WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: 3 major players in cloud computing are battling it out on sales rather than technology as the platforms mature and the enterprise adoption skyrockets. Gartner quadrant provides overview of the major players. Google is immature, AWS has aggressive sales tactics and Azure offering is confusing.

WHY IT MATTERS: this short example shows how far we've come with serverless and event-drive architectures in the cloud, enabling complex processing as a pipeline of small operations. For old dudes like me this is a throwback to the command line pipelines we used to make in Un*x way back when. It makes for very resilient solutions, once you debug the flow. Should be used more often.

WHY IT MATTERS: a good overview, well presented of tech trends for executives. Beware: for long-term strategy discussions only!

WHY IT MATTERS: short eBook on trends and use cases for edge computing in retail. Useful to realize that cloud is not just about centralized computing mainframe-style, but must be paired with edge computing as we do with laptops and cell phones...

WHY IT MATTERS: this article explores the cost of cloud computing for large SaaS companies that rely on cloud computing to run and operate their business. The basic argument is that cloud computing is amputating Billions from the market value of those large organizations. It should be read by every software engineer in every corporation and the proposed solutions implemented rapidly.

This statement summarizes the post best: "For a new startup or a new project, the cloud is the obvious choice. And it is certainly worth paying even a moderate “flexibility tax” for the nimbleness the cloud provides. The problem is, for large companies — including startups as they reach scale — that tax equates to hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value in many cases… and is levied well after the companies have already, deeply committed themselves to the cloud (and are often too entrenched to extricate themselves)."

WHY IT MATTERS: Google search made it easy for a generation of students to "borrow" content from others in order to get "inspiration" for their reports. Now Google also provides teachers with tools to automatically check what is unique and what is not in automated fashion. Why is this not included in WORD or Google DOCS to automatically verify what is truly unique in documents you receive, say from consultants like me? Oh no, many would find this not a good idea I'm sure... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: the opportunity of cloud computing remains whole as per this analysis from McKinsey. One chart of the benefits should convince the most reluctant CIOs that cloud is a good thing.

WHY IT MATTERS: this is just one infographics on Google Cloud services with others here https://thecloudgirl.dev/index.html and here https://github.com/priyankavergadia/GCPSketchnote . Unlike so many infographics these ones are actually useful... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: always interesting to track internet traffic from the infrastructure providers. Here Cloudflare but also Akamai, etc.

WHY IT MATTERS: a simple overview of cloud based ecommerce solutions that small businesses should consider.

WHY IT MATTERS: this post is a bit theoretical for someone not bathing in digital transformation all day as I do (mostly). It explores what could come next but more importantly stresses an important fact: we now have a new platform - the mobile phone - in our pockets that has the potential to transform our world. We have started to see this with eCommerce - physical retail stores become irrelevant and we can price compare from anywhere - but we have yet to see the real impact of eCommerce+mobile+cloud+5G. THIS is what I think about most days...

WHY IT MATTERS: this post highlights 6 key elements of successful technology projects. They include agile, cloud and service architecture. No surprise. What is interesting is that they can even prevent projects from busting their budget by 200%, which seems to be the "track record of comparable programs" according to McKinsey... #sad

WHY IT MATTERS: the net net of this report is that you should move all your data to the cloud and leverage very nimble solutions to aggregate, consolidate and massage data.

WHY IT MATTERS: with every product moving to a SaaS, pay as you go, model, retention has become a key metric to consider. This post delivers insights into retention metrics for GOOD and GREAT retention numbers. I'd love to see similar posts on email open rates, ecommerce conversion, app usage, etc.

WHY IT MATTERS: this is huge for inter-system operability and improved management and user experience. It is now possible to single sign-on between Azure and AWS cloud computing platforms. This is a big deal for us geeks... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a community created reference that I leverage all the time when asked about AWS services. You should too.

WHY IT MATTERS: this report on the use of software as a service in companies - think products like salesforce.com, office365, mailchimp and others. The data is clear: SaaS solutions are popular and no one seems to be in charge. This will have serious implications in terms of accountability, security, privacy, regulation compliance, economies of scale, etc. Who will manage that?

WHY IT MATTERS: cloud computing has moved infrastructure to the cloud, limiting visibility and control of IT teams on key components of the infrastructure that may be required to monitor and troubleshoot. This report from Gartner highlights the different solutions and skills required to cover cloud computing solutions from private cloud to SaaS.

WHY IT MATTERS: factories are being transformed by digital at a rapid pace and this paper provides insights into that transformation, including how technologies are being deployed today.

WHY IT MATTERS: always good to stay abreast of the latest buzzword... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: cloud computing Gartner quadrant analyzed to show that Seattle region is home to the industry leaders.

WHY IT MATTERS: there are only 3 players in cloud computing market: Google, Amazon, microsoft. Sorry IBM & Oracle just don't make the cut. Here is a great analysis of why this is so.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

If you ever doubted if cloud computing is important to include in a business digital strategy, this 10min video by Google chairman provides very compelling business reasons to do so.

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud - petabytes and exabytes - would take years to do if transferred using networks and the Internet. Amazon provides its customers with dedicated and secure hard drives - they call snowballs - and truck - they call snowmobiles - to move the data from one data center to the next.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

There are limits to our network infrastructures and physical solutions often are required to migrate data to the cloud or digitize products. For example scanning paper files or converting books to digital ones often require specialized equipments in order to perform the work rapidly and cost effectively. Google had patented a book scanning equipment in order to create its Google books project in the past. I assume this same kind of innovation will start to happen in other fields as well.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy 

https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/ 

More on this here: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-snowmobile-truck-is-a-funny-for-real-product-2016-11 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Every industry is being transformed by digital, even those that were not so long ago considered off limit. Great example, the police force, which have systems that date from another era, can now benefit from cheap communication, cloud services, big data and analytics services to deliver mobile police insight and tools using everyday mobile phones and tablets.