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Sutoiku

No longer with Intalio. Sutoiku is born.

Then came Semologics

More on this soon…

What the next iPad will look like

I have been playing with my new MacBook Air 11” for a few hours now. I love every part of it, and there is not much I would like to change. Maybe shrinking the screen's bezel and making it a 12” laptop without changing its outer dimensions. Or adding an SC Card port. And what about powering it with the A4 CPU so that it could use a diminutive 5V power adapter? All cosmetic changes of course. But there is a more radical change I would like to see in the future. In fact, it is so radical that it would create a brand new form factor altogether. To do so, one would have to really fuse an iPad with the new MacBook Air. Here is how it could be done.

Early tablet computers used a laptop design with a swivel hinge. The problem with such a design is that it is quite cumbersome. It's heavy, has too many moving parts, and ends up being quite fragile. One could add multi-touch capabilities to a regular laptop's screen, but as Steve Jobs pointed out, a vertical touch screen isn't very effective. After a while, your hands simply get tired. Clearly, the multi-touch trackpad is a much better user interface.

But what if we put a screen on both sides of the laptop's lid? When closed, it would look and behave like an iPad. When open, it would look and behave like a MacBook Air. In a nutshell, two LCD screens would sandwich a shared LED backlight. Structural integrity could be a challenge, but not anything Jonathan Ive couldn't figure out…

Today's MacBook Air 11” weighs 2.3 pounds. Let's assume that adding a front screen would add half a pound (glass is heavy). At 2.8 pounds, it would still be one pound lighter than the 3.8 pounds MacBook Air + iPad combo.

A MacBook Air 11” with 64GB of storage retails for $999. An iPad with the same amount of storage retails for $699. If we assume that adding a second screen would increase the cost of the MacBook Air 11” by about $200, the combo device could retail for something like $1,199, which is $500 less than buying the MacBook Air and the iPad separately. Well, technically it's $499 less, but you get my point…

From a software standpoint, the laptop mode would use the regular Mac OS X operating system, while the tablet mode would use iOS hosted by Mac OS X. In essence, you would get the best of both worlds. And all of that is being built today for Lion anyway.

Why would such a device offer a better user experience than using the iPad and MacBook Air separately? Because it would allow one to consume and produce content from the same device. The tablet is a great form factor for consuming content, but it's a lousy one for producing it. Nothing can really match the convenience of a keyboard and multi-touch trackpad for writing an email, editing a spreadsheet, or drawing a diagram. Combining the two form factors into one also means:

Thinking about it, I must believe that Steve and his team already thought about such a design. In fact, they might have patended it a long time ago. If they did, more power to them. But if they did not, here is a gift from me to them. And you.

Now let me tell you why all this matters to me, beside the fact that I love computers:

Apple is re-inventing the computing experience on the client-side, with better devices and better ways to consume applications and content with them (iTunes App Store). While I'm having fun dreaming about the new devices they might come up with in the future (like I did for the iPad with the Redux Model 1), what gets me really excited is to re-invent the computing experience on the server side. That's what Intalio, the company I work for, is all about.

How do we make it easier to build applications for the Cloud? How do we make them available to the broadest audience possible, for all the computing devices that are available today, from desktops to laptops, tablets, and smartphones? How do we go beyond systems of records and help organizations build systems of actions, or systems of engagement? How do we leverage BPM and CRM technologies into a unified computing experience that blends documents, objects, and processes in a seamless way? And how do we keep it simple? How do we make it social? How do we make it look good? These are the questions that we're working hard to answer at Intalio, and Intalio|Cloud is our best answer so far.

Intalio|Cloud combines most of the features and functions offered by Salesforce.com, Google App Engine, and Amazon Web Services, into an integrated software stack that can be deployed anywhere, on-premises or on-demand. It runs on any hypervisor (Hyper-V, KVM, VirtualBox, VMware, Xen). You can start small (free for up to five users), or grow very large (it's powered by OpenStack). You can use only a few of its components (I love the new Project Management application), or you can use them all. You can develop your applications with our graphical tools, or you can use your programming language of choice (we support Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). And you can run it from anywhere, on your local server, in your data-center, on Amazon, or on Mars if you find a way to get your software there (some did). In other words, the very best of what the Cloud has to offer, with none of the limits that sometimes come with it. No Limits!

The single-tenant version is coming out in November, so stay tuned…

Staying Connected While Traveling

As my TripIt page can attest, I travel for business quite a bit. On average, I'm on the road more than 150 days a year, with monthly trips to Tokyo, and quarterly trips to Singapore and Europe. And being Intalio's front-line sales representative, I am called to make product demonstrations to customers on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most of our customers and prospects are (very) large organizations, which tend to be fairly sensitive when it comes to the security of their private networks. As a result, public Internet access from any of their meeting rooms is usually unavailable. And because Intalio is all about Cloud Computing, it creates some interesting challenges. Since we launched our Private Cloud product a year ago, I have been experimenting with different ways of staying connected while traveling around the World. Here is what I learned along the way.

My primary phone is an iPhone 4, with a regular AT&T account enabled for international roaming. This gives me worldwide access to email from the handset device, but no ability to tether my laptop of iPad (since I want to keep my unlimited data plan). As a result, it's an incomplete solution, and a very expensive one if I start using Safari for reading blogs or making product demonstrations (Intalio's product is bandwidth-hungry).

In order to get Internet access from my laptop, I initially used 3G USB modems. They're cheap, easy to find, but a pain to configure, especially when using a MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop computer. I bought one in Japan, managed to make it work with one of my laptops, then failed to re-install its driver after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6. This lead me to consider using a mobile Wi-Fi access point as an alternative. My first such device was Novatel's MiFi 2200 Mobile Hotspot, which I introduced in this past article and used in the US. I immediately fell in love with the concept, and later on acquired similar devices for Japan, then Singapore.

This worked fairly well as long as I was traveling regularly to two countries only, but when business called in Western Europe, things started to get a bit more complicated. Today, I am finishing a trip that took me to Ireland, the UK, France, and Germany. I bought similar devices in the UK and France, then realized that my approach would not scale, not to mention the fact that it was an utter waste of hardware. Also, trying to get connectivity in France made me reconsider the form factor altogether.

The problem with my approach is that I usually cannot get regular data plans, since I don't have a permanent address (and their associated utility bills) in the countries I travel to on a regular basis. Instead, I have to rely on pay-as-you-go plans that require customers to follow super funky procedures in order to add credits to their plans. For example Orange in France makes it borderline impossible for the user. First, when you buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card, it comes with 3 hours of free connectivity, but you can't add more credits before 48 hours (because of batch processing in their billing system). Second, the only way you can add more credits is by calling a toll-free number that can only be called from a French phone. And if you want to add credits through their website, you need to create an account which password is sent to you over SMS, using the cellphone number attached to your SIM. But since you're using a mobile hot-spot device that does not have any screen on it, the SMS is positively unreadable — unless you have some X-Men powers that let you scan through flash memory. I for one don't.

After hours of trials and errors, I eventually gave up and decided to make some radical changes to my approach. First, I would use a device with a screen, also known as Android smartphone with Mobile AP (Mobile Access Point) enabled. Second, such a device would be unlocked, so that I would buy and carry a single device and only buy a SIM card for each country where I would spend more than 4 nights every year. This lead me to the positively fantabulous Samsung Galaxy S, which I bought unlocked from a tiny shop in Bonn, Germany.

Before I dive any deeper, let me get something straight: I am a patented Apple fanboy. I currently own four or five Apple laptops, I bought every single iPhone every released, and I still have a couple of shrink-wrapped iPhone 1G 8GB, which I hope will serve as a retirement plan sometime in the future… That being said, I must admit that Apple has some serious competition with Samsung's 3GS look-alike device, especially when using the factory model free of any carrier-installed crapware. What I like about this smartphone is that it's as light as any mobile hot-spot device I ever owned, but it comes with a (gorgeous) screen that tells me what's going on in plain English, instead of relying on some cryptic color-coding, or seemingly obfuscated instructions. Also, because it's a full-fledge phone, I can interact with local mobile operators through voice or SMS in order to activate newly-acquired SIM cards, or add credits to already-setup plans. In other words, it works.

To be honest, I am not planning to replace my iPhone with an Android device any time soon (unlike many of my trend-setter friends). The iPhone remains the best mobile device from an industrial design standpoint, and design matters a great deal to me. Also, its user interface has a level of polish that Android can only dream of, while its curated marketplace feels a lot safer than Android's Wild Wide West. Nevertheless, Samsung's top-of-the-line Android device is a perfect traveling companion, with its removable battery, regular-size SIM card, and support for Mobile AP. I know that Jonathan Ive will never go for the first one, which is fine with me. The second one is only a matter of time (until Micro SIM become the norm). But the third one is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned. If I pay for an unlimited data plan, I want it to apply to any devices I am using, be it an iPhone, an iPad, or a MacBook (Pro). So, if you don't want to lose my business to Android over the long run, you Apple should really consider having a serious talk with your friends at AT&T.

Until then, I will proudly carry my Samsung Galaxy S around…

With a bunch of SIM cards for various local carriers…

Which brings me to the real point of this article: acquiring SIM cards for multiple countries is a real pain in the neck. And having to pay a premium for pay-as-you-go plans feels like a total rip off. In the long run, major carriers will figure this out, and will offer roaming plans that actually make sense. But this will take three to five years. In the interim, I must believe there is a significant business opportunity for what I would call Global Mobile Virtual Network Operators (GMVNO) to offer roaming data plans with a single SIM card that would work in most major economies, with unlimited data plans. If I where the Product Manager for it, I would price it at something like $25/month/country, with a minimum of four or five countries.

I can't wait to be a beta-tester for one of these.

Love Respect

New iPhone released
It is a massive success
Yet many complain

For all its presumed flaws, the new iPhone is an absolutely amazing experiment in industrial design and ecosystem reshaping. It's bold, slick, gorgeous. It makes me wonder what the world would be like if all surrounding objects had been designed with the same level of attention.

The iPhone 4 is an acquired taste. At first touch, it feels angular. But as the relationship develops, a unique blend of round shapes and square corners emerges, making for a truly enthralling haptic experience.

It's so square, you want to flip it in circular motions between your thumb and index. It feels heavy on the lift, so you want to flip it some more, upside down, left and right. You're getting acquainted.

As you're fooling around, an idée force emerges: you're dealing with something quite exceptional. By now, you're fully aware that the aluminum trimming is actually an antenna, and its asymmetric black interruptions serve a real purpose. But as you're spinning the gizmo around, you stumble upon the screws surrounding the USB connector. Both are perfectly aligned!

For it to happen, Jonathan Ive must have asked one of his lieutenants to ensure that every Chinese worker responsible for the assembly of such an intricate piece of machinery would stop their screwdrivers at the precise point where the screw patterns would align with the user's discovery process. What more could you ask for?

Steve, Jonathan, David, and their teams are relentlessly pushing the enveloppe, taking uncalculated risks to create a breathtaking user experience. In most areas, they succeed. In some they fail, yet quickly learn from the experience. Knowing what is at stake, their unwavering belief in such a creative process is truly remarkable. For it, we should be grateful.

Thank you guys!

Farewell Sawada-San

Today, I am attending the funeral of Tomoaki Sawada, also known as Sawada-san. To me, he was a colleague, a mentor, and a friend. We met four years ago. Back then, I had visited Japan three times, in 1991, 1999, and 2006. Now, I live in Tokyo one week a month, and owe this lifestyle to him. I had an early interest in Japan, and Sawada-san turned it into a love affair. I would fly over the Pacific, and he would take me over the bridge that brings two cultures together.

Sawada-san and I met over this blog. His comments were followed by an invitation to meet in Tokyo, during which I realized the full extent of his technical expertise and his exceptional business acumen, both honed over many years working for IBM. We joined forces, and he helped launch Intalio in Japan, making all the introductions that later on turned into business relationships. Most importantly, he was instrumental in helping Intalio make the move to Cloud Computing, which is driving most of our growth today.

Japan is a fascinating country, but one where doing business can be fairly challenging for an American or a European, of which I am both. This is where Sawada-san excelled. He would patiently explain to me and other Intalio managers how business is done here, why certain traditions must be followed in a certain way, and most importantly, why patience would be the mother of all virtues. We listened, and success quickly followed. Sawada-san was a great mentor.

Over the years, a friendship developed. He exposed me to various styles of Japanese cuisine, all of which he enjoyed very much. His wife Chikako-san introduced me to the art of the tea ceremony, also known as sado. His son Noriaki-san guided me through Tokyo's most interesting neighborhoods, especially Daikanyama, where we dreamed of setting up Intalio's offices one day. And when time would come for me to fly back home, he would always give me a bag full of these famous Tokyo Banana cakes, to the delight of my wife and daughter.

Today, Sawada-san left us on this Earth. And while I do not know where he is going next, I know that his memory will remain with us forever. On behalf of all Intalio's employees, I would like to give our deepest sympathy to his wife, Chikako-san, his son Noriaki-san, and his daughter Yumi-san. For my part, I will simply remember the last minutes of Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo. As Uchida-san's life is about to end, he remembers his youth, playing a hide-and-seek game with other children in an open field. And as children ask Uchida-san if he is ready (“Mou ii kai?”), he simply answers “Mada dayo!” (“Not yet!”). We are never ready for events like this one, and I wish that I could have told Sawada-san how much I loved him before he passed away. But life goes on, and he shall rest in peace now.

Mada dayo!

New Intalio Website

Intalio just released its new website. Check it out!

Ultimate Mobile Setup

If you find yourself on the road as often as I do (every other week) and most of your traveling is done abroad (Japan, Korea, Philippines last week), you will want to optimize your mobile setup for portability, connectivity, and affordability. I tried quite a few combinations of countless devices, and I learned a few things along the way. Here is the setup that I am quickly converging toward.

First, as described earlier, I am planning to replace my MacBook Air with a Sony VAIO X complemented by an iPad. Same total weight, same total cost, three times the battery life, and a lot more fun…

Second, in order to reduce weight and bulk, I banned any electronic devices that could not be charged over USB. That way, I only have to carry my laptop charger, Apple's ultracompact USB Power Adapter, Belkin's USB 2.0 4-Port Ultra Mini Hub, and a few ReTrak cables to make it all look like a cute little octopus.

Third, I replaced all my cables with retractable ones. There are two reasons for that: one, they are lighter and take less space; two, they are quicker to pack, making it faster to check out of my hotel room. I usually carry the following cables:

Fourth, I ditched my 3G USB modems and replaced them with mobile WiFi routers. There are many reasons for that: first, many of these USB modems are difficult to configure, especially when using a MacBook laptop; second, they deplete your laptop's battery very rapidly; third, they only provide mobile Internet access to one device at a time. In order to reduce roaming charges, I bought one device for each country that I travel to more than once every quarter. By the end of the month, I will cover the following geographies:

Fifth, I keep my local mobile WiFi router turned on all day long. That way, my smartphone (iPhone 3GS 32GB) is always using WiFi for Internet connectivity, therefore reducing my roaming charges and allowing me to use Skype. In order to power my router beyond its 3 hours of battery life, I carry a HyperMac External Battery 60Wh, which fits neatly into one of the two pockets of my Incase Nylon Sleeve. It's perfectly sized for a small laptop, and the back pocket can neatly house my Kindle DX, soon to be replaced by a much more versatile iPad.

Once complete, the whole setup including Sony VAIO X, Apple iPad, Apple iPhone, HyperMac battery, mobile WiFi router, and carrying bag will weigh less than 4.5 pounds, which is what the Apple MacBook Pro 13” alone weighs. It will give me over 20 hours of battery life on the VAIO X plus 10 hours on the iPad, with 7.2Mbps instant Internet connectivity on all three devices.

I can't wait…

In the meantime, I am adding the following components to the setup:

VAIO X + iPad > MacBook Air

As a frequent traveler (300,000 miles last year), I am always looking for ways to shave some pounds off the gear I am carrying, without sacrificing convenience or performance. That's the reason why I recently switched from a MacBook Pro 13” (4.5 pounds) to a MacBook Air (3.0 pounds). But with the iPad (1.5 pounds) around the corner, I am starting to reconsider my options. Granted, the iPad cannot replace a laptop, but what about pairing it with a super lightweight netbook like the Sony VAIO X (1.6 pounds)? At just 3.1 pounds, the combination would only be 0.1 pounds heavier than a MacBook Air, would roughly cost the same amount of money, and would give me a lot more bang for the bucks. Let's take a closer look…

First, let me state that most of the applications I am using are in the cloud, hence the operating system I run does not really matter. In fact, the only offline application I allowed myself to use following my pure Office 2.0 experiment is Apple's iWork, mainly for Keynote. That being said, I rarely modify my presentations on the road, and the occasional use could be supported by the iPad. And if I need the convenience of a keyboard, I could always log to my Mac mini Server using LogMeIn or VNC.

Second, since most of my applications are online, I do not need a very fast computer. While the Sony VAIO X's Intel Atom Z550 is nowhere near as fast as the MacBook Air's Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, it won't make much of a difference when using a simple Web browser (Chrome or Safari for JavaScript performance) with Gmail or Intalio|Cloud.

Third, I would certainly miss iDisk, but Intalio|Cloud's next release will include the Nuxeo Document Management System, which I will use to store all my files, including over 10TB of movies. A copy of Intalio|Cloud is currently running on the Mac Pro workstation I use at work and serves the instance of Intalio|CRM I recently migrated to from Salesforce.com. Nuxeo will allow me to map folders from the Windows 7 filesystem to my online Document Management System, giving me a supercharged alternative to iDisk, with a lot more storage, plus versioning capabilities.

Fourth, after (or before) weight comes battery life, and the combination of a VAIO X and Apple iPad would give me over 13.5 hours of battery life with the VAIO's standard battery, and over 20 hours with the extended battery, compared to the MacBook Air meager 5 hours of advertised battery life (closer to 4 hours in reality).

Fifth, the VAIO X's ports are something that I learned to miss with the MacBook Air, especially the standard VGA port (no need for a custom adapter), the second USB port (nice for recharging my phone and mobile WiFi router), and the SD Card port (extremely useful for moving movies between my Mac Pro workstation and my laptop).

Conclusion: I will buy a Sony VAIO X tomorrow and wait for my iPad…

The Tablet I Want

Apple is set to release its much anticipated tablet in half an hour. While I am waiting for it like everybody else, here are my thoughts for what this device should be. A couple of years ago, I described its form in much details. Today, I am much more interested by its function. In a nutshell, I want this tablet to give me access to any media ever created, anytime, anywhere. I want access to every movie ever shot, every music ever recorded, every book ever published, every paper ever written. I want it now, in bright colors, animated, in stereo, and eventually in 3D. I want it at home and on the go. I want it in my pocket with a small screen (iPhone), in my jacket with a midsize display, and in my briefcase with as big a screen as I can carry.

Yesterday, on my way from Incheon to Seoul, the cab driver was listening to Queen's I want it all. Here is what Freddie Mercury could have said about Apple's Tablet: “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.”

What I Love About Intalio|Cloud, Part 2

Today, let's start with the beginning: Intalio|Cloud's home page. As with any web-based application, the home page is where most users spend the majority of their time, therefore making it user friendly is absolutely critical. While I learned over the years how to customize Salesforce.com's home page, I always found its customization tools difficult to use. I also found myself wishing that it made more extensive use of AJAX technologies in order to improve the overall user experience. Fortunately, Intalio|Cloud goes a long way toward fulfilling those wishes.

As can be seen on the screenshot above, Intalio|Cloud's user interface is closer to the one sported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM rather than Salesforce.com, and this choice was deliberate. Salesforce.com's user interface did not evolve much since the application was first released ten years ago, and is starting to feel a bit Web 1.0. For Intalio|Cloud, we decided to take full advantage of now-mature AJAX technologies in order to make it a true Rich Internet Application.

The result speaks for itself: an accordion on the left-hand side gives you access to large collections of objects (many more than you could get with an horizontal tab bar), while horizontal tabs are used for showing different dashboards. And a simple drop down menu on the top right lets user quickly switch from User View to Administrator View and Developer View, as long as he or she has the right privileges to do so. Everything is just one or two mouse clicks away, organized in a very logical fashion, while only showing a rather limited number of buttons and options, so that new users do not get overwhelmed at first sight (a common feeling with Salesforce.com or SugarCRM).

But what makes this user interface extremely powerful is that it can be customized right from the home page. Tabs, Views, Reports, Charts, and Widgets can be added without having to go through configuration options hidden deep into some setup area, empowering users to create the dashboards they need to get things done as effectively as possible.

Now, where things get really exciting is that such a design philosophy has been applied beyond the home page, throughout the entire application, and it's nowhere more evident than when looking at individual records. The following screenshot shows how an instance of the Account object (or any object for that matter) is displayed through a pop-up window. This user interface also makes extensive use of accordions and tabs, giving the user access to a tremendous amount of information without having to browse through very long HTML pages (as is the case with Salesforce.com unfortunately).

Furthermore, the application lets users open as many windows as they want at the same time, allowing records to be compared and data to be copied from one record to another very easily. To make a long story short, Intalio|Cloud provides a true multi-windowing environment, right in the web browser. When using a browser that supports fast execution of JavaScript code (Google's Chrome or Apple's Safari), the productivity gains resulting from such a user interface can be very significant.

This is what I love about Intalio|Cloud!

What I Love About Intalio|Cloud, Part 1

With this post, I am starting a new series of articles on Intalio|Cloud, focusing on practical use cases. As I am in the process of migrating my personal Salesforce.com instance to Intalio|CRM (powered by Intalio|Cloud), I am discovering lots of features that I did not know about. Along the way, I am literally falling in love with this platform. Today, we'll take a closer look at Intalio|Mashup.

One of the most useful mashups I ever developed is my Free/Busy calendar, which is available at freebusy.ghalimi.name. I introduced this project on this previous article. Since its release a year and a half ago, this little gadget saved me countless hours trying to get meetings scheduled with people.

This mashup is pretty simple. All it does is looking up events from my Salesforce.com account, producing an ICAL feed from them, and subscribing a public Google calendar to this feed. Nevertheless, this simple mashup could not be developed directly from Salesforce.com, and required the writing of 150 lines of PHP code hosted on a separate server. It also created somewhat of a security breach by requiring the storage of my Salesforce.com login credentials on a PHP page served by a public web server. Clearly, there must be an easier way of building such a simple mashup.

Here comes Intalio|Mashup, which is a component of Intalio|Cloud, which itself powers the Intalio|CRM application. Intalio|Mashup gives you the ability to visually combine pre-built components into very powerful mashups that can be published as web pages, web services, ATOM/RSS feeds, etc. The mashup I now use to publish my Free/Busy calendar only took 8 components, as illustrated on the following screenshot.

This mashup tool is available form the Developer view of Intalio|Cloud, alongside the application builder. On the left hand side, an extensive collection of standard mashup components are available, while custom components can be developed graphically or by writing code. On the top part, the canvas contains the mashup scenario itself, while the bottom part displays results of the mashup, at any point throughout its execution, in either text, tree, or grid fashion (very useful for debugging purposes).

As can be seen on the screenshot above, I am using a development version, because the very first mashup component used on the canvas (on the left hand side) does not even have an icon (bug already filed). Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting components of the tool: it's called XRM Reader, and it gives you access to the entire XML/Object-oriented database middleware (called XRM) that powers Intalio|Cloud and can be deployed on top of any relational database (like MySQL or Oracle). Using this mashup component, I can lookup my appointments and feed them to a For-Each component that parses them and retrieves just the information I need for creating a valid ICAL feed (start time and end time essentially).

One of the really nice things about this mashup tool is that it does not limit the developer to the set of standard mashup components offered out of the box. Instead, it lets the user build custom components whenever they are missing. For example, I needed a way to produce a text file instead of an XML document, and while Intalio|Mashup offers a few components for the manipulation of strings, it was originally designed to process XML fragments. That being said, using the Custom Operation component, I quickly built what I needed, writing nine lines of code that will look very familiar to anyone who has ever written XPath or XSLT code:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR"/>

BEGIN:VEVENT"/>
DTSTART:',replace(replace(start/@start-date,"-",""),":","")))?>
DTEND:',replace(replace(end/@end-date,"-",""),":","")))?>
SUMMARY:Busy')?>
END:VEVENT"/>

END:VCALENDAR"/>

While I initially spent a few hours getting familiar with the tool, building this mashup from scratch should not take more than 30 minutes. In comparison, the original mashup written in PHP and using Salesforce.com's relatively complex WSDL web services took a few days to write and debug. Furthermore, Intalio|Mashup is a tool that a less-technical user like myself can really be productive with, while I had to rely on professional software engineers to build the Salesforce.com mashup.

This is what I love about Intalio|Cloud!

Defining Cloud Computing for Business Users

Like any new IT trend, Cloud Computing gets its fair share of hype, and with it comes a multitude of vendors that use the terms in ways it was never intended for, therefore making it devoid of any sense. When pushed to the extreme, a simple server connected to a network seems to qualify as a cloud, thereby allowing pundits such as Larry Ellison to deride the concept to no end. Yet Cloud Computing is much more than a passing fad. It is a major step forward in the development of distributed computing, and one that will reshape the IT industry for years to come. But for it to happen, we must agree on a clear definition of the concept, and the less technical it is, the better. Let us introduce one that focuses exclusively on the business benefits of cloud computing.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing in the following fashion:

“Cloud computing is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.”

The definition we propose is borrowed form the writing of Neil Ward-Dutton, who works for MWD Advisors, a specialist European IT advisory firm which focuses exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment. In a post released in June 2009, Neil outlined The seven elements of Cloud computing's value, which we reproduced here with the author's permission and some minor editing, some suggested by Gartner's Daryl Plummer:

In a nutshell, Cloud Computing can be defined as a set of computing and storage resources providing an application platform as a service. This platform is characterized by a unique set of economic, architectural, and strategic elements of value, which clearly distinguishes it from anything that has been available so far, even though it builds upon the legacy of more than 50 years of distributed computing.

Utility Pricing
Cloud Computing is first a foremost defined by its utility-based pricing model. Users of the platform consume computing and storage services on demand and pay for them as they go, using an Operating Expenses (OPEX) budget, instead of paying for infrastructure resources up-front using Capital Expenditures (CAPEX). For example, a Director of Sales can create CRM accounts for 10 of her sales people on Salesforce.com by using her corporate credit card, without having to ask the CFO for a budget, and without having the IT Department initiate a requisition process for a new server.

Elastic Resource Capacity
Cloud Computing differs from more traditional forms of distributed computing in the way it scales computing and storage resources up and down. Instead of tapping from a fixed set of resources, users can add or remove capacity at will, almost instantaneously, and only pay for what they actually use. While utility pricing let users pay as they go, elastic resource capacity let them pay as they grow (or shrink). Following our previous example, the Director of Sales can add 5 more accounts for the sales people that were recently added to her team following the merger with another company, without having to worry about adding new servers or buying more hard drives.

Virtualized Resources
Cloud Computing would not be possible without virtualization, not for arcane technical reasons, but for one obvious business requirement: the need for multi-tenancy. In order to benefit from economies of scale, cloud computing is predicated upon the sharing of a common infrastructure by multiple groups of users, often referred to as tenants. And multi-tenancy can only be achieved through some kind of virtualization, either at the database level (Salesforce.com), application server level (Google AppEngine), kernel level (Red Hat), or CPU level (Amazon EC2). Unlike grid computing, which often pooled and aggregated distributed computing resources for the purpose of handling very large computing jobs that could not fit or would take took long to complete on a single server, Cloud Computing creates virtual slices of resources from clusters of servers and storage devices, perfectly sized to fit the specific needs of multiple users. Such virtual resources can be small or large, and scale elastically as user needs evolve over time. In our previous example, virtualization means that the CRM application used by our sales team is served by an infrastructure also used by over 60,000 other tenants, all securely isolated from each other (hopefully).

Management Automation
Cloud Computing platforms differ from traditional corporate data-centers in one major way: standardization. While your typical data-center will usually host every versions of every operating systems and databases known to mankind, thereby creating massive management overhead, most Cloud Computing platforms usually standardize on a single kind of CPU (x86-based predominantly), a single hypervisor (VMware, Xen, etc.), a single operating system (some Linux distribution usually), and a single database (MySQL rules). This standardization has an obvious business benefit: dramatic reduction of operating costs through aggressive management automation. Following our previous example, the sales team's CRM application is served by one of 16 instances, each made of a few dozens servers. Altogether, this infrastructure might require anywhere from 100 to 200 full-time resources to manage. As a point of comparison, if each of Salesforce.com's 60,000 customers were to require a dedicated infrastructure, it would take several thousands full-time resources to manage it all.

Self-service Provisioning
Cloud Computing and Software as a Service is often compared to the Application Service Provider (ASP) model that became popular for a brief period of time ten years ago. One element makes them fundamentally different from each other though: self-service provisioning. With the ASP model, dedicated servers had to be provisioned for each customers, which meant that technical resources had to be involved every time a new customer would be signed. Hefty setup fees would be added to the bill, and the service would become operational within a few days at best. With Cloud Computing, business end users like our Director of Sales can provision applications and user accounts in a few mouse clicks, and these become available instantly.

Third-party Ownership
Cloud Computing is also a new form of outsourcing. Customers trying to focus the allocation of scarce capital resources to their core businesses soon realize the benefits of moving IT infrastructure off their balance sheet. Furthermore, as technology evolves and leading service providers roll-out ever larger data-centers, the acquisition and operation of state-of-the-art data-center facilities makes less and less sense from an economic standpoint for most organizations. Cloud Computing is all about the transfer of ownership for such resources to a third-party that specializes in their deployment. According to our previous example, the company using the CRM application provided by Salesforce.com does not own any infrastructure beyond a few laptop computers. Everything else, from data-centers to servers and storage systems is owned by Salesforce.com, Inc.

Managed Operations
Cloud Computing is finally about allocating human resources to tasks that will directly impact the business, rather than simply managing the infrastructure that supports it. As such, Cloud Computing advocates a model according to which the IT infrastructure is not only owned by a third-party, but managed by the third-party as well. Software upgrades, data backups, and the countless other tasks required to manage mission-critical business applications on a day to day basis become the responsibility of a third-party, according to well-defined Service Level Agreements. Following our example, the Director of Sales discovered this morning the snowman adorned logo for the Winter 2010 version of Salesforce.com, without having taken any part in the software upgrade process that took place over the week-end. In the cloud, ignorance is bliss.

Until now, the only way for customers to benefit from the seven elements of value outlined above was to use a public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Force.com. Today, private cloud offerings such as Intalio are bringing these benefits on premises, behind the firewall. To learn more about how private clouds can address each element of value, please review this presentation.

I think there is a world market for maybe five clouds

In 1943, Thomas J. Watson, then President of International Business Machines (IBM), allegedly said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Today, industry pundits make similar flawed predictions, claiming that all the market needs is maybe five clouds: Amazon Web Services, Force.com, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and whatever IBM comes up with. However you define Cloud Computing, this revolutionary step in the 50 year-long evolution of distributed computing (kudos to Daryl Plummer) goes far beyond the few public clouds available today. And while simple principles of economy of scales will most likely limit the number of general purpose public clouds, most of the action will take place on private and virtual private clouds, served from private and virtual private networks.

The need for private and virtual private clouds is driven by a combination of factors, many of which were clearly outlined by Gartner's Bruce Robertson in his recent article titled Top Five Cloud-Computing Adoption Inhibitors (Gartner account required). Bruce felt compelled to add a sixth one (Vendor Viability), and we took the liberty to add a couple others, while slightly altering their designations.

Risk Management
When using the services of a public cloud provider, your options for risks assessment are rather limited. While compliance to industry standards such as SAS 70 or the publishing of auditable availability metrics in a trust.salesforce.com fashion can provide some level of comfort, they are not sufficient for proper risk management. Deploying a private cloud in your own data-center, or in the data-center of a trusted third-party (such as your local telecommunications service provider), will give you a more complete picture of the risks inherent to cloud computing.

Location
As the saying goes, real estate is about three things: Location, Location, Location. While this might be counter-intuitive for those of us confusing cloud computing with ethereal computing (a concept I just made up and which makes no sense at all), the location of clouds really does matter, be it when talking about meteorology or computing. The geographic location of the servers powering a cloud has direct implications on how it will perform, and whether it will comply to specific regulations or not. For example, desktop virtualization requires low latency, which itself requires geographic proximity. Similarly, most database-driven applications will work only if the application sits really close to the data. And if you're a retail bank, the data you collect about a customer must remain in the customer's home country, as stated by law in many jurisdictions around the World. While the largest public cloud providers will certainly deploy multiple Points of Presence (Salesforce.com now has servers in four regions: North America, EMEA, APAC, Japan), many local cloud providers will emerge in order to provide geographic proximity to customers in the World's 195 countries (as of today).

Portability
An application developed with Force.com can only run on the Force.com public cloud. And while many public cloud providers like to talk about interoperability, their objectives are to lock customers up with a proprietary architecture, API, or programming language. The choice is clear: Bluepill, half a dozen public cloud reluctantly agreeing to half-baked interoperability standards. Redpill, millions of private and virtual private clouds built on top of a common infrastructure. With no hesitations, I take the redpill.

Resilience
As a I write this article, it is becoming clear that Microsoft/Danger lost all the data stored by customers on their Sidekick smartphone. Contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, and photos are gone, following a botched SAN upgrade undertaken without proper data backup. Data loss is a huge concern for consumers and corporate customers alike, and private clouds provide an answer to this. For consumers, the deployment of reverse backup solutions such as the Egnyte Local Cloud (Disclaimer: I sit on Egnyte's Board and originated the idea for the ELC) provides a virtually failsafe solution, at a very low cost. For corporate customers, the use of a private cloud implementing proper data backup and disaster recovery policies will significantly reduce the risk of data loss.

Security
Many security experts claim that most corporations cannot afford the legions of systems administrators employed by the like of Amazon or Google to secure their public clouds, then conclude that public clouds are inherently more secure than private ones. This is either naive, dishonest, or plainly stupid. First, currently-available public clouds are utterly primitive when it comes to security. For example, VPN access is both a novelty there (Amazon just released the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud), and the very best they can offer (forget about two-factor authentication with devices like RSA SecurID). Second, the security of most public clouds currently available has been successfully breached over the past few years, usually through Denial-of-Service attacks or phishing methods, and the pace at which such events occur does not seem to be slowing down. Third, and maybe most importantly, a small number of homogeneous public clouds creates massive single points of failure. In essence, if a significant amount of the World's computing and storage needs are addressed by half a dozen public clouds, any vulnerability in the security infrastructure of any of these clouds will expose over 15% of the World's IT assets to unimaginable risks. This basic architecture simply makes no sense at all, and in a weird twist goes against the Internet's distributed architecture, which enabled cloud computing at the first place. If we want secure cloud computing, we want millions of private clouds, not just 5 or 6 public ones.

Confidentiality
Data confidentiality is one of the most difficult things to guarantee in a cloud computing environment. There are several reasons for that: First, as public clouds grow, the number of people working for the cloud provider who actually have access to customer data (whether they are entitled to it or not) grows as well, thereby multiplying the number of potential sources for a confidentiality breach. Second, the needs for elasticity, performance, and fault-tolerance leads to massive data duplication and requires aggressive data caching, which in turn multiply the number of targets a data thief can go after. Third, end-to-end data encryption is not yet available. What this means is that while data can be encrypted when transiting between the end-user's client and the cloud's server, and can also be encrypted when stored on the cloud's server, it must be decrypted on the cloud's server when being processed for a query or a transaction, unless fully homomorphic encryption is used. But until such a technology becomes commonplace (which will take quite a few years), data confidentiality will be maximized by using a large number of private clouds managed by trusted parties.

Regulations
Local regulations will most certainly be the strongest driver for the deployment of private clouds. Many vertical industries such as financial services and healthcare, as well as the overall public sector (for both national and local governments) mandate that certain classes of data be stored and processed locally, in some cases by local service providers. While the deployment of local Points of Presence by private cloud operators will address such requirements in some cases (as it did for Salesforce.com when signing Japan Post as a customer in Japan), it will not be sufficient in countless others, and the deployment of local private clouds will be necessary.

Service Level Agreement
Another powerful driver for the deployment of private clouds will be the need for specific Service Level Agreements that public cloud operators cannot address, either because they're not compatible with their business models, or because they cannot be supported by their technical architectures. For example, most public clouds today deliver three nines uptime today (99.9%, or downtime less than 8h45m57s per year), and four nines is a distant dream for all of them (52m36s). All the while, many customers require five nines availability (5m16s), which requires a technical architecture and a set of procedures significantly different from the ones deployed by most public cloud operators. Another area of concern is related to data ownership, as stated by user agreements. While some providers are pretty clear about it (Salesforce.com among them), others remain dangerously ambiguous (Google for example), making their clouds unsuitable for a broad range of applications.

Control
Last but not least, the need for overall control will be the one predicating the use of private clouds for most organizations. While this alternative form of cloud computing might not offer the same economics or the same level of elasticity as the ones delivered by their public counterparts, it will always provide the extra level of control that large organizations crave for, and large organizations are the ones that will drive the adoption of private cloud computing platforms in the years to come.

Postface: This post might leave you with the strange feeling that while you get a pretty good idea for what a public cloud might be (AWS, Force.com, Google AppEngine, etc.), the concept for a private cloud is a lot less obvious. If that is the case, please refer to this presentation, or read my next article, titled Defining Cloud Computing for Business Users?

Note: As promised, this post on Cloud Computing will be followed by many others…

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