A new survey of IT decision makers by SAP and Harris Interactive reithat the rise of machine to machine (M2M) communications - more commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things" - is on the cusp of transforming our homes, our cities and how business is conducted.

How, you ask?

• By leveraging Big Data and real-time analytics to improve parking and traffic flow, which could reduce pollution and traffic accidents as well.
• By managing all the gadgets in our homes, from lights, computers and smartphones down to our coffeemaker and garage door. Wake up, the coffee is brewing, the house is heated, the car already knows the best route to work and the news we need is showing on the screen of our choice - prioritized, obviously.
• Connected cars, roads and smartphones will guide us to the nearest open parking spot - and bill us automatically.

This Internet of Things will also let businesses increase "efficiency, productivity and collaboration," as it delivers real-time data and insight when and where it's most needed, including to a widely dispersed, highly mobile workforce.

Buried within the survey results are such nuggets as:

• Mobile devices will outnumber humans this year. 
• 90% of consumer-connected devices will have access to some personal cloud in 2013.
• 24 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
• 66% of IT professionals surveyed believe business and consumer technology will converge within 3-5 years - great news for consumer tech leaders like Apple, Samsung and Google.
• At least 4 billion terabytes of data will be generated this year alone.
• The trend toward BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has clear and present business repercussions: 75% of the surveyed IT professionals believe that employees' personal use of mobile devices impacts how the business itself uses the cloud. 
• 65% think the Internet of Things' biggest challent in managing and analyzing the resulting real-time data.

(Note: SAP and Harris have also prepared an infographic of the survey results, visible here.)

Global Phenomenon

The business-funded survey of 751 IT "decision makers" was generally upbeat about the Internet of Things. A statement released with the survey suggested connecting data from CRM systems, social media and billions of devices, all in real time, will result in "the ultimate social media collaboration of man and machine." 

That said, it is somewhat surprising that IT decision makers in developing countries - China, India and Brazil - appear more eager eager for the M2M revolution. Consider the response percentages to specific statements regarding the Internet of Things:

• Gives companies greater insight into their business: China (96%), India (88%), Brazil (86%), Germany (79%), U.S. (74%) and UK (61%)
• Enables businesses to respond to real world events: China (92%), India (86%), Brazil (82 %), Germany (82%), U.S. (78%) and UK (73%)
• Increases business efficiency:  Brazil (54%), UK (53%) and U..S (49%)
• Increases productivity for employees:  China (69 percent) - significantly higher than any other countries surveyed

Nearly all decision makers (89%) across all surveyed countries agreed, however, that widespread availability of LTE/4G infrastructure was vital for the success of the Internet of Things. This will likely not come cheap, however. A recent statement by Cambridge Wireless noted that today's mobile networks are "lacking ubiquitous coverage" and suggested that "service tariffs are too high to support" the full potential of the Internet of Things.

(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Internet of Things)

The hope of the Internet of Things is that greater connectivity, vastly more data, improved data analysis - and response - will make our lives better in ways we can scarcely predict, at home, on the road, at work; everywhere.

Note: Per SAP, "the survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of SAP among 751 IT decision makers in Brazil (n=126), China (n=125), Germany (n=125), India (n=125), the United Kingdom (n=125) and the United States (n=125) between January 15 and February 1, 2013."

Many of the world’s biggest companies have only a couple of people in their entire IT department dedicated to mobile. This skeleton crew is responsible for building and maintainin the company’s mobile apps, devising strategies and solutions, handling employee issues around Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and distributing software (apps) that coworkers need to do their jobs. 

As you might imagine, these people are often woefully overworked, not equipped to handle the stacks of problems they face. They are in this situation because the geniuses in the executive suite believe that the company needs to “do mobile” - but because they don't really understand the value, they're unwilling to invest more than the absolute minimum amount of resources.

This scenario is a reality in many non-tech, Fortune 500 types of companies. They know they have to go mobile but have no idea what that really mean.

Research firm IDC has a better idea than the classic “band-aid on a shotgun wound” approach to new IT solutions for large enterprises: Mobile Centers of Excellence.

What Is A Mobile Center Of Excellence?

According to the IDC whitepaper, sponsored by Netbiscuits, A Mobile Center of Excellence (mCoE) offers a framework for enterprises to organize, manage and distribute their mobile enterprise solutions and initiatives. They can help develop and distribute internal mobile apps - need a CRM app or something to help the accounting department? Ask the mCoE - as well as external apps for customers and clients. An mCoE would help the IT department with security and BYOD issues, help implement infrastructure and cloud solutions for apps and generally serve as the nerve center for everything mobile in the enterprise. 

IDC thinks enterprises could deploy four different kinds of mCoE:

1. Best Practice Centers.
2. IT-Focused.
3. Federated (integrated with business units and IT).
4. Dedicated Mobility Business Units.

The chart below outlines the characteristics of each type:

What's The Real Value Of An mCoE?

It is very easy for a research and consulting firm to write a white paper claiming, “Hey, you should have a Mobile Center of Excellence.” Most likely, if you call IDC for consulting help on how to set up an mCoE, it would be happy to charge you hefty fees for its advice. Everybody is selling something, and it shouldn't be a surprise that the mCoE whitepaper was sponsored by a mobile platform company. 

The name itself is a red flag. Imagine a new IT buyer coming to a new company, turning to the person next to him and asking, “Where is the Mobility Center of Excellence?” He'd get laughed out of the room. 

Really though, what the mCoE idea boils down to is that every big company needs a group of knowledgeable people that have the requisite skills and resources to handle mobile solutions quickly and efficiently. These people need to have power to make decisions, well-defined jobs that give them autonomy they need get things done. Enabling a group within your IT infrastructure to handle everything mobile problems could actually create competitive advantage for many companies.  

Whether you call it a Mobile Center of Excellence or just create a de facto sub-group within your organization that takes the lead in mobile practices isn't the point. The point is that enterprises can better manage their mobile priorities by assigning the task to a particular unit empowered to drive solutions for the entire company.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Dropbox is making a new push to win over business customers to its cloud-storage business. But its checkered history of security breaches may make it a tough sell in the enterprise.

Dropbox said Wednesday that it has added single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to its storage service, matching a capability that its chief rival, Box.net, has offered for some time. Dropbox also decided to rename its "Dropbox for Teams" business service "Dropbox for Business." The added feature and a name change may not seem like much to hang the new marketing push on, but Dropbox clearly has high hopes of making inroads in the enterprise.

With the SSO feature, companies can set up Dropbox so that employees who sign into their corporate account will also be signed into Dropbox, thus eliminating the need for a second login. The company said it's partnering with Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified. Ping Identity and Okta also provide SSO solutions to Box, which signed up with Ping Identity in 2011 to provide SSO capabilities via its PingFederate technology.

Dropbox doesn't just compete with Box.net, but SugarSync, Google Drive, Apple's iCloud, Microsoft's SkyDrive, and a host of smaller services. But it was Dropbox that Box CEO Aaron Levie skewered with an April Fool's Day prank. Why? Because Levie can see Dropbox in the rear-view mirror.

Dropbox's vast scale — it boasts 100 million users, with 600 million "work files" stored every work week, according to a spokeswoman — represents a threat. Dropbox counts users in 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies, according to Kevin Egan, the vice president of sales that Dropbox hired away from Salesforce.

Someone's Gotta Pay For All This

It's not clear how many of those people actually use Dropbox for business purposes — though it might not matter. Egan said that Dropbox's legacy in the consumer space — it has signed partnership agreements with both HTC and Samsung for free storage when customers buy the Samsung Galaxy S3 or HTC One, plus deals with Yahoo Mail and its purchase of Mailbox — means that consumers turn into evangelists when they enter the workplace.

"Millions of people have signed up using their work email address at Fortune 500 companies," Egan said. "And I think what we want to do is allow them to maintain the level of enthusiasm that they have, but embrace IT more, so they have 100 percent confidence that they have control and visibility."

The opportunity, of course, is that consumers are hooked on free; businesses aren't. Dropbox users can get up to 2 GB of storage for free, with up to 18 GB after various referrals and promotions. For Dropbox for Business/Teams, the price remains $125 per user, per year.

In 2012, however, co-founder Arash Ferdowsi told The Economist that only 4 percent of its users base were paying customers. That makes Dropbox look like the "we'll make it up on volume" strategy writ large — eventually someone's gotta pay, right? Attracting corporate customers helps make up for that.

Right now, Dropbox is asking what those corporate customers want. Tido Carriero, the lead engineer at Dropbox for Business, said future improvements could include things like making the Dropbox interface easier to use for large teams. "But for now, SSO is what they're shouting in our ear," he said.

Security Breaches Still Hurt

Unfortunately, what may be lurking in the back of some minds may be a pair of security lapses. In 2011, Dropbox accidentally pushed a code update that introduced a bug into the company's authentication mechanism, allowing third parties to log into user accounts and access files. Last year, hacks at other Web sites allowed attackers to penetrate accounts used by Dropbox employees, including a document from which they may have been able to harvest email addresses. In August, those email addresses were apparently used to send Dropbox users spam.

Since then, Dropbox has added two-factor authentication, as well as a recent administration console that can require two-factor authentication and monitor employee use, including restricting shared folders and links within the company. But Dropbox has been hurt by the lingering effects on its reputation.

"We haven't won deals — there have been deals that we have not won because of it," Egan said. "Sometimes it's just a matter of timing — explaining our security protocols better, sometimes it's a question of comfort with the business, and sometimes they're a couple of years away from embracing us. It's certainly hard to know what happened, but it's certainly top of mind for a lot of IT admins."

If Dropbox's strategy works, then its next target is government. Carriero said that the company is not FIPS certified. It's probably unlikely that the Pentagon would agree to use a cloud storage solution like Dropbox. A smaller county or town might end up using the service, though.

Storage has become a commodity. Box.net is attempting, through partnerships, to allow as many companies as possible to do stuff with that data. That adds value. Dropbox's purchase of Mailbox is headed in the right direction, but it still appears to be chasing Box, at least in the business space.

Lead image via Shutterstock

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more. 

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers. 

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013. 

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Amazon Web Services is on fire, and EMC and VMware are feeling the heat. So the established enterprise-computing duo is striking back — by launching Pivotal, a joint venture that aims specifically to dethrone the current king of cloud computing.

Pivotal is led by Paul Maritz, the ex-CEO of VMware and a former senior executive at Microsoft. In leading the charge against AWS, Maritz is diving into a cloud-computing mosh pit that will include other tech heavyweights, such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

(See also: Amazon: Can It Stay King Of Cloud Computing Forever?)

Pivotal heads for battle with parent-company assets — database technologies, data analytics and an application platform — it is combining into services that customers can lease to run their own software in the cloud. EMC owns 69% of Pivotal and VMware the rest. The two owners will have to invest a total of $800 million this year and next in order to kick start Pivotal, which Maritz conservatively estimates will reach $1 billion in revenue in five years from $300 million this year.

Amazon's Lead

Those numbers show how long it will take Pivotal to catch up with AWS. While Amazon won't break out the numbers for its cloud-computing unit, analysts say it is lumped inside the revenue category the online retailer calls "other." In Amazon's fourth quarter earnings released in January, "other" accounted for $769 million in revenue for the quarter and $2.52 billion for the year. That's a respective growth of 68% and 64%, according to the International Business Times. 

(See also: VMWare: "If Amazon Wins, We All Lose")

Nevertheless, the market is still young. Most AWS customers today are startups and small and medium-sized businesses. Amazon is expected to shift focus to large companies soon, heading right into EMC's and VMware's sweet spot. This is making both companies very nervous.

During a partner conference in February, VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger warned that if "a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever," CRN reported. To avoid that kind of customer drain, Pivotal will provide the public-cloud option for VMware customers using its infrastructure technology for private clouds. Supporting that migration is important to EMC, because it owns 80% of VMware.

Pivotal In The Cloud

On paper, Pivotal will provide an enterprise-class cloud-computing platform and infrastructure. The company includes Greenplum, EMC's Big Data analytics division, and Pivotal Labs, the storage company's application development environment. VMware is contributing cloud-computing platform CloudFoundry, and middleware and tools for building and running data-intensive Java applications.

Maritz will have to build a business on top of all this technology, but EMC's and VMware's commitment to Pivotal shows how they believe customer migration to cloud-computing environments outside their data centers is inevitable. The companies also know that failing to have what customers want would be suicidal.

In 2011, Gelsinger, then president and chief operating officer for EMC, said the company did not intend to become a casualty of any major change in the industry.

"The technology industry is ruthless and relentless," he said during an interview at the VMworld conference. "If you are not in front of those major waves of technological innovation, you will become one of the driftwood on the shores of the industry."

In cloud computing, stopping Amazon is how EMC and VMware plan to reach that shore alive.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Guest author Scott Geng is the CTO at cloud management software company Egenera.

It's no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like gangbusters. In fact, a recent Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud. That projects total cloud spending in 2016 to hit $240 billion.

Cloud computing (both public and private) will pave the way forward for how companies will deploy new IT services. Lower price points will help those organizations innovate faster, launch new services more quickly, be more responsive to market conditions and evolve their own business models.

Management And Specialization

The focus in the industry over the past few years has been on the core cloud management services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. But to truly understand how cloud computing is evolving you have to dive deep below the surface. Two major developments are driving the evolution of cloud: Management and Specialization.

In the management space, innovations like self-service portals have given IT shops and end-users a much-preferred way to request and consume services.

Specialization, meanwhile, is a natural development of any market. A few of the specialized services that will contribute significantly to the adoption of cloud based products and services in 2013 include Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) and DisasterRecovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

DaaS: Portable Desktop Services

Desktop management is a fundamental service for IT organizations. It’s critical for keeping the employees of a company productive. But there have been long standing challenges with managing the traditional desktop. The investment in desktop hardware can be a significant capital expense, especially for large organizations and day-to-day management of these devices can be a huge time sink.

DaaS solutions are secure, cost-effective, easy-to-use and portable – you can get the same desktop on any device.

According to the 451 Research Group, “Interest in third-party DaaS is at a fever pitch.” IT consumerization, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiatives, increase in mobile workers, Windows 7 migrations and security/IP concerns are driving organizations to reevaluate their desktop strategy.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) was supposed to address many of these challenges, but it came with its own set of issues. While it has been promoted as a technology that can save businesses money, large upfront capital expenses and complexity have created barriers to virtual desktop adoption.

With DaaS, savings come from operational expense reductions from centralizing and reducing administration and hardware savings over time. DaaS delivers faster desktop deployment, enhanced security, less downtime and lower support costs - and can enable a truly mobile workforce.

MaaS: Bare Metal In The Cloud

MaaS - the dynamic provisioning and deployment of whole physical servers, as opposed to the provisioning of virtual machines - is a drastically underrated cloud service. MaaS services will finally open the floodgates to allow any application to be run in the cloud – any application with any service level. That means multi-tiered apps with a backend Oracle database, home grown, performance-intensive applications, low latency trading applications, etc.

It’s been hard for people to pay attention to MaaS, mostly because server virtualization has been “the shiny new toy” over the past few years and frankly MaaS is not an easy thing to provide. But that may change once IT administrators see the speed, scalability, agility and simplicity with which they can deploy and protect their underlying server infrastructure.

The statistics are clear – a large percentage of servers have been virtualized in the enterprise (40% - 50% now and heading to 60% - 70%). However, there are still a large number of applications that remain running on bare metal. That important (and underappreciated) fact means that MaaS could be a key ingredient to driving more widespread adoption of cloud technology.

DRaaS: Increased Demand For Disaster Recovery

Over the past few years, IT departments have had to live in a culture of cost reduction – it’s just been the way of life. That culture has resulted in aging equipment, overworked staff and lots of cut corners - a perfect recipe for higher failure rates. The fact is that hardware failure and human error are still the leading causes of unplanned outages - but devastating storms and other catastrophes are also forcing businesses to get serious about geographic disaster recovery planning. Some estimates put 2011 weather related disaster costs at almost $150 billion worldwide, up 25% from 2010. And that is just weather, and doesn't include the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Public Cloud Failures Drive Demand

Another strong driver for disaster recovery is public cloud outages. The public cloud companies are under intense scrutiny - every major outage is noticed and publicized. The statistics show that public cloud outages are on the rise year-over-year, and because so many businesses use these services, public-cloud service failures are felt very broadly – e.g. the Amazon outage that impacted Netflix.

One of the forces driving the next phase of cloud computing adoption is the delivery of specialized services like DaaS, MaaS and DRaaS. These services will help improve the service level of cloud resources, boost efficiency and automation and deepen the consumerization of IT resources. They will also give companies more confidence in placing business-critical applications into cloud infrastructures.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Earlier pieces in this series on "BYOD Grows Up" have explained how bring-your-own-device policies can be productivity enhancers, employee morale boosters and even, counterintuitively, security enhancers (because new policies can allow IT departments to push through long-overdue upgrades).

But enough with the logical arguments. Let's have a look at the hard numbers behind the BYOD trend, as laid out in this handy infographic jointly produced by Intel and ReadWrite. Be sure to let us know what you think in comments. 

Read more in the series "BYOD Grows Up":

• Why Processor Choice Matters To BYOD
• Yes, It IS Possible To Have A Secure BYOD Program
• 10 Tips to Make BYOD A Success In Your Enterprise
• Why Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Is So Hot Right Now

For decades the enterprise software industry has grown fat on outsized, upfront license fees coupled with ongoing, high-margin maintenance streams. Cracks in the model have threatened  to dismantle the system for years, as reported by The Wall Street Journal back in 2009, with CIOs chafing at paying for low-value, high-cost maintenance.

But if Oracle's big earnings miss last week is any indication, one of three disappointing quarters over the past two years, the cracks have widened to a chasm. As bellwether for the enterprise software incumbents, Oracle's miss suggests that the legacy vendors may struggle to adapt to the world of open-source software and Software as a Service (SaaS) and, in particular, the subscription revenue models that drive both.

It isn't going to be pretty.

Changing How Vendors Get Paid

This isn't just a matter of improving legacy software products. It's a matter of fundamentally changing how these legacy vendors deploy and charge for software. For example, Oracle's entire cost structure is built around the premise of a hefty upfront license and high-margin maintenance (Over 20% of the license fee). Ever read The Innovator's Dilemma? Clayton Christensen's classic addresses just this sort of inability for established companies to change. It turns out to be brutally hard, and often impossible.

Small wonder, then, that SAP has been raising its maintenance fees, trying to milk more money from its customer base as it faces serious headwinds maintaining its license model against upstart competitors like Workday:

Such actions basically force customers to start looking elsewhere, if they weren't already.

If this were just a matter of technology, Oracle, Microsoft et al. would likely weather the storm quite well. Oracle makes great software. There's a reason it's the enterprise database leader, and by a wide margin (though smaller rivals are gaining in popularity).

But building great technology is not enough. Oracle's peers, from SAP to IBM to Microsoft, also charge for software in this way, and across the industry they've been taking a beating as enterprises look to the improved productivity and OpEx of open source and SaaS. Oracle, for its part, blamed its miss on "sales execution," but as Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher points out,

...[W]e have a hard time believing that almost all the legacy software names are suffering from poor sales execution at the same time. We believe the primary issue is a fundamental shift in the technology landscape away from legacy systems towards a new breed of better products at a lower cost both in Apps and in Data Management. Virtually every emerging software trend is having a deflationary impact on spend.

Not everyone sees it this way. Wells Fargo senior analyst Jason Maynard urges investors in Oracle to "keep calm and carry on," and expects Oracle's license revenue to grow 5% year over year. 

Good luck with that. 

Developers Rise In Importance

The problem isn't that Oracle and the mega-vendors have lost their hold on CIO affections. They haven't. The problem is that they have little to offer enterprise developers, who increasingly are the gateway to software adoption. Explaining this shift in his excellent The New Kingmakers, Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady argues:

With the rise of open source...developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses -- only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift....

Open source is increasingly the default mode of software development....In new market categories, open source is the rule, proprietary software the exception.

The top-down approach, in other words, is losing its currency within the enterprise, as both open source and cloud enable developers (not to mention line of business executives) to get work done without getting permission.

The effect on the mega-vendors is overwhelmingly negative, as Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz posits:

We believe something more secular is occurring as cloud computing increasingly entices CIOs to refresh their legacy IT systems with cloud services rather than infrastructure. Additionally, software purchasing is becoming more decentralized with decision-making power shifting away from IT and weakening the selling advantage as a "one-shop supplier." These trends dampen big-ticket on-premise software purchasing and remain a headwind for the infrastructure vendors.

None of which means the big vendors are going out of business anytime soon. In my years at Novell, for example, I witnessed a serious decline in the company's fortunes, even as revenue remained above $1 billion.

Time To Change?

In fact, Novell is a great example of what might happen to the mega-vendors. Ultimately, Novell had to be bought out and then split into pieces in order for its SUSE business unit, now an independent company, to thrive. SUSE can now support its subscription model without all the overhead Novell's legacy business imposed on it.

The same may well prove true for the other enterprise mega-vendors.

Not all enterprises will be affected equally, of course. Years ago IBM reshaped its business to be more services driven, which allows it to embrace new trends like open source enthusiastically. And even Oracle has built out a considerable cloud business (despite starting years later than it arguably should have), to which it can move current customers. Microsoft has been doing the same, transitioning customers to Office 365 rather than lose out on customers moving to Google Docs.

But the revenue profile for these businesses differs significantly from the traditional license/maintenance business, and it's an open question whether any of these companies will be able to turn the corner in their current form.

The Wall Street Journal echoed this sentiment, suggesting that Oracle's "business is being eroded at the edges by smaller, more focused companies offering newer technology," and, I would add, by the very different business models these firms employ. It's a great time to be in enterprise technology...so long as you're not selling a legacy business model. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Kyle Falkenhagen is director of product management at ServiceMesh.

Business and IT leaders are bombarded with cloud computing hype and promotion. Yet very little is said about how the cloud affects the evolution of the IT organization itself. Enterprise cloud adoption is a transformative shift where the greatest implementation challenges are often more about people and process than technology integration.

Agents of change, especially in large enterprises, must overcome various forms of resistance. This includes organizational fiefdoms and the IT silos that evolved with them. These four organizational change strategies can help IT departments fight fear and inertia as they move to cloud computing:

IT Change Strategy #1: Use Tiger Teams To Break Down IT Fiefdoms

While no one is shocked that IT silos can hinder cloud adoption, you may be surprised how quickly you’ll encounter resistance. For example, setting up IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offerings for your first private cloud will likely involve separate groups responsible for storage, computing, networking, platforms and security. Coordination among these groups is already difficult and you'll quickly find that many cloud vendors have product interoperability issues that cause documentation gaps, integration problems and incompatibilities. Teams will have to escalate issues through multiple vendors, causing long delays and strains between IT fiefdoms not accustomed to relying on each other.

The key is for siloed groups to share activities across traditional boundaries. To encourage this, leading companies have created Tiger Teams: small cross-functional groups of skilled, respected and entrepreneurial-minded workers. They should be experienced enough to navigate their home departments to accomplish needed tasks, politically astute enough to marshal resources and enterprising enough to push projects to completion. And they need a strong sponsor who can provide political cover and help break through entrenched resistance.

IT Change Strategy #2: SWAT Away “Analysis Paralysis”

One large financial institution implemented a cloud strategy with an incumbent vendor that claimed to offer the right strategy and products. The firm waited too long for proof points and had vastly disappointing results. When it tried to bring in other cloud vendors, they merely added confusion to the existing failed effort - leading to analysis paralysis and the inability to decide on the proper next steps.

Unfortunately, this scenario is being played out in many large enterprises. If you can’t afford a year of paralysis, create a SWAT team.

Smaller and more discreet than a Tiger Team, a SWAT team is quietly let loose to “get something done.” It emerges only when it has a concrete working model to integrate with the IT ecosystem for evaluation. Because it runs “small, fast and dark,” a SWAT team can be easier to initiate than a Tiger Team. A SWAT team’s goal is to break the paralysis and create a tangible model that everyone can improve. Building a SWAT team is relatively cost effective, especially compared to the opportunity cost of spending a year just trying to decide what to do.

IT Change Strategy #3: Challenge Legacy Obstinacy

Many organizations cling stubbornly to legacy applications and platforms, often including proprietary applications running on no longer supported platforms. While some groups may propose porting those applications to a modern, standardized, platform and as-a-Service offering, legacy zealots may claim that's too risky.

But there are many different techniques for cloud migration, including some require little to no re-architecture efforts. One size does not fit all when it comes to migrating applications to the cloud.

That's critical, because the benefits of eliminating non-standard platforms and infrastructure in favor of lower cost, cloud-based service offerings are too important to ignore. Because cloud computing promises automated processes that lower costs and speed cycle times for application provisioning, maintenance, patching and updating, cloud-based IT service costs will almost certainly decrease over time. Legacy system costs, meanwhile, typically continue to creep up. Many times, simply running numbers can help overcome emotional objections to changing the legacy status quo.

IT Change Strategy #4: Challenge Habitual Inefficiency

Most organizations existing IT processes and governance approaches are the result of years of layering of systems, technologies and process exceptions. Today’s cloud initiatives present a significant new opportunity to improve process automation and implement new governance best practices. That will likely breed resistance based on the idea of, “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Don't buy it. The process has likely been broken for years.

Part of the resistance is political, as people within the IT organization understandably worry about positions being eliminated or particular fiefdoms losing prestige and power. The misperception may also exist that automation is fraught with risk.

But the real risk lies in not doing anything.

While some positions may in fact be eliminated and other roles may change with a move to the cloud, this is far better than the alternative. Sub-optimal IT efficiency can lead to lower enterprise productivity, a loss of competitiveness, lower profits and ultimately the risk of wholesale outsourcing of IT operations.

Successful Organizational Change Management

Addressing organizational change is vital to ensure the success of enterprise cloud-computing initiatives. By incorporating the right approach and building strong arguments to overcome resistance, you can help your organization make the changes necessary for successful implementation of enterprise cloud strategies.

On Monday, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T431s, the first ThinkPad based on its new industrial design, founded upon what the company called "extensive research" with ThinkPad loyalists and other users around the world.

So why does Lenovo appear to have got everything so wrong?

Not Your Father's ThinkPad - Unfortunately

Chiclet keyboards. Removing the buttons from the touchpad. Eliminating the removable battery. And loading Windows 8 without the benefit of an IPS (In-Plane Switching technology) display, let alone a touchscreen. All flaws that show Lenovo is heading in the direction of budget-conscious design decisions, rather than designing the bulletproof, bulldog-lovely black bento boxes that generations of users have used and cherished.

Traditionally, the ThinkPad has been the staple of quality employers everywhere. Nothing against the Mac, but if you worked with Windows, there was nothing better than a ThinkPad for everyday use. ThinkPads offered the basics: extras like the screen and graphics were nothing to write home about, and I found that the Wi-Fi would whimper and cower from Macs during crowded keynote sessions.  But the ThinkPad's keyboards verged on the iconic, and I owned ThinkPads that I dropped - twice - and they survived just fine.

Lenovo may be trying to drag its users kicking and clawing out of the past. I'm willing to concede - grudgingly - that the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga keyboard isn't bad, and it appears to be either close or identical to the T431s. I tend to prefer the keyboards used by the larger Asus models, and my notes tell me that Samsung's keyboards aren't bad, either. But chiclet keys simply lack the travel of a traditional ThinkPad keyboard, let alone the mechanical monsters that shipped with the original IBM PCs.

The glory days of the ThinkPad: the T21.

Can I live with a touchpad without buttons? Perhaps. Implementing a touchpad into a single pane of glass also seems to be the wave of the future; if the force needed to actually "click" is too great, however, the experience fails. I'm still not happy.

2 Things That Kill This ThinkPad

In my book, though, the T431s has two fatal flaws:

1. No removable battery.
2. No touchscreen.

Apparently, every hardware designer in the industry, save for the team that designed the Droid RAZR Maxx, fails to understand a simple maxim: neither software nor hardware can be truly appreciated when it's powered off.

Design for battery life first - especially with a business-first notebook like the ThinkPad. Without the option of a removable battery - or my favorite, the "barrel battery" - there's always the risk that your laptop will die right when you need it most. Is it likely? Not really,. But business users have always held ThinkPads to a higher standard, and Lenovo should have, too.

As for a touchscreen - yes, we all know the arguments for and against touch on laptops. But the industry collectively has decided that if we're going to use Windows 8, we really do need a touchscreen. Microsoft clearly agrees with this conclusion. And, well, so does the IdeaPad Yoga. Why in the world would Lenovo back off one of the things that the Yoga does right? Just to shave a few bucks off the price?

Fair warning: I haven't laid hands on the new ThinkPad. So there are elements that I can't really address, including the size. Lenovo calls the T431s its slimmest ThinkPad ever, at 0.82 inches and just 3.6 pounds. Carbon fiber and other material may have maintained the traditional rigidity of the T431s, but I somewhat doubt it. And the ThinkPads' famous "rollcage" is a thing of the past, I suppose.

Here's what this Lenovo fan wants: a traditional bento box format with competitive performance, my beloved ThinkPad keyboard, a small SSD-based boot drive with either an additional spinning disk or SSD option, and a multi-touch, IPS display - all powered by a removable battery. And like many business professionals, I'm guessing, I'm willing to pay a few extra dollars and tote a few extra ounces for that, too.

You know what hurts the most? I really thought Lenovo would eventually design the perfect laptop I was hoping for. And this Ultrabook is not it.

Customers Hate It

Look at some of the comments attached to Lenovo's blog post:

"Why does my phone have a higher resolution than this Thinkpad??? I'm actually holding onto my 14" T61 because the resolutions you offer now aren't really an improvement over what I already have - and it was released in 2007!"

"Do you realize that several cheap Android tablets have better display (high resolution / quality / aspect ratio) than your flagship ThinkPad ultrabook (having the same contrast-less 178:1 display like T430) ? Do you realize that several cheap "plastic" notebooks have better connection options (European 4G/LTE) than your flagship ThinkPad ultrabook?"

"In all, I see this as a step back for Lenovo. Dell did something similar, chasing consumers and price points and look how they are doing. Apple did the opposite and look how they have grown."

Lenovo, please don't be afraid of standing out. For every college graduate who views a notebook as the relic of a bygone era, there's a graying IT executive who realizes that the ThinkPad name once stood for dependability. I'm not so reactionary as to suggest that the T431s represents a sharp step down from previous models. But what I fear we're looking it is the ThinkPad gradually sliding into mediocrity, into that midrange notebook market that only pretends to give a shit about the customer.

Who did you talk to, Lenovo, when you were planning the T431s? What did they tell you? Because I'm really afraid you've lost your way with this one.

Guest author Don Marti is a technical marketing manager at Perforce, and a Git user since 2007.

Key parts of the America Invents Act (AIA), which passed in 2011, came into effect on March 16, 2013. These changes in U.S. patent law can help all companies that use software to protect themselves from patent trolls — those annoying boiler-room operations that shake down software developers and users for software patent licenses without actually producing anything with the patents they own.

(See also A Patent Troll By Any Other Name Still Stinks.)

Fortunately, many of the best practices for tracking new versions of software and other digital assets can also help protect you against patent trolls. It’s a good time to talk to your lawyer about a defensive strategy, and to connect that strategy to your version control and deployment systems to make sure you’re collecting and retaining all of the information that could help you under this new law.

Understanding Prior Art

The AIA has a lot of changes, starting with the expansion of what counts as prior art. Prior art is any public information that shows the patented invention was not original. Patent examiners were always supposed to take prior into account when granting a patent in the first place. However, especially in the software field, the understaffed and overworked patent office misses a lot of details.

Sometimes the patent system’s definition of an invention does not match our own idea of what’s new or inventive. Take for instance the System and method for providing reservations for restroom use. In this case, the U.S. Patent database granted a patent for queuing up for the restroom on airplanes. For every silly patent that makes headlines there are many others that could threaten your business.

Track Your Work

Patents also cover the use of components in combination. You will need to document not just what you wrote and when, but what combination was ultimately deployed. And since you can’t tell what will get a patent, you need to keep a good version history of everything — code, deployment data and the text and media assets that go with it.

Fortunately, creating prior art ties in with many typical work tasks, such as participating in open source projects, running a development blog and publishing online documentation. How you track software releases and fix bugs can also be a low-pain way to publish prior art.

Implement Litigation Alternatives

What happens when the patent office misses some prior art and issues a patent anyway? That’s where a second change in the law comes in. Post-grant challenges are, according to attorney Michael Bednarek, “a quick, low-cost alternative to litigation.”

If a bogus patent in your field is issued, you’ll be able to challenge it at the Patent Office directly with a simpler process than would be required in court. Although it might seem like a lot of work, industry organizations such as the Linux Foundation could play a major role by tracking patents as they are issued and in organizing efforts to challenge patents that threaten their members. Nobody wants to take on this time-consuming cleanup work alone.

(See also How Patent Trolls Use Economies Of Scale To Force Settlements.)

Prove A Prior-User Defense

The AIA gives you one last defense. Under the old law, a new patent could potentially take away your right to do something that you had already been doing, if you didn’t file for your own patent or otherwise made it public. Now, if a troll comes after you for something you made “commercial use” of before a patent was issued, you may be protected by the new prior-user defense, which lets you rely on your own non-public uses. If you have a solid history that shows not only the innovation process but the production date, it can help significantly. The prior-user defense is harder than using public prior art, though, so it’s still better to make things public when you can.

Still More To Do

There’s still more work to be done on the software patent problem. The proposed SHIELD Act is a good example of another way to deter trolls by making them pay legal fees if they lose. Supporters believe this would reduce the incentive to bring nuisance patent lawsuits. In the meantime, software developers get quite a bit of help from the new AIA law — especially if they keep histories of all their work and when it was used, publish it defensively when possible, and work together to challenge anyone who seeks bogus patents.

(See also Why The New SHIELD Bill Can't Stop Patent Abuse.)

As more and more information floods into the Internet, organizing and making sense of this Big Data becomes more important and more difficult.

New database methods are emerging to help process unstructured data, but IT developers and database deployers also have to figure out how to deal with the world of legacy technology.

For the last 40 years, relational database programs (usually powered by SQL-based management systems) have been the backbone of supplying businesses with organized rows and columns of data. The problem is that these legacy systems may not be able to work together to give businesses the information they need when they need it. Older programs may also have trouble processing data requests over long distances.

A New Way Of Thinking About Databases

A new way of thinking is needed. Over the past decade the push for “not only SQL” or NoSQL database software has provided a pathway for businesses to connect bits and pieces of data from a variety of sources at very rapid speeds across different geographies.

(See also What's Next For Taming Big Data?)

Some businesses are spreading out the workloads using noSQL databases within cloud computing-based networks. Others are approaching the problem still using traditional SQL relational database software - and that’s perfectly OK.

Previous articles in this series (Taming Big Data) discuss the benefits of a noSQL database tool like VMware’s vFabric GemFire. But SQL database software retains a well-established community of tens of thousands of developers and integrators who may be reluctant to move beyond the SQL they know and love. What’s a company to do?

(See also VMware's Cloud-Based GemFire Makes It Easier To Work With Big Data.)

For SQL diehards, VMware’s vFabric SQLFire SQLFire is a distributed SQL database typically used for online transactions. The software is more modern than most traditional relational database management systems.

What Can SQLFire Do For Me?

SQLFire functions and performs much like GemFire under the hood. SQLFire uses GemFire's data grid engine, which lets both programs capture data and then replicate and partition the information "in-memory” on the server. But instead of having to learn GemFire commands and controls, SQLFire has a user interface and programming framework that will be familiar to developers used to programming in a SQL interface and with SQL tools.

Backups are enabled through virtual copies on other connected servers, although data can be stored long-term on disks as needed.

Unlike other embedded databases, SQLFire allows several servers to store replicated and partitioned tables, persist data to disk, communicate directly with other servers and participate in distributed queries.

For traditional IT developers and database deployers, the SQLFire interface makes it easier to write applications and take advantage of GemFire’s underlying noSQL technology. Developers and integrators who know SQL well will have an easy time adapting SQLFire to new projects.

SQLFire is perfect for classic Web transactions, especially where there is a need for fast speeds and a requirement to dig deep into clusters of data.

Business Case For SQLFire

In addition to making SQL developers feel comfortable, SQLFire can work across multiple networks and geographies. This comes in handy when enterprises need information at the moment it becomes available on multiple continents.

For example, a large regional bank in the Northeastern United States collects large amounts of data that helps it maintain its regional and branch offices. The bank also monitors customer transactions at tellers and various ATMs.

Bank management was interested in measuring the different types of transactions being handled at each of type of station, what types of accounts they were accessing and the various times of day the transactions took place.

Historically, the bank could attach an individual database to each branch, but in today's global environment the company decided it needed to measure all of these data points at the same time for each office. The company tested vFabric SQLFire against its own systems and found the existing server took 20 minutes to complete the queries while the SQLFire server completed its task in less than a minute.

Deploying SQLFire In The Enterprise

In the enterprise sQLFire is generally found on inexpensive computer servers in database clusters. A typical use case would find SQLFire helping eliminate potential data bottlenecks in new mobile and Web environments. Another common deployment option for SQLFire is to integrate it with existing traditional databases or analytics programs.

The software can also be interfaced through an API using programming languages such as Java or Spring. SQLFire is also compatible with Java database (JDBC) or ADO.NET.

As companies look for new ways to make data accessible and provide a consistent view of that information, it's important to have tools that suit the needs of all kinds of developers and IT managers.

VMware’s GemFire and SQLFire software are designed to address just those needs - allowing companies to move beyond concerns over speed and scale and tackle Big Data applications head on.

Remember when "Other" was just a rounding error in market share reports? Now in the server market, it just might be the main event, as Facebook's Open Compute project, cloud computing, and other trends drive buyers to no-name server vendors instead of IBM, HP, and Dell. Time to short the incumbents?

According to new research from Gartner, server veterans like IBM and HP took a beating last quarter, with shipments plummeting 11.5% and 5.9%, respectively, contributing to an overall 0.2% server shipment slowdown. Meanwhile, so-called "whitebox" vendors that make up the "Other" category saw a 22% rise in revenues, and now account for 35.2% of global units shipped. IDC's market data showed largely the same incumbent malaise, with "Other" pumping revenues 14% year-over-year.

It used to be that such whitebox vendors like Quanta Computer, Wistron and Compal Electronics, all based in Taiwan, could be counted on to quietly build products for their name-brand American partners like Dell. No more. As Chris Gonsalves reports, companies like Google and Rackspace have looked to tailor servers to their requirements by going direct to Taiwan's leading ODMs, which has encouraged these vendors to start selling directly to more traditional enterprise accounts.

It's only going to get worse for the incumbents.

Cloud: Friend or Foe?

After all, the whole focus of cloud computing is to commoditize the server, making it a compute resource enterprises rent rather than buy. While not all workloads will move to the cloud, a big percentage will. In the cloud, enterprises simply aren't going to care whose logo sits on a box they can't even see.

And for those who do persist in managing their own datacenters, things like Facebook's Open Compute project may drive enterprises toward designing in lots of "Other." While Open Compute may not matter to most mainstream enterprises, as Mark Hachman points out, it's one more pressure point that incumbent server vendors could do without.

(See also The 5 Big Questions Dell Will Have To Answer To Survive.)

Ironically, the very thing that most threatens legacy server vendors could also save them, and then ruin them anyway: cloud.

IBM just announced it's getting behind OpenStack in a big way, basing all of its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. HP and others have also committed to OpenStack or other cloud platforms. Rather than be cannibalized by the public cloud, these server vendors are trying to extend their brands to private clouds, allowing enterprise customers to rent what they used to buy.

The problem, however, is that these vendors might be too successful. 

A Catch-22 in the Cloud

While public clouds like Amazon's AWS have been on a tear, they've still largely been relegated to test and development workloads. What happens when IBM and HP help make CIOs comfortable with the cloud? It's possible that those risk-averse CIOs will stick with the tried and true incumbents. 

But it's just as possible that once enterprises get comfortable with running mission-critical workloads on a private cloud that carries a shiny Dell logo, they'll take the next step into the public cloud, projected to be a $131 billion market by 2017, according to Gartner. Amazon has long argued that the real benefits of cloud computing are lost when trying to replicate them in private cloud deployments. While it's possible that IT will effectively mimic the public cloud, it's just as possible that developers and line-of-business executives will take their CIOs newfound enthusiasm for the cloud and run with it...straight to Amazon, Rackspace, or another public cloud provider.

In so doing, they'll inadvertently be growing "Other's" share of the global server market... and legacy server vendors' desperation to embrace the very thing that may kill them: the cloud. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

While companies of all sizes are struggling with the growth of information overload often referred to as “Big Data,” some IT developers and database deployers are approaching the challenge with a cloud-based service designed to make accessing mass amounts of data faster.

In short, they turn to VMware’s vFabric GemFire.

GemFire is a distributed in-memory data grid database software product that enables data distribution, data replication and partitioning (sharding), cashing data management at the exact moment the information is needed.

(See also What's Next For Taming Big Data.)

While the ability to move data from server to server and replicate it to more than one location has proven invaluable over the last 10 years, today's critical challenge is how can companies manage this data properly.

Over the past decade, GemFire has helped companies:

• Maintain simultaneous data connections over long distances.
• Protect their data from natural and man-made disasters.
• Maintain data reliability and availability, even when server hardware periodically fails.

The software is able to achieve these goals by creating an object-oriented "data fabric" across a server cluster. It accesses copies of data that are stored in various locations as needed. To ensure compatibility with the latest cloud configurations, the management platform can spread the data across many virtual machines and GemFire servers to manage application objects.

But what does that mean in the real world? To find out, it helps to look at how vFabric GemFire is already working in key industrial applications, how it can be developed for new projects and how it can be deployed in a business network.

Passing Military Grade

Keeping connected across town or around the globe is never more important than when national security is on the line. So when the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) needed to deal with up-to-the-minute information and awareness of military actions wherever they occur, the agency chose vFabric GemFire.

GemFire provided speed and the ability to easily increase and decrease the size of projects, but also a management tool that orchestrates data delivery from the back-end data stores to the consuming applications.

Since 2007, DISA has used GemFire for managing massive amounts of data for the various government agencies it supports, including U.S. military commands, joint task forces and the Pentagon. And because GemFire allows for a consistent view of data across all geographies and in different clusters, the military has reliable event notification, continuous querying, parallel execution, high throughput, low latency, high scalability, continuous availability and WAN distribution

South America Calling

GemFire’s expertise at the middle data tier delivers reliability and critical data redundancy that keeps the information up to date even if one part of the network goes offline.

Take the case of a large telecommunications company in South America that sells prepaid phone cards via kiosks. The telecom uses GemFire to enable the sale and provisioning of pre-paid cards even when disconnected from the network. Because the country’s infrastructure is not 100% reliable, sometimes network data is not updated for several hours at a time and customers might not be able to use their cards. To overcome this obstacle, the telecom uses GemFire's distributed databases to maintain up-to-the-minute information.

vFabric GemFire was the optimal choice for managing a distributed database in this environment because it automatically recognizes systems and moves data around so that it remains accessible even on unreliable networks.

As VMware product line marketing manager Blake Connell put it, “vFabric GemFire automatically spreads the data over a wide network and accommodates network disruptions.

Capturing GemFire In The Enterprise

vFabric GemFire is best suited for new Big Data projects that require NoSQL - or distributed unstructured data - models.

GemFire is well-designed for latency-sensitive applications such as virtualized environments that may require interrupt-moderation or interrupt-throttling - industry terms that IT developers and database deployers use when building a system that potentially doesn't take well to lags in data flow or processing.

Because GemFire is designed for data distribution, data replication, caching and data management, it has special requirements. For example, GemFire suggests enabling hyperthreading and keeping at least 50% of the server’s memory space available.

Configuring GemFire servers and regions is optimally done with the Spring object-oriented programming framework. This allows developers to centralize application service configuration instead of having to deal with Spring context configuration plus a separate cache.xml file.

For those working with structured data and who are knowledgable in SQL, VMware offers a related product called SQLFire. SQLFire is a distributed SQL data-management platform. SQLFire will look familiar to SQL developers thanks to a similar interface and programming framework, and it allows the management of "not only SQL" databases much the way GemFire does.

Look for more information on the benefits of SQLFire in an upcoming ReadWrite post.

[Editor’s note: Joachim Kempin is a former top Microsoft executive and author of a new memoir, Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft’s `Secret Power Broker’ Breaks His Silence. It’s a fantastic book, and I’ve asked Kempin to write a few columns for us sharing his perspective on Microsoft. In this, his second column for us, Kempin argues Microsoft should take over the social networking space, and get out of the hardware business. –Dan Lyons]

Last week I gave you a historical perspective about Microsoft and pinpointed several areas for improvements. Today I will continue that discussion with more food for thought:

Reinvent Social Media Software

Microsoft could create lots of magic by developing advanced social media software, which would be so user-friendly that even a dog could use it with ease. The leading product, Facebook, lacks a good user interface; while it connects you, it basically sucks. Its value lies in its huge user base, the vast computer network it needs to function, and the ease with which it attracts immense amounts of advertising dollars.

As with any social media network, the vast user information it contains is its most valuable asset. This is the main reason why Google is making a serious effort in that product category. By properly analyzing and evaluating this info with modern data-mining techniques, Facebook can create unprecedented consumer market knowledge and deliver well-targeted advertising. Microsoft has only a very small share in this business.

Therefore, Microsoft needs to reinvent this space and make it easier, more fun and more intuitive for users to create a lively community. Convincing current social media users to migrate into a Microsoft-conceived realm will take time and incentives, and will require an easy transition path in form of a few clever mouse clicks to reestablish links and move existing user information into a more captivating universe.

A Facebook-like product with superior functionality and vastly improved privacy features, including characteristics from Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, would be extremely compelling. Microsoft has the technical capacity and the design wit to do this. In particular, when combined with free Skype usage, it could take a lot of advertising revenue away from Facebook and Google.

There’s also an opportunity to bend over backwards and open up the Chinese market. This could be done through a local partnership or a technology deal. Since Facebook is blocked in that country, Microsoft could have a nice growth opportunity.

In the ‘90s, Microsoft undertook something comparable with the Java programming language invented by Sun Microsystems. The principle applied was christened “embrace, extend, and innovate.” It succeeded because Microsoft improved a mediocre product by providing the necessary plumbing through foresight and architectural underpinning.

Applying the same method a second time, when reinventing social media software, would very likely succeed and curtail the success of Microsoft’s competitors.

But let’s not stop there. Let’s be audacious, and provide Internet Explorer (IE) with a long-needed boost by making social networking capabilities an integrated part of IE, available for everybody’s web-browser-fingertips, anywhere on any mobile and desktop device! This would be way more effective than spending advertising money to encourage people to use IE.

I can see the competitors already running for cover and complaining once again to the feds, but since it’s a “genuine technological integration” - as a court once ruled in regard to IE — such a move would represent a totally legal operating system/browser extension.

Research With A Product Angle

The other change I would introduce is to locate product development and relevant research personnel under one roof. The goal would be to accelerate the turning of research projects into marketable products.

This means abandoning the currently centralized research unit. Under this new scenario, the person running the Office group (for example) would pay for and guide his or her own research department. Therefore that executive would have the ultimate motivation to turn innovative ideas into money-making ventures. This was already talked about when I was still around, but has never been accomplished.

Best products win — mostly! The company needs to remember that and execute accordingly. Over the last decade it has not adhered well to that principle. Moving research into the product groups might just do the trick and re-infuse that old but so very successful principle and enable the company to lead in several categories, as it did in its glory days.

Complaining, as Bill Gates recently did, that the company is no longer innovative enough proves my point. Act, Mr. Chairman! Act!

Products To Divest Of

Very simply put: All hardware devices. The foundation for Microsoft’s prosperous ecosystem was built with software DNA and partnerships with hardware producers and software vendors. The company’s leadership needs to remember these old roots and make it a priority to keep suppliers who support Microsoft’s platforms close, and enlarge that club with the ones who once left.

Its CEO and chairman know very well that re-earning formerly prevailing trust is the key to success here. It takes years to gain it, and only one wrong announcement or power grab to destroy it.

The reason why people prefer a certain computing device over another ultimately comes down to a combination of usefulness and affordability. Usefulness means how easily one can operate the device and how many software applications are made available for it. Charge too high a price, and users will most likely compromise and pick the cheaper and a less useful platform. Low price is the main reason why Windows PCs beat Macintosh computers by eight to one, and why Android-based smartphones outnumber iPhones. Apple’s products, while superior, are as overpriced as the wonderful Porsches I love so much.

Recently, Microsoft announced it is changing direction and wants to be known as a device and services company, so that it can show off its software products more favorably. I am not surprised about emphasizing a more intensive focus on cloud services, where competitors are way ahead. But I vehemently disagree with the idea of producing hardware devices to the detriment of loyal ecosystem partners. It simply undermines their trust, and is a distraction for the company.

Microsoft’s experience with building hardware is very limited. From computer mice and keyboards to the Xbox game console, the company has struggled for years to compete and be profitable in that field. Why will the newly introduced Surface tablets change that?

In the ‘80s, Microsoft ventured into producing hardware in form of memory cards, an add-on board for the Apple II so it could run CP/M software, as well as printer hardware and computer mice. I sold all of them as General Manger of Microsoft’s German subsidiary. With the exception of the computer mice and the Apple II add-on board, all of them flopped. When the Apple II fell out of favor, only the Microsoft mouse survived until the turn of the century when ergonomic keyboards and the Xbox game console showed up.

The mice are still getting produced, but just for the replacement market. My team sold 150 million of them to PC manufacturers, but the business was abandoned in 2000 because we were no longer price competitive in that cutthroat market segment. The same happened to keyboard sales. Dropping mice and keyboards altogether would make some friends — Logitech comes to mind — and would hardly be noticed on the balance sheet.

Xbox, Microsoft’s game console, came into existence to keep Sony from conquering the living room, as Bill Gates once pointed out. It came with a steep price. The company lost $6 billion to $8 billion in this venture. Even today, every Xbox remains subsidized. Its losses are made up with software royalties from game manufacturers, profits from Microsoft’s prospering “Halo” game and service fees paid by cloud services users. Leaving Xbox behind would therefore only cause a small revenue shortfall, and would hardly be noticeable at the bottom line.

The best solution: Spin the total hardware division off and continue to do game software. Game consoles, in particular, are a dying breed. The future of gaming for hard-core gamers will be on powerful PC systems equipped with high-end graphics and on tablets for the causal crowd. Sony’s recent PlayStation 4 announcement confirms this to some degree. Sony wants to revive game console sales by making them as powerful as PCs, or maybe even more powerful, by including social media connectivity, improved cloud services and key PC attributes. Why not just subsidize PCs instead of spending money on a proprietary platform design which will increase Sony’s losses for years to come?

The real money is in gaming software, period. Spinning Microsoft’s console business off would avoid future losses. And last but not least, Valve might be interested in buying that division. Who knows?

What else to get rid of: All retail stores. Sell online instead and clean up the messy Windows 8 application store or Windows 8 might join the lists of Redmond management casualties.

Next Step

Next week, I will focus on organizational issues and explain why a major organizational change is needed to revive Microsoft’s mojo.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

If you're like most enterprise IT professionals, you have serious concerns about cloud computing. According to a new Lieberman Software 2012 Cloud Security Survey, sponsored by the Cloud Security Alliance, 88% of the 300 IT professionals surveyed believe that some of their data hosted in the cloud could be lost, corrupted or accessed by unauthorized individuals. That's likely why 86% keep their most sensitive data behind-the-firewall.

Despite those concernse, though, an equally whopping 86% believe their cloud deployment has been a success. It's therefore not unreasonable to suspect that 100% will be back at the cloud computing trough, again and again and again.

That is really good news for Amazon, which is looking to double down on selling its cloud services to the enterprise.

Amazon Hires an Army

In a bid to drive enterprise adoption, the cloud leader looks set to nearly double its AWS salesforce, as Business Insider discovered. No doubt these salespeople will focus on moving enterprises to use Amazon Web Services beyond the test and development workloads currently in the cloud, currently the dominant type of workload enterprises cede to AWS. The goal, clearly, is to get them to move mission-critical applications to AWS.

This could prove harder than it first appears, given enterprise insistence on tight Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and the big differences between enterprise and consumer cloud requirements, as Wikibon's Kristen Feledy posits:

IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to cut costs and the “Amazon Effect” increases that pressure. The reality is many of the successful public cloud examples are characterized by a single application accessed by millions of people; whereas the traditional enterprise is made up of hundreds or even thousands of apps accessed by thousands or maybe tens of thousands of users. These are different worlds where the former is all about scale and simplicity and the latter emphasizes service levels, reliability and security.

Amazon, after all, has mostly taken a somewhat blasé approach to SLAs, which Wikibon describes as "we’ll do our best – if we don’t please send us an email."

Not exactly a confidence booster for the cloud-wary CIO.

Shadow IT: First Open Source, Now Cloud

This is changing. Amazon recently rolled out premium support plans for the enterprise, including "white glove case routing." To sell a premium AWS experience, Amazon's job profiles scout for sales professionals who "possess both a sales and technical background that enables them to drive an engagement at the CXO level as well as with software developers and IT architects." In other words, Amazon recognizes that it is the developers and architects that pull cloud computing into the enterprise, but it is the CIO who will bless this "shadow IT."

After all, it is shadow IT that has been selling the enterprise on Amazon for years. By now, just every enterprise is using the cloud, be it from Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace or others, as progressive IT professionals have looked to the cloud to get things done despite friction from internal bureaucracy. For those paying attention, this is precisely how open source succeeded: currying favor with developers until its spread was so pervasive within the enterprise that CIOs were forced to accept it, and signed sales contracts with Red Hat and others to mitigate legal risk and improve service.

Hence, Cloudscaling's Michael Grant is arguably correct to suggest that rather than fight shadow IT and its inexorable march to the cloud, CIOs should recognize shadow IT as "a forward thinking testbed for IT innovation." If Grant is right, that testbed suggests a future in the cloud, both for dev/test and mission-critical workloads, driven by the promise of higher convenience and lower costs, but really about increased innovation.

But it also suggests that Amazon has been right to first focus on the enterprise's new kingmakers: developers. This is how open source won. It's how the cloud is winning, too. 

Imagine you are walking in London and want to book a trip to New York at the last minute: You hop online to search for a hotel. The smartphone you are holding helps you find an establishment that looks appealing. You tap a few buttons to send your credit card information.

Unbeknownst to you, however, there is only one available room left at this hotel for the night you need. You and and another traveler, from Brazil perhaps, are vying for the same space. That person is trying to make the reservation from a laptop at his office.

• Could these two transactions be handled at the exact same time?
• Can the hotel see a consistent view of this globally distributed data?
• Could the transactions be handled in a way that the hotel owner can identify where each request originated from?
• Could the hotel distinguish on which device the purchase was made and any other personal information required?

If the two transactions were being handled by a traditional SQL database with a siloed network configuration and little ability to scale on demand or access data in real time, the short answer would be, “No.”

As Jerry Chen, VP of VMware’s Cloud and Application Services noted recently: “The monolithic database of the past cannot meet the needs of modern applications.” What is needed, he added, are designs that support high-availability low-latency applications.

The Influence Of Big Data

Your experience with booking a room is a perfect example of how large amounts of important, fast-moving information - commonly known as Big Data - is creating problems and opportunities for customers and the companies that serve them.

While modern technologies provide faster access to higher volumes of both structured and unstructured information at any time of the day, making sense of the bits and pieces of unrelated data has required a radical shift in the way we organize networks and the Internet. It’s a challenge for even seasoned IT developers and database deployers.

In addition, real-world events such as the Arab Spring and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan have challenged engineers and developers to break through existing constraints and work wonders in hyperconnectivity using non-traditional methods.

Historically, companies sorted customer and transactional data in neat rows and columns of databases. These databases were built and managed by Structured Query Language (SQL) and stored in isolated, or siloed, networks.

But traditional, hard-disk-drive-based database products forged on SQL can no longer handle the deluge of Big Data in a timely fashion. The era of Big Data calls for new strategies and new approaches to queries.

The limitations of traditional SQL-based databases have prompted a slew of innovative developments in this direction starting with NoSQL distributed database models. These types of software platforms have caught the eye of decision-makers in the financial services, e-commerce, government and R&D communities.

NoSQL has the capacity to answer to their need to process Big Data sets as they happen. However, many NoSQL deployments still fail to cope with scenarios like the one detailed above because they cannot provide consistent speed or scale. Additionally, many NoSQL offerings lack maturity when dealing with data that needs to span multiple datacenters across vast distances.

Other Innovations Add Support

To keep up with the true volume and velocity of information from multiple sources, innovations in cloud computing are being paired with high-performance “in-memory” storage on database appliances created to address the obstacles of managing Big Data.

While cloud-based systems have helped develop online computing and software service delivery systems, IT developers and database deployers have adopted the cloud to take advantage of the ability to scale to globally distributed marketplace. Meanwhile, the addition of solid-state memory drives to storage devices has given companies an extra layer of quickly accessible data. These configurations allow for more rapid database queries and transactions - and thus the ability to deal with much larger data sets in real time.

But the raw technology is only part of the equation. No matter how powerful the exterior influences, IT developers and database deployers will always need tool sets that help them to design for their current Big Data database needs (such as our hotel booking example) as well as prepare for a future where Big Data needs to be addressed at multiple levels.

The tools must be customizable and easy to use - no matter the developer’s existing training. These offerings must also be easy to manage and easy to connect with new technology trends.

VMware’s GemFire and SQLFire software are designed to address just those needs of developers and deployers.

GemFire is a database software product that allows for data distribution, data replication, caching and data management at the exact moment the information is needed.

SQLFire is a distributed data management platform which functions and performs much like GemFire, but has a user interface and programming framework familiar to developers who are more comfortable programming in SQL interface and tools.

Both GemFire and SQLFire help companies move beyond concerns with speed and scale and tackle Big Data applications head on.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Bart Copeland is CEO of ActiveState.

Jetpacks, flying cars, hybrid cloud. Which one will be ubiquitous in two years? Here’s a hint: It’s the one that doesn’t involve personal air travel.

In two years, the cloud-computing-enabled enterprise will have the enviable luxury to take much for granted, including accelerated time to market, seamless deployment, true polyglot coding and agile-as-you-want development.

And the technology that will enable that bright future? Here’s another hint: It starts with “private PaaS” or private Platform- as-a-Service. Think of private PaaS as cloud middleware for the enterprise — Platform-as-a-Service technology for on-premise service delivery behind a firewall, or an operating system for an enterprise private cloud.

Here are six ways private PaaS will change the enterprise cloud space by 2015:

1. Mobile apps will drive enterprise cloud and private PaaS adoption.

Two years from now, the biggest driver for cloud adoption won’t be traditional applications, it’ll be mobile apps. Disparate workforces already make Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) a cost of doing business for the enterprise: More types of enterprise work will require more types of mobile applications. And that will burden IT leaders mandated with managing the cloud. To retain control (and sanity), those IT leaders will embrace private PaaS technologies to provide integrated application management of mobile (and Web and cloud) applications.

2. Private clouds will dominate the enterprise market for now… but hybrids will win in the end.

Marketers spin idealized tales of cross-cloud hybrid love, with capacity-enabling bursts to the public cloud, easy multi-datacenter application administration, better security management, and redundancy/failover operational models abstracted from the developers and employees doing the actual work. It’s a great, achievable vision. But for most enterprises, that hybrid cloud vision is still two years away. Which is why they’re investing in private PaaS architectures now. Today’s enterprise cloud adopters see private cloud — and in particular, private PaaS technology — as the path to tomorrow’s hybrid cloud glory.

3. Smaller "public PaaS" players will dwindle as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) subsumes PaaS.

To differentiate themselves against commoditization, IaaS service providers will continue to incorporate PaaS technology into their infrastructure service offerings. Service breadth will expand, prices will fall and small business will embrace the low-cost public cloud. But those competitive pricing scenarios will challenge small standalone public PaaS providers as VC funds dry up and competitors either partner with or get absorbed into larger cloud-services corporations.

4. 2013 PaaS purchase criterion: deployment acceleration. 2015 PaaS purchase criteria: administrative control, true polyglot development, easy extensibility to Big Data.

In the PaaS world, 2013 will be the year of rapid application deployment: Enterprise private PaaS adopters will see their cloud application deployment cycles reduced from weeks or months to just minutes. In two years, cloud adopters will take that speed-to-market for granted. As a result, enterprise cloud adopters will evaluate private PaaS technology not just for how it accelerates workflow, but for how it impacts the bottom line. In 2015, private PaaS technologies will offer even easier administrative control, support for development in any language, seamless integration to corporate applications (particularly big-data databases), and hybrid cloud capabilities.

5. Beyond polyglot, "anyglot"" development will move apps forward in ways we can’t yet imagine.

In today’s cloud technology market, enterprise developers must often choose between their preferred development language and the development language dictated by their IaaS/PaaS solution. When infrastructure services (whether public or private) mandate development environment, it’s the coders who suffer, and they’re the ones who must adapt to the new world order. In some cases, that can mean learning new languages and recoding (or even dumping) legacy applications. But two years from now, we’ll look back on inconveniences like that and laugh. Envision truly polyglot cloud middleware. Applications developed in multiple languages. True cloud application portability. Both developers and cloud managers (DevOps) collaborating. Dogs and cats living together in harmony. Really.

6. Agile development will be so agile we’ll need a new name for it (“SuperAgile?”).

Tomorrow’s agility will make today’s agility look laughably slow. In 2015, we’ll enjoy polyglot application development and dynamic deployment. With those capabilities will come newfound agility… not just accelerated nimbleness for cat-herders, but flexibility: Developers can work in the (fast) way that’s right for them. More apps, better apps, delivered to market faster.

The future looks… um, bright.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

You can be forgiven for writing off Microsoft's mobile future. Given that Apple's operating income for its iPhone and iPad devices nearly surpasses Microsoft's total revenue, or that Google's Android market share makes Windows Mobile's share look like a rounding error, it's easy to disregard Microsoft's chances in mobile. That is, unless you're a CIO. Within the enterprise, CIOs continue to rate Microsoft above all other vendors, giving Microsoft some breathing room.

The question is, how much?

The CIO's Pick

Microsoft's Windows Mobile doesn't show up in IDC's latest numbers.  While IDC declares that Windows Phone/Windows Mobile made "market-beating" progress in the fourth quarter of 2012, with sales of Windows-based smartphones up 400% year over year, Android and iOS still combined to claim 87% of the 722 million smartphones shipped globally in 2012. Microsoft's share? Just 3%, according to Gartner.

Yet in Piper Jaffray's quarterly CIO Survey released last week, a full 45% of CIOs picked Microsoft as their most indispensable "mega-vendor." This may not sound like much, but the second-place vendor, Oracle, got half as many CIO votes. The next few vendors include SAP, Cisco, IBM, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, which got a mere 4%. The reports authors note:

CIOs state that 'there are really no alternatives to Microsoft. [Others said] 'MS services are getting better and will allow us to move more to the cloud,' and 'we are highly invested in their technologies and dependent on them extending their platforms.'

We believe Microsoft's dominance in the enterprise is underappreciated, and some of the threats against Microsoft, such as alternatives to the Windows desktop OS in the enterprise or productivity software, may be over-hyped in the near term. That said, keep in mind that our CIO survey does not address the large consumer business for Microsoft, which faces much more intense competitive pressures than its enterprise business.

In other words, whatever CIOs may want to buy, their employees are purchasing iOS and Android devices in droves. 

Even so, developer interest in the Windows platform may yet save Microsoft.

Sexiest Nun In The Mega-Vendor Convent

Despite its stumbles in mobile, developers continue to hold out hope. At least, developers of a certain age and vocation. According to a new Evans Data developer survey, Microsoft was picked as having "top relevance" among two-thirds of the 450 surveyed, and claimed the top spot among 90% of developers aged 46-50. Google came in second, and was listed as the mobile company set to dominate within three years. Apple? It came in fifth.

Yes, fifth.

Which, frankly, hardly seems credible. Commenting on the results, Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin suggests:

I’m not surprised Microsoft is big with an older generation of developers, but what does that tell you? They’re sticking with a platform they’re comfortable with and hoping Microsoft hits it big. I’d be surprised if any of these developers who say they’re big on Microsoft or Android are not also supporting Apple. They have to be if they want to make any money.

Such results start to make sense if we separate developer interest from enterprise imperatives. According to Appcelerator's quarterly mobile developer survey, iOS and Android interest dwarfs that of Windows:

Source: Appcelerator, 2013

But among the enterprise mega-vendors, the few companies that control the vast majority of enterprise IT budgets, Microsoft tops the field as showing the most leadership in mobile among these same survey respondents:

Source: Appcelerator, 2013

This may not seem like a big deal ("Sexiest nun in the convent"), but given that 73% of enterprises have developed and deployed fewer than five applications, the mobile enterprise is still wide open. Keeping in mind Microsoft's clout with CIOs, even Microsoft's anemic 28% "leadership" rating could be enough to pave its way to significant traction within the enterprise.

Redmond's Fighting Chance

All that said, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon has largely rendered CIO edicts as to device preferences futile. IT has become an order-taker, rather than an order-giver, with regard to mobile devices. Microsoft may be cool with the suits, but it has yet to demonstrate that it can turn the heads of mobile developers.

Even so, it's too soon to count out Microsoft's mobile hopes. Not while it retains such fealty from enterprise CIOs and developers. With Microsoft CFO Peter Klein suggesting that Microsoft is closing in on "write once, run anywhere" cross-platform capability for Windows 8 to run across a wide array of form factors, which would allow the enterprise to have its cake (Windows desktop development) and eat it, too (Windows mobile devices), Microsoft's enterprise value proposition may be too tempting to ignore.

Guest author Michael Della Penna is Senior Vice President of Emerging Channels at Responsys, Inc.

We’ve heard it before… this is going to be the year that mobile payments will boom! Both Gartner and Forrester have made strong predictions of mobile growth, with Forrester recently saying that the U.S. mobile payments market will hit $90 billion by 2017, a 48% compound annual growth rate from the $12.8 billion spent in 2012.

But how do we know that 2013 is really the year that “mobile wallets” will finally take off? And what will things look like when mobile payments actually fulfill their promise?

4 Key Indicators Of Mobile Payment Success

Here are four indicators from players across the ecosystem that suggest we will see a global shift in mobile payments this year:

1. A survey of 200 mobile industry executives, developers and insiders conducted by Chetan Sharma Consulting voted mobile payments the top mobile applications and services category for 2013. The survey said mobile payments and commerce will get big in 2013, with Visa, the banks and more established online payment companies like PayPal well positioned to cause disruption in the mobile payments space.
2. Visa Europe claims that in 2013, there will be 40 issuers offering mobile contactless payment services to consumers, and by the end of 2013 around 80 types of smartphones will be certified to carry out contactless payments.
3. A study performed by Shop.org and Forrester research, called the "State of Retailing" found that mobile payments will be essential if retailers wish to remain competitive. 51% of the participating retailers said that their top priority in 2013 had to do with optimization, including mobile payments.
4. China is set to follow U.S. and Asia-Pacific countries to embrace a cashless society as it taps a boom in e-commerce and electronic payments, with mobile payments likely to soar 52.7% annually in 2013. Mobile payments are likely to expand to $17 billion in 2013.

How Will Mobile Payments Work?

So what do all the figures actually mean?

If things continue as predicted, people the world over could very soon end up walking out of the house without their cards and cash. Instead, they'll use their mobile phone to purchase everything from electronics to furniture, from groceries to gas. Sounds pretty cool right?

What’s even more fascinating is how the growing use of mobile and the increased popularity of apps, passbook and mobile payments are combining to create a comprehensive mobile experience that is changing the way consumers interact with brands.

Consider this scenario for early 2014:

• As you walk past your favorite electronics retailer, you get a notification offer pushed into your app offering you 10% off an LCD TV purchase.
• Intrigued, you enter the store, use your phone to do some price comparisons, see a few LCD ads and select the perfect new LCD TV for the Super Bowl.
• After learning your model is out of stock, the salesperson informs you it can be shipped from the warehouse in time for the game, so you order it.
• At the checkout counter you use your phone to access your offer code and loyalty number as well as to pay with your phone. The salesperson asks if you would like to receive product and shipping text alerts and you promptly opt-in.
• You leave the store and quickly confirm your subscription and a short time later receive a text message confirming the purchase and informing you that your order has been received at the warehouse.
• The next day you get an alert informing you your TV has been shipped and a final message informing you the TV has been sent out for delivery.
• Upon delivery you receive your final alert confirming delivery, thanking you for the purchase and a final prompt to text back ‘SERVICE’ should you have any questions for customer service.

What Will It Take?

While all these technologies are available today – SMS, targeted mobile advertising, push notification, passbook and mobile payments - they are rarely coordinated. The whole process never happens as smoothly as laid out in the scenario above. The industry still has a long way to go to create a seamless mobile experience for our customers.

Doing so will require combining data and systems that talk to each other. It will also require coordination and orchestration both within a single channel (i.e. Mobile) as well as across multiple channels (email, SMS, Push, Passbook, mobile ads) to create a positive experience for the recipient and a sale for the retailer.

It will also require real-time, automated management – so users are contacted only when they're in the market. Nothing would be worse or more inefficient than to have that same individual receive an offer promoting LCD TVs right after they've just bought a new TV.

The good news - again - is that the basic capabilities are here today and that brands and their partners are already developing the strategic know-how to build, manage and orchestrate mobile and multi-channel relationship marketing efforts around mobile payments. There are big rewards waiting for the first companies able to put it all together for their customers.