http://www.umbrellacloud.com/business-model/value-chain



Analysis‎ > ‎
Value Chain
Porter Value Chain Model divides activities of a business into two main categories based on their relationship to the end product or service. (Click here to learn more about Porter's Value Chain)

Cloud computing can increase an organization's competitive advantage and MARGIN by reducing the Information System resources required to perform the support activities in a firm. (Freshbooks.com's Billing and General Ledger Accouting, 37 Signal's Packages)
Emerging cloud services are capable of supporting some of the primary activities of businesses as well. (Salesforce.com's CRM, ZOHO's ERP, UPS or FedEx's Supply Chain Management, Getsatisfaction.com Customer Service)

Porter's Value Chain Model. Graph Courtesy of Gemino

Blogs

http://fountnhead.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/why-utility-computing-failed-but-cloud.html

Cloud for small offices

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/office-365-and-the-future-of-cloud/7244?tag=nl.e101

Office 365 and the future of Cloud
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By Patrick Gray
January 23, 2012, 11:26 AM PST
Takeaway: Patrick Gray talks about how hosted infrastructure is now within reach of even the smallest companies, and how it will evolve.

My company is in the final stages of a migration to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud computing offering. At first brush, Office 365 is essentially hosted email and online versions of Microsoft’s Office software. However, when you delve a bit deeper into the offering, one can also purchase a subscription that includes desktop versions of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office software, at a price that amounts to less than the cost of individual licenses.

I’ve always suggested that cloud should be about more than saving a few bucks, and for us, Office 365 promises a significant “hassle” savings as it will eventually replace our on-premise server that runs Windows Small Business Server. SBS was generally worry free, save for the bimonthly “ghost in the machine” that would require a couple of days of troubleshooting, time that could have been better spent elsewhere.

I will miss a few features of having a locally administered server. File and print services are now commodities available in big box store NAS units, but SBS offered centralized user administration and access management that’s not easily replaced. This concern brings me to what most interested me from a larger industry perspective as we migrated our network: how hosted infrastructure is now within reach of even the smallest companies, and how it will evolve.

The dawn of the black box

Tools like Office 365 will serve most of basic infrastructure needs for small and medium companies; however, there are still instances when a local server proves beneficial. Network backup, centralized user and computer management, file and printer sharing spring to mind-services that can’t easily be replaced by a cloud equivalent. What would be an interesting replacement would be local hardware that’s remotely administered by a cloud provider.

A reasonable analogy is the cable box provided by your cable or satellite company. It’s essentially a “black box” from a technical perspective: you’re unconcerned about (and prohibited from) managing or maintaining the hardware, and interact with the device through a simplified interface or, in many cases, through an online portal that communicates with the box. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Microsoft, Google, or Apple shipping a “black box” that a small business plugs into their network, then configures via a simplified web portal. The box could handle file and print services, centralized user management, and even cache OS patches and virus updates, all without the care and feeding one would associate with a standard server.

Microsoft’s Small Business Server seems to have been striving toward a “network in a box” concept, but at the end of the day still requires a full-scale server and the associated maintenance. The box I’m envisioning would likely be about the size of your current cable box, and perhaps be based on solid-state drives and fanless hardware. Rather than a howling rackmount unit, it might sit quietly in a 20-person office, updating its configuration automatically based on changes to the associated cloud account. Microsoft is already making moves in this direction, although it’s still not the computing equivalent of the cable box.

Could this work for the “big boys”?

When one begins scaling to thousands of users, cloud services look less attractive from a financial perspective due to migration costs and the economies of scale that can be accommodated with thousands of users. A remotely-configured “black box” might seem like heresy to the CIO of a large company, but it’s less of a stretch than one might imagine. All manner of single-purpose devices from routers and firewalls to anti-spam “appliances” are migrating toward this model. Most separate the underlying OS and associated configuration from a vendor-provided portal that configures the device. Virtual appliances fit the same mold, and it’s not too big a stretch to envision basic network services following a similar route.

If nothing else, local devices that are centrally managed and configured from the cloud offer a level of flexibility and redundancy that would be appreciated. New branch office? Set them up on your vendor’s cloud portal, have that vendor ship them a “black box,” and moments after they plug it in their local network is up and running.

While cloud computing seems to be the latest and greatest, like most technologies it is not a tool for every problem. For many computing services, local resources still offer benefits, especially when a cloud-based management and configuration philosophy is applied. While we still may be a year or two away from a true “network in a box” product, the major players seem to be making the right moves to get us there.

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Ops readiness for Cloud for enterprise

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/cloud-enterprise-applications-12-principles-of-operational-readiness/5265?tag=nl.e101

The Enterprise Cloud

Cloud enterprise applications: 12 principles of operational readiness
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By Nick Hardiman
January 23, 2012, 6:00 AM PST
Takeaway: Nick Hardiman lists his 12 principles of operational readiness for an enterprise application built on the public cloud.

I installed an enterprise application on my public cloud-based virtual machine. Can I hand the application over to my enterprise colleagues for operational use? If so, I can tick this job off my list, grab a coffee and move on. But how do I know if it is ready for enterprise operation? How do I measure operational readiness?

Installing an enterprise application is not like installing a desktop application. Both types of application are handy shrink-wrapped knowledge, providing a popular set of functions to help people work. The difference is an enterprise application requires a lot of non-functional work — I need to make the application work in an enterprise environment.

Here is the list of enterprise service operational principles that works for me. I measure my new enterprise application against my list, work with colleagues to fix the failures, and test again. When my application follows all the principles, it is operationally ready.

Enterprise service operational principles

These dozen statements describe how an enterprise service should be. If all these statements apply to my new enterprise service, I can happily stamp my operational approval on it.

I have provided a few examples to make these statements a little clearer, but I have not described the actions required to get there. As you can imagine, putting these principles into practice for enterprise services is complicated. It’s almost impossible to get everything right.

Many cloud innovators provide services in one or two of these areas, to ease an organization’s workload. You can pay Green Hat to provide cloud-based performance testing tools, Core Cloud Inspect to check security, and Cloudkick to monitor infrastructure. A few big players like EMC and Novell have enough tools to take all the responsibility. The bigger your wallet, the more responsibility you can avoid.

My enterprise service:

has been functionally tested. If a new business application has not yet been signed off by the guy paying the bills, I will waste my time carrying out operational tests.
has capacity. Sysadmins may want to scale up the disk space for a storage service and the bandwidth for a video chat service. They may scale down to a pocket calculator for a monitoring service.
is resilient. This is the world of High Availability: double up on single points of failure, improve code quality, and even if something does fail, make sure the service handles it gracefully.
is recoverable. If the student deletes half the files or the computer room catches fire, service can be restored.
is reliable. Customers use Internet services 24 hours a day, but an intranet may only be needed during office hours. An intranet that is down every night may still be perfectly reliable.
is scalable. What if the new service has traffic spikes or gets really popular? I may need to scale out by adding more servers. Wading through treacle is not attractive.
is monitored. The operational support people must be alerted immediately if someone breaks into the computer room, if upstream services disappear, and if a process goes berserk.
is supportable. If an architect designs an Internet bank that only runs on one server, how pleased will customers be when an operator turns off the bank to upgrade the memory?
is secure. Vulnerabilities get patched, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) watches the network, and the security team have signed on the dotted line.
has been pushed to the limit. The whole system has been thrashed, bottlenecks fixed and the system thrashed again and again. The service owner then knows how much performance can be squeezed out of her service.
has integrity. The customer support people won’t be plagued by calls from customers whose data is inconsistent, whose files have disappeared, or whose transactions were duplicated.
will operate within the SLA. The people sponsoring this service deserve to know how their investment is doing. The service builders automate the measurement and reports of the service level. Stakeholders can then help a failing service to succeed.
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PC platforms stats

http://www.asymco.com/category/industry/

Share of platforms

http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing/

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Any successful business that is sufficiently explainable is on the cusp of becoming unsuccessful.
6 hrs ago
iPod unit sales estimates for Q1 range from 9 to 18 million - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech
http://t.co/nolC1hUx
8 hrs ago
With SOPA Hollywood awoke a great giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
17 hrs ago
You cannot separate the MPAA from the value networks underpinning Hollywood. If you have one you must have the other.
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Follow @
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Windows and Windows Live generated $4.3 billion in Q4 sales five years ago. The same business generated $4.7 billion last quarter.
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Windows slowly shrinking as a percent of total Microsoft revenues. Now at 23%. Five year time frame:
http://t.co/Qkxypehv
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Google's Page: There are now about 250 million Android devices
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eBook on getting into the Cloud

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VNVMWW/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=thepartim-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B004VNVMWW&adid=0F3S31Q6PHGNJ3KPAEDV&

Amazon.com: Google Apps Express: The Fast Way To Start Working in the Cloud eBook: James Beswick: Kindle Store