CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU.  How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find.  If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

The interesting thing about disruption is that when it occur there are both opportunities and threats – opportunities for those who are prepared to stand on he edge of whatever the disruption is, and threats for those unable or unwilling to adapt. As I posted the other day, Cloud Computing is fundamentally changing the shape of the IT job. It’s undeniably disruptive to the IT industry, but this disruption extends beyond simply a threat/opportunity vector for IT, it effects more general roles as well.

Wanted Analytics, a real time business intelligence company, recently posted some statistics round the hiring for cloud computing skills. They found that recruiters, over a 90 day period, posted over 10000 online job ads that included a requirement for cloud computing skills – that’s 61% more than he same period a year ago. The graph below shows this growth.

The interesting thing here though is that these aren’t all in technical roles – there’s  bunch of marketing and sales roles, along with customer service and even cargo and freight agent positions that are all demanding a competency in cloud. It’s kind of analogous to typewriters. It used to be that only people who were looking for jobs in a typing pool needed to know how to type. Nowadays pretty much everyone needs some typing skills as a core competency for their role – so to with cloud skills. That’s our reason for creating the CloudU program, and even more so the CloudU certificate – they’re an attempt to give people an entry level introduction to Cloud Computing, something to whet their appetite and to give them a grounding.

Life is about ongoing skill-building. I’m a big fan of lifelong learning and the great thing about the disruption coming from cloud computing is that it means there is a real impetus to build skills in this particular area, and those skills in turn will make people more valuable to current and prospective employers. Feedback from course participants (and we’ve now had nearly 1500 people sign up for the certificate and going on 300 graduate) is that what we’re doing is on the right track. As recent graduate Melissa Huebener says;

Cloud is the future of technology. This Certification serves a springboard for continuing education in this area. It supplies a wonderful indication to employers that I am willing to learn, change and grow in my career as technology advances forward.

We’re also getting great feedback from other educators. Steve Mallard from the Tennessee Technology Center wrote an unsolicited email thanking us for the program and said that;

CloudU is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn about Cloud Computing.   As an instructor of information technology, the certificate provides a great learning tool for the planning, deployment and  logistics behind cloud computing.

And without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, someone also pointed out to us recently that we’ve been named one of the top 10 Cloud certifications in the industry – that’s pretty awesome praise!

CloudU is an exciting development and one that I’m really proud to be involved with – we’d love to have you join in the discussion!

Excuse the slightly cataclysmic title of this post, but the first post for 2012 in the CloudU notebook series is one which hopefully will get you thinking about your career and the changes it is going to undergo over the years to come.

One of the drivers for the CloudU program, and especially the CloudU certificate, was an attempt to give traditional IT folks an entry level introduction to Cloud Computing, something to whet their appetite and to give them a grounding, before offering up other, more specific learnings.

Of course our rationale for doing this is the thesis that the job market is fundamentally changing and that Cloud Computing is a major driver for this. It was good then to read the other day a Forbes article by Joe McKendrick that spells this fact out clearly. McKendrick pulls no punches saying that;

Just as cloud computing is a game-changer for many companies, it is also changing the nature of jobs – not only within the information technology department, but in other parts of the enterprise as well.

Interestingly McKendick goes on to discuss some empirical data that speaks to the real change that IT roles are seeing. In particular he references a study from CA technologies which found that;

A majority of 685 CIOs surveyed, 54%, believe that cloud computing has enabled them to spend more time on business strategy and innovation. Approximately 71% who have adopted cloud computing see their position as  a viable path to pursue other management roles, compared to only 44% of non-cloud adopting CIOs.

In other words, it’s precisely the CIOs who have adopted Cloud who are feeling empowered to move into broader management roles, while their more laggardly colleagues remain technically focused.

None of this should come as a surprise to CloudU participants – we’ve always said that management for the new IT is a totally different beast than in the old world. Whereas traditional IT leaders had to remain abreast of technology paradigms and ensure that their departments cut clean code, maintained pristine data centers and had their fingers on the pulse of software updates, a modern CIO has to think about more broad business skills like;

• Vendor relationships
• Rapidly accelerating technology innovations
• Strategic business skills
• Managing and maintaining a workforce when there is a limited talent pool

Now before people get up in arms pointing out that traditional CIOs have to manage these roles, let me say that I accept that fact. But I also contend that the rate of change, and the amount of time that a CIO has to spend on business as opposed to technical issues is far greater under Cloud Computing. And the statistics, at least from the CA report, would seem to back this up. Cloud adopting CIOs feel more confident with strategic, business-related functions within their role than do their traditional counterparts.

It’s also interesting to see other industry folks speak to the same themes – Chuck Hollis, VP at EMC summed up the challenge for IT leaders when he said that;

If you’re an IT leader, you’ve got an interesting challenge on your hands. You most likely don’t have the right portfolio of end-state roles, skills and processes. And you are probably lacking the people with skills who can lead the change from present state to future state.

In other words – we’re here now, and we kind of know we want to be someplace else pretty soon, but we just don’t know how to get from A to B. We just don’t have the people who can take us on that journey. Or our own people maybe could but they simply “don’t know what they don’t know”.

That’s what CloudU is all about – whether your preference is for whitepapers you can print out and ruminate over. Whether it’s for a certificate you can print out and point to in your resume. Whether it’s simply for a community where you can discuss the challenges you’re going through – CloudU aims to fulfill your needs.

So the Cloud is definitely changing your job – what are you planning on doing in 2012 about it?

In an effort to mitigate this threat, MYOB has been working on a multi year (and multi million dollar) project that sees it move from a desktop-centric vendor to one that looks more like a hybrid provider. One of the steps in that process has been to move the software from it’s old database approach to one based on MySQL and hence more able to play in a “cloudy world”.

But one of the things about moving a software platform, and a business, to the cloud is that two distinct barriers are in the way;

1. Moving millions of lines of existing code to a new platform, while still maintaining backwards compatibility and not breaking everything is an incredibly hard job. There’s a reason why the most successful SaaS businesses are ones that had no legacy products to move
2. Cloud is bout much more than a technology shift, in fact the biggest part of cloud is that it democratizes, consumerizes and commoditizes technology. That’s a very difficult thing to face for a vendor that has been used to license fees and annual maintenance contracts

So it was interesting o see the response that MYOB got to its initial attempt to migrate its core accounting product, AccountRight. Alas it hasn’t been plain sailing – with issues arising of both a technical nature and a business one.

Platform shifts are hard

Users are complaining vociferously about performance issues with the new products saying that they’re buggy and slow with unusual requirements put on users (the need for QuickTime for example, strange in a world that’s all about web standards). In their defence MYOB are being forced to support, almost on a case by case basis, individual machines with particular software and hardware issues. Which brings us around to one of the benefits of a true web app – so long as the browser a user has is supported – that should be the sum total of the potential issue list.

True Xero does require users to have Flash installed – but they’ve promised (for awhile now it must be said) to move off Flash onto something that is more preformant and more importantly native within the browser (HTML5 anyone?).

People expect consistency from an existing player

One subject of complaint from MYOB users is that with the new package, only one business entity is allowed per license. As a little background, in the past there was no barrier to multiple entities being run with one software license. While it is undeniable that Xero and all the other vendors charge  separate subscription for each business entity, the key thing here is perception. Companies have grown accustomed to running multiple entities with one MYOB license and when this is no longer available, another of their existing ties to the incumbent provider is lost.

Disclosure – Some parts of what ControlMyCloud does relate to cloud spend management and are in competition with Cloudability,  company that I’m an adviser of and investor in. This review was made at arms length and ControlMyCloud offers significant areas of functionality unrelated to spend management.

ControlMyCloud.com is a series of template control applications, delivered via a secure web interface, currently able to manage and control the cloud operations of a user’s Amazon EC2 environment (and with plans to include other vendors in the future).

The idea of ControlMyCloud.com, is that customers can manage the cost of public cloud services and match those services to required performance metrics, without having to constantly monitor and manually adjust their IaaS solutions. It’s a real world solution to the ineffective tool that an SLA can be – many of have long argued against the SLA as an effective performance tool for the cloud – solutions like ControlMyCloud give organizations the visibility and the control over the things that SLAs are meant to deal with.

ControlMyCloud works via the notion of the “watchman” essentially a combined monitoring/management tool that take pre-defined policies and sets KPI thresholds within a constantly monitored SLA framework. The service then adjust cloud resources up or down to maintain the optimum mix of service and resource use (ie cost).

I’ve long thought that an integrated monitoring and management platform is a good approach for companies seeking to ensure high performance from their cloud providers. Of course with its existing support for only AWS, ControlMyCloud still lacks the multi vendor functionality that would make their offering even more valuable, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do once other infrastructure vendors are dropped into the mix.

To this point, BMC is today announcing a new service offering, the Cloud and Data Center Automation Consulting service. This service offering initiates with 2-3 week cloud planning workshops to develop and design the cloud services, architecture and roadmap for customers. According to Carlos Granda, BMC’s VP of Global Services;

Each cloud planning workshop produces a detailed, phased 18-month cloud roadmap and uses a case design document which includes resource requirements, a project timeline and a financial investment summary. The planning exercise then defines the cloud’s reference architecture and creates the management and operational policies necessary to run the cloud to meet business objectives.

While it would be nice to think that businesses had the ability to self-discover the best cloud approach for them, the reality is somewhat different. So long as BMC’s approach sees it give advice untainted by its own commercial drivers, the service offering sounds like a valuable idea.

One of the tools that BMC will use on the workshops is its jauntily named BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution. The solution allows organizations to built a complete and dynamic application map – that gets updates as the IT environment changes. The idea is that application owners who often feel that providing detailed documentation to IT is a barrier to them actually getting stuff done, will be able to provide only a limited amount of data and the new tool will automatically discover and audit the applications.

While mapping is fundamentally boring, the reality is that in complex and heterogeneous IT environments there is a high degree of complexity and inter dependency making a move of application (whether it’s a simple on-prem migration or a move to the cloud) a complex and risky business. BMC is trying to minimize these risks.

I was impressed, here’s a guy who knows his stuff I figured. Well it turns out he does, he holds an MBA but, more importantly, he’s self taught in digital media and digital marketing. It also turns out that Nimish is unemployed.

Unlike a number of people though, Nimish decided to use his unemployment to great effect and has embarked upon an experiment in digital marketing – this time marketing himself. Nimish created the video below, as well as a blog site where he’s looking to tell his story.

Now I know this isn’t a completely novel initiative, but it’s still well done. Something tells me that Nimish won’t be unemployed for long.

Today it’s the turn of icomplete  to try and prove itself “the world’s simplest small business tool”. icomplete does so by packaging up CRM, email marketing and telephony in one small, economical and intuitive package.

Aimed for businesses under 20 employees, and proving popular amongst media organizations, icomplete fills functional requirements along three distinct arms;

• eMarketing (Bulk SMS, Email campaigns, physical post and dial-out messages)
• CRM (Contacts, calendaring, task management and BI)
• Telephony (VoIP, IVR)

It integrates these three distinct areas into one combined package that sees cross functionality – for example click to call within the CRM contact window enabled from the get-go.

I spoke with icomplete co-founder Myles Hantler to get his take on what differentiates icomplete from other CRM products. His perspective was that the breadth of the integrated functionality, along with icomplete’s focus on a simple UI makes the difference. In experimenting with the application my perspective is that it is the integration with telephony which is the real differentiator for the product. While many other lightweight CRM products are integrated with calendaring and email marketing, it is the telephony functionality on a single platform tha

Totango are today going one step further and, in a move that will make boards of directors, investors and advisers smile, are rolling out a SaaS executive dashboard, essentially a one stop place for executives and advisers to good an accurate handle on where their company is at. Totango integrates information from multiple data sources including the SaaS application itself, marketing tools, CRM and billing.

In terms of specific functionality – Totango powers the following classes of information;

In real time;

• Activity Streams – stream of user activities on the application (user of account was doing action in module)
• Conversion Streams – Sign ups, purchase, upgrades, cancellation

On a User/Account basis specific user activities can be tracked including;

• User actions on the application
• Application modules being used
• Unique users
• Activity Sessions
• Time between sessions
• Engagement Score

Within the executive dashboard;

• Account by status break down (current, week, month, quarter, etc.)
• Cohort analysis of status changes (weekly and monthly)

Totango provides a really valuable service for companies that are busy trying to grow – I wonder if it isn’t a natural extension of a PaaS play – imagine a Totango-like service as an add on to Engine Yard or Heroku…. More information about Totango in the video below

Totango SaaS Executive Dashboard from Oren Raboy on Vimeo.

Case in point…. DropBox. As a favor to a friend I agreed to write a quick review of some online backup/sync products. Nothing in-depth, just a quick synopsis of the landscape to give people wanting a very high level view of the space something to go with. I drafted a series of questions (again, very high level) to flick out to vendors to help me compile the report.

I got a few emails back with quick answers, and some others promising answers in the next few days. But what I got back from DropBox’s PR team was pretty interesting;

Thanks for your interest in Dropbox! Unfortunately, the Dropbox team leads are busy focusing on the product and hiring right now, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to politely decline.

I don’t want to make this specific to DropBox but I will say that the flip side of a young company getting to an astronomical multi billion dollar valuation in the space of a couple of years is that sometimes they don’t display the maturity that they would in the event that they’d taken a more gradual approach to growth. Now I’m just a mere blogger and I don’t expect CEO Drew Houston to drop everything to speak to me. But having a third party PR company send out a simple “thanks but no thanks” article is bad form – and in contrast to other startups enjoying stellar growth who have a more mature approach towards analyst and blogger relations (I’m thinking of box.net in particular).

Hopefully Dropbox matures a little to enjoy that valuation they’ve just got…