Outside Innovation

2011 in Cloud Computing: The Empire Strikes Back!

Patty’s Pioneers’ Predictions for 2011
By Pat Kerpan, One of Patty’s Pioneers

MY PREDICTIONS FOR THIS YEAR

Looking back on my 2010 predictions, I say I went 5 for 10, my colleagues insist it is 7 for 10. You be the judge (http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/12/30/2010-in-cloud-computing-game-on.aspx). Where I missed was actually believing that cloud-washing would start winding down (instead of ramping up) and that the basic and simple structures of the cloud market would become evident (unfortunately opacity has increased as some vendors and analysts pursue a “scare the enterprise users” approach to their business ambitions).

As a note, I am liberal in my cloud definition, so when I say “cloud” I mean public, private, partner, hybrid, etc., and am talking about Infrastructure as a Service. All standard disclaimers apply. While my views are obviously informed by my work at CohesiveFT, the predictions and commentary below are mine and do not reflect corporate statements from my employer.

The “Hardware Support for Software Encryption” Conversation Will NOT Begin

This is an about face from last year's predictions. No matter to what degree, enterprises CANNOT have their data in motion in “plain text” on a third-party network over which they have no insight, visibility or control. The hardware side of the technology market will expend resources on security approaches that have the potential for providing customer lock-in, rather than solutions which would leverage existing customer skills, understanding, and IT assets.

Expect a Sea Change in Application and Information Architectures

Intersecting waves of technology are converging: Cloud computing, massive parallel processing, distributed file systems like Hadoop, dynamic provisioning to the cloud, embedded computing, open mobile platforms and APIs, and semantic publishing, to cite just a few. Patty’s Pioneers (technology architects) have been talking recently about how these phenomena will profoundly change the way we do business, use computers and address problems. We already have the ability to send huge volumes of information to the compute cloud to perform long-running, compute-intensive pattern detection. Google works that way. The genome project and many other scientific endeavors are enabled by this capability. You can solve BIG problems. You can offload bursty, compute-intensive applications. You can enable new capabilities like high-frequency trading.

Information, data types, and file formats are changing too. Scientific and technical data isn’t always organized in relational databases or spreadsheets. There are huge flat files, analog files, arrays, sequences, 3D models, and a myriad of data types and patterns that most business IT was never designed to address. We are sensing and detecting real-time changes in everything from weather to ocean pH. We perform chemical analyses, create molecular models, and find interrelationships among everything. We have massive amounts of genetic sequence data, with genome browsers, model organism databases, molecule- or process-specific databases.

Information that we want to share and have customers find and use is increasingly being tagged to accelerate semantic processing. Many of Patty’s Visionaries (customer-centric e-business leaders) have already embarked on large semantic tagging projects. They are convinced that, in their fields of endeavor, important concepts need to pop out of the sea of words and data so that these concepts can be linked to the appropriate behaviors and services. A company name came be linked to news, financial data, personnel information, products, patents, geography, partners, and customers. A chemical formula or a gene sequence can be linked, viewed, and acted upon with a staggering array of tools.

This next generation of distributed computing and pattern matching will unleash a new economy – with new opportunities for value creation.

As I contemplate the tremendous and revolutionary changes that will hit all of our businesses as a result of the new ways in which we can now detect patterns and process information, I am grateful for the magic of the human brain. Our intuition and emotions combine with our sense-making and pattern matching to make magical leaps across disciplines.

This next generation of computing architectures is upon us. It’s time to take the plunge. Say goodbye to Microsoft Word, say hello to N-dimensional arrays and patterns. Say goodbye to PDAs and laptops. Say hello to holograms you can gesture through.

MIT's Smart Mobility Project Featured at TEDx Boston

I enjoyed Ryan Chin's presentation about the MIT Smart Cities' mobility on demand project.  It's a compelling vision with some great green engineering (intelligent wheels, folding electric cars and one-way vehicle-sharing). An important next step: creation of the software required to manage the dynamic pricing required to incentivize people to return cars, scooters, and bikes to the locations with the most demand.  Here's a link to my report on the innovative work being done by this team under the visionary leadership of Prof. William J. Mitchell at MIT. Here's the great conceptual map that CollectiveNext created during Ryan's talk.

Image: Franco Vairani

How Customer-Centric Visionaries Make Information Valuable

Last week I hosted two very rich customer gatherings: the semiannual meetings of my Pioneers’ and Visionaries’ groups. The tradition in these meetings is one of “show and tell”—clients share what they’ve been working on and seek advice from their peers. There are so many great “aha!s” that came out of both meetings, I’ll be digesting and summarizing the take-aways over the next several weeks.

“Documents” Have Become Interactive Landing Pages

Visionaries don’t present information in the form of flat online documents or lock information up in PDFs (although they make it easy to download and print PDFs). They provide actionable, interactive information in small bite-size chunks. Their “Document 2.0’s” include links to curated, authoritative, structured data, such as:

• Expert ratings
• 3D Molecular models or chemical formulas
• Sortable parameters to help in decision-making
• Rich interactive imagery
• Bills of material with links to product details
• Custom-configured products they can tweak
• Comments and discussions with experts

How to Spend the Infrastructure $$ in the U.S. Stimulus Package (Part 1): Broadband for All?

As the U.S. government wrestles with the final shape of its economic stimulus package, there is much talk about investing in infrastructure, including technology infrastructure, as a way to jumpstart our economy.

One of the key themes that Barack Obama has promulgated is providing broadband access to all Americans. The Obama/Biden position is laid out on the barackobama.com Web site:

“Deploy a Modern Communications Infrastructure

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Barack Obama believes that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access. As a country, we have ensured that every American has access to telephone service and electricity, regardless of economic status, and Obama will do likewise for broadband Internet access. Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.”¹

There are over 100 million people in the U.S. that do not have broadband Internet access. Although Americans are usually credited with “inventing” the Internet, we have fallen woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world in household deployment of broadband Internet access. I agree with the Obama team that making broadband Internet access available to all U.S. residents (and visitors) would help stimulate our economy. There are both short-term and longer-term benefits. In the short term, there’s the investment in computers, cabling, towers, set-top boxes, and jobs for smart local people to hook everyone up. By bringing broadband Internet access to more people, we’ll empower young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural. We’ll give small businesses in rural areas the opportunity to thrive locally while selling globally, and we’ll make it easy for more people to work from their homes. In the longer term, we’ll improve the level and quality of education and knowledge of our citizenry.

It’s one thing to have an intention; it’s another to have a plan. The best plan I’ve seen to-date, IMHO, is the one being promulgated by my brother, Andy Seybold! Andrew Seybold is a leading expert in mobile and wireless communications. His opinions and his track record are well-respected by executives in the world’s mobile phone companies, by emergency communications professionals in local and state governments, and by many of the leaders in the IT industry. One of the things that makes Andy’s advice so valuable is that he is very involved with the emergency communications practitioners—the so-called “first responders” in our nation’s communities.

My Brother’s Advice to the FCC re: U.S. Broadband Access

You can find Andrew Seybold’s plan in his white paper, Broadband for All Americans, published on December 30, 2008 and in his Open Letter to Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps, published in Andy’s blog on Tuesday, January 27, 2009.

In his white paper, Andy describes the complicated thicket of intertwined issues in this way: “We have a number of issues that have to be addressed: making access available where it is not, making it affordable to more of our citizens where we already have it, and how to equip those who want to take advantage of broadband with devices so they are able to use the service.”