Cloud computing overview

Straight-forward explanantion of cloud computing. Covers iaas, saas, and paas at a high level as well as the main characteristics of cloud services and issues. Cloud services:

• are elastic, can be bought by the hour, month, etc
• are flexible and scalable
• help organsations avoid capital expenditure

Agree with the above but the last one is a benefit not a characteristic.

While security is always an issue, a useful analogy to consider is that of money in the bank. We're more comfortable with holding cash in the bank rather than at home for instance. Simply because banks invest much more in security than a single homeowner ever would. Same goes for data stored on an organsation's server compared to a specialist cloud service provider

Designing for innovation

A look at innovating business models.

Designing For Innovation: Business Models

View more presentations from Patrick van Abbema.

Rumours of MTN leaving South Africa

Rumours surfaced during February that MTN was planning on moving its group operations to Dubai. This was vigorously denied by the company. However, some global management services departments are based in Dubai to serve to increasingly strategic regions such as Nigeria and Iran. Both of these countries have greater growth opportunities than South Africa and Nigeria generates more revenue than South Africa. This trend is bound to continue.

According to the ITWeb article, at least one analyst, reckons that MTN's longer term prospects are better served by a primary listing outside of South Africa.

Looking at other companies in the country there is a definite possibility that companies with similar strategies will be faced with the same decisions on greater investment in service infrastructure outside of South Africa.

Standard Bank, for instance, is looking to emerging economies for new engines of growth. While revenue from outside South Africa is relatively meagre, the greatest growth opportunities clearly lie in other regions of Africa or offshore. Will we be having similar conversations about the banking group in the short to medium term?

For these companies, South Africa will always be a strong revenue base but to become a truly global company some of the South African-ness may have be sacrificed.

Zoho

Zoho is under-rated, not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the name. No other platform has the breadth and depth of vision as Zoho. It's an amalgamation of Google apps and Salesforce.com.

Read what ReadWriteWeb has to say on this.

Force.com as a development platform

I recently had a discussion with attendees at a Salesforce.com administration module training course. It struck me that many of them commented on and were excited with the prospect of extending the CRM functionality or simply creating new custom objects for other purposes.

What was more surprising was that such a topic was discussed at an administration training session rather than a development course. This implies that extending the platform, at a basic level, can be relatively easily achieved at the admin level or through clicks rather than having to resort to code.

I wonder how this will play out at the interface between traditional IT teams and those business users who have knowledge of business requirements and processes? I think there is going to be a big shift towards business users doing rapid prototyping-type work while the formal implementation may be left to the developers. Having said that, a number of quick and dirty functional enhancements could easily remain as enhancements.

So it would appear that what is happening in the internet consumer space is beginning to happen in the internet business space on the back of the growth of cloud service providers. Platforms such as force.com are driving this shift in behaviour and are therefore exceedingly well placed to benefit from this including in regions such as South Africa and the rest of Africa.

Thoughts on choosing a saas provider

Have been trying to unpack some of my thoughts on saas and saas providers. Here's the first pass.

1. Are the requirements met by the existing offering? Are add-ons, third-party modules required?

Understand how much of the native platform's functionality will meet your needs and how much will have to be added on (and at what cost)

2. How open is the saas platform to integrating with other applications?

If you have existing an application, say, which holds your master customer data like a CIF then you'd want to integrate the data rather than maintaining multiple databases

3. Is the platform extensible? Can new functionality be added and/or existing functionality customised?

You don't want to invest in a niche-platform which will be limiting should you want to extend functionality later

4. What is the track record of the saas provider and what is the vision?

Have a quick look backwards and forwards, you want a platform which has been around for a while and has a roadmap for growth.

5. Are you considering saas because you really need and understand the benefits or are you caught up in the cloud hype?

In my view there are a couple of compelling reasons for going saas: you don't want the hassle of managing infrastructure, you want to be up and running quickly and you need access from geographically dispersed regions (the common theme being avoiding effort and investment in and management of I.T. infrastructure)

Gatorpeeps: do we really need it?

I'm all for new South African 2.0 sites. Have just heard about the launch of Gatorpeeps which is a twitteresque microblogging site with a focus on communities in Africa (or at least this is what I can gather). I haven't signed up and so can't comment on actual functionality but that's part of the problem. Do I really need another microblogging account?

Somebody called kilps asked the question "is this really needed over twitter? why not just sit on top of twitter as an african filter of sorts?". I have to agree. Voracious social media consumers and contributors may disagree but we're in danger of diluting the value of social media, ironically, by launching sites which are similar in function to existing properties which have critical mass.

Of course, this is not meant to be anti-innovation, simply anti-emulation if the value of the new site to a clearly defined niche is not defined and/or if the new functionality it brings is similar.