Tech Trends

Tide Launches iPhone Stain App; Customer Patience Levels Drop to Zero

About 15 years ago I visited Microsoft for a briefing on their “Information At Your Fingertips” strategy. Good idea, I thought, though a bit self-evident. Where else would you want your information?

Their strategy is now a reality (though stolen by Apple and the Web) with new applications like the “Stain Brain” app for the iPhone, developed by – who else? the makers of Tide. With this application you can compare you stain with other stains on line, find out how to remove it (hmm, Tide, Tide, and more Tide, I suspect) and upload your own stain-removal ideas.

At first, I wondered why someone couldn’t just read the back of the box, or Google “stain removal.” But then I realized that we are all becoming junkies on getting the information we want, when we want it, wherever we want it, and it has to be in a fun, graphical form. And we need to be able to talk about how we erased that stain and, heaven forbid, how we got it, too.

B2B buyers are getting hooked on this instant gratification and, increasingly, want it in their professional lives too. The quickest route to booking a sales call, a white paper download or just a click-through is to give them the information they need, when they need it, in the form they need it.

That means “content marketing,” “lead nurturing,” “funnel management,” “customized content” or whatever buzzword you use to describe tailoring content and delivery to where the prospect is in the sales cycle. In addition to all the other channels you must feed, you’d better have a mobile, social strategy for sales and support as well.

The next question: How to manage this on top of all the other content monsters you must feed every day? Would love to hear some answers.

Technorati Tags: B2B marketing,content marketing,consumer marketing,lead nurturing

Now: Virtualization Value Meals

If you’ve ever had a kid you know about product bundling. Fast food  chains combine a burger, drink, fries and – most importantly – the toy in a colorful box. The customer escapes the agony of their three-year-old choosing specific items, and the chain prices the combo high enough to meet their profit objective. It works because it’s simple.

Based on early feedback, it seems like Cisco, VMware and EMC are a few fries short of a Happy Meal in pitching their bundles of physical servers, virtualization software and storage hardware to customers building private clouds (internal virtual data centers.)

Bundling can provide several benefits, but the new joint venture formed by the companies to sell these bundles has to pitch the right benefits to the right customers.

One benefit is lower costs, but most big companies can already beat up vendors on price – especially in today’s market. Simplicity is another potential draw, but large companies will still need to integrate these bundles with their legacy gear and applications. Even EMC says customers will have to do 20 to 30 percent of the required customization for their bundles.

Providing “one throat to choke” in the event of problems is a possible benefit of buying a bundle. Buying from a single source cuts down on the costs of vendor management and possibly also of troubleshooting. But that benefit, in turn, could be offset by the threat of vendor lock-in, as some of VMware’s virtualization software will be tweaked for use in these bundles.

Cisco and EMC/VMware are smart companies, and I’ll bet they’ve figured out a lot of these issues. But customers haven’t gotten the message yet. Hey, maybe they should talk about the free toy.

Ellison Keeps the SPRAC Alive?

Here’s a story I’m surprised hasn’t gotten a lot more play: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says he plans to not only keep the Sun’s SPARC microprocessor technology alive, but to increase investment in it (assuming Oracle’s acquisition of Sun passes European antitrust review.

SPARC processors were one half of Sun’s one-two punch (the other being its Solaris operating system) that drove its success, especially in the financial services business, before the dot-com bust. Since then, Sun has been wandering from one strategy to another, essentially giving up on promoting SPARC in favor of storage and server hardware based on Intel’s X86 architecture just like everyone else on the planet.

Does this mean Oracle is going to be selling SPARC-based notebooks? No way, says Ellison. He wants to compete with IBM as a “systems” company (read: hardware and software combined) that can take on the really big jobs like running airline reservation or banking systems. In fact, he says, his model for Oracle is IBM when it was the prime “systems” company that determined the competitive environment in which all other vendors played.

Ellison’s vision seems to be tweaking future versions of SPARC to run with Solaris and Oracle to deliver really great database, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. But isn’t that what Sun has tried to do for years with SPARC, without notable success? Haven’t a lot of the big SPARC-based Sun boxes always run Oracle databases? Can Ellison, who grew up in the software, not the hardware business succeed where Sun couldn’t? And does SPARC actually have the oomph to differentiate future Sun/Oracle software? (Some analysts say maybe; others doubt it.)

If Ellison sticks to his word, SPARC could reemerge as a competitor to Intel’s X86 architecture – not in the commodity desktop and server space, but in the more rarified world of specialized database and storage servers and network switches. Among the targets are not only IBM itself, of course,  but Cisco with its Unified Computing System push into the server market. Give Ellison credit, at least, for keeping competition alive and reaching for the next big Brass Ring instead of just hunkering down to get through the recession.

Just the Virtualization Facts, M'aam

Among the usual flood of pre-VMWorld announcements was an unusually understandable and to-the-point briefing from VKernel. Its pitch: making it simple and inexpensive (or at least simpler and less expensive) to create more VMs on a given set of physical servers.

The basic problem, says Vice President of Product Management and Marketing Kevin Conklin, is that while VMware claims customers should be able to run 10-12 virtual machines on each physical server, most are stuck at 5-7 VMs because they can’t see well enough into the virtual infrastructure to determine which processors or physical servers have the processor, memory or storage capacity to handle more VMs. That’s where VKernel comes in, a one year old company with $7 million in funding and about 200 customers, comes in.

Its Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance creates reports (click on the image below for a larger view) that even I could understand showing the best places to create new VMs and how to eliminate or avoid bottlenecks with existing VMs. “We’re maniacally focused,” says Conklin, “on providing you with an answer, in an actionable format, so you can actually fix something with this product.”

This week VKernel introduced an Optimization Pack that features three new applets that not only show you which VMs are overloaded and which are unused and can be culled, but let you single-click to ease the processor and memory bottlenecks. While it can find wasted storage or storage-related bottlenecks, CA can’t yet go in and fix those problems. Not only does it take more work to integrate CA with storage vendors’ APIs, but most storage admins fight tooth and nail against anyone messin’ with their volumes.

Even so, VKernel claims some customers at getting instant return on investment just by using CA to find and then manually delete unused VMs, often saving (it claims) 10 to 20% of a customer’s overall storage.  That's an approach even a CFO can love in the downturn – especially given VKernel’s pricing, which it claims is a third to a fifth of competing products.

 

 

 

Chargeback Too Hard? Try Shameback.

Remember chargebacks? It’s the practice of tracking how much bandwidth, CPU time, disk storage or other expensive IT stuff a specific employee or business unit is using, and then charging them for what they used. The idea is that if people have to pay for what they use, they’ll use less of it.

Great idea, except it gets so complicated and cumbersome that very few IT organizations I talk to these days bother with it. Half the time, they don’t even know how many virtual machines they’re running or how much disk space they have, much less who’s using them or how the heck to charge them for it. Then there’s the monumental hassle of getting agreement on chargeback formulas, as well as all the paperwork required to issue and pay the bills. It doesn’t quite make sense, especially in a recession, when you remember you’re only talking about “funny money” – shifting pocket change from one pocket of the corporate pants into another, rather than spending your time getting more money from customers.

But how about if you could just show people how many IT resources they were wasting, holding them up to public ridicule – or at least pressure from their bosses – to hold down their ravenous appetites? That’s how some customers are using Hyper9’s Virtualization Optimization Suite, according to the company’s Director of Product Management Jonathan Reeve. It’s called “showback,” he says, when the offender is just shown the error of their ways – say, a report listing all the VMs they created to test a new application and never shut down, leaving them to eat up power, CPU cycles and disk space. “Shameback” is – well, when the conversation gets more pointed. If Sigmund Freud were a data center manager, he would have figured this out long ago.

Half a Pound of Security, and Slice It Thin

Customers want choice, they want control and they want low-cost.  Zscaler does a great job of promising all three, with a deli-counter style approach to marketing that lets customers choose what they need while touting the quality of what they get.

Zscaler delivers Web security in a software in a service (SaaS) model.  Rather than installing hardware or software on site, all a customer has to do is configure their clients’ Web browsers so their traffic first runs through one of the global data centers where Zscaler runs its gateways. The gateways act as proxy servers for all traffic, monitoring for inbound threats such as viruses as well as outbound vulnerabilities such as data leakage.  

Because the service was built from the ground up for SaaS, Zscaler claims each of its gateways can handle 50-100 times as many transactions per second as its competitors with far less latency. Customers can choose to buy any combination of four modules: security, management, compliance and bandwidth, according to Vice President of Security Research Michael Sutton. Among other capabilities, Zscaler allows for granular management of user activities, such as allowing them to view but not upload videos to YouTube. Pricing, depending on which combination of services a customer chooses, runs between $1-3 per user per month, says Sutton.

And from a content marketing perspective, their Web site does an unusually good job of “indexing” the content by subject area. The marketing message stands out from other “cloud computing” pitches because it is crisp, convincing and well-delivered, giving the impression they have so many smart things to say you wouldn’t have time to listen – but wish you did.

  

Not Files, But File Servers, In the Cloud

If plain storage is a commodity, on-line storage is even more of a commodity. So figures Egnyte Corp., a one-year-old startup that sells not cloud storage, but cloud storage servers, which look and act just like a local file servers but without all the hassles of, like, buying and maintaining equipment.

Egnyte is also different from storage in the cloud players like Carbonite and MozyPro, says co-founder Rajesh Ram, in that it’s designed to let company employees share files with each other and outside their organization, as well as regularly updates those files, not just leave them sitting untouched in the cloud in the event of a disaster. Their secret sauce, he says, is a virtualized, multitenant architecture that allows them to support as many as 450 customers with one commodity, $2,500 server.

In keeping with its “not just storage” theme, Egnyte doesn’t even price per the amount of storage provided, but instead charges about $15 per “power user” per month for up to ten users. Customers with p to three users get about 20Gbytes of storage per user, rising to a Tbyte per user for companies with up to ten users and unlimited storage for 11 or more users. Given its business, rather than consumer-focused market, these relatively low storage limits pose no problems for its customers, and keep Egnyte’s costs down to a reasonable level, says Ram. If they can indeed hold down their infrastructure costs, it’s an interesting play which might be transferable to other types of servers such as messaging, though Ram says he’ll probably OEM such products rather than develop them internally.  

 

 

 

 

Building A Cloud App? First, Don't Screw Up

My former colleague Mark Hall is predicting IBM's most recent cloud computing initiatives will fail. Mark thinks IBM's first offering, providing Web-based servers for application and test functions, will fail because it won't beat similar offerings from Microsoft and Google on price. He predicts IBM's second service, providing cloud-based "thin clients" (with most of the application processing and data done on a remote server and fed to a rudimentary, low end client device) will fail because "There is something visceral in the minds and hearts of people about having their own PCs."

I would argue there's more than just a "gut feeling" that makes me crave my own "thick client" PC with my very own processor and hard drive with all my own stuff on it. It's experience with Web sites such as LinkedIn and Web apps such as Salesforce.com.

First, the Web isn't always there. For that matter, I can't even get a decent cell phone signal half the time, even in my own house. And I'm going to rely on an Internet connection to see my own work in progress, customer lists and to-do lists? I don't think so.

Second, the Web is too slow -- not for background applications like backup but for anything that requires a crisp response, such as looking up a long-lost customer name in a rush or dashing off a quick email. There's just too much time w-a-i-t-i-n-g for screens to refresh or for drop-down lists to populate. When I'm in crank mode I don't want my computer, or connection, slowing me down.

Third, a lot of Web apps are just too kludgy. True, that's an app dev issue and has nothing to do with the underlying architecture. But have you ever seen a Salesforce.com screen? It's filled with tiny type, multiple identical-looking boxes and odd, run-around-the-block processes for something as simple as attaching a file to an email. And how about those "reply" boxes in LinkedIn, where it takes me about half a minute to figure out where my reply goes?

Finally, remembering passwords to my different cloud apps is just too much for my age-addled brain. On my PC, if I want to launch an app, I click on it -- period. True, configuring my browser to remember all those passwords is fine, except different Web apps and browsers handle this differently, and seem to forget my different user names and passwords just when I need them. Just when I get that all working nicely, a Web app forces me to change my password for my own good. At least my PC trusts me to stay me.

If cloud apps are ever going to take off for the great unwashed like myself, they'll have to 1) reliable, which requires big build-outs of reliable, broadband wireless networks; 2) vcry fast (maybe someone should get going on advanced caching techniques for thin clients and 3) more, not less, user-friendly than their client-based counterparts (which just takes good design.) Finally, give up on the "Web-only" theology and put enough code on the desktop (a la Tweetdeck, the front end for Twitter) so I can just launch it and be on the Web sans sign-on.

Until then, you can have my thick-client PC when you drag my cold, dead, fingers...well, you know the story.

  

Pay As You Go Pricing Death Knell for Software Vendors?

Software licensing is always a sensitive subject for vendors, because it's where all the flashy advertising and talk about strategic value gives way to hashing out just what the customer has to pay. It must get downright scary for software vendors when they hear that some major customers, as they move to cloud (Web-based) computing environments, want to pay for only the software they use, when they use it, and only for as long as they need it.

Alan Boehme is senior VP of IT strategy and enterprise architecture at financial services giant ING, and a major backer of cloud computing, both inside ING and in industry forums. If the promise of cloud computing is that customers buys only the computing resources they need, he asks, why are they still paying software vendors annual per-user, per-site, or per-processor licensing fees that don't reflect actual usage? He'd like to see the licensing of the software itself, as well as associated fees like maintenance and support, pro-rated to the time users actually spend using an application.

If buying computing services over the Web is all about the efficient matching of  resources to needs, it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to provide very granular, real-time, to the second pricing for application services over the Web. However they tweak their pricing, that has to mean huge hits to the revenue of raditional software vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle. Even Salesforce, the poster child for software as a service, charges an annual fee regardless of how often you log on. How will software vendors pay for all those fancy office buildings, schmooze-filled user conferences and -- gulp! - white papers  when revenue drops 30, 40, 50 percent or more?

For this ex-reporter, it's an eerie reflection of what newspapers are going through: Readers want content, but have been trained by the market to get it for free, or at least at minimal cost. The market is doing a great job at driving efficiencies for customers, but not at funding the intellectual content (software or journalism) that they demand.

 

Surviving (Nicely, Thank You) In A Commodity Co-Location Market

At first glance, there’s nothing duller than what Interxion does: Providing basic data center space (a raised floor, physical security, power (including HVAC and backup) and network connections to stock exchanges, ISPs and telecom providers. The customers have to roll in everything from the equipment racks to the carrier-grade switches, and then manage all that gear themselves.

So how did Interxion earn about €27 million on revenue of €138 in 2008, and why does it expect to grow 30 to 40 percent this year despite the global recession? As Group Managing Director Anthony Foy describes it, their 120,000 square feet of data center space across Europe is just the foundation for a global network of digital bazaars trading in 1) network bandwidth and 2) stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments.

First, the bandwidth: Interxion runs “carrier neutral” data centers, meaning that as many as 45 different network providers might serve the site, compared to only two or three for the average co-location facility, says Foy. That means lower prices for bandwidth as customers play one provider off against another.

The second factor lifting Interxion out of commodity status is that it gives very high-volume traders physical space and network connections right next to each other, speeding electronic trades in stocks and other financial instruments. Eliminating even the smallest delays is critical for computerized systems trying to make money predicting whether the price of a stock will rise or fall in the nanoseconds it takes for a buy or sell order to travel from, say, Frankfurt to London. In addition, European Union regulations require that all trades be made at the best current price – which means, again, getting the very latest price information.

Interxion also enjoys economies of scale (in everything from floor space to electric power and bandwidth) that individual companies, as well as smaller co-location vendors, cannot. Its attractive business model also makes it easier, says Foy, for it to get credit than competing co-los or companies looking to build their own data centers.

 

Sure, Interxion has headaches, ranging from competitors to what I’m sure are demanding customers to rising power costs. But I’d trade their problems, and their margins, to duking it out only on price with competitors offering essentially the same service. They did it by moving beyond cheaper or faster versions of what their competitors offer, focusing instead on the fundamental challenges facing their customers – and lifting themselves neatly out of the commodity death-trap.