Six steps to adopting cloud computing services

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years.

Trends in usage of the terms from Google searches shows Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year. There has also been a decline in general interest of Grid, Utility and Distributed computing. Likely they will be around in usage for quit a while to come. But Cloud computing has become the new buzz word driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.

The term cloud computing probably comes from the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. Cloud computing is associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. The underlying hardware and software of networking is of course still there but there are now higher level service capabilities available used to build applications. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

In essence this is distributed computing. An application is built using the resource from multiple services potentially from multiple locations. At this point, typically you still need to know the endpoint to access the services rather than having the cloud provide you available resources. This is also know as Software as a Service. Behind the service interface is usually a grid of computers to provide the resources. The grid is typically hosted by one company and consists of a homogeneous environment of hardware and software making it easier to support and maintain. (note: my definition of a grid is different from the wikipedia definition, but homogeneous environments in data centers is typically what I have run across). Once you start paying for the services and the resources utilized, well that’s utility computing.

Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource. What goes on in the cloud manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of one or more frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together. Frameworks provide mechanisms for:

• self-healing
  
  
• self monitoring
  
  
• resource registration and discovery
  
  
• service level agreement definitions
  
  
• automatic reconfiguration

The cloud is a virtualization of resources that maintains and manages itself. There are of course people resources to keep hardware, operation systems and networking in proper order. But from the perspective of a user or application developer only the cloud is referenced. The Assimilator project is a framework that executes across a heterogeneous environment in a local area network providing a local cloud environment. In the works is the addition of a network overlay to start providing an infrastructure across the Internet to help achieve the goal of true cloud computing.

Steps to adopting cloud computing services

1. Assess IT software assets, then consider putting commodity and standalone applications in the cloud. The IT team should built a chart showing business users which applications they thought were differentiators and which ones they thought were commoditized and explained why applications they viewed as commodities were better suited for cloud services like email for LiveOffice. Standalone applications like HR/benefits and sales analytics were also better suited for the cloud.
   
   
2. Reorganize IT teams according to application functionality rather than brand. To prepare for a virtualized/cloud environment, eliminate application silos such as those for Oracle or Siebel applications. IT thinks their value is associated with an application rather than a skill, so we need to change the mind-set to skills that we want in this new paradigm, like data management, business intelligence and analytics and the ability to do end-to-end business processing rather than skills tied to a particular application.
   
   
3. Get a handle on your internal IT costs. What does email, ERP and clustered storage cost you internally? You need to know this before you can validate what it costs you in the cloud. Engage the finance department from the get-go to validate these costs internally compared with a services model.
   
   
4. To socialize the cloud computing concept around the business, figure out the terminology that business executives and users are familiar with. When we heard that business users were reading The New Age of Innovation and using terms such as R=G for Resources are Global, he started to adopt the same terminology to explain the benefits of the cloud. You need to sync up the vocabulary around the cloud and virtualization with what the business users are hearing about it.
   
   
5. Engage IT staff members by giving them a role in the process. Make testing cloud services a game for IT. pick several cloud applications for IT to test like sales analytics and HR/employee performance management and have no ground rules. Test whatever service on whatever provider you like.
   
   I can tell you that there is no better motivation for IT than to see the CIO/CTO doing it himself.
   
   
6. Engage stakeholders throughout the organization. Information security, legal and finance are just a few of the groups that need to be involved.
   It took us two months to figure out security issues in the cloud -- with a lot of trial an error. The consensus in general is that security is ultimately up to you -- most cloud providers leave security parameters up to the customer, whether they be a need for encryption or beyond.

Making a Meaningful Mentoring Agreement

Successful mentoring relationships start with a clear agreement about goals, procedures, and limitations, says mentoring expert Lois Zachary.

Too often mentors and mentees start off without doing enough preparation and end up with an unsatisfactory experience. Zachary, author of The Mentor's Guide and the recently published The Mentee's Guide to Mentoring, provides guidelines for setting the groundwork for great mentoring.

Preparing for a mentoring relationship

Zachary suggests seven steps in an initial conversation between potential mentor and mentee.

1. Take time to get to know each other. To start out, share career journeys.

2. Talk about mentoring. Talk about individuals who have had a profound impact on your development and learning. Discuss previous mentoring experiences.

3. Share your goals for the process. What does each participant hope to achieve from the relationship?

4. Determine what each partner needs and expects. Be honest about what you need, says Zachary. A brain to pick? Someone who can help you get your arms around a problem? Someone to give you a kick in the pants?

5. Candidly share personal assumptions. As an example of mismatched assumptions, Zachary offers the following example: The mentee assumes that his or her mentor will be a sounding board, help with day-to-day challenges, provide quick answers to questions, and introduce him or her to his or her network. Meanwhile, the mentor assumes that his or her role is to be a guide, asking questions that help the mentee find answers. Unless the two talk their assumptions through, they will be at cross purposes.

6. Share limitations. Each of us has limitations, whether personal, time related, work related, or physical, says Zachary. It's best to share them early on.

7. Discuss personal styles. For example, you may have data from Myers Briggs or other instruments that indicate your need for structure or your resistance to "touchy-feely."

Create a Specific Agreement

After an initial discussion, you are ready to prepare a formal agreement, Zachary says. Here are her required ingredients for such agreements:

• Well-defined goals (What does each participant want to accomplish?)
  
  
• Success criteria and measurement (How will we know if we have succeeded?)
  
  
• Accountability assurances (How do we ensure that we do what we say we are going to do?)
  
  
• Ground rules (What are the norms and guidelines we will follow? Who will be responsible for what?)
  
  
• Confidentiality safeguards (What do we need to do to protect the confidentiality of this relationship?)
  
  
• Boundaries and hot buttons (What are the not-to-exceed limits? What hot buttons exist?)
  
  
• Protocols for addressing stumbling blocks (What process should we have in place to deal with any stumbling blocks we encounter?)
  
  
• Consensual mentoring agreement (What do we need to include to ensure that this agreement works for us?)
  
  
• Mentoring work plan (What are the steps for achieving our goals?)

Mentoring and training are both important parts of the daily HR challenge. They can be tricky to manage—there's such a load of extraneous planning, preparing, and tracking involved.

Five marketing time wasters

From: Five marketing time wasters

Deciding how to allocate time and resources is a difficult process for any business -and it’s even harder for start-ups. But of all the allocation decisions to be made, there’s none more difficult than marketing.

In an excellent article Scott Olson tells about five marketing time wasters the details to each of those can be found at his blog. :

1. Bloated Marketing Requirements Documents (MRD)
   
   
2. Direct mail lead generation
   
   
3. Analyst subscriptions
   
   
4. Branding, advertising, and trade show sponsorships
   
   
5. Detailed sales PowerPoint presentations

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual

This free PDF book is for PHP programmers developing applications for Oracle Database. It bridges the gap between the many PHP and Oracle books available and shows how to use the PHP scripting language with Oracle Database. You may be starting out with PHP for your Oracle Database. You may be a PHP programmer wanting to learn Oracle. You may be unsure how to install PHP or Oracle. Or you may just want to know the latest best practices. This book gives you the fundamental building blocks needed to create high-performance PHP Oracle Web applications.

About the Authors

Christopher Jones works for Oracle on dynamic scripting languages with a strong focus on PHP. He is a lead maintainer of PHP's open source OCI8 extension and works closely with the PHP community. He also helps ensure that future versions of Oracle Database are compatible with PHP. He is the author of various technical articles on PHP and Oracle technology, and has presented at conferences including PHP|Tek, the International PHP Conference, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and ZendCon. He also helps present Oracle PHP tutorials and PHPFests worldwide.

Alison Holloway is a senior product manager at Oracle with a number of years experience in advanced technology. She has presented at various PHP conferences. Most recently she has been working with Oracle VM.

Click Here to download this PDF book (6.2MB)

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American History class

It was the first day of a school in USA and a new Indian student named Chandrasekhar Subramanian entered the fourth grade.

The teacher said, 'Let's begin by reviewing some American History.
Who said 'Give me Liberty, or give me Death'?

She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrasekhar, who had his hand up: 'Patrick Henry, 1775' he said.

'Very good!'
Who said 'Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?'

Again, no response except from Chandrasekhar.
'Abraham Lincoln, 1863' said Chandrasekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, 'Class, you should be ashamed.
Chandrasekhar, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do.'

She heard a loud whisper: 'F**k the Indians,'

'Who said that?' she demanded.

Chandrasekhar put his hand up. 'General Custer, 1862.'

At that point, a student in the back said, 'I'm gonna puke.'

The teacher glares around and asks 'All right! Now, who said that?'

Again, Chandrasekhar says, 'Al Gore to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991.'

Now furious, another student yells, 'Oh yeah? Suck this!'

Chandrasekhar jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher , 'Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!'

Now with almost mob hysteria someone said 'You little shit. If you say anything else, I'll kill you.'

Chandrasekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, 'Michael Jackson to the child witnesses testifying against him - 2004.'

The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, 'Oh sh*t, we're f**ked!'

And Chandrasekhar said quietly, 'I think it was George Bush, Iraq , 2007.'

The CRM Mashup

From small to large, from the enterprise to the mid-size organization, from on-demand to on premises with consolidations aplenty, there's a sea change going on in CRM.

Enterprise mashups aim to bring business intelligence to desktops, with automated tools collecting and integrating selected Web data into a spreadsheet. Business Mashups LLC is conducting a "social CRM" experiment called Social Sales which reduces the need to leave a CRM app to gather information.

If mashups sound like the kind of Web 2.0 application best used for checking traffic jams on Google Maps, think again: Mashups within the enterprise environment are becoming common for functions such as integrating social-networking information into CRM Relevant Products/Services tools. And as they get easier to make, they'll continue to grow in popularity and usefulness.

Business Mashups LLC, which creates mashup environments for businesses, has taken some steps forward in bringing mature mashups into the corporation. In the coming week(s) we will release several mashup products that aim to bring business intelligence to desktops with little human intervention.

CRM Mashups

Customer-service management tools are also benefiting from mashups. Business Mashups LLC will provides open-source tools for rapid Web application development, in a "social CRM" experiment called Social Sales.

Today's CRM application users are tapping half a dozen other Web resources to populate their databases and get their jobs done. For example, when salespeople review trade-show leads, they may come across a familiar name. If more information about that person is not already in the CRM system, then someone needs to start researching on social-networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find out more about that person, which provides greater social context about the sales lead.

Social Sales will drastically reduces the need to leave a CRM application to gather the required information. Thanks to rapidly deployed Ajax applications and mashup robots, companies can create powerful social CRM applications in a day or two.