There are some very important standards that are heavily impacted by cloud computing:

• ITIL (ISO20000) for service management - should be interesting for a multi-cloud service - has anyone any ideas how to do it?


• ISO27000 Series for security management systems - this long-toothed standard needs to say something about trust and reputation management


• ISO15489 Records management - clouds need to store data reliably for long periods. Enterprises need to be able to extract their data from one cloud provider and move it into another.


• Compliance - there aren't any well-established standards for this but I am aware of ACE from the Open Group and a NIST initiative.

]]> Posted by John Arnold on November 18, 2008

Rick Mans (follow me on Twitter @rickmans)

TweetDeck: If I have to twitter without TweetDeck I feel lost. TweetDeck is the best tool there is to Twitter, especially when you follow more than 30 people. These are the killer features of TweetDeck:

• Groups: you have the ability to group your tweets. I use these groups to prioritize who I have to read, who I should read and who I could read. Besides that I have a group containing all my Capgemini and Sogeti colleagues and I have a search on Capgemini since I am very interested what other tweet about Capgemini.
• Cross platform: since I am using Windows Vista on my Capgemini laptop and Ubuntu on my private laptop I am very pleased that I could use TweetDeck on both laptops.
• Support: TweetDeck's creator (Iain Dodsworth) seems to answer all the issues of TweetDeck that are mentioned on Twitter. Besides that he is quote democratic in the development of TweetDeck since he also uses Uservoice in the way it was intended to.

Minggl: Minggl is a real timesaver, it is my PA for my social networks. This way you can manage all your connections without having to take care of any tool. It is easy to tag / group people and to define who will receive which message and who can see which data. Besides this functionality Minggl also offers a tool for social annotations on sites (or parts of sites). These sites can be any site which is available at the WWW or at local servers. You can decide who can see your annotation on the site (All Minggl users, all connections, some connections). The annotations can be display only (“social graffiti”) or it can be complete separate social applications in which users / connections can interact with each other. I am still getting used to it, however I see great power in these kind of tools.

Sproutbuilder: Sproutbuilder is the future of web development, you do not have to know any coding language. The only thing you need is your mouse to click your sprout (widget) to its final stage. Creating mashups? Absolutely no problem, select the components you need and again drop and drag and click to get your widget to its final stage.

Lee Provoost (follow me on Twitter @leeprovoost)

Animoto: One of my favorite applications of 2008 and also one of the few ones where I actually paid for a pro account! You give them pictures (upload or through Facebook or Flickr), select a song, highlight the pictures you find most important and Animoto delivers you an impressive photo video with awesome effects. Not happy with it? Remix it! Recently they've added the feature to add texts to your movies, something I quite missed. For the ubernerds amongst you: Animoto becomes even cooler if you know that it has been fully built on top of the Amazon cloud! Boo Yah!

Facebook redesign:I admit, I'm highly addicted to Facebook and an early adopter of their Facebook Mobile. However, I started to dislike more and more Facebook for the very reason that made Facebook big: the applications. I am in Facebook more for the conversations and staying in touch and barely use applications. So I got pretty annoyed with the fact that the applications were really cluttering up the profile pages and made some very tough to load. The Facebook redesign put the user and the conversations (wall) central again and put the applications to the background. Add to that the Facebook chat and that's why nowadays Facebook has replaced a lot of my email conversations and did me ditch my MSN messenger and Skype. Now I'm a happy farmer with Facebook messages, Facebook chat, GTalk (over Gmail) and Gmail itself.

blip.fm:The best way to describe this gem is: Twitter with music. Same interface, same concept, same character limitation but you express yourself rather with music than with your tweets. I manage to resist for quite a long time since I know from myself that I'm very easily hooked up to things like this, but @alkronos' influence was stronger (damn you!). Now I'm blipping my way through cyberspace while getting to know tons of new songs. The concept is pretty simple: tell blip.fm what kind of bands you like and they present you with 30 likeminded souls (or DJs). Since they should have a similar taste for music, you suddenly get to know a whole bunch of artists and songs you've never heard about, but that you quite like.

Mark Nankman (follow me on Twitter @mnankman)

280Slides and other cool sassy (read: SaaSy) stuff: 280Slides uses the SproutCore Ajax framework, but that is not why I like this product so much. I like it because it looks great, it works great, does everything anyone would ever need in a slide tool. And the best thing is that you don't need to install anything besides a Web Browser. No worries about having to install updates, and no worries about backing up your slides. Of course, that can be said for all your sassy software. Here's my new credo: don't worry, be sassy!

Webkit for the incredible penetration I believe it is going to get next year: I am impressed by the number of products WebKit is currently being integrated in. This ubiquity makes WebKit a platform that cannot be ignored. I predict that this ubiquity will further increase in the next years, making WebKit one of the most important platforms for SaaS application development. Currently, developing SaaS applications involves lots of Ajax coding, and we all know about the browser compatibility struggle. Every Ajax application that does more that saying "Hello World" will have an if statement somewhere for checking the browser vendor and version. What if you could simply develop for a single platform and being able to run the application everywhere. Allright, there are several alternatives for achieving that, but who would have thought that WebKit would be one of them.

Dell Inspiron Mini (basically any Netbook, because these devices have huge SaaS potential): My ideal netbook is affordable for everyone (wow, how communistic of me), boots up in mere seconds, has long battery life (see, I am green too), is small and light enough to make it REALLY portable but also just big enough to keep it usable. Also, a netbook gets you online in a few seconds. These qualities make the netbook the ideal device for delivering SaaS. The netbooks will be the devices to deliver SaaS to the masses, mark my words. ISP's are already giving netbooks away for free with their internet connectivity plans.

We encourage you to disagree with us and drop your 2008 favs in the comments below.

Rick, Mark and Lee

• A generation of business users that always have seen internet as a tool for collaboration and has been eager to adopt new web 2.0 tools to increase their work are moving into positions where they actually has a say over investment decisions. And it is not “generation Y”ers I am talking about, rather young enthusiastic knowledge workers that are fed up with the way they interact within their business.
• The smaller niched vendors of this kind of software (e.g. Sixapart, Social text, Awareness, Jive Software) are growing stronger in the enterprise space while big players such as IBM and Microsoft are moving into the social/collaborative space with their internally focused platforms such as Sharepoint (or maybe even more Live Mesh) and Lotus Connections.
• The probable recession that we see on the horizon might trigger a new behavior amongst IT executives with slashed IT budgets. That massive ERP reinvestment might have to wait for another year and money can be spent on a more lightweight hosted SaaS solution for social interaction.

The technology components to deliver this vision are already available today, and several trends in online music provision / consumption lend further support to this outcome. However, the biggest stumbling block remains the ever so excruciating process of license negotiation with rights owners, but even that is slowly becoming less of an insurmountable task given the number of online music services that can boast of content from all four major music labels and numerous Indies. So I can predict that it won’t be long before we see a proposition that offers real music-as-a-service; and one of several exciting fall-outs from this could be mega mash-ups of music content distribution and channels with a multiplier network effect (Think Rock Band meets Pop Idol meets Virtual Worlds, with an Alternate Reality Game ARG thrown in for good measure). You heard it here first.

The matter of control on solutions was something that was probably vital some years ago, however in the last few years it is not control that is important, it is trust that matters. Do you trust the service provider to share your knowledge and data, with the help of their infrastructure? Do you trust the service provider that they will not misuse this data and share it with a third party? Do you trust the systems of the service provider enough that there will not be a security breach? Do you trust your network of people which can help you to find solutions for your problems, or will they misuse your information about the issues you have?

If you want control, you should develop a local solution that is 100% behind the firewall. However at that very moment you are reinventing the wheel, investing more money than necessary on short and long term (since your solution should be hosted somewhere and should also be maintained) and you will hardly be able to collect views from your network outside your firewall. Off course you can do that in 2009, however you could also save money and gain competitive advantage by doing these things outside your firewall. You could even discover and developer new products and business models when you trust the outside world enough to speak with them about the issues you have.

If you want to make it through 2009 you really should giving up the want to control everything and starting to trust others. Would you trust me on this predication?

I know, I know, Adobe has just released version 10 of Flash Player and in my experience, it takes about 18 months for a new Flash Player version to reach the penetration level of its preceding version. So, fair enough, I will take that into account in my prediction. Let me rephrase:

I predict that WebKit will surpass the device penetration that Flash Player 9 has today, which, according to Adobe, is 97.5% (this is an average over the markets this is measured in).

Now you will want to know how in the world I think to measure the penetration of WebKit. The answer is that I don't know yet, but Adobe uses the Millward Brown methodology which looks to be very comprehensive. I don't see why the same thing couldn't be done for WebKit. Off course, someone will need to pay for that research and that is where my challenge lies. So, here goes nothing: Dear Adobe, would you be so kind to do the Open Source community a big favor and rank the ubiquity of your Flash Player against WebKit? Come on, I challenge you to bust my prediction!

The excellent Boardroom Enterprise Architecture course, (which I was fortunate to attend last week), does exactly what it says on the tin. It focuses on the key responsibility of an enterprise architect to communicate effectively with all stakeholders, especially those that operate in the boardroom. The following are some key messages / highlights from the course:

Found in Translation – We explored the role and value of enterprise architecture as a means for articulating the relationship between business and technology (especially as the gap between the two is now almost non-existent). The key is in communicating with the board in a language they can understand (i.e. not “architectese”)

Real World Perspective - A visit by Capgemini board member, Pierre Hessler, provided valuable insight into the various personalities, and agendas, of the individuals that might be found in a typical boardroom, e.g.:

• They are often extremely goal-oriented, with above average intelligence, and not very easily convinced – (therefore must have robust / evidence-backed reasons to engage successfully with them)


• They can be somewhat egocentric, and usually gifted with highly developed survival instincts / awareness - (it may be beneficial to align key messages to relevant areas of interest / immediacy


• They tend to have a full plate and not really interested in taking on more stuff – (simplicity is key)

Techno-Transformation Leadership (even in uncertain times) – Also discussed the position of TechnoVision as a business transformation context for architecture, which opens up the possibility of translating the output from powerful tools like the TechnoVision Matrix into directly actionable business outcomes, based on the robust models and principles of Enterprise Architecture. This would provide the discipline, traceability and flexibility inherent in any well architected solution or system.

To conclude, I thought this was a timely and well facilitated introduction to the future of Enterprise Architecture, as an upstream enabler of real business transformation, and it certainly deserves the positive feedback from all attendees (see example here). Hopefully, as a result, this architect may soon be playing in a boardroom near you!

Does that make sense? Does that contradict a bit the whole hosted XaaS cloud hocus pocus thing? (yes I quite like hocus pocus) First reaction would be… yes! But when you think about what a lot of global companies are doing, no. Couple of large clients have already big data centers with tons of iron and they have a whole application landscape where (web) services are reused. This all in order to stimulate reuse and consistency across the company. Unfortunately in reality it is not that easy, it costs a lot of money and effort and if your architects have some wrong (or different?) ideas about how things should be, it will badly affect the company (and cause a lot of frustration among your developers). Adopting an industry solution from let’s say Microsoft or any other cloud vendor could make a lot of sense in this case.

However, how can the cloud vendor still keep a bit of control over the cloud and make it “worry-free”? If I adopt cloud technology, I don’t want to be bothered with the hardware failures and software upgrades or changes. Since that is the very reason why I chose for a cloud computing solution. So let’s take the concept that Google already does for its own data centers: cloud-in-a-box, or rather cloud-in-a-container. Microsoft can make containers that can be plugged together and form actually a cloud data center. It’s connected with the Microsoft übercloud (so that we can actually easily scale up in case of spikes and for backups) and some system integrators (or Microsoft themselves) can do hardware maintenance.

I like it.

So what? Well, the interesting thing is that it used to be something that Corporate IT did for us – but now it’s something employees ourselves are ‘mashing’ up.

Why? Well, we’re at EuroSTAR again this year and our theme is “Capgemini as a Testing Innovator”, aligned to the conference theme “The Future of Software Testing”. Having been inspired by a colleague’s efforts at the SAP TechEd in Berlin a few weeks ago, we testers are moving with the times too to redefine (or at least innovate) the event experience for visitors as well as our colleagues and others that could not make it. It is after all better to show it to you instead of only talking about it…and even better that just showing it to you, is helping you to (virtually) take part. So, in addition to aspects regarding Innovating the Testing Profession, we’ll be providing a live feed of what our speakers, stand crew and other attendees are doing at EuroSTAR2008. We'll use Twitter for the reporting and to engage in discussions, YouTube for mobile video uploads (e.g. some one-minute interviews – hopefully with amongst others Ron Tolido (our CTO) and myself) and Flickr for mobile picture upload (mostly through Thomas’s mobile phone).

So, you still don’t get why we think we’re drinking our own cappuccino? Well, we make 2 tenets of Capgemini's TechnoVision real:
1. From Transaction to Interaction: static feeds are simply not enough anymore – so we offer the opportunity to engage in discussions and share experiences. You can add our energetic EuroSTAR organizer Thomas Som (@thomassom) on Twitter to ask questions, to arrange a meet-up or to get some goodies and gadgets! He’ll be passing information on on how to join this experiment through Twitter, how to use a RSS feed combining Twitter, Flickr and YouTube through Yahoo! Pipes and how to add our feed to your Google reader, My Yahoo!, NewsGator, your phone or any other destination you want.
On occasion he’ll give some extra information on where to find us or when to visit our Capgemini stand to get some (innovative!) stuff and the best cup of cappuccino around...the best interaction is of course ‘real’ – so visit us at stand 18 & 20 for a chat and see the best Cappuccino maker in Holland at work!

Join the EuroSTAR live-experience by:
1. Visiting our Yahoo!Pipes page and add our feed any destination you want
2. Adding Thomas (@thomassom) on Twitter

Hope to meet you (live or virtually!)

For a taste - here's a widget that displays the latest entries:

I see more and more people setting up rules in Outlook that move emails directly to the garbage bin when they are mentioned in the CC, something I’ve done as well last weekend. Enough is enough! I won’t let the overflow of emails take over my life anymore, especially if you have a Blackberry or other forms of push email this causes quite a lot of stress.

So by the fact that more and more people ignore the CC fields, this will lose more and more value. I’d say: try to avoid as much as possible to put people in the CC field. I tried it today very successfully. I only had to put one person in one email in the CC. Think about it, during the pre-email era with the fax machines we didn’t have CC either! A potential danger is that the same people that abuse the CC field, now are going to put everyone in the To field… Which is great since then it will completely kill the use of email.

Mark my words, 2009 will be the tipping point for email: companies will enforce rules for productivity and more and more people will attach less value to emails than before. I noticed that I actually do more and more phone calls or live meet ups than before (yes I feel ashamed as a computer geek) and my digital conversations have moved to Twitter and Facebook.

The funny thing is that the excessive adoption of technology as our means of communication will perhaps drive people more and more to old-skool forms of contact. The Internet will be personal again :-)

2009 will be the year where we will see large companies move their application infrastructure into the cloud (Amazon? Microsoft?) and thus create an invisible infostructure. It will also be the year where we will see some issues (growth pains?) coming up, think about a cloud vendor’s data center that goes down due to some “unforeseen circumstances”. The old-skool CIOs (and legal department?) will cry out loud “stop this Web 2.0 hocus pocus, we told you so”, but this shift in thinking where you trust a third party to take care of your commodity infrastructure that allows you to focus on the 10 to 20 % that will give you a competitive advantage will set a precedent for the future.

Companies that survive 2009 AND took the opportunity to heavily invest in revamping themselves will be the new darlings of Wall Street and tell the world: “in your face!”.

Oh and dear CxOs that read this blog: whatever you do, please continue investing a lot in your talented employees. They are the ones that will drive your company through these economic difficult times and will implement the necessary transformations. They will make sure that your company will rock and roll the new world after the dust has settled down :-) Reading this document might also help.

Microsoft has already announced their own cloud (Azure). This cloud which will likely see some impressive applications in 2009.

Oracle and Intel are collaborating on cloud acceleration to enterprise speed and possibly demo their first results in 2009.

Apanta - known for the popular Ajax IDE "Apanta Studio" and the incredible serverside javascript platform "Jaxar" - has now also introduced a Cloud that can run Javascript and do serverside DOM magic. This cloud has one very compelling benefit: it allows for very flexible mobile apps. If a device isn't powerfull enough to do CPU intensive stuff such as graphing, it could choose to simply do that in the cloud, using the same Ajax code!

There will be many more in the coming year. No doubt about it. The people on the ground look up in awe and wonder whether they should put their trust in these Clouds. Myself, I have no worries whatsoever. The benefits outweigh the risks. Clouds will reduce cost while increasing storage, automation, flexibility, mobility and innovation. Sure enough, these clouds will also attract hackers. To them, the clouds look like huge, very irresistible nuts, simply waiting to be cracked. Therefore, I predict the first cloud hacker to be convicted in the year 2009.

As Cisco moves the last few years by buying Webex, Postpath, Pure Networks, Faive Across and acquiring Jabber it is clear that communication is a big thing for Cisco. Since Cisco is so thoroughly expanding its footprint on communication it is could be just a matter of time that Cisco will become the biggest challenger of the passenger transportation branch. Cisco is able to offer a platform on which you interact with each other without spending hours in airports or in your car, without spending hundreds of euros / dollars on gasoline or tickets and without increasing the CO2 exhaust more.

The new way of traveling to meetings will be gaining ground in 2009: you will have your meetings at the place you prefer and the other attendees will be at the place they prefer. You'll travel less, saving you days or even weeks of time in which you can do useful things. You'll save money on tickets and gasoline and you can even mention that you are a greener person who is not pushing extra CO2 in the atmosphere while driving your car to another meeting. You could even be one of those who is solving the traffic congestion issues by not being on the road during peak hours.

I'll be looking forward to my meetings in 2009, are you?

Many organizations initial believe that Web 2.0 tools will take off and have great adoption inside an organization. But, this is not a "build it and they will come" scenario, even for the younger workers who are believed to love these tools and services and will not stay in a company that does not have them. The reality is the tools need selling their use, value derived from them, the conceptual models around what they do, and easing fears. Adoption rates grow far beyond the teen percentages in organizations that take time guiding people about the use of the tools and services. Those organizations that take the opportunity to continually sell the value and use for these tools they have in place get much higher adoption and continued engagement with the tools than those who do nothing and see what happens

For example: I overheard a conversation concerning a portal that should be build within a company to help employees with their work live balance. This portal would contain, in phase one, only functionality to plan a trip from location A to B and would provide a comparison on different transportmodes (phase two would have more functionality). Imagine you being at home starting your day with planning how you could get from your home (location A) to a customer (location B) and you start planning with the tool provided on the internal portal: You first have to startup your company laptop, than connect via VPN to the company network, go to the portal and than plan your trip. Or what you also could have done was going to a public site that is offering exact the same service and plan your trip (without using VPN, without your company laptop, you can even use this public application via phone).

It might be clear that there will not be a phase two for this portal project. Simply because it does not add value and the adoption rate in phase one is too low (if any at all). If you are planning to build an E2.0 solution: add value, sell value, sell value, add value, sell value, sell value, sell value, add value (this process is should be repeated over and over again).

Here are the questions that I have at the moment:

1. How sensible and safe is it to base important, critical parts of your business on SaaS?

Suppose you would use SaaS for something strongly data centric such as ERP. In such a case, the ERP Service provider is responsible not only for providing the required functionality and UI, but also for providing storage of all your data. In other words: would you trust your data to the service provider? Should a government use SaaS in that way for examle? What if the SaaS provider goes bankrupt?

2. Do you always have to accept changes made to the software by the SaaS provider?

With classic software, you can use a certain version of that software as long as your system can support it, even after the vendor of that software has stopped providing support for that version. A property of SaaS that is often named as a benefit is that you always have the latest version. Is that really always a benefit? Businesses using SaaS will base their workflows on the functionality and user interfaces of provided software.

3. Is SaaS mature enough for providing enterprise level QoS? Will it ever be?

This concern is related to my first question. Basing critical parts of your business on SaaS requires certain guarantees about availability, reliability and performance. Can such service level agreements be made individually for every business?

Don't get me wrong, I really digg the concept of SaaS. I am a definitive adopter of SaaS. However, I feel that these are important issues that I would want answers for before I would advise SaaS on an enterprise scale. The Progress Software Foundation is providing some answers, which is reassuring.

Maybe I am thinking too far ahead. Tell me what you think.