I am a big believer that as enterprises embrace a mobile strategy that includes iPads and iPhones, there will be a gravitational pull to the cloud. 

Additionally, this transition to mobile and cloud will decrease the relevance of Microsoft in the enterprise, especially small – medium business (since they missed the boat on mobile and to some extent cloud services). 

As I thought about this post and started writing, this morning TechCrunch has a post on “Box: Mobile Adoption Is The Gateway Drug To The Cloud In The Enterprise”.

“When Box tracks its enterprise sales, it tracks the reason for buying, and this past year, the company found there was a 30x increase in the number of enterprise deployments that were mobile-driven.”  WOW…is that telling!

The move to iPads has enterprises adopting SaaS / cloud services much faster then originally thought.  The ability to quickly (with a few swipes) deploy and enable a CRM application or a collaboration application is very compelling.  Especially if the security and privacy concerns can be mitigated.  Traditional IT must be agile and address this trend.  Enterprise IT will need to figure out how cloud becomes an extension of their infrastructure and services or become less relevant to the value that can be delivered to business.

If you want to get an appreciation for all that is written on FB privacy issues, just Google Facebook Privacy Issues and see what kind of interesting postings and FTC investigations and charges you will find.

See you on LinkedIn or Twitter!

Cloud is different for consumer experiences versus the enterprise.  A platform company that has the right strategy, needs to implement that strategy differently for the consumer market, versus the enterprise market!

OK…I guess my head is not totally out of the clouds! 

Leading Enterprise Architecture for Enterprise Functions at Chevron!  The scope of the application portfolio, the enterprise architecture leadership in the company, and the leadership in ITC is absolutely refreshing!

Cloud Foundry provides a PaaS implementation that offers developers choice:

• Choice of developer frameworks,
• Choice of application infrastructure services, and
• Choice of clouds to which to deploy applications

This PaaS is different from other people’s PaaS offerings that restrict developers to a specific or non-standard development framework, a limited set of application services or a single, vendor-operated cloud service; things that raises issues of lock-in by inhibiting application portability.

Instead, Cloud Foundry supports, or will support, frameworks like Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby, Node.js and Grails with others promised in fairly short order. And for application services, it will initially support the open source NoSQL MongoDB, MySQL and Redis databases with plans to add VMware’s own vFabric services, the application platform in vCloud, as well as the RabbitMQ messaging system, another VMware property.

Whats really interesting is that VMware has rolled out their CloudFoundry service as an open source project! An entire PaaS platform, which they will also offer as a hosted service, but also available for anyone to run within their own company or datacenter!

Coming real soon, VMware plans to produce the Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud, a free, complete, downloadable instance of Cloud Foundry that runs in a single virtual machine developers can use on their own laptop to ensure that “applications running locally will also run in production without modification on any Cloud Foundry-based private or public cloud.”  Down the road, the plan is to provide a commercial Cloud Foundry for enterprises that want to offer PaaS capabilities in their own private cloud and service providers that want to offer Cloud Foundry via their public cloud services.  Enterprises should then be able to integrate the PaaS environment with their application infrastructure services portfolio and service providers hybrid cloud environments.

Most large companies will not re-engineer their existing portfolio of applications to run in public clouds, and in fact will continue to invest in their existing infrastructure to enable the benefits of cloud and build out their own private clouds – driving costs down in their infrastructure, while gaining agility for their businesses.  Additionally, some will have additional flexibility, greater business agility, and greater savings in costs, through hybrid cloud scenarios.

Hybrid cloud will enable IT in the enterprise to optimize infrastructure services and their computing resources across their data centers and service providers as necessary to respond to business demands.  Hybrid clouds will provide portability for workloads, while maintaining consistent control and management, and maintaining security and compliance.

A key factor for to enable the Hybrid cloud capability is that IT will will need to build a private cloud platform that is consistent with cloud service providers and supports the portability mentioned above.  One approach that is leading the way is VMware’s vCloud Powered service providers.  Check it out.

If you step back and think about why cloud based services, like Gmail, Microsoft Online Services, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, etc., are becoming increasingly more relevant to the business user, there are several compelling benefits that business gain from cloud based services.  Among them – resource pooling thru shared compute and storage services, scalable and elastic resources to quickly react to increases in demand, as well as self-service.  This last one is a big one!  Business users want agility to respond to the demands of business.  Traditional IT has not been able to respond as quickly to business demands would require, and cloud computing can deliver this and more to the CIO.

Today’s IT organizations need to increase their ability and capability to respond to business thru agility, while reducing costs.  Additionally, while enabling this agility, they need to manage the corporate assets and corporate IP while maintaining a compliant and secure infrastructure.  Not everything can move to the Public Cloud, so its driving them to build out their own Private Clouds that come with some of the same benefits and capabilities as that consumers and lines of business seek from the public cloud.

IT is optimizing their existing IT infrastructure investments, their virtualized data center, to enable resource pooling, automation, elastic compute and storage services, and finally self-service to the line of business with a Private Cloud.

Topics to come – Hybrid Cloud, a new breed of business applications for the cloud, and end user computing!

First, its important to note that most of the 9 years I spent at Microsoft were incredibly rewarding.  I worked with some really smart and good people.  And Microsoft is indeed a great company to work for.

So why leave?  Well, first I need to get something off my chest – let me start with Innovation and R&D. Every year for the last 9 years, Microsoft executives remind all the employees, customers, partners, the world that they spend between $6 – 8 billion in R&D annually!  Really?  Now, I am not implying that there is a lack of innovation going on in the mildew forest (redmond); there are some really cool things like XBOX Live, Surface, .Net, Windows Azure, Live Mesh.  But lets face it, Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7 (a Vista SP) over 9 years was not very innovative – especially now that I am using OS X!  Windows Mobile Phone strategy?  Search?  Over $60 billion in R&D over 9 years – I can probably come up with a list 10 startups that had less then $300 million in funding in total that are more relevant today and innovative.  …OK.  I feel better now.

I mentioned being on the hot Windows Azure team, as well as listing it as innovative, and I still think there is some really cool technology there.  Some of the best innovation in the last 9 years at Microsoft.  Public PaaS Cloud is certainly innovative, interesting and very relevant to future deployment scenarios (not all, but some).  But I started to question the overall “cloud” strategy and approach.  I really think Azure technology should have first been introduced as a private cloud (on – premise) platform, enabling enterprises to build on their virtualization footing, and start with customized private PaaS.  Then compliment that with a Public PaaS strategy that included ISPs and Partners and enable hybrid cloud scenarios.  Instead, its sort of a huge leap for most enterprises to think about what workloads to build onto this primarily new and proprietary platform running in Microsoft Data Centers, and have a completely different perspective and approach to cloud patterns on-premise. Sorry, its not Hyper-V and Windows Server.

Then there is Ray Ozzie’s departure (not to mention all the other executives leaving to this day).  Ozzie was the new Bill Gates at Microsoft.  The “architect” of the new Microsoft and leading the transformation and vision for the cloud – the driving force and vision behind Azure.  All of a sudden, while on the Azure team and coming to, Ozzie resigns!  And then Ozzie writes his “Dawn of a New Day” . As I wrote in my blog post regarding the memo – Its a very interesting read and as one of my colleagues tweeted; “Shut the door, turn off your phone and read Ray Ozzie’s Dawn of a New Day” .

Anyway – my Azure bubble was popped.  I was no longer a believer, nor passionate about the direction.  There were other things that I wont go into, and there were also things that made me want to stick around – mostly some good people. I will absolutely treasure some of the work and people I was fortunate to work with – some of who are still at Microsoft.  Keep up the good work!!!

I have found a renewed love for something from Microsoft that runs on the Mac – MacOffice 2011.  Now, we just need OneNote on the Mac.

I am finding an incredibly rich, innovative, and very relevant approach and strategy at my new gig!  With some incredibly compelling dialogue with enterprises regarding cloud.  More on that on that later….

For now, however, I would like to tell a quick story.  My new employer gave me the choice of a Windows XP laptop or an Apple MacBook Pro, and for my mobile phone it was either Blackberry or iPhone (thank goodness I do not have to have a Windows Mobile phone again – for the last 9 years I have had to suffer with WM).  Well, after being on Windows 7 at MS, there was no way I was going to XP.  So I went Apple all the way!  I wanted to take a first hand take at Mac, as well as break my tie to Microsoft for a number of reasons (more on this later).

After about 2 days, I quickly fell in LOVE with Apple products.  The MacBook and OS 10 simply blow away Windows (any Windows)!  And the iPhone (mind you, I had to settle for 3G) was light years better than any Windows phone (Windows Phone 7 is certainly a huge improvement from WinMo, and I had the opportunity to use it, but I would still take iPhone any day)!  It has now been about 3+ weeks on Mac/iPhone and I have decided that I will be getting the iPad v2 when it comes out, and the next laptop I buy my children and/or wife will be Macs.  No more Windows machines in my house!

Now, please note that I also LOVE Mac Office 2011.  But Windows…OMG…I can’t believe I was using Windows PCs (and still have some at home that I have to support) for most of career.  There is only one thing, one application, that I miss having for my work pc – OneNote.  I am considering Evernote or Pear Note.  But otherwise, I am all in on the Mac.

My MacBook and iPhone ROCK!

Recently, the Corporate Strategy Group at Microsoft did an extensive analysis of the economics associated with cloud computing, leveraging Microsoft’s experience with cloud services like Windows Azure, Office 365, Windows Live, and Bing.  The outcome resulted in a blog post and a whitepaper,  “The Economics of the Cloud.”

In the paper, it highlights how the economics impact public clouds and private clouds to different degrees and describe how to weigh the trade-off that this creates.  Private clouds address many of the concerns IT leaders have about cloud computing, and so they may be perfectly suited for certain situations.   But because of their limited ability to take advantage of demand-side economies of scale and multi-tenancy, the paper concludes that private clouds may someday carry a cost that is as much more costly then that of public clouds.