Collaboration 67
global economic environment is raising both concerns and opportunities for
businesses today. Stricken by the crisis on Wall Street, executives are doing
everything they can to keep stock prices up. They are worried about keeping
their people employed, happy and motivated because they cannot afford a
drop in productivity, nor can they afford to lose their best people to com-
petitors. They are thinking about new ways to create customer loyalty and
customer satisfaction. They are also hungry to find ways to do more with
less. How can they deliver the same or a better level of quality to their cus-
tomers with potentially fewer resources, and at a lower cost?
Collaboration is also about opportunity. Businesses are looking for new
and innovative ways to work with their partners and supply chains, deal
with globalization, enter new markets, enhance products and services,
unlock new business models. At the end of the day, whether they are in
“survival mode,” “opportunistic mode,” or both, businesses want to act on
what’s happening out there—and they want to act fast in order to break
away from their competitors.
So what choices do current IT departments have when it comes to
enabling collaboration in their company and with their partners and cus-
tomers? They want to serve the needs of their constituencies, but they typi-
cally find themselves regularly saying “no.” They have a responsibility to the
organization to maintain the integrity of the network, and to keep their
focus on things like compliance, backup and disaster recovery strategies,
security, intellectual property protection, quality of service, and scalability.
They face questions from users such as “Why am I limited to 80 MB
storage on the company email system that I rely on to do business when I
can get gigabytes of free email and voicemail storage from Google or
Yahoo?” While Internet applications are updated on three- to six-month
innovation cycles, enterprise software is updated at a much slower pace.
Today it’s virtually impossible to imagine what your workers might need
three to five years from now. Look at how much the world has changed in
the last five years. A few years ago, Google was “just a search engine,” and
we were not all sharing videos on YouTube, or updating our profiles on
Facebook or MySpace. But you can’t just have your users bringing their own
solutions into the organization, because they may not meet your standards
for security, compliance, and other IT requirements. As today’s college stu-
dents join the workforce, the disparity and the expectation for better
answers grows even more pronounced.
Chap3.fm Page 67 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:25 AM
68 Cloud Computing
The intent of collaboration is to enable the best of both worlds: web-
speed innovation and a robust network foundation. New types of conversa-
tions are occurring in corporate board rooms and management meetings,
and these conversations are no longer happening in siloed functional teams,
but in a collaborative team environment where multiple functions and
interests are represented. Enabling these collaborative conversations is more
than systems and technology. It actually starts with your corporate culture,
and it should be inclusive and encourage collaborative decision making. It’s
also not just about your own culture; your collaborative culture should
extend externally as well as to your customers, partners, and supply chain.
How do you include all these elements in your decision-making processes?
Are you as transparent with them as you can be? How consistently do you
interact with them to make them feel that they are a part of your culture?
Once you have a collaborative culture, you will have the strong user base
through which to collaboration-enable the processes in which people work.
All business processes should include collaborative capabilities so that
they are not negatively impacted by the restrictions we see affecting pro-
cesses today: time, distance, latency. At any point in a business process,
whether internal or external, you should be able to connect with the infor-
mation and/or expertise you need in order to get things done. This is espe-
cially true with customer-facing processes. As consumers, we always want to
be able to talk directly to a person at any time if we have a question. Of
course, this is all enabled by the tools and technology that are available to us
today. Collaboration technology has evolved to a point where it is no longer
just about being able to communicate more effectively; it is now at a point
where you can drive real business benefits, transform the way business gets
done, and, in many cases, unlock entirely new business models and/or new
routes to market. As you look at the key business imperatives to focus on, it
is important to consider the changes and/or investments you can make on
any of these levels (short-term or long-term) to deliver the value you are
looking for. Let’s take a look at some examples now.
Customer Intimacy
When we talk about customer intimacy, we are really talking about making
yourself available to communicate with them frequently in order to better
understand their challenges, goals, and needs; ensuring that you are deliv-
ering what they need, in the way they need it; and including them in the
decision-making processes. And just as there are a number of solutions that
can improve the employee experience, your vendor should offer several
Chap3.fm Page 68 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:25 AM
Collaboration 69
solutions that can do the same for the customer experience, including an
increase in the frequency, timeliness, and quality of customer meetings;
improvement in the sales success rate, reduced sales cycle time, improved
and more frequent customer engagements that can lead to uncovering new
and deeper opportunities, and increasing your level of communication up-
levels and your relationship as a business partner, not just as a vendor.
Extending Your Reach to Support Customers Anywhere and at
Any Time
You can extend your reach to support customers anywhere and at any time
by promoting a collaborative culture through the use of collaborative tech-
nologies such as Wikis or blogs. Enabling customers to voice their ques-
tions, concerns, opinions, and ideas via simple web 2.0 tools such as Wikis
or blogs gives them a voice and contributes tremendous feedback, ideas, and
information to your business and “innovation engine.” These collaborative
technologies can also be used to promote employee participation to drive
innovation and self-service and increase employee morale, which is key to
productivity. In turn, this can yield higher customer satisfaction and loyalty
in branch locations. It is really more about driving a collaborative culture
than anything else. This culture is created by initiatives that promote partic-
ipation in these tools, which are easier to implement and use than most
executives believe. A Wiki can be a self-regulated setup for any operating
system and can become one of the most helpful and information-rich
resources in a company, even if the department does not support that par-
ticular operation system or have anything to do with the Wiki itself.
Save to Invest
Organizations are doing many things to cut costs to free up money to invest
in the future through the use of collaborative technologies such as telepres-
ence, unified communications, and IP-connected real estate. Telepresence
has vastly simplified the way virtual collaboration takes place, currently
offering the most realistic meeting experience and an alternative to traveling
for face-to-face meetings with customers, suppliers, and staff as well as other
essential partners. Most important, it yields significant reductions in travel
costs, improved business productivity, and elimination of travel-induced
stress. Consolidation and centralization of communications infrastructure
and resources resulting from moving away from legacy communication sys-
tems to IP-based unified communications and management systems can
Chap3.fm Page 69 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:25 AM
70 Cloud Computing
result in drastic reductions in PBX lease costs, maintenance costs, and man-
agement costs.
Mobility costs can be controlled by routing mobile long-distance calls
over the Enterprise IP network. A unified communications solution allows
users to place a call while they are on the public mobile network, but the
call is originated and carried from the customer’s communications manager
cluster. In other words, now your customers can leverage a unified commu-
nications manager to manage mobile calls, offering the same cost-reduction
benefits that Voice over IP (VoIP) did for land-line long-distance calls. Real
estate, energy, and utility expenses can be cut by enabling remote and con-
nected workforce through IP-connected real estate solutions. These collabo-
rative technology solutions provide the ability to conduct in-person
meetings without traveling, reduce sales cycles, significantly increase global
travel savings, and increase productivity. Even better, many of these technol-
ogies can pay for themselves within a year because of their significant cost
savings. Most important, these savings free up hard-earned company reve-
nue to invest elsewhere as needed.
The opportunity is there to drive tremendous growth and productivity
with new collaborations tools and composite applications, but it presents
great challenges for IT. Collaboration is challenging, not only from an IT
perspective but also from a political and a security perspective. It takes a
holistic approach—not just throwing technology at the problem but rather
an optimized blend of people, process, and technology. To fill this need, the
service-oriented architecture was developed and SOA-based infrastructures
were created to enable people to collaborate more effectively.
The service-oriented infrastructure is the foundation of an overall ser-
vice-oriented architecture. An important part in this is the human interface
and the impact of new technologies that arrived with Web 2.0. The benefits
include the way IT systems are presented to the user. Service-oriented archi-
tectures have become an intermediate step in the evolution to cloud com-
puting.
3.5 Service-Oriented Architectures as a Step Toward
Cloud Computing
An SOA involves policies, principles, and a framework that illustrate how
network services can be leveraged by enterprise applications to achieve
desired business outcomes. These outcomes include enabling the business
capabilities to be provided and consumed as a set of services. SOA is thus an
Chap3.fm Page 70 Friday, May 22, 2009 11:25 AM
Service-Oriented Architectures as a Step Toward Cloud Computing 71
architectural style that encourages the creation of coupled business services.
The “services” in SOA are business services. For example, updating a cus-
tomer’s service-level agreement is a business service, updating a record in a
database is not. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to
achieve desired end results for a service consumer.
An SOA solution consists of a linked set of business services that realize
an end-to-end business process. At a high level, SOA can be viewed as
enabling improved management control, visibility, and metrics for business
processes, allowing business process integration with a holistic view of busi-
ness processes, creating a new capability to create composite solutions,
exposing granular business activities as services, and allowing reuse of exist-
ing application assets. Differentiating between SOA and cloud computing
can be confusing because they overlap in some areas but are fundamentally
different. SOA delivers web services from applications to other programs,
whereas the cloud is about delivering software services to end users and run-
ning code. Thus the cloud-versus-SOA debate is like comparing apples and
oranges.
7
A couple of areas that SOA has brought to the table have been mostly
ignored in the rapid evolution to cloud computing. The first is governance.
Although governance is not always implemented well in with SOA, it is a
fundamental part of the architecture and has been generally ignored in
cloud computing. The control and implementation of policies is a business
imperative that must be met before there is general adoption of cloud com-
puting by the enterprise. SOA is derived from an architecture and a meth-
odology. Since cloud computing is typically driven from the view of
business resources that are needed, there is a tendency to ignore the archi-
tecture. The second area that SOA brings to cloud computing is an end-to-
end architectural approach.
Cloud service providers such as Amazon, TheWebService, Force.com,
and others have evolved from the typically poorly designed SOA service
models and have done a pretty good job in architecting and delivering their
services. Another evolutionary step that cloud computing has taken from
the SOA model is to architect and design services into the cloud so that it
can expand and be accessed as needed. Expanding services in an SOA is typ-
ically a difficult and expensive process.
7. Rich Seeley, “Is Microsoft Dissing SOA Just to PUSH Azure Cloud Computing?,” http://
searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1337378,00.html, 31 Oct 2008,
retrieved 9 Feb 09.
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