Google CEO Larry Page seems to, for now, have made a surgical strike rather than haven taken the axe to Motorolo Mobility. Although 20% of its workforce slated for removal, the company says two-thirds of the erstwhile 4,000 jobs are in Asia. Furthermore, the company says the US cuts are mostly at the VP level.

So Larry Page hasn’t yet made the big, scary cuts we might have expected. Sitting as I currently do in Illinois, I can also say this is big news at the local level. Furthermore, Google says part of its core product development will remain in the Chicago area. The company also says that said product development will involve a few dozens of people, not hundreds or thousands.

Eureka!
This makes sense, as most of the great breakthroughs in the Information Age have been made by small teams, if not a single individual. You need some scale to build things up and out, but certainly not to have Eureka moments.

This insight reminds me of my time a few years ago at a Silicon Valley software company, when on many days it felt like we were a group of about 2,000 people glommed to the backs of a few brilliant developers. It could be that Larry Page and company feel the same way, which would not be surprising given Larry’s technical roots.

It It’s Not Broken…
Page seems to be happy with the current Android model, which helps brand the company name and could set the stage for future revenues if the company decides to reign it in or charge a licensing fee. He certainly is planning for Moto to regain brand recognition and market share as the smartphone market continues to develop, and thereby create significant new revenue for the company.

The tricky part will be to balance the equity of the respective Google and Motorola brands. Will anyone really buy hardware from a software company? Microsoft is about to find this out, and Google will benefit from observing this, no matter how many mitigating factors are associated with the Microsoft name.

Eternal Change
The smartphone market has already seen a lot of flux, with RIM dying, Nokia putting itself on life support, Microsoft not breathing well, and Taiwanese company HTC seemingly coming from nowhere to emerge as a major player. South Korea’s Samsung is one of two 800-pound gorillas in the market, and I believe it will emerge from its tussle with Apple with only its fur roughed up a bit. The other big Korean play, Lucky Goldstar (LG) can’t be counted out, but needs to step up its game.

And we always have to ask, where is Sony? Can the company ever regain the magic it had from the 70s through the 90s? Remember when people took trips to Tokyo just to go to Akihabara and see what Sony was up to?

For now, Page has not killed the Motorola name, and he has not made deep cuts at the company. Today’s announcement looks like Google is simply ridding itself of some offices it doesn’t need in countries in which it doesn’t do much business, and also cutting out a top management layer from the old company. The question will be whether a few dozen people will be able to save the acquisition. I think they can.

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Juniper Networks with the AT&T Foundry®, on Monday announced a university workshop and software development hackathon being offered through the AT&T Foundry® and Juniper’s OpenLab – The Junos® Center for Innovation. The week-long event will be hosted at the AT&T Foundry® in Texas, in conjunction with the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Dallas starting on August 13, 2012.

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Late last week  the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) released an important whitepaper that reviewed it’s multi-year Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO). This project was designed to allow a small group of agencies to choose a virtual private cloud-based infrastructure as a service from a marketplace of service providers made available by a cloud broker. For this project, Texas DIR selected Gravitant and its cloudMatrix technology. This approach was selected as it maximized the opportunity to produce the broadest spectrum of experiences for customers. The cloudMatrix software helped to normalize the multiple services available, creating an “apples-to-apples” comparison in pricing and functionality as much as possible. In addition, this solution provided a single, unified web interface for end users to design, procure, provision, monitor, and govern the services. The PTCO allowed DIR and the pilot agencies to a gain a greater understanding of cloud infrastructure offerings for state government and document options and issues with provider selection, pricing, access security, data security, credentialing, provisioning time frames, service levels, service remedy options, terms of use, billing models, interoperability, mobility, scalability, capacity management, provider compliance, and monitoring and licensing.

As far as I know, the PTCO represents the only proven operational model of the cloud brokerage concept deployed within a government setting. Among the lessons learned, this project showed that the use of a cloud broker can:

• Help government agencies screen their applications for cloud feasibility and prioritizing cloud migrations accordingly;
• Address the challenges of cloud model comparisons due to the
  variables in product offerings, including the business models, service
  levels, and package inclusions;
• Translate capacity requirements into provider line items, thus allowing for accurate estimation of cloud cost;
• Provide a cloud service order review or approval workflow facility, a
  function not normally provided by cloud service providers; and
• Provide a means to regulate payment across multiple government entities.

If you are interested in learning more about the results of this pilot project, download the complete report at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/pilot-texas-cloud-offering.

NJVC is partnering with Gravitant to bring this advance cloud brokerage technology to the federal marketplace. Currently in limited pilot, you can learn more about cloudMatrix and NJVC’s cloud brokerage offering by visiting http://cloud.njvc.com.

Gravitant also released a whitepaper on how this approach can be used with the federal government.  It is available for download at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/gravitant-whitepaper-cloud-for-federal-govt 

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012)

Follow me at http://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

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VMware has struck again.
After buying Nicira for $1.26 billion two weeks ago in a threat to Cisco’s networking hegemony, it’s now bought Pattern Insight’s Log Insight analytics and log management platform, team and technology on undisclosed terms.
The widgetry can analyze web-scale amounts of machine-generated data in real time and is used for operational analytics in traditional data center and cloud environments.

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“What Cloud solution is right for us?”

“What functionality will be available in this solution?”

“When will I get my training?”

Each of these questions reflects a person grappling with uncertainty at different levels of the organization.  From the initial consideration of changing IT strategy, through the design, implementation, and go live, the project team is constantly working on uncertainty loops as uncertainty cascades down the organization. 

The senior decision maker starts with uncertainty and has zero commitment, until they commit to a strategy, then the IT manager deals with uncertainty of how to implement the strategy. The IT manager instinctively gathers information to fill in the blanks and then sets to work making commitments to specific design components.

As the final design gets closer to testing and rollout, end users have their own set of concerns and questions and eventually will be fully committed to the solution once they …

The term “Business Intelligence” and its acronym “BI” are so pervasive in today’s data-intensive lexicon that it’s a challenge to know just what to make of it. If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management (BPM), data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems (EIS), business activity monitoring (BAM), modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning. Here is a workable definition of BI that was provided in a Technology Evaluation report from a January 10, 2005, Technology Evaluation Centers article by Mukhles Zaman entitled, “Business Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs”: “BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis, and manipulation of information, which provides the business community with easy access to business data. BI analyzes historical data – the data businesses generate through transactions or by other kinds of business activities – and helps businesses by analyzing the past and present business situations and performances. By giving this valuable insight, BI helps decision-makers make more informed decisions and supplies end-users with critical business information on their customers or partners, including information on behaviors and trends.”

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