Cloud Data Management in the Spotlight

This week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar featuring two great subject matter experts on the topic of cloud data management in the era of hybrid IT:

• Mike West, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Saugatuck Research
• Andrew Bartels, former CIO, CTO and current Cloud consultant, guru and evangelist

Mike West outlined why “hybrid” (or highly interwoven) deployments are the new normal for enterprise IT. He reviewed how the coud is radically changing the role of enterprise IT and why data management must be a part of an overall cloud strategy. He identified 7 trends of the so-called Boundary Free Enterprise and pointed to these 5 best practices:

1. Commit to (Cloud) Data Management
2. Manage the Organizational Issues
3. Partner with a Data Management Provider
4. Manage Both Control and Access
5. Approach Data Management as Value Creation

Andrew Bartels shared the story of how he led the transition at his company to “cloud first” and drove Salesforce adoption from a peripheral system to a key driver of business performance and success. Andrew spoke passionately about the need to treat data as an asseet and concluded with the following words of advice:

• Communication is key
• Focus on real needs not just philosophy
• Establish a Data Committee
• Become a partner & not an obstacle
• Integration & accessibility is key
• Be prepared for a long road

I’ve embedded the video below and posted the slides on Slideshare. There’s some great insight here. I hope you find the discussion interesting and useful – I sure did!

Related articles

• Dirty Secret about Cloud and Data Integration (blogs.gartner.com)

Salesforce Customers are Asking for Big Data Management #DF12

Two things stuck out for me at Dreamforce 2012:

1. What an amazing ecosystem Salesforce has built. The Cloud expo was packed with high-quality booths and there were over 3000 people at the partner keynote! Congratulations to the partner success team and kudos on the newly designed Appexchange.
2. How important cloud integration / enterprise connectivity has become to Salesforce customers, partners and prospects. These two slides from that same partner keynote say it all:

When it comes to the back-office, Big Data Management apps top the list of Salesforce customer requirements. Oh, and by the way, all new cloud applications must connect across the business.

Today two post-Dreamforce 2012 articles caught my attention that address the need for cloud integration head on. In his post – Plumbing the Salesforce Clouds is Your Business, Mark Smith from Ventana Research notes:

“The challenges your organization faces with data are getting larger, and the financial benefits of data in the cloud, such as reduced TCO and reduced implementation fees, are substantive. Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly. Automation helps organizations rationalize their overall information management efforts.”

Joshua Greenbaum at Enterprise Applications Consulting has this to say his his article, Salesforce.com, Enterprise Platforms, and the End of the End of Software:

“And the tools are there, or on the way. Hence the refrigerator pitch, though it was interestingly devoid of details on just how easy it will be to build an integration framework that could tie together a Pandora-like pure cloud environment or a more common hybrid cloud/on-premise environment. But heck, that’s really hard. It took SAP years to get NetWeaver out of slideware mode and into simple and easy to implement mode, despite all their efforts. So I don’t expect Saleforce.com to settle this issue in just one Dreamforce. It will take a while, no doubt.”

I’ll write about the Informatica Cloud integration and MDM session later this week on the Perspective blog. In the meantime, I’ve embedded the slides below so you can see for yourself how three enterprise organizations have taken advantage of data integration, data quality and master data management technology to drive overall Salesforce adoption and success. It’s Big Cloud Data Management in action!

Power the Connected Enterprise with Cloud Integration and Master Data Management (MDM) from Darren Cunningham

Related articles

• Salesforce.com reveals brief roadmap for AppExchange through 2013 (zdnet.com)
• Dreamforce 2012: Salesforce.com Launches Dropbox Enterprise Rival Chatterbox (techweekeurope.co.uk)
• Dreamforce 2012: Betting On Social Enterprise (cloudave.com)
• Salesforce.com’s New Social Strategy is Brilliant, Here’s Why (studentforce.wordpress.com)

Big Data and Cloud Analytics Discussion

I sat down with my friend Patrick Morrissey this week to discuss the business intelligence market, Big Data and all things cloud. Pat runs marketing for a hot new company called Tidemark. This was a follow up to a discussion published on the Sandhill.com site: Enterprise Performance Management in the Cloud on an iPad.

Here are the questions he asked. You can read my answers here: Five for Friday – Darren Cunningham of Informatica Cloud.

1. Analytics and business intelligence are top of mind for organizations today and Gartner says that BI is the #1 CIO priority in 2012.  Why is this such a hot button issue?
2. If analytics are so critical to business success, why do so many projects fail?
3. There is a lot of talk about “Big Data” in the press, blogs and industry events. How do you think about Big Data?
4. Many larger organizations are now moving to “Cloud First” as their enterprise IT and application strategy.  How does cloud change the game?

Definitely some great questions – how did I do? Want to take a stab at answering them? What’s your POV?

Related articles

• A Sixth Thing CIOs Should Know About Big Data (cloudcomputing.sys-con.com)
• How C-Level Execs are Tapping into Big Data Analytics (blogs.sap.com)

The 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey Results @mjskok

Cloud computing icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A colleague of mine just sent me the 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey results from the venture capital firm North Bridge.  There were 785 survey respondents, which included a mix of line of business, CXO, IT and other. 65% of of the respondents were vendors and 35% were customers, which may skew the results to cloud, but the results are aligned with research from IDC, Gartner and other industry analyst firms.

A few of the results that my colleague highlighted as noteworthy (and I agree) are:

1. 75% of SW will be developed using PaaS in 2017
2. Confidence in Cloud for mission critical up from 13% in their 2011 survey to 50% in their 2012 survey
3. Consistent with IDC’s forecast, around 85% of all new SW will be delivered via Cloud (SaaS)
4. 55% of CIOs will increase spending in SaaS in 2012
5. Only 3% of respondents view Cloud as too risky (10% last year)
6. Venture investment in Cloud grew by 50% 2010-2011 to $2.4B

Do you agree with the results? Any naysayers still out there? With quotes from SAP included in the presentation, clearly hybrid is the new black…

Great job Michael J Skok for putting together a very nice presentation of your data. I’d have embedded it here, but it doesn’t seem to be enabled for the presentation in Slideshare.

Related articles

• 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey Exposes Hottest Trends in Cloud (cloudcomputing.sys-con.com)
• What’s Keeping You from the Cloud? Survey Says… (servicesangle.com)
• Using a Cloud Service at the Office Without Permission? You’re Not Alone. (allthingsd.com)

Executive Megatrends Panel – Informatica World 2012

This industry panel was fairly typical in that it focused on social, mobile, cloud computing and Big Data – the megatrends of technology in 2012. What I thought was  unique about this discussion, is that it featured different, lively and somewhat contentious points of view. Instead of violent agreement, there was actually some great discussion and different perspectives on the technology industry were represented. The panel was moderated by R “Ray” Wang from Constellation Research and featured executives from EMC, Informatica, Google and Salesforce.com.

Internet Trends: Mary Meeker’s Latest Presentation

Thanks to Business Insider for posting it. There’s some great research in this presentation from KPCB’s Mary Meeker.
http://www.businessinsider.com/embed?id=4fc63f056bb3f7fc42000004&width=600&height=430

Related articles

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• Mary Meeker Talks About How Digital Is Changing Everything (allthingsd.com)
• MEEKER: We Have A $1 Billion Growth Fund And We Didn’t Spend A Penny In Q1 Because Valuations Are Crazy (businessinsider.com)

Informatica World 2012: Return on Big Data

I’m spending the week at Informatica’s annual user conference in Vegas. The focus of the event is the new Informatica 9.5 release and the overall theme of Big Data and the Return on Data. The tweet stream is quite active – you can follow the conference at #IW2012.

Here’s the opening video from Informatica World. You might also find the Infographic interesting - Big Data, Big Returns.

Talking About Hybrid IT with @LoraineLawson

Over at ITBusinessEdge, Loraine Lawson published a discussion we had recently, which was primarily focused on the Informatica Cloud Winter 2012 release. The conversation ended up getting into the topic of “hybrid IT.” I was asked if companies are really pursuing Private Clouds and had this to say:

“If you’re Salesforce.com, you say that private cloud is like a unicorn, it doesn’t really exist and it’s everyone liking the benefits of cloud computing but feeling like there’s too much risk in terms of security and data privacy and those sorts of things. At Oracle Open World, I had several enterprise architects come up to me and say there’s two things I want to talk about: cloud computing and Big Data. And I said, so you’re an enterprise architect and you’re trying to figure out a blueprint for your company? Absolutely.

When it comes to cloud, one guy went so far as to say, “We will not do any public cloud in our company. It’s going to be 100 percent private.” And then you ask him are there any SaaS applications in your business? “Oh, yeah, they’re all over the place.” Well, good luck, right? Good luck shutting all that down and going 100 percent private, it’s just not going to happen. That’s why I think it is going to be a mix. It is going to be hybrid, whether it’s public-private, whether it’s cloud and on-premise. Hybrid is the new black.”

Accurate? Way off? I’m interested in the discussion.

Related articles

• Top 10 Cloud Computing Experts to Follow on Twitter (backupify.com)
• Big data in the cloud……..the ability to make business decisions (bi24.co.uk)
• Cloud Predictions for 2012 from a Researcher’s Eye (clean-clouds.com)
• 2012 outlook for enterprise architecture (zdnet.com)

Congratulations to the Informatica Cloudy Award Winners

Image via CrunchBase

Earlier this week, I wrote about Dreamforce 2011 on the Informatica Perspectives blog and congratulated the winners of the first annual Informatica Cloudy Awards. The 2011 cloud integration award winners are:

• Most Unique Integrations – CETCO
• Highest All-Time Success Rate – McKesson
• Big Data Cloud Integration – Avaya
• Rising Cloud – Novatel Wireless-Enfora
• Most Connected – Motorola Mobility
• MVP –  Andrew Bartels, PSA Insurance and Financial Services

You can read more about the Informatica Cloud awards here. Speaking of cloud integration, here is a presentation I had the pleasure of delivering twice at Dreamforce with three great Salesforce.com customers: PSA, Topcon and Qualcomm.

Hybrid IT: The Importance of Integration to Salesforce Success

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham

Sandhill.com Interview: Talking Big Data and Cloud Computing

My interview with Dave Kellogg (aka Kellblog) was published today over on Sandhill.com: Big Data, Cloud Computing and Industry Perspectives with Dave Kellogg. I always enjoy catching up with Dave (especially if there’s a beer or two involved). In this interview he weighs in on Big Data and why it’s getting so much attention, the intersection between Big Data and Cloud Computing, and he even throws in some career advice – and it’s good news for any budding “data scientists“ out there…

Here’s what Dave has to say about cloud integration:

“IT used to buy and run computers. Then they used to build and run applications. Then they focused on weaving together packaged applications. Going forward, they will focus on tightly integrating cloud-based services. They will also continue to focus on company-proprietary analytics used to gain competitive advantage.”

Be sure to check out the entire interview here.

Related articles

• Jeff Kaplan on Cloud Integration (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• Cloud in Action Interview: From Cloud Skeptical to Cloud First (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• 5 Requirements for a Big Data Integration Platform (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)