A Business Less Ordinary

Waving Hello and Goodbye

One of the things that truly fascinate me these days is Google Waves. It gives me the feeling of coming home. I mean there’s nothing in Google Waves I find “wow’ish” in the sense that I haven’t seen it “done” before- independently that is. What makes me love the Waves is how the thinking has been put together to erase the borders between different technologies.

The first thing I loved about my waves was the old “ICQ” way of communicating. You remember those guys from the late 90’s? I’m currently testing the environment together with a developer in the U.S. and the first time we waved online at the same time, I laughed loudly by seeing my question answered before I had finished the sentence. This happens as waves are instant keystroke by keystroke and so the message you’re typing is read and understood even before its final. Like ICQ in the 90’s.

Now you can add more people into the conversation and if they join late they can even press the “playback” button and get a rundown of the previous part of the conversation. The next great thing is to insert a comment directly into a previous sentence or relate it to a word or part of a sentence. So when I’m invited to join my kids discussion about their weekend plans (let’s just envision for a second such a remote possibility..) I can comment on my son’s party plans and attach my message directly into that part of their conversation. Better even; I can drag some pictures from my favorite ski resort onto their conversation and ask if that could be an alternative to the planned party? Even when dragging a cluster of highres images into the wave, the images will be visible to the others in low resolution almost instantly, and loong before they are actually loaded onto the Wave servers. I really love this.

Now, Waves wouldn’t fascinate me the way it does if its thinking didn’t invite for much more practical and real life applications to me than chats and playful stuff. Most of our software development days are spent on issues far from programming chat rooms or picture sharing software. A good deal of our work is related to “numbers” and “workflows” within systems like Human Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management and Financial Systems. Not many “wow” factors there you’d say..?

Well let me take you into the future here with some of those applications. In our FutureWorld, independent systems from various vendors will be blending together on “Waves”. This means that instances and their related pieces of information will be made visible across boundaries and platforms and presented on your screen despite the fact that you never even installed the piece of software where the action is now happening! It’s now coming to you on a Wave. Still a bit unclear you’d say? Let me feed it to you.

In this scenario your accountant is just updating the company books and in the process has just entered your expense record from your recent trip to Paris. Now he entered the debit / credit amount of €250.00 for your hotel, and then wonders if any mini-bar items were included in the invoice. He simply marks the voucher amount, right-clicks it, and posts it on a wave to you where he adds his comments. You will immediately get the wave as a blinking “conversation” at the bottom of your screen and are free to answer it now or later. Let’s assume you will choose the latter. In this scenario your accountant will soon finish off with his work and go home for the day, while you’ll be ordering your take-out pizza for your (too regular) office dinner.

When you later in the evening open his wave you’ll see the complete transaction in a window together with his question. You can directly reply to the wave like you would to a chat, and drag an image copy of the mini-bar bill, which you have kept separately, onto the wave. Or record and add your verbal comments. This way or that way, tomorrow morning your accountant will find your message and image attach to the voucher itself, inside the bookkeeping system. And it will remain there for the eternity of the transaction, and available for the auditors if there’s ever a second question to the issue.

Similarly a security inspector who is out on an oilrig in the north Atlantic can open a real-time video stream on his iPhone and connect with a Wave to the security officer in Stavanger. Now, integrating text, video and voice, two senior managers are added to the Wave to make a decision, and the complete record of it all is forever stored in the Security system of the company.

Now these future possibilities makes a pretty big WOW to me.. and only your imagination will be the limit to where you can go with your applications.

For starters, I think you just got a hell lot closer to that Indian accounting guy down in Hyderabad..

Will New Datacenters Save My Day?

While most people seems to think that software is becoming a standardized commodity, an incredibly high number of companies will continue to rely on mission-specific and mission-critical software made to the specs for their industry vertical, to efficiently deliver their business.

I was visiting the CEO of a company in Europe a while ago, and I was very impressed by their new datacenter he proudly showed me, hosting a two-digit number of the latest IBM servers, and a rack panel with Cisco firewalls, routers and HP switches. This company is well established and running a nice US$10 mill. "people" operation with a fair profit for the past 20 years. Now, it’s not within my scope to try to ruin anyone’s day, and in particular not when someone is so happy with what they have just achieved - but I just had to ask why he was moving into the “hardware business” like this? His company now employs two full-time VMware network technicians.

This scenario is not made up and is not an uncommon sight.

I’m sure you know the answer to my question already- and the heart of his lengthy and somewhat frustrated response.  Situation is- their current Windows based software system just isn’t optimized for any offsite datacenter hosting, and due to the complexity of the total solution, no datacenter will take it on as a standard software platform, or provide any competence for managing the solution. Offsite maintenance of this system would therefore be a scary scenario due to high risk of receiving a slow response and being faced with a confusing process if anything goes wrong. Not to mention the additional cost which incur when you’re hosting a solution which was not initially made to support the model. 

So what choices will a CEO in this situation have, as alternatives to the decision of carrying all the overheads and risks by doing the hardware job themselves, although it’s not his business focus? 

Let’s have a closer look at what is driving technology these days.

SaaS – “Software-as-a-Service” is one of the most important initiatives in recent years, and rapidly changing the world of corporate computing. What is interesting is that SaaS technology institutes the completion of “the circle” that started with the beauty of the IBM 360 and mainframes of the 60’s and which was later replaced by the PC and then the distributed client/server networking model with local servers (everybody has one) of the 80’s to 90’s. Remember how we all thought IBM where Down & Done? Well look at those guys now..

SaaS really leads the way for mission critical applications to move back into centralized, highly secure, and high performance datacenters, boosting performance and competitive edge for the companies using them. SaaS applications are developed based on a philosophy that the application represents a set of “services”, which should be readily available to the users on a 24/7/365 basis – no exceptions – where the user gets access to the services he wants, when he wants, without worrying about hardware, software or even licensing for that matter.

SaaS technology is also widely associated with the pay-per-use business model, where there are no more “licensing” or “maintenance” fees involved, but rather a simple sign-on and transaction-based model that will give an efficient- and variable cost model- directly linked with the business performance of the company which is using the service.

Globalization and integration

SaaS also makes a lot of sense when it comes to efficient cooperation between different legal entities, be it customer – vendor or business partners, and even cross-border businesses. As we see every day, a massive consolidation is taking place where major players are growing, through acquisitions, into multi-national companies. This involves different judicial systems, different legal entities, and limitations to data aggregation. Different systems, different time zones, and different formats- all adds to the overall pain.

Not only mergers, but also more loosely coupled co-operations through vendor networks are on the increase, as many smaller companies are working hard together trying to gain the benefit of a larger unit. Some of the challenges here are that these companies not only don’t have the same Board of Directors, but don’t even run on a common IT platform. Cooperation and data exchange across a variety of different software solutions from different countries of origin means working with a selection of vendors that most often don’t even intend to cooperate.. Now you can picture the benefits of a centrally hosted SaaS-based solution tightly integrated across borders and legislative environments..

One of the main obstacles to the adaption of any “next-generation technology” within an industry vertical is always that current vendors may be somewhat resistant to stimulate that change. Reason being that they are worried about losing their current position, the potential danger of disturbing current revenue streams, and in the end potentially pushing their existing customers into a new “evaluation” phase where they just may not come out on top..  Yeah- none of us wants that, do we?

PC, laptop, web, or even mobile phone- just hand me those data please…

Are You Comfortably Seated- In The Back Seat?

The other day I was visiting a good friend during the holidays, and as we sat down and enjoyed our holiday refreshments, the conversation drifted into business and technology developments, as it so often does.  My friend is (like myself) fast approaching the big Five-O, and has been a top official with an international software company for the past decade. Now the discussion soon turned to kids & the Internet, and naturally the family was concerned about their kid’s use of the Internet in general, the total time spent in front of the various screens, such as, TV shows, gaming, or surfing, and the “opportunity cost” of these kinds of activities. But in particular my friend was concerned about their kids’ addiction to Facebook (or Crapbook as some would call it).

What is Facebook and what does it represent- and more important- does it have an influence and potential value we should recognize as business leaders? As I have seen so often in the past, the general perception of adults, be it inside or outside the IT industry, is dominated by the fact that exposure on The Net represents a personal security risk, and the discussion often fails to venture much beyond that point. In essence our holiday reflection around FB ran ashore on a purely negative attitude towards these kinds of new communities, and a view that they represent basically worthless time killers.

So while there’s no doubt that any Internet community represents an online exposure which is by nature a risk in itself, in the sense that the information provided can be exploited, this is not specifically linked to sites like Facebook or Myspace, but actually includes online advertisement sites (used cars sales, auction sites like Ebay), Yellow and White pages, public information sites (e.g. tax return information in countries that allows this), and numerous other instances where personal information is publicly disclosed (have you thought about that restaurant you just went to, where the waiter took your credit card with him which includes a photo-ID on the reverse side, and disappeared for a good five minutes before bringing you the tab?).

So let’s step beyond the threats and fears for a while and look at the Web 2.0 and what is really going on out there. What is a fact is that web statistics tells a very clear message; People want to interact actively with the Web, and one-way information distribution is dying fast. Main news providers have discovered the trend and innovative new services like the iReport from CNN has caught on immensely, with thousands of news items being reported live through mobile phone cameras and the use of in-built MMS technology to send the report to CNN in an instant. BBC has their yourpics@bbc.co.uk and discussion forums where tens-of-thousands frequently tells their opinions about Barack Obama or what is happening in the Gaza. All this brings you and me into the picture in a completely new way, and with a great powerful way of communicating our views with others. Web 2.0 definitely has a huge impact on how we communicate and express ourselves and even our access to media and to being able to express our opinion. In my mind the immediate mobile phone video report of the killing of a Japanese journalist in the streets of Rangoon in Myanmar during the unrest there last year, was the ultimate evidence that even the worst regime of evil cannot suppress its people any longer without being exposed to the world- you and me will actually see to that through Web 2.0.

But Web 2.0 doesn’t stop with the news. 

Nowadays I get a good number of interesting emails from people whom I have actually never met. Most of them come from Web 2.0 sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, and others. Some send me “I would like to add you to my professional network” while others have specific requests or questions. Millions of people are seeking into these new environments as a new and important source for answers to their specific question, a source for new suppliers, a place to find new employees, and even a world of new potential business partners. Honestly guys, I haven’t spent a single dollar on printed advertising in the past 12 months but Exilesoft is thriving and we’re meeting with new potential clients more often than ever before. 

So is Web 2.0 the path to ultimate World Democracy?