Ftf 2011 Cloud Keynote Notes

2011_04_02_17_04_43.pdf

enStratus Cloud Governance and Why the Data Matters

I've been working on Enterprise Cloud Strategy and in the course of this work identified some interesting and non-obvious opportunities in the Cloud. One solution I’ve examined is the well-crafted solution that is enStratus. enStratus has built a SaaS Cloud Management / Governance product focused on providing critical management, monitoring, governance capabilities tailored to the needs of the Global 2000 market, rather than the startup market. As I have worked with a current Fortune 500 client to identify Cloud solution components, my assessment is that enStratus is uncannily well designed for the enterprise market. Yet as a result of working with the enStratus team and product I found not just a management tool, but also a deeply insightful perspective as to the how and what of the Cloud. To put this another way, as a result of using enStratus, teams will learn from the experienced approach enStratus takes to working in the Cloud and align with these successful practices. Yet enStratus remains open and light, rather than didactic. Again, this is a remarkable achievement in itself. As a result of my work with George Reese and John Willis of enStratus, I now have new insights into the Cloud and how Cloud management, governance, and automation fits into the overall enterprise Cloud opportunity. Where I expect to find functionality, I continue to find a deep intelligence and sophistication that runs through each aspect of the enStratus solution.

Station Vampire Musicians Video I recorded at 34th Street after call with enStratus

Watch "Station Vampire Musicians" on YouTube

Apple in the Post-Jobs Post-Modern World

While Steve Jobs deserves full credit for incredible achievements not only at NEXT and Pixar, I believe what enabled Steve Jobs to succeed at Apple was his application of the "Apple Brand" to the iPod. Apple Computer always had a cult-like group of followers who were willing to pay a remarkable premium for Apple's Macintosh line of PCs. Moreover, such people (and I was one of them) would not hesitate to vehemently evangelize the Apple vision and brand to any poor soul foolish enough to approach or befriend. For example, when I moved to New York City in or around 1993, I told a friend that I would simply not work for any company that had not chosen Apple as their computer platform. As a result I worked for firms like Ernst & Young (at the time Apple's financial auditor).

Yet several years later I found the burden of wearing the Apple "hair-shirt" too great and decided to defect to the world of PCs and UNIX and all thing outside the narrow little world of Apple. Yet the point I'm trying to illustrate is that Apple always had the ability to capture people's imagination and spirit and that this has been a characteristic of Apple that endured well beyond Steve Jobs's departure. What I believe is the event that unleashed the Apple "idea-virus" (to appropriate Seth Godin's most excellent phrase) is the iPod. Before the iPod a person needed to have a very very high level of faith and independence in order to join the Apple cult. To buy a Mac in 1987 I think the cost was in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. The number of people at that time who were interested in computers was very small. And within that small group, the number of people who were rich enough to buy a Mac was even smaller. And among that group of the rich, only a subset subscribed to the Macintosh Way (Guy Kawasaki's title for his book on the Apple brand and marketing strategy).

So the problems Apple faced early on never involved the brand itself, the loyalty of the followers, nor did the fervor or loyalty dissipate quickly after Jobs's departure. Rather, the issue was that when selling products to consumers, the "network effect" remains powerful and manifests itself even more acutely in consumer products than it does in business to business products. The real genius of Steve Jobs was to translate what was essentially a misguided approach to market expensive business machines to an approach to selling consumer devices such as the iPod and the iPhone. In other words, the entire winning strategy had been in place from the beginning, it was simply that the number of followers and the pool of people who could potentially be converted was too small.

One could argue that Steve Jobs was ahead of his time, and yet this misses the point. The vision which endures beyond Steve Jobs is that of how to design user experiences. When Jobs applied that vision to a market for business machines, he failed in every case (Apple, NeXT). Yet when Jobs applied his vision to a true consumer market (iPod, iPhone) his vision resonated and brought into sharp relief the difference between the status quo and Apple. Once infected with Steve's vision his iPod users and iPhone users could no longer defile themselves with "unbeliever" desktop, laptop, or tablet computers. So in my opinion once realized and unleashed in the consumer space, wild horses cannot return the masses to a world where Apple does not thrive and grow.

Are APIs Covered By Copyright or Copyleft or Neither?

Side Show In Oracle, Google Patent Fight: Are API's Covered By Copyright? | Techdirt

Although I favor Google in this litigation, I (as a layman) consider Oracle assertion that intellectual property copyright protection applies to APIs worth considering in the context of Cloud applications, SaaS, and the mobile application build-out that is reshaping the software and (as we seen with HP) hardware industry.

My curiosity regarding the evolution of Cloud Computing and the rapidly adoption of Service Oriented Architecture has caused me to wonder about the APIs firms develop as interfaces to their web services. If applications in the cloud will increasingly be composed of multiple web services, then the integration effort to program to such web services represents a significant investment of time and money in designing and building such an API so as to enable customers to conveniently access their services offered. Moreover, as a service becomes more widely used, maintaining, extending, and supporting an API represents a real cost of doing business and adds to the value of the business. For example, a substantial extension or redesign of an API requires a web services provider / developer to "map" legacy API calls to new API calls.

More important is the "network effect" of a web service. Informal standards emerge as more third-party developers choose to use a specific web service. And by "use" a large portion of what this means is developers will often choose whether or not to subscribe to or pay for one out of a set of competing web services based largely upon how convenient, transparent, and well-documented an web services vendor API is. And so web services providers that wish to grow their business invest in both the development community that grows around use of their API, and the web services developer invests to create a satisfied community of developers. As a result of this network effect, some web services may become standard simply because the community is comfortable and familiar with the API and maintains and build additional components using these APIs.

I argue that while each method call may not be protected by copyright law, that a set of methods, such as those created, planned, and assembled for an API constitutes "art" and that creating a useful and "good" API is difficult and is an art form. An API is far from being a simple functional aspect of an application that is either a separate component or obvious and inevitable.

APIs are "sticky" and as noted above, a good API can foster a community of developers and can rapidly become the basis for a successful web service. An API constitutes the dna of a web service and defines how it delivers its service as well as how elegantly it can be used by its subscribers. If an API is not protected by intellectual property law, specifically copyright law, what is to protect a web service provider's substantial investment in designing, developing, supporting, and documentation of the API? Consider the possibility that a competitor could simply copy a successful web services API and in essence "steal" the substantial investment made by the original artist / web services developer?

In my opinion this type of intellectual property protection is truly necessary to protect small web services developers from being swept aside by large players. This kind of protection goes well beyond patent protection, and will become one of the most important legal issues in the software industry as software development evolves towards a network based world of composite applications that interact entirely based on their APIs.

Sequencing the DNA of cloud computing. Understanding the Ecosystem by Examining the Nature of Web Services

Are APIs the New Black? — Tech News and Analysis

Of Clouds and Container Ships: Microsoft's Strong Technology in the Cloud: Are APIs the New Black? I've been further researching the platform / web services ecosystem. It is an interesting area bc it seems the int...

Hey HP When You Have to Shoot...Shoot! Don't Talk

I’m starting to see a lot of common cultural ground between HP and RIM.

Apple really has nothing to do with the problems firms like RIM and HP face. I wrote a month ago that the move to the Cloud would result in major vendor extinction. While HP is building Next Generation Data Centers for some large enterprises, I’ve found it difficult to accept HP as an enterprise software company, a storage company, a networking company, or anything but a printer company. Granted the company has made some acquisitions over the years notably Compaq, Mercury, EDS, yet for each of these product lines I have tried really hard to see where HP has in any way added value to the business. Beyond placing the HP logo on the product these captured firms ship, I see HP as having done more harm than good. For example after acquiring Mercury, HP has essentially frozen research and development to the point where an entirely new generation of competitors has grown out of HP’s overarching need to milk as much cash as possible from that acquisition. Similarly, the server lines still use the same naming convention as that used by Compaq. I remember the Compaq server DL line from as far back as 2000. And I get the sense that HP relies more on its incumbent status as an enterprise vendor than it does on innovation, competitive products, or customer service. When I read that HP had purchased Palm and was going to market with a tablet based on “WebOS” I laughed aloud at the tunnel vision, reinforcing internal culture, and at the idea that after Palm had completely failed to thrive after the 3Com acquisition, that HP could or would piece together anything more elegant than a Frankenstein monster by combing some HP hardware and a WebOS. Who is supposed to use such a device when people are buying and bringing to work their own iPhone and Galaxy Tabs and iPads and corporate IT is saying Yes? The consumers who HP cited as one its core competitive advantages was more of a prisoner.  HP has no relationship with consumers other than to sell them expensive ink and toner cartridges. Nobody ever cared about HP PCs or would seek an HP brand product other than a printer. I’ve made rash predictions that HP will be one of the first casualties of the Cloud and I’m fascinated at just how large of a gaping hole and husky enterprise HP has just revealed.

What Motivates Open Standards in the Cloud?

Open standards are a nice idea. And democracy is a great idea too, all citizens can vote, yet we only have two real parties representing us. Similarly, I think that standards start out as a good idea, yet over time may start to become ineffective. For the most part standards committees never actually complete a standard, and the industry starts working from a "draft."

In the Cloud I think standards should be less important to the subscriber than the actual capabilities. I recognize that nobody choosing a Cloud platform "wants" lock-in, or a proprietary system, yet at the same time I hear a constant din of demand for "Private Cloud" and for "better" security. While I don't necessarily think the "Private Cloud" and security and portability demands preclude a standard, I think firms need to focus more closely on leveraging what the Cloud has to offer today. I can't think of any solution in a corporate data center based on an open standard that meets the portability "test." SQL, for example, was designed to make it possible to query data regardless of the database, and while SQL is pretty close, I don't think anyone would tell you that migrating from one database to another is seamless, but rather the complete opposite.