Mark's Blog

Episode 35: A Bad Ruling

 
Many of you may have missed a small but significant legal ruling a few days ago. Basically it said that companies could not store TV media content on behalf of customers. The concept, generally called a network PVR, is simple. You do essentially what a TIVO does but you do it from a central location and deliver the video to the user (and only that user) on demand over the network.

Basically, it would be a simple way for consumers to get a great service (that is already considered legal) for a lot less hassle and potentially save consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s the problem though – the technology is too good – too many people would likely use it. It would disrupt the current mode of Information delivery from mostly “real time delivery” to “on demand delivery.”  

The fact is though, the disruption has already happened (remember Rule 7 of Information 2.0 in my last post?). Sure folks can use legal maneuvers to try to slow things down but it is just going to prolong the agony…

On top of all that, the decision itself makes no sense. 

Think about this for a moment, the ruling basically says, what? Is it now true that I must store all of my copyrighted material in my home? What if I get one of those rental garages and put my DVDs in it? Am I breaking the law?

Hey wait a minute, what about other brokers that hold things for me like, say, banks. In fact, banks don’t even keep all of my money; they give some of it out to others. I am essentially paying a bank to hold my property – do we have to start putting my money in a mattress to avoid breaking the law? 

Now, to be fair to the networks, if I create some content, I should be able to be paid for it and those whose store it should be able to be held liable if it is stolen. But, we need to all work with technology to exploit it vs. trying to constrain it.

Some one once told me that there are three stages to every company. In the first stage (growth), companies are lead by the technologists, creative folks, and entrepreneurs. In the second stage (maintenance), they are led by finance. In the third phase (I know you know what this phase is), companies are led by legal.

In my humble opinion, those companies in the media industry that we will see the high growth are the ones hiring the visionaries and technologists and leveraging technology to improve their “product.” Let’s save the court battles for protecting all of the new innovations and patents.

Mark...

Episode 34: Information 2.0 - The 8 Rules

Greetings,

I try to write all of my own blog material – if I post anything else I will always tell you. I am posting this set of written explanations regarding my 8 rules for Information 2.0. It was written by Lisa Stein from our communications team, who does the most amazing presentations for me and generally makes me look good at keynotes and in front of groups. This was excerpted from a speech I gave a couple of weeks ago. 

It should serve to clarify, in more detail, what I consider will happen as we move to “Information 2.0”

Mark…. 

 

1. Information is decoupled from applications – Information buried within applications has limited value; it can not be utilized by other applications or people. Moving from application-centric to information-centric computing means that the information is not constrained by the application where it resides. Now that information, freed from the application, can be shared and leveraged across the enterprise making it possible to extract value from the information. 

2. Information is accessible via Web Services – Information is only valuable if it’s available and accessible, therefore, information services and Web services must be one and the same. Viewing information as a peer to the application allows for connections from applications to information at the highest levels providing capabilities for managing information more effectively than ever before.

3. Information metadata is integrated with all data – 90% of information is unstructured—information such as videos, photos, and music, not suitable for management within a relational database. Adding structure to unstructured information, in the form of metadata, allows for the information to be indexed, queried, and searched. Embedded metadata is the enabler that transforms information from static to dynamic. 

4. Information security is explicit and built in- Firewalls assume two things: Everyone inside your organization is good. And, everyone outside your organization is bad. Rather than building moats, in the form of firewalls, to protect the castle organizations need to protect two things directly; the data and the identity of those using the data regardless of where either reside. 

5. Information optimizations are built in as services – Regardless of the application in use or where to the data resides, decisions about the information must be made: What tier of storage? What protection levels? How is the information backed up? Decoupling information from applications allows services such as tiering, virtualization, and consolidation to be delivered as a set of services to applications. In an information infrastructure optimization is delivered as an information service. 

6. Information is personalized –Every 1000 knowledge workers cost an organization $5.7M as these workers burrow their way through repositories, file systems and archives to find the information they need. The cost of lost, misplaced, or unidentifiable information is exorbitant. Therefore, to create value we must place the right information in front of the right people at the right time based on every individual’s changing needs.

7. Information is delivered both real time and on demand – More and more, information will be delivered two ways; real-time and on demand. However, over time I predict the decline of real-time delivery and the rise of on demand delivery. We will watch first-run movies and network television programs during our own leisure time, not on a network schedule. The capabilities required to facilitate the rise of on demand (more connectivity, more capacity and more bandwidth) are becoming a reality.  

8. Information is simply always available –As we build out information infrastructures with hundreds of applications, thousands – or hundreds of thousands- of users we are entrusted with, not only mission, but life and death critical information. IT systems and architectures must allow for zero downtime. Because you can never be 100% sure of who is accessing what type of information at what time IT infrastructures must never go down. End of story.

Episode 33: Catastrophic

I made my first trip to Israel this past week. It was a great trip. Through our acquisitions, we now have several local development teams.  I was impressed with the innovation capabilities not only coming from our own teams but from the overall startup environment in general. There is a real energy here for innovation.

On the trip out we were leaving Newark on a non-stop to Tel Aviv. We had started our takeoff and were going about 150 mph; everything seemed just like the thousands of flights in the past. Except, just as we were about to take off, we heard a “boom.” It sounded like a tire blowing. A second or two went by and then the pilot slammed on the brakes – hard. Hard enough that stuff came out from under places that had clearly not been cleaned in a while. Stuff like magazines from 1998 and long lost cell phones. Being the analytic person that I am, I was thinking about if the aircraft designer had sized the brakes to stop a fully fueled and loaded plane with maybe 1/3 of the runway left. The answer to that question was clearly yes as we came to a stop at the end of the runway. Impressive.

After a few minutes the pilot came on and said that we had had a “catastrophic engine failure” – being the curious person that I am, I wanted to know what constituted “catastrophic.” The pilot’s reply was “that’s when you leave pieces of your engine back on the runway.”

The simple lesson is, no matter how good we make anything, it still can and will fail from time to time. I have been flying for decades, flown millions of miles and, thankfully, never experienced any situation like this one. Ironically, this event actually increased my confidence with our air travel systems. As an engineer, I know things will fail. Failures are not, in themselves, a reason to be more concerned. What is critical is that the systems have been properly designed to deal with failures; what I will simply describe as “resiliency.”

For IT leaders, I believe the bigger problem is when we try to have too much reliance on “reliability” and not enough reliance on “resiliency.” Sure, we don’t want to have components failing all of the time but we also better not be betting our business on the fact that hardware won’t fail.

The tolerance for downtime and “catastrophic” failures in IT is evaporating. In this case we should take a lesson from the airline industry and make resiliency the prime objective.

Mark…

Episode 32: Finding the Cool New Stuff

OK Here is a test – do you know the following?

MySpace

Second Life

Glide

Yahoo Widgets

Del.icio.us

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you know most of these.

I was giving a speech the other day on the “Information 2.0” topic. I used a number of the above examples to highlight different capabilities and environments on the Web. I was amazed at first by how few people even knew about certain technologies or Web offerings. Then I got to thinking and realized that the pace of change on the web today is just incredible. What it means to me is that I have to quiz my kids weekly on the hot new “stuff.”

Think about it. Remember the era where we had 3 (and only 3) TV stations for like 20 years! As the Web started, I can remember exploring and finding the best sites. For the most part, you could come back a few months later and it was pretty much the same. I find now if I go a couple of months and not “look up” and check to see what’s new, I can fall behind on the hip new “thing.” Now, not everything is going to change the world but, be careful, I do believe the pace of technology advancement is going to accelerate.

I believe that there are three definitive reasons for this acceleration.

First, we have made it far easier to collaborate. Go back 25 years and think about what it would take logistically to get the best and brightest from around the world to work on a project. It cost a relative fortune and was possible only for a few things (like sending people to the moon). Today, we have effectively not only broken down the physical barriers but we have made global collaboration highly productive.

Second, the Web has essentially made access to the base infrastructure (e.g. a world-wide customer base) economically feasible for a company of any scale.

Third, we have enough base interoperability and standards that developers can innovate and leverage by leveraging other innovations while not having to build a completely new “platforms” for each application. The standards that matter are now at the SOA, Java, and .NET -- layers allowing for loosely coupled interactions between application services.

These are profound changes and I believe we will continue to see the acceleration effects, especially on the Web. Often people believe that this “infrastructure standardization” will make the infrastructure itself a “commodity”…

I believe this premise is dead wrong.

For example, a technology like virtualization actually needs a degree of standardization and network connectivity to be effective, but it also can greatly enhance and provide differentiated capabilities to infrastructures. I don’t know about you but I consider any technology that improves server utilization by like 20 to 1 - “an innovation.” In fact, I believe that, by making applications more portable across the infrastructure, we can actually innovate now at accelerated rates both with new composite applications AND with more intelligent and economical infrastructures.

In fact, when the uber-IT-systems companies dominated the landscape, you could argue that what we got was a good deal of “vertical” innovation – innovation occurring in stovepipes. These systems were geared to solving particular issues, but leverage across the infrastructure was not a priority. Our next phase will bring out a focus on horizontal innovation across the infrastructure which I believe will foster a new (and accelerated) set of innovations. These are likely to be more meaningful than we have seen simply because we will be investing our R&D more efficiently and new technologies will be able to be more easily added to existing environments.

Many think the era of rapid IT innovation is over; I believe just the opposite. I believe that we have actually just put in place the base – both in terms of connectivity for collaboration and in terms other base infrastructures – capabilities that will enable us to innovate more than ever!

Mark…

 

Episode 31: Information 2.0

A revolution is coming in information.

All of us in IT talk about how much information has been growing over the past decade. Now, a new study backs up my premise that information growth will likely actually accelerate over the next few years. This IDC study (sponsored by EMC) predicts that information added annually will increase 6 fold from 2006 to 2010. This translates to 988 Exabytes of information in 2010!

What is most interesting is that in 2007 we will actually cross over to the point where we create more digital information than we have storage capacity. We are probably not going to declare a “storage crisis” (a la an “energy crisis”) just yet but it does illustrate how quickly we a growing our digital information.

I talked about the growth drivers in a previous blog but suffice to say we will have some major new growth drivers including video, voice, and images. One of the most significant changes will be that 70% of the information in 2010 will be created by individuals.

OK, so you might think that this does not translate directly to your enterprise or business but that is not necessarily true. It is believed that “organizations” will touch at least 85% of this user generated content.

You can read the whole whitepaper here. What I will be discussing in this and a couple of future posts is how organizations need to think about access to this information. I will also present you my 8 Rules for Information 2.0. Fundamentally, with the amount and type of information we will produce in the future, we need to completely change how we think about information.

In terms of access to information, I believe it will be “flat,” it will be “deep,” and it will be “specialized.” Flat access simply means that the conduits to obtain information will be very direct. YouTube is a perfect example; with just a single intermediary, you can publish video for direct consumption world-wide to anyone with a network connection. There is no longer a filter or limited set of outlets for access to consumers.

Access to information will also be “deep.”  This is a direct correlation to “The Long Tail” principle. A consumer will have access to more and more sources of information with ever higher degrees of specialization.

Information will continue to evolve and become more “specialized.” Simply put, we will be able to build personalized “information services” that deliver the very specific information we require for a given situation.

While these concepts are more and more visible on the Web – these same concepts translate to businesses and organizations. For organizations to get the maximum value from their information they must also evolve how they think about information.

In short, here are the 8 Rules I will be discussing:

1. Information is decoupled from Applications

2. Information is accessible via Web Services

3. Information Metadata is integrated with all data

4. Information Security is explicit and built in

5. Information Optimizations are built in as services

6. Information is personalized

7. Information is delivered both real time and on demand

8. Information is simply always available

More Later – for now, if you are interested, take a look at the whitepaper.

Mark…

 

Episode 30: No Way to Run an Airline

 

Question  - Does Technology disrupt the Airline Industry? 

===

So, I guess I made the mistake of choosing to travel over the past couple of weeks. Wow; that was fun - not. I still have some luggage that hasn’t made it home.

OK, I know I am reacting a bit to some recent personal experiences but, if there ever was a place that could use some innovation, it is the airline industry. The airline industry seems to be in an all out race to the bottom both financially and from a service perspective. As I talk to other business travelers, folks have just come to accept travel as a cost of getting work done but almost no one actually “enjoys” air travel anymore.

Aside from safety (which is outstanding overall I would note), I am just shocked at the lack of differentiation and innovation amongst the airlines. I started traveling (for business) over 20 years ago so let’s look at the progress in the past 20 years. In my opinion, door-to-door travel time - thanks to larger airports, all of the buses and trains to get to terminals miles away, long security lines, and mandatory check in times has actually gone up! The actual speed for planes has effectively not changed in 45 years. Given the overall time costs for a flight - I now drive on any on trip less than 4-5 hours.

OK, so it takes longer to get there. There must be other improvements, right? Well, there sure aren’t many. Is their more personal space – nope. Is the food better? – well it is mostly gone so maybe that is an improvement. Are the planes cleaner? – I don’t think so. Is their enough space for what you want to carry on? – not hardly. Can they get the bags to you any faster? - no. Can they just provide consistent power for my laptop? – nah. 

One innovation I will acknowledge has been the recently introduced check-in kiosks and web check in capabilities. I will say, however, it is of marginal benefit if you still have bags to check. Also, the Kiosks are a huge labor cost savings for the airlines – this was not an incremental expense to deliver improved service.

Yes, there are some standout airlines, mostly for international travel, but for most domestic travel, it seems to be a race to the bottom. Whether you agree totally with this assessment or not, I think it would be hard to say that our overall air travel experience has improved a great deal in the last 40 years. 

The airline industry, more than most, has one of the most evolved methods of being able to charge us for why we travel rather than for the value they actually deliver. This type of pricing happens to some degree in almost every market. Discounts are given for students or for people who book in advance. With airline ticket pricing, however, the differences can be extreme as it is generally pretty easy to identify a business traveler. Imagine if taking a taxi was like flying. You would hop in a cab and the driver would ask you why you need a ride and then charge 10 times the normal rate if you were going to an important meeting!

I believe that this ability to drive pricing so independently from service has actually served to slow innovation within the industry. Today, business travelers don’t really get better “service” for their money. We pay more based on why we fly. We pay because we want to be with our families on weekends and don’t stay over on Saturday. 

Here is the problem that I think the airlines are going to face. Business travelers have been paying high rate and not receiving a service appropriate to that payment.  The service is a commodity if I have ever seen one, yet it has highly graduated pricing. If you look at business travelers today, most would fall into the customer quadrant called “trapped” – we are not at all satisfied but really have few options.

Information Technology to the rescue?

There are a number of new technologies that are starting to change things. From better web collaboration, to high-end video conferencing, to blogs and podcasts, we are collaborating more and more with less and less travel. One of my teams purchased a simple internet video conferencing system this year with an agreement to immediately cut their travel budget by 10-20%! 

I recently met the CEO of a startup that had developed a product with 17 individuals all located in different locations around the world. What was the most interesting was how seldom they actually met physically. 

So, with no real air travel innovations on the horizon, airlines that charge more based on why we travel than based on a level service they actually deliver, and the simple fact that most of us would prefer to travel less and stay home more with our families, air travel could be a market on the verge of major change. IT could actually disrupt the airline industry.

What remains to be seen is if the airlines will recognize this in time and start to close that gap between the cost of business travel and the service delivered. 

For now, I believe, business travelers will continue to seek out ways to avoid travel and information technology advances may actually prove to be a disruptor to the travel industry. I do like to travel (some) so I hope that the airlines will recognize that charging people mostly based on why we travel rather than for a delivered value is “no way to run an airline.”

Mark…