Back from a quick trip to Miami for a sales call (I know, it sounds terrible). But here’s what I found interesting and hope you do too. In a tip-of-the-cap to Spinal Tap, I’ve taken the list up to 11 for this week:

1. Excellent article by Timothy O’Neill-Dunne on how technology is transforming the travel industry
2. PhoCusWright Connect take on Hotel Prices on Google Maps. The entry of Google into meta-search (even if they don’t want to overtly call it that just yet) is an interesting development.
3. RedMonk’s James Governor drinks Microsoft Kook-Aid at MIX?
4. TechCrunch reports that Google is going to incorporate Adobe Flash in Chrome OS.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I think what the new friend is doing is stupid.  The headline says it all.  I’m not sure what sane reason Google has for changing its stance as the leading advocate for HTML5 to embracing Flash. To say it’s about choice would be a trite answer.
5. Marc Benioff is becoming something of a guest-poster-in-residence on TechCrunch. His latest post is about how he feels the iPad is going to lead a revolution in how people interact with technology.
6. Great article by Enterprise Irregular Paul Greenberg on the state of Social CRM
7. Interesting study on the performance of the Top 45 UK travel sites. Not terribly surprising that customer service is weakest link, but also telling that the steps after search…that is the part when people actually look to book…otherwise known as the part where travel companies make money…perform weakest.
8. European LCC EasyJet wants to add booking options over Facebook.  Would you book an airline over Facebook? Or maybe the right question is: “Are there any reasons that you wouldn’t book a flight on Facebook?”
9. Lawson to offer ERP on AWS instances.  A big step from a company whose CEO Harry Debes predicted SaaS was a fad just 2-3 years ago.  Still this is not SaaS, and only Cloud-ish (it’s single-instances on the Amazon Cloud; doesn’t significantly change the game on pricing or upgrades), but a baby-step in the right direction.  Basically it seems that Lawson wants to provide hosted solutions, but doesn’t want to invest in its own datacenters. Much better analysis from industry pundits Vinnie Mirchinani and Frank Scavo.
10. What brand of Freedom Would you Like? Apple’s or Google’s? Seems to me that at least Apple’s pretty straightforward with their approach. Google? It’s a little more murky.
11. Bonus Round: Forrester analyst John Rymer’s take on the future of app servers.

Last week Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens introduced a new initiative called Deltacloud that has a very lofty goal of simplifying the process of invoking cloud services via a new unified standard.  It address interoperability which can be an important challenge in cloud computing for ISVs.  Out of the box they have some pretty good market coverage, supporting Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization, VMWare ESX and Amazon EC2 with support for Rackspace to follow.

This is a good start, but I think that this is about as far as Red Hat’s going to be able to take this.  Nowhere is there any mention of, nor do I expect support for, some of the other leading Cloud platforms from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.com.  And this highlights the both the problems with the mega-vendors and the open source movement.  Open Source levels the playing field, but that is diametrically opposed to what the mega-vendors like Microsoft and Oracle want, particularly Microsoft who loves their proprietary standards.  And between Microsoft and Oracle, they control so much of the ISV ecosystem, that I don’t see how Red Hat’s Deltacloud gets any traction.  Even Stevens’ own statement talks about “creating a buzz”.  Well maybe for one day.

The other day I responded to a tweet from James Urquhart that prompted an interesting discussion:

“Does a successful virtualization strategy take away from the ROI of cloud computing?” <- Interesting. Not enough to avoid cloud, me thinks.“

What that made me start to think about was the underlying value proposition and ROI of cloud computing and the juxtoposition of operational and financial goals.

Under Urquhart’s perspective, a company that has deployed a successful VM has a lower Cloud strategy ROI than a company that has not deployed VM.  This may be true from a raw number perspective because the company with the VM strategy is already getting much more benefit from their existing infrastructure.  But they may still fight problems with scalability, depending on the projected use of their application, which might push them towards the cloud.

But it brought me to a very practical question that few are talking about: “How can companies maximize the value from their existing IT infrastructure when planning a cloud strategy?” If the Cloud is all about ROI, how should companies factor in their existing investments?

Now most public cloud advocates talk about the Cloud as if there is no existing infrastructure.  All you hear is No CapEx, Lower OpEx, Unlimited Scalability, Superior Performance.  Yet most of the people they’re trying to sell to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in infrastructure investments.  For those companies the ROI of the Cloud is a much more difficult proposition because it leaves them with dead assets.  Yes, they can try to re-purpose those assets to run other systems, but that would require some detailed analysis and planning of their entire infrastructure needs, look closely at when to retire servers or other equipment and build a phased plan to enter the Cloud.  Quite frankly that kind of analysis is probably long overdue anyways.  But in today’s economic environment – which is improving, yet still a long way from boom times – people are trying to figure out how to squeeze more value from what they already have, not how to abandon it more quickly.

And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud strategy (although a cloud on your own infrastructure in my view is not a cloud), they may be able to get more value out of virtualization and other strategies, but they lose the operational efficiencies and instant scalability to match spikes in demand that the Cloud has to offer.  It’s an alternative to the public cloud, but in many cases still doesn’t solve the business problem that moving to the Cloud is supposed to address.  As an aside @krishnan wrote a good post on his own changing views regarding the debate between public and private clouds and helped spark a few ideas for this post.

So it leads me to this.  If “Cash for Clunkers” worked for the car industry (at least to the tune of 690K vehicles), why not bring the concept to the Cloud?  Why not “cash for Infrastructure”? When you think about it, it’s a virtual rush to acquire clients.  While there may not be true lock-in, it’s certainly a hassle to move operations from Cloud to Cloud, so it’s time to lock-up customers.  So why wouldn’t deep-pocked companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft offer some sort of upfront cash for a company’s existing computing infrastructure assets to lock in a customer now?  Of course companies on the next tier like OpSource, Rackspace or GoGrid probably don’t have the resources to offer it, so they’re at a disadvantage.

Does anyone have the “onions” to make this offer?  I’m sure there are a lot of companies who’d be willing to take them up on it.  If any of the above companies run with my idea, I only want 0.5% of the assets they acquire in compensation

UPDATE: @lmacvittie had a great suggestion on Twitter to improve the idea. It doesn’t have to be cash. Even credits for cloud usage would be a good incentive. Maybe now guys like OpSource and Rackspace have a way to play.

Geva Perry is starting a series called “The Purpose-Driven Cloud” where it appears that he’s trying to address the aforementioned question by evaluating a number of different attributes that are all technology-centric.  It looks like it should be a worthwhile discussion, although it’s mostly written from a developer’s point of view.

But I think his angle is missing some important elements (although in fairness they may get addressed along the way) that are more customer-driven and business-driven:

• Suitability to task: What is the kind of application that you have?  Is it primarily workflow and transaction oriented like an ERP application or are you doing heavy number crunching and using complex algrorithms like a pricing credit default swaps?  Some cloud platforms like Force.com are great for the former, but wouldn’t be good for the latter. And if you are accessing data frequently, cloud storage options like Amazon S3, might not be the right selection.
• Data and Code Portability: When you are deciding what cloud platform to select, you’re not just making that decision for yourself, you’re making it for your customers.  So choosing a platform that doesn’t lock you in to a proprietary codebase or where extracting the data is more of a challenge must be a primary consideration.  Nobody wants to be locked in.  Call it the ‘Hotel California’ effect.  Many companies are wary of the Force.com platform for this very reason, unless they’re building their product in order to take advantage of the Salesforce.com ecosystem.  Also, what kind of protections are you afforded via code escrow?  Think about the challenges that companies who built their businesses — don’t just think about building applications — on Coghead?  For many this was extremely challenging to their business and to some it was fatal.  there’s a financial stability aspect to this as well, so advantage to the mega-vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce.
• What Does Existing Code Look Like?: Let’s start out simply: do you have existing code?  If not your choices are much wider.  But if you’re heavily invested in .NET or Java, your choices may be clearer, because the migration path afforded to you will be faster.  And speed does count for a lot.  Here’s one area where Microsoft Azure will have a strong value proposition to existing Microsoft shops.
• Integration: According to Forrester Research, integration is a top concern of clients when selecting SaaS companies.  So does the platform you’re selecting make this challenge any easier on you?  With Force.com, AWS and OpSource Connect you have a lot of existing connectors and modules sitting at the ready that make solving the integration problem easier and significantly reduce the associated coding effort.  Of course there are integration platforms like Boomi and Pervasive Software that you can integrate into your application, but if all else is equal, why not go with the platform that has the integration built in?

What else did I miss?  Please let me know.

Yesterday my CTO and I were given a demo of OpSource’s new OpSource Cloud, now in private beta. My company, Symphony Services, already is an OpSource partner, but as we’re starting to get more involved in developing Cloud-based solutions and POC’s, we figured to take a look under the hood. Admittedly we didn’t see much, but here are some early observations:

• Nice admin features: You start with a primary admin account which can then create any number of sub-admin roles with a lot of ability to set permissions based on role. Seems more granular control than what you have with Amazon.
• You have to set up a VLAN at the outset, so there’s an additional layer of security before the firewall.  Unless and until you open up the firewall the cloud is locked down.  Good fit for people who are looking for private clouds.
• The network set up seems superior in some ways to what AWS offers, particularly the IP mapping ability
• They offer a ‘local’ storage option as opposed to just cloud storage, which can help with application performance on data-intensive operations.  But today the limit is 400GB per virtual server which seems kinda limited, especially when you consider how many people have terabyte drives in their homes now and that many of the really large information services providers have petabytes of data that they’re working with.  But then again, OpSource seems to be focusing on the Enterprise rather than large service providers, so it may not be as much of an issue.
• While spinning up new servers seemed very simple and there was quite a lot of control given, what we didn’t see was anything about dynamic provisioning.  Perhaps we’ll see that once we start playing around in the sandbox during the private beta.
• With their focus on the Enterprise they’re making some clever use of their OpSource Billing solution (that they acquired when they purchased LaCayla about a year and a half ago) by being able to bill at the sub-account level, ostensibly to help charge different departments based on usage.
• The UI is a bit primitive, but they copped to that right up front and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t have this fixed when the product is ready to go live.

So we certainly saw enough that we’re going to give it a test drive and become part of the private beta, and perhaps run a few client POC through it as an alternative to Amazon Web Services.  Keep you posted as we learn more.

According to a recent post by SD Times’ David Worthington, the Azure team is projecting that 50,000 applications will reside in its cloud within three years.  Did anyone expect something different?

Everything at Microsoft is big, and if it can’t be big, it can’t be at Microsoft.  The company has over 10 products that have annual sales over a billion dollars.  And with a large installed base of applications already written on the .NET framework, it’s logical to think that many companies will develop their next generation applications on the next generation of Microsoft technology, especially as Microsoft is trying to make the upgrade path smooth.  But the operative word is “trying”.  Even according to their own website, many of the new .NET Services are still in the works, although I don’t doubt that they’ll get it done eventually.  But the question is when. Time is ticking along.  Force.com has over 100,000 applications already and AWS and AppEngine are picking up steam.

And that’s why the introduction of the concept of Azure was more important to the actual set of services and technology. Part of the strategy is a stall.  Don’t develop on AWS or Force.com or Google’s AppEngine, wait for Azure.  It will make life easy, it will feel good.  Even the name evokes visions of sitting on a beach looking at beautiful blue waters under crystal clear skies.  But at the end of the day they’re going to have a deliver a platform that performs very well (as a comparison, Salesforce.com runs its’ entire business on about 1,000 servers — that’s extremely efficient) and provides a reasonably clear and easy upgrade path to existing Microsoft shops.  And more importantly, it’s going to have to deliver a strong business proposition.  Worthington states that “…[Microsoft] is pitching Azure more on its merits as a business model than as a technology,” and they’ll have to.  How they structure the platform pricing and cost of the different software components will be key.  But the guys at Microsoft are no dummies, so we’ll see what they come up with in a month or two.  But otherwise, there are a lot of technology options and interesting business models that ISVs and Enterprises alike will have to choose from.