What is Cloud Computing? Is everything cloud?

Cloud is consumption model. It’s the idea of taking away all the IT skills and effort required by a user and letting them focus on their actual functional requirements. All the IT detail is hidden from them in The Cloud. Smart phones and tablets have really helped consumers understand this concept. They’ve become liberated. Knowing very little about IT they have become empowered with self-service IT to access functionality on demand. Within seconds they can decide that they want a business application, they can find it on an app store, buy and install it themselves and be up and running using it. When they’ve finished they can delete it.

CIOs are asking themselves why it can still take IT many months to get their business project up and running when in their personal lives they can have what they want when they want it.

The Cloud doesn’t take away the need for IT; for hardware, software, and systems management. It just encapsulates it. It puts it in the hands of the specialists working inside the cloud, and by centralising the IT and the skills costs can be reduced, risk can be reduced, businesses can focus on their core skills and have improved time to market and business agility.

It is confusing to talk about cloud without explaining whose point of view you’re looking at it from. Different people want different levels of complexity outsourced to the cloud.

Many users see cloud as a way of outsourcing all their IT. Some go even further and outsource the whole business process. I think the jury is out on whether cloud has to involve IT at all. Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is talked about as one of the cloud offerings. I think the important thing is to let the customer get on with their core business and take away any activity that is not a differentiator for them.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the area that most people think about first when they hear the word cloud. People have been using web based email for over 10 years. They don’t need to worry about maintaining a high spec PC and all the associated software. As long as they have a web browser they’re up and running. There is a move and a demand to make many, if not all, computer software applications available on the cloud, via simple consoles. Not unlike the idea of thin clients 15 years ago or mainframe terminals 40 years ago.

Moving down the stack a little further we come to a different group of users; the application developers. The people who want to be involved in IT, who want to create the business applications that run on the cloud. They still want to focus on business value though. They still want someone to take away the effort of writing the middleware. The code that is the same in 90% of all applications. The communication systems, the database, the interaction with the user. They want Platform as a Service (PaaS). An environment that’s just there, up and running, as and when they need it.

Finally we come to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is for real programmers or system administrators. For people who just want the base operating system to install or write the applications on, like they did in the old days. These people like the paradigm, of having a computer that’s all theirs. In the old days when their CIO wanted an environment for a new project they would request that someone find some data centre space, buy a PC, install it in the data centre with power and cooling etc, install the operating system, and then 6 months later hand it over to them to start the project development. Now they don’t need to worry about the physical world. They can just request the infrastructure as a service i.e. access to a brand new operating system install, and they’ll be up and running in minutes.

Or course these things can all run on top of one another. The business process can run on the software which runs on the platform which runs on the infrastructure, all provided as a service. But they don’t have to. The whole point is that the user doesn’t need to worry about what’s happening inside of their cloud. There could just be an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters working away inside the cloud. As long as the user is getting the service that they’re looking for they don’t care.

Which brings us to the other side of the picture. The cloud service providers. These can be traditional Managed Service Providers (MSPs), System Integrators, or the in house data centre offering the IT service to the lines of business. These guys are already taking the IT effort away from businesses, they’re already encapsulating and obfuscating the details of IT. But they’re in a competitive market, driven by the new expectations of the consumer and so they need to work smarter. They need to adopt some of these new architectures to be able to pass on the cost benefits and speed of delivery that their customer expects.

This is where some of the other terms associated with cloud computing come in – virtualisation, automation, standardisation. They’re not essential for cloud computing. The monkeys could do the job. But they really make it a lot easier. To make a step change improvement in delivery speed the IT departments need to share the environments on the same computer. Instead of having hundreds of servers running at 50% capacity they can just have one bigger one and schedule who’s using the capacity when. Instead of manually installing the application and all its dependencies and bug fixing and testing each part individually and together, they can standardise and automate and use virtual appliances to remove room for error. By introducing virtualisation, automation and self service a private data centre is moving towards and enabling cloud. Similarly, pay as you go, and sharing services between companies, are not cloud per se, but they are drivers towards and benefits from cloud.

So it can be confusing. People are talking about the same thing, but from different points of view. When people talk about cloud they might be talking about the hardware and automation in the data centre, or they might be talking about the complete absence of hardware by using business process outsourcing, they might be talking about handing all their data over to another company or they might be talking about making their private data more accessible to their own users.

So cloud covers a lot, but not everything.

Skins RIP

It has a formula, or a set of rules. It knows when to stick to the formula and when to push the rules. It never ceases to amaze me that some people don’t know the rules. That viewers can be put off by half the story without realising what the rest is. I guess this is part of the beauty of the programme that I admire so much. The ability to follow a formula and yet for viewers to be so caught up in it that they don’t notice that they’ve seen it a million times before. Most stories since Shakespeare’s time have been three act plays. They put the principal character up a tree, they throw stones at them, and then they get them down again. I.e. they put someone in a situation and then they get them out of it again. Lots of people don’t like Skins because they think it’s amoral. They see acts one and two where someone does something bad and then they switch off. They don’t realise that there’s an act three where the consequences of the actions are seen. Skins does it really well. There are so many layers of good acting, good directing, good script, good music. It’s subversive. They get their target audience who think that amorality is good, to watch and enjoy the first couple of acts, to really feel part of it, and then they hit them with the third act where they learn the consequences and because they were so bought into the bad side they really do feel the consequences. It’s not like the Cosby show or Sesame Street where they end the episode saying, this episode was brought to you by the moral ‘don’t take drugs’. It’s much more subtle than that and consequently more effective. People don’t want to be told what to think, just show it to them and they’ll reach their own conclusions.Skins is the best programme ever. There are others that are equally the best but that’s for another time.

I know it’s melodrama. I know it’s taking things to extremes and could never be real. Or rather it’s extremely improbable. But not impossible. It’s like Bergerac or Morse. You’d never have so many murders in one place but it’s a useful construct to pull different ideas into one framework. The chances of even these individual story lines occurring are one in a million but that’s the one worth writing about.

I like the fact that the actors are pretty much all unknown. There’s no baggage. No stereotyping, no expectation of what’s going to happen. They’re all great actors. However you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s no rule saying you can’t kill them off in the first episode. It’s not like The Simpsons where anything can happen but the story has to end with them in the same situation they started in so that the episodes can be shown in any order, in Skins the story does move forward. And yet the adults are all fairly well-known comedians playing it straight. A great idea giving them a certain element of familiarity and yet you don’t take them too seriously, like real parents.

There is an overarching journey for the series, but each episode is its own story. Each focuses on one character, shown from their point of view with that actor in almost every scene. At the start of the series is some stereotyping. They’ve carefully chosen a black, a white, a boy, a girl, a gay, a popular person, an outcast etc, and someone to really hate. But when the hated person, and the others, get the story from their point of view you understand that everyone’s an individual and you can actually identify with all of them, you learn to appreciate people for what they are. And then just when you’re getting too familiar with the cast and they’re all melding into one, they get rid of them all and bring a brand new cast in. It’s not like Hollyoaks where they go to college for two years and then they have to justify keeping them around. They really do move on to the next academic year and the next target audience.

I also really like the music. Again they don’t use stereotype music which brings its own baggage. It’s not heavy handed like Eastenders where the lyrics of the song always describe what’s about to happen. They use new music that you’ve never heard before. It’s relevant to the story and it’s relevant to the current scene. It’s not something you already love, it’s something you’ll grow to love.

The writing is brilliant. It credits the viewer with intelligence. It reminds me of Mad Men. In most TV they tell you something’s going to happen, then it happens, then they tell you it happened and explain why and the effects of it. In Skins it’s like someone’s gone through and deleted 80% of the lines. They just show you things happening. If you’re intelligent then you know all the other stuff. Sometimes there’s a reaction shot. If it was on ITV you’d then say a line in your head and then they’d say it on TV. On Channel 4 there’s no need.

So people who complain that the series isn’t what it used to be are missing the point. Life moves on. Music does, fashion does, issues do. And the programme does too. It’s an excellent framework to bring in new stories and new actors. So I don’t understand why they’re scrapping it. I will miss it.

Is Facebook appropriate for IBM?

IBM apparently, depending on how you measure it, has fewer product pages on Facebook or any other social media than its main competitors. Facebook has always been for the consumer market but that doesn’t mean it always should be. It needs to evolve. Many companies ban their employs from using it because it is not currently for business. When it becomes for business they will allow it. I think the Facebook verb “Like” is badly named. It means you want their updates to appear in your newsfeed and consequently in your friends’ feeds. Your friends can exclude it from their newsfeed but it’s a pain. Facebook may be for individuals but individuals work for companies. Coronation Street (as a random and possibly incorrect example) is for individuals but IBM still advertise in its commercial breaks. Facebook may be for cool young kids but these kids are gradually moving into the workplace and bringing their tools with them. Some Facebook info can show up in a google search, a lot of people object to that but it’s all configurable. So, Facebook is currently not the best tool for the job but it’s one of them. It will be a shame if a big corporation like Google can just come along and displace them by taking their ideas, they need to respond to the competition and evolve.

A new broadcasters’ business model?

Svolta nella Social TV: SKY sigla un accordo con Zeebox (Photo credit: paz.ca)

What should be the new broadcasters’ business model given that “advertising revenues are shrinking”.

Personally I never watch adverts. With Sky+ I go past them. Even before that I used to make cups of tea etc. Broadcasters need you to be so gripped by a programme that you don’t want to miss the return from the adverts. But in general the channels I watch are channels I pay for, including the BBC with the license fee. I guess there’s indirect advertising through product placement, and even sponsorship, and maybe banners in football grounds. I pay a fortune to TV companies for far more content than I could ever watch.

Is it true that “advertising revenues are shrinking”? That advertising money to broadcasters is dropping, rather than ROI from advertising dropping. Surely if the advertising can be shown to make money then it will still come, although it may be redistributed.

Targeted advertising could make the adverts more effective and so the advertisers could pay more to get to fewer people. As the ‘broadcasters’ deliver to viewers individually and know more about the viewers this can be effective.

Making twitter feeds available to the broadcasters could create a twitter feedback loop. It could just help reduce every programme to the lowest common denominator. But twitter is also good for making people watch things in real time. If my friends are chatting about a programme I’m watching, and journalists etc too, then I want to be there with them seeing their comments about things as they happen. Reading the feed a few days later when I watch the recording is not the same. The discussion enhances the programme, like in the old days when families watched TV together.

The partnership of Sky with Zeebox, combined with internet connected TVs and media streamers could change everything. Zeebox can/could connect to all the TVs on the LAN and know what you’re watching. It could report directly to the TV company to say whether you’re watching their programme, and whether you’ve switched it off. It enhances the viewing substantially in terms of helping you discuss the programme with your friends and so making you watch it in real time. Being able to select your “friends” based on common interests means that one programme doesn’t need to be reduced to being suitable for the whole family we can have the audience groups selecting and refining themselves instead.

Maybe we’re heading back to event television with good quality targeted programming.

The Internet killed the music industry, not.

Home Taping is Killing Music (Photo credit: diebmx)

Some people say that SOPA is due to the effect of downloads on the music industry. This leads me to wonder we really know what the effect was. I know that a few years ago there was a massive drop in sales due to piracy. Empirically that was because the pirates/consumers understood the new world a lot faster than the big corporations. Nowadays I see the likes of iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and last.fm with sophisticated recommendation engines and really easy to use interfaces for purchasing music legally, with a much lower cost for delivering the music and yet they charge not that much less for purchasing it. People can buy the music without having to pay to travel to a shop, so more impulse buys and more speculative ones, they can pay to download it without a risk of viruses and without being restricted to only the more popular albums. Spotify, last.fm, sky etc are “making” people pay to listen to albums they already own. New artists/start up bands as well as very established ones are selling music directly to the people on-line and probably making more money than they did when the corporations were involved. Touring artists like Prince are giving their albums away and still making a fortune from the tour. Lady Gaga says she’s happy with the amount of money she makes even though she’s the most pirated artist. I know Lily Allen is moaning that she’s not making money because she’s stopped touring and people aren’t buying her music but she’s only famous because the bootlegs of her music spread for free over the net, and I bet she makes a lot from The X Factor etc using her music as the backing track to the sob stories. I know I consume a lot more music than I used to and through the choice and availability that the net brings and the sophisticated recommendation engines and the information about discographies on wikipedia, and I spend a lot more, particularly on concerts. So although there was a significant dip in music revenue due to piracy I doubt that this has continued.