We here at Combat Consulting are firmly behind the Open Cloud Manifesto.

The problem is that the behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft are not interested in an open standard.I expect they will come around eventually.

The small and the powerless want rules, standards and cooperation. The big and the powerful do not. At best they pay lip service to them and press their advantages in spite of the agreements.

One simply has to look at the 19th Century attempts to get the British to obey the rules of the sea, rules that limited their power and advantage.

The rules were ignored for a long time, until British power waned, but eventually the standards took hold and are now universal.

From Conceptual Trends Current Topics:

“This is interesting. A fairly detailed taxonomy of the existing business models for web sites. The breakdown is here. Using their taxonomy the researches than examined one Top 100 web app list for 2008 and found that:

34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and 8% each for Virtual Products (typically digital downloads), Related Products (typically a large software company offering a free product to attract you to their platform) and Pay-Per-Use.

The graphic pie-chart display of those results look like this.
(I.T.A = Advertising”

Via Conceptual Trends and Current Topics.

“Particularly in hard times, it’s crucial to make the right assumptions in strategic planning. Despite claims that the current recession is “unprecedented,” it seems to be following many of the same patterns the four previous ones did—patterns that may offer insights into the performance of sectors in the coming months and years. All four recessions, like the current one, began with falling sales and EBITA in the consumer discretionary sector and three with similar declines in IT. Consumer staples didn’t suffer significantly in the last three or health care in the last two. The energy sector was among the latest to be hit in three of the recessions, though it was among the latest to recover in all four of them. The exhibit shows the sequence of decline and recovery in these and other sectors.”

From McKinsey Chart Focus

Steve O’Donnell discusses McKinsey’s recent prediction that datacenter carbon footprint will quadruple by 2020, exceeding air travel’s.

CIO and CTOs are in denial about this, but it is true, and one of the biggest challenges facing the industry.

Data Center emissions will quadruple by 2020 matching the volume of air travel. | The Hot Aisle

Joe and Parse 2 has a brilliant post entitled “11 Things I Learned While Trying to Figure Out the Financial Crisis“.

I particularly like his last two:

1. Cognitive errors. Megan McCardle of The Atlantic has compiled a useful list of cognitive errors that seem to have played a role in the crisis – both in creating the conditions that led to it and in compounding it…
2. The Black Swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is my kind of economist. The basis of his philosophy is that, “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.” He advocates “tinkering” as our best mean to change the world – and his theory of the markets take into account many of the previous points. While he was running his own hedge fund in the 1990s, he turned his own knowledge of his lack of knowledge – and others’ lack of knowledge – into enormous profits. It came at the expense of losing a little money 364 days of the year – but making enormous profits in that one remaining day. He would bet on market volatility – which he understood financial firms repeatedly underestimated. Taleb’s key insight is that we know very little of the world itself – and will be more often fundamentally wrong than right…

At the “Tinkering” link above, he explains Taleb’s idea by quoting from Brain Appleyard in The Times:

Taleb believes in tinkering – it was to be the title of his next book. Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do. All were black swans. The big hope for the world is that, as we tinker, we have a capacity for choosing the best outcomes.

“We have the ability to identify our mistakes eventually better than average; that’s what saves us.” We choose the iPod over the Walkman. Medicine improved exponentially when the tinkering barber surgeons took over from the high theorists. They just went with what worked, irrespective of why it worked. Our sense of the good tinker is not infallible, but it might be just enough to turn away from the apocalypse that now threatens Extremistan.

If some of the words in the excerpt seem a bit odd, it is because Taleb is creating an entire new glossary for his ideas.

In a thoughtful post entitled “Thoughts on the Financial Crisis“, Tim O’Reilly quotes a Rilke poem:

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming…What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

He explained the quote like this:

There are a lot of people bloviating about the financial crisis. It’s outside of our area of expertise, so there didn’t seem to be a lot of urgency to add to the hot air. Even professional economists and financial experts disagree on where this is going. I’ve been reading a lot, and sharing the best links via my twitter feed, but frankly, I’m feeling that we’re in the middle of a wave that no one completely understands.Meanwhile, I did in fact spend my NY Web Expo talk on the idea that “I sense a storm coming” (Rilke quote), and the idea that companies and individuals need robust strategies (ones that can work even in uncertain times), with one robust strategy being to “work on stuff that matters.”

In a letter to his own employees where he elaborates on this, he passes on some great advice that we can all heeded:

Many of you have no doubt been alarmed by the developments of the last couple of weeks in financial markets……robust strategies are ones you’d adopt in good times and in bad…we probably end up with more robust strategies if we assume the worst rather than the best.

We could be in for a long, rough time in the economy. I’m not going to say otherwise.

But I also want to point out that rough times are often the best times for creativity, opportunity and change.

…And if you look at history, you see that this has always and everywhere been true. It’s not an accident that economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about the “creative destruction” inherent in capitalism. Great problems are also great opportunities for those who know how to solve them. And looking ahead, I can see great opportunities.

The energy crisis (both global warming and the oil price shock) is helping people to focus on how technology can transform the energy sector. The financial crisis has demonstrated just how out-of-whack an unregulated, proprietary, black-box approach can get. This will lead to
an emphasis on regulation, but I hope, above all, on transparency. This is of course analogous to what happened with open source software. Meanwhile, the mobile revolution will continue, regardless of the state of the economy. If it can prosper in Africa, it can prosper even in an
American downturn. And all the stuff we’re exploring with Make: new materials, new approaches to manufacturing, and the “open source” approach applied to hardware, will take us in unexpected directions.  And all of these areas can benefit from what we do best: capturing and
spreading the knowledge of innovators.

We don’t know yet how problems in the overall economy will affect our business. But what we can do now are the things we ought to be doing anyway:

• Work on stuff that matters: Assuming that the world does go to hell in a handbasket, what would we still want to be working on? What will people need to know? (Chances are good that they need to know these things in a world where we all continue to muddle along as well.)
• Exert visionary leadership in our markets. In tough times, people look for inspiration and vision. The big ideas we care about will still matter, perhaps even more when people are looking for a way forward. (Remember how Web 2.0 gave hope and a story line to an
  industry struggling its way out of the dotcom bust.)
• Be prudent in what we spend money on. Get rid of the “nice to do” things, and focus on the “must do” things to accelerate them.
  These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.

I have been waiting for the dust to settle and for some informed commentary to emerge. Here is the first crop of interesting links:

Articles

Douglas Rushkoff on the Crisis 1

Douglas Rushkoff on the Crisis 2

The Fuel That Fed The Subprime Meltdown by Ryan Barnes (Investopedia overview)

The fatal banker’s fall – Financial Times

Taleb’s Warning by Richard Fernandez

Thoughts on the Financial Crisis - Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media fame)

Audio & Radio

The Giant Pool of Money – http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355 (also see Planet Money – Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson (the guys who did that program) have a new daily, free podcast and blog applying that same explanatory power to each day’s breaking news on the financial crisis).

This American Life “Another Frightening Show About the Economy”

Enforcers, Act II “Now You SEC Me, Now You Don’t”

A great episode of Fresh Air, in which Terry Gross interviews Michael Greenberger, a former director at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He gives a very helpful, lucid primer on the current financial picture.

A follow-up Terry did with Greenberger, just as good, when the government bailed out AIG in mid-September.

Most of you are familiar with Steve and I through our work as consultants in Serbia where we have mastered the art of “Combat Consultancy”, which is consultancy in high pressure, hostile and just downright difficult business environments.

It may surprise some of you to know that we are also both senior executives at DNS Europe, where Steve is the Communications Director and Jonathan the Technical and Operations Director.

Over the last few months DNS Europe has been working with our US partners 3tera and EUnet to introduce affordable Grid Computing to the UK in the form of our Grid Hosting services based on 3tera’s superb AppLogic.

It essentially means that for less than the price of mid-range dedicated server, small and medium sized companies can now enter the cloud computing game with their own AppLogic powered Virtual Data Center based in London (or Belgrade)

In addition to Virtual Data Centers, we are also slowly releasing a series of Cloud based virtual servers (Virtual Grid Servers) which are based on CentOS 5 Linux but to which you can add “modules” which range from Control Panels (like DirectAdmin) through to fully pre-packaged & ready to run Open Source applications and services like SugarCRM, PBX in a Flash (an Asterisk based VoIP PBX) and Zimbra Mail.

The idea is that customers can add and combine as many of these modules as they like to their Virtual Grid Server, they just pay for the resources that they use (drive space, CPU, bandwidth and memory).

Customers can get an entire business infrastructure (mail, CRM, Telephony, website) with their VGS, which is an ultra safe and stable platform that shrinks or grows to fit their real-world needs. This means their IT infrastructure investments are recession and growth proof, pegged to the real state of their business (i.e. what they need now). This really is Utility Computing, where like electricity or gas, customers only pay for what they use.

For an overview of what Grid Hosting is and its benefits, this is a good start: http://www.dnseurope.net/gridhosting/

We are absolutely convinced that virtualization breakthroughs like Cloud Computing and Grid Hosting are the wave of the future for business hosting and web applications. There is a huge and growing interest in this as more and more CTOs wake up to the power and potential of this technology.

If you or anyone you know is interested in Grid Hosting, just give is a call or shoot us a mail via our contact form. These are early days, but this is the perfect time to look into this: The technology is proven and stable, but the prices are still low to entice early adopters. It will all change within a few months.

Incidentally, this service is also a triumph for our long campaign for Serbia as an outsourcing location. We at DNS Europe are able to match the prices of US rivals and bring affordable Cloud Computing and Grid Hosting to the UK and Europe by outsourcing Research & Development and parts of our advanced technical support to Serbia, where we maintain an office and brilliant team of local experts.

For more information see the DNS Europe website and our recent press release.

Serbian and other South Eastern European readers may be shocked and delighted to note that EUnet is also offering Grid Hosting in the region.

I spotetd this on Ari Rusila’s blog and it reminded me of the One Page Project Manager:

In my post before I mentioned Logical Framework Approach (LogFrame) as a model to improve the use of donation money for regional development. LogFrame is not perfect but even with its weaknesses it is in my opinion the basic mean for programme/project management. There is also other good alternatives as well some upgraded models of LogFrame, but below and from document library you may find the basic matrix of LogFrame idea:

Logical Framework .doc

[From LogFrame: Basic matrix « AriRusila’s BalkanBlog]

I heard this idea from Steve O’Donnell 2 years, but I am delighted to see so many of those previously radical ideas now being seriously considered:

Data centers’ ability to suck up inordinate amounts of electricity is turning them into the Hummers of the computing world. And much like Hummers, their power-guzzling ways means they are becoming increasingly costly to run. We’ve already covered the efforts of companies to reduce heat, increase server utilization and build green data centers. Now Andrew Hopper, head of the Cambridge University Computing Lab, is working on a solution that could help reduce the demand data centers place on the grid.

Hopper’s vision combines cloud computing and renewable energy: He wants to take electrical transmissions costs out of the equation by placing a data center directly at the site of a renewable energy source and use fiber optic cable to link it to the entity that uses it. Hopper is also the co-founder of Level 5 Networks, which was bought by 10 Gigabit chip maker SolarFlare.

[From Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind « Earth2Tech]