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.

China: The Largest Cloud Player

• China is home to some of the world’s largest data centres, a bit of a triumph considering the heavily regulated environment in which they exist and the initial reluctance of international investors to be a part of them.

• In 2009, the Chinese government funded an experimental cloud platform under development by IBM and the Beijing University of Technology.

• The Chinese government has invested $173.2 billion in the development of key cloud computing hubs.

• A recent survey of Chinese IT executives found that 20% are already using cloud-based solutions, and 46% are evaluating cloud solutions for use in their businesses.

• Chinese policymakers have nominated five new cloud computing zones as part of its “12^th Five-Year Plan.” By 2015, the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzen in Guangdong province, Hangzhou in Zhejiang province and Wuxi in Jiangsu province should be well established as hubs of cloud-centric activity. Each of these cloud “laboratories” will work with industry to serve as pilot models for how such technologies work.

• The cloud market in China is expected to have reached almost $14.8 billion in 2012, up from $11.4 billion in 2011. At this rate, China is poised to become the world’s number-one cloud market.

India: Technology Hub

• India has been identified as a hotspot for cloud computing growth over the next few years. Its government has regularly indicated its endorsement of cloud with financial investments.

• Gartner has forecast that India’s spending on green IT and cloud initiatives will double, from $35 billion in 2010, to $70 billion in 2015.

• According to IDC, India is experiencing an information explosion, with digital data growing from 40.000 petabytes in 2010 to 2.3 million petabytes in 2020. The cloud is the means to this end, as Indian companies look to leverage cost advantages.

• Some 40% of professional organizations in India currently use cloud computing; 58% say cost saving is their primary motivation for cloud adoption.

• Gartner says businesses in India are adopting the cloud at a much faster rate than originally expected; two-thirds of Indian CIOs expect the majority of IT to be running on the cloud by 2015.

• Gartner has revealed that there are several “urgent and compelling forces” that will come to prominence in India and its 1.2 billion inhabitants in the near future. Cloud computing is prominent among them.
• Gartner has predicted that IT spending in India will rise by 9.1% to $79.8 billion in 2012, as in-country enterprises invest more in IT systems.

• In a recent survey conducted by virtualization platform provider VMware and Forrester Consulting, 91% of participants from India stated that cloud computing is “relevant to their business.”

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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.

We’ve said it before and we will again. Cloud computing is a saviour of sorts—and for more than just your bottom line and overtaxed systems. No, cloud computing has a larger calling than that. One might even say that cloud computing is poised to deliver the world to a finer place, one in which waste and excess are recalled as sins of a more reckless age. With this communal data-storage marvel, the carbon emissions that would otherwise be sent heavenward from a churning-away corporate entity can be slashed meaningfully, and the world thus scores a significant reduction to its reliance on carbon. 

This news comes by way of the Carbon Disclosure Project, an AT&T-funded European study whose just-released results suggest that large companies in the UK and France who migrate their data to shared data networks in the cloud could cut their emissions by a full 50% by 2020.

The savings, quite simply, are a result of the decreased call for energy consumption of the new over the old. The cloud’s responsive flexibility means customers only use what they need, sidestepping the wastefulness and redundancy of yesteryear.

Money Savings, Carbon Savings

The study, which focused its attention on large IT companies in Great Britain and France, found that big UK organizations that move to cloud computing could enjoy carbon reductions that are equivalent to the annual emissions of over four million passenger vehicles. Oh, and they’ll also save in energy costs, to the tune of about £1.2 billion—findings that underscore a recent announcement by a British cabinet minister that the UK government’s cloud strategy could save British taxpayers as much as £460 million a year—so it’s not all selfless stuff on offer here.

The figures were understandably somewhat lower in France, where nuclear power reigns supreme in the business of electricity delivery, but blue-chip French companies are also poised to exploit some pretty noteworthy savings, too. And, say the study’s authors, the exploitation will be on a grand scale, as almost 70% of these organizations’ IT resources will reside in the cloud by 2020. That’s up markedly from the 10% at which the services are currently used.

Closer to Home

Closer to home, the report concludes that a large North American company that made the switch to the cloud now could be sitting on top of $12.3 billion in yearly savings, and annual carbon reductions that are equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil, by 2020.

Considering that neither of these diminutions—energy or cost—serve as the most persuasive reason to switch over to the cloud (that distinction remains a function of speed, and the accelerated pace at which all corporate activities can take place in the cloud), the argument is more compelling still. Where developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, one pundit remarked, the much more responsive-to-demand internal cloud has shrunk that lag to just a couple of minutes.

Send your stuff up into the cloud, it seems, and you just might save the world.

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In fact, the looming cloud heralding the next stage of corporate computing, the same one that’s sent nervous naysayers into all manner of anxious fits, has a broad silver lining that these fretful types probably haven’t considered.

The Silver Lining

In a blessedly optimistic editorial published in late October, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman makes the point that the oppressive economic climate currently shrouding the United States is actually conducive to bursts of creativity like no other time in recent memory. And this advancement will unfold, in large part, courtesy of the supremely affordable and eminently functional resource that is cloud computing.

The latest phase in the IT revolution, he says, is being driven by the convergence of social media with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones—all of it operating under the facilitating miracle that is the cloud. The thousands of software applications stored in this cyber cell transform our handhelds into extraordinarily powerful devices that confer on their users the potential for unprecedented innovation. The cloud has lowered the barriers to entry like nothing else.

Startups to the Rescue

Specifically, goes the argument, this technology shift will clear the way for new companies of all stripes, from insurance brokerages to medical labs, to dip into a nominally priced technological asset and borrow its overarching infrastructure to create from within. With this exceedingly useful tool, entrepreneurs can find their feet more cheaply and easily than they could even five years ago. Where previous eras required serious commitments of capital toward promotion, real estate, labour and technology to establish an operation, the cloud has removed a substantial chunk from the imperatives. The savings to be realized from employing a cloud solution rather than the traditional means and their attendant call for application servers, database servers, various on-premise applications and a slew of expensive IT personnel are genuinely meaningful for a startup. The cloud’s arrival in our midst has delivered supercomputing powers to the masses and, said Friedman in an earlier column, produced a “DIY economy.”

S.O.C.I.A.L

As Friedman describes in this editorial, Marc Benioff, the founder of cloud-based software provider Salesforce.com, this phase of the IT revolution might be summed up with the acronym SOCIAL: S for “speed,” O for “open,” C for “collaboration, I for “individuals,” A for “alignment” and L for “leadership.”

“The emergence of the cloud,” goes the piece, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour. This is speeding up everything—innovation, product cycles and competition.”