Agile Development Blog

The Dream of the Cloud by Enrica Bressan

What is your dream for the cloud? 

Is it a blob that will cause you to lose all control, including your job?

Or, is it an amazing innovation that will save your company from this world-wide recession?

Or the it's The Blob - Buy the classic @ Turner by clicking image

On April 15th, I will be fortunate enough to join Sachin Saxena from Global Logic and Mac Devine, the AIM SaaS/Cloud CTO at IBM,  for a webinar to attempt to answer these questions (learn more and register here).  They are both experts in internet technology and hold deep knowledge (along with beautiful slides) on the topic of cloud computing.  Their goal is to help you understand the massive energy, time and computer savings made possible by the many cloud options.

Specifically,  they will define the cloud, its opportunities and roadblocks. They both plan to highlight case studies, and my role will be as a customer and extensive user of cloud solutions.  This is much the same role that I played at the New Jersey CIO summit in February.  (If you can’t wait for the webinar – don’t miss Troy Angrignon’s opinion post at Sandhill.com about the implications on cloud computing on software firms.)

At Rally, we are very comfortable with the application of these technologies.  As a 160 person SaaS firm provider, we have been in the early market for many of these technologies.  It was fun for us to benefit from the fast move to free of hypervisor/virtualization portion of this wave. Listen to Mike Cote’s podcast on the topic at RedMonk. He has been covering the Cloud/virtualization for years as an open source analyst.

As a result, I believe that 100% of the companies who attend this webinar will leverage these technologies in 2009 in a strategy to reduce risk and cut costs.  But what are the other rationales for the cloud?  What are your stories?  I think cloud/SaaS, Agile development and web 2.0 customer communities are an even bigger story, but one that will take longer to develop than the use of public/private clouds and virtualization technology.

Next up on this topic will be the actual energy savings reports from our virtualization and power management efforts lead by our internal green team.

This Friday, February 27th, I will be speaking on a panel at the New Jersey Technology Council’s 2009 CIO Conference called “Moving to a Virtual World” ( www.njtc.org). The panel is on Cloud Computing and it is a mixed collection of vendors and CIO’s talking about the rapid arrival, the clear benefits and struggles of adopting Cloud Computing.

At Rally, we have gained some firsthand knowledge of these technologies, platforms and applications as we try to find the most energy efficient, stable and cost effective solutions for us and our customers.  As a small fast growing technology company, we are an ideal customer for Cloud Computing and I am sitting on this panel as a user, supplier and leader on software development for the cloud.  (We use Amazon EC2, VMWare ESX, Salesforce and seven App-Exchange Apps, Google Apps Premier to run our business and manage our own multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS application in the cloud.)

In preparation for the panel, I was brushing up on some of the latest news and views on this topic.

Here are the worthwhile Cloud Computing links that I used to prepare my talking points:

• Cloud Computing – you have to start on Wikipedia to make sure your definition is grounded
• What is Cloud Computing - a wonderful video of a variety of folks from the Web 2.0 Expo
• Above the Clouds – is a new blog site, whitepaper and video from Cal Berkley Professors on Cloud Computing
• Cloud an Outsourcing Option in Troubled Times – CIO Insight article on using cloud services instead of more traditional IT outsourcing options (both development and operations)
• “What the hell is Cloud Computing?” - Larry Ellison rails on the whole idea as over-blown (see many YouTube videos)

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The various sizes of and shapes of Ecospheres

As you may know, I am very passionate about the concepts of sustainability.  For my birthday this year, my thoughtful wife and son gave me a living example of sustainability that sits on my desk and reminds me to work on this topic everyday.  It is called an EcoSphere and I got it from EcoProducts Home Store here in Boulder (they are folks who also provide all of our compostables that help us approach zero waste here at Rally – they are a great Boulder success story).

The Ecosphere is a completely closed world and is self-sustainable. It was developed by two NASA scientists (the late Dr. Joe Hanson and the late Dr. Clair Folsome) trying to create models for long-term space flight.  In it you will find algae, shrimp and bacteria living in a closed cycle with sun light as energy. (Learn more about EcoSphere’s sustainable model on their site.)

At $125 for a small sphere they are a bit pricey, but they are fun to watch, people always notice the shrimp moving around on my desk.  After attending Thomas Friedman’s talk on “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” I realize they are just another part of my “work in progress” to living sustainably in the U.S.  These do not feed me like my chickens and goats, but they also do not eat like my dogs and cats.

Here is mine on my desk - cool eh?

Definitely the most common question is:  “Are those sea monkeys?“  According to the web site, they live 2 to 7 years with really no maintenance and NO they are not sea monkey branded brine shrimp.

This EcoSphere keeps me focused on the long road of continuous improvement needed to make our industry a zero carbon footprint or sustainable industry.  We are currently on the road to be a larger emitter of CO2 than the airline industry by 2020.

We have to find the innovations in infrastructure, the methods and tools to reverse this.  My of view of how to reverse this behavior is through the emerging software value cycle that is made possible by SaaS/Clouds, Agile development and Web 2.0 customer communities.  You can read my thoughts on these topics or hear a MassTech webinar.

I have about 15 of these guys in my Eco-sphere.

I believe that with the change to Lean thinking – from products to services and with virtual connections to customers – we can learn to quickly adapt and adopt to new sustainable products and behaviors.

We need a value chain in the IT industry that is closed loop and sustainable, not open loop like the Story of Stuff.

I encourage you to take a moment and consider getting one of these model worlds for yourself or your best friends.  It will keep you on the road to smarter, leaner and greener.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Further Reading:

• Let’s stop splitting hairs – We need to get to zero carbon output to really make a difference
• Leadership in Sustainability – Blog Talk Radio Interview

Just got off the phone with Dan Montgomery who interviewed me on his BlogTalkRadio channel on Sustainable Leadership.

Following the ‘More…’ link will show my notes and links from the 50-minute interview using the Decker Grid.

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In the end of October, I did a short, 30 minute, webinar with the Ian McGuinness and Jeffrey Kaplan at the Mass Technology Leadership Council.  The topic was focused on the positive relationship between Agile and SaaS.  This talk spoke to software executives and provides an overview of agile and why it is a glove fit with SaaS business model.  I was joined on this call by one of our customer, Rick Simmons, Director of Agile Practices and Web Services, from Constant Contact. And, Rick’s color commentary was a huge addition to the webinar.  Thanks Rick!

If you are a SaaS provider or considering the move to SaaS, you should enjoy the talk, Rick’s comments and the questions from the folks in the Mass Technology Council that were on the call.  The recorded webinar for this call is available for viewing pleasure.

My theory is that the software industry’s move to SaaS and Agile are speeding up the value chain so fast that it is becoming a value cycle.  As a result of that value cycle, we are seeing an increasing need to become much better at managing customer uptake and successful application of new features.  If we do this well, a rapid ROI engine gets created for our customers and good things happen everywhere.  I see this value cycle as a great closed-loop model that is typical of the sustainable models that will become part of all industries as the 21 Century moves along.  My hope is that we leverage this model and become one of the first sustainable industries in the world.  If you want to read about what we are doing to make Rally sustainable, please visit these sites.

• Greening of the Software Industry forum
• Greening of Rally forum
• Rally’s Sustainability page

If you are more interested in the value cycle concept, I turned much of this content into an article for the Sterling Report; that article is available on the Sterling Report in this month’s issue.

If you are a software executive, I would encourage you to subscribe to their monthly publication of thoughtful and provocative articles.  If you want a complete white paper on the topic, you can download it from the Rally Download section.

If you have any comments on this article, I would love to see your comments below or on one of two forums mentioned above.

In Boulder Colorado, it is a beautiful spring day to admire the great spaceship that we live on.  In November 2007, we started our efforts to “green” Rally and our industry.  Since that day we have made some great progress on what I imagine to be a long journey.  I wanted to thank the employees at Rally, the City of Boulder, EcoCycle, Xcel, Salesforce Earthforce, EFBay Area “Do One Thing” and Native Energy for helping us start are journey.

Like adopting Agile, the effort to go “green” needs to be taken iteratively and incrementally and is done more quickly with good advisers, see above and below.  Our goal of fueling the move of Rally and our entire IT Industry to a sustainable industry will take continuous improvement process for years to come.   Carbon Neutral as a company and ultimately as an industry clearly has to be the goal.  Based on the work we have done to benchmark our energy usage and logical/economic actions, it is obvious it is going to take years, innovations and incentives for us to even make reach the goals adopted by the City of Boulder – Kyoto. (10% less Carbon output of 1990 levels by 2012 or 20% reduction from 2006)

For that reason, we started in our incremental approach toward “green expert” slowly:

• November – December 2008 – Kick-off efforts
  • Committed to off-setting our carbon use from Hosted Operations with Wind credits – DONE with Native Energy Cool Watts.
  • Started our team and the brainstorming environment – DONE – Green Ideas Hive
  • Signed up with City of Boulder program to help us learn from others – DONE – BeClimate Smart Audit

• Q1 2008 – Organize the Team
  • Build a backlog of Green ideas and build a roadmap of efforts for Q2 – DONE Roadmap Q2
    • April Implement Composting – DONE with help of Western Disposal (composting services), EcoCycle (consulting services), EcoProducts (compostable products) and Corporate Express (recyclable and compostable office products).
    • May – Implement a commuting incentive plan
    • June – Implement a single stream recycling plan
  • Build a backlog of Green efforts for Q3 to be partially funded by savings done in Q2
    • potentials
      include power management software, new building build-out efforts,
      moving to an alternative energy data center, reducing the energy used
      by our servers.

Thank you for your help, let’s keep working together to be “green
experts.”  It is going to take all of us to counteract our effects.
(The US has 4% of world populations but contributes 22% to global
warming – stopglobalwarming.org.)

Please post any comments here.