Telruptive

Cloudify, from the scalability experts GigaSpaces, is still its early stages. Unlike Google App Engine, Azure, Heroku, etc. this PaaS is more focused on the application life cycle and not on being a “transparent” application server and database.  The main focus is automating application and services deployment, monitoring, autoscaling, etc. The closest competitor would be Scalr.

Unlike Scalr, Cloudify’s focus is on Cloud-neutrality. Cloudify is not focusing on using specific Amazon services for scalability but instead to make a neutral Cloud platform. The advantage is that every possible Cloud being it private or public can be used and scenarios like hybrid clouds with Cloud bursting from private to public cloud are possible. The deep understanding of large-scale architectures in a company like GigaSpaces is a guarantee that Cloudify will scale in the future.

Cloudify is still missing some important functionality like security, multi-tenancy, integrations with lower-level automation frameworks (e.g. Chef and Puppet), complex upgrade management [e.g. rolling upgrades, MySQL schema upgrades, A/B testing of new features, etc.], etc. However the roadmap is pointing towards most of these items.

Software architects should understand the possibilities Cloudify, Scalr, etc. bring. By having a reusable automation framework companies are able to spend more development and operations time on bringing new business features and less on reinventing the wheel.

Twitter is having a Real-Time Analytics solution that could easily become as important as Hadoop. They talked about open sourcing it but so far have not done so.

This post is an open invitation to Twitter open source Rainbird and accelerate Real-Time Analytics adoption in the world. Hadoop has changed thousands if not millions of companies. Rainbird could do a similar thing.

In order to gather people around this subject, I am proposing that you include #TWOSRB in your tweets. #TWOSRB stands for Twitter please Open Source RainBird:
Tweet #TWOSRB
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Although the number of solutions Amazon AWS is offering has become very large, here are 5 ideas of what Amazon could be adding next.

API Marketplaces

There are thousands of APIs out there. However what is missing is an easy way for companies to control their costs. In line with other marketplaces Amazon runs, there could be an API marketplace. An API marketplace would allow third-party API providers to let Amazon do the charging. Companies would be able to pay one bill to Amazon AWS and use thousands of APIs. Also third-party API providers would be winning because they often can not charge small amounts to a large set of developers. Amazon already sends you a bill or charges your credit card, hence adding some dollar/euro cents for external API usage would be easy to do. The third-party API provider would avoid having to lock-in users in large monthly usage fees to offset credit card and management charges. Amazon of course would be the big winner because they could get a revenue share on these thousands of APIs. End-users would also be winning because they can easily compare different APIs and get community feedback from other developers and pick those APIs with the best reputation. The typical advantages of any online marketplace. Also cross-selling, advertisement, etc. and other areas can be reused by Amazon. A final advantage would even be to have Amazon be in the middle and offer a standard interface with third-parties offering competing implementations. This would allow developers to easily switch providers.

Language APIs

A lot of applications would be helped if they could use language APIs that are paid per request. Language APIs is a group name for text-to-speech, speech recognition, natural language processing, even mood analysis APIs. These are all APIs that are available individually but there is a clear economies of scale effect. The more speech you transcribe or text documents you process, the better your algorithms become. Also there is an over-supply of English language APIs but an under-supply of any other language in the world, except for Spanish, French and German perhaps. Another problem with existing APIs is that a high monthly volume is needed in the even the most basic subscription plan. Examples are Acapela VaaS pricing that costs a minimum of €1500. Very few applications will use this amount of voice.

M2M APIs and Services

Amazon is already working hard on Big Data solutions. M2M sensors can generate large volumes of data pretty quickly. S3 or DynamoDB would be ideal to store this data. However what is missing is an easy way to connect and manage large number of sensors and devices and their accompanying applications. There are few standards but with examples like Pachube, Amazon should be able to get inspired. Especially the end-to-end service management, provisioning, SLA management, etc. could use a big boost from a disruptive innovator like Amazon. Also M2M sensor intelligence could be offered from Amazon, see my other article about this subject.

Mobile APIs and Solutions

With billions of phones out there, mobilizing the Web will be the next challenge. Securely exposing company data, applications and processes towards mobile devices is a challenge today. BYOD, bring-your-own-device, is a headache for CIOs. We do not all have a MAC so we can not sign iPhone apps and launch them on the App Store. Ideally there would be a technical solution for enterprises to manage private app stores, deploy apps on different devices and be able to send notification to all or subsets of their employees. Also functionality like Usergrid in which developers would not have to focus on the backoffice logic would be of interest. Also tools to develop front-end for different devices would be appreciated, examples like Tiggzi come to mind. There are a lot of island solutions but few really integrated total solutions.

Support APIs and Services

Amazon is becoming more and more important in the global IT infrastructure business. This means that solutions will move more and more to the Cloud and sometimes be hybrid cloud. With these complex solution scenarios in which third-parties, Amazon and on-site enterprise services have to be combined, risks of things going wrong are high. Support services both from a technical point of view:

• detect failures and to automatically try to solve them
• manage support ticket distributions between different partners
• measure SLAs
• etc.

as well as from a functional point of view:

• dynamic call centers with temporary agents
• 3rd party certification programs in case small partners do not have local resources
• 3rd party support marketplace to offer more competition and compare reputations
• etc.

are all areas in which global solutions could disrupt local and island solutions that are currently in place.

Fujitsu just presented SaaSification on Cebit. Existing applications can be easily brought to the Cloud and sold via App Stores and SaaS marketplaces. IBM is also working on SaaSification and even adds multi-tenancy.

What is next?

Everybody wants to have a full App Store or SaaS Marketplace, so SaaSification is the next step after launching your store. However converting a client/server application to the Cloud is only step 1. Step 2 is creating new services that are specifically built for the Cloud.

What does Built-for-the-Cloud means?

Application design is changing. Traditional Web applications are built on a LAMP architecture. New Cloud-Ready applications should be Big Data ready and should be looking at SMAQ architectures.

Cloud-Ready applications should also accept the new reality of APIs. Both for exposure as well as consumption. This means that applications need to be redesigned according to application slices.

So if SaaSification wants to be successful then it needs to add quick enablers for multi-tenancy, big data, integration with external APIs as well as API exposure, etc. This integration concept can be called iPaaS or integration platform-as-a-Service. iPaaS should not only focus on exposing or integrating APIs but on providing complex services by integration multiple SaaS solutions together.

Other enablers should be added as well. Basically 80% of a SaaS solution consists out of the same elements or tries to solve the same problems. These could all be provided via a SaaSification PaaS:

• Blog – to describe the newest ideas.
• Forum – for people to get answers from the community.
• IT PaaS – where you run the actual business logic and UI. Data storage is assumed to be provided by the Big Data elements.
• Portal and Mobile Portal – allows to quickly define the “static” content for the web and mobile site.
• Deployment management – ideally continuous deployment or integration tools that allow fast feature by feature deployment.
• A/B testing – allow new features to be deployed to subsets of users and check which version of a feature has the highest impact on the bottom-line. A/B testing was made popular by Amazon.
• Automated testing – lots of testing can be automated but especially end-to-end and performance testing are the harder tests that should be focused on.
• Configuration management – manage the version control of the code.
• Metering and billing – be able to meter the resource usage by users, companies or any other element you want to meter and be able to bill users both for subscriptions as well as for usage, ideally with advanced set-up with overage, etc.
• Marketplace listing and provisioning – automate the listing of products on the marketplace as well as the provisioning of new services.
• Single sign-on & identity management - allow companies to use their own user credentials (e.g. SAML), authorization for third-parties (e.g. oAuth), etc.
• Reporting and data warehousing – this can be part of the big data stack but especially being able to create ad-hoc reports for instance for A/B testing . Of course regular business reporting needs to be included as well.
• ERP – accounting, resource management, etc.
• CRM – sales and lead management
• Operations & Maintenance – automation of back-ups, monitoring both for the performance and fault management but as well business monitoring.
• Support – helpdesk, ticketing system, SLA management, etc.
• Social integration – tools to add social aspects like Facebook apps, Twitter feeds, etc.
• etc.

The idea is not that a SaaSification PaaS offers all these solutions by custom development. Instead the SaaSification PaaS should allow startups to assemble an ideal architecture by combining different solutions from different providers. For example you would be able to select the support solution you prefer, e.g. desk.com, zendesk.com, etc. and this solution would be completely integrated into the overall stack, e.g. CRM integration with help desk and fault management together with sign sign-on.

SaaSification 2.0 should focus on making sure that 2-5 people can start a new dotcom solution and focus on creating a killer service and not on building up yet another stack of solutions for configuration management, support, billing, etc. If a SaaSification PaaS can shorten the time to launch with months and reduce the needs to operate the solution with several people then startups will see the value. Instead of SaaSification PaaS a good term could be Incubation PaaS, to incubate SaaS solutions. Once the business model and solution is proven, there will be money to move to a custom-build stack but during incubation and crossing-the-chasm enterpreneurs should be able to focus on delivering value to their customers and not on re-inventing the startup wheel.

The Raspberry Pi is nothing less than a revolution. A fully equipped computer the size of an iPhone for an amazing price, starting from $25. The first units will be shipped in Q2. The sites of the two global suppliers went down in the first hours due to overwhelming demand for pre-orders.

The Raspberry Pi is initially targeted as an educational device. However a low-power small fully equipped computer can do so much more. Hobbyist all over the world are working on new solutions.

Expect new solutions for consumers and the enterprise that will incorporate the Raspberry Pi. From home automation, think: “a server in every home”, to industrial use. Machine-to-Machine – M2M – solutions will be given a big boost.

Operators should look into offering industrial solutions whereby thousands of Raspberry Pi’s need to be monitored, remotely upgraded and administered.

Killing the mobile broadband oligopoly

For years operators have paid billions for spectrum. Millions of man-years have been spent on building standards like GSM, GPRS, CDMA, 3G, LTE, etc. Can disruptive innovation kill this in a few years?

Yes, it can. The FCC is finding out that large parts of the USA are still not covered by mobile broadband. After years of lobbying by groups like the New American Foundation, the FCC has finally decided to start with White Spaces. White Spaces are also being rolled out in the UK.  White Spaces allows spectrum to be opened for public usage, which was previously used by analog television or to separate different adjacent channels. White Spaces have been referred to as “WiFi on Steroids”.

Another disruptive technology is software-radio networks in which mobile devices use software-driven radio technology instead of hardware-driven radio technology. This allows a mobile device to be compatible with different standards and to switch and evolve quickly. Putting software-radio in a mobile phone will make it possible to use dynamic white spaces, in-door networks, etc.

A final disruptive technology is Openflow. Openflow, is part of software-driven networks, in which routers, bridges, firewalls, loadbalancers, etc. are implemented on software-level. Networks can be virtualized and used with different QoS and configurations at the same time.

Google and Microsoft are major backers of the White Spaces initiative. They also control two important mobile operating systems. Google is also running pilots with fiber-to-the-home. Google has its own routers and other network technology.

Google could easily be the first White Space operator and use a Fon-like way to roll out their network.

Killing ARPU

SMS is already death, and it will be just a matter of months before operators will see deep dives in revenue. Apple could make the iMessage protocol public and Android could come with a standard iMessage-enabled solution and people would no longer send SMSes but would not even realize it.

Next one on the list are calls. Roaming is already seriously being challenged for years by Skype and others. Operators are planning for VoLTE, or voice over LTE, only by 2013-2014. However most will start rolling out LTE in 2012. This is the ideal situation for Voxtrot, and others, to use the vacuum to get people accustomed to free calls. By the time VoLTE will be available there might just be one market price for it: FREE.

Other value-added services, are already being substituted. MMS is called Twitter & Facebook mobile app now. PBX are now on the Cloud. Call centers are now offered as a service.

Killing ROI

Operators are pushed by the market to invest in LTE roll-outs. However why would you need LTE? There is not a single operator service at this moment that will make people queue up in front of their stores to get an LTE subscription. There are a million and one reasons in the form of mobile apps, mobile video streaming, social networks, HD Video-calls, etc. that can push customers towards the over-the-top-players.

So network investment is only going to rise and revenues from the new technologies will be meager at best, if not cannibalizing high-ARPU services.

With Mega Upload and other sharing sites being disabled, illegal file-sharing is not going to go away. P2P is likely to come back with a vengeance. It is easy to shut down large sites. However what if special encrypted P2P apps are used to distribute the location of content and botnets for distribution. There are a lot of computers that are connected to the Internet but are badly secured. Instead of using them for spamming, Mega Upload 2.0 services can use them to store and distribute content. As long as these “hacked” computers use HTTP(S), it will be very hard for operators to distinguish regular do-it-your-self websites from illegal content hubs.

Killing the operator’s established business model

Operators have educated subscribers that everything that comes from them has to be paid for. Disruptive operators like Free.fr are undoing this education by giving a lot of services for free when you pay the monthly subscription fee.

The Freemium business model is likely to find its way into the telecom industry. The model in which 90-98% of the users get the service for free and 2-10% generate the revenue by purchasing premium services. Combined with advertisement, this is the model of big successes like Zynga, Linkedin, etc. Disruptive players that adopt Freemium are likely to start offering services outside of their country borders since the more people participate, the better. With a winner-takes-it-all business model expect roll-outs to be very aggressive.

What can the telecom industry do?

The first thing operators should do it to tell their providers that their top problem is the lack of new revenues that will sustain the industry. Not LTE roll-outs, not fiber-to-the-home, not customer experience management, etc.

Telling telecom providers that new revenue solutions will be a top priority for 2012 will shift R&D budgets into the right direction.

The second thing operators should do is to stop using their existing purchasing techniques to try to generate new revenues. Nobody will be able to invest 5 months into an innovative solution, spend 3 months doing business development, pass 3 months on filling out RFIs, pass another 4 months filling out RFPs, 2 months on contract negotiations and 6-8 months on delivery. The industry can not wait 2 years to launch the first solution. Especially the herding nature of operators is making any introduction of new innovative services difficult because everybody wants a market leading solution but nobody is willing to be the early adopter.

The response should be different. Joint innovation teams that are able to break the “established rules”; that are able to launch “beta-quality” services to early adopters; that are able to innovate with both technology, business model and go-to-market strategy, etc. Operators should be embracing innovation and learn from the IT industry and even better the dotcom industry on how innovation is done quickly, efficiently and successfully…

Google App Marketplace was the first marketplace for SaaS. However there has lately been an explosion of SaaS marketplaces. Unfortunately most of them are eCommerce sites that support subscriptions and resell Microsoft 365, some cloud backup and 3 to 5 things more.

Operators that are considering such a me-too marketplace should try harder

There is nothing like an average enterprise customer. Each customer is looking for a unique mix of services. You have innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. You have self-employed, micro, small, medium and large companies. You have industries. Users are working on different functions within a company (finance, operations, sales, etc.).

However never has it been easier to personalize product portfolios according to market segments, industries, adoption likelihood, usage, etc. Operators should not set-up one marketplace but instead set-up intelligent personalized niche marketplaces. Users can tell you which industry they belong to, what their company size is, what their function is and if they are more eager to use the latest and greatest or if they want a full eco-system with a market leading product. This means that a highly personalized portfolio can be shown instead of a bunch of generalist products.

Why sell different products via different channels?

If you have customers segmented, then ideally all relevant products are presented in one personalized marketplace. Ranging from phones, tablets, mobile apps, SaaS, on-site equipment, advanced consultancy services, support, etc.

Bringing in intelligence and social commerce

The next step is to increase the likelihood of selling a product and cross-selling products. Users like product reviews and ratings. However users love product reviews and ratings from people they trust. What if each product in addition to a general section on product reviews and ratings also has a social review section. The social review section would be like:

• these contacts from my linkedin network have bought this service
• these contacts have bought these alternative services
• their ratings are
• in addition they also bought these services

How to go from 0 to 1.000.000 products?

Many operators offer services for “the average customer”. The product catalog is relatively small. Few have more than a couple of niche products per industry. Setting up a social niche marketplace is no good if you do not have a large catalog of personalized services to sell.

SaaSification to the rescue. Every industry has a lot of small companies that have build niche products. Most of these products require on-site installations. This means a lot of CAPEX. Often more is spend on buying the hardware, base software, services to maintain the data center, support services, etc. than on the actual software. By offering these small companies a SaaSification solution whereby they can migrate their on-site solution to an operator-hosted SaaS solution, the product catalog can be quickly extended with thousands of niche products. Offering tools to make single-tenant solutions multi-tenant and to make web solutions mobile-enabled, will substantially improve your chances to attrack ISVs.

New SaaS will move from the innovators towards the early adopters, early majority, etc. Early majority products will be niche market leaders, have strict SLAs, a support eco-system, etc. Leading products can be identified by the market. Operators can spot those niche market leading products and offer special deals, even co-branding. This strategy will allow a personalized long tail strategy without the long tail costs…

When you ask a company about innovation, they talk about how their product manager asks customers what they want and how their R&D delivers new features or new products. Lots of companies are following the pain points to solution approach and engage in evolutionary innovation.  Although evolutionary innovation is the best way to grow revenue from an existing customer base in the short run, there are several disadvantages that most underestimate.

Evolution means assuming the status quo will never change

Evolving products based on customer feedback assumes that the current solution is the best possible solution for the customer and only some features are missing. Showing status-quo-breaking innovations, a.k.a. disruptive innovation, to customers will often yield a negative response.

Whoever went to the postal service to try to sell email servers as the next generation letter [letter 2.0], will have had a very negative reply. The postal service would not understand why they would want to offer free-of-charge instant delivery to their customers because it canabilizes their existing business. Instead if you would offer a sorting machine that can sort double the amount of letters in half the time for half the cost, you are a lot closer to a sale.

Whoever read “the innovator’s dilemma“, will understand that disruptive innovation is often rejected by the current customers because it either canabilizes their business or is not resolving their specific pain points.

World-leading companies focus at most 90% on evolution and at least 10% on disruptive innovation. Some like Amazon and Apple seem to invert the equation.

Companies that do not focus on disruptive innovation will sooner then later run into problems. Disruptive innovations are becoming more common place and occur more frequently. Whole industries are being transformed as we speak. Existing players can disappear in a few years:

Media:

• Books versus Kindle and eBooks
• CD, DVD and Blu-ray versus P2P, mp3 and DIVX

IT:

• Harddisks versus memory cards
• Data center per company versus Cloud IaaS
• PC with Windows versus Tablet with Android

Telecom:

• Physical PBX versus Cloud-based PBX
• Roaming versus VoIP
• Nokia feature phone versus iPhone and Android
• Circuit networks with pay per minute versus flat fee data traffic
• Physical routers, firewalls, loadbalancers versus virtual networks and Openflow
• High priced spectrum licensed versus white spaces

Towards a world of demand creation

Companies that want to innovate disruptively should focus on demand creation. Demand creation is about understanding customers hassles. Customers hassles are different from their pain points in the sense that customers do not always understand their own hassles, and even less tell you.

People never told Nokia that their phones were such a hassle to navigate the internet and to install applications on. Customers will not tell you that you need to build a touchscreen phone and app store to solve the hassles.

Disruptive innovators find those activities that customers waste a lot of time with, think are ackward, cost a lot but deliver few value, etc. by questioning, observating, networking and experimenting.

Disruptive innovators at the same time focus on developing technology capabilities in innovations that have a potential to change industries, e.g. VoIP, cloud computing, big data, collective intelligence, etc.

Disruptive innovators work together with early adopters to map out their hassles into hassle maps. To understand if solutions for these hassles are like painkillers [big market] or just vitamines [no or small market]. They propose the simplest solutions possible. Those that do not require a user manual.  First on paper and only when everything is validated [technical solution, business model, distribution, purchasing stakeholders, marketing] do they build a real prototype. Ideally customers can personalize the new solution towards their individual needs. Listening to customers is key. Being able to add features frequently and validating in a statistical manner which one contribute to the bottom line, allows innovators to rapidly go from an early beta to a ground-breaking product.

Disruptive innovations do not need to cost millions to launch. Good books on the matter are: Nail it then scale it, Demand: creating what people love before they know they want it, the lean startup, etc.

MIT is running an article about a new technology that allows printing electronics on commercial scale.

A 30 cents sticker can contain electronics to measure temperature. Imagine the possibilities of combining printing electronics with RFID/NFC or even longer distance transmission. Being able to transmit information from thousands of stickers to close by routers about temperature, electricity usage, identification, speed, etc. can revolutionize a lot of markets: energy monitoring, transport/logistics, gaming, sports, security, clothing, etc. Just like 3D printing this is a technology that needs to be followed because of its disruptive character…

The economist is featuring a nice article about a new communication medium – transmitting data via light or LiFi. Additionally there is a very nice video on TED about DIDO:

In the future 10Gbps for several meters would be possible. Among some uses is WiFi-like access but via light instead of radio in planes to avoid cabling and interceptions.

The technology seems to be invented, now it is time to find good usage for it. Most new technologies can only be used to their full potential when combined with others.

So what would be possible if you combined:

LiFi with Augmented Reality

At the moment augmented reality means a lot of image recognition in real-time which requires expensive equipment or high-speed backoffice connections. However what would happen if you could combine LiFi sensors with augmented reality. Imagine a data center in which when pointing your phone towards the servers, the LiFi sensor would start receiving real-time information about the server. This would avoid the current drawbacks of sending information about this server over the Internet to then return to the phone. All what would be needed would be a LiFi sensor and a mobile app. No backoffice processing. No security problem with data that has to leave the building.

LiFi with Transport

Your car can negotiate with the objects around it. Traffic jams could be announced from car to car and drivers could be alerted about the fact that they are going to run into a very long traffic jam and should better exit in the next exit.

LiFi with Dating

Put a bachelor LiFi batch around your neck and by pointing your phone towards a desired partner you would get a compatibility score and if the score is high enough some clues about what he or she would like to talk about.

Many more things

There are probably many more possibilities so do not be shy to share them so they can be added to the post…