September 5, 2011
Volume XXXVI, Issue 6
Octoshape and ON24 Partner to Supercharge Enterprise Communications
Octoshape, an industry leader in cloud-based global streaming technologies, has teamed with ON24, the global leader for webcasting and virtual events solutions for corporate communications, to offer a groundbreaking solution for internal video applications deployed within the enterprise.
"In today's complex business environment, the need to efficiently deliver corporate video without overloading corporate Internet connectivity or firewalls is rapidly increasing," said Ed Van Petten, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for ON24. "Our partnership with Octoshape provides our customers, who seek new ways to reach, engage and interact with their employees, the opportunity to do so with high quality video and global distribution. The combined solution eliminates the traditional barriers to large scale webcasting in the enterprise without overwhelming the internal IT infrastructure."
In collaboration with Octoshape, ON24 has established an end-to-end live audio and video solution that allows customers to reach all their employees anywhere and anytime. This solution is being deployed and offered to its clients and prospects globally.
The combination of ON24's and Octoshape's global video distribution technologies enables users in the corporate office or satellite office or who are traveling to receive the highest quality possible for their respective network conditions. This welcomes a revolution in corporate communication value.
The Octoshape suite of multicast-enabled technologies is unique in the industry in its ability to drastically reduce corporate bandwidth needs, while offering an optimized user experience with instant on, HD quality, and no buffering.
In addition to these features, customers can incorporate the following tools into their presentation: PowerPoint slides, Live Q&A sessions, Audience polling, Professional networking tools, and Custom 2-D and 3-D virtual environments.
"Our partnership with ON24 changes the game in enterprise streaming," said Michael Koehn Milland, CEO for Octoshape. "With the advanced ON24 webcasting applications and Octoshape's uninterrupted and quality viewing experience, customers will see that their attendance, message retention and overall viewer satisfaction increase significantly with the combined services."
Vestel to Preview the First BitTorrent TV at IFA
BitTorrent has been hard at work this year building the new ecosystem of software, content, and devices that it first previewed at CES, and this week marks a major milestone in the device arena. Vestel, one of the world's leading DTV manufacturers, will preview the world's first BitTorrent Certified TV at the IFA show in Berlin.
What does this mean for you? On your new Vestel TV (coming soon, stay tuned), you'll be able to find, play and share all of your personal media - e.g. cell phone videos, home movies, hi-res photos - plus all of BitTorrent's artist-approved indie media and your Internet files.
In the official announcement, Hakan Kutlu, Deputy General Manager responsible for marketing at Vestel said:
"Consumers want all types of personal media and Internet content in their living rooms and the TV remains the most desired device for consuming this digital media, regardless of source. BitTorrent certification helps our TV line meet this consumer demand and ensures that Vestel products remain at the forefront of technology innovation and adoption."
While digital media continues to explode, we believe the ways we find it, play it and share it have become unnecessarily complex and fragmented. We've been listening to your feedback, and understand that you want access to your entire content library - personal media, Internet files, and artist-approved content - regardless of the source, media type, or file format.
If you didn't catch BitTorrent's announcements earlier this year, the BitTorrent ecosystem integrates software, devices, and content, designed to empower its users to move their digital media experience into the living room via certified TVs, Blue-ray/DVD players, media extenders, NAS devices, and more.
One of the key parts of the ecosystem revolves around personal media. With file sizes exploding, it isn't always easy to move your media to your other devices. Add in hassles with transcoding and sharing massive files with your friends, and your options are limited. A couple of months ago BitTorrent released a beta of its personal media sharing feature in one of its software clients. This feature will also be a key aspect of our device integration, freeing your personal media from your PC.
The BitTorrent Certified program invites consumer electronics makers to help it achieve the ecosystem vision. Through the program, CE makers can leverage the speed of the BitTorrent protocol and key downloading, transcoding, sharing and file-shifting features to make it easy for everyday people to find, get and play all files on any certified devices. For more information on the BitTorrent Certified Partner Program, please e-mail info@bittorrent.com.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Google Chairman Eric Schmidt gave the high-profile MacTaggart Lecture this week in Scotland at the 2011 Edinburgh International Television Festival to more than 2,000 professional attendees representing all aspects of the television industry, ranging from on-air talent to digital entrepreneurs.
Schmidt's remarks drew special attention, not only because of Google's powerful market presence impacting media-related industries, but also because of prior controversy over the initial implementation of GoogleTV, including poor consumer response on the heels of feared potential negative effect on the television business itself - and Schmidt's notoriously casual views on copyright enforcement.
In Edinburgh, he said that in 2010, over 90% of TV viewing was to the original telecast of programs on broadcast and cable networks, and that he didn't expect that TV would ever switch to being entirely on demand due to the "cultural pull" of some shows.
But he also said, "I sense the default mode of viewing will inexorably shift. Try forcing a 6-year-old who's grown up on DVRs to only watch live TV. Once you're used to such things, it's hard to give them up - no pause, no rewind, no choice."
No choice? Fast-forwarding is what gives viewers choice on television? Seriously?
And perhaps most distressing to this audience, which represents a steadily advancing industry in terms of innovation, Schmidt said, "History shows that in the face of new technology, those who adapt their business models don't just survive, they prosper. Technology advances, and no laws can preserve markets that have been passed by."
True words, but we would argue totally missing the mark by being directed at the continually evolving television business, which has had as one of its hallmarks remarkable progress in adopting and deploying new technologies (see the article on "Set-Top Boxes Reach for the Cloud" below).
Schmidt actually admonished delegates, proclaiming that, "The Internet is fundamental to the future of television for one simple reason: because it's what people want. It makes TV more personal, more participative, more pertinent."
The DCIA respectfully disagrees. It's not at all clear that people want the Internet - at least as currently configured and typically manifest with existing user interfaces of today's applications - to be imposed on their so-called linear television viewing.
And it would certainly be hard to demonstrate how the Internet truly makes TV more personal; it would be hard to prove that people really want their TV viewing to be more participative; and it would be hard to explain what saying that the Internet actually makes TV more pertinent even means.
Not to be misunderstood - the DCIA absolutely supports the migration of television programming distribution to Internet protocol (IPTV) and sees this shift as even more inevitable - and much more promising - than the migration from over-the-air to cable and then cable-and-satellite as the predominant forms of distribution.
Online video is just in its infancy (see the articles below on "Online Viewing Evolves" and "US Viewers Prefer Streaming over VoD").
However, interactive television was on the covers of Time Magazine and Newsweek in mid-1992, full of incredible optimism, and yet after two decades of experimentation absolutely does not validate Schmidt's claims in Edinburgh that, "Now, we're riding a second, much bigger, wave of interactivity. It's a convergence of TV and Internet screens. It's on the web through your laptop, tablet, or mobile."
This error in trying to impose "computerish" behavior on the fundamentally passive activity of television program viewing has cost other leading technology firms billions, and it seems like deja vu all over again to see Google stumbling in this way.
From Microsoft's way-ahead-of-its-time WebTV to the most recent incarnations of Apple TV, the complex interactions required to handle PC-like functionality don't match people's expectations and desires when it comes to watching and absorbing TV shows.
Schmidt's view that video-on-demand (VoD) will make outdated "the broadcast model of showing programs in a drip-feed" schedule shouldn't send television programmers to their therapists anytime soon. If this were true, cable's pay-per-view (PPV) would have buried linear feeds years ago, and nothing close to that has happened.
He also tried to address the inflammatory issues of copyright and anti-trust, but did so by declaring Google's "delight in innovations without appreciating other's discomfort."
We do agree with Schmidt's concluding remark regarding the potential even greater danger of legislative interference than the ineptitude of highly educated technical specialists at grasping the couch potato's frame-of-mind: "When legislators try to figure out how to minimize the harm of online content, technology solutions rather than laws should be their first thought."
So what could Google do to improve its prospects in television? Larry Dignan provides a wonderful Labor Day Weekend read with his ZDNet post entitled Google's Schmidt Delusional on TV Again: 5 Ways to End the Madness featuring five suggestions, which Larry very sensibly puts forth "as a public service-and to keep Schmidt from digging a larger TV hole:
1. Stop making bold statements. Let's get real here: Few TV types really trust Google. These Hollywood execs want to control their digital destiny and are wary of Google and Apple gaining too much power. Schmidt yapping about how TVs will all have Google software doesn't exactly scream valued partner to content companies.
2. Hide the engineers. Google has an engineering culture. The company thinks algorithms. Google is also left brain. TV is a right brain exercise. Jobs gets that reality, but hasn't quite figured out TV anyway.
3. End the idea that TV manufacturers are the avenue to the living room. Google talks about Internet-connected TVs and wants Sony to stay as a partner. Why? Google just bought Motorola Mobility, which happens to split the set-top box market with Cisco. Schmidt should have said that Google TV will be on half the set-top boxes in America in five years. That statement is a no-brainer. Google bought Motorola and got Google TV distribution as a side benefit.
4. Pay up. Schmidt said that he will work to get broadcast networks to change their minds about Google TV. TV networks have kept Google TV from integrating their Web content. As Sandoval noted, there's only one way Google will get networks to change-license content or challenge them in court. It's unclear that Google wants to get into Netflix-like content licensing. And Google has enough lawsuits-Android mostly-to worry about.
5. Make TV a hobby. Google is trying too hard on the TV front. Schmidt talks and the company puts a TV in its collective mouth. Notice how Apple defused the pressure. TV is a hobby for Apple-at least until it makes its own TVs.
This five step recovery plan isn't brain surgery. Let's hope Schmidt takes us up on TV rehab." Share wisely, and take care.
Set-Top Boxes Reach for the Cloud
Excerpted from CED Magazine Report by Mike Robuck
Set-top boxes (STBs) aren't exactly bringing sexy back, but they are evolving into much more hip devices than the blue-collar editions that have squatted next to TVs for generations.
STBs have been enabled with the likes of EBIF, tru2way, and MPEG-4 for the past few years in anticipation of bigger, better services from cable operators. There are also the hybrid boxes with both QAM tuners and IP capabilities, as well as the HD DVRs.
While HD boxes are almost table stakes these days, the latest generation of boxes are also geared up with MoCA and Ethernet ports for home networking and more memory and processing power to reach out to the Internet.
"On the HD side, operators are looking for boxes that are smaller in size, have lower price points, while also keeping the memory high to be able to run more advanced applications or as your guide needs have grown," said Motorola's Evan Groat, Senior Director of Product Management for STBs. "For DVRs, there are a couple of key things: the size of the box, the energy efficiency of the box and more advanced capabilities in the box . Those are also some trends that are going on."
While the STBs are ready and willing to enable new technologies and services, it's up to the MSOs to figure out their respective roadmaps for MPEG-4, IP migration, tru2way, and Internet-enabled services.
"I would say the thing that has changed over the course of the last year is, especially for North American cable operators, that the kind of boxes they're taking are the ones that I would say have a little bit more future-proofing in them because they have more capable processors, more capable memory to be able to run some new, advanced services," said Ken Morse, CTO of Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group. "They also need to be able to have enough horsepower to be able to render HTML-based user interfaces as some of the user interfaces start to move to the cloud. For that, you've got boxes that are capable of rendering the standards that are applicable there as we go to HTML5."
At The Cable Show earlier this year, Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated the company's Xcalibur, or next-generation Xfinity TV, service. The goal of Xcalibur is to bring Internet-like search and discovery capabilities to TV screens via IP technology and cloud servers on Comcast's network. The demo in Chicago featured a hybrid STB from Pace that connected to Comcast's cloud-based video system back in Denver. In addition to a better viewing experience, the cloudbased system gives Comcast a much shorter window for new products and innovations.
The service, which features a cloud-based user interface and a DOCSIS 3.0 modem integrated into the STB, is currently in trial in Augusta, GA, with other markets slated for next year.
The lineage of the Xcalibur project can be traced to Comcast's Barcelona middleware platform, which is the company's current generation of end-to-end tru2way. The Barcelona platform uses STBs that fall under Comcast's Residential Network Gateway (RNG) specifications, which include STBs and DVRs from Samsung, Motorola, Cisco, and Pace.
"Every RNG box we put in the field is already MPEG-4 compatible, and, in fact, we're already running some VoD content and some 3-D VoD content in MPEG-4 to those boxes today," said Steve Reynolds, Comcast's senior vice president of home networking. "In addition to that, we've done tests of MPEG-4 for broadcast across the network, but we haven't activated that yet. We're not actually broadcasting anything in MPEG-4 yet. We've tested it to make sure it works; when you're buying a couple million STBs with that capability, you want to be pretty certain that it's going to work.
"It's not so much a question of trading out boxes for us. We've already started pre-positioning a lot of that hardware, and we're talking about millions of boxes here."
On top of the Barcelona platform is Comcast's Buckeye guide, which is a newer tru2way guide that has been deployed in a handful of Comcast's systems along with the Barcelona platform.
"There will probably be over a dozen sites before the end of this year, and then it will expand considerably across our footprint in 2012 so that a lot of those RNG boxes will be updated to run tru-2way and this new guide," Reynolds said. "This Barcelona platform that I'm talking about is the first step toward launching a guide that uses those cloud services. A lot of the functionality that we've built over the past two years - and I'm talking about the iPad application, the Android application, and even some of the stuff we do on websites - leverages a set of services that have been built in the cloud for Comcast. Things like remote DVR management, remote VoD purchasing, the ability to tap on your iPad and tune a channel on your television - all of those things have been encapsulated as services back in the cloud. The Barcelona platform taps into that same cloud."
The beauty of the Barcelona platform is that it leverages the cloud, and also allows Comcast to deliver new functionalities to the RNG boxes that are already in customers' homes.
"So, for instance, when you bring up the VoD screens in the Buckeye guide, what is actually happening is it's going all the way back to the cloud services and pulling things like metadata and poster art and the recommendation engine," Reynolds said. "It's the same service that we're leveraging to do our IP platform, and it's the same set of services that Brian Roberts demonstrated as part of the spectrum for Xcalibur.
"Going back to the RNG boxes, part of that specification included a DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem integrated into the device, so all of those RNG boxes actually do have a DOCSIS 2.0 IP pipe running directly into them. You can use those kinds of IP services on any box that can run that Barcelona platform."
Outside of North America, Motorola's Groat said boxes are connecting to clouds at a faster rate.
"What you are seeing a lot in the rest of the world is there isn't really a lot of QAM out there today; instead it's more IP," he said. "The STBs are a lot smaller in size, there are a lot smaller footprints, and they're actually starting to move up into the cloud faster. We're seeing that a lot more in the rest of the world than you currently are seeing in the US market."
Time Warner Cable is using boxes from Motorola, Samsung, and Cisco for its premium Signature Home offering, which includes home networking via MoCA. In order to provision Signature Home, Time Warner has also rolled out its OCAP Digital Navigator (ODN), or Mystro, guide in various systems. Bright House Networks is also following suit on the new guide.
"Bright House Networks has been working with Time Warner Cable in deploying the Mystro guide," said Jeff Chen, Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology at Bright House Networks. "We are multi-sourcing with Cisco, Samsung, and Motorola today. The tru2way and Mystro guide made it possible to introduce multiple vendors and to innovate on user experience. Innovation in the guide space is very important to our industry, yet always a very challenging task."
Last year, Cox bowed its Plus Package tier, which included its Trio guide and whole-home networking with MoCA, using a tru2way box from Cisco that includes a 500 GB hard drive. Cox's Catherine Mitchell, Executive Director of Video Product Management, said Plus Package would be 100 percent deployed across Cox's footprint this fall.
Cox and NDS Group developed the Trio guide over the course of four years, and its whole method of operation is based around making content easier to find, view and personalize for Cox's subscribers.
"Our Trio guide has a couple of different looks that you can choose as a customer, and one of them is the grid guide," Mitchell said. "We just recently got some research back that our customers overwhelmingly prefer the grid guide because that's what they're used to. We're going to go back to making that our default for our Trio guide because that's what customers prefer. It's difficult to determine if it's habit or just what they are used to, or if it really is just comfortable to navigate that way.
"I think the piece where it becomes interesting is not in the way we display it, but how people find and then choose what they want to watch. You're able to search all of the content, and you're able to discover what is there outside of just looking through the listings. The presentation may not change from the grid guide, but customers are very interested in how they can more robustly find, search and discover content. In the regular view, they're very happy with the grid guide."
Overall, the North American cable STB market is about 19 million units per year, declining at about 250,000 units per year, according to ABI Research Senior Analyst Sam Rosen. Rosen said most units going out are HD-capable, and about 50 percent of those shipped units were HD DVRs.
Cisco's Morse said there would also be a conscious effort by vendors not to make the current boxes look like their staid predecessors.
"From a software perspective, a trend that I think the industry will start to embrace is trying to make the STB look a lot more like another device versus trying to make it look like this unique thing that the industry has collectively driven over the past 10 or 15 years," he said. "As it becomes important for operators to deliver the same services and content across a range of devices in the home, especially the unmanaged devices, if you can make the STB environment look the same through HTML5 or whatever, then you actually get some economies of scale with being able to very quickly deploy new services.
"They will also definitely be more and more cloud-leveraged with the passage of time. I think when you look at the capabilities that are going to come out in what I would call entry-level IP STBs, there's a lot of leverage that is starting to happen from other ecosystems like the tablet community. Look at the horsepower that is sitting inside of a tablet, and see how quickly that changes. Every year the new tablets come out, and it seems like every year the horsepower doubles on them. You're going to see the STB space start to inherit from that, and that gives you very capable devices that can render cloud-delivered services very well. You'll see that more and more, especially when the operator is now dealing, as they go forward, with such a wide variety of devices on the end of their network."
Online Video Evolves
Excerpted from MediaPost Research Brief by Jack Loechner
According to a recently released Yahoo Study with Interpret (following up on a similar 2009 study), online video continues to grow significantly, specifically full-length movies and TV shows. In a given day 57% watched an online video, a 33% increase from 2009. However, short clips still represent the majority of videos watched.
Yahoo observed a change in online video that signals a maturation of this media format, says the report. Phase 1 of online video in 2009 was a revolution, but phase 2 in 2011 is an evolution. This evolution is happening on video consumption habits, the sharing of video content and the video content itself.
Key questions answered in the follow up research include: How have online video consumption and viewing habits changed in the last 2 years? What type of video content is being viewed and what are consumers expecting to watch more of in the future? How does the professional production value of video content impact engagement and ad receptivity?
The study found an increase of +30 percentage points in online video viewership between the hours of 6PM to 9PM in 2011. Viewership during "business hours" (9AM-5PM) has declined, with the majority of videos seen in the evening when viewers are home. The growth of services like Netflix and Hulu (both of which have more than doubled in 2011) have likely prompted the growth in evening video streaming.
While there has been an overall increase in streams that are shared, the percentage of viewers that share videos has decreased in the past two years. Only 26% of respondents stated they actually shared the video they just watched, compared to 34% in 2009. The overall video sharer has gotten older, as the 25-54 demographic has grown from 64% to 72%. And, older demographics are less likely to share video, thus contributing to a smaller proportion of online video sharers.
Video advertising receptivity increases when it's tied to professionally produced content. The report says that for professional videos, viewers are significantly more likely to remember seeing the ad, retain product information or recall the brand being advertised. Ads associated with professional content are also more likely to be viewed as relevant to consumers.
When it comes to online video, half will follow an online original series to learn new things and 60% intend to seek more professionally-produced short online clips in the future. Roughly 70% who watch these clips find them by way of their homepage, on large content sites or by going to a video site directly.
Consumers show greater engagement to professionally polished videos attached to "mixed media," like articles. They're also more receptive to ads in video environments that include content. 57% of online video viewers say they enjoy watching a video next to an article. The study also found that when a video is viewed on a page that includes an article, viewers are more likely to watch the video to get more information, recall seeing the advertising, and view the video as "professional" - resulting in a consumer who is in a more open mindset for advertising.
The report concludes by noting that as online video continues to grow and become more mainstream, an evolution is taking place on three fronts: viewer consumption habits, the sharing of video content, and even the video content itself.
For additional information about the report, please click here.
US Viewers Prefer Streaming over VoD
Excerpted from Home Media Magazine Report by Erik Gruenwedel
Consumers of movie rentals are increasingly opting for subscription-based video-on-demand (VoD) platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime instead of transactional VoD, according to a new report.
Dallas-based Parks Associates said that during a recent six-month period, US online video subscribers spent nearly $50 each on average for video subscriptions, while a la carte video typically garnered less than half that amount. From 2009 to 2010, the number of purchased movie and TV-show downloads dropped by 56%, and movie-rental downloads fell by 70%.
Consumers continue to migrate away from file-sharing and a la carte transactional download services to the adoption of streaming subscription services. As of the fourth quarter in 2010, domestic broadband households reported streaming an average of 2.4 movies and TV shows from a subscription provider - a 60% increase from the 1.5 average reported in 2009.
Subscription VoD services are driving consumer online video spending, according to Parks. Based on the reported usage of video download services by US survey respondents in Q4, consumer spending on a la carte video during a six-month period ranged from $12 to $26. Comparable spending on video services subscriptions during that same period reached at least $48 per household.
Driving this transition, of course, is Netflix, which ended its most recent fiscal quarter with more than 25 million subscribers in North America.
"The all-you-can-eat-style subscription approach taken by Netflix has proven successful in the US market," Parks said in its report, "Online Video and Internet Services: Global Outlook." "It has helped to drive up consumption - and spending - for online video."
The report cautioned that the SVoD model is not without its potential pitfalls, which include proper monetization, content licensing, distribution costs and charging users accordingly.
Indeed, Netflix's September 1st price increase for joint disc or streaming rentals underscores the fiscal pressures the online disc rental pioneer is facing acquiring higher quality content while expanding streaming service abroad.
It is exactly this type of deep-pocket requirement that many believe will put Amazon at an advantage should it ever decide to aggressively ramp up its Amazon Prime loyalty membership program that currently offers about 9,000 titles.
Cloud: The Last Great Shift in the Software Industry
Excerpted from Computerworld UK Report by Zach Nelson
Over the next ten years we will see the last great architectural shift in the software industry take place as everything shifts to cloud computing. Fifteen years ago, there was this inescapable sense that the Internet would change everything. It has, and the cloud is the ultimate expression of the Internet's disruptive nature.
Once cloud computing has truly taken hold in every sector, which it will before the next decade is over, the full promise of the Internet revolution will have been realized. The first successful cloud services were companies like eBay and Amazon, which put consumer transactions in the cloud. Now, there's no going back.
It may seem like a long time has passed since the days of Netscape Navigator and AOL, but after a clearly superior technology emerges, it takes time for the shift to take place. It was clear back in 1980 that Oracle was the leader in database technology, but it took a long time for the disruptions of their superior relational database to ripple through the system and push out the old guard. So even though it has been more than 15 years since the public Internet opened for business, we still haven't reached the point where all applications are delivered over the cloud. But we will get there.
If you don't believe me, ask a venture capitalist the last time he or she invested in a company that delivers software on a CD. All the serious development with major backing happens today in the cloud, and that will make itself more and more obvious in the next three years.
There is a lot of discussion about whether this move will be to the "public" or the "private" cloud, but when I hear that it tells me that people are misunderstanding how the cloud works. The nature of a public cloud is to provide secure, seamless access to information and applications. You won't buy services from me if I can't keep that "private" when you want it private, but "public" when you want it shared. More often, the term "private cloud" is abused by people who are just trying to slap a new coat of paint on the client/server architecture that we know is already dead.
Workforce churn is going to play a huge part in the adoption of cloud services in the next few years. Most people coming out of universities have lived their lives in the cloud. Show them a room full of servers and they're going to ask, incredulously, "What is this? This is how you run your business?"
The Zuckerberg generation was born on the Internet, not the PC, and they're going to turn to the Internet for both their business and consumer needs.
A lot of this change will be subtle and unnoticeable. Nobody can say exactly when people stopped visiting a bank just to check their balance, it happened slowly, over time. Five years from now we will see multi-billion dollar companies running all of their core business processes in the cloud, but it won't be part of some grand plan. We will wake up one day, look around and realize that the old ways have faded away.
And what customer demands and business trends will drive changes in software products, how they're developed and the industry that provides them?
The best way to look at any trend or demand is to ask whether the Internet is going to be core to that business process going forward. The answer is almost always going to be "yes." So any business or industry that isn't willing to truly embrace modern, Internet-based cloud architecture is one that will, by its own admission, fall behind and lose out.
The shift from the computer to the smart-phone is fascinating. Microsoft has struggled so mightily, despite the fact that they basically invented the tablet, because they kept trying to drag the notion of the desktop computer to mobile devices. Nobody wants to be tethered to a desk, they want to be tethered to the cloud. That's why the younger generations use their smart-phones for virtually everything we once thought of as the exclusive domain of the computer. In fact, it seems like just about the only thing they want PCs for, oddly enough, is to make calls with Skype.
Of course, a "smart-phone" can mean many things, and a Blackberry has pros and cons that differ from an iPad. Developers will have their work cut out for them to keep pace with the different choices consumers and business users have in smart devices, and will need to make some strategic decisions about what to support.
Social media is changing the way companies evaluate their performance. Instead of evaluating quarterly profit/loss statements, we can find out if we are doing our jobs correctly just by tuning in to what individual customers are saying. We can capture their thoughts from Twitter feeds, comments and reviews, and what they tell us in transactions, and break that down to immediately understand what these individuals are telling us about how we do business, and how our products, marketing, and customer service need to adapt to address gaps. That change will be coming soon, definitely within the next five years.
The sheer volume of social media content is going to force companies to get smarter about which customers they choose to respond to. Some are squeaky wheels which will simply never be satisfied. Others are canaries in the coal mine and will deserve immediate attention. And still others will be competitive saboteurs. Building the discipline that turns social media into competitive intelligence will not be easy, but it will be necessary.
Regulatory demands, both by businesses and governments, are going to drive consolidation of processes and data storage. The more systems data flows across, the more difficult it is to coordinate security policies and ensure compliance. There is no meaningful, consistent way to apply security standards to 25 different systems. So consolidating the number of systems that touch a particular data process, and consolidating all those individual servers running in data centers and utility closets in tens of thousands of businesses around the globe, is going to be a major concern.
Cloud Computing Can Break Hold of Global 'IT Cartel' on Governments
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Joe McKendrick
Former US CIO Vivek Kundra, now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, stated his case for cloud computing in The New York Times, pointing out that the US federal government - let alone any government - can no longer afford to be held hostage by what he calls a global "IT cartel." This "powerful group of private contractors encourages reliance on inefficient software and hardware that is expensive to acquire and to maintain," he maintains.
A "cloud-first" policy - in which government agencies are required to review cloud-based solutions first - can break this costly stranglehold, he says.
However, in a huge, far-flung organization such as the US government, such an idealistic policy can meet a lot of resistance, he says:
"Some agencies, like the General Services Administration, have embraced cloud computing; the agency has cut the IT costs on things as simple as its e-mail system by over 50 percent. But other agencies have balked. The State Department, for instance, has raised concerns about whether the cloud approach introduces security risks, since data is stored off site by private contractors."
One thing that will accelerate governments' embrace of cloud is the budget crisis, demanding draconian cuts. "Public and private organizations that preserve the status quo of wasteful spending will be punished, while those that embrace the cloud will be rewarded with substantial savings and 21st-century jobs," Kundra says.
Cloud Computing Is Here to Rock
Excerpted from CIOL Report by Shyaam Sunder
Think of how information technology (IT) systems were handled in the past by the consuming organizations. There were a variety of technologies to chose from, unforeseen usage scenarios to plan for, and changes to handle.
The technologies referred to here are hardware, software, networking etc.
Scenarios are user interaction spaces - named users, super users, reporting users and interfaces. Changes refer to the change in the style of IT usage from the client-server days to the Web 3.0 of the modern times.
All this has caused IT consumers to invest much of their valuable time into selecting, implementing, and working their IT solutions - clearly a constant and itinerant journey.
Cloud vendors want to save you of this itinerant journey.
The time we save you could better be used by focusing on your business. The traditional approach to realizing an enterprise solution for long term has caused needless outcomes. Think about it... If your ERP is great, why is there a high incidence of unused software licenses reported in the best of the businesses that use them?
When you think of cloud computing what are some of the words (and images) that come to your mind? Is your vision - a perspective (sangarsh), a boundary (ambar or ghera), or fear (mist or dhund)? Answering this question will help you understand your position relative to the cloud.
When you think about the words above, it is natural to feel like an itinerant again. "Oh God! It's one more journey of understanding and one more round of unlearning," you may think. This is where you need to change your perspective.
Cloud vendors don't want you to live like an itinerant in the IT space. The cloud requires the vendor to do this so that it would be beneficial to you. The cloud also requires that the consumer may right-size consumption in logical steps.
Bottom-line: Cloud vendors want the consumer to focus on the business and tailor IT consumption to suit your business growth.
Does it sound like a lot of mumbo jumbo? It probably does; and if I have your attention so far, I will ask you to work with me.
Through a series of articles, we will visit the first the perspectives to cloud computing. So we went from monolithic ERPs to flexible ones, technologically speaking. Why would you still buy them on expensive capital?
Thus, we will address how powerful solutions come to lend themselves to elastic consumption.
We will follow this up by discussions on whether there are any boundaries to consider. Is the cloud for everyone or is it irrational exuberance all over again? Is it as much a bubble as the technology economy was at the turn of the century or does it have some values?
And needless to say, we will be open about the fears and discuss solutions to them threadbare.
Every piece that will be presented solicits feedback. I would urge you to remember that I am journeying through your mind so that this will be your last itinerary worrying about IT.
The expensive, "itinerant," quality that IT consumers have had to hone in handling IT has come to an end.
Benefits of Cloud Computing Realized by Increasing Number of Companies
Excerpted from Cloud Times Report by Arjan de Jong
The adoption of cloud computing services has been swift for both large and small companies and satisfaction with cloud computing is very high, according to a recent study conducted by the Cloud Industry Forum in the UK www.cloudindustryforum.org. The study indicates that companies of all sizes are incorporating cloud computing into their overall IT strategies. Key drivers of this change seem to be flexibility, agility, and cost savings.
More than 80% of the companies already using cloud services indicated they would likely increase their use of the cloud during the next year. This indicates a high level of satisfaction with cloud services by adopters of the technology. Business applications companies are likely to move to the cloud are: e-mail management, data back-up and disaster recovery, storage, and web hosting services. Additional activities that users will move to the cloud are accounting, service management, CRM, security, and unified communications.
Businesses indicate that agility to deliver new services is their primary driver to adopt cloud computing. Companies are moving to the cloud because it offers them the flexibility they need to adapt to the ever changing business climate. The cloud makes it possible to access technology quickly and to offer solutions that they did not already have. At the same time, companies avoid the expense and hassle of owning and managing their own hardware.
Of the businesses surveyed that were not yet using cloud computing, nearly a third indicated that they anticipate adopting cloud services within the next year. It also appears that larger organizations are most likely to adopt cloud computing. Only 20% of companies with fewer than 20 employees are considering using cloud computing.
Within the IT Channel, cloud services are increasingly considered important, according to resellers surveyed. A large majority of resellers believe end users are ready to move to the cloud and the resellers are active in selling and supporting cloud services. There is still room for growth in this market, however, as almost one third of the resellers still do not actively engage with their customers about the relevance of cloud services versus on-premises technology.
In spite of the overall satisfaction of current cloud users and the number of companies that are considering adopting cloud services, there are still concerns that limit the growth of cloud computing. The issues that continue to create anxiety revolve around data security, privacy and the physical location of the data.
Because of these concerns, the vast majority of companies surveyed do not intend to move employee or customer information and accounts or financial data services to the cloud in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, regarding the location of data, companies feel more confident if their data is stored locally or nationally, as they are concerned about the potential impact of another country's laws on data storage. It appears companies are more confident when data is maintained in their home country where the laws and legal system are familiar.
In response to these concerns, cloud computing providers must stress the security measures they have in place to protect data and educate current and potential customers about the actual, rather than perceived safety, of the cloud. When it comes to the location of data storage, cloud computing providers must offer variety and choices to customers. Clearly, a one-size for all, single location data center SaaS or IaaS solution, however attractive from a cost stand point, probably won't deliver what the customer wants. Cloud computing customers do want value, but the savings should come from the hardware and redundant storage side of the equation, not at the expense of confidence and security.
Events such as the recent failure of Amazon Web Services' European cloud due to lightning strikes can also cause some businesses to doubt the benefits of cloud computing or to believe that it is not a safe or reliable method of hosting data. Cloud computing providers must reassure potential customers that they are taking all the necessary steps to mitigate these types of disruptions.
Base on this important survey from the Cloud Industry Forum, cloud computing is gaining momentum fast in organizations of all types and sizes. There are major opportunities for expanding the cloud market alongside on-premise solutions, by encouraging companies to adopt cloud computing and guaranteeing safe storage of even more data and IT functionality into the cloud. Cloud computing companies need to be more than mere service providers but industry advocates dispelling misunderstandings and communicating to companies the very real benefits of being in the cloud.
Happy Fifth Birthday, Cloud Computing
Excerpted from ComputerWorld Report by Patrick Thibodeau
In the vacuum between Hurricane Irene and Labor Day weekend, a major focus of the tech universe this week is on VMworld in Las Vegas.
It's here that the major and minor vendors are bringing out their latest virtualization and cloud offerings.
Dell Monday made one of the conference's bigger announcements by unveiling plans to launch a cloud infrastructure service based on VMware technology.
Dell's announcement arrives five years to the month after Amazon announced its Elastic Compute Cloud beta, or EC2, which may well have been the first service to call itself a cloud.
Pointing out the distance between Dell's new service and Amazon's EC2 unveiling isn't to suggest that Dell is a laggard in the cloud business. It was also just this year that Hewlett-Packard announced an ambitious cloud offering focused on business.
The announcements by Dell and HP show that for all the hype surrounding cloud computing in recent years, the path to mainstream business adoption is a long one.
"Quite a few companies have concerns about hosting company data and applications in public cloud environments," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. "We are still in the early stages in seeing these services roll out."
It's hard to believe, in some ways, that cloud computing is still in its early stage. The cloud computing term is so overhyped and so overused today that it seems like it's been around forever.
But it's hard to find any reference to cloud computing prior to 2006. When people talked about the idea of creating on-demand, scalable and metered resource pools, it was in context of grid computing.
Indeed, when Sun Microsystems, whose longtime logo "The Network is the Computer" embodied cloud-like thinking, opened its public utility compute resource in March 2006, it was called the Sun Grid. The Sun service allowed users to order up compute capacity over the Internet and pay for it via PayPal.
On August 9th in 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussed "an emergent new model" at the Search Engine Strategies Conference.
This new model, Schmidt at the time, "starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing -- they should be in a 'cloud' somewhere."
(Credit for pointing out Schmidt's remarks goes to a 2008 blog post by John Willis.)
Amazon's EC2 was announced on August 24th in 2006, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Coming Events of Interest
TransmitCHINA Talks - September 14th-16th at the Great Wall of China. International leaders, thinkers, innovators, and creators will have an exclusive opportunity to hear a cross-section of preeminent thought leaders from some of the world's most innovative organizations in the digital and creative content ecosystem.
NY Games Conference - September 21st-22nd in New York, NY. The most influential decision-makers in the digital media industry gather at this event, now in its third year, to network, do deals, and share ideas about the future of games and connected entertainment. Lively debate on timely cutting-edge business topics.
OMMA Global - September 26th-27th in New York, NY. The semi-annual gathering of MediaPost insiders featuring the most up-to-the-minute news, information, and ideas about the hottest online sectors - mobile, social, video, direct, display - presented for easy access and consumption.
Digital Music Forum West - October 5th-6th in Los Angeles. CA. Top music, technology, and policy leaders come together for high-level discussions and debate, intimate meetings, and unrivaled networking about the future of digital music. Digital Music Forum is known worldwide.
Digital Hollywood Fall - October 17th-20th in Marina del Rey, CA. Digital Hollywood (DH), the premier entertainment and technology conference in the country, once again welcomes the Variety Summit, which has been co-located with its past three DH events.
Future of Film Summit - November 7th-8th in Los Angeles, CA. An exclusive group of industry thought-leaders discuss the current state of the industry, and how film and transmedia deals will be struck in the coming years. This is a unique opportunity for creatives, producers, buyers, and film financiers.
Streaming Media West - November 8th-9th in Los Angeles, CA. Attended by more than 2,500 executives last year, SMW covers the entire online video ecosystem from content creation and management, to monetization and distribution. The number-one place to come see, learn, and discuss what is taking place with all forms of online video business models and technology.
World Telecom Summit 2011 - November 9th-11th in Singapore. The 2011 program will focus on topics that demonstrate innovation across the telecommunications industry, both on a commercial and technical level, to improve profitability and quality of next generation technologies and customer experiences.
Future of Television - November 17th-18th in New York, NY. Top television and digital media industry executives discuss the increasing importance digital media for the future of the television industry. Topics include viewer trends; programming for non-traditional platforms including online video, VoD, HD, IPTV, broadband and mobile.
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