This week I had the good fortune of spending time in Lisbon, Portugal. I met with several hundred business men and women at a mobility event in Microsoft’s auditorium in Lisbon, at banks and with mobile network operators where we discussed digital transformation, enterprise mobility, IoT and mobile strategies. In preparation for these discussions I did some homework. Here is what I learned about Portuguese history and how it relates to digital transformation and enterprise mobility.
The Portuguese developed innovative sailing technologies and navigational skills in the 15th-century that enabled ocean-going ventures, where before most ships stayed within sight of land or took very short excursions. Portugal’s Vasco da Gama (among others), using these innovations and skills, sailed south and east and ultimately reached India in 1498.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

A report from CipherCloud and Gigaom Research has revealed while most companies are in the cloud, they’re still reticent about using it to develop enterprise applications.

According to the research, just less than half (44%) of respondents had already made cloud deployments, with only 14% saying it would take them more than a year to deploy. 83% of respondents said they had adopted public cloud. Yet only 21% of those surveyed said they were using the cloud as a platform to build enterprise apps.

It seems that while businesses are more than happy to espouse the virtues of the cloud, it’s only for the front end. At Apps World Europe last week John Finch, the CIO of the Bank of England, all but confirmed this at his organisation, although when you’re the central bank and have no real market competition, it’s probably better to be on the safe side.

Not surprisingly, security is the primary concern for companies moving into the cloud, being cited by 62% of those polled. App performance (44%), time to learn new skills (41%) and cost (39%) were also popular. Yet the polls changed dependent on whether you were a leading edge or mainstream buyer, most notably with security (46% leading edge buyers, 63% mainstream) and vendor lock-in (29% leading edge, 5% mainstream).

The report leads on to shadow IT as a natural issue if there’s cloudy software afoot. Shadow IT being what it is, often the IT department only hears about it through the grapevine, or worse, when something goes wrong and the rogue employee needs bailing out because of a security violation.

It further warns that a company just can’t rely on this method – data security must cut across a business’s organisational lines.  81% of line of business employees admitted to using unauthorised software as a service applications, with Dropbox, not surprisingly, the most popular choice.

The report concludes shadow IT is, in reality, “an expensive road disaster”, security needs to be implemented across the company and not just an IT bailout, and that the cloud is here to stay.

“The cloud is not going to replace IT,” the report concludes. “Instead, the cloud is simply another vehicle for which IT delivers services to users – and IT should use it appropriately.”

What do you make of the results? Are you developing enterprise apps in the cloud at your company?

Each of the G20 member countries outlined a Comprehensive Growth Strategy at the recent G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia. One of the more aggressive plans comes from Brazil, which has pledged to train 12 million young people in technical areas by 2018.

The program is called Pronatec, and is administered by the Ministries of Labor and Education jointly with local councils. The program has actually been in effect since 2011, already reaching 8 million students, according to the report. It targets an additional 4 million students over the next four years. Its cost was listed as more than US$6 billion.

Pronatec is focused on many technical areas, including manufacturing, the chemical industry, and construction. It is designed to complement other job training programs in Brazil, one of which has been in existence since 1991 and is focused on serving tens of millions of rural citizens.

The Overall Challenge
Brazil’s size and population ensure that its development challenges remain formidable. It land area is larger than that of the continental United States — its vast Amazon rain forest covers 40% of that area – and its population of more than 200 million is about two-thirds that of the US.

Our research at the Tau Institute shows the challenge facing Brazil to develop its ICT environment to be in the middle of the pack globally. It is roughly in the same boat with its regional sibling Mexico, and with Thailand a continent away.

Subjectively speaking, this result surprises me. I’ve been critical of Brazil’s standing within our rankings, thinking that given the vast attention its received as a BRIC nation and its foreign direct investment of more than $600 billion annually that it should perform even better.

Go For It
It’s heartening to see its long-running commitment to technical development. But we think the country would benefit further from explicit commitments to building its underlying ICT infrastructure, to improve such key metrics as Internet access rates and average connection speed.

If the country can increase its commitment to ICT more explicitly – and its G20 report listed a commitment to telco only of just $1.27 billion – perhaps the country will, in fact, emerge as a true economic giant some day. As of now, it ranks seventh in the world, slightly ahead of Russia and slightly behind the UK.

An aggressive, explicit commitment to ICT will, we believe, decrease the country’s still-high level of income disparity, and will increase its government transparency will increase, thus also lowering an accompanying perception of corruption.

There is a network effect to improving a nation’s ICT ecosystem, and Brazil could benefit more than any other nation in the Americas from a commitment to ICT that matches its commitment to technical education.

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Infrastructure has provided the path to increase commerce and trade for over 5,000 years. It has created trade routes by overcoming natural obstacles ranging from spanning rivers and gorges, to providing access by land (roads and railroads), sea (docks and ports) and air (airports) to places which we want to do business with.
Today, trade routes have become electronic. Broadband connectivity has created a new layer of infrastructure within the “Platform for Commerce.”
Many educational institutions lag behind offering solutions to what is needed to solve today’s, as well as tomorrow’s, business problems tied to infrastructure. Traditional approaches and curricula at these organizations provide answers that do not satisfy today’s questions. As I say in my book, “21st century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions.”

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In her General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing, at Verizon Enterprise, focused on finding the right mix of renting vs. buying Oracle capacity to scale to meet business demands, and offer validated Oracle database TCO models for Oracle development and testing environments.
Anne Plese is a marketing and technology enthusiast/realist with over 19+ years in high tech. At Verizon Enterprise, she focuses on driving growth for the Verizon Cloud platform globally. Previous to Verizon, Anne spent over 10 years with Cisco. There she was focused on growing Cisco’s global data center and cloud revenue, and boosting market awareness and affinity for Cisco data center solutions within the Enterprise and Commercial market segments.

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There are many important characteristics of great leaders. Team players, good listeners and visionary are clear hallmarks. But being ambidextrous is required now more than ever. Ambidextrous leadership is a balanced approach where flexible leadership behaviors that lead to better business outcomes are the rule.

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In late August, voke, Inc. debuted its “Market Snapshot Report: Virtual and Cloud-Based Labs,” about how companies of all sizes and levels of testing sophistication view, use and benefit from virtual and cloud-based development and testing technologies. The results were pretty amazing―even we were surprised!

Among the many benefits the 503 participant companies (50% of which were U.S. based) cited, 53% saw reduced CAPEX (capital expenditures) from the use of virtual and cloud-based labs. Thirty-nine percent said they help eliminate defects prior to production, and 33% said they improve audits and compliance. Of course, the biggest benefit (58%) was on-demand access to environments, which we see as a primary reason why many organizations adopt virtual and/or cloud-based testing, either alone or in combination with on-premise, physical testing.

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The annual G20 summit, held this year in Brisbane, Australia, has concluded. It follows by a week the conclusion of the 15th Cloud Expo and 3rd @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara, CA.

I could argue that the latter events are more significant than the G20 summit.

To be sure, there is nothing of more importance in the short term than a meeting of the top leaders of the world’s largest nations. Imagine being able to namedrop Obama, Putin, Xi, Merkel, Cameron and others from your recent Australian holiday. Imagine further that your little conclave included the heads of other very large nations from Asia Pacific, South America, and Africa.

It’s In Our Hands
But the longer term is to a large degree in the hands of technologists. There are 3 trillion dollars spent worldwide on information technology and telecommunications, representing about 4 percent of the global economy and driving most of the other 96 percent.

It is technology, particularly the cloud computing, Big Data & analytics, and IoT things that will underpin any great gains in energy use, healthcare and food, transportation, and government improvements over the coming decades. Politicians come and go, but technology is steadfast.

This G20 summit was noted for various public scoldings given to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Western leaders. A little bit of that apparently went a long way for him, as he decided to leave for home before the summit officially concluded so that he could catch up on his sleep and put a full day in the office after the wild week-end.

Significant as the contretemps may prove to be, there are thousands upon thousands of people among the G20 governments who will be working on implementing the thousands upon thousands of words in the official documents that have emanated from the summit.

But…
Here’s the problem: technology isn’t mentioned in those documents.

Each of the G20 members has published a Comprehensive Growth Strategy document and an Employment Plan document. The goal is to add an additional 2 percentage points to the global GDP – about $1.5 trillion – over the next few years. The G20 members further believe their activities will create positive “spillover” effects to the rest of the world.

The efforts are focused on macroeconomic levers – mostly setting interest rates – and generally accepted worthy goals such as increasing trade, reducing bureaucratic impediments, bringing more women into the workforce, educating young people, and improving basic infrastructure. Private-public partnerships, the holy grail of government planning today, is mentioned. Ritual commitments to bolstering small and medium businesses are proferred.

The lack of specific commitment to information technology reflects a reality that almost four decades after the PC revolution was launched, there is a disconnect between technology and government, and a lack of technological understanding by politicians worldwide.

We Must Understand
The technology industry at all levels must appreciate that what often appear to them as obtuse, strutting buffoons are in fact the people who are running the world. They have power.

If the Russians want to station some fierce naval warships off the coast of Australia to accompany their leader’s arrival, they can. If the House of Saudi tires of a plunging oil price and wants to manipulate it, it can. If the leader of Canada wants to get into the face of one of the two most powerful people in the world and tell him to bug out of Ukraine, he can.

Steve Jobs’s un-ironic goal of denting the universe carries no weight among a G20 crowd that dent almost anything it wants to here on Planet Earth.

Our Research
Our research at the Tau Institute over the past few years has created a unique look at the nations of the world and how they have committed to information technology on a relative basis. We show which countries are doing the most with what they have, and which countries lead among their peers by region and income tier.

Among the G20, South Korea is the clear leader. South Korea leads the world, in fact. New Zealand is not an official G20 country but was represented in Brisbane as part of an informal ANZAC hosting of the summit. New Zealand finishes number two in our global rankings.

Other countries that do very well in our rankings among the G20 include the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Australia. The US could do better on a relative basis, as could the rest of the G20 nations. There is promise and potential for all in this group, as well as among all the 103 nations that we survey.

Act
With luck, the world geopolitical situation won’t become more tense after the tense week-end in Brisbane. Government staffs will go back to work, lip service will be paid to many of the Brisbane commitments, but real change will be effected as well. In particular, the Brisbane documents cite energy efficiency and distribution as a key goal, and much of the wording reads like a blueprint for IoT implementation.

I’ll report more on specific country plans over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the technology industry ignores politicians at our mutual peril, and we must be clear about how serious, explicit commitments to information technology will be the key to the G20 approaching and reaching its ambitious economic development goals.

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Picture credit: CenturyLink

Feature CenturyLink is a cloud provider on a mission. With nearly fifty years’ experience in the traditional telecommunications space, it’s looking to challenge the main storage and infrastructure players.

The Louisiana-based firm is going about it in all the right ways. The company launched CenturyLink Private Cloud back in August, offering the “frictionless hybrid” of private cloud instances plugged into public cloud nodes, and is beginning to make its mark in Europe, opening up a data centre in Frankfurt alongside the five it currently has in London.

Jared Wray, CenturyLink Cloud’s chief technical officer, is in the UK to kick-start proceedings. How has the expansion to Europe been going? “So far it’s been well received,” he tells CloudTech. “A lot of our customers are looking to move to cloud – they’ve already done colocation, they’ve already done managed services.

“When we look at the growth engine we have, we’ve done the United States, we’re now taking a foothold in the UK and our biggest approach right now is to grow our cloud platform,” he adds.

CenturyLink isn’t the only cloud provider to realise the benefits of European data centres to EU-based customers. Wray argues how CenturyLink’s cloud is good enough for the job. “Data sovereignty is a huge topic, especially in the UK [and] Germany, and we’ve built our platform specifically to handle data sovereignty extremely well,” he explains. “We can actually replicate your data on the inside of a specific zone.

“That’s a big critical thing for our customers,” he continues. “Being able to do that and understand the policies in regulations, just like we understand in Canada what they want, we want to be able to do that, and so we built the technology to understand [that].”

The firm’s growth in recent years has been impressive, and fuels the expansion to Europe. Revenue increase in ten years from one billion to 18 billion, and more than 55 data centres globally.

More importantly though, there’s a major opportunity afoot for telecoms operators.

Take a large, built-in customer base, add a sprawling network, and a sprinkling of technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), and the telcos have a great chance to achieve buy-in through cloud solutions, implementing new services, reducing costs and improving the customer experience – generally not operators’ strongest suit.

In September Ericsson bought a majority stake in platform as a service provider Apcera. Verizon has made its intentions perfectly clear with Verizon Cloud. Nokia calls itself a ‘forerunner in developing telco cloud’. Not to be outdone, CenturyLink has a plan. Wray came to CenturyLink through acquisition, as founder of cloud firm Tier 3, and he notes how the senior execs had a plan for ‘cloud-like services’ even before he came on board.

“They said – we don’t want to be just a standard telco, we don’t want to say this is an additional service,” he explains. “When they acquired us they went to the point of actually saying ‘we’re going to build a single platform’. So what you’re going to see from CenturyLink is something completely different than what you see from most telcos, actually going to take the network we have that’s extremely robust and converge it with our computing layers.”

Any service CenturyLink rolls out going forward is going to have three tenets: fully automated; fully programmable; and self service. Wray wryly notes these aren’t telcos’ major strengths either.

“Many telecommunications providers, they’re used to ‘give us an order, we’ll take 90 days, and sometimes we’ll get it right,’” he says. “In our world it’s completely different. We want to make it so you can get up and running, do it all yourself and decide what level of engagement you want us to be on.”

All (internal) change please, all change

So far, so good. Yet if there’s one more thing telcos are notorious for, it’s agility – or lack of it. Most telcos are lumbering behemoths where the simplest memo takes days to sign off, never mind organising business change. Wray notes CenturyLink was a relatively smooth-moving organisation in telecoms land, but he wanted more.

Enter CenturyLink Cloud Development Centre. Opened last month in Seattle, it brings DevOps to the firm’s working environment for cloud platform and innovation. The new ‘offices’ include team rooms organised by function, desks suited to pairing, and built-in collaboration spaces.

“The average developer inside Seattle has four meetings a day, because they’re working for big corporations,” Wray explains. “At CenturyLink Cloud, they have less than one. Most of the time they have a team standup, and that’s it.”

Wray describes the ‘one-to-many communication rule’; wherever possible, avoid one to one discussion as it’s inherently inclusive – this also means, within reason, no phones, which is almost jaw dropping for a telco – and remove meetings. “We used to ban the words ‘good meeting’,” he says. “That was a good meeting. Well what did you get out of it? No, it was a good meeting. They kind of felt like, to run the company, they had to have meetings.”

More organisational change is being ploughed ahead too, collapsing teams and ensuring operations and developers aren’t siloed. In a way, it relates back to the image of a telco becoming more agile through cloud. Telcos can – and have – told customers that cloud is just another payment option, not a concept on which a bunch of stuff hangs. With improved product iteration and a belief in a minimum viable approach, it works both ways.

“I like to say we got rid of trying to have the crystal ball, which a lot of product managers try and do,” Wray says. “It’s almost asinine, if you think about it. They say ‘in three years, this is what our product’s going to look like’. How do you know that the market really wants that?”

The truth is you don’t. But CenturyLink is trying to make things easier for both itself and its customers as the tangled transition to cloud computing takes pace.