My colleagues and I have charted up several years experience exploiting R&D projects that the company is involved in. In many of the projects we found that the process would start well, the market was analysed, the competitors charted, the USPs of our project results neatly identified, and so on. However we found that common to most of the projects was a point where we didn’t know what to do next. If we had had a business model for delivering a clear value proposition then fine, we could have proceeded to develop business plans for taking it to market. We would have run our best and worst case scenario analysis, totted up our financial sums and had some nice ROI figures. But HOW was the problem. How should this technology be provided? Where is the business? We have a consolidated result, some clever technology, unique in the world, but how do we move from collaboratively building something to practically selling it? “Open source” I hear someone shout. “In a cloud” someone else calls out. It seems that often at this point in the exploitation process, standard practice is to pick the best candidate from a list of contender models. A pragmatic solution perhaps, but one that overlooks many of the more subtle or innovative models. What is more, it’s an approach which lacks a unifying principle to allow each model to be reduced to the raw differences which separate them.

So over the last year or so, we realised that we had unintentionally been developing a technique do deal precisely with that big hurdle. The technique uses a value chain to generate business models from scratch, consequently providing both a common basis for comparisons and an exhaustive breakdown of the options. Although still fairly new, variations of this bottom-up technique have been used in several projects to date with good results and it was felt that it was stable enough to describe in a whitepaper and to share it with the community. Moreover when this technique was formalised during the writing phase, it was applied to existing businesses such as LinkedIn and Facebook, the iPhone and Canonical, and was seen to also be a viable technique for classifying the models of existing companies. The results are explored in a forthcoming paper at the e-challenges conference later this month. The whitepaper itself was presented last week at the Internet of Services collaboration day in Brussels, and is available free of charge at scribd. Funnily enough, as a consequence of the presentation, Jennifer Zaino from semanticweb.com then contacted me and we had an interesting chat about some exploitation best practices in general in the context of R&D projects.

So all in all, it’s been a busy few days! For more information on this check out the whitepaper and accompanying presentation on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/66506762/From-Value-Chains-to-Business-Models and http://www.scribd.com/doc/66408751/Identification-of-Business-Models-Through-Value-Chain-Analysis-A-Method-for-Exploiting-Large-Technology-Projects-A-Whitepaper.

The SESERV project studies, analyzes and fosters a thoughtful debate to help shape the Future Internet related to Socio Economic aspects.

SESERV, aka Socio-Economic Services for European Research is a 2-year European support action project selected by the European Commission to be funded through FP7 under the “Network of the Future” research challenge.

SESERV kicked off in September 2010, and its goal is to bridge the gap between those who study and those who “build the Internet” – or shape the Future Internet -  by supporting discussion and debate within a multidisciplinary community of researchers and professionals working on Future Internet Socio Economics.

Motivation

The motivation for SESERV is that nowadays the Internet has become a central part of social life. People use the internet to communicate, to express ideas, and even more with the increasing importance of social networking and interaction to build relationships. The internet and its architecture will be enhanced to meet societal challenges and evolve as society develops. People not only use the internet but have become without a doubt truly internet-dependent. The Internet has evolved and grown to an unprecedented and unique size and such changes have an impact on the evolution of society. Thus, the Internet of the future is facing some challenges, as there are an increasing numbers of users, providers, services, and so on, and it needs to be shaped and defined to meet user demand and needs.

The goal

Thus, in this project, the aim is to discuss and analyze what the socio-economic challenges and future trends of the Future Internet are. And the idea behind this project would be to help to maximize the impact of research by raising the awareness of socio-economic trends in the areas of incentives, accounting, Digital Europe, and risk management ,whilst, at the same time, addressing possible policy priorities within the research community across key dimensions of the convergence of information technology, telecommunications, and media.

SESERV was inspired on the back of the Future Internet Assembly (FIA), which is a European initiative looking to define and shape the Future Internet. FIA grew out of collaboration across diverse research projects seeking to maintain European competitiveness in the global marketplace. As such, the SESERV project looks to engage with the FIA community to co-ordinate discussion from a socio-economic perspective for Future Internet development.

The Workshop

Project partners are studying the work done shaping the Future Internet through white papers, research consultancy and workshops created across the collective of research projects. In this context, SESERV is holding a workshop at the end of this month (June 28th) that intends to set the basis for an open and deep discussion about shaping the Future Internet, and where stakeholders will describe how the latest technology developments are facing socio-economic realities.

People from different profiles will attend with the idea of fostering open discussion and debate to shape the basis for the future of the internet, such as experts in FI technology, researchers, academics, social scientists and economists, and policy experts. Particular attention will be given to the methods and approaches that facilitate the creation of multidisciplinary networks of collaboration and knowledge exchange.

The event will offer an opportunity to analyze how to understand the future of the Internet as a platform that can foster innovation, collaboration and knowledge transfer. The results of this event will be written up as a whitepaper, and considered for possible publication.

SESERV will host a Workshop on: “The Future Internet: The Social Nature of Technical Choices” next June 28^th in St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Click here for further information

Project web site: www.seserv.org/

Back in June 2010, now some 11 months ago, a new project with the aim of building a large scale, multisite cloud testing facility was initiated. The project, led by IT company Atos Origin supports applications, services and systems research within the Internet of Services community, part of the Future Internet research movement. Called BonFIRE (Building service testbeds for Future Internet Research and Experimentation), the project aims to give researchers access to an experimental facility which enables large scale experimentation of their systems and applications, the evaluation of cross-cutting effects of converged service and network infrastructures and the assessment of socio-economic and other non-technological impact.

BonFIRE will operate a Cloud facility based on an Infrastructure as a Service delivery model with guidelines, policies and best practices for experimentation. It will adopt a federated multi-platform approach providing interconnection and interoperation between novel service and networking testbeds.  The platform will offer advanced services and tools for services research including cloud federation, virtual machine management, service modelling, service lifecycle management, service level agreements, quality of service monitoring and analytics. Where appropriate BonFIRE will reuse and adapt existing tools from other FIRE projects such as Panlab, Federica and Deisa.

BonFIRE will support experimentation and testing of innovative scenarios from the Internet of Services research community specifically focused on the convergence of services and networks. Three scenarios are envisaged:

   – Extended cloud scenario: tests are run on cloud computing sites interconnected through public Internet. Properties within the site are controlled but the properties of the network are not.

   – Cloud with a controlled experimental network scenario: nodes are now connected through an emulated virtual internet, allowing both server and network properties to be controlled

   – Extended Cloud: with complex network implications (using networks slices) and involving federation with other FIRE infrastructures.

BonFIRE will provide innovative  methods for describing, deploying, managing, executing, measuring and removing experiments including:

   – Uniform test description and deployment descriptors for all the scenarios (including crosscutting tests)

   – Cloud resource federation through the federation of clouds in different administrative domains that provide physical resources to BonFIRE

   – User-friendly user interfaces at the facility’s entry point with an easy to use portal

Three driving experiments from leading industrial service providers and research centres to help define requirements, test facility services and demonstrate the added value of Future Internet research using BonFIRE. These will be supplemented by 7 new experiments selected through two open calls. The first of which has recently closed and 28 proposed experiments are currently under evaluation by the European Commission for inclusion in the project.  The results are eagerly anticipated and should be announced within the coming weeks. Watch this space!

At IT-tude.com we’re proud to present a new section devoted to Cloud Standards.  We just launched it but will keep adding more content in the near future.  We also will be periodically adding new Cloud case studies, papers, and more.

Why Cloud Standards? Cloud computing is becoming mainstream, but it’s almost a newborn paradigm, so we have to be careful, and think about what kind of technology we want and need. So now is the moment to address issues like vendor lock-in.

This is why many standards bodies and forums are creating initiatives to tackle such issues as standardization in data storage and management, IaaS interfaces through common APIs, VMs monitors across different IaaS, and much more.  Take a look in the new section to see who is addressing this, what they’re doing, and some initial results to keep up to date.

And remember! Don’t hesitate to contribute more content and we’ll be sure to develop the section further.  Tell us what you think!

Optimized Infrastructure Services, ‘OPTIMIS’ is a three-year, €10.5m research and development project selected under the ‘Software and Service Architectures & Infrastructures’ unit of the EU’s FP7 framework program.

OPTIMIS kicked off in June 2010. It is a cloud project that aims at optimizing cloud services, using techniques that take advantage of an OPTIMIS architectural framework and a development toolkit that takes trust, risk, eco-efficiency, cost and legal issues into account.

The motivation for OPTIMIS is the vision that hybrid clouds will become commonplace, realized by private clouds interacting with a rich ecosystem of public and other cloud providers. OPTIMIS is aimed at enabling organizations to automatically externalize services and applications to trustworthy and auditable cloud providers in the hybrid model. Consequently, OPTIMIS believes its activities will support and facilitate an ecosystem of providers and consumers that will benefit from the optimal operation of services and infrastructures.

One of the OPTIMIS cornerstones is the investigation of new business models and value activities derived from the evolution of the Cloud industry.  The cloud market is now an evolving multi-player and multi-layered ecosystem of technology providers, users, aggregators and other middlemen. One of the OPTIMIS first activities has been a dissection this complex ecosystem in its ‘Cloud Ecosystem: Taxonomy and Value Networks’ report.

With the cloud evolving rapidly, the OPTIMIS business team looked at the broader cloud marketplace and generated a new market facing cloud taxonomy. The main building blocks of this taxonomy are Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Software Infrastructure-as-a-service (SIaaS), Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Cloud services. All identified segments (and sub-segments) come with a definition and an extensive list of vendors -their products and primary customer focus- to reinforce the relevance of the respective category. This report also analyzes some typical and potential value networks and shows how the different segments and sub-segments fit together and create value for the participants in the cloud market. The statements are supported by sample company profiles and case studies. More information about the Business and Technical activities of the OPTIMIS project can be found in www.optimis-project.eu.

elasticLM offers a novel technology for the management of software licenses designed for distributed computing environments like Grids and Clouds.

Licenses are usually bound to hardware and are provided on the basis of named users, hostnames, or as a site license for the same admin domain of an organization. What happens when we want to run a job in a Grid, Cloud, or in a third party provider? Software licenses become extremely expensive and make it almost impossible to use commercial applications in a distributed environment. This is an important limitation to adopt the new IT trends; you cannot take advantage of these new technologies.

With elasticLM, created in the EC FP7 project SmartLM, an IT-tude.com Associate, the license resources are treated as web service resources that the end-user can use on-demand, book in advance, aggregate with other license resources and more, all while having control over the costs thanks to an integrated Accounting and Billing Service. elasticLM allows seamless combination of old and new models, as pay per use.

• provides the mechanisms for managing licenses lifecycle and using licensed commercial applications in a fairer, more secure and flexible way
• implements models and technologies for accounting and billing of license use (detailed statistics are provided)
• adequate security mechanisms to protect unauthorised use of software

elasticLM solves perfectly the license restriction to move the licenses in a distributed environment (online and offline) for commercial software applications, and allow the adoption of new business models as pay per use.

The basic version of elasticLM is to be provided to early adopters and for evaluation.
We are looking for early adopters with special conditions, be one of them!   For more information, you can visit us at www.elasticLM.eu

Since their launch, Virtual Worlds (VW) have been considered a rapidly evolving trend that could play an important role in the future internet. VWs gained enormous popularity at the beginning of the decade and although the hype around them did seem to fade down for a while, they have managed to maintain a strong fan base. According to a study by K Zero, currently 580 million people worldwide are registered as virtual world users.

A great asset of VW environments is that they provide an appealing context inside which people can interact with each other in many ways. As a result, apart from the marketing potential that the participation of so many people can offer and which businesses have already began to leverage through advertising, VWs are also offer a vast amount of user related content. More specifically, two types of content that the VWs are abundant in, namely social networking information and user generated content, could, when captured and processed appropriately, prove extremely valuable.  The following two paragraphs briefly examine those two types of knowledge that the VW environments have to offer.

Social networking information is essentially the information that can be derived by examining the VW users’ interactions with each other. Direct communication (live chatting, instant messaging etc) as well as other types of interactions (offering virtual gifts, avatar gestures etc) are commonplace in a VW; in fact it is the reason the majority of users access the VW for. A VW is a controlled environment, inside which those interactions can be easily tracked.  With the appropriate tools this information can be harvested to create a rich social network graph and leveraging this graph can bring value to a wide range of domains such as commercial applications, search engines and recommender systems.

User generated content (UGC) is media content that is provided by end users and is publicly available over the internet.  This may include photos, videos, blog articles and forum discussions among others.  VW environments are rich in such content as most users, and especially the most active ones are happy to contribute content in order to enhance their virtual profile and increase their popularity with other users. It seems that although most VWs do not offer any tangible benefits to content contributors, for many users it is being able to showcase this content that adds to the experience of VW participation. Again, as in the case of social networking information, being able to gather and exploit UGC would be valuable in many manners such as for marketing and advertising as well as for gathering public opinion.

It seems that from a data-oriented perspective, VWs can be viewed as vast resources of content and in an analogy to Cloud Computing, the VW space with its current lack of interoperability can be viewed as a Cloud of heterogeneous resources.  The challenge lies in finding a way to exploit the potential VW platforms by developing a technology that is able to manage a pool of VWs similarly to the way a middleware platform does for a Cloud of underlying data resources. A tool that allows companies and other parties to harness the VW content by granting them access to this cloud of resources while at the same time resolving interoperability issues would be a great asset for companies and other parties for which this type of content may be of value.

+Spaces is an FP7 EU project which aims to tackle this issue by creating an infrastructure that will act as a single point of access to a pool of VW platforms. The infrastructure developed will not only allow users to draw and seamlessly integrate content from a pool of heterogeneous VW platforms but will also provide them with the tools necessary in order to analyse and leverage the data captured and turn it into valuable knowledge. The project focuses on e-government and in the pilot scenarios Virtual Worlds will be used for gathering and analysing public opinion in order to incorporate it in the policy making process. The infrastructure will however be highly extensible so that, with the addition of the analysing tools and services appropriate in each case, it will be possible to use it for any other domain for which the content residing in VWs can be translated into valuable knowledge.

The use of multi-core processors opens new horizons in the deployment and the use of computer systems as well as in the design and development of software. Moreover, the modern multi-core processors provide hardware virtualisation support by default. This gives great advantage to virtualisation platforms as virtual machines can gain increased performance and can be deployed in sectors where, traditionally, physical machines were deployed. Virtualisation uptake has been rapid on standard server applications, but has not been yet exploited in Grid and High Performance applications. We identify a number of appliances where virtualisation can be used to enhance a Grid environment, either in academia or industry:

Reliability / Availability / Fault tolerance

The cost of failure in the Grid and HPC domain applications is significant. Restarting the whole machine is not the most effective way to fix the problem. Virtualisation offers extra reliability as we can divide single systems into multiple ones for different groups of users. Having applications that need low-level access for privileged operations can lead to compromised integrity of the system. Application-induced failure of the operating system will affect only the virtual machine the application is running on. In addition, virtualisation can offer improved performance, as intelligent, pro-active, fault-tolerant solutions enable a virtual machine to migrate automatically from an ‘unhealthy‘ machine to a ‘healthy‘ one. Fault tolerance and live migration increase the probability of completion for applications with long run-times.

Portability

Virtual machines can be set up to test new systems when upgrades are needed. They can be used to exploit new hardware resources by different operating systems and different user groups. A specific virtual machine can easily be ported to another physical host which can even be a desktop or laptop.

Productivity and development

Virtual machines can be used to set up a lab grid environment for testing purposes. The operating system can be configured in a way to meet the requirements of the specific application. Any tools required can be installed without affecting other applications and users who work on different virtual machines. Geoffroy Vallee terms this “adapting systems to applications and not applications to systems”. For instance, a virtual cluster (i.e. networked virtual machines within a single physical host) could demonstrate the scaling capabilities of Grid applications before being deployed in large scale.

Virtualisation middle-ware supports all major operating systems: Linux, Solaris, BSD variants and Windows. Applications that are developed on one platform do not necessarily need to be ported to another. A virtual machine with the requested operating system can be configured to host the application. On the other hand, multiple virtual machines with different operating systems and different versions of operating systems and system libraries can be made available to developers to experiment, test and debug their code.

Management

Virtual machines and virtual clusters offer ease of management. A virtual machine template can be easily cloned to as many virtual machines as desired. Management tools provide central management of the virtual machines even if they do not run on the same physical host. Monitoring tools of virtual machine inventories help to identify faulty systems and restart or re-configure when and as needed. A crash of the operating system does not need physical presence of the administrator to reboot the machine; it can be done remotely through the management tool.

In summary, virtualisation offers significant user and provider benefits. The combination of wide virtualisation support in modern commodity hardware (Intel VT and AMD-V) shows great promise for virtualisation to become one of the default ICT infrastructure technologies of the future.

2009 was a busy year for bidders in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector in Europe (FP7 ICT call 4 and 5, FP7 Capacities – Research Infrastructures call 1 and 2, Ambient Assisted Living call 2, just to mention a few) and there is more up for 2010. European proposal solicitors and evaluators claim that many proposals lacked passion and enthusiasm which made them one among many.

Most people agree that if we want to be successful at our job, we need to be passionate about our work. Passion, zeal or enthusiasm, call it what you want, is a state of mind, a self-driven attitude about our work that can help lead us down the path to success.

Same rule applies to ICT research and development. It starts at proposal preparation stage when the basic project idea is born, sails through project development and berths at proposal writing. This last bit is crucial as it is the one that is evaluated and makes you succeed (get funding for your project) or not. If you know your subject and you’re passionate about it, this will show in your writing. Passion sells. Share your passion with the readers (evaluators) and they will be hooked. The voice and passion of the people (who will deliver the project) must come through, after all, in raising funding, people give money to people, not projects.

When referring to traditional IT and IT research, you might not relate it to passion in the first place. (This doesn’t mean that IT developers and programmers haven’t always been passionate about their work.) But, marketing –and related sciences such as psychology and sociology- have left their footprint in ICT, as elsewhere. A young and dynamic target market’s preferences and behavior drive the design of ICT products and services. Intrepid solutions that come with smart advertising are the ones which succeed. ICT is becoming passionate (e.g. iPod and iPhone).

But, what do we see on the bidder side? What other emotions may influence their passion?

On the one hand, these past 2 years were hard on most of us: drops in revenues, outstanding invoices, clients dropping out, pressure on sales people, nervous CxOs, layoffs, exponentially increasing interest in public funds accompanied by a great deal of pressure, and so on…I must say that under these circumstances is hard to keep that passion alive and above all.

On the other hand, there was a general confusion about what exactly the expectations were regarding the topics and content of the bids which did not come through so clearly for everyone. Should we address short term goals or long term goals? If it’s too long term, it may fall too far from reality and industry may not be interested in being involved even if we thought the outcomes would have been really disruptive. If it’s short term, it may not be considered research and hence it may not get funded even if we thought the outcomes would have been very useful. And, which objective does our bid belong to? It partly addresses the specifications and goals of topic X, Y and Z too. Which is the most appropriate one? Where do we expect less competition? And, regarding the collaborative nature of these bids, how do we get the best out of each participant? How do we bring the different ideas and point of views together and communicate a single (and sound) voice and passion?

Having said that, neither bidding nor evaluating is easy and the circumstances do not always help either. Nevertheless, my advice would be to keep the passion and creativity as alive as we can.

At the PoweredByCloud conference earlier this week in London, around 170 CEOs, CTOs, analysts, lawyers, universities and users from the cloud computing community met for three days discussing developments in cloud: its adoption, barriers, business models, success stories and legal issues.

Interestingly a lot of the talk actually centred on getting out of the cloud. It appears that among those users and potential users that have done their homework, the business case for cloud is satisfactory and the use cases so far disseminated encouraging. However along with the security, privacy, reliability, compliance and similar concerns that we have been talking about since the start of the field, one of the major barriers to entry for many users is that once in a given cloud, is it possible to get out again?

The scope of this question ranges from the concerns regarding provider lock-in to emergency withdrawal in the case of a breakdown of relations with the provider. The view from many of the smaller players and the “cloudarati”, as someone has coined them, is that cloud is a commodity and as such it should completely painless to move data and applications between competing clouds.

However, these are also barriers we see in a number of other sectors without such great concerns, and vendor lock in is rarely (if ever?) absolute. Really we should be talking of switching costs, a term that emphasises that it we are dealing with only half of the equation, because countering the cost is the benefit. When the benefit outweighs the cost then we are prepared to make the change. It only becomes effectively absolute when that cost is insurmountable, irrespective of the potential benefits. But switching costs are something we all accept all the time. When you change your telephone provider you may be charged a contract termination charge by your old provider, or even a connection cost by your new provider.

Let’s take another example. When it comes to the banks and mortgage lenders it is usual to find a myriad of different terms and conditions relating not just to the interest rate but also the costs of setting up the account, the cost of paying it off early, different if it is paid in full or in part, and so on. Do these deter people? Clearly they do not, despite much of them being overtly groundless charges. One has to look at the entire package. It is actually similar to cloud provision in several ways: it is a potentially long term decision, you must trust the provider (at least somewhat), banking is a commodity and cloud is heading for one, and you have relatively little loyalty to one provider or another. And yet people are happy to accept mortgages with explicit switching costs as part of the contract, when we know there is no basis for the charge, so why not for cloud?

True, when it comes to mortgages the numbers are fairly easy to compute. You know the switching cost (say 1%) of closing the mortgage to go to competitor. You know the competitor rates and you can calculate how long it takes to amortize the switching cost. You know the time remaining on the mortgage. You make the decision based on the magnitude of the eventual saving. In cloud the situation is more blurry: the time it takes to set up the new infrastructure is only an estimate as are the exact benefits from the new provider. Nonetheless, any decision to change provider is based on both sides of the same equation. Cost and benefit.

Essentially, then, the attitude of the cloud providers to deliberately building switching costs into their business model should be based on business principles. If you offer long term savings you may be able to impose higher switching costs. As you are trading a commodity, you must look at the overall benefit and cost you provide. Indeed having switching costs may well afford a buffer for fending off rivals on a temporary basis. This may actually be beneficial to the long term profitability of the market, likely to see profit margins eroded in a price war. By the same token, other providers, particularly the smaller, newer or otherwise more expensive players may need to eliminate switching costs entirely to attract clients in order to get a foothold.

However, the situation is perhaps not straight cut. As well as the economics of the situation, there is also the inertia of the situation. In banking, the first mortgage lender you approach is your existing bank. You don’t swap provider over a trivial amount. Cloud will be the same. Switching costs also include the investment in time and the consequent disruption the change causes.

Currently the market is young and even Amazon, the assumed dominant player does not have it sewn up, not by a long stretch. Most providers have some switching costs, different APIs and configurations. Providers are still competing as much on differentials as on price. However, as the market evolves towards full commoditization, the companies will become less differentiated on offering and on price. Now is the time for those with the stronger position to start a land grab. If they can keep those clients during the journey to commoditization in the next couple of years, even low switching costs may become enough to mark the difference between those still trading in 2020 and those that are not.

So in conclusion, we providers must know their switching costs. Their customers and potential customers certainly will. They are not an absolute barrier to entry, merely a hurdle, a fee. Providers should attempt to minimise them for new customers and deliberately assign their magnitude for exiting customers, high or low, as part of a larger strategy based not just on today’s market, but also tomorrow’s.