The secret was poorly kept, key figures had dropped hints and clangers and at least one NDA seemed to have expired 12 hours too soon, but nonetheless the anticipation for the formal unveiling was significant. I’m a reader, I like to read and my library will testify to this. Not only do I consume new books at a significant rate, I’m also happy to re-read books often a number of times. I’ve also out in quite a few air and hotel hours over the years and I do enjoy killing time with a good book. For this reason I’ve been hanging my nose over e-Book readers for the last few months looking for ‘the one’ which would satisfy my need for ease of use, portability, battery life and library access. The number of books being ‘e’-d is on a significant upward curve and this was pushing me more and more towards an electronic rather than paper buying habit – much the same way that I now purchase pretty much all of my music on-line (good by DRM and good riddance!).

The problem I had was that all of the e-readers I picked up and tried left me feeling decidedly bleh. They were, it felt, a bit… backward, a bit simple and just a bit one-dimensional. Certainly not something I could justify £200 and upwards upon.

I love my Macbook. It’s just a simple Black one, nothing ‘Pro’ here, but it’s in almost constant use, even at home where I’ve got the big machines, and I have used it to read stuff on too, but the problem is that it’s the wrong shape. Wide-screen is great for movies and I love having desktop acreage to spread out upon but it’s 90 degrees out from what I want when I’m reading – web-sites are bad enough but at least these are, mostly, formatted for the standard screen. And then there’s that big bit sticking out the front… the keyboard. Great when I’m typing (some would say essential) but decidedly in-the-way when all I want to do is read. Plus I need to put in on something, it’s not a hold-in-your-hand device. The MacBook is not an e-book reader.

The iPad though, certainly looks like it could be. iBookstore fills me with a warmth of anticipation which (I know inside) is going to be tempered, at least initially, because my favourite SciFi authors won’t be available. The reader application looks like it’s going to deliver the ease of access and flexibility that I’ve been looking for too. So far – tick!

Now then, let’s look further ahead. The Times application they showed was lovely. Seriously, newspapers online should be multi-dimensional and this one is a massive step in that direction. I don’t read a daily paper in print, but I consume a huge amount of information from “Teh Internetz” – SIDEWAYS STEP! do you remember Ananova? This little darling was touted as the rebirth of news consumption, aggregation of the stories YOU wanted and delivery to you personally. It fell far short of this, but I’d probably put a few pennies a day into a service which delivered this to me in a digestible and multi-dimensional format ir not just text.

Anyway, the morning news is something which people ‘do’. My partner Sarah drags over the MacBook in the morning and scans three or four websites every day. Scrolling up and down, up and down because the laptop is the wrong shape for this kind of information. The iPad would certainly make this exercise easier. Once again, for making life easier – Tick!

But here’s where I start drifting off. Remember the iPhone initial release? Remember the depression that set in after the hype blew over? Remember how everyone said it was a mistake for Apple to get into a market which Nokia, RIM and Microsoft were tearing up? Remember how utterly, utterly wrong everyone was!

My problem is that I can only ‘feel’ the use I’d get out of the iPad, I can’t describe it in any way which would justify the £4-500 it’ll cost me.

My email I can happily do on the lapdog, as can my notes, scribbles and musings which get turned into various documents and psts along the way. My music lives on my iPod and will continue to do so. Movies are a significant variable, I still love DVDs and will more that likely switch, formally, over to BluRay in the near future. Or will I? Am I destined to ‘go digital’ in this area too? Anyway, the point is that this is not currently a consideration for me.

I want an iPad, believe me! I want the beautiful technology, the ergonomic lines and the overall sleekness and beauty of the idea. I’m a geek and happy to be one (although in more formal circles I use the term Technologist!). And PLEASE, this is not a “Well PC tablets have been around for ages – the new <ASUS, HP, Acer, blah> one will do all of that too” argument. Yes they may, I’m sure.

This is about my gut feeling, and that says “you’d like using this”. I’m having trouble finding a reason to disagree.

It does look good though...

No  one can make you serve customers well…. that’s because great service is a  choice.
Harvey Mackay, tells a wonderful story about a cab driver that  proved this point.

Wally the Cab Driver made a different choice. He  decided to stop quacking like ducks and start soaring like eagles.
How  about us?   Smile, and the whole world smiles with you…. The  ball is in our hands!
A man reaps what he sows. Let us not become weary  in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not  give up… let us do good to all people.
Ducks Quack, Eagles  Soar.

And this is fine if you expect people to leave their brains at the door on the way out of the building and their mobile devices at the door on their way in. The problem is that neither of these are practical in the world today (OK certain security-sensitive organisations do actually require that you NOT bring mobile devices into the building but they kind of fall outside of my scope of general business here). So even if the strict policies of the organisation are enforced at the desktop, folks are still able to access Facebook, twitter, blog-spaces and the like from their “mobile  phones”. I’m quoting here because as time passes these devices have become so much more than phones and the name increasing doesn’t fit. These are the the small screens which make up the screen triumvirate of most of our lives; small screens = mobile devices, mid-screens = desktop systems (PCs, Macs etc) and large screens being our TVs which are also becoming a source of rich media and not just TV broadcast.

But I digress, the point here is that very few organisations have put in place policies and guidelines to help the individual employees understand what they should and should not share outside of the company, how they communicate what they are doing and who that communication is available too. An example of this would be the Facebook invitation to ‘Friends’ to attend a party. The intent was honest but the method and audience hadn’t been properly considered, the result was several hundred people turning up and a seriously wrecked house. Translate that into Business terms and you get my point.

I’m not any sort of advocate of nannying at all, and I believe that in the majority of cases common sense prevails and individuals are reasonable sensible. HOWEVER, we live in a statistical universe and given enough people, someone will do something stupid and potentially damaging unless strongly advised otherwise, simply out of ignorance or lack of thought.

So policies ARE necessary to help to mitigate these statistical certainties and to enable businesses to protect themselves. As an employer, ask yourself these simple questions:

• If someone blogged about their working day, could they unintentionally reveal sensitive information?
• Could someone updating their Facebook status as “This place sucks, no-one EVER listens!” reflect poorly on you as an employer?
• Could a Twitter update of “Another meeting, I wonder what bad news is coming now?!” impact your business confidence?

While it’s true that the comments of one person may not even register, it’s also true that it only takes one person to start a rumor.

Being able to identify and address ANY sort of communications channel and how it could be used or mis-used is vital. Those forward thinking businesses have adopted social media as a marketing medium and done so with great success, so it MUST hold true that bad news has the same, if not greater, impact.

There are, of course, many reasons for this but primarily my words are being used as a reference both generally and specifically by Planet Technologies and I feel that there needs to be a more focused area for them. After all I’m sue that the other stuff on Silesti.net, while interesting (of course!), aren’t necessarily too relevant!

I’ll be cross posting some/most of the stuff back here anyway, but take a gander over at Hosting-Thoughts too.

This week, we talk a little bit about the origins of shared hosting, why things have not really moved forward in that space so much, the rise of framework engines and virtualisation and why no-one should be building datacenters!

Next time we’ll be talking about email and related bits and pieces.

And I’m as guilty as everyone else! When ones livelihood depends on the adoption and deployment of technology you sometime have to kick back and ride the wave and certainly there are new technologies emerging which are simply fantastic and would not have been possible without the recent developments in browser/OS/platform technologies. The Software as a Service Cloud is probably the most visible evidence of this, I can now write a document, put together a spreadsheet and edit graphics and a myriad of other cool stuff using free online services – brilliant!

But there’s another side (or two) to the picture. Let’s not forget about the techncal layers, the Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service versions of the “Cloud” definition. In particular I’m more than a little smug that, what I would have termed well designed, internal infrastructures are now being heralded as ‘Private Clouds’.

We did a project in the Middle East nearly two years ago which involved the deployment of a virtualised environment for a corporate development team. The idea was to provide the team with a scalable platform within which they could spin up or down servers and systems without needing to refer to the IT department for every build. The stated business goals here were improved productivity, reduced overhead costs and flexibility with control. The control element came into play by allocating ‘points’ to each developer allowing them to create and use ny specification of virtual server or servers as long as the ‘cost’ fell inside their points allocation. Simple, easy and all delivered within the functionality of the chosen underlying technology.

This, dear reader, is a Private Cloud, we were doing it before it had a name! Of course there are now entire solutions built around the idea of the Dynamic Data Centre and the technology has moved on to allow even greater levels of administration, deployment and management to be achieved but the concept is the same; abstract away from the hardware and introduce services which are scalable, flexible and resilient without even needing to think about how these features are achieved.

And pretty much any business can take advantage of this kind of solution for a minimal level of investment. I’ll put good money on most businesses have at least one important if no critical systems or service which runs as a single point of failure. It’s economics, running multiple physical servers for resilience costs money. Not only in the original purchase of the time and it’s ongoing update/upgrade/replacement cycle, but also the power, cooling and administration side of things too.

By using virtualisaion and some central storage (this is were some investment may be needed) EVERY service can be resilient, monitored and flexible in it’s consumption of resources. Private Clouds are not just for giant enterprises and Universities they are for anyone who values their technical infrastructure and who would love to see their IT move from being an overhead cost to forming part of the strategic assets of the business.

Today’s announcement that the pricing for BPOS is being dropped and the mailbox spec increased is surely going to cause more growls and shrugs. The simple fact is thought that Microsoft tried over and over again to place Exchange Server, SharePoint and OCS into the hosing space through it’s partners and it simply didn’t take off the way that it should have done.

There are as many reasons (or excuses) for this as there are HMC – the MS hosting solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration – partners out there, but the main ones are simply that the product was never positioned by any partner the way that Microsoft has positioned BPOS and that the investment in making it easy for the customers was almost totally missing.

BPOS customers are able to migrate their users, groups, contacts and mailbox contents onto the hosted platform with little deep technical knowledge being required. They can also elect to keep some mailboxes locally if they need to.

The release:

New Pricing Announced for Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)

Let’s take a look at one of those prices in particular: Exchange Online.

With these price releases organisations can now get an Exchange Server 2007 mailbox – with a built-in upgrade path to Exchange Server 2010 – for £3.35 per user, per month. Take a look around the hosters and see what the pricing is… really. Then have a think about the cost of a new server, the OS and Application licenses, the backup tapes / disks and the administration resource and tell me it makes sense to run Exchange yourself as a business who’s core competencies are NOT technology!

And to the hosters out there who are, today, throwing their arms in the air and screaming betrayal; you had the opportunity over the last 3 years to develop a significant business offering your own BPOS solution and put yourselves in this position but you didn’t, you put an Exchange Server logo on your web site and sold the TECHNOLOGY not the SERVICE. If you don’t have a migration plan for new customers then you are simply saying you don’t actually care about their needs.

I’ve been banging on about this stuff for quite a while now and it seems that the proof is finally coming to roost.

1. Do it first
2. Do it best
3. Do it cheapest

Those are the keys to making money in hosting. If you can get a combination then it’s pretty much a cast-iron guarantee.

If you’ve simply built an HMC platform, created some plans and then marked up your SPLA pricing thinking you have a solution you’ve missed the point, significantly and now MS are making it for you.

To Hosters
You have a choice now, provide your Exchange products as a value-added part of a larger solution like ERP, CRM or the like, position your solution against BPOS with good, solid business support and services, OR resell BPOS and make a solid recurring referral fee. It’s really become that simple

To Businesses
Give your TCO a serious look. BPOS now offers a significant benefit in both technology and financial terms as an alternative to running your own systems. If you believe you have a more difficult technological issue to overcome then talk to a Systems Integrator (like Planet Technologies of course!) who will be able to not only identify how your systems can be structured but also how ‘Cloud Services’ such as BPOS can and should be leveraged for your business and help you to migrate, quickly and easily, to BPOS if you make that decision.

I made a decision a few weeks ago that if I was going to be espousing the benefits of Cloud Services, as well as assisting businesses with understanding how to take advantage of them in their various different guises, I should really see what it’s like to be a small-scale consumer of these things and I set out to make MY life as easy as possible using the technologies associated with The Cloud.

Virtualisation is the main hanger for these service. Virtualised storage means access from anywhere – in theory. Virtualised machines provide portability and flexibility. So here is my situation.

I use Macs as my workstation of choice, there are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that I can do what I want and need to do with ease. There are however a couple of items which mean I also need a PC- read Windows – environment to work within:

1) Visio – I do systems architectural diagrams and exchange these with others
2) Project – Project plans need to be built and shared
3) Groove – As a virtual team we use Groove for shared document library storage and for projects

These applications are not available for the Mac – Boo Hiss MacBU in Microsoft! I know that there are alternatives around which will read file formats etc, but the important thing is that I exchange these with others and I’ve not found a ‘clean’ conversion which works both way in any of the options. Groove is simple Windows only.

My adopted solution is to use Parallels Desktop for the Mac and run a virtualised PC o take care of ‘that side of things’ in my working life. now this has been fine for many months and I actually run the PC off a Firewire connected portable drive so I can use it on my iMac at home and my MacBook when on the road; a nice solution as far as it goes but there is still a catch. My data lives on that Windows PC image. If it goes, it’s gone.

This would be bad in a number of ways, all of which are, I’m sure, clear to all. YES! I could take regular backups, but that is mitigation not resolution I needed to be more portable and more de-risked. My solution is a Cloud Service: Microsoft Live Mesh.

The Mesh allows me to publish a folder structure and subscribe to it from many devices including Mac’s natively, updates are made through the Mesh to all of the devices and things are kept up to date. I no longerneed to carry data around with me. But if we think about it, that means I actually no longer need to carry my Windows PC around with me either, I just need access to one wherever I am.

A new virtual PC was created on each of my device ‘locations’ and was added to my Mesh, now with the right aaplications installed and my Groove workspaces also synced, wherever I am I have access to my data. The Mesh also lets me access my library via the web so if I’m guesting on someone else’s PC for an hour I can still work (No Groove, but.. well… a move to Mesh for the team seems VERY likely!). It’s also worth noting that our email service at Planet is hosted, another Cloud service, so it also follows me around or is accessible via OWA.

I should also mention that my new virtual Windows PC’s are running the Windows 7RC. As I write this, I have a Mac running OSX Leopard with Parallels running Windows 7 AND a Windows XP virtual machine too (Groove syncing!!) and eveything is right with the world. I can leave me desk go to another location and have EXACTLY the same functionality, data and access without carrying anything other than my login details This makes me happy.

And things seem to be moving along nicely too. I read with GREAT interest the updates coming to OSX with the Snow Leopard release, in particular the inclusion of Exchange server support in the OS! As quoted from the Apple site “something even Windows PCs don’t have”.

But I am a multi platform user and I have to say that Windows 7 DOES seem to work… on the whole. I’m aware that it’s RC and that there will be a few niggles so I’m living with them for now, but those aside, it’s reasonably speedy (remember I’m running virtualised too) and easy to use. Having bypassed Vista, my XP tuned brain is re-learning how to do things, but it’s not too bad! Niggles a around file extension handling – especially with Groove!!! – and the way it sometimes provides a little too much technical info about  a file type. The apps work well and I’ve not broken anything yet.

Anyway, think about the Cloud but not as a distant goal for corporate strategy, think of it as something hat, with a little planning can free you from the constraints of 1 system, 1 OS and 1 location, wander free and be productive for now is the time!

I got sent this today though:

Extract of Oliver Cromwell’s speech as he dissolved the long parliament:-

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!”

It could have been written today!

Have we really learned so little? Are we really so disenfranchised and disinterested  with our countries gevernance that we’ve allowed these blood suckers to carry on such?

Well, the answer is of course; “It was all within the rules” – so that’s OK then.

Many have sought and created definitions over the last year or so and all are without fail both right and wrong, how so? Because everyone uses things in a different way and their perception of them is also different.

The on-line services offered by Salesforce.com have been described as SaaS ( and as such represents probably the most visibly successful deliveries of SaaS ) but I don’t necessarily agree. “Where is the software?” I would ask. If this is Software as a service then show me the boxed product which I can purchase outright. This is of course my opinion only but serves to prove my point.

So for that sake of  this article I’m happy to stipulate that Software as a Service is an application delivering functionality over the internet (web-based or via client side applets), in a reasonably platform independent way, on a subscription basis – which I think sounds fair.

So let’s look at this for a moment… we, in the hosting and associated industries are looking at SaaS and it’s delivery and wondering ‘What can we deliver which has mass market appeal’ – the real question here being of course ‘ How can we make some money out of this?’! And it’s with this in mind that I would like everyone to take a step sideways and have a glance at the world of Gameing.

The Games market has grown considerably over the last few years, the birth of the 3rd generation consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3) has introduced high-definition gaming to the mass market and the phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii, which is really a 2nd gen console teamed with an exquisite marketing and positioning strategy, has shown that with the right products it’s relatively easy to gain a substantial share of a growing market. But there is another aspect to Gameing which is pertinent here and that’s the MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) the most popular and most discussed at the moment being World of Warcraft – WoW.

Ladies and gentlemen, in WoW I give you the most deeply penetrative SaaS application never discussed!

If I refer back to my previous stipulation on the definition of SaaS, then WoW hits the nail right on the head. It’s subscription based, platform independent and delivered across the internet. Moreover it further DEFINES SaaS in that updates to the core are made centrally and available to all, whereas expansions in functionality can be purchased separately by those who feel they need or want them. The notion of physical location of the service is never questioned, the communications channel is self monitoring to alert the user should a loss of effective connectivity occur, data is stored wholly centrally and, as long as the subscription is maintained, always available to you regardless of where or when you connect.

In-application interaction with colleagues is part of the service, data objects can be stored for later retrieval by the user or trusted associates, actions are limited and defined by the level of experience and the role which the user has and the environment is persistent, changing and expanding for ALL users based on the actions of ALL users.

There is a lesson here for service providers and SaaS ISV’s: Think outside of the traditional norms when thinking about SaaS and look beyond typical application functionality. If you’re a WoW player (which some of you undoubtedly are) think about how it delivers what it does and hoe WoW as a paradigm for SaaS really does show what’s possible.