Want to build a business? You need an IT ecosystem.GigaOM
Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it?s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days ? and that cycle will continue to accelerate.
But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.
The technology ecosystem has always been important. Even in the days when a minority of companies had a single mainframe, you still needed parts, skills, power, data centers, tools, and ideas, etc. But that ecosystem was smaller and moved more slowly. The technology ecosystems of the 60s through the 90s tended to change over months or years, and our systems from then were more likely to be from a small handful of vendors. This simplified provider environment reduced dependence on an ecosystem of otherwise unrelated partners and vendors, but guaranteed your dependence on the one.
That was then, this is now.
The difference today, and going forward, is that technology is rapidly moving to a much more agile adoption, development, operating and use model. Buyers today can identify and use cloud-based infrastructure or obtain a few licenses of a Software-as-a-Service delivered application in a matter of hours. Aside from cloud-based services, there are virtual platforms, appliances, internally developed applications and myriad customer devices that all need to interact, but can change almost overnight.
Some would argue that the sheer complexity of the ecosystem today screams for CIOs to try to create homogenous infrastructure environments. However, the very fact that we?re making IT solutions more portable and readily adaptable means that we must plan for the ability to support multi-vendor solutions at any layer of the technical infrastructure, from the CPU, through to platform as a service.
The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for ?their? provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.
Many software, cloud, and hardware providers in today?s market would argue that they offer a strong ecosystem of partners, but I think the future ecosystem will be as open as possible and also offer the customer access to a wide variety of cloud, network and other services within the confines of a single data center. Think of your IT ecosystem as the local shops near your downtown flat, easy to access and well understood. However, if you?re downtown ecosystem was like the technology ecosystem you would have five coffee shops, three butchers, six shoe stores and so on from which to select goods and services. .
The open ecosystem
An open ecosystem allows for you to select the technology or service provider you like when the opportunity presents itself. It?s an environment where the customer has broad access to vendors and services related to any portion of the infrastructure stack, including wide area networking services and the data center capacity.
Under the old way of building IT, managers built it once, built it to last, and then got fired when it didn?t last. The new IT calls for managers to build it fast, possibly fail fast, and then build it again.
An open ecosystem means that in most cases you shouldn?t be spending years putting in a new technology architecture or solution. If it?s that complex or limited in its ability to adapt new technology you should be using a partner?s infrastructure such as an IaaS or PaaS provider solution.
There are also many options for building private cloud infrastructure, especially for larger businesses, but the focus should be on making it as open as possible. If you can?t taste test an application or new platform environment in a matter of days or weeks, you?re doing something wrong. Openness also helps if you need to move your work, because you want to have as many destinations to choose from as you can.
Many providers under one roof.
But even among open ecosystems there are important differences to be aware of. Ideally you will find an open ecosystem with a large number of different network, cloud, software and hardware providers under one umbrella. This allows the customer to make decisions around adoption of new technology quickly and efficiently. So instead of providing access to one or two bandwidth providers, the ideal ecosystem provides access to big and small players, and can play them against each other to get the best price and services for customers. In reality bringing together the combined customer and supplier community creates greater opportunities for both sides, in effect, a win-win.
It shouldn?t stop with bandwidth, either. An ecosystem should have not only the option of different hardware, and support services, but also different cloud service providers. If a customer wants to get cloud computing from a vendor, the ecosystem provider should invite that provider in. And if someone wants to build their own cloud, the ecosystem provider and data center provider should have an array of choices available for a customer to choose from.
The ideal delivery platform for this ecosystem is a data center provider who can create an environment that supports the needs of enterprise computing, while also lowering the costs and barriers to entry for ecosystem partners. This is an environment that removes all your risks associated with disaster avoidance, regulatory concerns, capacity and security. That location should have access to national freeways and airports as well as local government support that will help facilitate worker relocation and education, while also providing considerations for your hardware taxation risks.
It?s tough to find one place where all the above are available to the customer, but they are out there. Having these resources readily available is like having a Home Depot and a Lowes move in next to your house the day before you start a big home project. No matter what tool or resource you need, it?s all right there, immediately available, with competition, quantity and variety.
In this environment building a business that requires IT ? or rethinking your existing IT doesn?t seem so daunting: With all these resources available, you virtually eliminate the risk of being forced into a ?pragmatic? (read: bad but necessary) decision. You are free to experiment once, twice, three times, and then put it into production, without most of the historical baggage like ?high network costs?, ?no skilled staff? or a data center that is ?out of capacity,? which have traditionally driven IT decisions.
So the increasing complexity and speed at which IT is moving doesn?t have to be something to worry about, instead look at it as an opportunity to roll with the technological changes without becoming too invested in a closed ecosystem.
Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.
Image courtesy of Flickr user john-norris.
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What a week! Most of the world was obsessing over the mother of all IPOs ? Facebook. So no surprise, I had to include some good writing on the subject. Of course, I have already started looking beyond the social internet and got some good pointers for that.
NowStreet Journal asks, what would have Facebook S-1 (and IPO) looked like had it come out in the days when tech stocks were given the small stock treatment? Also: Why Facebook is failing, Why Facebook?s growth is slowing so much and Evaluating a big network, which isn?t the same as a big product.
It is time to move on from the social internet and instead dream of what Gideon Rosenbaltt calls place-based networks.
Brilliant Kevin Kelly comes out with a list of things/trends that are going to be part of modern society in coming years. It is a delightful little post. I am fixated on Mirror Worlds and GlobeNet he talks about.
Talking of Kelly and Wired magazine people, John Battelle, the founding managing editor of Wired, writes about Google and its recent moves and puts them in context of Facebook. I am not sure I have read a better post on Google than this one.
I have never been a fan of Davos and Bruce Nussbaum does a good job of articulating why. The Death of Davos Man?The Death of Davos is heck of a read. Plus 10 things you are not allowed to say at Davos.
Information doesn?t want to be free, argues Andy Weissman. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. I totally agree, and I said so in my piece from last year, Old media is being unbundled, just like telecom was.
Happiness takes a little magic, says Brian Lam. +1 to that.
Recently, I was invited by Google to participate in ?Mobilizing Mobile? in Mobile, Alabama. As part of Google?s Go Mobile initiative, the event demonstrated what happens when a city?s infrastructure and community goes mobile.
Below you?ll find four key take-aways from teaming up with Google. I believe they can be applied by any startup, in any industry.
Lesson 1: Set the agenda
Consumer adoption of the mobile web is outpacing the rate at which mobile web experiences are being built. In less than three years, more people will access the web via a mobile device than by any other way. Google recognized this trend, and now its showing others where the world is headed.
By painting the bigger picture for everyone else, Google is also framing what the future will look like. Setting the agenda may sound like a lofty goal for a startup, but that?s what you should be focused on.
Startup companies are all about painting the big picture before anyone else can see it. Without a big picture idea, who will join you as a co-founder on your high-risk, potentially hallucinogenic quest? Who will fund you? Who will buy your product, rent you office space, listen to your pitch, or support your ideas? It?s this kind of foresight that creates new opportunities in the marketplace.
Lesson 2: Make your innovation tangible
Now that you?ve created your framework, you need to show it to your audience.
Google goes to great lengths to make its products approachable for users and developers. And they work hard to get users to test out new products as soon as possible.
For the GoMobile initiative, they built the GoMo Meter ? a mobile preview tool that ?shows you how your current site looks on a smartphone, and provides a report on what?s working and what you can do better.?
The GoMo Meter embodies several aspects of Google?s philosophy when it comes to new products. It has a low barrier to start, requires no commitment to use it, and offers easy access with a simple and obvious interface, all tied to a topic that interests each of us endlessly ? ourselves (or, in this case, our websites).
How do you make your startup?s innovation tangible?
Start by figuring out what makes your innovation meaningful to your customers. What do they see and feel in their initial product encounter? When they ask themselves, ?What is this?? and ?Is it for me?? guide them to the right answer.
Look too for the human behaviors that your product is working on. It?s humans who will make decisions and judgments about your products, and you can tap into some enduring human traits in well-known ways. For example, after successfully raising a VC round, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman mentioned that well-known VC Roelof Botha only invests in consumer companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.
Lastly, give users something obvious and easy to do. This could be watching a video or slideshow, clicking a button to initiate an action, entering a few data points, showing some before and after screenshots ? anything that leads to a tangible and specific interaction.
As a startup, if you get people interacting with your product, you start to influence their behaviors. Their behaviors then influence their beliefs, which again influence their behaviors in a virtuous cycle.
You could try to influence beliefs. Untold millions are spent everyday attempting to influence beliefs ? that?s much of the advertising you see. But it?s very hard both to influence beliefs and to measure changes in beliefs to learn if you?re effective. So focus on behaviors and let them lead to beliefs.
A simple way to prove that you want to influence behaviors over beliefs is to consider fast food. People eat it (a behavior) but they don?t believe it?s good for them. And how many of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to? Sloth, to start, and greed and gluttony for good measure.
Ask the hard question: what are the behaviors you want to have happen because of interaction with you product? Are those behaviors plausible and part of human nature?
Lesson 3: Focus, focus and focus
Focus on the parts of your business that are fundamental to how customers use your core product.
Since a growing number of customers are accessing Google?s core search products through mobile devices, the company has purposefully allocated time, people, and money to development in this sector. It may sound simple for a multi-armed beast like Google to redistribute some of its wealth, but having a lot of resources means the company can easily get derailed and scattered. It?s just as hard for a large company to focus as it is for a startup.
While a startup tends to have a scarcity of resources, it also has the freedom to focus wherever it chooses and to change that focus whenever it wants. The popular term here is ?pivoting.? Startups, like all businesses, find success in momentum, and momentum is all about velocity. A startup that changes direction all the time ends up going in circles.
Lesson 4: Track the micro, decide on the macro
Google has built a superb business by understanding the value of data and gathering that information so that others can make meaning from it.
Google tracked the traffic it generated from the Go Mobile event to see if the initiative had been persuasive. Let?s call those micro-metrics.
Micro-metrics ? visits, conversions, leads ? were used for tracking and tuning, and the macro-metrics ? years of mobile adoption, traffic, revenues ? drove the strategy and focus.
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a great blog post with much more detail on startup metrics (and tracking the micro while making decisions on the macro) called ?Learning is Better than Optimization.
The hard part is balancing the micro and the macro. Every day in a startup involves a ton of detailed work in the micro details of execution, while each decision in the micro details of execution influences the macro strategy.
The answer to balance out the two? Habits and self-reflection.
For Google?s GoMo we connected monthly on a few measurements we?d established to track our success ? traffic numbers, leads and conversions.
Internally at my company Mobify, we have a weekly process where each team lead announces their key numbers. Then on a regular basis we review the key numbers. In that review we talk about both the key numbers ? their sources, influences and meaning ? as well as whether these key numbers are the right numbers to be tracking.
A great framework for figuring out your key performance indicators (KPIs) is to think about your segment ABCs: Acquisitions, Behaviors, Conversions. This ABCs framework is from Avinash Kaushik, Google?s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of two great books on web analytics. His blog post Web Analytics Segmentation is a terrific guide to getting started and improving your abilities to balance the micro and the macro.
Combine the ABCs framework with good habits and self-reflection and you will find meaning in measurement.
Bringing it together
While it?s hard to imagine that your startup has much in common with a giant like Google, these four strategies should resonate with any sized-business. Think big and paint the picture before anyone else can see it. Have the resolve to focus where attention is needed. And most importantly, never lose sight of what makes you meaningful to your customers. Your company may never reach the size and scale of Google, but your startup can still make a sizable difference.
Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites.
Image courtesy of Flickr user thinkpublic
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Android this week: Galaxy Tab 7.7 tested; Sprint?s nabs $99 tablet; Nexus still NexusGigaOM
After spending a full week with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 I purchased from an importer, I?m thoroughly impressed with the small slate. U.S. consumers will see a version with LTE for Verizon?s LTE network in the near future, but my hope is that the Wi-Fi version I bought follows soon; it would be priced less than an full-cost LTE version and wouldn?t require a lengthy data contract.
The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is Samsung?s first tablet to use its Super AMOLED Plus technology, bringing vivid colors, deep blacks and super-wide viewing angles. It doesn?t hurt that the 7.7-inch screen has a higher resolution than most 720p HDTV sets either: the 1280 x 800 resolution is a treat for the eyes; especially when watching high-def videos.
Of course, the outside of a tablet is only as good as what?s inside. In this case, its Samsung?s Exynos dual-core processor running at 1.4 GHz. And this chip keeps the Galaxy Tab 7.7 humming along quickly.
I ran many benchmarks between this new tablet and several others, including the quad-core Transformer Prime, and found that the new Tab tests just as fast, if not faster.
The Prime is better for gaming, thanks to 12 graphics cores, but for most tasks the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is currently comparable. This may change in the future as more apps become optimized for quad-core chips, however.
A cheaper Android tablet option appeared this week as well. Sprint is selling the ZTE Optik for $99 with a 2-year 3G data contract or $349 without a commitment. This 7-inch slate runs Android 3.2, not Android 4.0, but has a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, two cameras, GPS radio and 1280 x 800 resolution display.
ZTE, a Chinese hardware maker, is starting to make a big push in the U.S. tablet and smartphone market; if it can build quality devices with these low price points, it should do well against the current competition.
Late in the week, some confusion arose around the Galaxy Nexus, Google?s flagship developer phone. Verizon currently sells the Galaxy Nexus LTE in the U.S. while an unlocked GSM version ? the one I have ? is sold overseas. On Google?s website for the Galaxy Nexus stock software, the Verizon version is now archived. It appeared at first glance that Verizon was taking over control of the Galaxy Nexus software for phones on its network.
Google later provided an explanation that suggests it will still provide the updates for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, saying certain software signatures on CDMA phones aren?t compatible with the Android Open Source Platform builds of Android. The situation is odd because the Sprint Nexus S, available since December of 2010, is a CDMA Nexus phone and this issue never cropped up. I suspect there?s more to this story, so I?ll be researching and watching for further developments.
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