You can forgive many CIOs for not exactly jumping on the cloud-based computing and shared service bandwagon. After all, “the cloud” only recently started moving to the right of the technology adoption lifecycle – at least, in the enterprise world. Successful case studies were few and far between. In many cases, the perceived risks and costs exceeded the benefits. Many midmarket organizations — and IT departments in particular — were feeling the pain of the Great Recession. Many simply did not have the financial means to move away from tried-but-true on-premise solutions that, while clunky, usually worked well enough. Until recently, there just wasn’t enough motivation for most organizations to make the jump to the cloud.

Click here to read the entire SearchCIO article. Registration required.

This week I was able to attend the DSCC 2011 conference near my home in Las Vegas, NV. (Any reason to hit the tables, right?) Along with a number of other bloggers and media types, I spoke with Bernard Charlès, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dassault Systems. According to its website, DS is “a world leader in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). [It] provides solutions that enable businesses of every size and sector around the globe to design, simulate, and experience tomorrow’s products with [its] partners, from suppliers to consumers.

Disclaimer: I attended the conference for free and was granted media access. 

Right now, DS’s applications are traditional (read: on-premise or client-server based.) DS’s software and applications are admittedly too bulky and complex. As presently constituted, DS’s products are not sufficiently simple to install, maintain, and use. Moreover, they are not sufficiently open to encourage third-party innovation. As a result, potential partners are unlikely to develop apps for the company’s products. This is both a short- and long-term challenge.

Charlès’ candor was refreshing and atypical of many of his contemporaries. To his credit, Charlès realizes that this is not tenable–and he’s taking steps to ameliorate things. Maintaining his organization’s status quo is certainly not conducive to building a true platform, something about which I asked him point-blank. The company is already working on deploying its apps in the cloud.

Emulating the Right Model

Charlès spoke highly of the Force.com model. Ideally, DS will create a platform that will allow others to easily create their own intellectual property (IP). And this shouldn’t be a discrete event; partners should be incentivized keep the innovation coming.

Of course, you don’t “get to the cloud” or create a platform overnight. Further, building a robust ecosystem takes time–and current clients rightfully expect a cogent game plan. Charlès notes that, in the future, DS will offer a number of different options for DS’ clients:

1. On-premise software–i.e., a continuation of its current infrastructure for clients unwilling to go to the cloud.
2. Running its software on a public cloud
3. Providing a virtualized environment for predefined set of companies (multi-tenant)
4. Offering a country-specific cloud

Simon Says

In the enterprise space, any software vendor faces a major challenge: it has to strike the right balance between leading and following. Many of DS’s clients are large, conservative organizations. As such, they tend frown upon their software vendors telling them about major changes in direction, architecture, and licensing without giving them sufficient time to prepare.

This should be interesting to watch. Charlès clearly gets it; he understands the power of the cloud, ecosystems, and platforms. For a number of reasons, however, many companies have historically struggled reconfiguring their applications and architectures. Microsoft readily comes to mind. There’s no cloud “switch” on any application, much less complex ones that support manufacturing, retail, and other large enterprises.

Feedback

What say you?

I get it.

Today platforms are hot. You can’t watch five minutes of Bloomberg West without someone dropping the term platform. 

But calling it a platform does not make it so. The term has been so misused that it risks losing its meaning. To listen to some pundits and software vendors, today everything is a platform. By this rationale, Microsoft Excel is a platform because you can create different workbooks and insert some fancy code to automate manual processes.

Except Excel not a platform. It is an application. There’s a big difference.

An application is not the same as a platform.

Or consider rock star Chris Brogan, who recently praised Google+ as a great storytelling platform. It’s not. Google is the platform–and Plus is one of its many planks. If Google+ is your only “platform”, then you’re in trouble. What if Google changes its terms? Retires it? How can anything be your “platform” when you have no control over it?

It can’t.

So, let’s get our terms straight.

A true platform allows third parties (partners and developers), the community, and individual end users to build applications, services, plug-ins, extensions on top of it. Think open APIs, SDKs, and other tools that let others augment the native functionality of your product or service. As new features and planks are added, the platform becomes more powerful.

I’ll have much more to say about this in the coming months.

I’ve become a big fan of Dropbox over the last few years. It’s just a more efficient way of managing documents than email.

Inviting people to folders is beyond simple and accessing even large files can be done with anything, including a BlackBerry. Yet, when I invite some of my colleagues and clients to view documents in this manner, I more often than not am met with resistance. I’ll get an email response of “I’d prefer to not have to use that thing” or a non-response.

Far too many of us rely upon old standbys and, in the process, minimize our ability to learn new tricks, do things better, and save time. The larger implication is that we ossify old, inefficient ways of doing things–and alienate those who have found and like to use better mousetraps. Sending and locating five emails, en masse, is why it takes someone four hours to do something that can be done in 15 minutes.

Benioff discusses vendor lock-in, a term that describes organizations that continue to use big, expensive, and complicated applications because they want to, not because they have to. Think databases, ERP, CRM, and other involved technologies.

In the era of the cloud, lock-in is largely minimized. It’s much easier for a company to get away from an app, system, or tool that’s not working for a number of reasons. For one, the switching costs tend to be smaller–if not non-existent. Also, contracts tend to be much shorter, maybe even non-existent. Data migration tools have evolved a great deal over the last two decades.

The end result? Now more than ever it’s easier for people to try out different tools. Mobility, the cloud, Freemium, web services, and open source mean that it’s easier than ever to avoid vendor lock-in.

So, what does this mean? Especially in the technology world, your product has to work well and immediately. Alternatives to just about everything abound. Few busy consumers and small business owners want to fiddle with settings just to get basic functionality to work. Technology should just work. Period. Does yours?

Click here to read the entire SearchCIO article. Registration required.

It doesn’t matter if you’re picking up an instrument, learning a new language, or figuring out how to start a new business.

There are three ways to learn how to do something:

1. In a vacuum by reading books, watching videos, etc.
2. Out in the “real” world by doing it–aka experiential learning.
3. A hybrid approach, doing a bit of both.

I subscribe to this third way–and I’m not alone. A friend of mine–Todd Hamilton of Bubbalon–is a fellow acolyte. We realize the limitations of learning in isolation. You have to get out there.

But if you just get out there without an existing framework, you’ll have to learn everything for yourself. You’ll make too many mistakes. Your learning curve will be unnecessarily steep. You’ll deprive yourself of centuries of valuable insights.

The trick is to balance the first two types of learning.–and realize that you’re never finished.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are not successful because they’re big. They’re big because they’re successful.

I’ve already had a few relatively animated discussions with intelligent folks about whether small businesses can learn anything from The Gang of Four. I say yes.

That doesn’t mean that you or I can buy DoubleClick or Zappos. We can’t.

But aren’t there other companies out there that complement your products and services? Aren’t they’re ways to work together short of an expensive and highly public acquisition?

Funding is off to a great start. Nary a week into it, I’m almost at 33 percent of my $7,500 goal.

On a different note, I really believe that I’m on to something important with this book. Different people have very different ideas about platforms and I’ve yet to see a book that takes the approach that I am. A really smart author and friend of mine recently told me that she had a completely different take on the notion of a platform.

Rather than be disheartened, I was encouraged. My favorite books are the ones that cause me to really think about things. There’s nothing inherently wrong with books that you can read while tweeting and watching TV. It’s just that The Age of the Platform won’t be one of them.

Thanks to all who have backed the project so far. Every little bit helps. Click here to back it.

If you enjoyed this tip, check out more at the New Small App.