Are You on the Cloud?

I am pretty sure that most of technical people are aware about the technical term "cloud", and even can give some kind of description about what does it mean. The well known association of the cloud computing is with the software as a service, SaaS. However, there are more and more areas of IT services which are moving to the cloud. So, knowing the acronyms for such cases is a part of the IT literacy.

I have filled a survey today "Managing Cloud Applications" posted by the The Office of the CIO®  in collaboration with Katepano SaaS Monitoring and Optimization which reminded me about my intention to create this post and to list all abbreviations.

Here is the list of the cloud services that I am aware of:

PaaS - Platform as a Service
 BaaS - Backup as a Service
BPaaS - Business Process as a Service
CaaS - Communication, Content, and Computing as a Service
DaaS - Database as a Service DaaS ( another one) - Desktop as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
IDaaS -  Identity as a Service
MaaS - Monitoring/Management as a Service
NaaS - Network as a Service
SaaS ( another one) - Storage as a Service
SECaaS - Security as a Service
UCaaS - Unified Communications as a Service
APMaaS - APM (Application Performance Management) as a Service 
LaaS - logging as a service 

Here are some other acronyms that go together with the cloud:
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
SOCCI - Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure

As you can see, there are so many IT service already on the cloud that they are even reusing the same surnames. According to industry definition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the "as a service" acronym formed a category XaaS which unites all cloud-related services.

The IaaS was pioneered by Amazon. UCaaS becomes a popular because it is easy to outsource. The MaaS is almost a requirement for IT that uses cloud.  The NaaS is a choice for the mature large companies because they want to get out of the IT business.

According to the market forecasts, by the 2015 year the XaaS market will be more then $40 billions. Microsoft's latest strategy shift to the cloud with its offering of the SkyDrive cloud storage service and cloud-based Office 365 is a strong evidence of the industry shift to the cloud.

So, are you YOU on the cloud? Do you use other then listed above services?


Resources: NETWORK WORLD, August 13, 2012. Volume 29, Number 14.

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience: Do you know that you can present your resume through infographics by using free ans easy tools that pull out info from existing sites.

Visualize Your Experience

Do you know that you can present your resume through infographics by using free ans easy tools that pull out info from existing sites.

Social Media Demographics - infographic

Via: Online MBA Resource social media

Word clouds from the words used on sitecore.net, created with Wordle

Digital presentation of Sitecore on twitter  http://bit.ly/xRXgCJ

Tying Business Intelligence with Business Process Management

Companies are watching carefully, using business intelligence and analytics tools to figure out what’s happening in their markets from the perspective where efficiency can make the difference between profit and loss. The goal is to use right analytics tools to guide business processes changes towards “dramatic productivity enhancing”. This is a responsibility of CIO to establish cooperation between IT department and business units to create a data warehouse and to enable the best use of predictive analytics tools and techniques and tying them with BPM. The metrics are: improvement of financial forecasting, customers retaining and operating profits.


Examples of successful data enabling changes where analytics and BPM are connected:

· The insurance industry – fraud detection;
· Order management, global inventory and invoicing;
· Increasing timing intervals of reports for the decision making produced results allowing adjust business process;
· Analytics tools integrated with customer-relationship management (CRM) or e-commerce systems helps improving processes for engagement with customers;
· Introducing measurements and showing success from the analytics-BPM helps CIO to add more dedicated to analytics staff to their teams.

Companies discover new ways to save:

· Business analytics produced incredible results for CUNA Mutual to open their eyes where that should concentrate their effort to attract new customers. Example: to attract generation Y – build mobile and web products; provide up-sale additional services in convenient way.
· Outsourcing of analytics and data warehousing by using the 3rd party vendor (like Oco) thorough their SaaS tools can resolve a lot of timing issues and save money by providing timely reports and provides for for necessary changes in the business processes. Example: transportation expenses were cut by 12-15%.

Organizations can improve their conversation with customers:

· Many modern BI and analytics tools provide prebuild statistical models which remove the need for highly educated resources and reduce time of the analyses. Example: complex analyses as segmenting customers based not simply on demographics and the products and services they buy, but also on less cut-and-dried information, such as how they behave at a website or what comments they make during call- center interactions .
· Key to game-changing decision making is the ability to detect and respond to market changes, taking into account historical knowledge. Evaluating historical data such as the average annual revenue the customer represents, her payment history and other bought product, and forming the customer value, Direct TV created tactics how to cut churn rates and retain customers.
· Coca Cola created an innovative personalized way of attracting their consumers to interact through the website and provide information about where the products were purchased and offer customers some rewards for that. The company uses this feedback to tailor its pitches and have a relevant dialog with customers.  The company has learned that watching behavior is more meaningful than reading questionnaires Web visitors are asked to fill out. The idea is not just to save business but to create new business.

Analytics tools help companies create more money-generating interactions with customers and shave costs from internal operations. CIOs should connect analytics technologies with ideas about refining business processes.


Resources:  Kim S. Nash, CIO. June 17, 2010. Business Intelligence Meets BPM: Using Data to Change Business Processes on the Fly. Retrieved from www.cio.com

Business Intelligence and Social Media

I have heard different opinions about the value of organizational activities on social medial channels. A lot of advocates (or anti-advocates) see the value of social medias only as another channel to bring visitors to their website.

In such statements at this stage a very important aspect of collecting followers is overlooked. Most of social media website have APIs that let query information about people who are part of your network (your friends, followers, etc.). By privacy policy you can only view the profile of people who allowing queries. A lot of recent software tools exploit this social networking openness. I can see that somebody will come (or already did) with models for  software applications that will do a business intelligence analysis of the data about visitor's behaviour on your website and your activities on social medias, and will provide suggestions how to engage your followers even further.  There will be a clear "aha" moment for your organization how to push social media followers to create a business value for you. Since they are already following you, it means that they are already initiated engagement. Something particular for their needs or interest needs to be done to make them do a second step on the engagement ladder. At some points business intelligence analysis can turn this ladder in the slide.

Very exiting time we are living with the turning point of the web to become a proactive and coming to you with the information you are interested, instead of the current and past way of you going and searching the information on the web. Social media networks are the channels for that, so collect your follower and obtain more!