World Innovation Forum
Posted inInnovation

World Innovation Forum

1Posted inInnovation

There were several innovation-related topics that caught my eye yesterday. Innovation has become a huge word this year, given that many believe that a down economy is a great time to innovate.

The first topic I saw was a reminder that the World Innovation Forum is occuring in NYC starting May 4th.

The second thing I saw was this tweet from Stu’s coverage of the IDC conference in Boston yesterday:

stu: #IDC Carr says Cloud follows the Innovator‘s Dillema: disruptive tech comes into low end and eventually good enough to kill sustaining tech
Both of these items have Clayton Christensen in common. He’s the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he’s one of the featured speakers at the World Innovation Forum (speaker lineup is here).
Is Cloud Low-End?
It’s hard to get the full context from Stu’s tweet but I have always pictured IT clouds as “big” as opposed to “low-end”. Nicholas Carr asserts (based on my reading of Stu’s tweet!) that cloud technology is disruptive because it enters the low-end and will eventually kill “sustaining” technology.
I dug around the internet and pulled up an article by Mr. Carr (November) which I believe provides more context. It defines cloud as a “utility” completely hosted outside of a corporation (a la Amazon). The IT outsourcing model describes employees performing computing and storage tasks for “pennies on the dollar”, which I interpret to mean “low-end”.
This of course is a different description of cloud than what I’ve been thinking (and blogging) about: private clouds. This is also not surprising, given the nebulous nature of the word cloud. For me, private clouds are not low-end products but rather large aggregations of virtualized servers, networks, and storage.
Is Private Cloud Innovative?
I think it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to look at the agenda and workshops occuring at the upcoming World Innovation Forum and ask if Cisco’s UCS and private cloud vision are innovative. What are the sort of things discussed at the Forum? Here’s a list:
  • Learn what an innovative culture entails and how to implement it in your organization
  • Learn what successful leaders do to support innovation
  • Find out why behavior triumphs over process
  • Gain a deeper understanding of the nature of innovation
  • Learn from real innovation practitioners

There you have it. Announcements aren’t innovative, but the organizations that implement them can be. From the list above, I like “find out why behavior triumphs over process” and “learn from innovation practitioners”. Executives can put an innovative process in place, and companies can make innovative announcements, but ultimately innovation occurs in the trenches.

Innovative behavior coming from the trenches is what matters.

Then again I may be a little biased. ;>)

The True Measure of Innovation == JUICE_FLOW

If I were to ask myself the question “Is Private Cloud Innovative?”, I would respond with a resounding “oh yeah!”, because the opportunity to work on new types of problems, especially this type of problem, gets the creative juices flowing.

Don’t get me wrong, private clouds are being implemented in data centers already. The Forrester report is a current survey of deployed private clouds.

But the long term vision of a private cloud, in my mind, has huge numbers of identical beefy servers, large banks of JBOD-like tiers of homogenous storage, and a ton of cool software tying it together. Much of the storage software will be running as Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs), a topic I’ve covered before (shipping storage files as opposed to storage hardware).

The “cool factor” for me is that designing a total solution goes beyond storage systems and intersects with a set of products EMC ships that are somewhat outside of my day-to-day responsibilities. Examples include SMARTS, Voyence, and Infra, for example. I know tangentially that SMARTS can analyze a highly-complex alert storm coming from cascading network errors (will be common in private cloud) and conclusively diagnose the “real” problem.

In other words, innovators have to bring different technologies into adjacent areas that are, though related, not the intended initial use case. I like it. Lots of cool work ahead.

Comments about private cloud and innovation welcome.

Steve

1 Comment

  1. Andrea Meyer
    March 19, 2009,

    I found your blog through Twitter. I like your discussion of potential innovative uses of the cloud. One useful idea is see is that companies can use cloud media to develop products with less guesswork. For example, software companies who host their applications in the cloud can watch what users/potential customers are doing – in real time, all the time. They can see which features really get used and which don’t. They can notice if users hit the “undo” button frequently, which suggests that the feature isn’t doing what users expect it to do. If you’re interested in more about this, I wrote about it at: http://workingknowledge.com/blog/?p=158
    Thanks for posing these ideas – and perhaps we’ll see each other at the World Innovation Forum.

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