Enterprise 2.0 Summit at Cebit

The Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CeBIT was the first conference that I've moderated. Wow, was I nervous.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, the speakers were truly fantastic, the audience wonderful and the organisers Bjoern Negelmann and Kongress Media had done a fantastic job.

I was also given the opportunity to give the opening and closing talks. So I've made a video of each (I've just re-recorded them as I don't have audio from the conference itself.).

Opening Talk

Closing Talk

Utility computing is good for ducks ... OFFICIAL

Those boffins at Accenture Technology Labs apparently believe that utility computing is good for the environment (and hence as I said good for ducks - thx to Suw for the notes.). They even talk about a future spot market in computing resources.

Of course, resource brokers is old news to any readers here who hopefully are well versed in the impacts of commoditisation. I can't really claim any credit - I take my ideas from history, whether it's Petrarch, Schumpeter or McCarthy.

In any case "anytime you think of an idea it is likely that someone, somewhere else in the world is independently thinking or has thought of the same idea".

Damn, nicked that one too.

The only downside is the potential for more consumption but in the short-term it should hold some benefit. Longer term, we're going to have to solve those thorny energy production issues.

--- Update 6th October 2013

Many years later, at the Royal Society, we're still talking about utility computing and sustainability.

Can I borrow a cup of silver colloid solution?

Back at EuroFoo 2004 I ran a couple of sessions; one on worth (and commoditisation) and the other on fabrication technologies. Apparently at the latter session, I stated "home printers to be here within three years".

Well it looks like I was out by six months or so. DeskTop Factory has won Popular Science Magazine's Best of What's New Award.

Cool. So the first home 3D printers will be available next year at $4995 a piece.

Still it's not cheap, but then the first mass produced inkjets - the HP ThinkJet (1984) - was priced at $495 which is between $950 and $1,700 in today's terms (depending upon which measure you use).

These days you can pick up a high resolution inkjet photo printer for less than a $100. I expect the same to happen with 3D printers, and over the next decade the capability of these home fabrication machines to include not just form, but multiple materials and electronics.

[Added : Objet Geometries have announced Polyjet Matrix and a 3D printer capable of printing out in multiple materials]

They will become commonplace as well as cheap. Of course the real money will be in materials and design.

With the commoditisation of the manufacturing process itself and a further reduction of the barriers to participation, we will start to see the extension of the consumer as producer into new industries.

I look forward to the day, that my neighbour asks to borrow more exotic materials than sugar.

P.S. Watch the video .... there is a duck in it!

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

I've uploaded a video of my Web 2.0 Expo Berlin talk below. Unfortunately there was no audio available, so I've had to record myself speaking in the hotel - doesn't seem quite the same without an audience.

I had a small but really pleasant crowd turn up - not surprising since I was up against some superstars from Google.

There is a lot of buzz about open social, I should check it out myself in more detail. I do hope it is as really open as it sounds.

Duck Vs Duct.

Hey .... Ducks rule ... According to HotForWords.

This is a bizarre concept for a video, it's very silly and I'm afraid I don't understand the beginning of it at all ... however I was fascinated to discover that Duct Tape is actually Duck Tape.

Audio --

Still waiting for the audio, so the video will be a bit later.

In the meantime I've posted the slides with slideshare. For some reason the encoding they use has messed up a few slides and the transcript is just gobbledygook and I can't seem to find a way of removing it.

I note that they use S3 - and for some reason this crashed my preview in blogger - oh well. Still at least it's a fairly easy way of getting slides up, though not quite as easy as video.

The previous talk ...

Whilst I wait to get my hands on the audio for my FOWA talk, I thought I'd post a video of my slides from OSCON 2007. It's an earlier and shorter version.

I'll be exploring all these themes in more detail at Web 2.0 Expo in November.

The SEP boundary and more rough thoughts.

I've been busy for the last few weeks - but I thought I'd post more on the "as a service" field and annoy Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz (a wonderful and talented person) by introducing more acronyms.

Now "as a Service" or "X as a Service" (XaaS as it's often called) is fundamentally about creating a SEP (someone else's problem) boundary. In homage to Douglas Adams, by SEP, I mean the outsourcing of a client responsibility to the provider - in terms of a service, what was once done by a client is now done by the vendor ... it's someone else's problem ... though to be safe, assume it will fail and plan accordingly.

I normally talk about a narrow range of these services, however for the purposes of this post I'll extend up and down the XaaS "stack" to show the concept. This isn't about payment or worth mechanisms (utility or subscription or otherwise) - I'll deal with those another day.

To begin with I thought I'd outline the "stack" and then in a series of posts go through each level in some more detail. These concepts are framed from the viewpoint of cost of doing business activities (CODB) and not competitive advantage or transition.

The "stack", at this moment in time, can roughly be broken into :-

• BaaS - Business as a Service
• OaaS - Organisation as a Service
• PaaS - Process as a Service
• DaaS - Data as a Service
• SaaS - Software as a Service
• FaaS - Framework as a Service
• HaaS - Hardware as a Service
• IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service.
• NaaS - Nothing as a Service (the default position).

The use of these services at any level, for any particular instance, changes the SEP boundary - that which was the responsibility of the customer now becomes the responsibility of the provider.

At the top level of the stack, Business as a Service - the provider is responsible for the business, its organisation (marketing, operations, facilities management, manufacture etc), processes, the data it uses, any software etc. The customer's activities include initial funding and the desire to do something and their main responsibility is for the choice of vendor. This is the concept of virtual businesses, niche or otherwise and is something which I discussed at length with Matt Webb and Suw Charman, sometime last year. Though none truly exist in the space today, it has analogies to the VC market and is worth just noting as a concept.

Next there is Organisation as a Service - with the provider offering a complete organisational function for the business such as marketing, manufacturing, HR, legal, facilities, supply & distribution, finance etc. There are a few examples of these outsourced arrangements.

Process as a Service covers a finer structure, whether it's a marketing programme, translation, lead management, customer support, design, advertising, strategy, manufacture, governance, market analysis, recruitment, billing or payroll etc. Here we start to see a larger number of companies set up to deal with such arrangements either within discrete parts of the organisational structure or as a whole. There are the first signs of utility or subscription models for payment. This process area, often a mix of interrelated internal and external processes, given meaning through the organisational structure, is the remit of business process management. The use of external services is commonly known as BPO (business process outsourcing).

Data as a Service means simply the provision of data. The customer is concerned about the business, its organisation, its processes and how internal data combines with vendor provided data. The provider of such a service is concerned about providing the data and any application, framework or supporting hardware. An obvious example of this today includes business and analyst reports. I specifically call it data rather than information - as data is only given meaning through relational connections within the context of a business.

Software as a Service is a relatively new field (and more aptly called Application as a Service). The customer is concerned about the business, its organisation, its processes and its data. The provider of such a service is concerned about providing the application for the data, the framework the application runs on and the hardware that support this (e.g. SalesForce).

This extends further into Framework as a Service (e.g. Bungee Labs) where the customer is concerned about their code and data whilst the provider takes care of the rest.

Then we have Hardware as a Service (e.g. Amazon EC2) where the customer is concerned with their code, data, frameworks, network configuration, operating environment etc and the provider is concerned with virtual machines or storage etc.

Infrastructure as a Service means simply space and basic infrastructure (such as power, air con, telco etc) which there are countless examples of hosting companies offering this.

Now most of the time this is a pick and mix exercise. Most companies rent infrastructure or at least some element of it and in many cases infrastructure is provided on a utility basis. Some companies have moved higher up the stack and started to shift the CODB-like activities in discrete areas to other providers. The reason for this is that all of these activities are common and suffer from issues of scaling, resilience, availability, management, operations, investment etc and are more economically provided by larger scale specialists.

Now this "stack" is not a fixed model - in my view it's temporal. Over time I expect that SaaS, FaaS and HaaS will all be considered infrastructural services in much the same way that power, water and telco have. However for the purposes of this discussion it is useful to separate them out.

Also this stack isn't just related to the use of digital information. Manufacture is a process which at its core turns data and raw materials into a product (inputs to outputs). The use of rapid manufacturing techniques, on demand manufacture and fabrication technologies are likely to make significant changes in this area and lead to commoditisation of the manufacturing process - another topic, another day.

The key issue to bring up at this point is the concept of portability between service providers or fungibility of any particular service at any level of this stack. I describe this idea as "fungitility". Robert would be proud of me or maybe not.

Fungitility

Adjective
From the Latin fungi 'perform, enjoy' and utilitas 'usefulness'

The freedom and portability to move from one service provider (including internally) to another without hindrance (including excessive cost, time or effort), without boundaries and predicated on the existence of an equivalent service or services.

Whilst there are obvious cost benefits to moving CODB activities to a larger scale specialised provider, there is a risk associated with a lack of fungitility. Having supply and distribution or your CRM service or your governance processes locked into one provider can create significant risks should the provider either change pricing, personnel or even suffer a major outage of some form.

Fungitility reduces this risk and it is why open, free and common standards provided by multiple common resource or service providers are essential.

Before I go, I want to re-emphasise this is only to do with common or ubiquitous types of necessary activities and processes. This is only to do with CODB, which should be focused on cost and fungitility. The ideas of Taylorism are only applicable to commonly repeated activities and at a service provider level this means ubiquitous within the industry.

A novel and new activity, a potential source of competitive advantage (CA), may make efficient use of some CODB-like activities. It might even be a commonly repeated activity within an organisation - however by its very nature it is not suited for a service provider. It is neither ubiquitous nor necessary (in the short term). For such activities I would promote the use of worth based and VC-like techniques.

I've now outlined the topic, created my new word - and so I'll deal with each section of the "stack" in detail over the next few posts.

[Amendment, June 2008: I never found the time to do this. If you want to know more on my views then there are videos of my presentation from OSCON in 2007.]

[Amendement, April 2014: The *aaS terms have changed since this was written, HaaS became IaaS, FaaS became PaaS and there's more confusion than ever].

My ignite talk

Mark Fowler has very kindly put my Ignite talk about commoditisation concepts onto Viddler.

This is a general light hearted overview of the ideas. If you want to get more details about what we are doing in this field, or find out about the open sourcing of Zimki then check the Zimki blog or come and see us at OSCON '07.

Now this was a talk prepared whilst jet lagged, with short notice (i.e that afternoon) and with the rule of 70 slides in 5 minutes. I was still writing it just before presenting.

Scary stuff....

I didn't quite make the 70 slides in 5 minutes, just over, but it was sooooo close.

70 slides in 5 mins.

Just added my talk, for anyone who likes commoditisation, ducks and kittens with guns.

3, 2, 1 ... Ignite ...

As soon as I arrived at the hotel in San Francisco, I was out of the door heading to a Werewolf game. It was a great evening organised by Artur Bergman.

I accused Brady Forrest of being the Werewolf! He said I was only accusing him because he'd turned down my talk for Ignite - I laughed and still said he was the Werewolf (I can't remember if I was right or wrong in the end?).

The following day, about four hours before Ignite, Brady and Jessie sent me an email and asked me to do a talk. I didn't have time to write a new talk to fit in the with standard process, which is 20 slides in 5 minutes automatically switching. So we agreed I could control the pace of the talk if I did 70 slides in 5 minutes!

So I was on for Ignite. 70 slides in 5 minutes, jet lagged, hungry and four hours to go! Arghhhh. I was still writing it whilst the other speakers were presenting.

It was a mix of my talk from FOWA and E-Tech

Well I did it ... a ducks, kittens with guns, commoditisation, utility computing, yak shaving and fabbing etc .. and it wasn't too bad, at least I didn't go down in flames - which could have happened oh, so easily.

Thanks to Brady and Jessie for letting me do this, crazy, but fun...

E-Tech was fab.

As usual E-Tech was an outstanding event - there were some excellent speakers, an interesting crowd and good conversations all round.

I'd like to have seen more, but there is never enough time. The talks I really enjoyed were :-

• Body Hacking, Quinn Norton. This is a really interesting subject matter, enhancing the human body and the potential social impacts of this. Wonderful.

• The Making of Virtual Earth, John Curlander. Captivating stuff on how to go about creating entire 3D images of the environment from a mass of 2D pictures. This is definitely one to watch.

• From Pixels to Plastic, Matt Webb. Well it's Matt and I couldn't miss one of his talks.

• JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! James Duncan. I work with James and so I know the talk, but I do enjoy his presentations and yes JavaScript is very cool.

• Spintronics, Kevin Roche. Harnessing quantum spin in modern electronics and methods of creating streams of electrons with the same spin. I was stunned by this.

• Haml: A Semantic Rebellion in Template Land, Hampton Catlin. It's always dangerous to use live demos but building your presentation in your own tool - crazy. It worked, it was great fun and Hampton presents with flair. Shame the room was pitch black.

The list could and should go on, but all I'll say is that if you've not been to E-Tech I would strongly recommend it for next year.

I also gave a talk on commoditisation (with ducks, Zimki and fabbing as usual).

Unfortunately there was a mini gale at the time, so the doors were blasted in on several occasions and also the room was located outside the main area, down a small track, through the woods and past the signs which said "beware of the dragons".

I'm very grateful and extremely surpised that people made the trek. Unfortunately we didn't get many people to sign up for our carbon offset site in Zimki . We'll have to try again later in the year.

Now this is fairly old, but I'd never seen it before until Craig Dwyer pointed it out to me. If you like Lego, you have to watch this.

More Fowl, less foul ....

There are some people whom I am very grateful to, mainly because of the excellent ideas which they generate. The list is long, from many that I have been fortunate to work with, to others I have just read the work of or occasionaly met - such as Bruce Sterling (invented the term "Spime"), Andrew McAfee ("Enterprise 2.0"), Nick Carr ("Commoditisation of IT") and Tim O'Reilly ("Web 2.0" and other concepts).

I have met Tim on rare occasions, and in my view he is an interesting person who has provided some outstanding conferences (from EuroFoo to ETech) through which I have been fortunate to meet some highly creative people.

I'm very grateful for this (along with the books of course) as my life has been enriched by such experiences.

However I have seen some fairly hostile posts against him the past. The latest comment from Steve though is just acidic.

First Tim, thanks for organising great conferences - very much appreciated.

Second Tim, thanks for posting your views on the radar - very much appreciated.

Yes, I'm speaking in a vendor slot at E-Tech, I'm a vested interest and I'll be talking about a subject matter (commoditisation of IT) which I'm not only interested in and passionate about but I'm also trying to make a good living in to.

So I suppose I'm up for the duck shoot too.

We need more fowl and less foul in this world.

Simple pleasures from things most fowl

Feeding the visiting ducks at my home.

EuroFoo and all that Jazz

It's been a long, long time since I last blogged at length - basically life has been hectic.

Anyway, I've just got back from EuroFoo and EuroOSCON - which were both outstanding events.

I ran one session at EuroFoo - on commoditisation of manufacturing. I gave one talk at EuroOSCON - on commoditisation of manufacturing - and then spent the rest of the time talking about commoditisation of software and our new product Zimki.

This was Zimki's second outing, and we seemed to get a positive response - not just to the product itself, a JavaScript application platform, but also to the ideas behind it and the plans to create an international grid of operating environments.

Nicholas Carr has written another excellent article on this, and the end of corporate computing environments, this is exactly what we have been talking about.

Most evenings I spent in the company of Greg Stein, Ben Laurie, Andrew Kelly, Denise Kalos and Piers Crawley which was wonderful. There were so many interesting people at the conference and it was a truly fantastic experience.

Damian Conway spent some time with helping to get my presentation in shape - something I'm extremely grateful for.

The Maker faire was as usual wild, with some very crazy stuff indeed - including stem cell harvesting! Visions of scary biological manufacturing stuff appearing around the corner.

Anyway, I'm back home now, and there is lots of work to be done and ducks to feed!

Nissan - Great cars, Great Company

Someone asked me today, how I was getting on with my Nissan Primera SE - well it's magic.

I bought a Nissan about a year ago. I had been renting a Nissan for several weeks whilst the car I owned (a Mercedes Benz A-Class) was in the garage on one of its numerous and reoccuring visits.

The Merc was my first car, I had owned it from practically new around five years beforehand. Within the first few weeks of ownership, I had called out a repair van because the lights had gone faulty.

By the end the car had done around 68,000 miles and at the time of it's last visit these were the sort of faults that it had racked up.

1. Engine control unit failed - replaced
2. Clutch failures - fixed.
3. Gear failure - intermittent visits to the garage.
4. Rollbar links failed - replaced
5. Rear axle arms failed - replaced.
6. Rear suspension failure - replaced.
7. Windscreen washer failed - pipe replaced.
8. Central locking failed - pump replaced.
9. Intermittent electrical faults - all replaced.
10. Car stinking of petrol - fixed on third attempt.

and on...

I was generally under the impression that this was all part of the course of owning a car (having spent a lot of time working in the computer industry with particular products, I was used to things not working all of a sudden).

Anyway, the A-Class was in the garage again with gear failure, it was a dead duck so to speak.

I decided that enough was enough, the repair and service bill over the last five years had been horrendous. So I decided to buy a cheaper Japanese car instead and to sell the now non-working A-Class on a trade auction.

The Mercedes dealer advised me against this purchasing choice and had some interesting commments on Japanese cars. I decided to ignore this though.

I did discuss my problems with Mercedes, and after a good old merry-go-round, I was eventually told they were not going to do anything and how important customer support was ... yada, yada, yada.

So I bought the Nissan. How have things been? Fabulous.

1. It has NEVER gone wrong - not even a tiny little smidgen of a problem. Not a teeny weeny itswy witsy little hint of anything.

2. The service has been brilliant. They always keep on improving things.

3. It doesn't cost a fortune to run.

4. It is totally reliable.

5. I keep on discovering all these useful features it has - and they are genuinely useful.

6. It is a wonderful driving experience.

7. It's made in Britain.

8. Their customer support is absolutely fantastic, incredibly supportive and always helpful.

and lastly, everyone I have ever spoken to at Nissan has been helpful, polite and pleasant. They even sent me a model of a 350Z because I said I liked that car so much (it's definitely my next car now - Nissan have completely sold me on it).

Nissan know a thing or two about "A" class quality - "A" class cars, "A" class people and "A" class support, which is unfortunately the one thing that I feel was missing with my A-Class.

Anyway, that is my experience.

Duck count

I live in small heap with a little pond.

When I say little, it's large enough that it is on the local ordinance survey map and I have a rowing boat.

Anyway, for the last couple of years I have had ducks and moorhens living there. I'm now upto the grand old count of thirty two ducks and ten moorhens.

They are all wild, I do provide feed daily and they are the most wonderfully affectionate creatures - especially the brigade of ducklings who charge out of the wood to surround any visiting person.

A duck isn't just for christmas.

Sterling's Spimes

Life is being very distracting as usual - the new company product, my various research projects, the ducks (we now have fifteen) and the maths degree (all in pursuit of my MAMScMPhilMBA - a dumb way of educating myself I know!) - I need to get my own attention economy information market up and running.

However, I did find time to read Bruce Sterling's book - "Shaping Things" last night.

The books covers a future set of things called "Spimes" which in my language are nodes or collision points between the physical and digital world. It discusses the reasons for the emergence of such things, the society in which they will develop and exist within as well as potential economics

It would be easy to take pot shots at the book, the main concepts could be more rigorously defended but that's not the point - it's a window on a much greater body of change

The beauty of this work, is that it crystallises many distinct areas into one coherent theme and provides a new vocabulary for this.

The themes put forward by Bruce are one's I firmly believe in, and he has done an outstanding job of this. It is warming to see such views put forward, having personally received ridicule and utter disbelief at these concepts.

I'm very grateful for this book, and I would recommend anyone with an interest in future technology and change to read it.