Relational applications will be end up at mobile applications, thus in the future, mobile applications will be not games, not communication, but will be the front-end of interaction in the group called relational processing, which is a large area and open for developers that need not to invest a lot.

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Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Looking back to 2 decades we moved away from mainframe computing to client-server then web based application delivery mechanism primarily due to cost and simplicity reasons. After 2 decades, now we are at the crossroads again (major platform shift) with over grown complexity of our IT infrastructure, more daunting than the mainframe era. As you walk through the data centers, you can see stockpiles of servers sitting there and waiting for the workload to come! The server sprawl is going to continue. Many companies are getting ready for their tech refresh – replacing their old computing infrastructure with new ones. The cost of management and data center operations, including the power, real estate, cooling, and facility management is going through the roof. If you take a look at many public companies, significant portion of their corporate spending goes for keeping the lights on for these truckloads of servers with utilization far less than 12-15%. Close investigation of these servers would reveal two important factors (1) most of the cores available on these servers are never utilized (2). Huge memory banks loaded on these in anticipation of improved performance and workloads never even needed.

30 years ago, the mainframe faced dramatic change, driven by the motivation to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Today, it is still this same motivation is driving he adoption of Cloud services. Technological advancements, bandwidth, and software is driving more innovation without really owning and operating your own data centers. Whatever technologies and solutions built to manage mainframe were quickly replicated to mini computing era, then to client-server, then to web based, and now to cloud computing. Many new companies emerged to address these challenges and became so big. With the shift to Cloud now, it opens up whole new opportunities to deliver new platform and services to enables innovation and creativity for next generation enterprises. Hopefully, this renewed interest in accelerating business innovation through integrated information and intelligence will make CIO more relevant and technology a key driver in enabling operational efficiencies, customer reach, business intelligence, logistics and market intelligence, and driving open innovation across business partners, suppliers, and customers.

“What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating-current network did for electricity: it makes the location of the equipment unimportant to the user. It also allows disparate and formerly incompatible machines to operate together as a single system. It creates harmony out of cacophony”, writes Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch.

We entered 2010 asking where will Cloud take enterprises in 2010? Still the debate on whether Cloud is ready for enterprise adoption is picking up the steam. 2010 going to be a year for emergence of many new applications that would run in the Cloud. But, wide adoption of cloud needs both technical issues to be addressed as well as organizational cultural issues.

Today most of the business applications run on dedicated hardware. Challenge is to accurately determine the proper sizing of resources for stable operation of traditional applications. Moving away from dedicated resources to shared computing pools requires more diligent management of available computing resources. While it helps to consolidate the unused resources, it leads to new challenges where more applications compete for these computing resources. Need more sophisticated automation and deployment tools to balance these workload demands.

The overwhelming challenge for data center operations is managing complex application environments. Service Engineering & Operations (SE&O) teams constantly deploy many third-party applications as well as homegrown applications, upgrades, and patches. They make application configuration changes for security and performance tuning frequently. In addition to deploying and constantly monitoring for any security breaches and performances issues, SE&O folks need to track and analyze the configuration and state of deployed applications on a regular basis.

Moving these applications into Cloud is going to pose many operational challenges. Any technology designed to address these issues to configure and deploy their applications must be infrastructure, application, and demand aware. For these applications to work in the cloud, application packaging and deployment need to capture knowledge about an application, such as its configuration methods and dependency requirements. More importantly, end-to-end automation of the deployment process is possible only when a technology understands that infrastructure elements such as Web servers, application servers, databases, and application elements — such as custom code and content — must all work together to make a functioning application.

“It will take many years for the utility computing system to mature. Like Edison and Insull before them, the pioneers of new industry will face difficult business and technical challenges. They’ll need to figure out the best ways to meter and set prices for different kinds of services. They’ll need to become more adept at balancing loads and managing diversity factors as demand grows. They’ll need to work with governments to establish effective regulatory regimes. They’ll need to achieve new levels of security, reliability, and efficiency. Most daunting of all, they’ll need to convince big companies to give up control over their private systems and begin to dismantle he data centers into which they’ve plowed so much money. But these challenges will be met just as they were met before”, Nicholas Carr, in “The Big Switch”.

James Urquhart in his Cloud computing and the big rethink series described how cloud computing will change the way we build and deploy applications.

Cloud Computing: Innovation Edge

Enterprise networks are large and run wide variety of applications and typically operate under strict reliability and security constrains. Normally, these applications, networks, and security represent challenging environment for management and operations control. Stakes are high when enterprises move their applications or burst into the Cloud capacities, as productivity can be severely hampered by any SLA degradations or security compromises. Andi Mann quoted in his tweet that 76% of downtime comes from human-error and Yankee group reported that 80% of IT budgets are spent on maintenance and operations.

Many applications in today’s enterprises are multi-party services and demands different levels of isolation, security, assurance and auditability with very different characteristics. At the same time, we see the emergence of wide variety of value added services composed from shared services with different levels of SLAs. Services will range from low-level services that transport bit streams over the cloud infrastructure to value-added services such as integration services, data analytics, data mining. Complex services will demand access to large amounts of data, real time data streams, and distributed computing tasks. Supporting this service model and this emerging class of complex services requires innovation in a number of areas.

Dynamic Resource Allocation Based on Application Demands: In some cases applications and services have advance knowledge of changes in resource requirements, and in many cases services have no knowledge of resources demands due to variability in user demands. Mechanisms are needed to dynamically scale services to optimize performance, which demands end-to-end service delivery guarantees. Virtualization came to rescue this challenging IT infrastructure to provide consolidation, flexibility, and resource management. Virtualization technologies evolved to abstract compute, network, and storage resources to separate physical resource from their of way of consumption. Sounds good. This enabled Service Engineering & Operations (SE&O) teams to assign computing resources as needed to virtual machines and quickly respond to fluctuating loads. While this simplified the complexity in the computing infrastructure, virtual machine sprawl added another layer of complexity. Now enterprise need to manage two different sets of computing resources, physical infrastructure and virtual infrastructure, to keep their applications running to meet their customer Service Level Agreements (SLA). To some extent, virtual infrastructure provided mechanisms to eliminate the need for provisioning for the peak. Thanks to virtualization for redefining the relationship between the application and physical deployments.

Though server virtualization enables dynamic workload (for clarity, workload means any demand for performing an unit of work) management. However, current models of VM live migrations induce significant overheads on hypervisors and network bandwidth.

Virtual Networking: Setting up and operating logical networks across participating enterprise networks to provide network isolation, security, confidentiality (Note: current dependence of complex VLANS and tunnels needs specialization to setup, management, and tear down these networks. For enterprises to leverage the power of Cloud Computing, new class of network services required to provide the assurances required). As explained in my introduction, most of the operational overhead in today’s enterprise private data centers is coming from the lack of consistent and integrated operation, administration and management plane.

Application-aware Networks: As more and more businesses use Cloud, conditions in the network (inter/intra Cloud communications) and at the endpoints will change continuously, and mechanisms are needed that allow the network and services to adjust quickly depending on service specific demands. Also, different services demand different levels of data transferability and latency needs. Cloud should be able to handle traffic streams both in terms of the ability to share resources between co-operating traffic streams and the quality of service for individual streams. Hence the need for systematic methods for balancing the constraints and priorities of services competing for resources – computing, storage, and network services including the security, perimeter control, auditability, service assurance, SLA enforcement etc.

Customization vs. Configuration: Many companies still believe that customized business processes are their competitive advantage. Enterprises spent huge sums of capital in undertaking multi-million dollar customization projects coupled with 6-12 months of upgrade/deployment cycles. That is one of the reasons traditional SaaS offerings didn’t take off as it inherently restrict the customer’s ability to customize the solution, require co-mingling of sensitive data from various customers, and force all customers to comply with upgrade and downtime schedules dictated by the vendor. Customers demanded greater freedom. SaaS advocated one solution for all.

Then comes the Cloud computing with low cost mantra and re-instating the freedom to customize and deploy applications/business processes. Customers can gain back the control over its own IT infrastructure at a very low cost combined with an ability to scale up and down. In addition, cloud can offer them complete freedom to customize the solution as it sees fit and complete control over upgrade/deployment cycles.

”A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way” – Mark Twain

“All generalizations are false, including this one” – Mark Twain

“Don’t preserve the past – find the future”

“Too much attention is focused on technology innovation and not enough on business innovation. When that happens, we add functionality, but also complexity. The technology innovations with real impact are those that reduce complexity”

Private v. Public Cloud Debate

In Public Vs. Private Clouds: Which Cloud Wins? Vanessa Alvarez writes, “The concept of private cloud on the other hand, is of course, more appealing to enterprises. Because of the very nature of its name, it gives enterprises that comfy feeling that their data is safe and secure. It’s the age-old enterprise mentality that if you lose control of your data, it’s not safe”.

Transformation from traditional silos to more responsive networks of operations centers – combination of private and public clouds.

• shared infrastructure in local corporate data centers
• application of virtualization to simplify the infrastructure automation
• manage resource pools vs. dedicated silos
• cloud burst of resources based on seasonal demands or need based to virtual networks

Cloud and Governance

Governance is all about helping IT get to the expected business benefits of their IT services. Governance helps IT do is to more broadly foster trust across those distributed domains. It’s going to help become a catalyst for communication and collaboration, and it’s going to help jump-start that non-expert staff. The thing that’s key about governance is that it helps integrate those silos of IT. It helps integrate the folks who are responsible for designing services with those who actually have to develop the back end implementations and with those who are doing the testing of performance and functionality. Alternately, it integrates them with the organizations that are responsible for both deploying the services and the policies and integration logic that will support accessing those services.

In Governance: Service Catalogs and the Cloud Lori Macvittie says,

“The use of SOA governance solutions never truly took the world by storm, and that may be in part that the metadata it carried wasn’t “meta” enough given the level of abstraction used by SOA. Virtualization and cloud computing take that abstraction far enough to be useful both in invocation and management. SOA, too, was hampered by the fact that automation of processes – while nice – was not a necessary piece of the value equation. For cloud computing (on-demand) automation is one of the key variables in the benefit equation, making abstraction of management a necessity.”

Keeping a perspective on lifecycle governance, your organization can be primed and ready to handle Cloud, as it scales, as more and more services go into production, and more and more services are deemed to be ready for consumption and reuse into new composite applications. The key is to keep a service lifecycle governance perspective in mind, as you go about your governance program, and automation is key. … Automating policy compliance can bring a huge pay off.,/p>

What we are finding more and more now is that organizations are actually investing in a role known as service manager, someone who oversees the implication of not only delivering a service over time, but those that are consuming it. I see this as a best practice that can be supported by Cloud governance, and which helps empower them by giving them a foundation to set up policies and have visibility in terms of how this service is meeting its objective and who is consuming the service.

Intelligent Application Delivery

Application delivery is so complex and overwhelmed with way too many complexities. There is no push-button deployment of services. It takes way too many manual steps, scripts, and configurations to make these services/applications work even in the small deployments. Imagine them deploying to Clouds. THis gets way to complex when it comes to deploying enterprise applications/services. Chris Hoff very crisply articulated the vision of intelligent application delivery in his post Application Delivery Control: More Hardware Or Function Of the Hypervisor? Chris Hoff writes,

” there’s the real meat: contextual networking. That’s the ability of a solution to take into consideration context when applying policies and rules and functions to traffic and data. Understanding the context of a request and response – location of the client, type of client, type of response data, network over which a client is connecting, etc… – makes it possible to apply application delivery functions like optimization and acceleration and security more efficiently. In order to understand the client, you’ve absolutely got to have visibility into the client-side of the equation as well as the server-side. If you’re nothing more than a service in the fabric, you aren’t going to have that visibility – some other device or solution will. Without that visibility you can’t easily obtain the context, and thus you aren’t capable of adapting to what’s going on right now – on demand.”

Vision sounds great. Who is delivering these solutions. There are some solutions exist today. They are way over engineered again to make then unusable by SE&O folks. That leads to one more layer of strip down and dress-up to meet their needs. That in turn leads to versioning and patching challenges. So, if we need realize the value of cloud, it is time for us to define mechanisms to define application/service packaging and delivery mechanisms in a vendor or service provider agnostic manner.

Cloud: Strategy

If we want to get the cloud right, we need put aside the technology discussion and start thinking about how the Super Corp of 21st century going to work – who their partners are, who their customers are, and then think about how we can support customer, suppliers, partners, and collaborators better than ever before. Too many people look at the cloud as a technology phenomenon when they should look at it as a business opportunity and an accelerator for innovation. The cloud is an environment for creating ways of doing business that are radically different from monolithic ERP-based processes. The age of command-and-control in business technology is over. You empower the knowledge worker through collaboration.

What this is telling us is that we have reached another stage of maturity, and that in order to move forward organization will need to think about Cloud as an overall program, and how it impacts both technology and people dimensions within the organization. We are indeed moving from project- and application-level Cloud to more of a system and enterprise scale. We need to look at how Cloud’s success is actually defined, and what factors and practices in these organizations that are successful have the most impact. While you may think that technologies are key enablers, but what I found was organizational and program dynamics are the key contributors to success. If you’re able to handle trust, you’re able to influence organizational change management effectiveness. If you’re able to address business alignment, then you’ll have much more success in understanding the impact on architecture and vice versa.

Companies should adopt cause-effect strategies for private/public cloud, finding appropriate applications, integration mechanisms, and exploiting the economies of scale of Cloud to boost the bottom-line performance of the companies.

Peter Drucker wrote many books and papers about the role of information in building sustainable and competitive organizations. Even after a decade of such prediction, role of information is getting ever more important than before. Peter Drucker wrote,

“Increasingly, a winning strategy will require information about events and conditions outside the institution: non-customers, technologies other than those currently used by the company and its present competitors, markets not currently served, and so on. Only with this information can a business decide how to allocate its knowledge resources in order to produce the highest yield. Only with such information can a business also prepare for new changes and challenges arising from sudden shifts in the world economy and in the nature and content of knowledge itself. The development of rigorous methods for gathering and analyzing outside information will increasingly become a major challenge for businesses and for information experts.”

Technology is becoming integral part of the business. In 21st century, CIOs and their teams need to play a much broader and expanded business role sharing leadership of technology with business peers as well as acquiring responsibility for many of the firm’s shared services. CIO also need to find an inspired ways to recruit and retain the best and the brightest new talent who will be eager to solve problems and who speak the language of populist technologies as a first language. CIO who can’t see them playing this role should begin now to change the profile of themselves and their teams or see their role ever more marginalized.

One of the major issues I have seen last 10 years working in various management roles, technology teams lacks the necessary business knowledge and ability to map the great technology to business opportunities. To build a successful bridge between the technology and the business, CIOs have to play a significant role in boosting the business knowledge of their teams. It is time to transform a tech-oriented staff into one that has the requisite business skills, including negotiation, strategy, or financial analysis. These are very essential skills required to align the business and IT.

CIO’s need to play a bigger role in strategy execution rather than focusing more of their time on technology selection and operations. I have seen so much of friction between technology and operations. CIOs focus lot of their time and energy trying to align the technology and business. In my view, first thing that CIOs should report to CEO. CIO should play a bigger role in helping CEOs with necessary tools and frameworks to integrate critical information flows from the Information Systems to Business Systems and vice-versa. Also, CIO should focus more on forming networks of supply partners, tapping them for new ideas, engaging them to broker cross-industry lessons learned, and with them, establishing a responsive ecosystem of providers.

Paul Saffo summarized the state of machines, complexity of tools, and exploding information in his HBR article, “Are You Machine Wise?”

“As our tools become ever more complex and interconnected and more central to the conduct of business, their benefits also become harder to recognize. Furthermore, executives need to know and understand the logic of the work done by machines—and, above all else, the limits beyond which those tools cannot be pushed. Meanwhile, the volume of information continues to expand exponentially, generated by machines conversing with other machines on our behalf. Every business activity leaves behind a wake of information, from data spinning off production-line process controllers to transaction records generated over retail-credit-card networks. And the growing centrality of the Internet for business purposes will only add to the flood.”

Finally, CIOs need to think technology from the business perspective to help CEOs position the company for competitiveness — their firms’ differentiation of products, services, and business models. Technology itself is not a differentiator unless it align with the business. So, CIOs need to think differently – just technology perspective is not enough and they need to start creating value for the businesses. I think CIOs can play a very influential role in bridging the customers, suppliers, partners, and innovation channels by aligning technology from business perspective.

What do you think?

Notes from Cloudplay Panel Discussion:

Good afternoon. Let us give a big applause for our panelists for taking time from their busy work schedules and showing up here today. Welcome to Cloudplay 2010. We have a great panel. Our topic today is Cloud Computing: Challenges and opportunities for Consumers, Enterprises, Entrepreneurs, and Service Providers. I see cloud computing is a revolution in making for number of years. Financial meltdown, globalization, and consumerisation accelerated the seeding of Clouds. Enterprises, regardless of their size, are seeking ways to rein in capex, drive down internal IT costs, consolidate their IT resources, and run as lean as possible. Cloud is seen as a solution to managing their Capex/Opex. Cloud is becoming a strategy and an approach for service providers, technology vendors, enterprises, and consumers. This impacts everyone of us here in way or the other.

Next, with the emergence of powerful handsets, including smart phones, iPhones and iPads, consumers are now using data services and applications as never before. This exponential growth in data traffic is forcing network carriers to increase their bandwidth through adoption of WiMax/LTE.

This opens the door to a world of unlimited choices to the consumers as well as numerous opportunities to services providers. There is no shortage of opportunities and new competitive challenges. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) are now foraying into content publishing, application stores and other complementary areas under the Cloud umbrella. You can hardly see any business presentation without a reference to Cloud.

Cloud services will continue to represent a larger proportion of the overall market than the infrastructure services. My guess is that the scale and growth of cloud services will be significant during the next five years to 10 years. This growth of cloud services will lead to a period of accelerated business innovation and IT evolution. Adoption of cloud-based solutions will not only increase the absolute business value. But will it radically transform the way these services are sourced by enterprises. All this madness to cloud transition may lead to a storm (no more bubbles though!) and cloud becomes “business as usual”.

Let us get started with introductions with our panel members. Each of our panel member will introduce themselves and tell us their point of view on Cloud computing: a hype or a reality?

• Not long ago there was a browser war driven by the adoption of Internet. I am sure there are enough lessons learned to win the expensive war. Now, cloud computing is brewing another platform war. What is your strategy to deal with this disruption? What will you do differently this time?
• Cloud computing is creating new opportunities for consumer driven applications. It is transforming the way consumers connect, communicate and interact through very rich user experiences. However, still lot of work need to be done to deliver back-end services to drive enterprise adoption of Cloud computing. Given these challenges many CIOs are still building their own infrastructure rather than using Cloud services. Let us ask our panelists from HP, Microsoft, and SAP, how Cloud will disrupt their MaaS (Monopoly as a Service) and if they are motivated to address these issues to accelerate the cloud adoption?
• We are oversimplifying moving enterprise applications into Cloud. People don’t understand how complex is to move existing applications into the Cloud. There are many oversimplified pitches: Take an application put into the Cloud. Magic happens. In realty, there are great deal of things that need to be done. Need to spend whole lot of energy to make these applications work in the Cloud. Confusing licensing and pricing strategies from software vendors, lack of transparency, lack of standardized protocols makes it really hard. Can you explain to us what kind of platform, pricing and licensing innovations you can think of emerging for cloud services?
• Amount of computing power we can buy for $1000 is doubling every 12 months. But, Data is exploding much faster pace than the computing. Still dealing with large data is a daunting challenge. Amazon recently introduced “sneakernet” and you can put your data on disks and ship it to them. They can load into S3. Let us ask Lou how his company Zetta is disrupting the way data is stored in the Cloud? What Microsoft and HP doing in this space? What can we expect next 12-18 months from now?
• Cloud offers attractive business benefits and opportunities for creating value through elimination of complexity and creating new revenue generating services. But, there is a flip side to these attractive business benefits. It will be necessary to take a fresh look at each of them to be able to assess benefits and the respective management, organization and governance challenges. I want to ask each of our panelists from their business perspective, what are the new challenges of cloud services?
• Cloud services are offered as “plug-and-play” assemblies that need little or no attention to set up processes, and can — allegedly — be implemented immediately. Most of these products are essentially “black boxes”. Lack of transparency and open standards introduces whole new challenges and new business risks that must be assessed and properly managed. Let us check with our panelist to what their company’s strategies to address these challenges?
• Look at Apple app store. Number of applications is exploding. Cloud service providers are finding new ways to deliver value to their customers. If Cloud service providers are capable of becoming competitive publishers, application storefronts, and value added service providers, what opportunities it opens for innovators and entrepreneurs? What kind of partnerships and ecosystem needed to exploit these opportunities?
• I see new emerging trend at the intersection of Cloud adoption. Generation Y are entering the workforce with unprecedented knowledge of how to communicate with each other using social networks, blogs, and all things digital in the Cloud. This new generation will disruption as they climb up in the enterprise ladder. Fast forwarding 5-10 years into future, do you think this shift in consumeration & influence of generation Y would hyper accelerate cloud adoption?
• Do you think cloud service providers can really make money and keep the cloud based innovations more sustainable?
• What are we going to see in next 12-18 months? What we can do in 12-18 months which we can’t do it today? What opportunities exist for entrepreneurs and investors next 24-36 months.

I recall an interesting note by Charles Hardy in 1995 May-June, Harvard Business Review article, “Trust and the Virtual Organization”,

“An economy that adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence—the Three I Economy—offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and environmental erosion. Information, ideas, and intelligence consume few of the earth’s resources. Virtuality will redesign our cities with fewer skyscrapers and fewer commuters, making a quieter and perhaps a gentler world. Our aspirations for growth in a Three I Economy would increasingly be more a matter for the mind than for the body”.

Imagine where we are after 15 years. We are still building data centers to manage our applications with so much of waste of our capital resources, eroding the earth’s resources. Our roadways are still crammed with traffic jams. Like our roadways, our mind-ways are also jammed with too much of information pushed at us. Finally, Cloud is here to enable the next wave of 3I revolution and virtuality.

Cloud: Enabling Customer Driven Enterprise

Cloud Computing enables enterprises to invest their resources in improving and streamlining the customer facing business process(Core) and eliminate or reduce mundane and costly IT infrastructure services(Context). This shift in customer focus will enable enterprises to benefit from Customer driven innovation and thereby improving the customer satisfaction and loyalty factor. For the past one decade, vendor pushed many unnecessary technology features to the customers increasing the complexity burden on the customer. As a result of this complexity, vendors also supplied the best practices to deal with these complexities. Customers are more smarter now. They can do more with less. Open source innovations offered more choices at cheaper price as well as lesser complexity. Technological advances also offered “mashable” services on need basis. This is forcing vendors to shift from “vendor push” approach to vendor-customer co-creation.

Cloud Computing: Enriching the Customer-Business Interactions

Cloud offers technology and rich information access enables more interactions between customers and businesses. The result will be better customer experience, lower customer defection, increased customer dedication to the brand. Moreover, social network empowered customer becomes marketing agents for the company by WoM referrals to their social networks. As cloud simplifies the overly complicated information services delivery mechaims and frees up scarce resources to focus on reversing some of the damages caused by reduced or eliminated customer interactions for the past decade or so.

Cloud drives or enables:

Innovation: Creating innovative products and service by collaborating with customers

Product Promotion: Customers are key elements in the current social media network. Satisfied customers are more inclined to spread the promotional messages to their networks. Also, they are more likely to recommend the product favorably when some one checks with them. So, keeping the customer center of the innovation process helps immensely.

Customer feedback: Technological advancements and social networks have completely chaged the landscape of marketing communications and product promotion. With emergent tools and inexpensive cloud services available now and emerging in next two-three years will change the way enterprises will interact and react to their customer needs and demands. Business should be able to learn more about their customers and quickly configure business process to cater or address these customer needs. I clearly see current Customer Relations Management software evolving into very intelligent service capable of detecting, publishing, and analyzing the customer information or need changes and dynamically configure their business processes or rules.

Sensing and Responding: We are already deeply woven with many modes of presence and interaction technologies. Twitter, IMs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Contextual Mail Services(my wild thought: current mail systems are dumb. I am envisioning next generation mail services are much smarter ones powered by machine learning for semantic as well as contextual intelligence), GPS, and many other modes that convey who we are and what we care about. Manufactures will evolve their relationships with the customers directly eliminating the middleman.

Social Networks Connects Businesses and Customers: Next generation businesses will focus to engage their customers at every level of their business process. With all the chatter going on in the social media, businesses are facing daunting challenges to keep their brand image. So, Super Corps should be more focused on measuring their customer satisfaction by identifying critical interaction points and focus on delivering business processes to achieve these interactions. Cloud makes this easier for enterprises to achieve their goals.

Conclusion

Cloud not only enables customer driven innovation it also enables 21 century socially responsible organizations to tap into their customer social networks. These customer social networks provides valuable consumer context information that can be leveraged to discover new customer trends, needs, and complains. Also, by understanding the communication patterns related to products and services helps businesses to respond more quickly to address the customer needs. Businesses can also identify key influencers that can be instrumental in promoting their product and services. Cloud enables businesses to compose their business process more rapidly than ever before in response to the contextual information discovered in the social networks. This will put “You”, the customer, at the center of these interactions and drives WoM marketing. WoM is two more effective than radio advertisements, four times more effective than direct selling, and seven times more than print advertisements.

What do you think? I would like to hear your views and comments.