Recently I’ve been lucky to meet with the CTOs of two important Canadian public sector organizations, Canada Health Infoway and the Province of Ontario.

Indeed Dennis Giokas kindly presented on Cloud Computing in Healthcare at our recent seminar in Toronto.

This presentation was about the recent CHI Cloud white paper, which is quite visionary in its description of how Cloud will evolve and grow in E-Health.

In particular, and this was the common theme for Ontario as well, was the forecast of increasing use of SaaS (Software as a Service) as a delivery model.

This is a simple and logical part of the Cloud trend of course, but exciting to see it described in both strategy and real-world terms – The Province for example has recently a numbed of SaaS-specific tender RFPs.

E-Health Big Data PaaS

It’s exciting because both Dave and Dennis also describe it in terms of …

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

This blog is a response to the most common question that I and my marketing team receive from small and growing hosters: “I do not know how to make my business different and unique in some way. How do I differentiate my products and services?” 

Your business is differentiated not by what you sell but by what people buy. What you sell is finite, can be described as a set of features, an object or a service with a price. What your customers buy is changing, unique to each buyer and differentiated not by feature and prices but by the unique set of problems it solves for the customers. It is your customers who differentiate your business not your products.

But you still sell a product. And if you are a shared hoster you sell hosting services … and if you are like most shared hosters you sell them in 3 flavors.

• ·         Bronze, Silver, Gold
• ·         Small, Medium, Big
• ·         Starter, Preferred, Professional 

Each of these flavors describes a set of resources (memory, accounts, websites counts). If you navigate to pretty much any shared hosting websites you will find a carbon copy of these. All the offers are focused on product and feature level differentiation.

But your business is not a carbon copy. Your customers are choosing a “medium hosting package” to start a business, get a blog for a church, or to create a site for a favorite cat. They are doing it in their neck of the woods, their living room and on their couch and not on-the-generic-internet. 

So sell a Bronze website hosting service but differentiate it by telling the story from your customers’ perspective. Find out who is buying from you and why and tell their story. You are making a difference in their lives that is worth paying for so it is also worth talking about and sharing.

The simplest way to tell a story is through a simple blog. Many larger hosters do it quite well and you can see good examples on Softlayer site at http://blog.softlayer.com/softlayer/ or Rackspace at http://www.rackspace.com/blog/. My heart though goes to GoDaddy and Bob Parsons’ blog at http://www.bobparsons.me/index.php?ci=78114 . Nobody in the hosting industry has more personality than Bob and, in my opinion, the success of GoDaddy was singlehandedly driven by the differentiated persona that Bob was able to create.

Another very powerful way of storytelling can be done through the voice of the customer. Here you have a choice of testimonials and more formal case studies. My personal favorites, however, are customer- written blogs. They have more depth than testimonials and are less corporate and dry then case studies, and when the customer writes the story of their business it comes from the heart.

If you can do both – create stories in your own voice and supplement these with the voice of your customers, you will be making a truly inviting narrative.

Telling your customers’ story will give you another advantage. Story telling is a personal thing. One learns as much about the storyteller as the story.  And this story will be told by you and will therefore be unique and made specific by your voice and personality. It will be your first step to creating a brand for your business and making your business remarkable i.e. one that people will remark on.

Let me know if you find these blogs useful. Write back, argue if you disagree. I want to hear from you. You can always email me at adambo@parallels.com

Moving applications to the cloud can create a more flexible, more responsive IT department, but what about moving application data to the cloud? How secure is that? And are cloud applications truly reliable and less expensive than on-premise applications?

Let’s consider some issues before you take the cloud-migration leap.

1. Goals
 
Are you moving to the cloud to reduce costs, time-to-deployment, or your IT department’s workload? Goals are the foundation of success, so you should list them, prioritie them, and quantify them. Before long, you’ll be able to determine whether some level of cloud migration is right for you.

2. Security
 
Will the cloud application provider secure and encrypt your data, both in motion and at rest; safeguard against breaches; execute threat analyses and penetration tests; and be candid about their findings? Remember: you, not the provider, will have to answer to the client in the event …

“Cloud made Big Data what it is today,” stated Scott Morrison, CTO at Layer 7 Technologies, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Cloud gave us the massively scalable infrastructure necessary to practically do Big Data,” Morrison continued, “as well as the engineering mindset that made it a front-of-mind solution for organizations that may not have considered it before.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Scott Morrison: It’s about both, but one or the other may be the driving motivator depending on the organization.

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Younger enterprise IT employees understand how easy it is to consume services from the cloud. They are becoming instrumental in helping corporations find better solution alternatives than currently available.
Enterprise IT‘s focus is moving from software development to data analytics, so it is not surprising that attention is also being paid to help them address these needs. The exhibit hall at the recent Strata conference (run by O‘Reilly Media) was packed with start-up companies demonstrating innovative data analytics solutions. One of the challenges in implementing analytics is customers‘ lack of skills. A common theme among start-up solutions was overcoming that skills barrier. Some of these solutions were designed to help users get started with simple BigData initiatives and then progress to solving more complicated problems.

Krish Krishnan from Sixth Sense presented on the first day of Strata and made an interesting comment on one of his slides: «The Gen Z and Millennial Generation of buyers will not be swayed by traditional engagement models of selling products and services.» Having worked with large enterprise vendors, I have seen many sales deals closed based on relationships between vendor account teams and enterprise IT buyers that often take years to cultivate. Customers take a long time to develop solution requirements in the form of Requests for Proposal (RFP) and then mandate proofs of concepts from vendors before they make a buying decision. While Krish identified these buyers as just Gen Z and the future, I think anyone past generation Y are ready for a new model.

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It is often the case that when you look at things a certain way, they become filtered over time, and you see what you expected to see. This happens to everyone, and while a wonderful adaptation to help handle all of the various inputs in our lives, has caused just about everyone to jump to conclusions because they think they know what they see. Neville Chamberlain did that. He (and his advisors) was certain that Hitler would keep the peace after he was given what the German people wanted. He saw Hitler as the same as other European leaders, and that was definitely not what Hitler was. There is no definitive proof that things would have gone differently had the allied powers put their foot down on Czechoslovakia. But the Munich accords, and the statement quoted above, definitively did put an end to Chamberlain’s career.

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The IT stacks we saw and worked with until recently are almost things of the past now. This change, of course, can be mainly attributed to the Internet evolution and the way IT is being leveraged these days especially with the blurring of lines between personal and work-related IT use. The role and expectations from IT have vastly changed in an increasingly shorter amount of time than in previous years. The epiphenomenon of these expectations is the emergence of technologies like cloud computing, mobility, Big Data and social collaboration. This has had a dramatic and direct impact on how we look at the IT stack today and in the near future, what we plan to achieve with IT, how we are going to achieve them, and what skills or acumen we should be developing in order to succeed.
Of course, there won’t just be a single IT Stack per se (no one-size-fits-all), but we need a basic framework that will set the direction for future options. Future IT stacks that stem from the proposed one below won’t be driven by technology alone, but by the very nature of the applications and workloads they are created for; and equally, by the end user’s aspiration for newer experiences.

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With the evolution of the Internet, organizations found new avenues to reach consumers in the virtual world. With the ubiquitous reach of cloud technologies, not only has rich media reached consumers in every corner of the globe, the very focus of marketing is shifting from product-centric to consumer-centric.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ajit Sagar, Associate VP, Digital Transformation Practice at Infosys Limited, will focus on the application of cloud and Big Data to the business of digital marketing. He will cover the shifting trends in digital marketing supported by the cloud, the products that enable marketing applications on the cloud, omni-channel marketing through the cloud, and what it takes to deliver end-to-end marketing solutions on cloud-based infrastructures, exemplified through real-world case studies.

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«Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing,» said Robert LeBlanc, IBM SVP of Software, as IBM – one of the world’s largest private cloud vendors with more than 5,000 private cloud customers in 2012 – this week announced that its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture, including OpenStack.

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