Enterprises spend 0 billion on software every year, yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Shocking? Well, such was the problem for Chiquita before they moved to Workday.  But rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world, and every individual within those enterprises. When we need to derive anything beyond the basics from our enterprise software, most corporations are out of luck.

This problem is only getting worse. With 1.8 trillion gigabytes of information projected to be generated and stored this year alone, our enterprise technology is on a collision course to become utterly useless if something doesn’t fundamentally change.  The data being created is obnoxiously large, with IDC citing that “by 2020, IT departments worldwide will need to administer 10 times the number of servers–both virtual and physical–50 times the amount of data, and 75 times more files.”  Our software, infrastructure, and organizations are ill-prepared to manage this scale of data creation, let alone generate anything meaningful or useful with this amount of content being created and shared.

But this is about to change. It has to. The cloud, social capabilities, and a web of integrated applications are on the verge of creating a far more personalized technology experience for tomorrow’s workers, and a world where an increase in data generates an increase in value and knowledge for organizations.

The client-server paradigm and a reverse network effect

The emergence of the personal computer may have transformed the way we work, but the software revolution that followed was anything but personalized. And amazingly, very little has changed for today’s average knowledge worker over the past two decades. The legacy software within today’s enterprises is stale, static and non-contextual. Applications don’t adapt to our behavior, or tell us anything new about our content and projects that we didn’t explicitly tell them. And they certainly have no understanding of our relationships with co-workers, partners, or customers.

It’s not just end users who are suffering. Technology still rooted in the client-server paradigm invariably prevents organizations from deriving real value from their systems.  Generally, any influx of employees or the addition of a geographically disparate team requires new instances of applications and infrastructure. An organization might have SharePoint running in many different data centers throughout the world, making it nearly impossible to efficiently upgrade applications, deploy new servers and perform maintenance at scale. And with application sprawl comes data sprawl, creating a veritable digital landfill of unconsolidated, silo-ed information.  In looking at the fragmentation of SharePoint in large organizations, a leading enterprise content management analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, discovered that “…enterprises can in fact reach a point of negative returns where an inability to manage proliferating SharePoint silos becomes a hidden but serious enterprise management risk.”

Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the opposite of a standard network effect with their information and people. In these sprawled and firewalled environments, an increase in users and data make it more difficult to locate content, make decisions, and gain insights from past actions.  This means more information is creating more complexity – far from the ideal outcome if organizations are about to generate orders of magnitude more information.

The cloud and centralization

Of course, decentralization and fragmentation of data and applications isn’t a new problem by any means. Early last decade, Oracle decided that application and data sprawl were hindering customers’ agility, decision making and cost savings.  Larry Ellison said of the client/server era, “Your information was chopped into tiny pieces, stored in lots of tiny databases, running on lots of tiny PC server computers.  This data fragmentation was accompanied by distributed complexity.”

Not surprisingly, Oracle’s solution to this problem was to have all core applications run on a single Oracle database instance with consistency across its apps. This would have worked marvelously if the world wanted to adopt only Oracle’s software — but that comes at the cost of tying your entire fate to a single vendor’s vision, roadmap and services.  With the emergence and maturity of cloud platforms, there’s now another way.

On-premise applications are inherently limited in that they rarely leverage data beyond what’s immediately available on a local machine, server or narrow data store. The opposite is true with most cloud products that take a centralized approach to storage and computing, and we’re only now starting to tap into their potential.

At Box, our model is store once, extend everywhere — and “everywhere” spans desktops, smartphones, tablets and even other apps. With the cloud, users can get to content and tools from any device, and IT departments are no longer burdened with maintaining and upgrading cumbersome hardware and software. This is making today’s employees more mobile, nimble and productive, and it’s enabling organizations to focus on competitive differentiators rather than systems management and maintenance.

But centralization is only phase one. If the first wave of the cloud is about realizing the efficiencies of moving software to the web, then the second wave is about making this software — and in turn, our organizations — much smarter. Software has tremendous potential to look at lots of pieces of information and make decisions to produce optimal outcomes. Then learn from these results, iterate, and do it again. We’re seeing this at work in the consumer world: think about how Facebook exposes the people we’re likely to know or updates we’re likely to engage with, or how Netflix makes personal recommendations to its users, aggregating and learning from the ratings across millions of users. As described by Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera, the power all this data is about being able to answer qualitative questions like, ”What do you like? Who do you know?” and no longer about simply solving basic equations.

Applied in the enterprise, our software, backed by large amounts of information to cull through, can tell us far more about our businesses than we could ever know ourselves.

From the social enterprise to the smarter enterprise

Given our trajectory, all enterprises will soon be filled with dozens or hundreds of light and heavy-weight applications that are function, company and industry specific. Salesforce.com has an app marketplace of thousands of add-ons, Jive and Yammer have their own respective ecosystems. With apps that can talk to each other, we’re seeing the emergence of a much more integrated enterprise technology stack – starkly contrasting the vertically integrated solutions from a single provider, apps are pulling from different data sources to create powerful mashups and overlays. Roambi, for instance, makes it easy for you view your CRM data from your iPad. Marketo lets you create extensive marketing automation customizations tying together email marketing, Google AdWords, and Salesforce.

But rather than the proliferation of apps creating more fragmentation, they’ll actually increase personalization and relevance of information. Driving this will be the social utilities that wrap around our enterprise applications of the future. Every action we take in our personal lives can be manifested as a social event, whether it’s checking into a restaurant, accepting a party invitation, or updating a status — our whereabouts, thoughts and actions help us engage with others both actively and passively. The same is becoming true in the enterprise, and it will create the first real ROI we’ll see from social activity in the enterprise. Yammer, Jive, Box, and Chatter securely broadcast the work we’re doing to our coworkers, and we’re about to see yet is what happens when these streams become more connected to all the other applications we’re using.

But it’s not just about creating a more social workforce with frequent status updates, file “likes” and ad-hoc conversations. In the enterprise, social is only useful if it makes us smarter. Think about it. You update a project status and all the relevant participants are passively notified of the change or delay.  Or a member of the sales team uploads content for a proposal, and someone from another department or team comments on its relevance to their own work.

As our social stream algorithms improve, user behavior will drive for better ranking of the information you and others should be looking at.  And with federation and syndication of this data and events, our applications will all work smarter together.  An HR update in Workday will prompt a response from someone on Chatter.  Customer support requests on Zendesk are analyzed by an executive in GoodData.  Software will be able to quickly connect the dots across people and data, building a combined view of the most important information. Most importantly, this can all be done passively, with little to no involvement from the user.

Rather than an increase in information and engagement yielding diminishing returns, our systems will get smarter with every interaction. We’ll be served content that has been filtered by our colleagues, and outputs that are corroborated by multiple platforms. As individuals and organizations, we’ll move faster and make better decisions based on better data. This is what we’re starting to hear from customers when they deploy cloud solutions like Box and others. This is the future.

Aaron Levie is CEO and founder of Box.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Susan NYC.

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Assuming that most of those are running atop some version of VMware’s hypervisor, there’s a lot of reason to care what Maritz has to say about the future of the cloud. His company will have a major role in defining the transition from virtualization to cloud computing.

Maritz noted that there’s a lot of hype around the cloud, even acknowledging that “We at vmworld are not immune to cloud fever,” but it’s more than just a fad, he said. Maritz thinks there are three very profound, and very real, forces driving the move to cloud computing: modernization of infrastructure; investment in new and renewed applications; and entirely new modes of end-user access.

However, there’s a big difference between what drove the world to deploying 20 million VMs and what will drive it to modernize infrastructure even further with the cloud. Consolidation largely drove the move to virtualization, but applications and mobile devices will drive the move to cloud computing.

On the application front, Maritz looks to “canonical applications.” “When canonical applications change, that’s when you see really profound change [across the computing ecosystem],” Maritz said. He pointed to bookkeeping applications as indicative of the mainframe era, and to ERP, CRM and e-commerce as the defining applications of the client-server era.

Real-time and high-scalability capabilities — both in terms of traffic and data — are driving the development of new applications. Being able to analyze data days after it’s generated, or to adapt to new traffic patterns within days, just isn’t good enough anymore. We can’t keep “putting lipstick around” current applications and expect them to meet these new demands, Maritz said.

How we write those applications also will be critical, because they’ll have to run on a variety of non-PC devices. We’re approaching the intersection of consumerization and next-generation enterprise IT, Maritz explained, which means that companies like VMware have to plan for very serious change. Running enterprise applications on consumer devices, especially of the mobile variety, is a big change.

They’ll have to embrace things such as HTML5 to enable cross-platform applications, and new programming frameworks to attract young developers that demand a simple, dynamic development experience. Companies will also have to figure out how to secure corporate data against the myriad threats that accompany employees downloading apps willy-nilly and operating often on unsecured (0r at least less-secured) networks. VMware CTO Steve Herrod actually will be highlighting VMware’s role in the mobile ecosystem at our Mobilize conference next month, and it’s safe to assume these will be among the topics he addresses.

Maritz, of course, thinks VMware has strong plays in all of these spaces — vSphere, Cloud Foundry, Horizon, the list does on — and he highlighted them. However, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham pointed out while highlighting the key VMworld trends, VMworld isn’t alone in making this realization. It has major competition, including from companies like Microsoft that know both the enterprise and the consumer spaces very well.

Every year at VMworld, Maritz highlights the movement toward cloud computing and how VMware is driving that migration. In large part, he’s right every time on the latter point. Now that almost everyone is on board with Maritz’s vision, though, I’m interested to see how long VMworld, and VMware in general, continues to drive the discussion around the future of IT.

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The last major computing infrastructure paradigm shift happened in the ‘80s when “client/server” was introduced as the new way to design business applications. Those applications typically ran on x86 computers – aka PCs.

Then, in the ‘90s, the “client” part of this overall design was disrupted and changed with the advent of the Internet. Instead of having applications running on a desktop PC accessing application servers on other PCs, we started accessing applications through web browsers which did little more than rendering on your own desktop or laptop computer. Now, 10-15 years later, we’re seeing the “server” side of client/server disrupted and replaced by cloud computing.

A New Architecture for More Devices

The underlying driver of these changes is the 10X effect — writ large. The early Internet had around 10 million users. Today we have on the order of one billion users (100X) on the Internet, and up to three billion if you count Internet-enabled mobile phones too. Whereas in the early days of the Internet, there were perhaps one million websites, today we have about 100 million active websites (100X). The total number of Internet connected devices is today around five billion (a 100X growth from about a decade ago), and the boldest predictions say that in the next few years this number will grow to a trillion! That’s 200X the current number.

These massive growth numbers, stepping up two or three orders of magnitude in about a decade, are forcing us to look for a new way to design our IT systems. The old architecture is completely unable to handle the new compute load, so we must re-architect the systems on all levels. Cloud computing is the new architecture.

Cloud computing is a term that reaches from the lowest piece of computer hardware all the way up to the highest level of web and mobile services. Google’s search is a cloud service. Salesforce.com is a cloud company. Apple’s iTunes is music and entertainment in the cloud. Amazon Web Services is cloud computing, as is Microsoft (a msft) Azure. Cloudera, RightScale and Eucalyptus are innovators of infrastructure software for the cloud. The modern servers produced by Dell and HP are made for cloud computing, as are the new storage solutions from giants like EMC and NetApp and from newer players such as Fusion-io.

Computers and the Three Musketeers

Whereas in current IT systems, computers and other resources are hardwired to serve just one specific set of users or set of applications, cloud computing lets any computer serve any need of any user. Computers are finally learning from the Three Musketeers: one for all and all for one.

Interestingly, the converse can be true as well in the cloud. When usage shoots through the roof (think of a mobile game that suddenly becomes popular), all cloud computers can be put to the use of one single application. Compute resources such as servers, storage devices and network equipment, can be called to duty and sent back on leave in an instance. This is called “elasticity.”

The “one for all and all for one” principle is possible because computer and software engineers have made sure that compute resources are fungible, i.e. mutually replaceable. You’d think engineers would have made this possible decades ago, but this has been a very hard nut to crack. It requires new thinking so new products (both software and hardware) are ready to operate across multiple computers from the start. This may sound like a natural thing to do, but so far in our history of computing, most software and hardware products were designed to function on their own with little interaction with other similar products.

Fungible compute resources that produce enormous elasticity are the only way to serve the growing Internet. When we reach the point of having one trillion connected devices, those connected devices all need service from the underlying computer network, but they do so at unpredictable times and with unpredictable workloads. It’s totally impossible to have servers devoted to certain uses — sitting there idly waiting for the user or the application to need them. Such a model would require close to a trillion servers. But with cloud computing, resources can be shared across the cloud, and a much smaller number of servers can successfully serve the fluctuating needs of the users and the connected devices. With fewer servers, we save time, money and energy.

As compute loads grow 10 times, 100 times and even 1,000 times, we need new architectures for our IT systems. In cloud computing, it is all about creating elasticity by making the compute resources fungible. When any computer can step in at any time to do any computation needed, scaling will no longer be an issue.

Marten will sharing his thoughts on “The Future of the Cloud” at our Structure 2011 event in June.

Marten Mickos is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

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Norwegian web expert Opera has today announced the release of its Opera Unite service that promises to shake up the old “client-server computing model of the web”. Opera Unite works by turning a computer into both a client and a server – effectively removing the need for a third party server to host data. What this means for the average web user is that serving and accessing data should become much easier. A user simply selects folders on their PC that they wish to share. These folders will then accessible via web browsers at a designated web address. Opera have stated that the service should work with any modern web browser. Apart from standard file sharing, Opera Unite also allows the creation of photo galleries complete with thumbnails and also allows users to play any mp3 stored in a shared folder within its built in media player. More savvy users can also host entire websites on their PCs should they wish to. There’s also a social networking aspect to the service. If you’re still not getting the gist of it, here’s a little scenario to illustrate its potential: Johnny goes on holiday to Alaska – he wants to see the grizzly bears. He takes his netbook with him, which only has an 8GB SSD. Johnny has planned ahead though and has set up his desktop back home to share his mp3s. He can now access all of these via his netbook from anywhere with a web connection. He can also save the photos of his trip on his netbook on a daily basis and share them with his friends and family back home without needed to upload to a hosting site like flickr. Opera Unite is available with special versions of Opera 10, which itself is a pretty good web browser. If you still don’t quite get it, maybe this video will help. (Warning: video contains dramatic American voice over and mood-setting music).

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How can I speed up the program’s performance?
In case of a poor performance of Anyplace Control while viewing of the remote screen, it is recommended (in order from most effective remedy to less effective): Try to disable “Hardware acceleration” on the remote PC. In some cases it gives a significant increase of the performance level. How to disable “Hardware acceleration” you can read here. Connect to a Host PC and enter either Full Control or View Only mode, select Performance/Quality tab.

My computer is running very slow. What can I do to speed it up?
There are many factors that affect PC performance including both software and hardware. First, check out the minimum requirements found at  Please realize these are the minimum requirements and any hardware additions especially adding memory will help boost performance significantly. Eliminating unused programs from your computer and unnecessary icons off the desktop will also increase PC performance.Virtual PC was originally produced by Connectix.

Why isn’t Client/Server support bundled in the base engine jar?
Many applications run entirely on a single system in a single process, so do not require Client/Server capabilities. For instance, a servlet storing data entered into a Web form or an address book application running on a PC does not need to communicate with other processes. Client/Server code would increase the footprint of these applications and provide no benefit. For such applications, Derby provides all the advantages of a relational database without unnecessary networking code.In case of a poor performance of Anyplace Control while viewing of the remote screen, it is recommended (in order from most effective remedy to less effective): Try to disable “Hardware acceleration” on the remote PC. In some cases it gives a significant increase of the performance level. How to disable “Hardware acceleration” you can read here. Connect to a Host PC and enter either Full Control or View Only mode, select Performance/Quality tab.FactSage 5.

How will my organization benefit from the MX Logic Web Defense Service?
bull; Improve employee productivity  Reduces computer downtime, unproductive Web surfing, network congestion. bull; Reduce IT costs  Frees IT staff from threat management, enabling them to focus on core business needs. Fewer Spyware and virus infections mean less PC rebuilding, cleaning, and maintenance, better PC performance, and fewer Help Desk calls.Yes. But most home office networks can upload data only about 10% as fast as they can download. This often limits video performance to just a couple of frames of video per second. You can increase performance by making the video window smaller or by using a network with faster upload speed.

What is MA1840 development software?
This language is similar to assembly language. The language supports the same high-level SCSI operations of the C/C++ product with an enormous speed increase. Programs developed with this software actually run on the OP1840/50 card and do not need constant communications with the PC, so performance is not degraded even on the slowest PCs.In case of a poor performance of Anyplace Control while viewing of the remote screen, it is recommended (in order from most effective remedy to less effective): Try to disable “Hardware acceleration” on the remote PC. In some cases it gives a significant increase of the performance level.

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