John Treadway

Symform, a Seatle company focused on cloud-based storage for the enterprise, has just taken $1.5m of venture financing according to Xconomy.  The basic premise is that your data is stored on my computers, and mine on yours.  Or more precisely, a very small portion of my data, super-encrypted, resides on the servers of many other customers.  It’s redundant, secure and “in the cloud.”

Now you get to hear a familiar refrain of many entrepreneurial types… I had this idea over two years ago.  I even tried to get some of my totally smart ex-colleagues from ODI to join me (this is a big-brain storage-oriented thing, after all).  My concept has several differences, but the core idea of a cooperative shared storage cloud was there.  Kudos to Symform for getting it done!

 Way back in 2006 when Amazon released their first enterprise web service, S3 (Simple Storage Service), I immediately wanted in. At the time we were wracking up huge data center and hardware bills (for a small company) and storing tens of terabytes of image files. We got in the S3 early beta but didn’t get too far because we needed image processing to happen in the cloud to be cost-effective.  My contact at Amazon hinted that a compute infrastructure was not long in coming.

When EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) launched in 2007, I really wanted in. The digital photo business was winding down, so there was no point.  My 2008 venture, did use EC2 and S3 and we saved many thousands of dollars and hours by not having to worry about hardware. While there were countless stories of Web startups using cloud services back then, only recently have I begun to hear of enterprise applications in the cloud.

I know what you’re thinking.  What about SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com with their PaaS (platform as a service) models?  Yes, these are in the cloud, and fit in most people’s definition of “cloud computing.”  However, for me the inflection is where enterprises are now deploying any type of application, not just those that are build as ASP or SaaS frameworks, or that require you to build into a narrow framework like sforce.   Truly custom apps written in any language are not what sforce was designed for.

Now I am hearing about life sciences companies putting the cloud to work in HPC environments for drug discovery or genetic mapping. And trading firms, like Majedie Asset Management, who own or manage no physical data center assets.  All of their applications – from the most trivial to the most mission-critical – live in the cloud.

There are tools providers like RightScale and  Stax building deployment management environments on top of Amazon and other cloud infrastutures.  There are folks like Enomaly building cloud stacks for deployment by telcos and hosting providers.  There are guys likeGood Data building BI in the cloud.  

Think of the opportunity!  Over the next 10-15 years millions of systems now operated in-house will be ported to the cloud.  An increasing number of new applications will be built specifically for cloud environments.  Vendors of systems management, security, indentity and access control, databases, ERP, CRM, and most other types of IT technology will create cloud versions of their systems, and new vendors will emerge for this new environment.  

There will be opportunities across all aspects of enterprise IT to profit from this wholesale shift.  How will you participate?

We’ve all heard the concept of the hive mind, where when one member/node/bee/ant etc. knows something it gets transmitted instantly throughout the hive. The Borg from Star Trek is the hive made evil, with no free will.

Twitter behavior is starting to look more and more like a benign hive, where participants have free will but often willingly join in collective behavior.  A recent example of this came from Demi Moore (twitter user “mrskutcher“) who saw a tweet from someone in San Jose who said she was going to kill herself.  Demi re-tweeted one of these horrible tweets from sandieguy and the collective jumped into action.  The San Jose police were contacted.   Hundreds of Twitter users sent supportive messages (a few a-holes were mean), and we all hope that the crisis was averted and @sandieguy is getting the help she needs.

This is only the beginning.  Imagine as tweeting gets even easier, and more pervasive.  The ability to mobilize the hive mind to deal with a crisis, inform the world, solve problems, generate action and more is only going to get more powerful.  

A collective/hive mind can be powerfully negative as well.  Imagine at some point a Rush Limbaugh-like personality who uses Twitter to mobilize hate and fear-mongering in a way that is destructive.  Imagine Hitler with a Twitter account (no, I’m not comparing Rush to Hitler).  Scary, though perhaps if there was a Twitter in the 1930’s Hitler may never have been able to go so far.  Maybe the benign, voluntary, and informed collective would have forced a quicker response to the threat.  

For marketers, this collective mind is a huge opportunity – and an even larger threat.  Never has it been so easy to inform a huge community of influencers about your experience with a product or service.  We all know that people are much more likely to complain than to compliment, so downside risks from the hive will impact more brands than upside.  A strange trend, though, is that my informal scan of the environment shows that there are a LOT of positive tweets about brands.  Perhaps this is because collective participation is so easy and immediate – it takes only a few seconds to tweet about that great customer service you just got, so why not?  If you’re not following your brand on Twitter, you are missing a huge opportunity.  Someone talks you up?  Reward them!!  Someone puts your brand down?  Make it better and win them back – instantly.  They’ll tweet about how impressed they are with your attention. 

One brand that gets the collective is Zappos.  Tony Hsieh (CEO) follows most of his followers, and he probably has a whole team dedicated to tracking the conversations about his incredible service.  There are over 350,000 people who follow his tweets.  Most are huge fans and never miss an opportunity to say so. 

For good or for evil, the global collective mind is here – and it’s growing.   Resistance is futile – assimilation has begun!