• Expect new policies that police network congestion and offload data to alternative networks such as Wi-Fi and FemtoCells.
  • Perhaps companies should consider installing both of these as cost saving measures?

• Privacy concerns will finally be centerstage and more issues will arise with mobile data location services along with this comes new worries about spyware and virus attacks on mobile handsets.
  • Does your virus/security software provider cover mobile handsets and all platforms available? With the growing proliferations of applications available on handsets how do you manage your infrastructure?

• More and more the Internet is becoming a place for things, not just computers and phones. The machine to machine market is increasingly viable and as a result we can only expect more products that transform platforms.
  • are you ready for the next change?

There are still areas of deelopment as well..

• what outcomes will mobile advertising drive, by and large dumb phones are still the bread-and-butter of the cell phone market
• Increasingly specific technologies are being adopted by consumers and pushed by businesses. Think about mapping applications that allow you to see virtual “tags” or Mobile wallet solutions that allow for quick payments.
• Consumers still get most of there equipment from carriers, and carriers have the largest market presence with the exception of Apple only the major carriers have a large physical presence.

All of these could play differently in specific business models from the corner store to the small software seller mobile will have an impact in 2011 what will it be for you?

Facebook continues to utterly dominate the social networking industry in fact it consumes more of a US is user time than any other site. This means that sites like Google and Yahoo no longer command the lead and in what is sure to be a hotly contested battle audience size, frequency of usage, and page views speak to Facebook’s ability to reach users.

When it comes to numbers however some interesting trends emerge. (See the graph below)

It’s pretty clear with Google’s $28 billion in ad revenue that Facebook has a bit of a revenue shortfall in comparison. Giga-OM has an interesting thought on why that might be it appears that companies like Zynga and Groupon are more effective for acquiring new customers. It appears that Facebook is not commanding a high price for its ad’s. What’s more Giga-OM theorizes that communication based platforms are less effective than content based. This makes sense because when you start to look at works in the off-line world we don’t have advertisements on our phone calls we do in her magazines. One way to fight this is an increase in the lead content that Facebook provides, this would create an opportunity for users to spend more time with content and less time just communicating. Google has managed to accomplish this with their YouTube franchise where a few years ago you would never see an ad today you are regularly shown Ad‘s.

• This year watch for a change in communication as the Facebook messaging platform gets fully underway with e-mail usage we may see a shift to this type of communication.
• Look for a renewed focus on engagement measurement by this marketing organizations are being asked for specific objectives like awareness or intent, there will be munificence devise to measure how this is accomplished
• e-commerce isn’t going anywhere with giants like Google Amazon and newcomers like Apple there will surely be a battlefield in 2011

Businesses large and small are now faced with decisions about in sourcing outsourcing and resourcing. the frameworks commonly available to help them think about how to design a business architecture are often incomplete and overly cumbersome. Most of the current enterprise architecture frameworks are designed for large enterprises national governments or specific lines of business. This leaves them largely incomplete and incomprehensible for most business owners.

the goal of any business architecture is below:

• a focus on value delivery not just analysis, what makes the most sense to stakeholders involved thinking about sales operation marketing finance etc
• a complete view of the business meeting business environment external and internal, business strategy, capabilities, operations and organizational culture
• the business orientation describing the business fully in common business charts this is often a business service map of some type
• having a clear outcome for designing a business architecture this means using terminology and relationships to help dry out simplicity in common business functions
• finally with any model having practical meaningful examples is very important, being able to demonstrate how all and architecture can change the way a business functions

Taking a look broadly at the enterprise architecture frameworks available today there are four major models being used.

1. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
2. United States Government’s Business Reference Model (BRM)
3. MIT Sloan School’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)
4. Canadian Government’s Business Transformation Enablement Program (BTEP)

The very idea of business architecture is still newly minted in today information organizations. IT managers and business architects should expect changes from every direction including consultants, standard bodies, user communities, and vendors. As with any new developing idea focus should be given to the business value achieved. Today business architecture is focused on the correct model, that doesn’t mean much to the CXO trying to determine the most capable business execution strategy and the associated CIO who get to execute.

To that degree there are other frame works worth reviewing although not as fully though out they offer signf

• The Business Motivation Model (BMM) provides an excellent model for describing the complete strategy landscape. The strategy component definitional work is excellent and provides a sound basis for establishing a standard vocabulary.
• IBM has published a detailed paper on its view of capability maps, the Business Component Model (BCM) it also provides a good discussion of capability maps.
• Motion Lite is a Microsoft methodology for applying a simplistic view of capabilities to prioritize the project portfolio. It provides a high-level view of the process, including examples of interim deliverables.

The present state is very fractured so choose carefully and consider a combination..

When considering the options in helps to condense your decision making factors.

1. Extent of useable feature set (things that your organizational will want to do)- PaaS products fall into 2 general categories those designed to satisfy specific development scenarios. On the other hand there are others are designed as general-purpose development environments that compete with popular Java, .NET, and scripting platforms.
2. Application Purpose – Some PaaS platforms are designed for content-oriented applications, while others are designed for transactional business applications. How will your application or service be used, is the platform selection designed for you?
3. Programming Language – Some of the PaaS environments are designed for programmers who work in Java, C#, or similar third-generation languages , while others use dynamic scripting languages such as PHP, Python, and Rails. Some PaaS products provide visual tools appropriate for developers who are used to working in Visual Studio and other fourth-generation language environments, and others provide tools non technical business analysts.
   

What to review prior to making a platform choice

• What kind of database services does the organization need? (platform provide)
  
• What kind of application logic would you want to build or configure with the platform? ( I think the tree planting)
  
• What kinds of development tools does the platform provide?
  
• Does the platform allow on-premise deployment?
  
• Does the platform provide application authentication?
  
• Does the platform provide a detailed billing service for application usage?
  

There is of course one other option if you find that PaaS doesn’t meet your needs. Infrastructure-as-a-service vendors provide developers with access to virtual machines, storage, and network capacity, and most use a subscription-based billing model to charge developers based on the resources they consume. In most IaaS offerings, APIs exist but no programming model, lack of a development environment, and only basic application administration. Some common examples are below

• The regaining vendor is Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) includes the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Simple DB. These services are widely used by development groups creating custom “cloud” applications and by PaaS providers that don’t want to build and run their own data centers.
• For those creating slick web 2.0 “shiny” web applications, Engine Yard is a hosting environment for Ruby on Rails applications. Engine Yard is a startup that provides “cloud,” managed hosting, and on-premise deployment options for applications built using the Ruby language and either the Rails or the Merb framework. The “cloud” options are subscription-based “slices” of Ruby on Rails clusters, with additional options for dedicated cluster resources; the on-premise option is a locally installed software image.
• Want to implement a completely custom build check out IT Structures today runs a variety of applications, ranging from Zimbra’s office applications to Cisco’s IronPort and to SAP Business Suite 6.0. IT Structures’ value arises from a proprietary software layer that adapts existing applications to run in its Internet data center, including provisioning, WAN-latency compensation, usage and operations analytics, and backup and recovery.
• Want to have both internal and external infrastructure options Joyent provides infrastructure and support for all the major frameworks. Their offering provides hosted infrastructure that developers and PaaS platforms can use to host their applications and provides built-in support for Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Java applications. A secure option for virtual local area networks (VLANs). The offering can be be deployed in customer data centers. Joyent’s ability to easily bridge on-premise data centers and its own Internet data center lets customers create hybrid environments that use both.

Lots of choices.

Related Articles

• Amazon Web Services Gets into the Platform-as-a-Service Game with Elastic Beanstalk (readwriteweb.com)
• Tropo Sponsors Node.js PaaS and NodeFu (readwriteweb.com)
• PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Amazon Enters The PaaS World (cloudave.com)
• PaaS choices today (zdnet.com)

First some thoughts on applications that, can prove difficult to move to SaaS:

1. Industry based process specific applications
   1. Financials as accounting and financial reporting
   2. banking or securities transaction systems
   3. Utilities customer information systems
   4. Insurance claims management and underwriting systems
   5. Hospital management systems
2. operating, database management systems
3. Software for managing internal IT operations (such as job scheduling or change and configuration management) or internal data (extract, transformation, and loading tools; predictive analytics and data mining; or customer data management)

Next: areas that are beginning to erode: Companies that have large investments in Legacy “software” from vendors have applications that manage and follow processes. Supply chain management, product life-cycle management, Procurement in purchasing products, asset management, manufacturing materials management, electronic design automation, financial management, or human resource management. I would expect to see 30% growth in this segment over the next 3 years; however the lack of integration will continue to be an issue here, as companies are not willing to let data outside of the firewall.

Successful, SaaS inroads have been made SaaS, is unseating licensed software vendors is sales force automation and CRM applications, salesforce.com has captured market share from licensed software vendors like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and others. Other areas include: Human Resources, governance, risk, and compliance, application development, Payments & Risk Management, security products like identity management and security operations or IT management products like server management, service desk, and IT asset management

SaaS is the emerging standard in other application market areas:

• Content management document management, blogging, and wikis
• Purchasing applications for electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP), Sourcing, and automated spend analysis
• Travel & entertainment (T&E) expense reporting
• Time & attendance tracking products as SaaS solutions

SaaS is the dominant model in

• Web conferencing
• Services procurement, supplier risk and performance management, and supplier network services in the ePurchasing market
• Talent management, compensation management, and recruitment management in human resource management systems (HRMS)
• Application security
• Global trade management

What does this mean for your every day run of the mill software vendor?

1. Most vendors have taken a singular approach either “all-SaaS” or “no-SaaS” stance on the offering. Large software vendors position that SaaS has only limited relevance. Small vendors are trying to offer both licensed, on-premises solutions for some clients and SaaS for others. Both of these views are inaccurate looking at the data to support, 45% of 2010 software revenues, where in fact SaaS for the next three years at least will have little or no role. While that still leaves more than half the software market in which SaaS will compete with (or complement) licensed software, in most cases, SaaS will grow into a minority position or is already headed for dominance.
2. As a software vendor focus on products with low barriers, You can overcome the SaaS challenges of integration, security, customization, and migration from existing systems, those are barriers of perception rather than reality. If you already carved out a leading role in a product category where these challenges exist, it may be worth the effort to overcome these barriers to expand SaaS’ share. However for a SaaS vendor looking for other products to go after, it is much more cost-effective to focus on products where those barriers are low.
3. Legacy or incumbent licensed software vendors have more decisions and more complexity involved with selecting a SaaS offerings. For instance there is no reason for a major enterprise supply chain or vertical industry application vendor to replicate their produ. After two or three years, what started as a single product will become in effect two (or more) products requiring their own development and support teams.ct portfolio on a SaaS. Because there is a SaaS vendor like NetSuite offering a SaaS counterpart.
4. Each company should have a product portfolio and profitability approach to decide where to offer licensed vs. SaaS.
5. Vendors with licensed software products are starting to offer SaaS as an alternative. This is not a good idea vendors need to understand the longer-term challenges of maintaining two products that will quickly be on two development tracks and cycles. The SaaS product lends itself to frequent, incremental updates and enhancements. However the licensed product will have longer version releases. It is better in my view to have purely licensed software offerings for some products and purely SaaS for others, rather than trying to support both versions for one product.

• Have you identified the supporting business model and marketing education for your SaaS offering?
  • Many channel marketers will need shift some of their product and sales training & certification resources to business model and marketing ‘enablement’ are they willing to make this investment in staff
• Do you have existing partner networks and communication?
  • Social networks like Yammer or Ning that go beyond online user forums are a great idea.  Collaboration with channel partner companies, works best with partners when they are able to see  project lifecycles, share common service challenges, and understand winning platform themes and capabilities that service each vertical/ industry. (BaseCamp, SharePoint and Others)
• Have you considered common online and offline marketing and interactive design offerings?
  • Often partners lack the resources to produce a capable brand and message statement.  Marketing brand and design is a service most SaaS providers provide as a service for there partners. This helps to keep the brand consistent while serving the dual purpose of understanding strategic partner value.
• Do you have a plan for “pushing” interactive and print marketing content?  Content sharing represents a marketers shovel as partners get brand and message consistency pushed to them. Content sharing via marketing tools from vendors include Marketto, Eloqua, Marketing Advocate, TreeHouse Interactive, WebCollage, and Ethofy.

More to come

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Technology Enabled Services – The Business Productivity Opportunity

• Salesforce just hired a gaming VP for there product development organization (think about the implications of using a Sales / Organization automation tool with a point ranking for contributers)
• The success oppertunits take longer for the SaaS B2B offering
• IT is over a trillion dollars a year
• Incumbent CRM vendors (on premise install base) are expanding there  customer base by purchasing other on premise customers (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc.)
• SaaS vendors are  focused on selling to new markets, and are global (Small medium enterprise)
• Sales & Marketing -
  • Selling more pricey solutions remotely (with less sales involvement)
  • Business Freemium model allow customers to test products, and create an up selling experience for an existing happy customer (note that this not a new customer as with an on premise sell)
  • For margins to be reasonable the conversion rates in 10-15%  are needed,
  • Finally some Freemium models are using viral marketing (you send it etc), each use generates a possible new customer
• Yammer vs. Salesforce
  • Yammer - Originally directed to a consumer market now with over 80% of fortune five’s
  • Jive –  Professional Salesforce, more B2B
  • Chatter – Most likely will grow organically through the Salesforce customer base
• SalesForce – Service Cloud, CRM, Chatter are the 3 strongest platform strengths
• Cloud Security & Privacy – Challanges exist but they will not last
• Consolidation Trends- Large Incumbent ventures, Sucessful M&A and consolidation of market

All this leads to some really interesting questions.

• When the incumbents challenge the SaaS products how will they differentiate there product offerings? vs. just making there products offered on a subscription?
• How long does it take mature and adopt a enterprise SaaS offering, SalesForce seems to have take 5-7 years. (How long did it take Sieble?)
• When offering a Freemium offering what is the right position to take for a traditional vendor ?

Synopsis

• During 2010 the US tech sector grew about twice as fast as the US economy as a result 2011 outlook is similar
• Uncertainty is greater in 2011 due to the following changes the end of economic stimulus programs and a politically divided US government unlikely to provide another boost to the economy.
• Gartner/Forrester estimates that growth in the industry will be double that of the economy which is around 7-8%
• The following contributes to these factors
  • Investments in cloud and Smart Computing & SaaS
  • Govt. IT will lag, though, as federal, state, and local governments struggle with high deficits
  • The computer renewal boom that helped the tech market in 2010 will slow
  • Software and IT consulting services will pick up the slack

As a result of the forecasts there are some items for technology vendors and tech. consumers alike to be aware of in 2011.   Tech purchases will be faced with the following possible landscapes

• weak revenue growth  and potential for renewed recession
• Versus the positives of good profits, ample cash sitting on balance sheets, and the attractions of new Smart Computing and cloud computing solutions.

Thinking  about all of this …

Increase your focus on industries that have high growth potentials. Both the economic outlook and prospects for tech spending will vary dramatically between different industries in 2011. Do your research to understand where growth will happen and where it will be a challenge.

Review your marketing and sales investment for 2011, reduce costs elsewhere. There seem to be enough challenges on the forefront that vendors should be prepared if the tech market under performs.

Cloud computing is the smart choice for SMB’s when it comes to Enterprise organization a careful ROI review will be needed.  Intelligent Infrastructure Computing offers opportunities for businesses to u to implement new technologies of awareness, analysis, and alternatives that can significantly improve their business.

Here is a brief synopsis of what the article states

• Google – Andriod is a success on the mobile platform, it doesn’t end there though. The move into the living room and further advancement into entertainment high lights Google’s push into the consumer market.
• Apple – Innovative design and simple execution continue to be the hallmark of this company. Just as they jump started the smart phone revolution they created the tablet market with the Ipad.
• Rovio – The company that created touchscreen games sold across a variety of different platforms, Apple and Android.
• Primesense. The 3-D technology at the core of Microsoft’s new Kinect has had a significant impact on the market in 2010. Primesense will work to develop new interface types for 2011.
• Amazon. With the e-book growth in 2011, Amazon will continue to extended its advantage and to find additional ways to innovate in the book publishing industry.

So what impact might this have on the Enterprise?

• Smart: Phones, Tablets and Internet Connected Devices alike users will no longer be satisfied with Blackberry bricks. If IT doesn’t innovate  the user community will, each Enterprise should be prepared for this and have an engagement strategy.
• Design and Simplicity: contain to be the products that people are fanatical about, the take away here is the focus on simplified UI’s and best of breed applications will continue. The headache of system consolidations could evaporate, if “as a service” infrastructure and platforms are correctly implemented.
• Its entertainment, as the consumer industry provides strategy, business and IT leaders will be involved with not just logical solutions but entertaining ones. Remember that old web dashboard, put it on an Ipad and make it interactive. Think about internal incentives to have more usage of existing applications (jigsaw is a good sample of this)
• Interface will change in this decade, while most companies are still mouse and keyboard, people tactile input, and just plain gesture should be a consideration for the right user community.
• Traditional industries are changing, Publishing, Media, and Music are all being forced into a digital shift. What is the total enterprise printing cost currently? How many print outs are disposed of? Is there an ROI business case to move to another format, by the end of 2011 there will be solution providers.

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According to Tech Crunch there seems to be 7 neat things to be on the prowl for in 2011, this list seems entirely consumer facing but there are enterprise technology impacts as well.

1. Web Video On Your TV – TV meet the internet, internet meet the streaming video.
2. Social Q&A site – Lets all answer together
3. Mobile Social Photo Apps – Sharing your media
4. Mobile Wallets & Payments – Pay from your phone
5. Context-Aware Apps
6. Open Places Database – facilitate the a common repository between apps
7. The Streaming Cloud – All media is moving to a steaming platform

Thinking about these trends it means that the following can also be assumed.

• Business users will grow fed up with carrying around many devices – 2 mobile phones (work and personal) 1 Laptop and some kind of tablet
  • Consolidation of these devices on to a common platform is in the cards, how will the organization cope?
• Everywhere access for all files and documents that pertain to a user, streaming these (insert your S/I/PaaS standard here) is a reality
  • Technology from Citrix (and many others) continues to enable anywhere working.
• Extremely intense growth in the mobile device and portable device arena will only quicken the move away from the PC  ruled work place.
  • Geo, Mobile and Photo apps are driving this new adoption of hardware, the business impacts for this are starting to emerge, real time updates (Ala SalesForce Chatter) mobile posting via any smart phone etc
• The need for a common set of referenced open data stores, the next frontier will be how these many apps choose to share store and analyze data
  • The enterprise will face a million leaks from the Google spreadsheet to the  unsecured RSS feed, strong referenced data store such as AWS, Google, and others are creating will provide the framework for the growing interrelated web of applications