Cloud vs Distributed computing and the Social Customer aka the Global Citizen

Clouds in the Eagle Nebula where stars are born. Source: Wikipedia

The past few weeks have been all about cloud computing. Be it the wikileaks and Amazon standoff or the Dreamforce 2010 event unveiling 7 'Clouds'. Lots have been talked about both. One is a political discussion, the other an enterprise discussion. And I got torn between the new patterns of behaviors arising around cloud. Let me explain a bit more so you help me out.

The promise of cloud computing is the abstraction of the unnderlying complexities of the technology from the users, and their plug & play as well as on demand supply - much like electricity.

For businesses, now they can have IT as an operational expenditure rather than capital. Thus the plethora of XYZ as a Service. Purists would like to make a distinction between Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service. Now add the new & upcoming Business Process as a Service to the hype.

Another confusion to all this is public vs private cloud. Some say Private cloud is merely glorified data center server racks, some say its bullshit.

All said and done, cloud is about consolidating your computing stacks & sharing it with various users for their computational tasks.

Distributed computing, for me, is the exact opposite. Take a huge computational task, break it into various mini/micro/nano tasks and distribute them across various systems. Like the SETI@Home program which lets u donate some of your computers' idle time in the hopes of finding aliens so that you have enough time to reach out for a towel.

Aspects like reliability, scalability, redundancy, security, etc. are built into cloud computing, but it is a single point of failure for your business irrespective of all the redundancy & reliability built into the cloud. This was what happened when Amazon pulled the plug for Wikileaks quoting violation of its terms & conditions. Quoting The Guardian:

"It's clear," pontificated Amazon, "that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

To which they also say bunkum:

... any work "prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of that person's official duties" is not entitled to domestic copyright protection under US law. So, in the US at least, the leaked cables are not protected by copyright and it doesn't matter whether WikiLeaks owns the rights or not.

Irrespective of the politics involved, here is a balanced view from the crusader against IT #FAIL, and a good friend, Michael Krigsman:

Cloud computing suffers from the weakness of central point of failure. For example, when a cloud owner, such as a particular vendor, suffers an outage all customers could potentially go down. In contrast, distributing Internet-based data among numerous outlets creates redundancy and lowers the risk of catastrophic disruption.

Regardless of one’s political view of Wikileaks, for instance, the organization brilliantly anticipated service disruptions caused by political pressure. As a result, they distributed their materials on servers owned by different companies throughout the world. When Wikileak’s storage provider, Amazon, pulled the plug, data mirrored elsewhere kept the site accessible.

Cloud computing combined with distributed mirroring offers a robust means to share information on the Internet.

Star analyst & great friend Esteban Kolsky goes a step further wrt Cloud vs Distributed and changes my fundamentals. He opines that cloud & distributed computing are not much apart in real life. He explains that cloud was built to leverage distributed computing and says that there is not just a single point of failure in a cloud but also not a single provider. Stuff at all the layers of the cloud would be interchangeable & inter-operable. (Amen!) And thus:

without going into the politics of it, the ability of wikileaks to continue to flourish after being officially "shut down" in their main place proves the value of the cloud as a continuously growing and evolving platform where content and applications can live forever.

Internet is a great platform that enables both cloud & distributed computing. All said & done, Internet is a tool. From an anthropology view, apparently,tools came before bigger brains in the human evolution. And internet is a very BIG tool that is changing human behavior. The rise of the social customer is one manifestation. The global citizen is yet another aspect of this social customer. May be it will pave way for the fall of the nations? Sorry, let me not start gathering wool.

But for the internet to become more useful, it will have to evolve a lot more, in terms of how we consume it. There might be some parallels with how electricity was adopted at a time when steam, wind or water were the major sources of energy. How the power generation was centralized and the distribution grids were built. How various providers had to inter-operate & were interchangeable too.

And then people could also generate power at home using solar/wind/bio/etc. and get credits for that. Which would be something like me providing my extra/idle CPU & storage space to the cloud providers and thus getting extra credits. Now that would be a true innovation in cloud & distributed computing, isn't it? More power & flexibility to the social customer aka the global citizen.

A lot of things to wrap my thoughts around and too early stages to say how the human behavior is evolving wrt cloud & distributed computing. Whats your say?

Digital Customer vs Social Customer - what GetSatisfaction.com got wrong

Source: GetSatisfaction.com

I woke up to find a new infographic on Social CRM being tweeted about. Curious, I clicked on it and found myself on GetSatisfaction.com's blog with great hopes since they had featured on Esteban's blog. And was ... disappointed. So I left them a comment ... and it went into moderation. And thus I am reproducing my comment here.

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Andy,

I am utterly disappointed in this infographic. I would rather call this a hypegraphic.

How is this an infographic on the "Evolution" of Social CRM? All I can see depicted is how it is different from CRM.

You missed out a crucial aspect about the Social Customer - the communities they form, interact with, and the collective clout (no, not Klout) these communities have over the businesses. How they help each other out.

Irony, no? I guess that's what GetSatisfaction tries to do as a business, right? Allowing customers to create communities where they would help each others out and thus strong arm the businesses into providing service in the GS communities? And you missed that VERY VERY key aspect.

Social is not just the technology alone. What you have depicted as the Social Customer is actually, merely a Digital Customer, a Customer who wields the Digital Technologies (including the internet and the various paraphernalia on top of it) very well. The Digital Customer does NOT become a Social Customer unless they gang up together to help each other out, and if need be, use their collective voice as a major influence over the businesses.

And you also missed out the part about how the Social Customer wants to co-create, the experiences as well as the products/services.

Social is a behavioral characteristic & Co-Creation is a key aspect of this social behavior of the customer in conjunction with the business.

And PR is going to drive the change? All the best. And right after that you mention everybody in the company does/is responsible for SCRM. Not to forget your own business model. Mixed signals?

The sole section where you do try to chart out the evolution, its about what should be & what is. Nothing about how to go/it got from from the here to the there. BTW, the concept comes from Mitch Lieberman, while the design of the graphic came from Chess Media in a jointly published whitepaper. Since you have used your own graphic, I would presume the credit should go to him predominantly?

Sorry if I came out pretty hard on you, but you are a trusted source and you have an obligation towards yourselves, your customers & the community at large.

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I do not know if this comment will be approved or not, but being the social customer myself, I felt obligated to share this with my community and thus I have reproduced it here irrespective of whether my comment gets approved or not.

Please do let me know what you think of the infographic & my views. :)

Primal needs in a digital world

A Dai Pai Dong in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Source: Me.

After my half baked ideas & notes on a collaboration framework in my previous post I published while in a jiffy to get to Hong Kong, I write yet another visceral post that I could not hold in my mind for further contemplation. This one while I am in Hong Kong.

India & China are emerging nations/developing countries that most of the western, educated, industrialised, rich & democratic (WEIRD) countries would have found to be stupid sloths 2 decades back. (I really recommend you read that article I have hyperlinked).

Developing countries like China & India (disclaimer: I am from India & writing this while I am in Hong Kong - which is part of China) have one huge advantage over the developed countries, other than the ever growing educated population that is hell bent on becoming the new middle class (India has none according to some reports, as a matter of fact).

Newer Infrastructure - faster & vaster.

On the other hand (OTOH as internet afficianados would like it), scientists say there is now proof that though city living is great in terms of easy accessibility to stuff we need, it puts a LOT of strain on our minds due to the deluge of inputs our senses receive. The easy way out was to look at greenery & thus they observed that every city needed a green preserve. Like the hill outside of Tokyo. And this means only one thing to me.

Ancient Habitats - green & serene.

(Much like why we find beauty in certain things as per this Darwinian view.)

Ok, so much for the tangential stuff. What relevance to the social customer or business or the relationship between the two does this have?

Simple.

We now, thanks to the advancements in digital technology (computing, internet, mobility, cloud, etc. for consumption AND production) have much better infrastructure at our disposal. Let it not go unutilized.

• Where do you think are the better airports? Newark or Dubai? Ok, La Guardia or Hyderabad?
• Where do you think are faster trains? NYC-Boston Acela express or Beijing-Shanghai PDL? 
• Where do you think are better systems? Intranet or Internet? 
• Which do you think are fastest growing communication mediums? Telephone, Email or Social Media/Networks?

Newer Infrastructure - a convergence of social, cloud & mobile that is more relevant & easier to use. Faster & Vaster.

Does this mean you have to give in to the hype & bow down to the social media marketing/monitoring gurus? I ask you a few questions in return.

• Has human nature to feel connected ever changed? If you are not sure, please do read the New York Times best seller, Social Intelligence by Daniel Goelman - author of Emotional Intelligence. 
• Has the meaning of business ever changed? If you cannot represent your business in a single diagram, I would suggest you read Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder. That would be the least yet best investment for 2011 or even a great Christmas self gift. 
• Which do you think are the growing trends in customer satisfaction? Customer service or Customer servitude? People can talk all they like about service design, but the nature of servitude, voluntary ones that is, comes by habit &/or culture, from empathy, by awaking our primal instincts to feel part of the tribe, not by design (Design is the next best option though). But then even the understanding of servitude has been clouded by all the emancipation related palpitations. I need to specify that I do not mean involuntary servitude to the customer. If nothing else, please do consider reading this post on the Taj Hotel's gesture towards its customers, employees & the community during & after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai two years back on what I mean by servitude. Employees laid down their lives to save guests - otherwise known as customers. Will yours? Managers considered the welfare of their guests & staff paramount even in the face of massacre of their family.

Ancient habits & instincts if not the habitats - empathy & the resulting servitude. Green & serene.

So are you ready to embrace the new & yet relearn the ancient, primal nature of humans?