So, I was interesting to page through one of the recent OpenStack surveys. Granted, it’s just 33 respondents, so that’s nothing scientific or otherwise. Nonetheless, they have a nice listing of social networking sites those 33 keep an eye on:

Asked about their primary source for OpenStack info, 33% said it was social media, 33% said the official OpenStack site, and the rest got their info from blogs and other sources. Check out the survey write-up for some more details and other questions.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a client.

I’m always curious how “new media” publishing is going for other people, like Barton George of Dell who’s put out a lot of podcasts and videos over the years, including one with myself at the event. He’s one of those guys who always has a Flip camera in his pocket and managed to get some great interviews with people during the “HallwayCon” of events. Back at the Dell analyst event in Austin, we say down right outside the entrance to the new Austin City Limits studio for a chat on all that:

In addition to clicking play above, you can download the episode directly or subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Shows Notes

• I ask Barton to tell us about the ins-and-outs of recording and a little history, like being used as a news reference from time-to-time.
• I ask him to tell us how these videos and podcasts have helped out the companies his worked for, and himself. He tells us some interesting internal usage stories from Dell.
• See Barton’s YouTube channel for the newer videos he’s been doing. And, of course, there’s Barton blog for all his stuff, media and not.

Disclosure: Dell is a client.

After all this time I’ve come up with a theory for cloud marketing: cloud is speed. Everything else supports that simple, clear message, and anything else is distraction and marketing-bloat.

Pardon me as I get hyperbolic to explore the theory here – I explicitly call it a “theory” because I don’t think it’s 100% solid and it definitely doesn’t apply across the board…but let’s pretend for awhile that it does.

Cloud marketing tactics

If you accept the theory that cloud is speed (which we’ll explore below), that means several things for your cloud marketing:

• You start by telling your audience that once they start using cloud, they’ll be able to do apply IT to business (make money, more than likely) faster.
• That speed means not only that you can pursue opportunities (another word for “money”) faster, but that you can fail faster and thus, “fail towards success” (or “iterate”). If failure is “cheap,” you can use it as a way to learn what success is.
• The point of doing all this cloud stuff is to make things faster: if we can’t prove to you (with past case studies and projected mumbo-jumbo) that our technology makes your IT service/software delivery faster, we’re doing the wrong marketing.
• You have to build enough trust to have the audience ask for more – you’ve got the gain the benefit of the doubt for a very doubtful message. More than likely, no one is going to believe you: every wave of IT has promised to make things more “agile,” cheaper, and faster. If it worked, why are we here with all this opportunity to speed things up? (Never mind Jevon’s Paradox for now.)

Of course, if you’re of the “every great argument needs an enemy” mindset, that implies another straw-man you need to depict.

The problem with IT is that it’s slow

In order to buy more IT, you must connivence people there’s a problem, and that it can be solved with what you have to sell. Here, the problem is that traditional IT – “legacy” if you want to be aggressive – is slow by nature. There’s nothing you can do to fix it by addressing the symptoms, you have to change the core sickness. To put it another way, “cloud dusting” won’t work: you’ll end up with the same boat-anchor of IT with just a different management layer on-top.

This is a point Randy Bias makes relentlessly, and rightfully so. Him and the CloudScalling folks have been wiggling-up a more nuanced, pragmatic argument that exposes the costs of the “legacy cloud” vs. the (my words) “real cloud” that’s worth checking out.

Again, racing to the simple message: cloud is speed. How fast does it take to deploy a new release, IT service, and patch, provision a new box, and so on with your “traditional” setup? How fast does cloud allow you to do it? If a marketer doesn’t immediately prove that cloud is not just faster, but dramatically faster, the whole thing is off.

You want something like this chart from Puppet Labs:

Once you speed up IT, you make more money

Slow IT means the business has to move slower, both missing out on opportunities in hand and missing out on the option to spend time developing new opportunities. If I, as a business, can try out a bunch of different little things quickly and cheaply (see below), I’m not “trapped” in my current shakles of success: “that new idea is all fine and well, but do you have any idea how long it’d take to build it up to even try it out? It takes 4 weeks and $100,000 just to keep them to add a new field to our order form!”

We’ve used the term “business/IT alignment” in this industry a lot over the past few decades. It sounds awesome, and powerful, and like big bonuses: the CEO actually depends on me to help make money…and it works! Business/IT alignment has meant many things when it comes down to the details. Here, it means one thing: speed. By using cloud (the marketing message goes), we can actually respond fast enough to be valuable to the business.

Does this hold water? A survey from Appirio last Fall seems to answer “yes,” at least, you know, among the people who answered:

Have these expectations been realized in actual results? Cloud adopters report that they have. More than 80% of companies that have adopted cloud applications and platforms say that they are now able to respond faster to the business and achieve business objectives. They’ve also found these solutions easier to deploy and cheaper to maintain. The cloud has helped change IT’s role in the business—70% of adopters say that IT is now seen as a business enabler and 77% say that cloud solutions have changed the way they run their business.

(What’s novel about the Appirio survey is that they asked people who’ve already been using cloud stuff, not just what people are “planning” on doing, which most cloud surveys ask – it’s worth submitting yourself to Appirio lead-gen funnel to get the PDF.)

What about cost?

EC2 means anyone with a $10 bill can rent a 10-machine cluster with 1TB of distributed storage for 8 hours. –@mrflip

Costs are a type of friction that slows things down. Having lower costs is table stakes, and if your cloud offering isn’t at least affordable, it’s going to take longer to catch on. Once something is cheap, I can do more of it, more frequently, meaning I can try out more things, explore more options, and – yup – move faster.

If I can spin up a super computer in hours rather than months (or minutes!) for thousands rather than millions, I can achieve a huge amount of speed because I can do more, at lower cost, more frequently. Lowering costs for the sake of lowering costs is only valuable for IT when there’s nothing new gained with the new technology. “Commoditized” IT is what fits here: x86 boxes, email without Enterprise 2.0 bells and whistles, backup software. As a counter example, notice how Apple is able to build up brand to not do that: also notice how “closed” their whole brand ecosystem is.

Controlling costs, then, is something that support speed. If cloud was the same price as traditional IT, or more expensive, it would slow down the rate you could use it (unless you have unlimited budget, e.g., spies, scientists, and other past customers of super-computers).

(There’s a sub-argument to be made that lower costs “democratized” the technology, like open source did the Java application servers and middle-ware, and later software development in general. But, at this high-level, that’s details for further discussion.)

Building trust so you can get to the boring stuff

The most important thing you need to do for cloud marketing is to make people actually believe you. The goal is to get the benefit of the doubt enough to be asked to speak for a few more hours on the topic. The stretch goal, if you’re a public cloud thing is to get people to trust you enough to sign up for the service, for example, to try the Opscode Platform trial, do some “Hello world!”ing on Heroku, putter around on GitHub, or just mess about in EC2. Sadly, most people with high dollar cloud stuff to market don’t have that luxury as they’re selling private clouds, which require, you know, the usual PoCs and such, if only in hardware acquisition and network/security setup. Appliances can go a long way here, of course. But, back to that first goal: being asked back to further educate the prospect.

While cloud gasbags like myself may bore of the whole “what is a cloud” talk, when I talk with the cloud marketers in the trenches, that’s a whole lot of what people want. What exactly does your vision of the cloud mean and how does it apply to me? And let’s be frank, if you, a high paid marketer are involved, you need to sell big-ticket, transformative projects, not tiny things (marketing to the masses is an entirely different set of tactics). This isn’t a cynical, “a sucker is born every minute” take, it’s realizing that if IT is to be a core asset for business, it’s going to be a big deal. The Big Switch hasn’t happened just yet.

How can you build this trust? First, focus on what’s different this time. Explain what has changed technologically to make this speed with cloud possible. Again: “agility” is something IT is supposed to do and everything laughs at. Here are some stock, “what’s different this time”‘s:

• New options are available: Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, and all the other public clouds are new, different ways to run IT. They’re fundamentally different: we’re not just installing magic software on-top of it, the way you manage the hardware, the datacenters, the network, etc. is different.
• Moore’s law has delivered: infrastructure is cheaper and faster (and somehow outpacing Jevon’s Paradox, I guess – though certainly not on my desktop!)
• Once you move to this new model and change the way you develop and manage applications, you can start doing things differently like Frequent Functionality (delivering smaller chunks more often), observing user behavior (a million one way mirrors), and other useful killer features.
• Thanks to consumer web apps and the iPhone-led renaissance in smart phones, people don’t expect IT to suck as much. It’s the old “if Facebook can do it so easily, why can’t the IT department.” This trend is important, because it means there’s demand for IT to suck less – put another way, they have a reason to change – put another way: rouge IT is a very real competition, see that ticker symbol CRM.

There’s more, of course: but to win the benefit of the doubt, you have to explain why it’s different this time, why it will work. All you want to achieve is getting asked back for more and if you can make them believe that cloud is speed, they might just ask for further discussion. And, it of course helps to no end if there’s plenty of examples, but you don’t always have that luxury.

Everything else

Obviously, there’s more details, but I want to keep the theory simple: cloud is speed. Once you go down that rat-hole, the other valuable things like dev/ops, the types of applications you drive on-top of cloud, how you change your deliver model, and where your offerings fits in on the SaaS/PaaS/IaaS burger all come next. The biggest argument of all is over public vs. private. The idea that you need private has all but won, with “security” and special snow-flake concerns weighing too heavily on decision maker’s minds.

But all those things come from what you, the marketer, is actually trying to sell beyond simply speeding things up.

(Here’s some more details and rat-holes in lovely mind map form for those who want to dig deeper.)

Disclosure: Puppet Labs, Opscode, and others mentioned above or relevant are clients. See the RedMonk client list.

Dell held an analyst event in Austin a couple weeks ago (titled “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era”, or SSVE), coming out strong with its message of transformation and growth via an expansion in the general “enterprise IT” space. This was primarily based on two, traditionally non-Dell lines of business.

The Growth Plan

Our strategy around the efficient enterprise and flexible supply chain continues. We continue to develop and acquire key IP and enhance our sales capabilities. And we’re also narrowing our focus on three key solution domains, namely end user computing, data center and information management and services and all things cloud. Each of these solution domains represent key areas Dell has to win. If FY11 was largely about getting operationally fit, then FY12 is going to be about leveraging this position of health and strength to move more aggressively and accelerate our transformation as a services and solutions company. Customers are now seeing Dell in a fresh light and we’re heading into the new year with strength and optimism.
–Michael Dell, FY11 Q4 Earnings Call

The up-shot is that Dell is trying to grow beyond its “cheap boxes” niche, which of course it should be. Dell is trying to become like those other “elder companies” out there: IBM, HP, Oracle, and a handful of others that dominate in the space of hardware, software, and services. For Dell, this is the way out of all their problems. That problem, as my investing friends would tell me, is being perceived as a low to no growth company. Microsoft is in that spot as well – and the pitch-fork mob of growthies have recently been let loose on Redmonk more than usual.

After the two day event:

• It’s still not entirely clear how Dell will first become a peer of and then win against the likes of IBM, HP, and Oracle (the tactics that is), but you almost don’t expect them to spill their playbook enough to make you feel like it’ll work.
• What is clear is that, product-by-product, Dell has a lot to offer: they’ve got a software division on their hands if they can realize it and start running it as such.
• Accelerating into this new role requires paying more attention to the practitioners involved: both the IT staff and the developers who’ll drive innovation and adoption. RedMonk, of course is always big on those “kingmakers.”
• As a “one stop shop,” Dell is at the beginning. While Perot allows them to speak to health-care as a vertical (“applications” and “solutions,” if you will), they need to build up more of these “solutions” with actual software and skill. The needs are things like: building up the IT for new banks from scratch, saving telcos from being stupid networks, leaning up government IT, modernization efforts, and other massive IT changes.

The rest, from Dell, is actually pretty good. Dell can talk to being additive to acquisitions, esp. in storage, but also in servers where Dell has been good at innovating and delivering to new needs for boxes from traditional profiles to “custom” orders of 50,000+ units for high scale web shops.

Also, see the quick video interview Barton George did of my reaction on the first day.

Dell as ISV

Most of all, what I like is that Dell is building a software division. I don’t feel like they really think this exactly, but they should (and they’re certainly acting like it). Software is what will allow Dell to grow in the enterprise, giving their customers a reason to buy Dell systems (or “solutions,” if you like) rather than just boxes.

Dell needs to start thinking like a next generation ISV: something even beyond salesforce.com. What does that kind of software organization look like, how does it operate day-to-day, how does it innovate, how does it package technology, and then deliver it all to make the most profit? Rival HP needs the same thing, but Dell is in a great position: a clean-slate, more or less. Dell doesn’t have the shackles of success tying them to previous (software) revenue models and technology.

Luring Developers

Well, I think the largest cloud providers today, if you will, are those Web 2.0. Those are like new workloads. I think there’s very little of the traditional workloads that are being moved into that space today. And so, most of those — and so, that’s pretty much incremental opportunity. I know there’s a lot of concerns about at some point is there cannibalization and then what happens. We haven’t seen that. I think where companies are at on private cloud is very, very early. And the number of them moving a massive amount of their scale out into the public, very, very few. And so, most of the consumption there is social media and things that wasn’t even in the calculation. So, this is net new business.
–Brad Anderson, Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit

This is a hard slog, though, and just the beginning of the “fun” for Dell. The main thing they’re missing is a tighter focus and catering to practitioners, developers in particular (those “king makers” of tech companies). Developers love Dell monitors, but they need to love Dell software, hardware, and systems.

Mounting up a developers relation program here starts small, but requires patients and stamina. As with any marketing program, you have to offer something better, unique, if not cheap to draw a crowd. For example, Dell could create the ultimate build box: take one of the T7500 work-stations, load-up git, Jenkins/Hudson, Vagrant, etc. and do the work to make the development tool chain integrated and ready to use once the box was plugged in. And then there’s updates to the actual open source tools and configuration to make it take advantage of the 8+ cores on that box and the 12+ gigs of memory (that’s the base-profile I have, at least). Having a powerful build-box that development teams can plug in and have it just work would be attractive: just like the Google Search Appliance is (equipment OEM’ed from Dell, by the way). The build box could come with OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus (curated to simulate Amazon EC2, perhaps), or whatever cloud platform you wanted. Developers always want faster builds, and they’re not too shy about being impressed by over-powered hardware.

Here, the long-term plan for Dell is (a.) gaining relevancy with developers, and, (b.) as the developers need more hardware, they’re familiar with – even like! – Dell systems and hopefully buy it. On the extreme end, in what Dell would call the “Web 2.0″ space (public web sites that use a lot of servers, cloud or not, to host their web apps), developers with datacenter needs might favor the systems platform they started with, Dell. Of course, there’s software, now, for Dell to sell as those teams accrue the needs of success: security, IT management, networking, storage, and whatever vertical offerings Dell can bring to the table. Throw in a few big-ass monitors as a bonus, and there’s even more incentive for developers to dive into a Dell build box.

IT Folks

There’s another group that Dell needs to cater to: sys admins, operators, IT staff, or whatever you like to call that lot. New technologies and practices – cloud, mobile as the new PC, SaaS (to call it out as its own force), and the vague but getting more fully baked “social” – are set to dramatically change the IT department, if not greatly reduce its importance. Who knows what the change will be, but it seems like it’s there.

Dell should be the hand-holder, thought-leader, or at least best-friend of admins: the company needs to help that community stay relevant and paid. Cost savings (or “efficiencies”) work well at first, but then IT needs to actually do something that contributes to their company’s revenue generation. Even if that contribution is just cost-cutting, there’s a question of how those savings are then strategically used. For example, as one Dell executive told me, Dell’s internal IT clean-up helped save $2B, which could be shifted, at the corporate level, to apply to acquisitions and the transformation Dell is going through.

A slightly less than impossible ambition

Dell has set itself up for the big, risky challenge of becoming a one-stop, enterprise IT shop. One of the “big boys,” as I put in my interview with Barton George. Dell needs to not only graft on and grow a software division, but build out their services arm with broad industry skills and programs. At the same time, Dell has to keep up its pose as the most affordable option that works. Normally, this challenge would be an operational quagmire (something Dell people have found themselves in too much in the past), but Dell is slightly better positioned then its peers: there’s little defendable reason to be loyal to the way things are/were, and almost no “legacy” models the company needs to cater to. In a very real sense, Dell has a clean-slate to start from, but enough existing assets to make their turn at the wheel of tech company transformation an interesting, if only slightly less than impossible ambition.

Disclosure: Dell is a client, as are IBM and HP. See the RedMonk client list for others mentioned or related above.

In many cases, when you’re at the actual technology level, you want lots of bullet-points and “burgers” – those dizzy diagrams of boxes and arrows, stacks, and layers.

For example, if you’re releasing a new development platform of some sort (like a mobile framework), it’s good to list all of the integration points you have. Detail what functionality the platform has that’s different from others. Hypervisors would be a good example. If you’re going to compete in that crowded space, you need to detail what’s new and different, not just splash up some paint an enemy, show the hero, and have some minimalist slides with three part diagrams.

Of course, you don’t want to fall too close to text overload. Obviously. But if you’re putting together a technical presentation – or even a presentation about a new release or product – don’t feel shamed into being detailed. In general, if you’re trying to make an argument, the minimalist style works best – better not to have your audience get “confused” about how awesome you are with “details.” But, if you’re giving an introduction and overview (which you should mostly be doing with even only slightly technical people, and beyond – esp. those looking to use or buy your stuff), be detailed. Your audience will want to know these details, and why not take full advantage of their time and just bullet it out?

Why pitching development tools as “making you more productive” doesn’t work as well as you’d think.

Developers don’t care about money – in the same way doctor’s don’t care about money. That is, they actually do care about their personal income, but don’t like to admit it, and are not always motivated to think about the company’s income. Business owners and manager care about money. At small companies, they may be the same, but for many shops (at companies and ISV) across the medium and “enterprise” spectrum, they’re not.

This means that discussions about “productivity,” as in saves and/or makes the company more money, are often not useful conversations to have with developers.

The success of Eclipse Mylyn, TaskTop, tools from Atlassian, and Agile are interesting exception here. Each of those may contribute to the overall success of the company employing the developers, but they mostly increase the ease at which developers can do their own job, irrespective of how profitable that ease becomes. Something like Mylyn makes working on a bug or feature less boring and tedious because all of the relevant context is presented to the developers: it also isolates the developer from the “productivity” tools the rest of the company uses (the way TaskTop 2.0 layers on-top of and hides all the ugliness of wonky, never-gonna-be-replace ALM back-ends is a good example here as well). Chances are, whatever project management, issue, and bug tracking systems and process a company is using, developer loath it. They want to stay in their IDE, coding.

Agile is successful, at the developer level, because it seems to empower developers and make their lives easier. It gives them a tool to talk to the rest of the organization through in terms that work, helping developers do expectation management (not overselling their abilities and then suffering when they have to deliver on unrealistic goals). Much of the excitement you see in developers eyes when they’re exposed to dev/ops comes from a similar function: finally, a way to see what their software is doing in production without involving mind-numbing conversations with “IT.” (I like to think of these types of phenomena as The Developer Landgrab.)

Whether using Agile makes a company more or less money is irrelevant to a developer: what matters (as with all “productivity” tools) is if it makes the developer’s life easy and allows them to block out (or, at best “manage”) the non-developers in the rest of the company. Developers don’t want to be made productive, they want to be empowered.

Disclosure: TaskTop is a client.

Drinking and partying your brains out at SXSW is an easy enough task, but how do you come to this massive conference to do business? I pulled aside Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Maney to hear how his team makes sure to fit into “the vibe” of the conference and get business value out of it, as well as have plenty of fun, as you’ll see.

The highlights:

• Alcatel-Lucent setup the #ElevenAPI lounge and was able to host the Angry Birds folks there with several announcements and, as you’ll see in the background, live-action Angry Birds playing.
• This year, there’s a lot more good conversation, good business conversations with folks big (like Johnson and Johnson, NBC, JC Penny’s) and small.
• People like that it’s not vey corporate in here. It facilities conversation.
• Measuring: tacking hash-tags and measuring interest from people in conversations. (Also, there’s some things like driving seven hours just to play Angry Birds that you can’t really measure).
• If you didn’t have a lounge: look for sessions that interest you, check out the planned networking opportunities, or just walking down the street and meeting people.
• For a large company, you have to be a little looser and casual to fit into “the vibe.”
• The effect: We’ve had lines out the door every day with people hanging out, and getting cool folks making the lounge a base.
• How far ahead of time do you start planning for SXSW? Mike’s team started for 2012 during the 2011 SXSW.
• Problems: Bigger parties with long lines, people who are just hanging out vs. working, but, really, “we haven’t had a lot of bad experience here.”

Transcript

As usual with these un-sponsored episodes, I haven’t spent time to clean up the transcript. If you see us saying something crazy, check the original audio first. There are time-codes where there were transcription problems.

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are at the Alcatel-Lucent Angry Birds’ Lounge at South by Southwest. We have a returning guest here, this time visually, to talk about how the South by Southwest is going. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Mike Maney: Sure! Hi Michael! I am Mike Maney. I am the Head of Influencer Management at Alcatel-Lucent.

Michael Coté: And as you can see, you are very into the Angry Birds.

Mike Maney: I am into the Angry Birds, yes. They are good people.

Michael Coté: So what I wanted to ask you is, I guess people can predict that things are going well by your willingness to put on this awesome suit. But last time we talked we were just kind of talking about the sort of PR and Influencer Management tools and things like that.

So I thought you would be a good person having this Lounge here to kind of go over, has this South by Southwest thing been worth it? Like how is it fitting in to the thing you do for Alcatel?

Mike Maney: So it’s our second year back, and it’s kind of nice when we get a lot of returning folks back to the Lounge. It’s the ELEVEN API Lounge, because it does go up past 10 to 11, that’s sort of what we are doing here. It has been really good.

I think one of the changes that we have seen this year is that we have really seen a lot of good conversation with people, like real business. We have had folks like Johnson & Johnson, NBC, JCPenney’s, folks that are from the enterprise world coming in to talk about APIs and development and non-enterprise stuff.

Michael Coté: And do you get a good audience for that?

Mike Maney: Yes, you get a really good audience for that. I think they are drawn in by a lot of the excitement that we do and the fact that what we do is not very corporate in here. Not very corporate at all. And they just come on in. They have a really good time and it facilitates conversation, which is really what the networking of South by Southwest is all about.

Michael Coté: So I mean, is that the kind of thing that you can measure somehow, or is it sort of like, you just like, hey, trust me, people are coming in and they like this stuff?

Mike Maney: I would like to say that it’s a little bit of the gut feel, and trust me, we know when it’s going well, but for my corporate marketing folks, yeah, I will find a way to measure it somehow.

Michael Coté: Right. Yeah, it’s seems like Twitter is probably a nice way to do that, right?

Mike Maney: We hashtag it with ELEVEN API, so we are measuring volume that way and taking a look at the content of the conversations that are happening there. We are also just sort of gauging interest from comments from folks that we are having interactions with.

Michael Coté: So outside of the Lounge area, which we will get back to, like –

Mike Maney: Wait, there is a place outside of here?

Michael Coté: What about the rest of the conference, have you gotten a feel for what — so like with the rest of the conference, like what — and having been here two years, what do you think of — if someone didn’t have a Lounge going on, what would be kind of the way you would interact with the rest of the conference?

Mike Maney: Well, I do what a lot of the tips say. So I go and I look for the sessions that interest me and I make that list. I try and get to them, and I know they didn’t blow up on day one, and I would do what — South by Southwest’s probably best act is the networking opportunities with peers, with people that you don’t know, walking down the street and seeing somebody with a Gluecon shirt last night, and being able to introduce them to Eric Norlin, being able to do stuff like that.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I notice that in the schedule they actually have a lot of like meetups for different types of categories, which is — I haven’t been to one of those, but it seems nice.

Mike Maney: I tried to get to the Photo one, didn’t make it. But for a large corporation, there are some that I think will do it right, some that won’t, and you have to really be a little bit looser and have the ability to not take yourself as seriously, to be part of the vibe that is South by, and part of what it’s about and embrace it.

I think we have done that here coming back for the second year. We have got Angry Birds in the Lounge, which has been — we have had lines outside the door every single day. What time is it now? It’s 11:30. We have been going since 10, 10:30 today, with lines outside the door.

People playing live action Angry Birds. We have got RCR Wireless broadcasting live. We have had the guys from the Yobongo in here. I mean, I would venture to say we have had the two hottest companies at South by Southwest hanging out and making the Alcatel-Lucent Lounge their home base; the Yobongo and Angry Birds.

Michael Coté: For people who don’t know Alcatel-Lucent very well, I mean, can you kind of explain how those — how that kind of fits into your business? Like why do you want to have this stuff running around with each other?

Mike Maney: Well, we want to have it running around with each other because a lot of people, you are right, they don’t know who we are, they don’t know what we do, but they use our stuff everyday without knowing.

Alcatel-Lucent sits at the very heart and core of all of the networks that all these games, all of these apps, everything runs on. All these devices connect to some sort of Alcatel-Lucent innovation and technology. We just want to be able to have people understand this is the company that’s helping to make that possible.

Michael Coté: Yeah, Cisco does a lot of moving bits around, but you guys do a lot of moving bits and voice and switches, like all the gear.

Mike Maney: Exactly! Exactly! We do all of that stuff that nobody every sees and is really vitally important. It’s really tough work and it’s fun.

Michael Coté: So a couple more little operational questions. So how far ahead of time do you start planning for South by Southwest?

Mike Maney: Oh, we started last Thursday. I mean, this year we actually just started today for next year. So we had a meeting this morning and we are already planning and booking stuff for next year. Thinking about what we can do differently, how we can make it even better, how we can make it a little more interactive, and shift stuff around to keep it fresh.

Michael Coté: Right. So I mean, there has been a lot of positive things you have been seeing, but what are some things that you would like to see work out better or that just flat out don’t work when you are coming here?

Mike Maney: That’s a really good question. I think some of the bigger parties with the lines, that’s always a challenge. People that are here for just hanging out at the parties versus the actual networking, that will always be a challenge, again, embracing the culture of it.

We really have not had a whole lot of — we really haven’t had a whole lot of bad experience here, it has worked out really, really well. We just look for incremental ways to make it that much better.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right. Okay. Well, great! Well, I think unless there is any other sort of like tips or trip report experiences you want to relate to us, I think that was pretty good.

Mike Maney: Thanks a lot, Michael.

Michael Coté: Yeah. We will talk to everyone next time.

Mike Maney: Yeah. Bye.

Seeing a computer play two humans at Jeopardy! is a lot more entertaining than I thought it’d be. I’d been ignoring most of the hoopla around Watson figuring it for a big, effective PR campaign on IBM’s part. It is that for certain, and good on them for doing it. I’ve been more interested in what practical and “work-place” applications the technology behind Watson has, and I got a little bit of that along with some other interesting tidbits at a Watson event this week at IBM’s Austin campus.

The Technology Used

In addition to IBM PR and AR reaching out to me, the Apache Software Foundation sent me info on the Hadoop and UIMA software being used by Watson:

The Watson system uses UIMA as its principal infrastructure for component interoperability and makes extensive use of the UIMA-AS scale-out capabilities that can exploit modern, highly parallel hardware architectures. UIMA manages all work flow and communication between processes, which are spread across the cluster. Apache Hadoop manages the task of preprocessing Watson’s enormous information sources by deploying UIMA pipelines as Hadoop mappers, running UIMA analytics.

The ASF press release is actually jammed with a lot of “how it works” info.

Additionally, Watson is run on POWER7 machines with Linux, one of IBM’s exotic (but revenue pulling – $1.35B last quarter by TPM’s estimates) platforms. I was wondering why the team chose POWER, and though I didn’t get a chance to ask, once of the IBM’ers I was sitting next to said that the cooling ability of POWER machines meant they could pack more of them into the Watson cluster(s).

Here’s a brief hardware description from an overview whitepaper:

Early implementations of Watson ran on a single processor, which required two hours to answer a single question. The DeepQA computation is embarrassing parallel, however, and so it can be divided into a number of independent parts, each of which can be executed by a separate processor. UIMA-AS, part of Apache UIMA, enables the scale-out of UIMA applications using asynchronous messaging. Watson uses UIMA-AS to scale out across 2,880 POWER7 cores in a cluster of 90 IBM Power® 750 servers. UIMA_AS manages all of the inter-process communication using the open JMS standard. The UIMA-AS deploy- ment on POWER7 enabled Watson to deliver answers in one to six seconds.

…

Watson harnesses the massive parallel processing performance of its POWER7 processors to execute its thousands of DeepQA tasks simultaneously on individual processor cores. Each of Watson’s 90 clustered IBM Power 750 servers features 32 POWER7 cores running at 3.55 GHz. Running the Linux® operating system, the servers are housed in 10 racks along with associated I/O nodes and communications hubs. The system has a combined total of 16 Terabytes of memory and can operate at over 80 Teraflops (trillions of operations per second).

During Q&A an audience member asked if Watson could do better if it took longer to answer questions. In the game, of course, Watson is trying to answer questions as quickly as possible. The answer was, yes. And, in fact, Watson already does this: it’s actually running two processes to answer a question:

1. The first is a quick process that favors speed instead of accuracy. This fast process is used by Watson to see if it should buzz in at all.
2. The second is a longer process that favors accuracy and is the process used to actually answer questions.

So, you’d think, at the start of each question, Watson spins up these two processes, handing the real answer off to the one that gets a few more seconds.

There’s a 6 page whitepaper on the POWER7 (and software) angles of Watson over at IBM, tragically, you have to lead-gen your way into it, but it’s worth the typing if you’re interested.

Open Source

What I find interesting here is the big reliance on open source software for this impressive Big Data application. The innovations are interesting on their own, but from a “how do I apply this to my situation?” perspective, in theory, the fact that it’s open source opens the possibilities of using the underlying technology to a wider set of people, if only because it’s cheaper than proprietary options.

For the IBM Systems & Technology Group (STG, who produces and sells all the hardware IBM has), it’d be gravy: why spend all that money of software when you can spend it on hardware? (To be fair, for sometime now and especially with Software Group [SWG] head-honcho Steve Mills running both STG and SWG, IBM would prefer to collect on both types of -ware.)

It’s part of what John Willis would call “The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion.” In my words: there’s an excess of technological innovation at affordable prices (the big difference) out there just waiting for business demand.

Applications beyond Trivia

In addition to the technologies used, the most commonly asked question around Watson has been what other uses. As one of the professors at the Austin event said, what they wanted to do was have a system where “you give a question, and it comes up with a specific answer, not just a [list of documents like Google].” That should remind people of what WolframAlpha is trying to do (in fact, see an in-depth comparison).

Dealing with unstructured text (much of what we humans produce) has always been difficult. Getting “computers” to understanding the nuance in human questions has also always been hard – I can barely understand my UK-dialected fellow English speakers at times, I wonder how a computer gets by? Part of what Watson does is prove advanced in both of those. The costs for this initial run (and those that have come before it) are high, for sure, but watching that thing zoom through oddly phrased questions on TV is pretty amazing.

The IBM folks sent along some possible applications post-Jeopardy!:

Making better decisions- Companies relate to the problem of data-overload. Potential applications for Watson are:

• Healthcare and Life Sciences – Diagnostic Assistance, Evidence-Based, Collaborative Medicine. More, as quoted by Michael Cooney: “… a doctor considering a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson’s analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance’s voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible. This could help medical professionals confidently determine the most likely diagnosis and treatment options.”
• Tech Support, Help-desk, Contact Centers – Enterprise Knowledge Management (looking stuff up, documenting it) and Business Intelligence – Watson’s analytics ability generates meaningful and actionable insights from data – in real time.

Heathcare is the most cited industry for application that I’ve come across. As an analyst presentation on Watson said, providers could ask Watson questions like “What illness presents the following symptoms…?” And check out more from Mike Martin on the healthcare angle.

A post from Louis Lazarus over at “Citizen IBM” about using Watson in the non-profit sector ads some more possible uses:

It’s not hard to imagine how the technology could be used to help triage health patients, or field phone calls placed to municipal quality-of-life hotlines, or assist teachers in helping to score complex essays on tests, or help provide information to disaster survivors.”

Check out this IBM video for some more possibilities discussion.

Injecting UX into AI

Several people have alluded that part of what’s special here is the interface – how humans use – the technology. Coming up with just one, or a handful, of definitive answers over a massive body of content is no doubt helpful – going to wikipedia when you know a topic is generally faster than simply searching Google (esp. considering all the spam-crap it’s loaded up with on general topics).

In the health-care sector, as one Enterprise Irregular said, doctors often find themselves in wikipedia instead of the better, official references simply because it’s easier to take out your iPhone and look up the topic there. This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of “the consumerization of IT”: realizing that if you make your user’s life easier (focus on UX and usability), the overall software will be more valuable because (a.) users will use it, and, (b.) they’re be more productive using it. Speed is a feature here (how many times has someone at a call center told you “the computer is being slow, please wait”) but honing workflows to be help is too. And when it comes to helping find the answer instead of a pile of crap from a knowledge base, that’s huge.

Getting your hands on it

The question, as with any whiz-bang technology, is a depressing: so, how much is that gonna cost me? Hopefully, the open source angle helps drive down the cost, but the hardware needs are still high. Part of the reason to build Watson on POWER7, IBM says, was that the systems are commercially available, as opposed to the custom-built machine used for their previous AI, DeepBlue. Perhaps there’s some help from cheap cloud infrastructure, but I’d wager you’d be sacrificing speed.

It’s fun to watch that polite flat screen beat human at buzzing in, but it’ll be even more interesting watching the technology be industrialized for the mainstream.

Also, you can check out my quick debriefing recording of the event.

Update: Ideas from John Arley Burns

An old friend of mine, John Arley Burns, suggested some possible uses over in Facebook:

1. a google labs plugin that returns watson search results alongside normal results, maybe a watson tab
2. watson was not connected to the internet – connect it to a webcrawler and let it give you answers
3. watson’s search results, instead of being a list of sites like google, will be a list of hypothesis for the answer, in order of descending cofindence, as the reasoning tab on the TED lecture showed
4. i was disappointed that it was getting the information electronically instead of via understanding what was being said – hook watson up to a speech processor so it can crawl audio content as well
5. hook it up to a visual pattern recognizer – IBM already has one of these – and let it crawl images and videos so it can begin to form semantic constructs around them as well
6. put it on the cloud for long-running questions you could submit in batch jobs, such as, here’s all my research data, i want you to tell me how many nanotubes i should use for this circuit layer
7. give it long-running backend goals at low priority, as with SETI@home, that serve a socially useful function
8. allow it to rank importance in recent semantic hypothesis, so that important new items it has with high confidence can be placed on an always-updated news page: what’s watson learning now
9. feed it news wires so that it can answer time-dependent questions about current and just-now events
10. connect it to incoming data feeds at all air control towers so that it can reason where probable collisions or bad weather encounters may occur, and automatically warn pilots
11. connect it to flight schedules, stock prices, pipeline meters, so that it can form a current world view of the instantaneous state of reality
12. allow it to improve itself by testing program hypothesis, evaluating if they cause its answers to be more or less correct, faster, higher confidence, and then updating to new code if it performs better than previous code (using genetic algorithms, perhaps)

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is ASF and Cloudera.

Soon, everyone will have a tablet in the market, it seems. Watching the HP TouchPad & friends (excellent coverage from Cade Metz) event this morning, I got to thinking about what tablet makers must do to compete with Apple. Most of them, so far, have failed on the key item: being cheaper than the iPad. That’s feature number one.

Price < iPad

I mean, let’s be frank: if you’re releasing a tablet, you’re benchmark and your competition is the iPad. That could change in time, sure, but for now, as in mobile, that’s the sort of Platonic model of perfection that most buyers seem to have.

The sell isn’t “here’s why you should buy our tablet because it’s awesome.” The sell has to be “here’s why you should spend your money on us instead of what you really want, an iPad.” As the always entertaining @jrep said in Twitter while we were watching the HP/Palm/webOS/TouchPad shin-dig: “Interesting, ain’t it, that Apple finds itself both “best” and “cheapest” for once?”

From what I’ve seen in non-iPad tablets released so far, each has been around the same price or more than an iPad. The Kindle is a the lone stand out here. I’d argue that it only succeeds because it’s cheaper than an iPad. Not having used one personally, but having talked with many people, the Kindle is a great form-factor and a great device for reading books (that screen is pretty fantastic looking, even across an airplane row). But if the Kindle cost as much as an iPad, most people I’ve spoken with would just get an iPad. They especially have that thought if I mention that you can run a Kindle app on the iPad.

As Stephen O’Grady put it awhile ago: “Anything more than the iPad is too much, given the quality of that device. Less is better, obviously.”

Other Requirements

There’s some other differentiating “musts” as well that I’ve been metaphorically jotting down on the backs on envelopes as I see more and more tablet action:

1. It better work and look good doing it – we’ve seen plenty of tablets in years past that were basically crap or just clunky enough to not really be worth it. Back when I was at BMC, a co-worker had one of those laptop/tablet things where the screen twisted around to be a “tablet.” I think it had a stylus too. It was just a little weird.
2. Flash – having used iOS devices for awhile now, when I switch to a mobile platform that supports Flash (like Android on a phone or the Logitech Revue Google TV) I notice Flash is a good way. I sort of think, “oh yeah, I’ve been missing that without realizing it.”
3. All-in-one device for business and pleasure – clearly, having as many devices in one as possible is highly desired (phone, camera, computer, digital picture frame, music/video player, email machine, etc.). The fact that the first iPad didn’t have a camera was pretty weird and something competitors can’t get away with. Another “all-in-one” is allowing people to use the tablet for both personal and work use – integrating with Exchange, VPN, Office formats, and all that. The emphasis on email in HP’s webOS bonanza this morning was a nice indication along these lines. The device has to work with corporate email and applications, but at the same time allow the user to cart around their personal music collection, photos of lady/guy-friends and kids. And most importantly, it needs games. Lots of games.
4. App Integrations – allowing apps to integrate and communicate with each can be a big disaster, but done right it can be great. One of the major problems I have with iOS is the inability route different types of files and “streams” to different apps. For example, on an iPhone, looking at a picture you can only upload it to MobileMe (boo!), MMS, or email. While on Windows Phone 7, they add in Facebook – and then with Android (and WP7) you can actually gets apps that will add new Share options in there, say, for flickr. Providing these extension points makes the tablet platform more useful and customizable to how I want to do things. iOS has finally added in opening PDF files in other apps like Goodreader, but I’ve seen much better use of these extension points on Windows Phone 7 and Android.
5. Apps – a tablet needs a wide range of popular apps if not right at release, very quickly. At the moment, your best bet is to probably just get the popular apps in the iTunes App Store duplicated in your app store, paying off the developers if needed (for some, free devices might do the trick, other will be more savvy and just want cash). While not a tablet, the current state of Google TV provides an excellent counter-example: the apps are limited to the handful of ones that come with it, making the device an overly expensive alternative to the excellently priced Roku box.
6. Developers – the other side of apps is providing a platform that developers want to develop on (ostensibly, webOS should be doing well here, esp. with the tight node.js/HTML5 emphasis) and speeding up the compile-to-cash cycle as much as possible. In the mobile space, developers are (rightly) driven by profit motives: they want to sell apps. It’s a bit hyperbolic to make a point, but after a “generation” of developers raised on “open source as in ‘no one pays me for my code’” the prospect of making a living of selling software is alluring.
7. Cables – just use USB cables, micro or mini, or whatever: use something that’s standard so I can use the same cable between my external hard-drives, camera, and tablets. This is more of a personal preference, but, again the point is to be compete with the iPad.
8. Battery Life – as Stephen pointed out back in September, battery life is key. Being able to use a tablet “all day” is sort of the key use case and depends on portability, wide app availability (you can do all the things you need to do), and long battery life. Every happy iPad user mentions this to me, esp. the startup execs and sales people (an edge case – except if you consider all those field people at $500-600 a pop for a tablet) who basically use their iPad as a fancy, three-ring binder presentation slide binder.

Actually, you probably shouldn’t make a tablet

Finally, and to satisfy the Talebian quip that good consultants tell you what not to do: chances are you probably shouldn’t be making a tablet. Aside from a handful companies (good for you guys!), delivering a tablet is out of scope and potentially a big distraction from your existing businesses.

The task of doing a tablet well – read: not loosing money and avoiding lost opportunity cost – is immense, expensive, and multi-year. You’re essentially building a whole new computer platform. Worse, you could be OEM’ing a rag-tag of hardware and OS that’s going to get you into a thin-margin market. People like Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, and those folks can hack through businesses like that int he PC space (surviving that crappy marketplace is their core competency – compare to high-end Apple), but it’s not a model you want to get into as a new line of business.

I know, I know: your share-holders (if you’re not public, you’re probably nowhere near big enough to even think about making a tablet) are asking you WTF? on Apple making all that cash from phones and tablets. Just focus on making more money in what you know and then ask your share-holders, “do you want a tablet, or a higher share price?” Your existing customers who just want your existing stuff working better, and for cheaper, will thank you too.

(Side-note: while I was there for the HP TouchPad launch, it looked pretty fine – thanks to the guys at precentral.net for live-blogging it. Hopefully their pricing is good. As one of the commenters at precentral.net said, “Dear HPalm: Please make this worth the wait in a hundred different ways. It is my love for you that prolongs my patience, but it is now wearing thin.” Also, pardon the link-baiting title: I couldn’t help myself.)

Disclosure: check the RedMonk client list for relevant clients.

While working on the west coast recently, I snagged Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Maney (@the_spinmd) and asked what tools and practices he’s using right now in his job of “influencer management.” As a “Director of Influencer Management” over at his day job, he simmers in this soup all day long. We discuss the use of things like Twitter, Quora, blogs, but also the traditional out-reach and “PR” tools like events and face-to-face engagements.

Listen right now by clicking play below:

In addition to clicking play above, you can download the episode directly or subscribe to the RedMonk Media feed (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent is a client.