So it’s been for me here lately. Some eight years into the mission, I’ve embarked on a mission to take stock of exactly what we’ve built here at 360 Visibility, to address those elements that need attention, and to align everything inside an overarching brand that authentically represents who we want to be. The exercise has been invigorating.

Finding Inspiration

The inspiration for the overhaul took root at various events I’ve attended in recent months, where I was motivated by the likes of Lululemon CEO Chip Wilson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to scramble our corporate culture in a way that more accurately reflects our values. Add to that an external cascade of events—including market changes and the widespread commoditizing of the products we sell and deliver—and the call for change became too compelling to ignore. From sales to delivery to post to go live support, I’m freshly committed to having our entire company speak in a single voice that offers compelling evidence of our reason for being here.

All of this is no small undertaking, and I find myself returning to infancy with my efforts, learning to walk all over again. Certainly there’s no shortage of speeches, white papers and case studies detailing other executives’ efforts to revamp their corporate culture, but nowhere is there a handbook that lays out an exact path for doing so. It’s an endeavour that’s extremely individualized to the organization behind it.

Outside of the Comfort Zone

More than that, I am not in possession of a personality that’s naturally suited to the exercise. A designated accountant and certified management consultant by trade, I am an analyzer at heart. And changing a corporate culture is anything but analytical.

It is, however, extremely challenging, consistently gratifying and, dare I say, fun. My push to revitalize my business has emerged as my reason to come into work every day. I examine each of our entrenched processes and challenge it with a battery of questions: Why, why, why do we do it that way? One of our core values is to “keep it simple.” Applying that imperative in each case is the first move we make.

Reaching Out

So my new post is a soapbox from which I regularly preach the value of revolutionizing the way we look at things. Our weekly tactical meetings are now full of KPIs, and red, yellow, green and “supergreen” scorecards that focus us on our goals. We’re communicating with our customers via LinkedIn, newsletters, Youtube and other social media outlets.

360’s reinvention isn’t going to happen overnight. Indeed, I suspect it will take at least the rest of this fiscal year before we’ve made any meaningful strides on this front. But I truly believe we’ll all be better for the effort. And it’s an ongoing commitment. It’s one thing, after all, to identify the need for a refreshed corporate existence; it’s another to live it every single day.

Let us breathe, then, and draw in some of the new language this upheaval has brought into our revised realities.

Cloud Computing: Here, computer users share resources, business processes, applications and information as a utility service over a network. This shift takes an organization’s management of its own data from traditional software models to the Internet. Its existence traces back to large companies’ realization that their computing infrastructures weren’t exploiting their capacity consistently—in spite of a consistent cost.

Cloud Provider: An organization that makes a cloud-based infrastructure available to others to use and pay for.

Cloud Application: A software application that’s never installed on a local desktop computer, but is always available exclusively via the Internet.

Cloudware: The various bits of software that enable the provisioning, deployment, operation and management of applications in a cloud-computing environment.

Cloudburst: In its most negative sense, this term refers to a cloud-computing environment’s breakdown due to its inability to cope with a spike in demand, rendering the data it keeps inaccessible to their users. On a more positive note, the same word denotes the dynamic operation of whatever internally deployed software application works against just such a potential failure.

Vertical Cloud: A public cloud-computing infrastructure that’s designed to service the particular requirements of a single industry.

Hybrid Cloud: A combo of both private and public clouds, where users dip into one or the other, as needed.

External Cloud: A cloud-computing environment that’s outside the boundaries of a particular organization. It’s set up for use by select external parties, though not the general public.

Public Cloud: A cloud-computing infrastructure that’s open for use by anyone in the general public, including individuals and professional organizations.

Private Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s dedicated to the needs of a single organization for its exclusive usage.

Community Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s shared by multiple users (though not as many as share a public cloud) who possess common approaches to such issues as security, business continuity, privacy, availability and security.

Cloudstorming: Those instances in which multiple cloud environments are connected in a single, unified, virtual cloud. This is also referred to as a “cloud network.”

Cloud Portability The ability to easily move applications (and, often, their attendant parcels of data) across cloud-computing environments from discreet cloud providers, whether they be private or public clouds.

Cloud Enabler This term describes vendors who are not bona-fide cloud providers, but who facilitate users with the cloud-computing technology—along with its associated advantages—through such tools as cloudware.

Cloudwashing The arguably deceptive act of attaching the magical word “cloud” on existing products and services in order to capitalize on the spilloff effects of its power.

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With more and more organizations opting to store their data on cloud computing systems rather than under their own roofs, outsourcing data centres are springing up like mushrooms to answer the demand. That development, say the folks at this Colorado-based thinktank, spins off into all kinds of good stuff, including savings in manpower, savings in money and—here’s where the world’s interests kick in—savings in energy. Indeed, say the analysts behind the research, this cloud business could help reduce the world’s energy costs by almost a third over the next decade.

First up, the stuff that lines the pockets.

Revenue from these proliferating data centres, predicts the new research, will inflate to a compound annual growth rate over the next decade of 29%. In hard numbers, that means a revenue climb from $46 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion in 2015. More than that, says the report—titled “Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency”—new investments in the stuff will continue to spur greater efficiency for those dollars spent.

Indeed, Pike Research’s analysis suggests that, absent the cloud, only the very largest commercial or governmental organizations would have the capital and expertise required to achieve the same kind of efficiency at a comparable cost.

Green Shoots

But it’s the trending transformation of another kind of green, says Pike’s senior analyst Eric Woods, that’s even more impressive.

“Cloud computing revenue will grow strongly over the next decade,” Woods says. “But the reduction in energy consumption will be even more significant.”

Pike forecasts that, if the world continues along its current cloud-computing adoption curve, overall data centre energy consumption will be slashed by a dramatic 31% in the period between 2010 and 2020.

This news comes on the heels of other publicly stated initiatives that acknowledge the wasteful footprint of the globe’s infinite IT goings on. Facebook, for one, recently announced that it intends to make public the details of its data centres such that others might benefit from this massive operation’s evolving understanding of energy efficiency. According to the social media giant, the servers in its refurbished data house—which apparently took two years and tens of millions of dollars to complete—run 38% more efficiently, and 24% less expensively, than those in their comparable peers.

One Centre, Less Energy

Simply put, goes the report, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional, siloed data repositories are. The more disparate operations they take in under their generous eaves, the more efficiently is this channel of energy expended.

And all signs point to a continued drift in this direction. As increasingly more of the work that was conventionally performed in internal data centres is consigned to the cloud, the world’s basket of energy consumption, associated energy expenses and greenhouse gas emissions suffers ever fewer hands dipping into its bounty.

10 Things you need to know about PSOs

1. The global PSA software market will hit a staggering $7.63 billion by the year 2017, according to new research from Global Industry Analysts, Inc. The news is surprising, considering the hit this market took during the recent global economic dip, as those companies purchasing such products opted to hold back their purse in infrastructure-enhancing purchases.

2. The tide is turning on this front in a significant way. Indeed, PSA software suites are increasingly emerging as bona-fide recession-proofers for corporate IT department principals inside professional services organizations anxious not to suffer the same shortfalls again.

3. Professional Service Automation is enterprise software that’s particularly designed for companies engaged in the delivery of accounting, management consulting, engineering, and agency and PR services, among others. With it, companies enjoy increased productivity and efficiencies across their operations, along with a much-enhanced view of what’s actually going on within them.

4. Up until fairly recently, PSA was regarded in terms of its individual components only. But its usefulness increases manifold with recent developments that link the software’s various disparate modules in a way that reveals the full breadth of available integrated solutions.

5. Not surprisingly, the omnipresent Cloud hovers above this aspect of operational efficiency, too. As more and more companies adopt the off-site approach to their data-management efforts, the opportunity to bundle all of their corporate activities—from sales to service to finance—under a single umbrella is too appealing to pass by. It’s why a muscular movement is afoot to blend the worlds of CRM and PSA.

6. A recent study conducted by consulting firm Service Performance Insight demonstrates that Salesforce CRM users who shift their interests to the Cloud are rewarded for the choice with higher bid-to-win ratios, greater average revenues per project and deal pipelines that are vastly superior to those of their less forward-thinking counterparts

7. The Service Performance Insight research also shows that PSOs simply cannot realize all the powers of their CRM systems unless they’re well integrated with their PSAs.

8. An integrated CRM-PSA application offers users the ability to track the gamut of their business activity—from fingers-crossed leads through in-the-bag deals—on a single platform, with a single interface, employing a single data repository.

9. By amalgamating their CRM and PSA platforms into one, goes the news, professional services firms benefit from larger project backlogs, improved executive visibility, better success with winning bids, higher billable utilization, an enhanced percentage of billable employees, more revenue from new clients and a greater proportion of projects that are completed on time.

10. Just the same, another burst of research from the same organization, this exploring the challenges of Salesforce CRM customers in the professional services industry, reveals that precious few of them have taken the steps to see through such a profitable integration. The news, still in the pipeline, is clearly yet to be fully put into profitable play.

Will the Dropbox privacy storm abate?

The storm began not in a teacup, but in a Dropbox, and it was a doozy.

The Web-based file-hosting service that allows users to share files and photos across the Internet courtesy of cloud computing is still sweeping up from a summer squall that was set off with nothing more spectacular than some poorly chosen words.

Dropbox set the leaves in motion in June when it sought to tweak its terms of service to better explain its position on a range of platforms, including the thorny business of its ownership of the data it hosts. But its reworked explanation just served to muddy the scene, arguably further damaging cloud computing technology’s more widespread adoption.

Dropbox wrote, “By submitting your stuff to the services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the service.”

Not surprisingly, the revised text sent users into a panic for its suggestion that they relinquish ownership rights as a condition of use.

Dropbox: Dropping the Ball?

Dropbox, whose first cloud-data-ownership scandal was an authentication bug that left its 25 million users’ accounts wide open in June, scrambled to address the misunderstanding, offering apologies along with yet another attempt at clarification. “When we announced an upcoming revision to our Terms of Service last week, we aimed to explain the key changes in plain language to make all our legal docs much clearer,” the company, which burst on the scene four years ago, wrote. “It’s important to us that these terms are easy to understand, and your feedback has told us that we still have work to do.

“You retain ownership of your stuff. You are solely responsible for your conduct, the content of your files and folders, and your communications with others while using the services.” The blog adds that users only grant Dropbox license to use customer data “solely to enable us to technically administer, display and operate the services.”

A few days later, the Dropbox founders followed up with more cris de coeur, presumably worried about the negative impact on cloud technologies: “We want to be 100 percent clear that you own what you put in your Dropbox,” company principals Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. “We don’t own your stuff. And the license you give us is really limited. It only allows us to provide the service to you. Nothing else.”

Cloud Forming?

This Dropbox incident, along with a recent spate of high-profile cloud failings, might seem unfortunate for the way they undermine an emerging technology shift that promises dramatic savings, in both expenses and efficiency, to a corporate landscape hungry for both. But it may all be for the best, in the end, for the spotlight it shines on a prominent cloud operator’s pledge to the world regarding the fuzzy and emerging subject of cloud computing. “What’s yours is yours.”

Predicting the effects of new technology can be a challenge

Although it’s still early days, from a long-range historical point of view, the cloud has actually hovered above our various computer-powered preoccupations for a good few years now. Adoption rates for this game-changer motor ever forward, with bugs being identified and addressed, and capabilities being increasingly celebrated.

But it’s worth noting that we remain far from an end point in our understanding of, and appreciation for, this paradigm-shifting newcomer to our daily lives. The Microsoft-produced white paper, The Economics of the Cloud (TK), offers some insight on how this new age might evolve, and urges its proponents to take the long view and see the underlying economics as having the biggest impact on long term take-up rates.

What are the Future Prospects for the Cloud?

It’s always instructive to refer back to other examples of revolutionary design to gain a sense of the way a new advancement might unfold. The world’s first automobiles were described as “horseless carriages,” and they were designed just as their equine-powered predecessors had been—complete with whip holders—in spite of the revised absence of such requirements. “Engineers initially failed to understand the new possibilities of the new paradigm,” the paper points out, “such as building for higher speeds, or greater safety.” Just as in the early days of the car business, it’s difficult to predict where this novelty will take us, but it’s critical not to be hemmed in by restrictions that no longer apply.

Technical complexities and adoption hurdles steal most of the ink these days in literature covering the cloud, as was highlighted in our previous blog entry Calming (Mis) Conceptions about the Cloud. The Microsoft white paper points out the detriment to users’ exploitation of the technology such misinformation creates. Historically, however, it’s been underlying economics that have in fact had a much stronger impact on the direction and speed of disruptions, as technological challenges are resolved or overcome through the rapid innovation to which we‘ve become accustomed.

The cloud allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centres that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three areas: supply-side savings (amortizing costs across multiple servers), demand-side aggregation (reducing variability) and multi-tenancy efficiency (amortizing costs across multiple customers).

Making the Most for your Business – Cloud Flexibility

Capitalizing on these economic benefits is the trick. Just as engineers had to fundamentally rethink design in the early days of the car so too will developers have to rethink their approach to this new era of application design. The concepts of multi-tenancy and demand-side aggregation will represent a formidable challenge for developers and IT departments after all; whatever their level of sophistication. And if you screw up, you could find yourself enjoying only some of the savings on offer, or, even paying more for application development than you currently do.

Onwards and upwards, then. And leave the whip holder in the dust.