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Showing posts with label cloud computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud computing. Show all posts
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Alfidi Capital at Dreamforce 2017
Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce convention for 2017. I missed attending in 2016 so I definitely had to catch up. This is by far the most complex, high-profile, and costly corporate event I have ever experienced. The spectacle is always impressive. There's a ton of stuff going on all over the city, including affiliated events for people who want the Dreamforce experience but don't need to attend certification sessions. Here come several badge selfies, with summaries of some very rewarding events.
The Dreamforce designers had wood carvings and other outdoors decorations all over the ground floor of Moscone West, where the Trailhead exhibits dominated the event space. The chainsaw-made wood sculpture at the front door was such a nice touch. I was a Boy Scout once and I never was very skilled at woodcarving. People who complete Salesforce training modules earn badges that look like Scouting merit badges. It's all so positive and benign, you'd almost think no one is making a buck off people. Dreamforce is an amusement park for techies.
The Customer Success Expo was festooned with the latest tech tricks, and a whole floor of exhibitors giving away free coffee and T-shirts. I scored enough coffee and candy to fuel my entire week. It takes a lot to get me excited sometimes, but free goodies never hurt. I got some hands-on time with several AR/VR displays, which are becoming very common at major tech shows.
The Trailhead logos and mascots were front and center in many ways. I don't know whether the real Albert Einstein ever went to the woods, but Salesforce has him climbing fake rock cliffs with fake animals. Pop music tribute bands played on the outdoor stage. I wonder which Dreamforce attendees came just to goof off on Howard Street and not tell their head office back home. I only had time for the free coffee and snacks at various places on Howard Street, because that's how I totally score in between events at Dreamforce.
I attended the Radius B2B Champions Club affiliated event to get a fresh perspective on, what else, B2B sales. The new B2B buzzwords are revenue operations (RevOps), Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Product Officer, and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). The CEO's span of control is expanding as executive suites decide they need more complex teams enabling their work. Marketing ops people can join MOCCA for the full flavor of sales tech buzzwords. Remember ABM because vendors are building services around the concept.
I believe DevOps teams have become a mechanism for discovering new revenue sources via ABM, using IT systems to establish links between sales (account managers) and marketing (product development). They find data to demonstrate new sales opportunities. DevOps generally means integration of different functional silos' contributions to the enterprise's strategic plan. It matters because goals are now aligned and validated by data rather than assumptions.
Here's new math: sales + marketing = revenue ops. Hmmm . . . DevOps + RevOps = Bonanza! I cannot claim to have coined the term "RevOps" because revenue operations is already in action at firms doing ABM.
Listening to sports marketers talk about how they use tech made me smack my head. I can't believe that old-school pro sports talent scouts still refuse to use Moneyball metrics. Sometimes adoption of new techniques unequivocal management support to either use the new method or be fired. Jeff Bezos did this at Amazon to make development products compatible with public interfaces, thus paving the way for Amazon Web Services and the cloud.
The Dreamforce Keynote with CEO Marc Benioff was more low-key than I recall from years past. It's always cool to hear Mr. Benioff talk about love, family, and magical mahalo stuff. People love the guy when he does that. Giving props to Salesforce's big corporate clients enhances his persona as the noble bringer of light and wisdom. My goodness, no wonder Dreamforce is such a costly spectacle, because it costs a fortune to buy such an image of generosity. I trust the guy, and I understand the need for a spectacle to convince everyone else that doing the right thing is worthwhile. Using relatable people as expert examples of Salesforce power users in the keynote's vignettes is a very effective way to make emotional connections in marketing. I have to hand it to Mr. Benioff and his image consultants for pulling off this masterstroke of sincerity.
The keynote rolled out the Trailhead learning platform as some white label solution, much like their Einstein AI predictive analytics solution. Co-Founder Parker Harris did not wear a costume this year. I was disappointed that he had no skit to play. The good news is that Salesforce is now attached to some Google platforms. I'm sure I'll know more about that once I complete some of Google's free training modules. I tried not to LOL that their vignette touting a mobile sales platform used the same scenario (shopping for customized athletic shoes tied to a celebrity's brand) that Oracle OpenWorld 2017 used in a major product keynote. I can't make this stuff up.
I spent some time at the Ops-Stars affiliated event. I really wanted to hear what a VC had to say about his investment criteria, and he surprised me by emphasizing a "go-to-market architecture." The cloud sector's declining costs and increasing quality must make it easier than ever for startups to immediately have world-class IT architecture. The VC guy clearly used the term "RevOps," so my chance to claim ownership of the term vanished into thin air. Oh well, my genius is sufficiently expansive to pioneer other concepts. Any ops team is the CEO's direct strategic presence within a functional silo, so the innovation of RevOps removes the thinking and planning function from sales and aligns marketing with sales in a fusion cell. If you can follow my paraphrasing of that VC's wisdom, then congratulations, you may be qualified to work in RevOps.
It sounds like integrating DevOps and RevOps into an enterprise's strategic plan requires a knowledge management officer (KMO) to synch them. An integrated approach to participating in different functions' working groups is definitely under a KMO's purview. RevOps still uses recognizable KPIs like LTV and CAC, so we don't need a completely new vocabulary.
The Sales Enablement Soiree was another affiliated event that I found intriguing. I had never heard of the "sales enablement" discipline. I worked in sales once and we had "sales support" people who programmed product training. The sales systems have obviously evolved. The Salesforce people were on hand talking up Trailhead for employee on-boarding. It is hard to believe that business leaders still need to "buy in" to enablement, or maybe that imaginary obstacle is just more rationale for an upsell into Trailhead. I cannot find an industry standard definition of sales enablement, so I'll offer my own. Sales enablement is an internal function ensuring sales teams are trained on product knowledge, certifying them on the corporate message, and collaborating on content production.
Other Salesforce keynotes back at the main Dreamforce event clarified a few things. A "Trailblazer" is someone who uses the Trailhead platform. Customer service systems can now instantly perform multifactor ID authentication (i.e., facial and voice recognition) on mobile. The Einstein AI auto-generates graphs produced from the user's data priorities. It's all so pretty to watch from the audience. It must be even more fun up close for users.
The Dreamforce Equality Keynote had something to do with art and activism. Expect professionally unqualified cultural icons to assume leadership roles when political leaders' inaction leaves a vacuum. Americans follow celebrity leadership anyway, so most people won't notice the change. One of the celebrity panelists argued that setting political speech to music gives it mass appeal, moving the media and politics. We saw in 2016 and 2017 how extremists can use the same techniques to promote bigotry and hatred. Look no further than the foreign bots pushing derogatory memes on social media to divide Americans. If artists are fighting back in the name of freedom and equality, then they're doing the right thing for America.
The Compassion in Action Keynote was difficult for me to witness. I have experienced that building compassion into organizations denies human nature; productive people are grasping, vicious, and cutthroat because our species evolved to favor those qualities. Even advocates for compassion recognize how humans respond to transactional initiatives, because generosity must have some self-interest payoff to be sustainable. Allow me to set aside my skepticism for once and recognize some truly good things in this keynote. It's good that we now have evidence that people want to work for companies that offer compassion, meaningful work, and support during adversity. It's classic Stoicism to identify one's own emotional triggers and rehearse a controlled response that is productive and maintains emotional equilibrium. These Dreamforce keynotes do offer good life advice. Marc Benioff brought out a surprise guest at the keynote's end: Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. Mr. Benioff convinced Metallica on short notice to headline a relief concert for the Santa Rosa wildfire victims. I totally agree with Mr. Ulrich's stated formula for enduring success: look forward, be open to inspiration, and have empathy when working with others.
Dreamforce 2017 was a winner. It is the place to be for ginormous amounts of free wisdom. The outside world gets to see San Francisco and Silicon Valley at their best when sales and marketing types converge at Dreamforce. Sometimes getting people to do good is as simple as cajoling them into a decent mindset.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at Trailhead, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Dreamforce designers had wood carvings and other outdoors decorations all over the ground floor of Moscone West, where the Trailhead exhibits dominated the event space. The chainsaw-made wood sculpture at the front door was such a nice touch. I was a Boy Scout once and I never was very skilled at woodcarving. People who complete Salesforce training modules earn badges that look like Scouting merit badges. It's all so positive and benign, you'd almost think no one is making a buck off people. Dreamforce is an amusement park for techies.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at Customer Success Expo, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Customer Success Expo was festooned with the latest tech tricks, and a whole floor of exhibitors giving away free coffee and T-shirts. I scored enough coffee and candy to fuel my entire week. It takes a lot to get me excited sometimes, but free goodies never hurt. I got some hands-on time with several AR/VR displays, which are becoming very common at major tech shows.
 |
| Fake rock cliff on Howard Street, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Trailhead logos and mascots were front and center in many ways. I don't know whether the real Albert Einstein ever went to the woods, but Salesforce has him climbing fake rock cliffs with fake animals. Pop music tribute bands played on the outdoor stage. I wonder which Dreamforce attendees came just to goof off on Howard Street and not tell their head office back home. I only had time for the free coffee and snacks at various places on Howard Street, because that's how I totally score in between events at Dreamforce.
 |
| Radius B2B Champions Club, Dreamforce 2017. |
I attended the Radius B2B Champions Club affiliated event to get a fresh perspective on, what else, B2B sales. The new B2B buzzwords are revenue operations (RevOps), Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Product Officer, and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). The CEO's span of control is expanding as executive suites decide they need more complex teams enabling their work. Marketing ops people can join MOCCA for the full flavor of sales tech buzzwords. Remember ABM because vendors are building services around the concept.
I believe DevOps teams have become a mechanism for discovering new revenue sources via ABM, using IT systems to establish links between sales (account managers) and marketing (product development). They find data to demonstrate new sales opportunities. DevOps generally means integration of different functional silos' contributions to the enterprise's strategic plan. It matters because goals are now aligned and validated by data rather than assumptions.
Here's new math: sales + marketing = revenue ops. Hmmm . . . DevOps + RevOps = Bonanza! I cannot claim to have coined the term "RevOps" because revenue operations is already in action at firms doing ABM.
Listening to sports marketers talk about how they use tech made me smack my head. I can't believe that old-school pro sports talent scouts still refuse to use Moneyball metrics. Sometimes adoption of new techniques unequivocal management support to either use the new method or be fired. Jeff Bezos did this at Amazon to make development products compatible with public interfaces, thus paving the way for Amazon Web Services and the cloud.
 |
| Executive Briefing Center, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Dreamforce Keynote with CEO Marc Benioff was more low-key than I recall from years past. It's always cool to hear Mr. Benioff talk about love, family, and magical mahalo stuff. People love the guy when he does that. Giving props to Salesforce's big corporate clients enhances his persona as the noble bringer of light and wisdom. My goodness, no wonder Dreamforce is such a costly spectacle, because it costs a fortune to buy such an image of generosity. I trust the guy, and I understand the need for a spectacle to convince everyone else that doing the right thing is worthwhile. Using relatable people as expert examples of Salesforce power users in the keynote's vignettes is a very effective way to make emotional connections in marketing. I have to hand it to Mr. Benioff and his image consultants for pulling off this masterstroke of sincerity.
The keynote rolled out the Trailhead learning platform as some white label solution, much like their Einstein AI predictive analytics solution. Co-Founder Parker Harris did not wear a costume this year. I was disappointed that he had no skit to play. The good news is that Salesforce is now attached to some Google platforms. I'm sure I'll know more about that once I complete some of Google's free training modules. I tried not to LOL that their vignette touting a mobile sales platform used the same scenario (shopping for customized athletic shoes tied to a celebrity's brand) that Oracle OpenWorld 2017 used in a major product keynote. I can't make this stuff up.
 |
| Ops-Stars, Dreamforce 2017. |
I spent some time at the Ops-Stars affiliated event. I really wanted to hear what a VC had to say about his investment criteria, and he surprised me by emphasizing a "go-to-market architecture." The cloud sector's declining costs and increasing quality must make it easier than ever for startups to immediately have world-class IT architecture. The VC guy clearly used the term "RevOps," so my chance to claim ownership of the term vanished into thin air. Oh well, my genius is sufficiently expansive to pioneer other concepts. Any ops team is the CEO's direct strategic presence within a functional silo, so the innovation of RevOps removes the thinking and planning function from sales and aligns marketing with sales in a fusion cell. If you can follow my paraphrasing of that VC's wisdom, then congratulations, you may be qualified to work in RevOps.
It sounds like integrating DevOps and RevOps into an enterprise's strategic plan requires a knowledge management officer (KMO) to synch them. An integrated approach to participating in different functions' working groups is definitely under a KMO's purview. RevOps still uses recognizable KPIs like LTV and CAC, so we don't need a completely new vocabulary.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at Sales Enablement Soiree, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Sales Enablement Soiree was another affiliated event that I found intriguing. I had never heard of the "sales enablement" discipline. I worked in sales once and we had "sales support" people who programmed product training. The sales systems have obviously evolved. The Salesforce people were on hand talking up Trailhead for employee on-boarding. It is hard to believe that business leaders still need to "buy in" to enablement, or maybe that imaginary obstacle is just more rationale for an upsell into Trailhead. I cannot find an industry standard definition of sales enablement, so I'll offer my own. Sales enablement is an internal function ensuring sales teams are trained on product knowledge, certifying them on the corporate message, and collaborating on content production.
Other Salesforce keynotes back at the main Dreamforce event clarified a few things. A "Trailblazer" is someone who uses the Trailhead platform. Customer service systems can now instantly perform multifactor ID authentication (i.e., facial and voice recognition) on mobile. The Einstein AI auto-generates graphs produced from the user's data priorities. It's all so pretty to watch from the audience. It must be even more fun up close for users.
 |
| Mascots dance at Equality Keynote, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Dreamforce Equality Keynote had something to do with art and activism. Expect professionally unqualified cultural icons to assume leadership roles when political leaders' inaction leaves a vacuum. Americans follow celebrity leadership anyway, so most people won't notice the change. One of the celebrity panelists argued that setting political speech to music gives it mass appeal, moving the media and politics. We saw in 2016 and 2017 how extremists can use the same techniques to promote bigotry and hatred. Look no further than the foreign bots pushing derogatory memes on social media to divide Americans. If artists are fighting back in the name of freedom and equality, then they're doing the right thing for America.
 |
| Einstein AI solution, Dreamforce 2017. |
The Compassion in Action Keynote was difficult for me to witness. I have experienced that building compassion into organizations denies human nature; productive people are grasping, vicious, and cutthroat because our species evolved to favor those qualities. Even advocates for compassion recognize how humans respond to transactional initiatives, because generosity must have some self-interest payoff to be sustainable. Allow me to set aside my skepticism for once and recognize some truly good things in this keynote. It's good that we now have evidence that people want to work for companies that offer compassion, meaningful work, and support during adversity. It's classic Stoicism to identify one's own emotional triggers and rehearse a controlled response that is productive and maintains emotional equilibrium. These Dreamforce keynotes do offer good life advice. Marc Benioff brought out a surprise guest at the keynote's end: Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. Mr. Benioff convinced Metallica on short notice to headline a relief concert for the Santa Rosa wildfire victims. I totally agree with Mr. Ulrich's stated formula for enduring success: look forward, be open to inspiration, and have empathy when working with others.
Dreamforce 2017 was a winner. It is the place to be for ginormous amounts of free wisdom. The outside world gets to see San Francisco and Silicon Valley at their best when sales and marketing types converge at Dreamforce. Sometimes getting people to do good is as simple as cajoling them into a decent mindset.
Alfidi Capital at Cloud and IoT Expo 2017
There is an endless parade of cloud computing action in Silicon Valley. I attended Sys-Con's Cloud Expo and IoT Expo 2017 down in Santa Clara to check out the latest action. They also had some Big Data and DevOps stuff going on at this show. It's easy to get all of these cloud conferences mixed up if we don't identify the primary organizers. It's even easier to understand cloud action once you read my Alfidi Capital blog articles. I do in fact have a badge selfie, as you can see below.
The major cloud providers all publish global maps of their service availability zones. Their data center locations may be proprietary information, so I will let interested readers peruse those maps on their own. Cloud users should know how a cloud provider will support their data classification and workload types. AI processing of enormous data volumes will drive cloud growth, and so will blockchain adoption. "Serverless" is a new cloud buzzword often appearing with "containerization" in a buzzword combo.
One speaker took the stage in an inflatable dinosaur costume to tell us about microservices. It was a cute stunt. Microservices decompose a tech's scope into single-function modules, reducing a system's complexity by minimizing communications between people. Expect to see this "microservices" buzzword to join "containers" because it sounds so cool. Kubernetes fans can use the Istio open source framework along with whatever toolchain they need; someone will likely be impressed.
All of this talk about microservices made me ponder how I would use them in a real project. API governance is a new challenge for microservices frameworks. A bigger challenge is to model workflows that cross different microservice architectures. I searched the Web for examples of these models; there are quite a few. Code Project may have something useful. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2017 identifies machine learning (ML) very close to the peak of the current cycle. I need an open source ML process or AI engine I can use to improve an app or bot, provided I could control the input of proprietary data. The process needs to handle classification, clustering, and regression without problems. Alternatively, I could use open source training data sets, similar to the business data I need to process. Perhaps Uncle Sam's Data.gov has both training and real data that would suit my analytical goals.
Ask yourselves what "serverless" truly means, given the chronic underutilization of on-premise data centers. Serverless is not just another cloud function. It should remove developers from routine things and given them true DevOps freedom. Seek the cloud's wisdom if you speak the correct language. I will not take a serverless expert seriously if they think ICO "digital credit" as a virtual asset is something the cloud can leverage.
Cloud operators are talking more about the EU's GDPR and the need to do a gap analysis to become compliant. It's a healthy development for anyone who respects data privacy. Outsourcing GDPR compliance services is now a growing cottage industry in the cloud sector. Operators also need cool metrics like "idea to cash" and mean time to repair (MTTR) to impress their financial auditors.
The cloud cannot exist separately from the real-world IoT systems it will manage. Manufacturing plants are info-synched to adjust operations in real time, so the physical plant must be designed to incorporate software and sensors for data capture. I foresee massive security vulnerabilities if manufacturers allow their supply chain vendors to have real time visibility into their live factory operations. Such easy access allows hackers and viruses easy penetration to an entire vertical. The cloud can make ordinary ICS/SCADA vulnerabilities even worse.
Cloud success increasingly means using AI. Imagine AI governing BRMS with the ability to adjust principal rules. A human designer must be in the loop to ensure the AI does not get out of control. If the Singularity happens, the most likely origin will be some AI governing a major cloud provider that has access to the AIs of enterprise clients running their own BRMS through public clouds. The self-aware computer apocalypse is the worst-case scenario of AIs leveraging other AIs. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) should codify standards that will prevent this AI nightmare.
Choosing a cloud provider has strategic implications for a business. All configurations (data center, container, serverless) lead to "vendor lock" where a customer is permanently tied to one cloud provider. This is the exact definition of a switching cost in a sector where the biggest players have a durable competitive advantage. It's why data centers are becoming just like railroads and pipelines. Cloud vendor lock is a switching cost for the customer and a competitive advantage for the provider. Spell my name correctly when you quote me on that point.
DevOps people belong in the cloud. Read the Puppet and DORA State of DevOps Report 2017 for assessments of where DevOps is going. There are also plenty of DevOps handbooks and white papers on the Web for additional guidance. I know how to solve the tech culture problem of which developer cult is best for the cloud sector. Design a "Project X" and have different teams (DevOps, agile/lean, waterfall) work to solve it on a fixed budget. Ready, set, go. May the best team win. There will always be some expert who thinks forcing teams to compete is bad, and who can cite research on development teams to support that conclusion. My point is that they don't need to compete internally, so the competition should be confined to conferences and hackathons where teams can demonstrate their skills.
Containerization is the future of the cloud. Composable infrastructures should theoretically lead to the elimination of data junkyards. We will see how fast this elimination occurs if the cloud continues to trend away from virtualization and towards containerization. Latency is the single most important business criteria determining resources directed to containerization. Power management is the single most important limiting factor in data center optimization.
The app development ecosystem has massively diversified and has become dependent upon object assembly from multiple open source code bases. Optimizing apps with AIs will be a big thing. Open source APIs must be flexible enough to accommodate microservices designed for either containers or virtual machines. Each microservice must perform one function only, and must only communicate with other functions via well-developed APIs; otherwise the microservice will not work well with containers.
Plan out cloud use thoroughly. Assess the opportunity cost of not using cloud for some project. The cost avoidance is justification for cloud adoption. Any business decision in a large enterprise that's not justified with data will come down to politics. Design thinking is useful in enterprise architecture, with every potential choice having its own cost estimate.
Scrum is one variation of the Agile Manifesto. Making agile work in verticals with declining economics means firing a lot of senior people who stand in the way of a pivot that will keep the organization alive. The dinosaurs won't take risks. The old 80/20 rule applies, so the worst 20% of employees just won't grok agile. Once they find less demanding jobs at less pay, they may have an epiphany that they need to acquire new skills and attitudes. The cloud will disintermediate servers from their users.
I am very impressed with emerging attempts to determine the economic value of data (EVD). The accounting approach to EVD is wrong because accounting uses historical cost only. Economics uses a future value for EVD because data value persists into the future as its multiplier effect cascades throughout a network. I like a quote I heard at the conference from a data science practitioner working on EVD: "Data is the new sun, not the new oil." Petroleum is a deleting asset. The sun never wears out, just like data persists. That one metaphor made my entire conference attendance worthwhile. Upon reflection, I will add that EVD models must account for incorrect or obsolete data that must eliminated and no longer adds value. Data's persistence does not make it immune from depreciation.
Edge computing makes IoT smarter. The MQTT protocol is multi-cloud connective tissue where more than one cloud overlaps with remote devices. Edge analytics turns BI into behavioral understanding; expect it to use data lake dumping (heads up, Hadoop fans). Common cloud architecture uses MQTT to push data from analytics engines (assigned to collect from IoT device categories) into the cloud. The whole point of edge computing is to reduce the volume of data going to the cloud. It economizes on traffic by sending only analytics (a compression of data) or patterns (even further compression).
I covered a lot of intellectual ground at this Cloud / IoT Expo. The tech expertise routinely concentrated into the Santa Clara Convention Center is one of the wonders of Silicon Valley. The conference gave me even more inspiration for some tech ideas that I really need to execute. I may even showcase my concepts at next year's Cloud / IoT Expo. The sky is truly the limit in the cloud.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at Cloud and IoT Expo 2017. |
The major cloud providers all publish global maps of their service availability zones. Their data center locations may be proprietary information, so I will let interested readers peruse those maps on their own. Cloud users should know how a cloud provider will support their data classification and workload types. AI processing of enormous data volumes will drive cloud growth, and so will blockchain adoption. "Serverless" is a new cloud buzzword often appearing with "containerization" in a buzzword combo.
One speaker took the stage in an inflatable dinosaur costume to tell us about microservices. It was a cute stunt. Microservices decompose a tech's scope into single-function modules, reducing a system's complexity by minimizing communications between people. Expect to see this "microservices" buzzword to join "containers" because it sounds so cool. Kubernetes fans can use the Istio open source framework along with whatever toolchain they need; someone will likely be impressed.
All of this talk about microservices made me ponder how I would use them in a real project. API governance is a new challenge for microservices frameworks. A bigger challenge is to model workflows that cross different microservice architectures. I searched the Web for examples of these models; there are quite a few. Code Project may have something useful. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2017 identifies machine learning (ML) very close to the peak of the current cycle. I need an open source ML process or AI engine I can use to improve an app or bot, provided I could control the input of proprietary data. The process needs to handle classification, clustering, and regression without problems. Alternatively, I could use open source training data sets, similar to the business data I need to process. Perhaps Uncle Sam's Data.gov has both training and real data that would suit my analytical goals.
Ask yourselves what "serverless" truly means, given the chronic underutilization of on-premise data centers. Serverless is not just another cloud function. It should remove developers from routine things and given them true DevOps freedom. Seek the cloud's wisdom if you speak the correct language. I will not take a serverless expert seriously if they think ICO "digital credit" as a virtual asset is something the cloud can leverage.
Cloud operators are talking more about the EU's GDPR and the need to do a gap analysis to become compliant. It's a healthy development for anyone who respects data privacy. Outsourcing GDPR compliance services is now a growing cottage industry in the cloud sector. Operators also need cool metrics like "idea to cash" and mean time to repair (MTTR) to impress their financial auditors.
The cloud cannot exist separately from the real-world IoT systems it will manage. Manufacturing plants are info-synched to adjust operations in real time, so the physical plant must be designed to incorporate software and sensors for data capture. I foresee massive security vulnerabilities if manufacturers allow their supply chain vendors to have real time visibility into their live factory operations. Such easy access allows hackers and viruses easy penetration to an entire vertical. The cloud can make ordinary ICS/SCADA vulnerabilities even worse.
Cloud success increasingly means using AI. Imagine AI governing BRMS with the ability to adjust principal rules. A human designer must be in the loop to ensure the AI does not get out of control. If the Singularity happens, the most likely origin will be some AI governing a major cloud provider that has access to the AIs of enterprise clients running their own BRMS through public clouds. The self-aware computer apocalypse is the worst-case scenario of AIs leveraging other AIs. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) should codify standards that will prevent this AI nightmare.
Choosing a cloud provider has strategic implications for a business. All configurations (data center, container, serverless) lead to "vendor lock" where a customer is permanently tied to one cloud provider. This is the exact definition of a switching cost in a sector where the biggest players have a durable competitive advantage. It's why data centers are becoming just like railroads and pipelines. Cloud vendor lock is a switching cost for the customer and a competitive advantage for the provider. Spell my name correctly when you quote me on that point.
DevOps people belong in the cloud. Read the Puppet and DORA State of DevOps Report 2017 for assessments of where DevOps is going. There are also plenty of DevOps handbooks and white papers on the Web for additional guidance. I know how to solve the tech culture problem of which developer cult is best for the cloud sector. Design a "Project X" and have different teams (DevOps, agile/lean, waterfall) work to solve it on a fixed budget. Ready, set, go. May the best team win. There will always be some expert who thinks forcing teams to compete is bad, and who can cite research on development teams to support that conclusion. My point is that they don't need to compete internally, so the competition should be confined to conferences and hackathons where teams can demonstrate their skills.
Containerization is the future of the cloud. Composable infrastructures should theoretically lead to the elimination of data junkyards. We will see how fast this elimination occurs if the cloud continues to trend away from virtualization and towards containerization. Latency is the single most important business criteria determining resources directed to containerization. Power management is the single most important limiting factor in data center optimization.
The app development ecosystem has massively diversified and has become dependent upon object assembly from multiple open source code bases. Optimizing apps with AIs will be a big thing. Open source APIs must be flexible enough to accommodate microservices designed for either containers or virtual machines. Each microservice must perform one function only, and must only communicate with other functions via well-developed APIs; otherwise the microservice will not work well with containers.
Plan out cloud use thoroughly. Assess the opportunity cost of not using cloud for some project. The cost avoidance is justification for cloud adoption. Any business decision in a large enterprise that's not justified with data will come down to politics. Design thinking is useful in enterprise architecture, with every potential choice having its own cost estimate.
Scrum is one variation of the Agile Manifesto. Making agile work in verticals with declining economics means firing a lot of senior people who stand in the way of a pivot that will keep the organization alive. The dinosaurs won't take risks. The old 80/20 rule applies, so the worst 20% of employees just won't grok agile. Once they find less demanding jobs at less pay, they may have an epiphany that they need to acquire new skills and attitudes. The cloud will disintermediate servers from their users.
I am very impressed with emerging attempts to determine the economic value of data (EVD). The accounting approach to EVD is wrong because accounting uses historical cost only. Economics uses a future value for EVD because data value persists into the future as its multiplier effect cascades throughout a network. I like a quote I heard at the conference from a data science practitioner working on EVD: "Data is the new sun, not the new oil." Petroleum is a deleting asset. The sun never wears out, just like data persists. That one metaphor made my entire conference attendance worthwhile. Upon reflection, I will add that EVD models must account for incorrect or obsolete data that must eliminated and no longer adds value. Data's persistence does not make it immune from depreciation.
Edge computing makes IoT smarter. The MQTT protocol is multi-cloud connective tissue where more than one cloud overlaps with remote devices. Edge analytics turns BI into behavioral understanding; expect it to use data lake dumping (heads up, Hadoop fans). Common cloud architecture uses MQTT to push data from analytics engines (assigned to collect from IoT device categories) into the cloud. The whole point of edge computing is to reduce the volume of data going to the cloud. It economizes on traffic by sending only analytics (a compression of data) or patterns (even further compression).
I covered a lot of intellectual ground at this Cloud / IoT Expo. The tech expertise routinely concentrated into the Santa Clara Convention Center is one of the wonders of Silicon Valley. The conference gave me even more inspiration for some tech ideas that I really need to execute. I may even showcase my concepts at next year's Cloud / IoT Expo. The sky is truly the limit in the cloud.
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Alfidi Capital at BoxWorks 2017
Here we go with another very special description of my experience with the Box ecosystem. I'm talking about BoxWorks 2017, of course, and I attended for more than just the free food. Check out my badge selfie below, and then we can get to work talking about enterprise cloud computing.
Box CEO Aaron Levie is still as dynamic and charismatic as ever in his public appearances. He had a nice dig at Juicero's failure: "The only sector not disrupted (by digital tech) is juice." I'm glad I never bought a Juicero machine. There weren't any clear breakpoints between the four eras of content management's evolution he described, but the clear driver of progress is the cloud's ability to rapidly scale up processes. Study up on information governance and encryption key management to know how IT pros manage their secure clouds.
The "wow" moments for me came during some of the product demos. Box workflows now enable assigning business tasks to trusted partners outside the enterprise. The BoxSkills video search can map facial recognition by frame, make tags searchable in a content management system, and extract an entire transcript of a video's conversation into text and closed captions. That is a big leap in machine learning (ML). It can do similar things with audio file searches, and it performs a sentiment analysis of the voices in an audio file. Wow, I mean, like, wow.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky came out for a chat with Aaron Levie. I did not know that these hoteliers started by selling boxed cereal. Mr. Chesky had a bunch of insights to share on innovation, especially on building a team that actually pushes an innovative project. His description of a handcrafted design thinking process is also covered in Reid Hoffman's Masters of Scale podcast, which used Airbnb as one of its many case studies. Yes folks, I pay attention what these experts broadcast.
Building apps without coding is the future of development. Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) are part of the low-code/no-code (LCNC) movement that enables non-computer scientists to build business apps. Box showed off their LCDPs where an amateur's business apps can integrate with workflows and define triggers for actions. The revelation for me is that any API connection (as a process) can be automated, and even blockchain integration is possible with these homemade apps.
American companies must now prepare for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very comprehensive regulation that touches any data process touching an EU nation's citizens. Expect serious fines for even inadvertent violations. Businesses developing binding corporate rules (BCRs) for GDPR compliance will pay premiums for "good practice" (GxP) implementation consultants if they don't have in-house EU expertise. They can start by reviewing the Privacy Shield Frameworks the US has worked out with its European counterparts. Cloud providers in particular will need to implement the BSI Cloud Computing Compliance Control Catalogue (C5) and Trusted Cloud Data Protection Profile (TCDP) if they do business in Germany. Attend BoxWorks and you learn about this stuff.
I had an epiphany during the second day's keynote. We need new metrics to evaluate both revenue per user and the cost of API calls per month for cloud companies and the data sector. It's no longer sufficient to process huge numbers of API calls per month, because call usage must be profitable to sustain the cloud enterprise. These metrics work just like revenue passenger miles in the airline sector and ton miles in trucking. Atomized revenue metrics determine whether an enterprise's assets are adding value at their full capacity.
The fun Crystal Ball keynote used a fake "Space Ham" movie production as a vehicle to Box's planned future product functions. No one outside the company will know whether these dream products make it to market. I was more impressed with the audio and video products they already have. The audience was seeded with Box employees for recognition at the end, and they obviously led applause prompts at key moments. Every aspiring enterprise tech startup should learn how to evenly distribute the ringers throughout their sponsored conference. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the closing keynote, and he was a knockout as usual. The dude had galaxies on his necktie, which just reinforces my opinion that he should run NASA. I noticed a typo on his slide showing this 2017's Santa Rosa, California wildfires dated "2018," the wrong year. That's a trivial error in an otherwise flawless presentation on species intelligence, global consciousness, and the humility that comes with a cosmic perspective. He got a standing ovation at the end after totally capturing everyone's attention and imagination. Dr. Tyson is definitely qualified for national and global leadership roles.
BoxWorks exceeded my expectations, just like the other Box events I have attended. If you're putting on a tech show, it needs to be big, loud, and most of all packed with expert wisdom. I will see Mr. Levie and the rest of the team in years to come.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at BoxWorks 2017. |
Box CEO Aaron Levie is still as dynamic and charismatic as ever in his public appearances. He had a nice dig at Juicero's failure: "The only sector not disrupted (by digital tech) is juice." I'm glad I never bought a Juicero machine. There weren't any clear breakpoints between the four eras of content management's evolution he described, but the clear driver of progress is the cloud's ability to rapidly scale up processes. Study up on information governance and encryption key management to know how IT pros manage their secure clouds.
The "wow" moments for me came during some of the product demos. Box workflows now enable assigning business tasks to trusted partners outside the enterprise. The BoxSkills video search can map facial recognition by frame, make tags searchable in a content management system, and extract an entire transcript of a video's conversation into text and closed captions. That is a big leap in machine learning (ML). It can do similar things with audio file searches, and it performs a sentiment analysis of the voices in an audio file. Wow, I mean, like, wow.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky came out for a chat with Aaron Levie. I did not know that these hoteliers started by selling boxed cereal. Mr. Chesky had a bunch of insights to share on innovation, especially on building a team that actually pushes an innovative project. His description of a handcrafted design thinking process is also covered in Reid Hoffman's Masters of Scale podcast, which used Airbnb as one of its many case studies. Yes folks, I pay attention what these experts broadcast.
Building apps without coding is the future of development. Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) are part of the low-code/no-code (LCNC) movement that enables non-computer scientists to build business apps. Box showed off their LCDPs where an amateur's business apps can integrate with workflows and define triggers for actions. The revelation for me is that any API connection (as a process) can be automated, and even blockchain integration is possible with these homemade apps.
American companies must now prepare for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very comprehensive regulation that touches any data process touching an EU nation's citizens. Expect serious fines for even inadvertent violations. Businesses developing binding corporate rules (BCRs) for GDPR compliance will pay premiums for "good practice" (GxP) implementation consultants if they don't have in-house EU expertise. They can start by reviewing the Privacy Shield Frameworks the US has worked out with its European counterparts. Cloud providers in particular will need to implement the BSI Cloud Computing Compliance Control Catalogue (C5) and Trusted Cloud Data Protection Profile (TCDP) if they do business in Germany. Attend BoxWorks and you learn about this stuff.
I had an epiphany during the second day's keynote. We need new metrics to evaluate both revenue per user and the cost of API calls per month for cloud companies and the data sector. It's no longer sufficient to process huge numbers of API calls per month, because call usage must be profitable to sustain the cloud enterprise. These metrics work just like revenue passenger miles in the airline sector and ton miles in trucking. Atomized revenue metrics determine whether an enterprise's assets are adding value at their full capacity.
The fun Crystal Ball keynote used a fake "Space Ham" movie production as a vehicle to Box's planned future product functions. No one outside the company will know whether these dream products make it to market. I was more impressed with the audio and video products they already have. The audience was seeded with Box employees for recognition at the end, and they obviously led applause prompts at key moments. Every aspiring enterprise tech startup should learn how to evenly distribute the ringers throughout their sponsored conference. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the closing keynote, and he was a knockout as usual. The dude had galaxies on his necktie, which just reinforces my opinion that he should run NASA. I noticed a typo on his slide showing this 2017's Santa Rosa, California wildfires dated "2018," the wrong year. That's a trivial error in an otherwise flawless presentation on species intelligence, global consciousness, and the humility that comes with a cosmic perspective. He got a standing ovation at the end after totally capturing everyone's attention and imagination. Dr. Tyson is definitely qualified for national and global leadership roles.
BoxWorks exceeded my expectations, just like the other Box events I have attended. If you're putting on a tech show, it needs to be big, loud, and most of all packed with expert wisdom. I will see Mr. Levie and the rest of the team in years to come.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Alfidi Capital at Oracle OpenWorld 2017
I attended Oracle OpenWorld 2017 because I am all about tracking cloud sector action. Check out my Oracle badge selfies below so we can get right to work talking about important cloud stuff. I dare you to keep up with all of the photographic proof in this article that I really got a lot from this conference.
I sat way in the back for Larry Ellison's welcome keynote, figuring that a speedier exit to the next event was better than being up close with the star himself. The opening speakers introduced the concurrent events like JavaOne and Oracle Code. Some SVP from Intel got going about "blah blah transformation" (that's exactly what I wrote down, it was all about blah blah). I totally called it when Intel's video teaser said data is the most powerful force in the world, because I'm awesome. Intel did impart some wisdom about the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).
Intel and AT+T talked the talk about network capacity and virtualization before Larry came out. All of these concepts, including future blockchain execution, validate my belief that data center REITs as a "pick and shovel play" on the cloud sector will see massive growth for years. These kinds of REITs can handle both cloud expansion and legacy on-premise computing. All of those servers need to sit somewhere, and REITs owning the buildings will get paid to keep them secure.
Larry came out and hit a few themes, like autonomous databases in cybersecurity, that I'm pretty sure he's promoted at previous Oracle OpenWorld keynotes. Automated detection and response to intrusion reminds me of his pitch in 2015. Whatever happened to the software that was supposed to be hard-coded into the servers? Is that product still available? I have no idea, because I don't work at Oracle. Anyway, Larry said that Oracle's auto-cyber machine learning security thing will be half the cost of Amazon Redshift. I wonder whether any of Amazon's cloud offerings will still be part of big Amazon after the next downturn. Larry taught me a new catchphrase, "automated hardware resource elasticity," his term of art for planning network and cloud capacity utilization. The term IMHO implies automation of purchase and leasing decisions for new capacity. Whoa, I would not trust a machine learning algorithm to make financial commitments.
The Tuesday morning keynote gave me food for thought about virtualization. I do not consider virtualization to be synonymous with optimization, partly because containers are compatible with cloud virtualization. Object programming has now come full circle; DBAs can connect action blocks to process flows and search fields, using free-form natural language that tells bots to process cloud server requests with no programming language needed at all to configure cloud settings. Business rule management systems (BRMS) are moving from rule-based processing to inference-based processing; it's how e-commerce sites push product recommendations across social media channels. I did not know that lift analysis was amenable to A/B testing, but that's how smart business users adjust product positioning and avoid brand conflicts between competing products.
Larry's second keynote was his chance to tell us all how he's making a more secure cloud. I was not surprised to hear that Oracle's cloud security concept is still not 100% automated after all the hype people in this sector are putting into AI and machine learning. We're not yet at the nerd nirvana of total security automation. Larry's insight that standard log analytics are hard to run for data security due to different data silos tells me that there's a developmental opportunity for something that compares different silos simultaneously.
The Code Conference Developer Keynote had lots of gems for Oracle developers. I am not a developer, so they can't make me do their work for them. The lesson from all of these "ecosystem development partners" was that other tech companies' APIs and microservices can reside on Oracle's IaaS and PaaS. These people are the developers building the code behind the plain language business objects demonstrated in OpenWorld's keynotes, complete with staged problem-solving vignettes.
It was a privilege to hear Patrick Debois, founder of the DevOps movement, speak on the DevOps mindset at the Code Conference. DevOps people grok the outsourcing movement to the cloud. Patrick envisions cloud services as an application of Promise Theory where DevOps people must collaborate with third parties outside their enterprise, so customers have more realistic expectations of service reliability.
One top Oracle honcho gave a keynote on how to "own your next," playing on some theme around the word NEXT. True believers want us to know that blockchain will solve all of our problems. Get ready for more blockchain-as-a-service things like Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. Finally, we see blockchain in its originally intended use as a transaction audit ledger instead of its miscast role as an asset. There was a retired NBA legend on hand in this keynote to share with us the typical motivational speech on humility, persistence, and setting goals. The legend did cite Malcolm Gladwell's Blink as an example of NBA superstars' abilities. Uniquely wired brains can explain so much of superperformance. I always knew that, because I have a uniquely wired brain myself.
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee took time out of his busy schedule to rededicate the renovated South Hall of Moscone Center. I scored a front row seat for his talk because I'm special. Actually, I just showed up early to get in line. Yeah, that makes me pretty darn special. I heard there was free stuff for the first people who arrived.
Mayor Lee cut the ribbon re-opening Moscone South with help from one of Oracle's top executives. Oracle could not have timed this event any better for the free publicity. I would have helped cut that ribbon but no one asked me, so I guess the folks in charge had it all under control.
Oracle also held its NetSuite SuiteConnect conference in conjunction with OpenWorld. I did not have enough time to review this suite's shiny features. Oracle acquired NetSuite in 2016 to have a turn-key, all-in-one ERP offering that SMBs can use. I don't know what's wrong with Oracle's existing product line that they must add a one size fits all solution, unless they feel the need to keep up with Salesforce.
The Java Community Keynote was the JavaOne wrap-up, and a continuing lesson in how the developer community generates its own mythos. The perfunctory JavaOne keynotes opened with IBM Open Source project team introducing its Open Liberty platform for building Java microservices and cloud apps. We also got to hear about how the Eclipse Foundation supports microprofiles that build enterprise capabilities for microservices.
The fun started when one of Oracle's top Java evangelists came out to set the scenario for the long skit the Java community performs as the culmination of its keynote. This year's theme was a spoof of the Matrix movies where Neo, a Java developer, must use his coding skills to defend the Oracle community. There were lots of inside jokes about programming, a "bullet time" motion capture demonstration, and a light sculpture installation from an artist playing the "Oracle" (get it?). Juggy J. Finch, the puppet mascot of the worldwide Java user community, played the Morpheus role. I liked how the coders poked fun at the buzzword bingo of AI, blockchain and other popular terms.
I must bring this summary of Oracle OpenWorld 2017 to a close. You can see from the above photo how strongly I support VetsinTech, a non-profit organization that gets US military veterans into tech careers. Oracle and its partners would do well to hire our veterans. The Java Community Process is big enough to accommodate them. I shall return to future Oracle events to watch it all unfold.
 |
| Oracle had its sign up at Moscone West. |
I sat way in the back for Larry Ellison's welcome keynote, figuring that a speedier exit to the next event was better than being up close with the star himself. The opening speakers introduced the concurrent events like JavaOne and Oracle Code. Some SVP from Intel got going about "blah blah transformation" (that's exactly what I wrote down, it was all about blah blah). I totally called it when Intel's video teaser said data is the most powerful force in the world, because I'm awesome. Intel did impart some wisdom about the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).
 |
| Oracle had another big sign over at Moscone South. |
Intel and AT+T talked the talk about network capacity and virtualization before Larry came out. All of these concepts, including future blockchain execution, validate my belief that data center REITs as a "pick and shovel play" on the cloud sector will see massive growth for years. These kinds of REITs can handle both cloud expansion and legacy on-premise computing. All of those servers need to sit somewhere, and REITs owning the buildings will get paid to keep them secure.
 |
| I saw a large number 9 at Moscone West. |
Larry came out and hit a few themes, like autonomous databases in cybersecurity, that I'm pretty sure he's promoted at previous Oracle OpenWorld keynotes. Automated detection and response to intrusion reminds me of his pitch in 2015. Whatever happened to the software that was supposed to be hard-coded into the servers? Is that product still available? I have no idea, because I don't work at Oracle. Anyway, Larry said that Oracle's auto-cyber machine learning security thing will be half the cost of Amazon Redshift. I wonder whether any of Amazon's cloud offerings will still be part of big Amazon after the next downturn. Larry taught me a new catchphrase, "automated hardware resource elasticity," his term of art for planning network and cloud capacity utilization. The term IMHO implies automation of purchase and leasing decisions for new capacity. Whoa, I would not trust a machine learning algorithm to make financial commitments.
 |
| IBM sketched storage and next-gen ERP at the Expo. |
The Tuesday morning keynote gave me food for thought about virtualization. I do not consider virtualization to be synonymous with optimization, partly because containers are compatible with cloud virtualization. Object programming has now come full circle; DBAs can connect action blocks to process flows and search fields, using free-form natural language that tells bots to process cloud server requests with no programming language needed at all to configure cloud settings. Business rule management systems (BRMS) are moving from rule-based processing to inference-based processing; it's how e-commerce sites push product recommendations across social media channels. I did not know that lift analysis was amenable to A/B testing, but that's how smart business users adjust product positioning and avoid brand conflicts between competing products.
 |
| IBM sketched boxes and clouds at the Expo. |
Larry's second keynote was his chance to tell us all how he's making a more secure cloud. I was not surprised to hear that Oracle's cloud security concept is still not 100% automated after all the hype people in this sector are putting into AI and machine learning. We're not yet at the nerd nirvana of total security automation. Larry's insight that standard log analytics are hard to run for data security due to different data silos tells me that there's a developmental opportunity for something that compares different silos simultaneously.
 |
| IBM sketched excellence and migration at the Expo. |
The Code Conference Developer Keynote had lots of gems for Oracle developers. I am not a developer, so they can't make me do their work for them. The lesson from all of these "ecosystem development partners" was that other tech companies' APIs and microservices can reside on Oracle's IaaS and PaaS. These people are the developers building the code behind the plain language business objects demonstrated in OpenWorld's keynotes, complete with staged problem-solving vignettes.
It was a privilege to hear Patrick Debois, founder of the DevOps movement, speak on the DevOps mindset at the Code Conference. DevOps people grok the outsourcing movement to the cloud. Patrick envisions cloud services as an application of Promise Theory where DevOps people must collaborate with third parties outside their enterprise, so customers have more realistic expectations of service reliability.
One top Oracle honcho gave a keynote on how to "own your next," playing on some theme around the word NEXT. True believers want us to know that blockchain will solve all of our problems. Get ready for more blockchain-as-a-service things like Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. Finally, we see blockchain in its originally intended use as a transaction audit ledger instead of its miscast role as an asset. There was a retired NBA legend on hand in this keynote to share with us the typical motivational speech on humility, persistence, and setting goals. The legend did cite Malcolm Gladwell's Blink as an example of NBA superstars' abilities. Uniquely wired brains can explain so much of superperformance. I always knew that, because I have a uniquely wired brain myself.
 |
| Mayor Ed Lee addresses OOW 2017. |
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee took time out of his busy schedule to rededicate the renovated South Hall of Moscone Center. I scored a front row seat for his talk because I'm special. Actually, I just showed up early to get in line. Yeah, that makes me pretty darn special. I heard there was free stuff for the first people who arrived.
 |
| Mayor Ed Lee cuts the ribbon at Moscone South. |
Mayor Lee cut the ribbon re-opening Moscone South with help from one of Oracle's top executives. Oracle could not have timed this event any better for the free publicity. I would have helped cut that ribbon but no one asked me, so I guess the folks in charge had it all under control.
Oracle also held its NetSuite SuiteConnect conference in conjunction with OpenWorld. I did not have enough time to review this suite's shiny features. Oracle acquired NetSuite in 2016 to have a turn-key, all-in-one ERP offering that SMBs can use. I don't know what's wrong with Oracle's existing product line that they must add a one size fits all solution, unless they feel the need to keep up with Salesforce.
 |
| Duke points the way to the JavaOne Keynote. |
The Java Community Keynote was the JavaOne wrap-up, and a continuing lesson in how the developer community generates its own mythos. The perfunctory JavaOne keynotes opened with IBM Open Source project team introducing its Open Liberty platform for building Java microservices and cloud apps. We also got to hear about how the Eclipse Foundation supports microprofiles that build enterprise capabilities for microservices.
 |
| Java coders explored the Matrix. |
The fun started when one of Oracle's top Java evangelists came out to set the scenario for the long skit the Java community performs as the culmination of its keynote. This year's theme was a spoof of the Matrix movies where Neo, a Java developer, must use his coding skills to defend the Oracle community. There were lots of inside jokes about programming, a "bullet time" motion capture demonstration, and a light sculpture installation from an artist playing the "Oracle" (get it?). Juggy J. Finch, the puppet mascot of the worldwide Java user community, played the Morpheus role. I liked how the coders poked fun at the buzzword bingo of AI, blockchain and other popular terms.
 |
| I support VetsinTech. |
I must bring this summary of Oracle OpenWorld 2017 to a close. You can see from the above photo how strongly I support VetsinTech, a non-profit organization that gets US military veterans into tech careers. Oracle and its partners would do well to hire our veterans. The Java Community Process is big enough to accommodate them. I shall return to future Oracle events to watch it all unfold.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Alfidi Capital at DevTech Strategy Summit 2017
I attended the DevTech Strategy Summit in San Francisco. I don't recall ever seeing this event before so I couldn't miss it, especially because it's from the same organizers behind DeveloperWeek. The developers have their own show for practical tools, and this one was for executives bringing a bunch of enterprise functions together. Check out my badge selfie below and let's get to work.
The dialogue between developers and executives got some needed attention. Developing mobile apps in a vacuum makes no sense if it ignores a market segment's pain points. Imagine how Customer Development works for a dev-focused product, then imagine engaging prospects at different levels of the marketing funnel. Use lots of imagination, or borrow someone else's imagination if you're left-brain dominant and can't compensate.
Developers still get hung up on designing the perfect product if they think budgets are unlimited, which happens when overly generous investors support weak managerial discipline. Project leads must show the Cloudonomics metrics demonstrating the lower cost and higher ROI of their preferred solution. My regular readers know that I have harped on Cloudonomics many times as a proof-of-concept guide, yet many developers dreaming of startup riches still don't take it seriously.
The CIO is still the ultimate purchase decision maker for tech not available in-house. They are especially important in minimizing buys of incompatible shadow IT. The key to their success is evangelizing developers who have the authority to recommend software buys. CIOs need Cloudonomics more than anyone but I suspect most don't even look for the metrics. Computer science programs need to start teaching a business-related elective covering the ROI of project development.
The DevTech panelists came with some best practices for executives. Using searches with Bayesian logic in Stack Overflow can measure developers' engagement with a topic by showing how quickly questions get answered. Tracking GitHub updates and following Hacker News are other ways to assess developers' engagement. Executives could also track my blog, for crying out loud, because I discuss the hottest tech sector developments ever.
The debate on open source versus closed source development got me thinking. I believe a freemium pricing and distribution model precludes a choice of closed-source architecture, but a 100% open-source solution is hard to monetize. Yeah, I know, open-source monetization must really be ad-based rather than fee-based.
The town hall toward the end reminded us that the big software companies carry the lobbying burden. Aspiring tech executives in the room should start building their lobbying expertise now by joining tech trade groups and tracking public testimony offered to regulators. Venture capitalists still don't understand devtech business models, which doesn't surprise me since I witnessed the cloud / mobile / Big Data convergence force multiple startups to pivot. The VCs are reluctant to invest in startups that often see little revenue traction from a large customer base. They do want to see KPIs like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and retention, which enables them to see how a prospective startup investment compares to known successes in their portfolios.
Guy Kawasaki always said sales fixes everything, so I can understand such VC reluctance to go for startups with nonexistent traction. The metrics in devtech also apply to other cloud/mobile app startups, so there's nothing surprising about a corporate VC asking devtech people to justify their CAC.
The DevTech Strategy Summit was a winner for any startup executive running a mature business. Anyone pursuing an acqui-hire as a specific strategy can probably find a niche in devtech. I am now such a regular fixture at Silicon Valley's biggest developer events that acqui-hire entrepreneurs are going to see me. Let me know what's working for you, tech community, and whether you benefit from my interpretations.
 |
| Alfidi Capital at DevTech Strategy Summit 2017. |
The dialogue between developers and executives got some needed attention. Developing mobile apps in a vacuum makes no sense if it ignores a market segment's pain points. Imagine how Customer Development works for a dev-focused product, then imagine engaging prospects at different levels of the marketing funnel. Use lots of imagination, or borrow someone else's imagination if you're left-brain dominant and can't compensate.
Developers still get hung up on designing the perfect product if they think budgets are unlimited, which happens when overly generous investors support weak managerial discipline. Project leads must show the Cloudonomics metrics demonstrating the lower cost and higher ROI of their preferred solution. My regular readers know that I have harped on Cloudonomics many times as a proof-of-concept guide, yet many developers dreaming of startup riches still don't take it seriously.
The CIO is still the ultimate purchase decision maker for tech not available in-house. They are especially important in minimizing buys of incompatible shadow IT. The key to their success is evangelizing developers who have the authority to recommend software buys. CIOs need Cloudonomics more than anyone but I suspect most don't even look for the metrics. Computer science programs need to start teaching a business-related elective covering the ROI of project development.
The DevTech panelists came with some best practices for executives. Using searches with Bayesian logic in Stack Overflow can measure developers' engagement with a topic by showing how quickly questions get answered. Tracking GitHub updates and following Hacker News are other ways to assess developers' engagement. Executives could also track my blog, for crying out loud, because I discuss the hottest tech sector developments ever.
The debate on open source versus closed source development got me thinking. I believe a freemium pricing and distribution model precludes a choice of closed-source architecture, but a 100% open-source solution is hard to monetize. Yeah, I know, open-source monetization must really be ad-based rather than fee-based.
The town hall toward the end reminded us that the big software companies carry the lobbying burden. Aspiring tech executives in the room should start building their lobbying expertise now by joining tech trade groups and tracking public testimony offered to regulators. Venture capitalists still don't understand devtech business models, which doesn't surprise me since I witnessed the cloud / mobile / Big Data convergence force multiple startups to pivot. The VCs are reluctant to invest in startups that often see little revenue traction from a large customer base. They do want to see KPIs like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and retention, which enables them to see how a prospective startup investment compares to known successes in their portfolios.
Guy Kawasaki always said sales fixes everything, so I can understand such VC reluctance to go for startups with nonexistent traction. The metrics in devtech also apply to other cloud/mobile app startups, so there's nothing surprising about a corporate VC asking devtech people to justify their CAC.
The DevTech Strategy Summit was a winner for any startup executive running a mature business. Anyone pursuing an acqui-hire as a specific strategy can probably find a niche in devtech. I am now such a regular fixture at Silicon Valley's biggest developer events that acqui-hire entrepreneurs are going to see me. Let me know what's working for you, tech community, and whether you benefit from my interpretations.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Alfidi Capital at DocuSign Momentum 2017
I attended DocuSign's annual Momentum conference for the first time ever in 2017. I had never heard of this firm but apparently they are doing really hot things by automating document management in the cloud. I had to see how they connect with their customers at this conference so I could score some knowledge in person.
Keynotes at these types of shindigs are always fun. I won't blindly repeat anyone's claims about how much customers save for every dollar spent on a DocuSign product. I could probably save less than a buck fifty by going completely paperless, but I score all of my paper note-taking products for free at conferences like Momentum. Hey, that means I'm saving money already thanks to DocuSign.
I have known about the US government's FedRAMP cloud product security standard for some time, but I learned at Momentum that a separate FIPS 140-2 standard applies to cryptographic security. Any service provider offering cloud solutions must be compliant with these standards or they will never get into Uncle Sam's procurement pipeline.
DocuSign's "Advisory Councils" sound like CustDev feedback channels for the firm's biggest verticals. I'll bet their data streams on who signs documents, how and when they sign, and the length of time for a transaction to close are a gold mine.
I mentally ran through a list of potential acquirers during the opening keynotes: Workday, Adobe, Google, Microsoft (if they want a SharePoint tie-in) . . . who did I miss? Salesforce? Nah, not them. I think Salesforce would rather acquire Box to build out its document automation and storage portfolio if it were so inclined, but hey, I don't run any of these companies, so I have no idea what they're doing.
Two special Momentum guests were contrasts in demeanor. I will not identify them so I can preserve an air of mystery. One overgrown frat-boy who somehow ended up as a financial service executive had more than one attendee swooning over his good looks and arrogance. He did not strike me as all that competent, so count me in the minority of people who weren't fooled. Another special guest was self-effacing and displayed technical competence on the speaking platform, but somehow came off poorly to the people sitting around me. I get it how physically attractive people, regardless of gender, get a big pass in life but I don't have to like it.
Experts on trust and digital transaction management said that clients now demand trust certifications like ISO 27001 and AICPA SOC. It's not my job to implement those certifications so I'll just trust that some people love doing the work for me. There's also an xDTM standard for digital transaction management and the EU GDPR standard for data protection in Europe. There should be plenty of jobs in document automation for people who know these standards. Real pros also know the difference between Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in an API's JSON response.
People here think they can accelerate your employer's digital adoption. Forrester's white papers will tell you to get buy-in at all levels for change management. I would tell Forrester that they had better not use any of my writing without attribution. Anyone who has more patience than typical Forrester readers can study the SPeRS standards. Prevailing wisdom holds that automated document processing adds value in mergers, because absorbing new business units is easier if forms and checklists are shared digitally.
The future of banking and wealth management is digital. Robo-advisors are coming to steal the jobs of Wall Street's cubicle dwellers and document automation will make the AI systems' data verification easier. I believe fintech's niche is data aggregation from financial service providers. Banks and brokerages say they are willing to "partner" with fintech providers but not necessarily acquire them. Fintech solutions give banks off-shelf added value they can't quickly build in-house. Even real estate is getting into document automation, although the sector's natural conservatism towards newfangled things is a barrier to adoption. Oh yeah, I had to tell the presiding wealth management experts here about how their sector has told me many times that my US military background is a disadvantage in wealth management. One executive advised me to move to Texas where that wouldn't be a problem. I don't think she's heard about how Texans dislike California transplants. Liars make me mad. Here's the truth: Maximizing a firm's Net Promoter Score (NPS) and minimizing "not in good order" (NIGO) data are popular approaches to assessing whether document automation enhances the customer experience.
The closing keynote revealed the litany of tools programmers need to succeed: DocuSign (of course), Python, Django, and Node.js. I was thrilled that a fellow military veteran led one of the winning hackathon teams. The free food at Momentum and its afterparty were good reasons to attend. The free insights into how companies like DocuSign are automating corporate back office processes are good reasons to come back next year.
Keynotes at these types of shindigs are always fun. I won't blindly repeat anyone's claims about how much customers save for every dollar spent on a DocuSign product. I could probably save less than a buck fifty by going completely paperless, but I score all of my paper note-taking products for free at conferences like Momentum. Hey, that means I'm saving money already thanks to DocuSign.
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| Alfidi Capital owns DocuSign Momentum 2017. |
I have known about the US government's FedRAMP cloud product security standard for some time, but I learned at Momentum that a separate FIPS 140-2 standard applies to cryptographic security. Any service provider offering cloud solutions must be compliant with these standards or they will never get into Uncle Sam's procurement pipeline.
DocuSign's "Advisory Councils" sound like CustDev feedback channels for the firm's biggest verticals. I'll bet their data streams on who signs documents, how and when they sign, and the length of time for a transaction to close are a gold mine.
I mentally ran through a list of potential acquirers during the opening keynotes: Workday, Adobe, Google, Microsoft (if they want a SharePoint tie-in) . . . who did I miss? Salesforce? Nah, not them. I think Salesforce would rather acquire Box to build out its document automation and storage portfolio if it were so inclined, but hey, I don't run any of these companies, so I have no idea what they're doing.
Two special Momentum guests were contrasts in demeanor. I will not identify them so I can preserve an air of mystery. One overgrown frat-boy who somehow ended up as a financial service executive had more than one attendee swooning over his good looks and arrogance. He did not strike me as all that competent, so count me in the minority of people who weren't fooled. Another special guest was self-effacing and displayed technical competence on the speaking platform, but somehow came off poorly to the people sitting around me. I get it how physically attractive people, regardless of gender, get a big pass in life but I don't have to like it.
Experts on trust and digital transaction management said that clients now demand trust certifications like ISO 27001 and AICPA SOC. It's not my job to implement those certifications so I'll just trust that some people love doing the work for me. There's also an xDTM standard for digital transaction management and the EU GDPR standard for data protection in Europe. There should be plenty of jobs in document automation for people who know these standards. Real pros also know the difference between Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in an API's JSON response.
People here think they can accelerate your employer's digital adoption. Forrester's white papers will tell you to get buy-in at all levels for change management. I would tell Forrester that they had better not use any of my writing without attribution. Anyone who has more patience than typical Forrester readers can study the SPeRS standards. Prevailing wisdom holds that automated document processing adds value in mergers, because absorbing new business units is easier if forms and checklists are shared digitally.
The future of banking and wealth management is digital. Robo-advisors are coming to steal the jobs of Wall Street's cubicle dwellers and document automation will make the AI systems' data verification easier. I believe fintech's niche is data aggregation from financial service providers. Banks and brokerages say they are willing to "partner" with fintech providers but not necessarily acquire them. Fintech solutions give banks off-shelf added value they can't quickly build in-house. Even real estate is getting into document automation, although the sector's natural conservatism towards newfangled things is a barrier to adoption. Oh yeah, I had to tell the presiding wealth management experts here about how their sector has told me many times that my US military background is a disadvantage in wealth management. One executive advised me to move to Texas where that wouldn't be a problem. I don't think she's heard about how Texans dislike California transplants. Liars make me mad. Here's the truth: Maximizing a firm's Net Promoter Score (NPS) and minimizing "not in good order" (NIGO) data are popular approaches to assessing whether document automation enhances the customer experience.
The closing keynote revealed the litany of tools programmers need to succeed: DocuSign (of course), Python, Django, and Node.js. I was thrilled that a fellow military veteran led one of the winning hackathon teams. The free food at Momentum and its afterparty were good reasons to attend. The free insights into how companies like DocuSign are automating corporate back office processes are good reasons to come back next year.
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
The Haiku of Finance for 02/03/16
Small cloud service scale
Scaling cost trailing leaders
Cloud needs rainmaker
Scaling cost trailing leaders
Cloud needs rainmaker
Fusion Telecommunications International In Cloud Services
Fusion Telecommunications International (ticker FSNN) is a small player in cloud services. The management team has experience in previous telecommunication and networked communications enterprises, which is part of the cloud computing spectrum but not the whole enchilada. Their current CTO at least has data center experience. Big companies like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce dominate the cloud sector. Anyone muscling into their market share must bring serious computing power.
A simple rundown of this company's summary statistics from Yahoo Finance reveals their present condition.
Profit Margin (ttm): -11.88%
Operating Margin (ttm): -6.41%
Full disclosure: No position in FSNN at this time.
A simple rundown of this company's summary statistics from Yahoo Finance reveals their present condition.
Profit Margin (ttm): -11.88%
Operating Margin (ttm): -6.41%
Return on Assets (ttm): -5.89%
Return on Equity (ttm): -138.70%
Those annual numbers are discouraging. It's even more discouraging to search FSNN on Reuters and find long-term financial highlights. Fusion's 5yr sales growth exceeds the industry's average but they are still not profitable. Revenue and net income per employee both underperform the industry. The company's 5yr ROA, ROI, and ROE are all negative. The management team has its work cut out.
One simple math comparison illustrates the competitive disadvantage Fusion faces. Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is a make-or-break metric in cloud computing. Analysts can approximate a company's aggregate CAC without even knowing its detailed product pricing or the seat count of the solutions it sells. We can divide the cost of revenue by gross revenue to find a rough CAC percentage. It's really the inverse of gross profit, but it's worth finding to see whether other expenses are contributing to a problem. Let's use the numbers in Yahoo Finance for the most recent quarter to show current conditions.
Fusion's rough CAC percentage in this method is $13.5M/$24.5M, or 55.10% for the quarter ending September 30, 2015. Compare this rough CAC to the figures for Oracle (ticker ORCL) and Salesforce (ticker CRM). Oracle came in at $1.85B/$8.99B, or 20.58% for the quarter ending November 30, 2015. Salesforce clocked in at $0.42B/$1.71B, or 24.56%. Fusion thus spends twice as much for a dollar of revenue as its larger competitors. What's really hurting the company is that SGA expenses have remained stubbornly high as a percentage of revenue even while revenue increased for several years. Oracle's SGA is usually a smaller percentage of its revenue than Salesforce's comparable numbers, which is partly why it is more consistently profitable than Salesforce. Mitigating both SGA and the cost of revenue will be a challenge for Fusion while growing its revenue.
Data storage is now a commodified supply chain input where the low-cost providers are market winners. I do not know whether Fusion can scale its services to the point where it mitigates its cost disadvantage. The company's retained earnings deficit of -$172M has grown year by year, quarter by quarter. It is not obvious how a smaller cloud provider can compete against larger companies without maintaining a cost advantage. Any investor who bought into FSNN in late March 2015 when it was over $4/share, only to see it close under $2/share in early February 2016, learned that the hard way.
Full disclosure: No position in FSNN at this time.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Monday, November 02, 2015
Alfidi Capital Visits Oracle OpenWorld 2015
I had enough white space on my calendar this autumn to accommodate the other big San Francisco tech conference besides Dreamforce. That would of course be Oracle OpenWorld 2015. I love these big brand-driven showcases for the latest enterprise computing things. I also attended parts of Oracle's JavaOne 2015 even though I have no clue how the programming language works. All I know is that installing Java updates on my computer used to require changes to my browser's advanced options TLS and SSL checkboxes just to keep pop-up reminders away. I think the Java people finally fixed that bug.
A whole week of tech keynotes includes free food and booze. I scored access to multiple receptions during the week. I listened dutifully to product pitches while enjoying snacks and libations. The food was always excellent. I had more meatballs and sauteed shrimp than a mere mortal could handle. I did not leave one Oracle reception until I tried all three varieties of boutique whiskey on hand. Mission accomplished. My buzz wore off every night. It was nice to score free granola bars and banana bread during the day thanks to my high-powered tech connections. One vendor was very generous with pastries and smoothies. I learned a new cloud computing term: "Happiness as a Service" (HaaS). I think it means the consultants smile and say nice things while they migrate on-prem apps to the cloud.
Oracle's Java mascot "Duke" awaits the JavaOne opening keynote. I high-fived it as I entered the keynote hall. Duke has way more personality than some people I used to serve with in the US military. I spent some quality time at his namesake "Duke's Cafe" blocking Taylor Street during Oracle OpenWorld. I scored so much free coffee there that I may as well run on Java myself. I was tempted to find out what happens when tea mixes with beer. I did not have as much time as I did last year to probe vendor pain points on the OpenWorld trade show floor. One vendor gave me a mimosa but did not scan my badge. That scores a booth marketing fail.
Arriving early to the JavaOne opening act means sitting in front of giant screens like the one above. I have never done drugs in my life. When I see these wild animations at major corporate tech conferences, I think, "Oh, that must be what drugs are like." I get high on life, people. I must say, this corporate keynote canned warm-up music is really dreamy. One of my Spotify playlists is devoted to ambient music. I could spice that playlist up with this upbeat corporate conference house music.
The first JavaOne keynote covered orientation to their mini-conference, along with what sounded like product announcements. I don't see what's so earth-shattering about announcing that versions of Java now run end-to-end on Intel and other platforms. Java has always worked pretty well on all of the Intel and AMD desktop PCs I've used, so mobile use is the only real hurdle remaining. I missed the whole Geek Bar, Maker Zone, and on-site immersive experience celebrating 20 years of Java. That's what happens when an on-demand genius like me gets over-scheduled.
Oracle does listen to its developers' pain points when updating Java releases. Maybe that's how they solved the pop-up thing I noted above. I could have used a good definition of generic programming while the Java experts were discussing their innovations on stage. I did comprehend their explanation of how data laid out across different caches takes longer to process because electrons must travel farther. Their solution was to increase the number of instructions per clock cycle so data speed would increase. I could not understand why one Java presenter stood silently while two Java-enabled toy cars' onboard sensors sent cloud alerts to a display table. I know it was recorded, but he could have at least talked us through what was happening instead of waiting until the pretty graphs and tables came up at after the simulated data load. Sheesh, even engineers can learn to make running commentary.
The fun part was Scott McNealy's surprise video appearance wearing a classic Sun Microsystems sports jacket. In case you're too young to remember, Sun created Java when Mr. McNealy was its boss, and then Oracle bought Sun and everything. He did a top-ten list of inside jokes that only Java developers could truly appreciate. The video gave me flashbacks to the mid-1990s with magazine covers talking about how great the Internet was going to be. It turned out great, all right.
Java engineers celebrate the 20th anniversary of their programming language. I was tempted to take a selfie with the cake but I did not want to miss the next keynote. The OpenWorld opening keynote was the next thing in the Moscone North hall after the Java engineers cleared off the stage. I wanted to make time for their Modern Finance Experience sessions but I didn't think my lowly Discover pass would get me access. Hey there Oracle, I had a full-access analyst pass to Dreamforce 2015, so next year you folks need to upgrade my status. I'm a bona fide thought leader around this neighborhood. The discussion of data center optimization made me wonder whether Intel and Oracle consider data center HVAC and facilities management as pain points their solutions can mitigate. Run the Cloudonomics numbers, folks.
Speaking of cloud economics, the brief mention of cloud KPIs like variance/swing, workload, IOPS, and latency deserve more explanation for the non-engineers at OpenWorld. The CIO people throwing those terms around at their CFOs and COOs need to show that they've actually calculated the economics on how more IT spend will improve those metrics. Every CFO needs to ask for the CIO's data proving their proposed innovation has the promised higher IOPS and lower latency.
Oracle allowed Intel to introduce their "Trusted Analytics Platform" during the opening keynote. The platform enables domain experts and data scientists to run analytics during real-time data collection. Bay Area startups have been claiming they can do this for years. Some critical mass of acqui-hires and internal development now allow the big ERP providers to dominate this action. It is the natural end result of all of the knowledge management (KM) and business rule management system (BRMS) trends I have tracked for several years.
Larry Ellison came out for his portion of the OpenWorld initial keynote. His biggest disclosure was about how Oracle gradually discovered it must operate in all three cloud layers in response to competitors' moves. I inferred that Oracle has not driven the cloud sector's innovation. They are reactive rather than proactive, and it explains their acquisition strategy since buying Sun. I do not recall hearing Larry mention Workday as a major cloud competitor at last year's OpenWorld, so mentioning them here was news.
Security is very much on Larry's radar. The new Oracle stuff about automated backup and restoration with no human intervention is an omen for the end of human system administrators. Even engineers will now face a jobless future as the cloud sector matures. Larry moved Oracle to open standards so enterprise cloud accounts will be more portable between providers. He also thinks the full transition from on-prem to cloud will be sufficiently long to require a decade or two of continued on-prem support. Predictions of long transitions remind me of the migration from 1970s mainframes to 1900s client-server architectures. The client-server paradigm reigned supreme throughout the dot-com boom-bust cycle until the cloud was ready to replace it.
I liked Larry's improvisation without his glasses. "I don't have glasses . . . I can still do this" was his mantra when he ran his live tutorial of Oracle Learning modules showing employees how to pitch Oracle cloud products. I noticed one of the Oracle executives sprint past my near-front seat to go backstage; I wondered if she was going to fetch Larry's glasses. I couldn't LOL because that would be classic teamwork and loyalty. I would have done that for any boss, but my bosses never appreciated me with huge compensation packages like the ones Larry gives his people.
Tuesday's keynote was Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd's chance to offer his predictions about the cloud sector. I gleaned his live insights into CEO thinking. He argued that CEOs care first and foremost about current period performance, i.e. survival. Growth, agility, and new markets are all secondary because CEOs don't have the luxury of long-term thinking if they don't meet short-term earnings expectations. He confirmed an assumption I have long held about how enterprises cut IT spending when their revenue growth stalls. Get ready for lean times in the next recession, people, and I've been harping on that note for a while. I was intrigued to hear the guy claim that the demographic shift to a gig economy will stress IT for rapid workforce development tools. I take that as another hint that Larry's demo of Oracle Learning is the next big thing. I agree with his prediction of an oligopoly coming to cloud, and you can recall my predictions from OpenWorld 2014 about how the sector's leaders would fare. The tech big shots from GE and AIG also came out to share how impressed they were with their own cloud stuff. Good for them.
The combined forces of Wipro and the Golden State Warriors in another keynote were instructive. Wipro thinks digital tech can reduce fulfillment cycles to two weeks, down from the current 8-12 weeks of design, production, and distribution in retail supply chains. I think there are implications for IT spending priorities if legacy records must migrate to the cloud before customer engagement systems migrate.
It was really awkward to switch narratives between the Oracle guy and the Warriors dude when they were on stage. They didn't even address the same subjects. The Warriors' building project and brand management are not the same thing as Oracle's cloud service scalability. I would have got their points if they had stuck to leadership in renewing corporate culture, but the juxtaposition of the moderator's questions made no sense. The whole point was to enhance Oracle's brand by association with the Warriors. The experience of watching a Warriors game is not completely scalable with tech. The TV or mobile audience can only remotely experience the two dimensional visuals of the game.
I liked the coffee bean bag props thrown on stage during the video vignettes about how some IT bit player could use Oracle's open-source solutions. I could have used come coffee at that moment. My big takeaway from the coffee escapade was how containerized databases enable linking data to apps with no coding. Non-developers can thus create new business functions in sales, discounts, incentives, and loyalty programs without learning to code. I like how spreadsheet uploads mean mobile users can do analytics and visualizations without access to data warehouse. Darn it, these mobile sales people now have all kinds of on-demand OJT modules for prospecting and closing that I never had when I was in sales. I hope all of these Oracle things work as advertised.
Getting an early seat in Larry Ellison's keynote on Tuesday had its perks, like the seat photo I snapped above. The legendary founder had to wait for the warm-up acts from Infosys and GE. Infosys wanted everything automated because it reduces full-time employee headcount. Now I'm getting a clear impression that all tech CEOs want a jobless future for the rest of us. Here comes the bad news. Everyone who does not attend these tech conferences is doomed to be either a ward of the state or a peasant on some CEO's plantation. Now for the good news. I promise to be a benevolent plutocrat to my subjects, because I'm a really nice guy. The GE person said ERP must move faster, but I wasn't sure whether he meant with faster data processing or faster ERP deployment. I had no chance to ask him for clarification because I was sitting in the audience among thousands of Larry Ellison fans.
The long-awaited Larry Ellison keynote on "Innovations in Security and IaaS" was one for the ages. Larry's tour de force through modern enterprise security placed every recent mass data breach into one context. The singular point of failure in ERP security to date has been software vulnerability. Hard-coding security protocols into silicon hardware may solve this problem. Larry announced an always-on memory intrusion detection system into Oracle's hardware, claiming they are the first software company to encode security into a microprocessor. Their "Silicon Secured Memory" uses color matching to compute a number key that locks memory.
Larry also noted that any cloud service provider DBA who can read client data represents a massive security vulnerability. He emphasized Oracle's storage of encryption keys on-prem for clients, and I got the impression that he prefers clients storing their keys on-prem instead of in the cloud. Larry also announced other initiatives like the "Private Cloud Machine" that replicates an Oracle cloud's performance for on-prem clients who just aren't ready to migrate due to regulatory requirements or geo-specific preferences. The guy covered all the right bases. His presentation style is different from Marc Benioff's persona at Dreamforce. Personal characterization is great as long as the software works.
The Oracle CX afterparty at Moscone West was memorable. I had to try this "Blue Lagoon" cocktail with Curacao, one of my favorite liqueurs. A neon dance troop (pictured above) materialized out of nowhere and jammed to the Party Rock Anthem. All we needed were some glow-sticks and it would have been a rave party. This is normal for a San Francisco tech conference afterparty. My contacts told me another party had dancing electric violin players, but I missed that to hear a former US Navy SEAL discuss leadership lessons. Long live Oracle OpenWorld.
I attended the final JavaOne keynote only partly for the free lunch. I really wanted to see how engineers have fun. IBM people kicked it off with an obvious pitch for IBM Bluemix as a PaaS solution for cloud apps touching multiple APIs. The dudes from Big Blue hit the right note by toasting Java's 20th anniversary with mini whiskey bottles at the podium. That is just totally awesome. I might have become a software programmer if I had role models like that as a kid. Containers, business logic, the API economy, and microservices mean so much more if you can drink whiskey on the job.
Oracle's Java engineers have a house band called the Null Pointers. They entertained us prior to the JavaOne keynote. I think the extra percussionist in back should have done a cowbell solo. The real "JavaOne Community Keynote" was one big interactive party with free beer, cute sketches, and Duke the Java mascot. The kickoff video featured a geeky coder powering up on cans of "Java" to impress his attractive female boss. The level-up cues from video games would impress the male geeks in the audience. I don't think the video was sexist, but tech parodies ought to feature women as something other than foils for a male-driven plot if the tech sector is serious about encouraging women to have careers.
The skits were low drama that only an engineer could love. They had a UK-style red phone booth on stage (pictured above) but pretended it was the TARDIS from Doctor Who with the soundtrack, time tunnel, theme music, and everything. Dude, every true nerd knows the TARDIS is a UK blue police box. Only Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure used a phone booth as a time machine. I didn't mind the mixed metaphors because these folks were on a budget. Duke was the central plot element in the skit series. The engineers were concerned when they saw him destroying San Francisco in 2035, so they time-traveled to various points in Java's developmental history to figure out how to stop him. The Paris programmers waved French baguettes and made inside jokes about development projects. The Brazil people used a "Future Communicator" to predict how Java would change. The outer space skit has a cute "soh-crates" mention of the Socrates character from Bill and Ted, which no one in the audience under 30 had probably ever seen. James Gosling, the father of Java, helped the skit engineers launch T-shirts into the audience. The JavaOne 2015 app revealed a secret code that enabled kid programmers to tear off Duke's angry mouth and save San Francisco from destruction. Wow, I have no idea why I noted all of these details except for the sake of posterity. If I had been an engineer instead of a finance person, I could have invented something that would have put me on stage. I did score a bite of some Java 20-year anniversary cake they had on stage, so I got my taste of nerd excellence for the week.
I did catch a few minutes of some workshops in the Modern Finance Experience after all. The door sentries generously let me in, so I guess they instantly recognized the pure genius of Alfidi Capital. I was shocked to discover that some SMBs still track financial reporting from geographically separate branches on linked spreadsheets instead of using cloud ERP. What is with those people? This isn't the 1980s. It's amazing that small-time CFOs and COOs now discover that automating some FP+A tasks reduces forecasting errors and saves time. That must have been how cave dwellers felt when they discovered fire. No kidding. The partner network people from larger firms talked about how Millennial generation employees expect tons of incentives even for marginal performance, because all of them got participation trophies growing up. I don't think those incentives will last long if the big-shot CEOs get the jobless future they expect. Millennials can expect zero self-esteem support when they're shoveling dirt on some plutocrat's ranch.
Oracle OpenWorld 2015 brought me more glimpses of the future. I didn't even need Duke's Java-powered time traveling phone booth to see the future, even though it was a nice touch. Here comes the standard Alfidi Capital mental jet-blast, so strap yourselves in for my genius. The future is a cloud full of encrypted silicon tended by a dwindling number of STEM graduates who slowly work themselves into obsolescence over the next decade or two. The early DBA and sysadmin dropouts still have a window of opportunity to create cloud service startups the bigger firms will acquire as they build their oligopolies. The final STEM survivors will be godlike analytics and domain experts keeping cloud systems running with AIs. The rest of the tech workforce in between these two forces will see their wages and career prospects gradually slide into nothing as everything they do is automated away. I will invest my capital accordingly so my perspectives survive indefinitely. Future tech conferences like Oracle OpenWorld are my path to salvation.
A whole week of tech keynotes includes free food and booze. I scored access to multiple receptions during the week. I listened dutifully to product pitches while enjoying snacks and libations. The food was always excellent. I had more meatballs and sauteed shrimp than a mere mortal could handle. I did not leave one Oracle reception until I tried all three varieties of boutique whiskey on hand. Mission accomplished. My buzz wore off every night. It was nice to score free granola bars and banana bread during the day thanks to my high-powered tech connections. One vendor was very generous with pastries and smoothies. I learned a new cloud computing term: "Happiness as a Service" (HaaS). I think it means the consultants smile and say nice things while they migrate on-prem apps to the cloud.
Oracle's Java mascot "Duke" awaits the JavaOne opening keynote. I high-fived it as I entered the keynote hall. Duke has way more personality than some people I used to serve with in the US military. I spent some quality time at his namesake "Duke's Cafe" blocking Taylor Street during Oracle OpenWorld. I scored so much free coffee there that I may as well run on Java myself. I was tempted to find out what happens when tea mixes with beer. I did not have as much time as I did last year to probe vendor pain points on the OpenWorld trade show floor. One vendor gave me a mimosa but did not scan my badge. That scores a booth marketing fail.
Arriving early to the JavaOne opening act means sitting in front of giant screens like the one above. I have never done drugs in my life. When I see these wild animations at major corporate tech conferences, I think, "Oh, that must be what drugs are like." I get high on life, people. I must say, this corporate keynote canned warm-up music is really dreamy. One of my Spotify playlists is devoted to ambient music. I could spice that playlist up with this upbeat corporate conference house music.
Oracle does listen to its developers' pain points when updating Java releases. Maybe that's how they solved the pop-up thing I noted above. I could have used a good definition of generic programming while the Java experts were discussing their innovations on stage. I did comprehend their explanation of how data laid out across different caches takes longer to process because electrons must travel farther. Their solution was to increase the number of instructions per clock cycle so data speed would increase. I could not understand why one Java presenter stood silently while two Java-enabled toy cars' onboard sensors sent cloud alerts to a display table. I know it was recorded, but he could have at least talked us through what was happening instead of waiting until the pretty graphs and tables came up at after the simulated data load. Sheesh, even engineers can learn to make running commentary.
The fun part was Scott McNealy's surprise video appearance wearing a classic Sun Microsystems sports jacket. In case you're too young to remember, Sun created Java when Mr. McNealy was its boss, and then Oracle bought Sun and everything. He did a top-ten list of inside jokes that only Java developers could truly appreciate. The video gave me flashbacks to the mid-1990s with magazine covers talking about how great the Internet was going to be. It turned out great, all right.
Java engineers celebrate the 20th anniversary of their programming language. I was tempted to take a selfie with the cake but I did not want to miss the next keynote. The OpenWorld opening keynote was the next thing in the Moscone North hall after the Java engineers cleared off the stage. I wanted to make time for their Modern Finance Experience sessions but I didn't think my lowly Discover pass would get me access. Hey there Oracle, I had a full-access analyst pass to Dreamforce 2015, so next year you folks need to upgrade my status. I'm a bona fide thought leader around this neighborhood. The discussion of data center optimization made me wonder whether Intel and Oracle consider data center HVAC and facilities management as pain points their solutions can mitigate. Run the Cloudonomics numbers, folks.
Speaking of cloud economics, the brief mention of cloud KPIs like variance/swing, workload, IOPS, and latency deserve more explanation for the non-engineers at OpenWorld. The CIO people throwing those terms around at their CFOs and COOs need to show that they've actually calculated the economics on how more IT spend will improve those metrics. Every CFO needs to ask for the CIO's data proving their proposed innovation has the promised higher IOPS and lower latency.
Oracle allowed Intel to introduce their "Trusted Analytics Platform" during the opening keynote. The platform enables domain experts and data scientists to run analytics during real-time data collection. Bay Area startups have been claiming they can do this for years. Some critical mass of acqui-hires and internal development now allow the big ERP providers to dominate this action. It is the natural end result of all of the knowledge management (KM) and business rule management system (BRMS) trends I have tracked for several years.
Larry Ellison came out for his portion of the OpenWorld initial keynote. His biggest disclosure was about how Oracle gradually discovered it must operate in all three cloud layers in response to competitors' moves. I inferred that Oracle has not driven the cloud sector's innovation. They are reactive rather than proactive, and it explains their acquisition strategy since buying Sun. I do not recall hearing Larry mention Workday as a major cloud competitor at last year's OpenWorld, so mentioning them here was news.
Security is very much on Larry's radar. The new Oracle stuff about automated backup and restoration with no human intervention is an omen for the end of human system administrators. Even engineers will now face a jobless future as the cloud sector matures. Larry moved Oracle to open standards so enterprise cloud accounts will be more portable between providers. He also thinks the full transition from on-prem to cloud will be sufficiently long to require a decade or two of continued on-prem support. Predictions of long transitions remind me of the migration from 1970s mainframes to 1900s client-server architectures. The client-server paradigm reigned supreme throughout the dot-com boom-bust cycle until the cloud was ready to replace it.
I liked Larry's improvisation without his glasses. "I don't have glasses . . . I can still do this" was his mantra when he ran his live tutorial of Oracle Learning modules showing employees how to pitch Oracle cloud products. I noticed one of the Oracle executives sprint past my near-front seat to go backstage; I wondered if she was going to fetch Larry's glasses. I couldn't LOL because that would be classic teamwork and loyalty. I would have done that for any boss, but my bosses never appreciated me with huge compensation packages like the ones Larry gives his people.
Tuesday's keynote was Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd's chance to offer his predictions about the cloud sector. I gleaned his live insights into CEO thinking. He argued that CEOs care first and foremost about current period performance, i.e. survival. Growth, agility, and new markets are all secondary because CEOs don't have the luxury of long-term thinking if they don't meet short-term earnings expectations. He confirmed an assumption I have long held about how enterprises cut IT spending when their revenue growth stalls. Get ready for lean times in the next recession, people, and I've been harping on that note for a while. I was intrigued to hear the guy claim that the demographic shift to a gig economy will stress IT for rapid workforce development tools. I take that as another hint that Larry's demo of Oracle Learning is the next big thing. I agree with his prediction of an oligopoly coming to cloud, and you can recall my predictions from OpenWorld 2014 about how the sector's leaders would fare. The tech big shots from GE and AIG also came out to share how impressed they were with their own cloud stuff. Good for them.
The combined forces of Wipro and the Golden State Warriors in another keynote were instructive. Wipro thinks digital tech can reduce fulfillment cycles to two weeks, down from the current 8-12 weeks of design, production, and distribution in retail supply chains. I think there are implications for IT spending priorities if legacy records must migrate to the cloud before customer engagement systems migrate.
It was really awkward to switch narratives between the Oracle guy and the Warriors dude when they were on stage. They didn't even address the same subjects. The Warriors' building project and brand management are not the same thing as Oracle's cloud service scalability. I would have got their points if they had stuck to leadership in renewing corporate culture, but the juxtaposition of the moderator's questions made no sense. The whole point was to enhance Oracle's brand by association with the Warriors. The experience of watching a Warriors game is not completely scalable with tech. The TV or mobile audience can only remotely experience the two dimensional visuals of the game.
I liked the coffee bean bag props thrown on stage during the video vignettes about how some IT bit player could use Oracle's open-source solutions. I could have used come coffee at that moment. My big takeaway from the coffee escapade was how containerized databases enable linking data to apps with no coding. Non-developers can thus create new business functions in sales, discounts, incentives, and loyalty programs without learning to code. I like how spreadsheet uploads mean mobile users can do analytics and visualizations without access to data warehouse. Darn it, these mobile sales people now have all kinds of on-demand OJT modules for prospecting and closing that I never had when I was in sales. I hope all of these Oracle things work as advertised.
Getting an early seat in Larry Ellison's keynote on Tuesday had its perks, like the seat photo I snapped above. The legendary founder had to wait for the warm-up acts from Infosys and GE. Infosys wanted everything automated because it reduces full-time employee headcount. Now I'm getting a clear impression that all tech CEOs want a jobless future for the rest of us. Here comes the bad news. Everyone who does not attend these tech conferences is doomed to be either a ward of the state or a peasant on some CEO's plantation. Now for the good news. I promise to be a benevolent plutocrat to my subjects, because I'm a really nice guy. The GE person said ERP must move faster, but I wasn't sure whether he meant with faster data processing or faster ERP deployment. I had no chance to ask him for clarification because I was sitting in the audience among thousands of Larry Ellison fans.
The long-awaited Larry Ellison keynote on "Innovations in Security and IaaS" was one for the ages. Larry's tour de force through modern enterprise security placed every recent mass data breach into one context. The singular point of failure in ERP security to date has been software vulnerability. Hard-coding security protocols into silicon hardware may solve this problem. Larry announced an always-on memory intrusion detection system into Oracle's hardware, claiming they are the first software company to encode security into a microprocessor. Their "Silicon Secured Memory" uses color matching to compute a number key that locks memory.
Larry also noted that any cloud service provider DBA who can read client data represents a massive security vulnerability. He emphasized Oracle's storage of encryption keys on-prem for clients, and I got the impression that he prefers clients storing their keys on-prem instead of in the cloud. Larry also announced other initiatives like the "Private Cloud Machine" that replicates an Oracle cloud's performance for on-prem clients who just aren't ready to migrate due to regulatory requirements or geo-specific preferences. The guy covered all the right bases. His presentation style is different from Marc Benioff's persona at Dreamforce. Personal characterization is great as long as the software works.
The Oracle CX afterparty at Moscone West was memorable. I had to try this "Blue Lagoon" cocktail with Curacao, one of my favorite liqueurs. A neon dance troop (pictured above) materialized out of nowhere and jammed to the Party Rock Anthem. All we needed were some glow-sticks and it would have been a rave party. This is normal for a San Francisco tech conference afterparty. My contacts told me another party had dancing electric violin players, but I missed that to hear a former US Navy SEAL discuss leadership lessons. Long live Oracle OpenWorld.
Oracle's Java engineers have a house band called the Null Pointers. They entertained us prior to the JavaOne keynote. I think the extra percussionist in back should have done a cowbell solo. The real "JavaOne Community Keynote" was one big interactive party with free beer, cute sketches, and Duke the Java mascot. The kickoff video featured a geeky coder powering up on cans of "Java" to impress his attractive female boss. The level-up cues from video games would impress the male geeks in the audience. I don't think the video was sexist, but tech parodies ought to feature women as something other than foils for a male-driven plot if the tech sector is serious about encouraging women to have careers.
The skits were low drama that only an engineer could love. They had a UK-style red phone booth on stage (pictured above) but pretended it was the TARDIS from Doctor Who with the soundtrack, time tunnel, theme music, and everything. Dude, every true nerd knows the TARDIS is a UK blue police box. Only Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure used a phone booth as a time machine. I didn't mind the mixed metaphors because these folks were on a budget. Duke was the central plot element in the skit series. The engineers were concerned when they saw him destroying San Francisco in 2035, so they time-traveled to various points in Java's developmental history to figure out how to stop him. The Paris programmers waved French baguettes and made inside jokes about development projects. The Brazil people used a "Future Communicator" to predict how Java would change. The outer space skit has a cute "soh-crates" mention of the Socrates character from Bill and Ted, which no one in the audience under 30 had probably ever seen. James Gosling, the father of Java, helped the skit engineers launch T-shirts into the audience. The JavaOne 2015 app revealed a secret code that enabled kid programmers to tear off Duke's angry mouth and save San Francisco from destruction. Wow, I have no idea why I noted all of these details except for the sake of posterity. If I had been an engineer instead of a finance person, I could have invented something that would have put me on stage. I did score a bite of some Java 20-year anniversary cake they had on stage, so I got my taste of nerd excellence for the week.
I did catch a few minutes of some workshops in the Modern Finance Experience after all. The door sentries generously let me in, so I guess they instantly recognized the pure genius of Alfidi Capital. I was shocked to discover that some SMBs still track financial reporting from geographically separate branches on linked spreadsheets instead of using cloud ERP. What is with those people? This isn't the 1980s. It's amazing that small-time CFOs and COOs now discover that automating some FP+A tasks reduces forecasting errors and saves time. That must have been how cave dwellers felt when they discovered fire. No kidding. The partner network people from larger firms talked about how Millennial generation employees expect tons of incentives even for marginal performance, because all of them got participation trophies growing up. I don't think those incentives will last long if the big-shot CEOs get the jobless future they expect. Millennials can expect zero self-esteem support when they're shoveling dirt on some plutocrat's ranch.
Oracle OpenWorld 2015 brought me more glimpses of the future. I didn't even need Duke's Java-powered time traveling phone booth to see the future, even though it was a nice touch. Here comes the standard Alfidi Capital mental jet-blast, so strap yourselves in for my genius. The future is a cloud full of encrypted silicon tended by a dwindling number of STEM graduates who slowly work themselves into obsolescence over the next decade or two. The early DBA and sysadmin dropouts still have a window of opportunity to create cloud service startups the bigger firms will acquire as they build their oligopolies. The final STEM survivors will be godlike analytics and domain experts keeping cloud systems running with AIs. The rest of the tech workforce in between these two forces will see their wages and career prospects gradually slide into nothing as everything they do is automated away. I will invest my capital accordingly so my perspectives survive indefinitely. Future tech conferences like Oracle OpenWorld are my path to salvation.
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