Group items tagged

Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast

Chart comparisons detailing the success of Amazon and Microsoft in the Cloud, and the decline of Oracle and IBM regarding IT future Spending.

"But Microsoft is way ahead of Oracle when it comes to the IaaS segment with Microsoft Azure growing at triple-digit speeds for the last several quarters. Oracle's IaaS segment grew only 6% during the latest quarter, a growth rate that exemplifies its weak position in the strongly growing IaaS market. As Office 365 keeps marching onward and upward, Microsoft is gaining an even stronger foothold in the enterprise segment. Its IaaS offering is as good as any other company out there in the segment, something that is also validated by the strong growth numbers it has been reporting in the last two years. As Microsoft keeps expanding its business management software portfolio that includes CRM and ERP, the company will be in a unique position with strong cloud offerings in SaaS-PaaS-IaaS segments that will be unmatchable by its competition. Companies will naturally gravitate toward a single vendor that can take care of several workflows instead of going through the headache of handling multiple vendors and worrying about integrating all of them to work seamlessly. With Microsoft, that won't be a problem, and that's something Nadella is consciously crafting out of the company's many disparate products. But don't get me wrong. The need for multiple SaaS vendors will always be there. Different businesses have different needs, and there will be times when only a niche player would be able to adequately address those needs. But when you have a company that can take care of the majority of the workflows as well as workloads, like Microsoft can, you'd rather keep Microsoft to handle all the heavy lifting while throwing in a few more SaaS companies to address the entirety of your technology needs. There won't be a need to have Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) manage your customer relationships, Oracle handle your enterprise resource planning, Microsoft handle your office productivity suite and Amazon handle your infrastructure. All you need is a few clicks on your Microsoft

"It's not easy tracking the girth of public cloud providers amid run rates, as-a-service sales projections, and a lack of transparency. Here's how AWS stacks up against Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and Oracle." Good comparison with stats

By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.

"In the engineer-glorifying culture of Silicon Valley, salespeople are often an overlooked breed. But there's a man who's quietly built his legacy by mastering the art of selling business software. Meet Dave Rudnitsky, senior VP of enterprise sales at Insidesales.com, a software startup that was last valued at roughly $1.5 billion. Although he started in finance, Rudnitsky soon made the jump to sales and carved out an incredible 30-year career, helping grow some of the most groundbreaking tech companies, including Oracle, Netscape, and Salesforce early on - even earning a separate chapter about his prolific sales skills in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's 2009 book, "Behind the Cloud." "If you're going to build the greatest product in the world, you're going to need the greatest engineers in the world. But if you can't execute on it, you're going to fail," Rudnitsky tells Business Insider. "And executing means selling." Finance to sales Rudnitsky first got into sales for a simple reason: money. In his first job out of college, with payroll software company ADP's finance team, Rudnitsky realized his peers in sales were getting paid a lot more than he was.  "At a minimum 3 times more," he recalls."

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

"As CIOs look for better value from their enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, they're finding more cost effective ways of operating from cloud based file storage vendors. Box, Google Drive, AWS and others provide the same capabilities offered by expensive ECM solutions. In this article, ECM refers to a solution that stores unstructured data, such as documents, images, and plain text. Traditional ECM solutions are no longer cost competitive and do not provide any additional value over the simple indexing, storage and retrieval capabilities. Shifting ECM management of infrastructure, maintenance and operations to cloud based file storage vendors seems unavoidable to stay cost competitive."

"Dropbox made a number of headline-grabbing moves over the past few weeks, but Storm Ventures partner Anshu Sharma's more concerned than impressed. He sees a company that's failing to figure out what customers truly need - falling for what he calls the "Stack Fallacy," a term he coined to describe how successful companies in one area often overvalue what they know and misjudge what they need to build next. "Companies fail when they take the 'what' for granted," Sharma told Business Insider, referring to companies that falsely believe that they already know "what" customers want. "

""The real opportunity is moving mission critical systems in the cloud. [Industries] are the biggest hold out. We see that as the biggest opportunity." That's how Stephan Scholl, co-president of Infor--an enterprise software company that specializes in solutions for specific industries--explains what he sees when he looks at the cloud market. For all of the endless hype about cloud computing over the past five years, most companies have remained slow to move their most important applications to the cloud. Sure, the cloud has been good enough to run a few experiments and save big money on licensing fees with less critical apps like HR and collaboration and some overly-glorified shared address books. That's because if those services go down or get hacked or employees have a slow internet connection then it's no big deal because people can still get their work done. It's different when it comes to the software that your whole company is logged into every minute of the business day. That was the conventional wisdom. But, it's starting to change. PINBOX The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next Read More Large enterprises, SMBs, startups, and everything in between are now taking a hard look at moving their core business applications to the cloud. While that obviously includes software like ERP and financial systems, the even more interesting story is the software that's specific to each industry--insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, etc. These industries all have specialized needs because they all have very different kinds of business processes. In many of them there are even sub-specialties within industries that have even more specialized needs. "

Has Google fixed Java? Sure looks like it.