrapolation of the Technological Singularity (when machine intelligence capability exceeds all human intelligence capability), as happening around 2045, he still maps out the many potential changes in IT, robotics and nanotech over the next few decades which have to be taken account of when developing tech strategy now. (Amazing meme: 1 human brain = approx. 10¹⁶ computations per second (cps). In 2045 there will be approx. 10 billion (10⁹) humans on the planet => 10²⁵ cps in total. If Moore's law continues at it's current rate, this would be the equivalent of just $1000 of computer processing capacity!)

So, the major landscape changes we've been seeing over the last years can be understood as just the continuation of aeons of accelerating change. Fundamentally: CTOs need to underpin their thinking with this knowledge, and understand the corollary that product investment lifespans and adoption cycles will be ever shorter going forward.

At Memia, this thinking has really permeated our way of looking at strategic engagements, and we have come to feel at ease with exponential technological change. Nay, wildly optimistic at the opportunities it brings! In 2011 we will be re-focussing our consulting offerings to work with our customers to develop robust strategies which fundamenally take account of the dynamic and ever-faster-changing technology landscape.

Exciting times.

Rebuilding Canterbury #2: Buildings of the future

2010-09-19T19:53:00.004+12:00

(Off-topic again following our recent Earthquake!)

So, the resurrected Mayor Bob Parker announced last week an Architectural task force led by "Architectural Ambassador" the eminent Ian Athfield: see http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/canterbury-earthquake/4129202/Row-grows-over-rebuilding

My personal thoughts:

- I love futuristic architecture (see the video above). I used to live in central Edinburgh and loved the historic buildings there too, but I always felt that the "heritage" of a place often stifles innovation and preserves an obselete past in aspic. The fact that everything is built to be (relatively) temporary here in NZ is actually quite enabling. (Unfortunately the down-side of this is too many lowest common denominator strip malls and big-box retail sheds...)
- We need one or more landmark "phoenix" buildings which commemorate the earthquake event and the optimism that we now feel in Canterbury to rebuild with confidence. We should leverage Christchurch and NZ's eco-image as well, and deliver a world-class eco-building cluster as an example for the rest of the world. In fact, let's make the Chch CBD an architectural theme park! Let's get our own Sydney Opera House out of this.
- The CBD needs more technology businesses: instead of building an "innovation park" out on some anonymous industrial estate near the airport, let's make the whole CBD an innovation zone, and a new type of technology campus in itself: let's get citywide wi-fi, hot desks and rent-by-the-hour office facilities. The majority of cloud-based tech businesses which we deal with these days need only a desk, a wireless internet connection and a good laptop. (And educated capital, natch, but that's another post...)
- The ability to renew some of the uglier older buildings in town (now that the Post Office has been transformed into CCC's new HQ: in my opinion that building, amazingly regenerated inside, really gives the city a renewed confidence), check out the practice of adding Building Skins http://buildingskins.blogspot.com/
- Ultimately everybody realises that this is an opportunity to add to Canterbury's international brand as a modern, thriving and vibrant (ok, niche) business centre, and to continue to provide commercial and community facilities which attract more inward investment and skilled migration. Lots of landmark buildings please Mr Athfield!

Rebuilding Canterbury the smart way #1: Libraries

2010-09-07T20:43:00.009+12:00

So.... going off-topic a little...I've been thinking about our future here in Canterbury after Saturday's earthquake, and about what the positive opportunities are to invest wisely in our future.

First off: libraries. My wife is currently a student at University of Canterbury, whose libraries were devastated by the quake as shown in these shocking pictures: http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/photos.shtml

So the questions I'd be asking are: how much money is available to rebuild a library, and how should it be best spent?

Option 1:

Renovate or completely rebuild the building
Buy a load of new shelves
Purchase a library-full of replacement books
(Not to mention chop down forests, use litres of ink, ship the books from A to B and pay someone to catalogue them and stack the shelves....)
AND: the knowledge in the book is out of date the moment it's set to paper

Option 2:

Ensure that all study materials are published online from now on
Provide campus-wide free wifi
Subsidise all students to buy a tablet with e-reader software (see http://www.androidtablets.net/ for some examples)
AND the knowledge is updated without needing a reprint, plus everyone gets accessible wireless internet access to carry around with them.

So if you're in charge of the business case for rebuilding UC's libraries, think forward rather than backwards! Books are just too obselete now to support a modern learning environment, and commodity technology is well ready to replace them.

Canterbury Earthquake - free emergency help available for businesses without email

2010-09-05T19:22:00.008+12:00

What a weekend.

I was out in central Christchurch until 11:30pm on Friday night for my wife's birthday, and then 5 hours later the parts of town where we'd been were under a pile of rubble after Saturday morning's 7.1 richter scale earthquake. (#eqnz and #nzeq on Twitter). It was an incredible jolt and went on for nearly a minute (felt longer!) - but due to the time of day, amazingly there have been no fatalities. We have been so lucky. My kids have been progressively calming down as the severity and frequency of aftershocks have reduced steadily over the weekend. We're still getting regular jolts, but hopefully that's the worst of it over.

The Civil Defence, Police and volunteers seem to have done a superb job of managing the crisis - mayor Bob Parker in particular has been excellent in the media: competent and empathetic.
After a few hours during Saturday morning without electricity and water, normal utilities have been restored to most areas of the city and things are past the initial emergency reaction and into a second phase of damage assessment.

At Memia, we currently have no access to our offices in Cashel St due to the emergency cordon, but our team will be working online during the first few days of the week at least. Also, Tuesday is the Software Summit at the Grand Chancellor hotel - currently happening as planned, to my knowledge.

One item in particular: if there are any businesses which are without email and other IT systems due to the earthquake, we're here to help. If you need an emergency solution for your business email (eg to your team @yourdomain.co.nz), we can get email flowing again usually within hours implementing Google Apps standard edition. If we can help out just get in touch 027 344 6808 and there's no charge. (You will need access to your DNS records).

So - I'm looking forward to getting Christchurch up and running again. Hopefully the Twisted Hop is still standing as well! ;-)

NZCS Canterbury Presentation Slides - SaaS Tools for 21st Century Service Provides

2010-08-27T16:06:00.004+12:00

Had a great time presenting to the audience at NZCS last night on the topic of SaaS Tools for 21st Century Service Providers - lots of great questions and knowledge about the pros and cons of taking a wholly SaaS approach to IT. Thanks for the invite, guys! For those that attended the talk, and those that didn't here are my slides.

Exciting SaaS ERP startup Letstrade moves into Beta

2010-08-27T15:56:00.005+12:00

(I've been looking forward to writing this post for a while... ) ;-)

Exciting news from cornerstone Memia customer Letstrade International who announced the start of their beta programme starting in October. Access will be free to Xero users during the beta period.

Letstrade provides a powerful Sales, Procurement and Inventory solution for businesses of all sizes, and has been (beautifully!) designed from the ground up to meet the needs of today's complex trading operations. Take a look at the video below to see a bit more info on the product and go to http://letstrade.com to sign up. Also, take a look at Xero's blog post Be the first to try Letstrade.

Memia SaaS Standard Architecture for SMEs - from NZ$31+gst per user per year

2010-08-08T20:39:00.017+12:00

As I said in my last post, it's been a great month here at Memia. We're starting to see the fruits of our strategy to build a critical mass of expertise in new "best of breed" SaaS solutions, and work with our customers to establish a new model of agile, responsive and radically cost-effective IT services.

When we started the business two years ago, I blogged about Memia's earliest Cloud Services IT architecture and how we were "eating our own dogfood" trying to ensure that all our IT was delivered "as a service" on demand.

Things have moved on considerably since then:

The choice of quality SaaS applications has increased massively, together with the ability to integrate one application with another to build joined-up solutions.
The performance and reliability of the internet, especially the mobile internet, has improved considerably - just for example this evening at home we had two hi-res YouTube streams coming down our suburban ADSL pipe at once without a single frame slipping: even 9 months ago this was unheard of in bandwidth-scarce NZ. (Kudos - finally - to @telecomnz for getting the engineering right).
Perhaps the biggest change, however, is that SaaS solutions are now more widely understood and acceptable to business owners and IT managers, together with providing the critical mass of functionality to be a compelling value proposition.

Over the last year especially we've been working towards a proven suite of integrated best of breed applications which we can run our own business on, and can recommend to our own customers while providing implementation, support and training services. The result is the collection of apps above: Memia's "21st Century IT" SaaS Standard Architecture for SMEs.

Based largely around the Google Apps and Xero core platforms, this suite of applications provides a full range of functionality required to run a large number of service and trading business processes:

Email, Calendar and collaboration tools
Office productivity: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing
Task management
Contact Management and CRM
Sales opportunity pipeline management
Support case management
Sales process automation
Time-based billing
Job-costing and quoting
Job-based workflow
Invoicing and accounting services

... plus plenty of other functionality and configurability.

We're also pretty excited about an upcoming customer application in the Xero ecosystem launching later this year for Inventory, Stock control, Purchasing and Sales processes - watch this space.

So, we're happy to be evangelical about how much this combination of apps works well together. But best of all, the combined pricing for all of these applications running together works out according to the table below (NZ$ ex. GST):

Google Apps Premier Edition
Xero "Large" Edition
CapsuleCRM
MinuteDock
Workflow Max

No of users	Cost per month	Annual cost	Cost per user per month	Cost per user per year
1 user	$92	$1,107	$92	$1,107
3 users	$204	$2,445	$68	$815
10 users	$438	$5,250	$44	$525
50 users	$1,538	$18,450	$31	$369

A full suite of business applications for NZ$31 per user per month!?!? If it sounds too good to be true then get in touch with us at Memia and we will help you run a TCO comparison with other solutions you may be evaluating: you may well be happy with the results.

New Memia Senior Associate Consultant: Rob Laidlaw

2010-08-08T20:33:00.003+12:00

We've had a great month at Memia, starting with Rob Laidlaw joining the business as Senior Associate Consultant within the SaaS Solutions consulting practice, bringing with him website and internet marketing experience to the business.

Rob is based in Christchurch, New Zealand with over 10 years of professional I.T. experience. His career includes QA management at financial software leader Sungard Avantgard and extensive consulting in software testing, website development, and internet marketing strategies for customers throughout New Zealand. Rob will be working with customers to help them make the most of internet platforms such as Google Apps, Xero, Workflow Max and CapsuleCRM (more about this combination soon....). He enjoys working with other people in business to improve efficiencies and help drive more revenue by using 21st century internet technology.

Outside of work, Rob is the licencee and chairperson of the Moa Kids Community Early Learning Centre in Redcliffs, and enjoys kite boarding during the summer months.

Welcome to Memia, Rob!

#gonegoogle Clarus implements Google Apps and achieves ROI in 6 weeks

2010-07-08T14:57:00.001+12:00

(8 July 2010) Clarus Ltd, Christchurch's leading IT and Business Consulting firm, recently rolled out the Google Apps suite of productivity tools to all of its staff and contractors, in a bid to significantly reduce their IT spending on email, calendaring and document sharing applications. Clarus were dissatisfied with how much they were spending to rent hosted Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint solutions, and were looking for better reliability and, above all, better value for money solutions for their staff.

The solution came in the form of Google Apps, Google's flagship platform for business productivity and collaboration. Google Apps is a full integrated package including Business Gmail, Calendars, Documents and Spreadsheets, Shared folders, Sites (eg intranets, team sharing) and many other features. Google Apps is accessible securely and reliably across the internet needing just a standard web browser, and costs only $69+gst per user per year for the premier edition with all features enabled. Google Apps is in use in over 2 million businesses worldwide, including New Zealand Post and Tait Electronics in New Zealand.

Clarus engaged Memia Cloud Consulting, Christchurch's leading Google Apps experts to plan and implement the Google Apps migration. "The whole process took less than 3 weeks from the initial meeting" said Edwin Dando, Clarus Managing Director. "The transition from our old Email system to the new was seamless - our emails just started arriving into Business Gmail minutes after we flicked the switch. While we have had some teething issues with user training requirements for those staff who are used to traditional email and office programs, generally our team is more productive and more mobile than ever." Clarus staff and contractors now have access to their Google Apps account from wherever they are working: at a customer site or out and about on their iPhones.

According to Edwin, the whole migration to Google Apps is saving Clarus hundreds of dollars each month compared to their previous solution: "Memia did exactly what we asked them to do: the ROI of this project has been less than 6 weeks.".

For more about Clarus Ltd see their website: http://www.clarus.co.nz

For more about Google Apps, click here

Get started with Google Apps today

Complete our online application form and a Memia consultant will contact you shortly to discuss your requirements.

#gonegoogle: Memia helps Irelands Property Management to deploy Google Apps successfully

2010-06-01T22:42:00.002+12:00

Memia helps Irelands to roll out Google Apps to all of their staff in weeks: see http://www.memia.com/latestnews.html

Memia becomes Authorised Google Apps Reseller

2010-04-24T13:28:00.008+12:00

Memia is pleased to announce that we recently achieved Authorised Google Apps Reseller status, making us one of the few IT solution providers in New Zealand who can offer our customers the expertise and experience to implement and support Google Apps – a cloud-based suite of email, calendar, IM, and collaboration tools - for their business.

Google Apps reduces IT costs and empowers today's employees. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, and more - NZ$69+GST per user per year when you buy from Memia, and you can try it free for 30 days.

Memia has been providing Google Apps consulting services to our customers for some time now, including: a full implementation service, solution architecture and integration, training and support. We enable our customers to get up and running with Google Apps rapidly, to radically reduce IT costs and improve staff productivity, and to leverage the Google Apps platform by adding other SaaS applications from the Google Apps Marketplace.

We look forward to growing our Google Apps practice from our base here in Christchurch, and helping many new and existing customers to improve their productivity and reduce the cost and complexity of their IT.

For more details of Google Apps Services from Memia, see our website: http://www.memia.com/googleapps.html . If your business is ready to get up and running with Google Apps now, or your would like a free Demonstration, please fill in our online form (itself powered by Google Apps) at: http://www.memia.com/googleappsform.html

Update: Ben Kepes NZCS Christchurch next Thursday 22 April: The Cloud in 2010: After the Hype

2010-04-15T19:02:00.006+12:00

Updated 18th April: Unfortunately due to European air disruption as a result of the Icelandic volcanic dust cloud, Ben Reid is stuck in the UK and cannot speak at this event. Please go along to see Ben Kepes speak, however.

Next Thursday 22nd April it's a "double Ben header" with Cloud commentator Ben Kepes and myself presenting to NZCS on the topics "The Cloud in 2010: After the Hype" and "21st Century CIO".

Summary below - see http://www.nzcs.org.nz/events/canterbury/130-The_Cloud_in_2010_After_the_hype! for more details.

Event Details:
22 April 2010: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Hotel So
1st Floor Conference Room
165 Cashel St
Christchurch

The NZCS Canterbury Branch invites you to join in the stimulating discussion that Cloud-watchers Ben Kepes of Diversity and Ben Reid of Memia will be generating when they present on the state of "the Cloud" in 2010.

Free for NZCS members, inexpensive for others.

The Cloud in 2010: After the hype!

First, The Cloud - A Post-hype Reflection. Cloud Computing analyst and commentator Ben Kepes tiptoes through the tulips of what is happening "in the Cloud" in 2010.

Late 2009 saw almost every vendor producing "cloud-specific" marketing material and tailored cloud offerings. In an IT world where almost everything is offered "as a Service", where the Cloud is seemingly the panacea for hunger, disease and early balding and where traditional business models are falling by the wayside - profit? Who needs profit?

Then, a big question from Ben Reid - 21st Century CIO: All your IT is in the Cloud - now what?

The founder of New Zealand-based Memia Cloud Consulting will present on the immediate future of IT management for businesses of all sizes, given the current momentum towards placing IT solutions in the Cloud. What if all your systems were cloud based? First, is it possible? What will be the differences for IT managers when there are no servers or software left to manage? What will be the practical impact on running your organisation's IT and what new techniques will the CIOs of the future need?

Upcoming Australia / NZ CloudCamps: Sydney, Wellington, Melbourne, Perth

2010-01-18T10:14:00.004+13:00

NZ's own resident Cloud rainmaker @benkepes has been hard at work helping to get CloudCamps organised around the region this year.

Mar 4 2010: CloudCamp Sydney http://www.cloudcamp.org/sydney/2010-03-04
Mar 26 2010: CloudCamp Wellington http://www.cloudcamp.org/wellington/2010-03-26
Apr 1 2010: CloudCamp Melbourne http://www.cloudcamp.org/melbourne/2010-04-01
Apr 8 2010: CloudCamp Perth http://www.cloudcamp.org/perth/2010-04-08

Cloudcamp's mission statement:

"CloudCamp was formed to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing

Through a series of local CloudCamp events, attendees exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. As an informal, member-supported gathering, we rely entirely on volunteers to help with meeting content, speakers, meeting locations, equipment and membership recruitment. We also have corporate sponsors that provide financial assistance with venues, software, books, discounts, and other valuable donations. To become a member, simply register. Anyone may attend a meeting, there are no fees or dues."

Hope to see you there...

Gartner Prediction: By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

2010-01-18T09:18:00.005+13:00

Gartner's New Year predictions included a pretty impressive statistic that confirms the "IT Free Business" trend which Memia is working towards for our customers:

"By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points."

For the rest of Gartner's predictions see http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413

Cloud model software development team - Technology Architecture viewpoint

2010-01-10T14:38:00.022+13:00

Over the last 6 months Memia has successfully operationalized and proved a new (for us!), scalable cost model for our software application development business, almost exclusively using cloud infrastructure and services throughout. I'm sure there are a lot of other folks out there who have done the same, but having worked in software for 15 years I wanted to share our experiences - and ask how can you do it for even less? The near-zero financial capital requirements of this model implies that the barrier to entry for software (...as-as-service) is now based almost entirely on how smart your team is rather than how much capital you have.

Business Principles

The business principles we've used to guide our Technology architecture are pretty simple:

Minimize total cost of ownership
Opex not Capex where possible - we're a startup!
Ensure an acceptable level of data security (In particular protection of IP)
Ensure an acceptable level of usability for staff
Our priority is to deliver working, tested, software, monthly - we need our IT collaboration services to be available 99.9% of the time at least. However, we can survive the odd outage.
Content over style: documentation associated with software development does not need rich desktop publishing features.
Generally we find our team are more productive when they are colocated in the office for core hours every working day
Trust our staff to uphold security policies and procedures

The first couple of financial principles strongly push towards buying our applications as a service, not as a capital expense. However, when we started out, we still weren't absolutely sure what "acceptable" meant for security or usability: but after trialling some services and reading through the SLAs we decided to see if using the common SaaS collaboration applications which are currently available (in particular Google Apps) would be "usable enough" (they are. With spades on) and "secure enough" (the jury's still out but looking good so far...)

Technology tactics

- Bring your own laptop and softphone (each staffmember / contractor gets a monthly allowance to provide and support their own equipment - this is the 21st century everyone has their own laptop, why double up?)
- Cloud for everything. No servers anywhere in our business
- HTTPS and, where necessary, certificate-based authentication for all internet-based communications
- Everything in a browser. (Where possible: most IDEs, application runtimes don't allow for this. There are some examples such as Heroku (Rails) and Force.com are getting there, although that's not so practical yet).
- Wireless internet only
- Work remotely outside core hours if you want (Note: this has implications for Business continuity = go home and work from there!)
- Think of the trees before you print anything - collaborate electronically and round a projector where possible
- Skype is "good enough" for non-sales conference calls
- All integration, system, performance, load and UAT testing is done on Cloud IaaS (either Amazon or GoGrid). Once the testing has finished we wind the virtual servers back down and stop leaking $$$

This means we've ended up with an infrastructure technology architecture that looks (simply!) like this:

...that is, the only capital expenditure on IT Equipment required was:

Wireless routers (in our case these came free with our ADSL line but we upgraded to our own for better reliability)
Wireless multifunction printers
A projector for each meeting room
PSTN phones (only used for free local calls - looking at getting rid of these as we never use them for business!)

Again: No servers, no datacentre. Everything else is opex.

Services Architecture

Abstracting up a level from the networking and infrastructure technology, we've developed a reference services architecture for an software development organisation, shown in the diagram below. This basically enumerates all of the input technology services (ie excluding sales, marketing, HR, real estate) which go into delivering a working increment of the software on a monthly iterative cycle, together with associated artefacts like project management reports and requirements documentation (the output services).

The input application services are divided into two main categories:

1. Collaboration and productivity applications

We have become solid users of Google Apps for collaboration as a team - Google Sites especially is a great way for the team to post content and documentation for the rest of the team to collaborate on together. We also use it for our requirements documentation and our BAs work directly with customers to get Use Case and UI screenshots right. It meets most of our requirements, and the real-time collaboration beats client-side productivity tools hands down. We also use Skype for conference calls and, for the most part, it's ok. (And we're at the end of a long thin pipe under the Pacific Ocean here in New Zealand!)

2. Software development applications

Depending upon what the target application technology is that's being developed, you can mix and match on the software dev apps. (For example for developing ASP.NET applications developers will generally use Microsoft's integrated Visual Studio and Team System toolset, installed on cloud IaaS, but for Ruby on Rails for example you could use Netbeans or Aptana for the IDE, GitHub for source control and then choose your own flavours of continuous integration and defect management).

What I'm still on the lookout for is the best SaaS requirements management tool - any suggestions?

Fundamentally, our experience is that this technology model *works*, and furthermore it *scales*. It cuts the technology costs of running a software development organisation to the bone, and provided that the business in question is satisfied with the security and reliability of using services in the Cloud provides easily the best value solution.

So this is how you design and operate IT for a software development business. How many other industries does this model apply to....?

Notes from Cloud Futures Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference

2009-12-10T06:57:00.009+13:00

On my way back home to NZ now, time to collate some thoughts on the last couple of days here at the Cloud Futures SaaS migration conference.

There were some really great speakers here - including the first time in a long while when Amazon and Salesforce have spoken together in the same room. In particular, my main takeaways from the speakers were:

Keynote from Bill McNee, Saugatuck Technology: Valuable fact-based market research:

- Despite current economic crisis, purchasing for Cloud IaaS and SaaS remain strong through 2011
- However, financial benefits around cloud IaaS potentially illusory? (=> position around other business benefits than price).
- A new ecosystem is forming around Cloud Computing, will transform IT sector
- Sweet-spot: 100-499 employee count, then 500-1000. But there is significant demand from Enterprise.
- Highly interwoven: hybrid app architectures emerge
- Cloud dev via PaaS providers has begun to open up
- A new SaaS based business services delivery model is emerging
- While roughly 35% of ISVs have begun transition to SaaS, will be long and rocky road for most (expect around 70% eventually.) Totally new model for traditional ISVs - many not prepared financially or operationally for the changes needed.

Mark Trang from Salesforce:
- 7 secrets of SaaS success, a small set of moves from Benioff's playbook

Allan Leinwand from Panorama Capital giving the VC perspective:
- Enablers of Cloud Computing such as networking are continually getting cheaper: run CC on the "Taiwan Inc" model - eg Vyatta, a firm that Allan is invested in can provide networking equipment equivalent to an $6000 router for $10! The landscape changes. Expect costs to keep coming down.
- Cloud Services Market: Gartner : Cloud Services market triples from $56.87 -> $150.5 2009 -> 2013 (mainly SaaS)
- Obstacles: Security, Management,Performance,Economics
- VCs are looking for Cloud startups who understand how to measure performance / SLAs
- Q: What will drive exits for Cloud startups? A: Monetization of customer growth.
- Being "cloud" is sexy and doubles your valuation multiple. (Eg Rackspace cheap acquisition of Slicehost (<$10m?) made them a "Cloud" company overnight, their multiple went up to 4x compared to 1.2-2.7 for their competition.

Rick Nucci from Boomi
- "API is not optional" - all SaaS must come with API AS STANDARD. (There is NO DATABASE!)
- All SaaS-to-SaaS integration can now be done in the Cloud
- SaaS API Blueprint recommends Object.Operation naming convention

Sumatrar Sarkar from TechStrategyLabs: The Economics of Cloud Migration
- Demand side economics: NO MORE CAPEX
- Supply side economics split between Supplier and VAR
- Very impressive (if slightly incomprehensible!) TCO model which models optimum allocation of costs between Customer, Supplier and VAR.

Doug Harr, CIO of Ingres:
- Ingres decided to run with totally SaaS-based IT (except desktop productivity and directory services from Microsoft)
- Successful implementations, rapid agile delivery
- Have implemented SSO across their SaaS apps using MyOneLogin
- Leading frontrunner in "IT Free Business" model
- Enables the role of CIO to be more involved in enabling business strategy, not day to day operations.
- CIO is more involved in understanding risk model: auditors still learning how to audit control objectives for security and management when it's consumed via SaaS.

Erik Novikoff, Enki (previously director of software dev, Netsuite)

- Enki provide "people on demand" ;-)
- Enki have done 50-60 customer deployments from on-premise to the Cloud.
- Enki customers enjoy increased revenue, new opportunities,delight their customers. (He says).
- With SaaS, can calculate costs as fraction of total revenue
- Retrain some traditional sys admins to be cloud admins
- Charging for service:
Model - Enki charges based on "cost plus"
Pricing
- Start with equal 2-year NPV (ie equal to boxed software) and upsell

- Gotchas / one time costs/tasks:
-Moving to Cloud
- Web presentation platform
- Single to multitenant conversion
- Redesign for scaling
- Adding API / mashup
- Monitoring (SLA) - internal and external
- Billing system
- Upgrading support offering (24x7)
- Financing your move: Covering delayed time-to-value
- Marketing: whole new world with different competitors/comms channels

Ramon Chen, Rainstor
Rainstor is a vendor of Cloud-based archiving solution. Useful for the following use cases:
- Storage of archived data for compliance purposes
- Escrow of data held in 3rd party SaaS services
- Log and security event data retention

Interesting product (service!), launched in US today.

Richard Reiner @ Enomaly
Richard woke up the room with more specialized detail on the security question than I've seen to date. Cloud IaaS is potentially compromisable because software is the *only* security control - a compromised virtualization layer therefore means that your data and applications are not secure. He characterizes all current cloud IaaS vendors as saying "Trust me" based on their quality people and processes. (The "Trust Me" cloud). Enomaly is (about to?) launch a product which provides the "Verified" cloud, and provides a direct channel from a browser plugin to the underlying hardware layer to verify that the software installed (eg virtualization / hypervisor layer) has not been tampered with. Good communication of the issues, but does the cost outweigh the risk?

Nolan M. Goldberg, Proskauer: Legal Issues of Cloud Computing- Case law is behind the technology
- Make sure legal issues are covered off in service agreement (which is a contract!). In particular, make sure that responsibility for paying costs to comply with legal requests is assigned.
- Went through the standard legal risks of privacy, data security, geographical location / jurisdiction

Gowri Subranium, Aspire Systems:
- Aspire are a Chennai-based SI / development partner specialising in building SaaS. (Bit like us!)
- Gowri introduced three main strategies to build SaaS:
1. Ground up build
2. Build on top of PaaS
3. "Solution Accelerator" - effectively a set of code libraries which enable delivery of the platform out of the box.

You can see the Twitter stream for the conference at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23cfsj09 (mostly me, natch...)

From my side, the conference was worth it in that it:
- Validated my thinking that the industry is at the same early stages of development across the globe, and ISVs / IT Services Vendors are still unclear as to which business models will work and which ones won't. "How do you make money out of SaaS / Cloud?" - there's only one data point so far and that's Salesforce. The costs and risks for traditional ISVs to make the move are substantial, and maybe better strategy is to "enhance" an existing on-premise offering with SaaS rather than "migrate". (Begs the question what do you do when a SaaS competitor for your core offering takes your customers a couple of years down the road....)
- Enabled networking with a (surprisingly small) number of key players in the industry in the US (particularly enjoyed catching up with @MichaelDunham of Scio - who are an agile outsourced SaaS vendor much as ourselves - and trading war stories, and the other guys from outside the border Luc and Stephan from C3Wave from Belgium).
- Overall, the trip has provided some solid new insights into the risks, opportunities, strategies and challenges with moving from on-premise to SaaS and Cloud. Useful, all in all.

In San Jose for Cloud Futures SaaS Migration conference

2009-12-07T11:13:00.002+13:00

Arrived in San Jose after 11 hour flight to SFO from Auckland and then what seemed like almost as long to get from the airport in a shared minibus. Good to go all around the Valley though - drove a really roundabout route past the silicon valley headquarters of Oracle, Ebay, Microsoft, Adobe and hundreds more. Great to be back in an economy where software truly "belongs" rather than one dominated by agriculture... ;-/

Anyway, I'm here for the Cloud Futures Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference '09 which starts tomorrow - see http://www.cloudfutures.com/usa/index.shtml. This is one of Memia's "sweet spots" and we really enjoy working with software businesses to make the move (both technology and operations) from the on-premise model to SaaS (see http://www.memia.com/isvservices.html) for more details. I'm looking forward to meeting others who are doing the same thing in this particular part of the industry, and learning about what's going on this side of the Pacific and how our skills and experience stack up back in APJ.

Memia is hiring: XHTML, CSS, ASP.NET Developers

2009-11-20T17:30:00.001+13:00

Are you an experienced web developer with strong Web 2.0 and Enterprise Application development knowledge, an understanding of how the best SaaS applications should work, and (even better) experience of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes?

If so, we would like to hear from you.

You will need the following experience and skills:

* Over 3 years of professional experience as a Software Developer
* XHTML - with knowledge of upcoming v.5 features
* CSS (2.x min - ideally 3.x) - for typography, positioning/layout, image manipulation/sprites and experience in cross-browser compatibility issues
* JavaScript with a working knowledge of the JQuery library.

In addition any additional knowledge and experience in the following would be a strong advantage:

* ASP.NET 2.0 and/or ASP.NET MVC
* IIS (6.0 minimum, 7.0 preferred)
* A deep understanding of web-based applications and SaaS delivery models
* Ideally experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and processes
* Ability to work closely with customers, software testers and business analysts in an Agile software development environment
* Strong written documentation skills
* Rigorous attention to detail
* Ability to bring creativity and new ideas to the job, and to be willing to put in the extra effort to help the team meet deadlines
* Above all, we are looking for you to be a self-starter who delivers results from day one.

What we can offer:

* Market-competitive remuneration
* Work from our great City Centre offices on Cashel Mall
* Relaxed flexible working environment
* Get to be part of a world class team using the latest Cloud-based technology
* Be part of the next great global SaaS success story born right here in Canterbury

If this role describes you and fits in with *your* career ambitions, please send your CV in confidence to Smina Vanlerberghe, Director: smina@memia.com

Note: You have to be able to work in New Zealand to apply for this job.
There's visa information at New Zealand Immigration Service.

CloudCamp Christchurch - Fri October 30th

2009-10-12T17:01:00.001+13:00

Cloud Camp Christchurch Unconference

October 12, 2009 - "CanterburyCloud", an emerging idea for a network amongst SaaS/Cloud Computing businesses in Christchurch, today announces the first Cloud Camp Christchurchunconference (agenda free event where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supportive environment) to discuss what such a network could achieve for its participants, the region and the world.

In Christchurch and Canterbury we have a surprising number of players in this field - all doing interesting things with internet technologies but, at least to a certain extent, isolated from the good advice, talent, resources and plain support of their peers.

We believe we can change this, thus the idea of developing CanterburyCloud. So what is CanterburyCloud? It is a network where start-ups can access and leverage the communal wisdom of their peers. It is potentially a co-working space where growing companies can work and bounce ideas off like-minded businesses. It is potentially a marketing platform - a network of businesses that can, to an extent, share key messages about our value proposition, resources and evangelise each other's services within New Zealand and internationally. It will become what we want it to be but ultimately, it has to be unique - shine for its excellence from a healthy dose of agility, smart business and web savvy people.

We would like to explore this opportunity with you and we are therefore inviting you to join an unconference - but beware! It is not going to be a tech event, rather it is going to look at developing this idea of CanterburyCloud further- vision, goals, forming, participants, sponsorship, venues, business models, strengths and weaknesses and the general appetite for working together.

We will be holding this event at 1pm-5pm on Friday 30 October at CDC, 193 Cashel Street, Training Room T1, Level 2, followed by free drinks and nibbles at Memia, 107-109 Cashel Street, Level 1. Please RSVP by 28 October to smina@memia.com

We would like to thank CDC and Telecom for their generous contribution in supporting us with organizing this event.

See also Ben Kepes' blog post at diversity.net.nz for a bit more background.

NSFW: The Cloud Computing Consultant

2009-10-07T20:39:00.001+13:00

This is bang on the nail, laugh out loud funny. (Warning it's NSFW so not for sensitive types).

Presenting Course at CDC 24th Nov: Productivity and Internet Technology

2009-10-07T12:44:00.003+13:00

For anyone based here in Canterbury, Smina and myself will be presenting a course on "Productivity and Internet Technology" at CDC next month 24th November. Course synopsis:

"A workshop designed for owners and managers of service based businesses looking to improve productivity and reduce costs through better use of IT.
Participants will be introduced to Enterprise Architecture techniques for small to medium sized businesses, productivity improvement by using better IT, whilst exploring the benefits that Cloud-based IT can provide your business and especially your workforce. You will take part in discussions on the basic approaches to improving productivity: change technology, change processes or change how people work. We will show you how businesses use technology make it a worthwhile investment to their business.

Follow-up coaching with the presenter provides a valuable opportunity to discuss challenges and opportunities specific to your business."

For more details and to register, go to the CDC website at:

http://www.cdc.org.nz/main/fast-track-detail/?course=34#

Did you know?

2009-10-07T09:03:00.003+13:00

Thanks @Smina who emailed this over, worth taking 5 minutes of your time. Video presentation on the progression of information technology, researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman.

"By 2049 a $1000 computer will have more computational capacity than the whole human race". Get your head around the consequences of *that*!

Amazon Web Services provisioning 50,000 EC2 server instances PER DAY

2009-10-04T12:27:00.002+13:00

Picked this up from Reuven Cohen @ Enomaly's blog: The Business of Cloud Computing is booming:

"An analysis by Guy Rosen also sheds some light on the cloud opportunity in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50,000 EC2 server instances per day. A 50K/day run rate would imply a yearly total of over 18 million provisioned instances. "

Read the rest of @ruv's post: this confirms something that we've noticed is that cloud provisioning provides up to 90% cost savings relative to traditional outsourced data centre hosting, PLUS with no vendor lock-in or minimum contract terms. Bring it on.

Memia is hiring: Senior SaaS Test Analyst

2009-09-27T20:59:00.001+13:00

We're hiring a number of roles at Memia - first up, Senior SaaS Test Analyst:

Play a key role in the next global SaaS success story from New Zealand

Memia Cloud Consulting is focussed on building and deploying Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and solutions - we are currently developing the next global SaaS success stories from our base in central Christchurch, Canterbury.

We are looking for key people to fill a number of roles on our team, either on a Contract or Permanent basis:

Senior SaaS / Web 2.0 Test Analyst

Are you an experienced software QA analyst with formal Enterprise Application testing knowledge, an understanding of how the best SaaS applications should work, and experience of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes?

If so, we would like to hear from you.

You will need:

* Over 3 years of professional experience as a Software Test (QA) Analyst
* A deep understanding of web-based applications and SaaS delivery models
* Ideally experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and processes
* Ability to work closely with customers, software developers and business analysts in an Agile software development environment
* Strong written documentation skills
* Rigorous attention to detail
* Ability to bring creativity and new ideas to the job, and to be willing to put in the extra effort to help the team meet deadlines
* Above all, we are looking for you to be a self-starter who delivers results from day one.

What we can offer:

* Market-competitive remuneration
* Work from our great City Centre offices on Cashel Mall
* Relaxed flexible working environment
* Get to be part of a world class team using the latest Cloud-based technology
* Be part of the next great global SaaS success story born right here in Canterbury

If this role describes you and fits in with *your* career ambitions, please send your CV in confidence to Smina Vanlerberghe, Director: smina@memia.com

Note: You have to be able to work in New Zealand to apply for this job.
There's visa information at New Zealand Immigration Service.

Upcoming Cloud Conferences: Auckland, San Jose

2009-09-23T16:49:00.004+12:00

End of a long blogging hiatus - Memia has been in vertical lift off over the last couple of months and things only just settling down again. Lots of stuff going on! ;-)

Just a quick shout out for a couple of upcoming conferences I'm going to be attending in the next few months, would be good to catch up with anyone else who's going to be there:

New Zealand Cloud Computing Summit: 5th October, Rendezvous Hotel Auckland NZ.

See: http://www.brightstar.co.nz/nz/cloud-computing-summit.html#

Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference 2009: 7-8 December, San Jose

See: http://www.cloudfutures.com/usa/

Microsoft Office 2010: The Movie

2009-07-10T07:08:00.002+12:00

I like this from Microsoft.

"Watch your margins!" ;-)

The software business: your risk model, should you need one.

2009-06-18T20:51:00.005+12:00

I was just going back over Microsoft's announcement from January when they announced their "cost cutting initiatives" (it was referenced in a friend's "my last day at Microsoft" email), when I noticed at the bottom the bit about "forward looking statements".

These sections are usually pretty bland and generic - however, what is fascinating is that Microsoft have actually broken out all of their downside risks into a list for everyone to see: check out the list below. If you're running a software business and don't have a risk model, here you go. ;-)

•	challenges to Microsoft’s business model;
•	intense competition in all of Microsoft’s markets;
•	Microsoft’s continued ability to protect its intellectual property rights;
•	claims that Microsoft has infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
•	the possibility of unauthorized disclosure of significant portions of Microsoft’s source code;
•	actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products that could reduce revenue or lead to liability;
•	government litigation and regulation affecting how Microsoft designs and markets its products;
•	Microsoft’s ability to attract and retain talented employees;
•	delays in product development and related product release schedules;
•	significant business investments that may not gain customer acceptance and produce offsetting increases in revenue;
•	changes in general economic conditions or the availability of credit that affect the value of our investment portfolio or demand for Microsoft’s products and services;
•	adverse results in legal disputes;
•	unanticipated tax liabilities;
•	quality or supply problems in Microsoft’s consumer hardware or other vertically integrated hardware and software products;
•	impairment of goodwill or amortizable intangible assets causing a charge to earnings;
•	exposure to increased economic and regulatory uncertainties from operating a global business;
•	geopolitical conditions, natural disaster, cyberattack or other catastrophic events disrupting Microsoft’s business;
•	acquisitions and joint ventures that adversely affect the business;
•	improper disclosure of personal data could result in liability and harm to Microsoft’s reputation;
•	outages and disruptions of online services if Microsoft fails to maintain an adequate operations infrastructure;
•	sales channel disruption, such as the bankruptcy of a major distributor; and
•	Microsoft’s ability to implement operating cost structures that align with revenue growth.

Ray Ozzie: Cloud lowers margins shocker

2009-06-11T20:46:00.004+12:00

Ray Ozzie at Microsoft has gone and said the unsayable: the economics of Cloud Services will yield lower margins than packaged software for Microsoft. Uh, yeah. The company’s gross margin for the quarter ended March 31 was 79% - is that sustainable in a new industry paradigm which is relentlessly driving out efficiencies and economies of scale?

On the other hand, as Google and others have shown, when your technology scales to 1.4 billion users and counting, and supports a significant percentage of global commerce, then margins aren't everything.

Perhaps of most relevance is Microsoft’s key incumbent strength in this space: an estimated 5 million to 7 million developers who write software based on Microsoft technology (mainly .NET these days). MS isn't going away any time soon - however they will need to work out how to monetize Azure differently to the open source / EC2 crowd.

Google Wave - the future of email, collaboration?

2009-05-31T19:37:00.003+12:00

Just seen this preview of Google Wave:

Letting the implications sink in but if Google migrate all of their (commercial and consumer) GMail users onto this platform when it launches next year this could become the new paradigm for enterprise(to-enterprise) collaboration pretty quickly: email, IM, documents and media sharing. As Rod Drury comments: the classic Exchange email model is just broken.

Google are going to open-source the APIs - how many new apps could be built upon the top of this and what new business models could that lead to? (Google exec quote: "...this again is a very early release and at Google we have quite a luxury that in the beginning of the life of a product we focus exclusively on technology and making a product successful....the question of monetising we deal with later"). Yeah right.

(Incidentally one of the jumpouts of the demo was the multilingual collaboration on a document - 4 users editing in English Chinese, Hindi(?) and another asian character set all at the same time! - not sure if this is in Google Docs already, but mindblowing compared to just a few years ago)

Cloud Services in the Enterprise - slides from Canterbury Software Cluster meeting 5 May 2009

2009-05-07T21:12:00.005+12:00

I enjoyed giving a talk on "Cloud Services in the Enterprise - Making Sense of XaaS" to Canterbury Software Cluster on Tuesday. Lots of great questions at the end and conversations afterwards - please feel free to carry on the conversation by email or here on the blog.

The slides are here for reference:

Google App Engine supports Java!

2009-04-21T20:28:00.005+12:00

In case you missed it Google App Engine now supports Java. See:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/04/seriously-this-time-new-language-on-app.html

That's likely to drive adoption considerably deeper than support for Python, then.

PS Also in case you missed it see the earlier Google App Engine blog article from April Fools' Day: Google App Engine Supports Fortran. Funny.

Ruby over ABAP - is this SAP's cloud PaaS play?

2009-04-21T19:55:00.008+12:00

Something caught my eye the other day which might be nothing, but might be the first inkling of another global PaaS play. This great interview on InfoQ with Juergen Shmerder on Blue Ruby, SAP's implementation of a Ruby VM over their proprietary ABAP stack.

So this is SAP's strategy to drive much broader developer adoption of the ABAP technology in which much of SAP's ERP products are written. (Let's face it they're never going to do it with ABAP by itself! ;-) ) To quote Vishal Sikka, SAP CTO:

"The language Ruby, for example, is thought to have reached a million programmers faster than any other language ever."

Now Blue Ruby itself is still very much still in SAP's laboratory, but when you combine this with SAP's recent acquisition of cloud application platform Coghead's IP assets, and (maybe I'm reading too much into this) you start to see another PaaS play emerging. In the same way that SalesForce have leveraged their leadership position in the CRM space to drive adoption of Force.com and the Apex language, so SAP might play in the ERP space with Ruby:

	Google	SalesForce	Microsoft	Bungee Connect	Heroku	SAP?
Platform	Google App Engine	Force.com	Azure	Bungee Connect	Heroku (Rails over Amazon EC2)	SAP Cloud Platform?
Language	Java and Python	Apex	C#, VB, Python, Ruby	Bungee Logic (proprietary)	Ruby	ABAP and Ruby

Cloud Services Stack - "Above the line"

2009-02-28T19:35:00.007+13:00

Well it's been a while since my last post: so happy new year, then. ;-)

(I've been very busy! Among other things adding lots of features to the Memia Cloud Services portfolio management toolset which is currently in development *and* doing a load of business planning around the forthcoming SaaS offering - watch this space...)

Meanwhile, I've recently joined the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and while browsing through the forum posts I came across one from Kent Langley of nScaled : "Cloud Computing Stack Update". In this post Kent updates his ontology of the Cloud Stack - copied below. This picture gives a nice "ground up" taxonomy view of the Cloud Stack, from "public utilities" (=power companies) upwards.
However, I'm often struck by the subconsious manifestations of the two primary mindsets at work within the "Cloud" space. Generally people seem to either come from an infrastructure background or a software background, but not both. So while this diagram gives plenty of detail describing everything up to and including "operating system" (ie what I would call "Cloud Computing" but not "Cloud Services"), it doesn't place the same emphasis on the variety within the SaaS space. That is, it's an infrastructure-centric view.

Nothing wrong with that, but as someone working in the Cloud space with a primarily *software* hat on, here's an (equally skewed!) ontology which elaborates a more software-centric view of the Cloud - effectively "above the line". Obviously its horses for courses, but in my opinion if we're trying to define the whole Cloud stack from top to bottom then we need to be more granular when describing the common services living within and across the PaaS/SaaS level. (Feedback invited on the contents of the light blue boxes - this is a first cut and I intend to iterate.)

"Services 2.0" - that'll be our Magic Quadrant, then

2008-12-14T20:57:00.005+13:00

Last week I read an incisive article on “Services 2.0″ company Appirio by Prashanth Rai on CloudAve:

http://www.cloudave.com/link/services-the-very-critical-part-of-the-on-demand-ecosystem-appirio

There is some pretty visionary content included here with an outline of how the move from on-premise to cloud-based software will affect and remodel the IT services industry, especially those wrapped around implementing and integrating these solutions. This shift to “Services 2.0″ is likely to happen at the same rapid pace as the move to SaaS is happening now - exciting times. Memia is aiming to be prominent in this space, so it's good to finally have a term that Gartner can hang a magic quadrant on. ;-)

Secure "cloud" services offered by retail bank in New Zealand

2008-12-09T21:37:00.005+13:00

Check out this advert from ASB bank here in New Zealand (http://www.asb.co.nz) - a bank offering secured data storage in (their own) cloud: this is a great (early) example of how established businesses can leverage their existing internet channels to expand into adjacent offerings using cloud services. In this case ASB is relying upon the Trust relationship they already have with their customers. Interesting...

Cloud Services - Business Fundamentals

2008-11-20T21:10:00.002+13:00

I thought I'd just separate out some key points I made in my talk last night on cloud services business fundamentals - what are the emerging axioms by which we're going to do business in the cloud in future?

Market size: at least 1.3 billion users (and counting)
Competition: anyone else in the world who can develop and operate the same software/services as you
There will only be room for 1-3 profitable operators in each niche

But there will be a lot of niches!

Corporate Cloud Services spend will be $42Bn/year by 2012 (IDC, Oct 2008)

0.001% = $42 million annual revenues

Rules of engagement:

Frictionless sign up / leave model
No vendor lock-in possible any more
Reputation and trust are everything

Customers own their own data

They can ask for it back
They can control their own privacy settings
However, while they "lend" it to you, you can make $$

The customer is in charge

However, there are plenty of customers to go around!

Presentation from Chch DNUG,19 Nov 2008

2008-11-20T20:56:00.002+13:00

I've uploaded my slides from last night's talk at the Christchurch .NET User Group:

(Direct link http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddtw9mh4_57g4vkgzcc)

IDC market analysis: IT spend on cloud services to grow to $42 billion / 25% of spend by 2012

2008-11-16T20:33:00.004+13:00

More predictions:

"IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion (triple what it is now) by 2012 and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year."

Read the IDC press release and follow the links here.

Also worth noting, the press release includes IDC's definitions of Cloud services vs. Cloud computing:

Cloud Services are the consumer and business products, services, and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet. (IDC identifies eight key attributes that more clearly define the new generation of commercial cloud services.)
Cloud Computing is an emerging IT development, deployment, and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services, and solutions over the Internet.

Economist Corporate IT Survey: Cloud Computing

2008-11-10T20:28:00.002+13:00

Spent much of last week delving into my weekly Economist subscription enjoying the Corporate IT survey on Cloud Computing.

The story covering the market for Enterprise SaaS has the following graph from Gartner (pre- or post global financial meltdown?!?!?!) which speaks volumes:

Slides from Chch .NET code camp cloud services talk

2008-11-03T20:18:00.004+13:00

I very much enjoyed giving a talk at the 2008 Christchurch .NET Code Camp on Saturday, although some in the audience may have noticed that I hadn't timed the slides beforehand! (ended up squashing half the talk into the last 5 minutes - oops). Anyway, the event was excellently organised by Matt Smith, Andy (Scrasé ☺), Chris Fairbairn and the rest of the team - thanks I really enjoyed the event. Unfortunately I had to run off immediately and look after 10 six year olds at my daughter's birthday party - but I'm still alive! ;-)

I've attached the slides here in PDF format - please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of the topics I discussed.

Microsoft announce "Azure" services platform at PDC - no hard pricing yet

2008-10-28T20:37:00.005+13:00

Microsoft's big Cloud announcement finally came out yesterday at PDC: the "Windows Azure" services platform:

"The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together."

More info at What is the Azure Services Platform?

Also, take a look at the section on Pricing and Licensing: no hard pricing is available yet as this announcement is just for the CTP - planning to go into production in H2 2009.

Given the pricing competition from Amazon EC2 and other players on a spending spree like Rackspace this is going to get pretty darwinian pretty quickly. However, this is good for everybody (except perhaps Microsoft $hareholder$ who were expecting monopoly revenues forever!) - there are far fewer opportunities for vendor platform lock-in in the frictionless cloud: Microsoft can reinvent their revenue model around the stuff which delivers the most *real* value - which will be .NET from now on - but I don't think we'll be seeing >90% market share any time soon. ;-)

"The Azure™ Services Platform business model is aligned around four basic principles. These are:

* Consumption-based model
* Pricing attractive with the market
* Market expansion opportunity for Microsoft partners
* Easy access through the Web, or through existing channels and programs"

Consumption is based upon:

" * Compute time, measured in machine hours
* Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure data center), measured in GB
* Storage, measured in GB
* Transactions, measured as application requests such as Gets and Puts"

If you dive a bit deeper into the FAQs, you can see the production schedule:

" * Availability Timeframe – H2 2009
o Acquire directly through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal
o Acquire though ISVs (independent software vendors): purchase an ISV application which utilizes the Azure Services Platform, and pay the ISV through their own licensing and pricing model"

Intergen's Chris Auld is blogging the PDC - see his take on the Azure announcements here.

Amazon announcements: General Availability (99.95%) and Windows on EC2. Windows cost benchmarked at 25-40% over Linux to provision!

2008-10-26T20:17:00.006+13:00

Amazon have done it - they have committed to "General Availability" (GA) with a service level agreement of 99.95% within a "Region". If availability falls below this level, customers will receive service credits. Read more information at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla

In a simultaneous announcement Amazon have announced that Windows and SQL Server images are now available on EC2 - pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows 2003 Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour (see below). Amazon are also supporting SQL Server Express and Standard editions on EC2. The only restriction is that all instances must be in the same availability zone - read details at: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/.

Pricing comparisons are below - so now there's a benchmark: Windows costs between 25-40% over Linux to provision!

Instances

Standard Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Small (Default)	$0.10 per hour	$0.125 per hour
Large	$0.40 per hour	$0.50 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.00 per hour

High CPU Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Medium	$0.20 per hour	$0.30 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.20 per hour

Microsoft Cloud Announcements

2008-10-02T19:41:00.002+13:00

2 "Microsoft" "Cloud" press releases made it out simultaneously today.

First, Steve Ballmer pre-announced the launch of "Windows Cloud" operating system (which isn't Midori):

Secondly Amazon announced EC2 with Windows:

Both press releases predictably make no mention of pricing and licensing models - Microsoft's share price would tank if they did... ;-)

Microsoft's big Cloud launch at PDC 2008

2008-09-25T20:21:00.003+12:00

Went to a good talk yesterday by Nigel Parker (slides here) of Microsoft New Zealand on Cloud Computing, IE8 and Silverlight. The talk was general scene setting for the Cloud computing paradigm, showcasing of MS's latest demos of gadgets like Photosynth, Live maps and Mesh, and generally painting Microsoft's future vision of Cloud computing (=Microsoft, Google, (Amazon?) and, er, no-one else can afford to play on their scale!?!).

Key announcement is that after the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld teaser ads (Youtube: here and here ), Microsoft are finally launching their Cloud services platform into the wild at PDC in a month's time. See the post on Gianpaulo's blog for full details of the Cloud Services Symposium they are holding on day 4, and some sneak preview slides of architectural guidance for Cloud Services Architecture.

Good stuff - about time from Microsoft, too.

Data property rights: a banking analogy

2008-09-21T17:47:00.005+12:00

Further on from previous comments on data portability, I read an interesting post on GigaOM from a while back from Nitin Borwankar: Data Property Rights, Not Portability. Nitin makes some really clear points regarding the rules which *should* govern your data which is placed in a third party's system (ie YouTube, Facebook), if you took a classic "property" analogy:

1. Data Accessibility
2. Data Visibility
3. Data Removal
4. Data Ownership

(...read the full post for details).

This makes me think of traditional business models surrounding being a trustee for other people's property: the classic model is banking. With a bank, I place my money in their trust, and am free to withdraw the money according to the agreement I have with them (ie savings / chequeing / fixed term investment account types). Conversely, while they have my money they are free to invest that money for their own profit (again, within certain limits - for example maybe I would specify that arms and tobacco investments are off-limits).

In the same way, for a piece of data or content that I own, I can choose which "trustee" I place my data with and can "withdraw" (ie to another service provider) my data according to the terms of my service agreement. Meanwhile, that trustee is free to try and make profits from my content by driving advertising, social mapping or other revenue from it.

Sounds fair enough to me.

Couple of afterthoughts, however:
- Banking is regulated: the internet will potentially need a regulator to achieve the "liquidity" of content outlined above.
- If these content ownership rules become embedded in internet culture over the next few years, and Facebook, YouTube and all the rest are just trusted, temporary custodians of their customer's content: what implications does that have for internet company valuations?

13,000 days down - nearly half way there?

2008-09-11T20:10:00.002+12:00

Poignant message from my iGoogle home page today:

(I think I've configured my life expectancy at around 80 years old, give or take - ever the pessimist...). Now, what can I do in 16,221 days?

Cloud services enterprise architecture part 2

2008-09-04T21:02:00.004+12:00

We've developed the EA further from my last post - adding an output service of software development consulting, and adding the following input services:

Messaging services:
-IM
-SMS
-Tweets (down with the kids!)

Work management services:
- Task management
- Workflow
- Timesheets

Mind mapping services:
- Mind mapping

Business continuity services:
- Backup

Legal services
- Legal advice

Software development services:
- Application platform
- Database platform
- IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
- Test management
- Architecture
- Requirements

Here's the latest picture: now to find the right providers for each of these services!

Interesting posts on the "Principles of Cloud Oriented Architecture", and "Cloud Computing Bill of Rights"

2008-08-30T10:41:00.004+12:00

I've been reading James Urquhart's blog The Wisdom of Clouds for some time now - a leading thinker in the emergent space of Cloud-based architecture.

In particular, the following recent posts are especially worth reading:

Update: the Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

The Principles of Cloud Oriented Architecture

Generally I agree with James that, since the world is now coasting towards a single common, shared Cloud Oriented Architecture that a set of common principles, rights and responsibilities can and should be drafted (but I would ask by whom?). As with any technological advance, the social and legal effects cannot be thought through soon enough before the impact of the change is felt. The question of jurisdiction will always be hardest - which authorities govern and legislate for data and other services in the (international and potentially off-planet) Cloud? Technology moves ever more quickly than the human population can keep up.

In some ways this "Bill of Rights" reminds me of a political manifesto - there will be diametrically opposing views on privacy and security for example from the governments of many countries, and so the practical question is *how* such a BoR would ever come to realised.

However, another way to look at the BoR is as a requirements spec trying to solve 3 discrete technical problems:

Namely:

Providing clear ownership of data and avoiding Cloud services providers ever "owning" their customers' data.
Providing clear accountability (=measurable!) for Cloud service levels
Providing clear ownership of (patented?) intellectual property underlying a Cloud service

James has brought us all a long way by articulating these vulnerabilities in today's Cloud services model - however I personally think that it's more likely that these issues will be addressed successfully (and cheaper!) using technology rather than by the law.

An alternative Microsoft-based Cloud Services Architecture

2008-08-14T20:27:00.006+12:00

Just had a read of my friend Matt Smith's blog post from a couple of weeks ago, which covers very similar ground to my last post on the cloud services I've started using. Matt is a Microsoft fanboy - he even once proposed SharePoint as a viable alternative to a girlfriend in a presentation - these things come back to haunt you, you know! ;-) - and so is pretty keen on MS' Mesh services (must take a closer look at these) - I'm mostly using Google at the moment. Compare and contrast at http://blog.mattsmith.co.nz/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=40.

Integrating Google Calendar and Contacts with Windows Mobile 6 - OggSync

2008-08-10T19:31:00.008+12:00

Further to my previous post on an early cloud services architecture model for my business, this week I've had great success integrating two different services: Windows Mobile 6 handheld operating system with Google Calendar and Contacts - this enables me to maintain a "single version of the truth" for both calendar events and contacts - and at the same time carry both around with me on my mobile. After years of being tied into Microsoft's Exchange / Outlook sync model which ties your data to a particular desktop PC, it is pretty liberating to have everything looked after in the Cloud!

After scanning through the web for tools to manage this integration (there are a few - see Jonathan Wilbur's post on the subject at http://www.jonathanwilbur.com/syncing-google-calendar-with-windows-mobile-6/ ), I settled on OggSync (http://oggsync.com/) - version 4.19 beta currently.

Happy to report that US$29.95 buys a 1-year subscription to a fully functional sync service running on my mobile device - enables sync of timezone and multiple calendars and all of my Google contacts. Easy to buy, install and configure - highly recommended.

Cloud services enterprise architecture week 1 - eating our own dogfood

2008-08-04T21:23:00.010+12:00

OK, I'm at the end of month 1 of setting up the business from scratch, and have begun operating the business (Memia Ltd) and trading. It's an exciting time!

I thought I'd share some of the initial architectural outputs of this exercise - effectively as time goes on I will provide an ongoing commentary on how Memia is putting together a "Cloud Services Enterprise Architecture" for a small services business (with growth ambitions!). Hopefully the experience and techniques will be generic enough to be useful for others doing the same thing. This is, after all, our core business. ;-)

The diagram below shows the first iteration of Memia's cloud services architecture. (Click for bigger picture).

First off, I have divided the cloud services diagram into two main groupings, with the business in the middle: Output Services and Input Services: basically, the business consumes a set of services, and most importantly provides the "secret sauce" which enables the output services to be provided.

You can see from the Output Services box that the actual revenue-generating services are a pretty small part of the overall operational complexity of running a small business - in addition to earning money doing the day job, the business has to provide marketing, communications, regulatory compliance, day-to-day financial operations, and be set up to look after shareholders as well. These groupings are my first attempt at defining what a generic "baseline" business must do in order to get trading - I am sure there will be plenty more that I come across as the business grows...

The Input Services box illustrates all of the services that I have begun using during the setup over the last few weeks. As a matter of principle (and to eat my own dogfood!) I have used Cloud-based services wherever I can (shaded Green) - luckily(lazily) I have been able to delegate most of the complexity in my Enterprise to Google Apps - for free! - something that wasn't possible even a year ago. If you look at the diagram below, you can see the service providers I have chosen (for a business based in New Zealand).

- Home office space provided by yours truly ;-)

So I'm going to keep iterating this model and add new input and output services according to the business strategy - I'm also going to try to generate some traceability between the output services and the input services - this will be a good way to shake out the dependencies and business processes involved. I haven't followed any formal methodology (because life's too short in the real world) - however, I reckon this "services in, services out" technique is a pretty effective "agile" methodology for small businesses. I'm interested in anyone's comments here...

Cloud Services Manifesto

2008-07-30T16:58:00.004+12:00

OK here we go. To start with, a “Cloud Services manifesto” to look back on in future years.

Definition:

“The Cloud” = “The universe of all economic services”.

- Cloud Services are all-encompassing - we’re not just talking about web services here. Every economic good or service belongs in and can be exchanged in the Cloud.

- Cloud Services are what's important to the end user so that’s what we will talk about: “what” rather than “how”. Talk of ‘Cloud Computing’ is already backwards-facing.

- Cloud Services will be Darwinian in their evolution: in any particular service niche, ultimately “there can be only one”, since all Cloud Services will eventually be able to scale to 6.6 billion users (and counting). There will, however, be an ever-expanding number of niches.

- We are now at the early stages of when we use Cloud Services for all aspects of life and business. The economic and social implications of this change need to be surfaced and recognised.

- Cloud Services will make what was previously achievable faster, easier and cheaper until they are commoditised and effectively free.

- Cloud Services will make new things achievable faster, easier and cheaper to more people, businesses and geographies.

- Part of me (/my business/my organisation) will live in the Cloud from now on: the Cloud is an extension of a consciousness, an extension of a business, with increasing symbiosis and decreasing boundaries between each entity.

Of course, only time will tell how prescient these predictions actually are... ;-)