Why I Joined Pivotal Software

Cross-posted from my first blog published on LinkedIn…

Not only did I recently join Pivotal Software, I found my way into the swag closet…

I’m proud to announce that I have joined the marketing team at Pivotal Software.

There’s a special kind of excitement in helping build a business that you know can change the world. I’m excited to have a chance to work with the many talented people here at Pivotal, and be part of an amazing company and culture dedicated to helping customers create new innovations in big data.

Hypocritical Innovators, Making Smartphones Smart, Salesforce Promises to be Green, and SAP HANA Crowns Hadoop

Some Good, Fast Reads From Last Week

Greetings Geek Marketing readers.

The last couple of weeks I have been pouring my heart into developing content for a few new initiatives I’m involved with. This has left me with little time to keep the Geek Marketing blog fresh. However, I’m very much looking forward to sharing some awesome things my various teams are developing.

In the meantime, there are a few blogs I read over the last week that I keep thinking about, so I thought I’d share them with you. No, they aren’t in any particular theme, just some cool stuff.

[SOURCE: © raider of gin, used according to Creative Commons License]

Coming out of my content cave to share some good reads…

For Fun: If IT Products Were Marketed Like Cereal & Offbeat Analogies for IT Cloud Strategy

Found some pictures I made over the last couple of years as social media gags about the IT industry.

If IT products were marketed like cereal:

New Podcast with SAP Insider: The Relationship Between IT and Business Innovation

As a companion to my latest SAPinsider article, How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation, in this podcast I discuss how companies can leverage IT to drive business innovation, how a lack of governance between IT and business can hinder innovation, offer an example of one innovative company that I’ve heard about, and provide advice on how to use IT to bring more innovation to your company.

http://sapinsider.wispubs.com/Article/Podcast–SAPs-Greg-Chase-Examines-the-Relationship-Between-IT-and-Business-Innovation/6900

My championship First Lego Robotics Team from Graham Middle School, sponsored by SAP, trying to innovate a solution.
[SOURCE: (c) Greg Chase]

Characteristics That Make SAP HANA Use Cases Suitable for Cloud Deployment

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network…

So I’ve decided to take an approach that might sound backwards: discussing use cases and opportunities for a certain deployment option of SAP HANA without first looking at business requirements. While I’d never start a business case this way, I think it’s instructive to decompose the technical characteristics of cloud applications, see how they mesh with the characteristics of SAP HANA applications, and relate these to potential requirements of use cases.

 Typical Characteristics of Cloud Applications

Those more familiar with traditional SAP HANA deployments may be less familiar with the world of native cloud applications.The best definition of cloud computing that I’ve seen was created by the National Institute of Standards. Part of this definition of cloud computing is 5 essential characteristics:

• On-demand self-service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Elasticity
• Measured service

While the service model in which you subscribe to a cloud application may not provide the subscriber of a service all these characteristics, they are inherent in the supporting infrastructure.

[SOURCE: From ASUG 2012 Annual Conference © SAP and Asuret, used with permission]

How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

My latest article for download: How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

Or see in the online version of SAP Insider.

In Wine Making and Cloud Computing Choose the Right Service Levels To Achieve Your Goals

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network.

I’m one of the few people in the cloud marketing team at SAP who’s been involved in supporting nearly all categories of SAP’s cloud offerings in the last couple of years: from virtualization and public cloud support to the software service offerings to our platform service offerings. These different offerings can help you migrate your on premise SAP software into cloud environments, deliver configured software as a service via the web, and develop and deliver custom software in the cloud. Which you might choose boils down to whether you want to retrofit what you have, take new capabilities via the Web, or need to build your own solution. I’ve commented on these as components of a cloud program extensively in my blog series “Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy – Part I.”  Part II, and Part III. For an excellent discussion of IT as a Service, see SAP Mentor Sina Moatamed’s blog “The Era of Demand Supply IT Begins”.

If Wine Making Were Like IT

If you read my recent Blog It Forward blog, you’ll know that I’m an amateur wine maker. I’m also a user of Wine making as a Service (WMaaS) offerings.  Ok, that sounds really geeky, but I do find an analogy in how I engage in my hobby and how customers use the various cloud services I’m in charge of marketing at SAP  – we marketing people think in analogies all the time.

When I first started wine making I did it in house. In the analogy, this would be the equivalent to writing my own software and deploying it to servers I manage in a server room. I literally implemented my own winery in my garage with hardware I purchased and leased – fermented the grapes in a primary fermenter, pressed them, racked the wine into 5 gallon glass storage containers, and let them bulk age in storage in my garage until it was time to bottle some number of months later.

My former garage winery – table is the winery lab, to the right are 5 gallon glass jars of chardonnay and petite syrah in bulk aging.  [Source – © Greg Chase, under creative commons license, use w/ attribution]

The Real Disruption Behind Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data Lies in Decentralization

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network…

This blog is the result of a debate with my colleague Rahul Asthana, who asked, which of the four forces in Gartner’s Nexus of Forces: social enterprise, mobile devices, cloud computing, and big data, is really truly disruptive to the IT industry and practice today.

Replatforming to Mobile Devices

The evolution of mobile phones to smart phones over the last decade.
[SOURCE]

Five Innovative Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data Apps From the US 2012 Election Campaigns

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network…

With the US 2012 election campaign finally, thankfully, winding down, I wanted to share some interesting stories about the technology being used by the campaigns and super PACs to more effectively direct their field staff and target voters.  From the various news stories I’ve heard over the past few weeks on NPR, and read in articles, it seems that both the presidential campaigns and the big budget super PACs have been making heavy use of social media, mobile device applications, cloud platforms, and big data.

This blog isn’t meant to take a position in the campaign. I can’t even argue that one campaign has made more effective use of new technology than another. Whereas in 2008, the Obama campaign clearly made more effective use of social media than his opponent, it seems that both campaigns in 2012 have aggressively embraced emerging technologies.

Here are five descriptions of applications that I was able to find. I will add to this list as I run across more.  Please feel free to add any links to interesting stories that you know about as well in the comments. Also, the application of this technology is strictly an American perspective. I suspect many of my European colleagues will have an entirely different view of the acceptability, and even legality, of some of these applications. Please share your perspectives on this issue as well.

Interesting Feedback from SAP Customers About Hybrid Cloud in Recent Webinar

Cross posted from my blog at SAP Community Network…

Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at an SAP webinar covering IT strategy for cloud computing and how customers are evolving a hybrid approach. This is a topic I’ve been working on since SAPPHIRE NOW Orlando this May, and I am gratified to find there is still a lot of interest in the subject. Since you can watch the recording of the webinar yourself I won’t repeat too much here.  However, the attendees were very generous with their participation by asking several good questions and sharing their opinions in two interesting polls.

Adoption of Cloud Computing

In the first poll we asked attendees a multiple answer question about which ways their company has adopted cloud computing. As a result, some responders answered in more than one category, so each answer is a % of total respondents clicking that category, and percentages to the question will add up to more than 100%. To my surprise almost 30% of respondents said their company is not leveraging cloud computing. That seems very high for me, even for the most conservative SAP customers. I suspect if the IT department did an audit of the different systems their lines of business used, they’d find at least a few software services – and this doesn’t include services brought in virally by employees on their own. Also interesting is that 15% of attendees reported that they are already supporting their developers through a platform as a service. This isn’t far off from a recent IBM survey that finds 16% of their respondents use PaaS and see strategic potential, while an additional 33% use PaaS incidentally. Not included in either poll is any indication as to what each respondent considers to be the definition of “platform as a service.”