Bruce MacVarish Notes

Adoption of Cloud Communications is an evolution, not a revolution

The emergence of cloud technologies and architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  There is no doubt that introduction of cloud enables many new and exciting experiences for end users and opportunities for productivity gains for enterprises. 

It seems to me, that while we will continue to hear how “the Cloud” is creating a revolution for end users and enterprises, adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

As enterprises and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) evolve toward cloud communications, each have different business and technical drivers that will result in a number of different deployment models based on their priorities, path and pace of introduction.

Many enterprises and CSPs have initially focused on deploying private cloud solutions as a complement to their on-premises communication and existing collaboration applications.  This approach enables enterprises to gain early benefits of decentralized communication applications while maintaining a private, secure deployment. 

Other enterprises and CSPs are considering the introduction of public, multi-tenant communication applications delivered as a hosted or cloud service. 

Still others are interested in the benefits of hybrid communication clouds that combine on-premises, private and/or public cloud communication applications and resources.  

While the concept of managed and hosted services is not new, the emergence of cloud architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  Every day enterprise executives, end users and IT organizations hear how “the Cloud” is a revolution and is transforming their industry.  Yet, when it comes to communication and collaboration solutions for mid-size to large enterprises, the reality is that the adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

Aggregating Value

Peter Kim has a short post describing the guiding principle of :

Aggregate or Be Aggregated

Peter writes:

"Functional integration of ecosystems is emerging as the path towards maximizing value creation within our increasingly digital world. To own an industry leadership position, you need to own the experience.

Aggregate or be aggregated. Keep this in mind as you encounter offers to publish and syndicate your content, explore new opportunities for customers/members/users, and consider how your relationship will be monetized by the company that's helping you out."

The principle reminded me of an earlier post on the value of aggregating communications where I wrote:

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.   

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the real-time web.

I agree with Peter.  Value creation is found in aggregating content, streams, interactions and conversations for users in a more useful and powerful way than competitors.  

Platform Strategies Evolve

While most platforms evolve from "killer apps" to powerful platforms, Bijan Sabet highlights how new platforms are emerging without developing an application first.

From Bijan, examples include:

Yodlee for banking apps

Twilio for voice and sms apps

Cardspring for payment card apps

Clever for education apps

Onswipe for touch web apps

These “platform first” companies are getting traction because

a) they are solving an extremely messy (understatement) problem behind the scenes

b) their APIs are simple & clean. the ease of developing apps on these platforms are capital efficient (e.g. compare this with the old days of mobile app development pre iOS)

c) they are supporting and creating an ecosystem to flourish where the previous ecosystem was broken. The apps want the platform to succeed because the pain and mess previously felt was unbearable. 

d) roles are fairly well understood between platform and developer. everyone leaves a little money on the table on both sides to get to a happy place. 

I still like the idea of app first, platform second. In the best case, the app provider that has platform ambitions can dogfood the same API that they give developers.

But it’s no longer the only way to get a platform started.

It’s interesting to think about other markets where a “platform first” company could emerge

Twitter Federation

Dan Wineman lights up the federation crew by asking for a federated Twitter.  Dan outlines the benefits as well as the problems when it comes to a decentralized, federated, real-time, social communications app.

"I’d like to see App.net move toward a federated architecture. Broadly, what that means is that instead of being a central service that each client connects to directly, it would become a loosely organized mesh of independently controlled nodes. Users and devices would connect to whatever node they liked best — you can run your own if you want — and the nodes would talk to each other in some clever way to collectively maintain the appearance of a single unified social network.

The advantages are numerous and comparable to those of the web itself: no single point of failure, no concentration of power, no risk that the entire network will be sold to Facebook.

But does this work for a service like Twitter? Can the behavior we’ve come to expect from social networks be reproduced in this model?

Here’s a list of three constraints we’ve come to expect of our social timelines:

• Immediacy: if a post has been made by someone I follow, I can see it in my timeline right away (or close enough that I don’t notice the difference).
• Chronology: posts always appear in order by time posted.
• Monotonicity: timelines grow only from the top; older posts are never retroactively inserted.

The problem appears to be that no federated architecture can simultaneously satisfy all three of these conditions. You can have any two: for example, if you let go of immediacy, your node can just wait until it’s received the latest content from every other node before displaying anything. But that’s not very scalable, and it makes real-time conversation impossible, so let’s keep immediacy. Now we have to decide what to do when content from a far-away node arrives late: if we’ve already displayed newer posts, we have to violate either chronology (by posting the older content above the newer) or monotonicity (by inserting it chronologically into the timeline).

The moral of the story is that the qualities that make Twitter interesting — its mix of conversation, discovery, and one-to-many communication — are direct consequences of its centralized architecture. Without the centralization you can still have something interesting, but it’s a different thing.

I’d love to be proven wrong."

A few of the comments related to Dan's post include:

  Kevin Marks

You're assuming a single conversational thread, but the key value of twitter is the semi-overlapping publics that mean we don't have to read all responses to a post in order, just those from people we choose to follow. Chronology is violated by Twitter, explictly by retweets and quoting. They favour monotonicity instead, but this does lead to repetition. 

Monotonicity is a display choice at the client.
See http://j.mp/twittertheory for more on semi-overlapping publics.
See SWAT0 for discussions fo ow to test and achieve this: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubat...

• Josh Triplett

  First of all, it seems odd to have a post about federated Twitter without mentioning OStatus, the concrete implementation of federated Twitter that already exists and works.  It implements pretty much everything about Twitter that you'd care about, except for the userbase, which seems like a given for any federated microblogging implementation given that Twitter doesn't allow or support federation themselves.

  Second, these criteria are not binary.  With a decently functioning network, you can have enough immediacy to expect messages within a minute or so, which means you can expect enough monotonicity to only look for new messages within the most recent minute or so of your timeline, a region that normally fits on your screen without scrolling unless you're insanely popular (and thus probably not reading every message anyway).

  • dwineman

    I probably should have mentioned OStatus, but it seems to have different goals. Does it satisfy the constraints I listed, or make them irrelevant somehow?

    And you're right, the constraints have tolerances, and in the absence of multi-party conversations (or to someone catching up a few minutes later) they don't really matter at all.

Chris Saad

So tired of this conversation. Blogging type software with 140 character constraint + PubSubHub + An aggregator = Distributed Microblogging/Twitter service. It's easy.

The Story of Nike+

Stefan Olander is VP of Digital Sport at Nike and co-author of The Laws of Velocity.  Under his leadership, Nike is transitioning to a digital product + services company and is innovating in a number of ways to change their relationship with users.

"It used to be that when you bought a product, that was the end of the relationship. It's classic marketing. 'Great, you bought the product. See you in a year, when the next campaign comes along.' That thinking has flipped on its head.

Now, the purchase of any Nike product needs to be the beginning of the relationship we have with the consumer."

Stefan Olander, @soland

The Story of Nike+ and the lessons learned during Nike's shift from innovating products to innovating at the intersection of user experiences, behaviors and goals is inspirational and instructive.

 

Stefan Olander: Running Nike's Digital Strategy

 

Federated Content Delivery Networks

EdgeCast Networks has announced their vision for a federation platform that enables the exchange of content between independent Content Delivery Network operators.

As we've seen with the introduction of federated communications and enterprise applications, the introduction of federated content may well change the content delivery landscape.

It is worth looking at 3 patents related to the federation of content:

Systems and Methods for Invoking Commands Across a Federation (1)

Systems and Methods for Invoking Commands Across a Federation (2)

Systems and Methods to Uniquely Identify Assets in a Federation

I believe in the value of federation for enterprise users and IT organizations to enable new, powerful communication and collaboration networks. 

While the EdgeCast approach is interesting, it has not applied the lessons, architectures or models that have been proven in other federated solutions.  It is an interesting step in the right direction, but a solution that could create new value for enterprises and CDNs with broader, unconstrained thinking.

 

Ranking Attention in Realtime

Bitly, the company that basically ushered the world into short links on sites like Twitter, is playing around with a new service, launching it under its “Bitly Labs” umbrella.

It’s called Realtime, and is available at http://www.rt.ly

Here’s what we know:

Realtime (http://rt.ly) is an internet attention ranking engine, giving you powerful tools for analyzing what the world is paying attention to right now. You can filter and explore activity on the social web by topics, phrases, domains, social networks and more.

(via TheNextWeb.com by Drew Olanoff)

Nike+ Fuelband

 

There is new, untold value when offering innovative experiences for users that help them monitor, analyze, share and shape behavior.

 

Cooperation Flows

I've posted before of the shift toward conversations and relationships within the enterprise and how new value and productivity would come from flow based collaboration apps.

I believe the enterprise is:

• Being redefined around people - not tasks or processes
• Improving productivity by unlocking people's conversations and relationships - not focusing on transactions
• Delivering new value through the flow of my many, loosely coupled interactions of cooperation - not tightly coupled, structured constraints of collaboration.

I found alignment and agreement with these points when reading JP Rangaswami's insightful summary of how workflows of the past are different from collaboration flows of today.

 

JP writes:

"Workflows, like trains, worked in well-defined, closed systems.

Collaboration flows, on the other hand, are like rivers and oceans.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. The oceans and rivers of collaboration flows include all these conversations. The conversations themselves are manifestations of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral. Sometimes they lead to transactions, surfaced by the capability as seen in the context.

What are these conversations? There’s nothing special about them. Here’s a loose classification of the types of conversations one would see in the workplace:

• Questions needing answers (Hey, how do I do this? Here’s how. Where can I find this? Here it is. Who really knows this? Here’s who)
• Sharing of experiences (I just installed this app, and it was *useless*. Here’s why. I just read this book and it was *fantastic. Here’s why)
• Feedback (I really found your answer helpful. I couldn’t have done this without you.)
• Social filtering (I rate this answer more than the others. I think you should see this so I will +1 it or Like it or RT it.)
• Status reporting (I’m here doing this, I’m there doing that)
• Alerts potentially needing action (If THIS then THAT, coming from a litany of sources)

...and a little later...

These conversations have been going on for aeons. But there’s one major difference. And that is this: the conversations are recorded. Persisted. Archived. So they’re auditable. Searchable. Findable. Besides this, there are other significant differences:

• The conversations are made visible immediately , in real-time
• They come wrapped in context, auto date and time stamped, author identified, location mapped, topic tagged
• The context can be enriched by other participants
• They’re channel- and device-independent; conversations can start in one medium, move to another. They can start on blogs, move to twitter, move to synchronous sound.
• They’re time- and space-shiftable. Synchronous and asynchronous. Mobile in design.
• They work on “publish-subscribe” networked models rather than broadcast and hierarch

I'm also reminded of this comparison of Collaboration vs. Cooperation by @shiftctrlesc and a number of posts by Stowe Boyd about cooperation, flows and the future of work.

As a result of the above, while JP makes a distinction between workflows and collaboration flows, I believe we should make the same type of distinction between collaboration flows and cooperation flows.

For me, the enterprise is being rebuilt around people, conversations and relationships powered by many, many loosely coupled interactions and cooperation flows.

Creating Value from Information Assets

To Facebook, you're worth about $81. Your friendships are worth $0.62 per connection. Each “Like” or post is worth about $.03. When added up, information generated from your (and all other Facebook users')  friendships, likes, posts and pages accounted for $68B in Facebook's planned IPO.

From the WSJ post on how Facebook creates and values information:

The Financial Value of Facebook’s Information Assets

"The value of all the information Facebook collects is in the hinterland between its reported balance sheet book value of $6.6 billion and the anticipated post-IPO market value. Facebook is a pure information-based business; it doesn’t buy, make or sell anything else. Using Facebook’s own conservative valuation of $75 billion, its information value gap is more than $68 billion.

What information has Facebook collected from you and me? Facebook reports it has 845 million Monthly Active Users (“MAUs”) as of December 2011, up from 608 million in 2010 and 360 million in 2009. Facebook claims users punch the “Like” button or post a comment 2.7 billion times per day. Estimates suggest about half of those are “Likes” and half are some form of written content. Based on Facebook’s recent trajectory, this extrapolates to 2.11 trillion pieces of monetizable content collected during the past three years. Facebook’s filing also discloses that it has 37 million pages with 10 or more “Likes,” while other sources indicate Facebook hosts nearly 22,000 business pages. Its 845 million users, each with an average of 130 friends, equates to 109 billion friendships. Facebook’s S-1 corroborates this figure as “over 100 billion friend connections.”

Dividing Facebook’s 2.11 trillion pieces of content into this market-to-book valuation differential indicates that each “Like” you click or item you post will be worth about $.03 to Facebook or its future investing public.

Because Facebook actually generated $3.7 billion on these information assets last year, the realized value of its information portfolio is only 1/20th its investor-anticipated potential. Facebook and its investors plainly expect this gap to be closed through its information monetization capabilities. Information value gaps aren’t unique to Facebook — Google and other information-centric businesses experience the same gaps."

How is your business creating value from the information you and/or your users generate while using your product?

"Most organizations do not benefit from a global pool of data-churning staff and a pure information-based business model. But to remain competitive, they must continually become more information-centric. This starts with CIOs considering what sources of information are available both internally and externally, envisioning how this information can be deployed in transformative ways, and valuing and managing information as an actual corporate asset."

Want to start finding the answer?   Read just about anything written by Hal Varian including "Information Rules".