GMO Cloud

Adobe finally gets on board the Cloud Train

For most of us, when we think Adobe Software, we think of desktop applications for multimedia and creativity, as opposed to anything that you could run on virtual servers. That is probably because they have been producing these types of applications for over thirty years. But the world of the PC has gradually evolved into a place where desktop software is becoming old fashioned and virtual servers based “Software as a Service” (SaaS) is increasingly becoming the norm. It has often looked as if Adobe was completely unaware of this evolution happening around them. But that seems to have changed. Recently Adobe announced a very different set of tools for the creative community, one that is meant to work in the cloud.

Adobe Mobile Apps in the Cloud

Adobe recently revealed that they have created a set of applications (apps) that show they are ready to begin to change their focus. It will move them towards mobile technology and the ability to work with virtual servers to make those platforms a part of the Adobe world. The new mobile apps are called “Adobe Touch Apps” and were created to work with Android tablets and Apple iPads. They have the look and feel of the current Creative Suite desktop software and will continue to allow users to do full Photoshop image editing just like the desktop version, as well as a bunch a new creative design tasks.

These six apps are created specifically for touch screens and are designed to be intuitive. They will give users the ability to explore ideas and present creative concepts on the go through their iPad or Android tablet. These devices will be connected to cloud-based Adobe applications that will sit on virtual servers. These apps will have the same high professional quality that Adobe is known for and that many creative business people rely on, but with the ability to access them through a touch device while on-the-go. The mobile apps will create instant accessibility to image editing, ideation, sketching, mood boards, website and mobile app prototyping as well as being able to present finished work.

The Creative Cloud

The biggest step for Adobe has to be the creation of a virtual server hub for users to share files, synch the collaborative work they are doing and allow others to view work as it progresses. This hub, which Adobe has named “Creative Cloud”, will take the company that extra step into one of the areas that cloud is best at, collaboration. In many ways, this is a natural step for a company that has always been at the heart of the creative community.

It is no secret that the company sees this move as an important step that will transform the company and bring it into the 21st Century. Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch has even said, “The move to the Creative Cloud is a major component in the transformation of Adobe.”

With this move to bring the desktop software that has been so vital to many creative businesses into the world of virtual servers and cloud technology Adobe brings its unique creative software to the world of the tablet and beyond. It also anticipates the move by many tablets to stylus capabilities and will prove to be a good partner for that development.

Flash vs HTML5

One of the hallmarks of Adobe has always been its Flash product, an application that at one time was used anywhere that animation and video was seen on the web. But Flash has recently been under fire as video, gaming and animation developers in both large companies and independent studios explore HTML5 capabilities. HTML5 is an open source standard as opposed to Flash’s proprietary platform, which is another reason for HTML5’s recent popularity amongst developers. At a recent conference Adobe talked of its own work with HTML5 and was noticeably silent about any new Flash developments. This may also be a sign that Adobe is moving more of its gaming based software towards the open source HTML5 and the cloud. It is probably no coincidence that Adobe also announced its recent purchase of Nitobi software, creators of PhoneGap, an open source platform for creating mobile apps based on HTML5.

With the addition of these six apps and the introduction of the Creative Cloud, it looks like Adobe has finally entered the Cloud universe. Adobe’s push toward HTML5 development support merely endorses that change. For many within the creative community this will be welcome news. It is also welcome news to anyone in the cloud community as it simply reinforces that almost any business model can be adapted successfully to the power of virtual servers in the cloud.

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Tips to Combat Cloud Migration Risks

Is your company considering moving some or many of their day-to-day operations to cloud servers? These days it is no longer really a question of if you will move at least part of your business enterprise to the cloud, but when. If this is a step you are contemplating soon, you might want to consider a couple of key questions that will help you to decide what elements in your groundwork may prevent your business from utilizing virtual servers or cloud hosting.

Will It Meet Your Financial Objectives?

Every project has both long term and short term risks for its financial return on investment. Have you looked at both of these to assess how including cloud servers will affect your goals? There are a number of factors to consider when looking at risk probability including utilization, speed, scalability and value. While it is true that these factors can and often will be built into most ROI models, careful consideration should be made to ensure you are aware of how including virtual servers or cloud hosting will affect the headline numbers for investment, revenue, cost and most importantly how long before you see your return.

Does the Solution Fit in the Enterprise Culture?

This is an important question that isn’t always asked at the beginning. The best solution is to start with an executive vision that clearly shows the direction the business transformation will take. Of course, this is easier said than done. It will require top-level support for the changes proposed, a clear roadmap for procurement, cloud services or cloud hosting and applications implementation and most of all the organization of stakeholders. You will need to develop consensus amongst these stakeholders for such elements as storage, computing, network and applications in order to prioritize demands for usage. If you begin by creating a series of pilot introductions you can build confidence amongst the users and create buy-in from your most critical stakeholders.

Can You Integrate Cloud Solutions and Current Services?

If you are considering several different cloud solutions as part of a bigger solution, do these various elements integrate and can they work well with the existing system in addition to each other? This can be a critical factor since the inability to integrate an element such as cloud VPS servers into the current system may make the changes impossible to implement. The three key elements to include are taking into account the interface conversion cost, assessing the difficulty level in changing the existing system and considering whether the skills exist within the company to make these changes.

The question of skills is an important risk as you will need to know if the current skill sets include an ability to assemble and customize multiple cloud servers and services from various providers. This will need to be accomplished in a flexible way that is adaptable while able to maintain the same high levels of security, handle backup and all governance issues that may arise. If you do not have this kind of skill in house, the cost of adding it needs to be considered as part of the solution.

Will your Legal, Contractual and Moral Obligations be Impacted?

Noncompliance can become an issue when considering an outside cloud service provider for cloud hosting or cloud VPS servers. Even the provision of contracts may not be sufficient when it comes to confidentiality and location assurances. In some instances you may even discover that force majeure will stop the supplier from honoring those agreements. A good example of this would be if a legal action resulted in a subpoena of another tenant’s data that is in the same system. This may have an impact on the enterprise’s corporate reputation.

Is the System Quality and Security Adequate to Meet Your Users’ Needs?

If you were buying a system in-house, you would have benchmarks it needed to meet. The same criteria holds true for anything in the cloud. You can assess the quality of an external system using the same factors you would use for the quality of your own system. In addition, take a close look at the provider’s track record just as you would with any other vendor. The same rules should be applied to security. Ask questions, get answers and adapt your traditional security models to the new cloud computing needs. Be sure that you include end-to-end security as part of the solution. Your own internal policies regarding user provisioning and control over access should be a part of the entire security plan.

As you can see, none of these questions are a large departure from what you would be asking if you were considering a new system in the traditional mode. Deciding to include cloud servers or cloud hosting as part of a larger project simply requires a few more questions that in the long run will give planning stages more information, ultimately ending with a better designed solution.

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Looking at Cloud Servers as the New Reality

Anyone paying attention to technology today is familiar with the term “disruptive technology” as coined by Clayton Christensen in his ground-breaking work “Innovator’s Dilemma”. A great example of this particular type of innovation can be seen by simply taking a look at your desktop and the desktop software you use on a weekly basis. When you compare that to the services your company uses from the cloud, you can begin to see how much this has changed in a short amount of time. With the introduction of cloud servers, business could move away from the clumsy and burdensome applications that took up time and money, often more time and money in maintenance then was originally invested in the product. Business has begun the move to the cloud, and this disruptive technology is the new reality being born in every enterprise.

Cloud Hosting Costs

As an alternative to the legacy models, cloud hosting technology is more inexpensive to run. It is easier to implement and often offers a broader application when it comes to enterprise computing. Customers are drawn to the advantages of performance and low expense on products that in the past were often over-serviced as well as over-priced. As with many disruptive technologies, the cloud have begun to solve additional problems as the solutions spread through an organization, often due to the ease of adaption and low price for introduction.

But just as Christensen pointed out, it is the smaller more adept businesses that are the initial ones who embrace the changes a disruptive alteration brings, like cloud hosting and cloud servers. With only a small fraction of the $270 billion spent on enterprise software currently going towards cloud vendors, it is obvious that many don’t feel the need for change or yet see the writing on the wall. Some traditional enterprise leaders can see the need to make the leap, but often don’t have the business models to allow the change. They are like a huge cumbersome ship trying to turn in the wind. Some don’t see the need for change; others just don’t have the support within the organization to make the changes needed to accommodate the new dynamic.

The comfortable positions that these enterprises hold make them unable to initiate the aggressive changes needed to accommodate a new cloud directive. Fear of confused customers, disrupted channels and unfamiliarity leading to problems in product execution hold them at bay. Their predicament is obvious, the solution not quite so.

Cloud Server as Business Model

There are some, however, that see this as an opportunity for change and growth. Mike McCarthy is the VP of Cloud Computing with IBM and he recently spoke at the INTEROP technology conference in India about these very changes. In his keynote talk he spoke of the importance of businesses to reinvent themselves in regards to changes and the cloud, or they would soon find themselves being left behind.

An interesting statistic he gave at the talk was how of the ten top companies listed a decade ago, only two could be found in that list today. The others were left behind when changes to the way business is being done found them caught in their own stagnation. To stay on top you have to constantly reinvent yourself, and that includes your business model. With the coming changes created by cloud servers and cloud hosting, we are not only going to be working faster with fewer expenses attached to that work, but thinking differently. And that means looking at cloud computing not as a technology but as an important concept that will give us a smarter planet.

Tracking Cloud Adoption Growth

With an expected 80 percent of the traffic moving to server-to-server by 2014, according to a recent report by Mike Nielsen, Director of Vertical and Solution Marketing for HP Networking, we will see unbelievable growth in new ways. “We anticipate 1,000 percent growth in the next four years in the enterprise network because of video,” says Nielson. “Data center on the cloud, fragmented networks and new services are the new realities of today. And the entire ecosystem has to be prepared with solutions around these.”

However, McCarthy does caution that although he sees cloud computing as an important player in the roles that are affecting the IT landscape, it is not the only solution. IT organizations today face some big problems and part of the solution is to understand where cloud hosting or cloud servers fit as part of the answers.

“The percentage of CIOs who see cloud computing as IT and business model is growing,” says McCarthy. “Cloud helps a business and IT to create and deliver value in fundamentally new ways. Businesses are choosing a variety of cloud models (private, public and hybrid) to meet their unique needs and priorities.”

But he stresses that IT will need to re-invent itself several times over as enterprises look to sustain growth. There are cycles of sprawling IT complicated by incomplete data and an inflexible IT that must change.

Innovation vs. Disruption

But not all innovation needs to be disruptive. When technology reinforces current leaders, it can then be seen as sustaining rather than disruptive. But is that so with the cloud? Are the go-to-market strategies unchanged or the technological advances linear ones? In these instances the current market players can maintain the status quo. But when a totally new technology is brought to market, such as the introduction of the web, new players can move more quickly to capitalize and commercialize the new reality.

A good example is Dell versus The Yellow Pages. The web simply meant that Dell could put its catalog on the web, and it did so quite quickly. The difference between the catalog and a web page was a linear move. With the Yellow Pages, they lost their opportunity when Yelp came along and recognized the power of the community on the web. The web was a disruptive change in this instance. It had the ability to access local information and from it creates a community. This was an element that the Yellow Pages lacked.

We see this once again with the move of many of the core business applications to the web. Almost every aspect of business has changed from sales, marketing and distribution to the actual utility of cloud powered software. End-user adaptation drives sales and marketing, not the top-down mandates of old. Startups can access the same distribution networks (i.e. the Internet) as current market leaders, diminishing their high-value partnerships and vendor relationships. And in the final analysis, the products themselves are defined by their openness, ability to be mobile and their flexibility that makes them perfect tools for collaboration. And so, with this new disruption, startups have the ability to compete successfully with the traditional leaders in their field, changing the rules of the game for many.

Salesforce is a good example of a business that initially competed by slipping in as a “just good enough” competitor that with time and more complex product roadmaps became an indispensible tool for its clients. What began as a small 2% share of the market in 2002 that had analysts dismissing it as an also-ran lacking the functionality side of the equation became a $2 billion enterprise with 100,000 customers by 2011. They were able to serve their customers in more meaningful ways and knew how to capitalize on that fact.

This kind of change is happening across the globe as IT is liberated from solving the day to day functions of putting together servers and plugging cables into boxes. Instead it can move on to help build value of interest on the software and systems of the enterprise. Reaching beyond the necessary but more utilitarian tasks, IT can add value to the core business process of a company.

We see this beginning to happen at companies like Pandora where the integration of applications creates greater value, speed and flexibility for their clients and employees. Dole has seen their IT create systems that allow individuals to work from anywhere drawing critical information through their iPads from any part of the company to any other. And at Proctor and Gamble they have an innovative IT team that works to deliver the cloud to teams and groups in just about any corner of the globe. They work securely and with greater productivity than ever.

Customer experiences are more dynamic, solutions are updated more frequently, projects are completed more quickly, and this all contributes to better business results. The entire system can grow with greater breadth, wider diversity and a farther reach of technology for all. The change is here already, it is up to us to decide if we are part of that change or if we will cling stubbornly to the old truths while the new realities emerge.

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Friday Cloud News Round Up

Cloud Hosting and the Need for Business Agility

Michael Hugos is a writer and speaker on the changing world of business and technology. In this week’s blog for CIO, he talks about the need for businesses to become more agile as social media and the advances of cloud hosting change many aspects of business.

Survey Shows Support for Government Cloud

A recent survey of California voters revealed that 9 out of 10 supported the idea of the California government using technology including cloud technology such as cloud servers to save the state money. In addition, a second survey by the same company, BlueText, showed that government IT managers who were familiar with cloud servers and other cloud technology were more likely to support it in their agencies.

Putting Movies in the Cloud

In a bold move Apple announced they are talking with numerous studios to ink a deal that could allow them to offer major motion pictures through their iTunes service as early as late 2011 or early 2012. This move reflects the recent trend towards entertainment in the cloud as UltraViolet, a multi-studio collaboration to bring movies to mobile devices through a cloud hosting service launches their first offerings: Warner Brothers Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern.

VMWare Refocuses its Offerings on SMBs

A recent realization that over half of the licenses sold were to businesses with less than 1,000 employees has prompted virtualization leader VMware to rethink their focus. The result was a launch of cloud service products and services geared to SMBs. They are now seeing a triple in the number of SMB clients from last year and are planning an upcoming announcement of the expansion of this portfolio of products.

Science and Cloud Servers Break New Ground

With the announcement of DNAnexus and Google’s upcoming co-venture, it is only a matter of time before we see more breakthroughs in science that were only possible with cloud server based collaboration. All of the recent breakthroughs in DNA sequencing were only possible because of the collaborative nature of cloud hosting solutions, and this recent announcement will give the SRA website a greater ability to build stronger ties with its publicly accessible DNA sequence site.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Moving Lawyers into the Cloud

The legal profession is another area that has started to see more movement into Cloud Services. A recent article discussed how the new choice of IT platform for lawyers in Scotland has become the Cloud, with many firms moving IT processing and data to cloud servers. By doing this, they have suddenly made a vast amount of information that the legal professionals need access available to whether in their offices, in the field or at a court case. It has also made it much easier for smaller law firms to expand into new locations.

Data Accessibility in The Cloud

The first element that most lawyers want to see in the cloud is practice management. This type of software would facilitate an individual lawyer or practice setting up or branching out to new locations quick and easily.

Cloud Hosting Costs

With cloud services’ popular benefit pay-as-you-go cost structure, many lawyers find that moving all of their IT processing and data to the cloud makes a lot of sense. Active case data can be accessed no matter where a lawyer may be at any time. Once a case is closed, the majority of data can be archived. Overhead is reduced and with an ability to share infrastructure many smaller firms find they can afford professional IT structure at a reasonable price.

Cloud Data Security

There was a time when all lawyers worried about the security of the data they had for any case they were working on. This could include physical data as well as information on laptops and USB sticks, as all were vulnerable to theft or damage. With the move to the cloud, all pertinent data can be stored in a safe environment, even in a private cloud if needed, to ensure security for all sources of information. With confidentiality an important part of the business, this increases the ability of any legal professional to serve their clients — knowing that they have a safe and secure place for all confidential data.

Cloud Computing Flexibility

Another great advantage for any lawyer when using the Cloud is that they can work from just about anywhere: at home, the office or even while away on vacation. The ability to check in on new information posted, double check sources and know that all of your information is secure can make it easier for most members of the legal profession to stay on top of latest developments and learn new information as it becomes available.

In short, by evolving with the latest in cloud technology, many legal firms are finding that it can help their teams be more efficient, engage more productively and attend to their business in a more competitive manner than ever before. As the cloud continues to evolve, many predict that it will come to be one of the most important tools yet for the modern law firm.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.