Captain Kirk, to the Bridge! No! Wait, Go to Engineering!

Apologies to +William Shatner (@williamshatner) for the title but let's talk about V'ger (@_vger), I mean The Cloud.

Cloud discussions may not come from IT, in fact, it seems IT is the last to know about the idea sometimes. While asking some fellow consultants and Business Partners, we are seeing an interesting situation arise and hope this example helps you to not find yourself in the same predicament.

Business leaders are making choices, then telling IT. The opposite of the way things have been done in the past. Not a bad thing entirely.

Is this a step forward for business and one back for IT? Have we finally reached the tipping point where the next generation of business leaders are technically proficient enough to make their own decisions? (If your decision makers at your company are not including you, that is another blog post.)

Let's presume you get included in a decision making meeting about moving email, IM, collaboration or whatever to a Cloud. But you are not invited to provide options and ideas, rather to be told,  "we are moving to this vendors Cloud".

Huh? What? You are knocked across the head like a hangover the morning after drinking some Saurian Brandy. Questions come to your mind, ideas fly from your tongue. All you can say is "Is this a done deal"?

Sound familiar? Is this how your company is going to The Cloud for mail and collaboration? Around you entirely?

When did the business leader get all technical? Or is this a case of someone handing you a carburetor and saying you need one of these because they heard cars have them? When did the leader become Captain Kirk? Let me explain.

Kirk, as many will know, could often be found doing engineering work on the ship, or patching a rocket launcher out of sticks and stones. I did not attend Starfleet Academy, but from my reading, it seems that a Captain does stints in all types of areas of the ship. They also get  class room training time, not just the Kobayashi Maru simulation, and first hand knowledge about other areas as time moves along once the cadet was shown to be captain material. Once you are a captain, evidently you know every Jefferies Tube in your ship and every panel/wiring circuitry in case you need to do some amazing things and save your ship, usually, all withing 50+ minutes. 

Surprisingly, the business leader is not a captain, although they may have the ability, does not have the depth of knowledge of all of your infrastructure to know what is or is not running. Making a decision to go to The Cloud should not exclude your trusted and knowledgeable IT staff or partners/vendors. Each situation is different but moving your email, may or may not break numerous applications.

How can moving your email break applications? Many ways! Here is just one example. 

If other applications rely on a specific directory of your employees for security, how will you access it once it is in the Cloud? If you can access it, what will happen to the application, if the Cloud is down? Or your ISP is down (Spock says this is statistically more probable) how will people work? Is there a size/usage limit for the number of requests sent back and forth before you get charged some exorbitant fees? It is not always about the money, sometimes a little planning goes a long way.

All we ask of you business leaders is you keep us in the loop and work with you.

Let us help you reach your goals without causing problems to your services.

May your company live long, and prosper.

Office365 - What's in a Name?

So you, thought you, might like to, go to the Cloud, To feel the warm thrill of confusion... slightly changed from the Pink Floyd song In the Flesh from the album The Wall

By now you have heard about the Microsoft announcement, not Ray Ozzie "retiring", but the Office 365. Gartner had this to say about the office 365 announcement. Quick damage control by Microsoft it seems.

There is a UK company called Office 365, wonder if Microsoft will pay them for the use of their name. Hopefully they have that name copyrighted and cleared.

So BPOS is now DOA, renamed, excuse me, rebranded, as Office 365.

Now is Microsoft trying to tell us that Office is really the end all be all of this offering? Hardly, but you know what is in a name is very interesting.

LotusLive has a nice ring to it, implies Lotus products are alive and kicking and active and not just any one in particular.

Office 365 in contrast shows a primary target of Office, naturally there is more included but the name is odd.

Maybe Ray suggested before he retired that if Microsoft could find a way to have everyone use their Office suite 365 days a year they might have something.

On the other hand, BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite)was not something easier to roll off the tongue. Quite a mouthful. Very descriptive though.

So what happened to Sharepoint 365? Or SQL 365? Shame 2011 isn't a leap year, that would have been fun. So expect another rebranding in 2012.

Long term thinking? Of course not, since when did Microsoft ever think long term?

Microsoft has upped the ante by having Office 365 utilize the 2010 versions of Sharepoint, Exchange and OCS which is now called Lync.

I figure we will hear about OfficeLync 365 sometime down the road. Most likely as a ploy against IBM's LotusLive offerings.

IBM has not been quiet either, slight tweaking of the offerings has produced some impressive options and cheaper than Microsoft and Google's offerings.

IBM isn't giving the world away for free, but if LotusLive Notes is $5 a head per month that is an offer well worth thinking about. Larger quantity customers get better pricing but still at this price your sad infrastructure may just be able to get everything it needs to stay on the cutting edge of Lotus and your IT staff can go home at night earlier since they no longer have to patch Operating Systems.

Microsoft is not making Office cheap. If you want full Office,, Office 365 is a partial functional version, the full price is an extra $8 a month! So you will pay for Office 2007 or 2010 on desk and another $96 per year for it in the Cloud? OUCH!

Lotus Symphony is not in the Cloud yet, it's free for anyone to use on their machines. When it hits the Cloud, will it still be free? Even if it isn't, it's a great deal.

It will be an interesting run to the finish and neither company will sit still or be happy with the other winning. But from a customer perspective it is all good no matter what you choose.

Today we sold....updated version

LotusLive Engage and Notes.

It's an interesting idea of Vaughan's to do this.

Who's next?

Edited 9:30am:

After reading Stuart's post I agree, some detail is in order.

The client wanted:

1. To not have in house IT staff handling their email(we will manage it in the short term until their AA's can handle it)
2. They wanted online meetings, many and the infrastructure costs for Sametime 8.5 put them off
3. Secure file sharing(We may yet put in Quickr if they need more depth)
4. Always up email(we presume Lotuslive will always be up)
5. Smaller price to pay monthly on their whole order versus buying licenses, servers, hardware etc
6. Quick and easy migration from their "free email that is painful" and they use Outlook Express to POP it right now

LotusLive Q&A with it's Product Managers

In discussing LotusLive with sales, tech people, Business Partners and clients there are a number of questions I have still, both from a client perspective and a Business partner perspective. This is not about a specific offering, although probably mostly aimed at LotusLive Notes, but in general I am listening to opinions.

After an email to Sean P. I had a great discussion with Beverly Dewitt who used to be part of the same team as me, but she was in the US, not EMEA. Her role now is to work with the Business Partners on LotusLive. She pointed me to the BD day session which I was unable to attend due to the SRO of the small rooms and I apologized for my ignorance on some topics. She also put me in touch with John Beck, PM for LotusLive. But for those who are not privy to all the Lotuslive knowledge here are some of the questions with some answers.

From the client's view:

1) Security - Login/password is NOT enough for some customers. VPN access would alleviate this a bit, SecureID perhaps?
Answer- VPN is possible, so are many other routes, but the customer should be able to leverage their existing security. We as Business Partners are working on the best practices for these connections to Lotuslive. It can involve many parts of your organization so be aware and think about the choices. We are here to help.

2) Support - Who provides it and for what? The Business Partner? No, IBM manages the hardware, OS and Domino updates so any problems must go to them.
Answer - In short, yes, if the service goes down, call IBM. Since the life of LotusLive Notes is very basic and vanilla currently, not much can go wrong. The downside is you as a customer give up the rights to customization(until 2nd Half of 2010) of the mail template. Ideally this will work for those in a pure email usage case and heavily relying on Notes. Your Business Partner can handle administration of the service, though not via a full Domino administrator client but a custom LotusLive management console as well as management of users accounts.

3) What about our Domino applications? Even if we can put them on LotusLive, will we always have the capability to NOT upgrade the Lotuslive site because of potential update problems in code?
Answer - No Domino applications are going to LotusLive Notes...yet. You can of course host them but for now this is not an option. When customized mail templates are available, John Beck said IBM will test the template customizations for compatibility and approve them accordingly. There will most likely be some cost to perform this, a setup fee most likely but still yet to be determined.

4) Once the customer goes to Lotuslive, as a service partner, once you get locked in to someone's cloud it is really going to be hard to go to another one.
Answer - Perhaps in some cases, but LotusLive Notes, which runs on Domino, should not be difficult. However, it may involve GTS (IBM Global Technology Services) rather than your own staff or Business Partner. I have a follow up call on this subject with GTS. But I am comfortable with it for my clients.

5)What is still needed when you go to LotusLive Noets?
Answer - ID/User admin and training. SaaS solutions requires provisioning users if you utilize them. Customization of UI and other similar services will be coming in the near future and may be of interest to some companies. Archiving is NOT part of the offering of LotusLive as one example of a 3rd party connection.

6) What about other applications like BES, Traveler?
Answer - At some point in 2nd half 2010 these will be options and may or may not involve a small monthly fee.

7) Will LotusLive Labs provide an option to customers for their own "sandbox"?
Answer - No, the sandbox is NOT for customers to use. However, IBM will have BP apps up there. These will mostly be SaaS applications NOT likely to be Domino related.

LotusLive Meetings is very active in many companies and makes more sense as a pure Cloud offering perhaps compared to email. Why? Because until mail template customizations are allowed or Domino applications (stand alone ones that do not require links to other depositories) and Traveler support is included it may not work for everyone just yet.

On the plus side, IBM lowered the minimum number of users required to use the LotusLive Notes solution to 25 from 1,000 and that will go far for those small to medium businesses who really could get the most benefit.

If you are a company with 5-10,000 people you may not see the benefit as easily. However, market segmentation of your employees may show people who could benefit from LotusLive iNotes or LotusLive Notes and reduce your maintenance/licensing fees accordingly.

This is the future, no denying it, but how long till everyone gets there is the question?

Fud Buster Friday #36 - Who needs IT when the Cloud is your choice, er master?

Ever take a vacation and come back to an alternate reality?
Well the last 8-10 days were bogged down in Passover holiday for me and I can say it is a new world.
One of my clients emailed to say the firm has committed to migrate to Domino 100%(they were 1/2 and 1/2).
Another client phoned and emailed that their server went down or rather as we found, the router failed.
Other clients emailed to say they had problems emailing specific people or domains and could we help them.

Also we will be a vendor for the Super Bowl, no, not as a Lotus item, but more on this as it materializes(if I am allowed to discuss it).

The nice thing is although I had a few hundred emails and a dozen or so voice mails, nothing horrible occurred. So the next question is who needs me or the IT staff?

Obviously we are still needed, on some basic level 1 support, all the way up to a migration of mail servers. But what would this look like if I pushed my clients to the Cloud I was wondering this week.

We would still need to provide relatively normal help desk functionality, so tier 1 but beyond that it would probably be out of our control and in the hands of our Hosts(IBM, Google or Microsoft).

So we then act as a middle man for the people with problems? Sounds like the IBM Support model we use where we sit on the phone instead of the customer to resolve higher level issues.

Services? Not so many anymore, applications is where it is at and this is my wonder.

If my clients can "download" an app and off they go, where do we fit in for this model of business? Yes we could design a new app, but really I'd rather do an iPhone app and make my millions that way, less headaches!

So where does your CIO, and I act as one for 3 different organizations currently, stand in the middle of all of this? What do you tell your IT staff? What is our or your value you bring to the business that would either negate The Cloud or enhance it and provide more value to you or your client?

When email is down, and thus your Blackberry, who are you goiong to call? Will it matter? Who uses email anyway? Or wires anymore? Or who pays for applications anymore that cost more than a dollar?

It's not as bleak as this may sound, nor is it as simple either. Think about it this weekend.

Mainframe's Get Your Mainframes

More power Scotty!
Not likely, but if you throw enough Mainframes at the cloud, IBM will rule the world.

Happy Fool's Day!