Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.

But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.

The technology ecosystem has always been important. Even in the days when a minority of companies had a single mainframe, you still needed parts, skills, power, data centers, tools, and ideas, etc. But that ecosystem was smaller and moved more slowly. The technology ecosystems of the 60s through the 90s tended to change over months or years, and our systems from then were more likely to be from a small handful of vendors. This simplified provider environment reduced dependence on an ecosystem of otherwise unrelated partners and vendors, but guaranteed your dependence on the one.

That was then, this is now.

The difference today, and going forward, is that technology is rapidly moving to a much more agile adoption, development, operating and use model. Buyers today can identify and use cloud-based infrastructure or obtain a few licenses of a Software-as-a-Service delivered application in a matter of hours. Aside from cloud-based services, there are virtual platforms, appliances, internally developed applications and myriad customer devices that all need to interact, but can change almost overnight.

Some would argue that the sheer complexity of the ecosystem today screams for CIOs to try to create homogenous infrastructure environments. However, the very fact that we’re making IT solutions more portable and readily adaptable means that we must plan for the ability to support multi-vendor solutions at any layer of the technical infrastructure, from the CPU, through to platform as a service.

The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for “their” provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.

Many software, cloud, and hardware providers in today’s market would argue that they offer a strong ecosystem of partners, but I think the future ecosystem will be as open as possible and also offer the customer access to a wide variety of cloud, network and other services within the confines of a single data center. Think of your IT ecosystem as the local shops near your downtown flat, easy to access and well understood. However, if you’re downtown ecosystem was like the technology ecosystem you would have five coffee shops, three butchers, six shoe stores and so on from which to select goods and services. .

The open ecosystem

An open ecosystem allows for you to select the technology or service provider you like when the opportunity presents itself. It’s an environment where the customer has broad access to vendors and services related to any portion of the infrastructure stack, including wide area networking services and the data center capacity.

Under the old way of building IT, managers built it once, built it to last, and then got fired when it didn’t last. The new IT calls for managers to build it fast, possibly fail fast, and then build it again.

An open ecosystem means that in most cases you shouldn’t be spending years putting in a new technology architecture or solution. If it’s that complex or limited in its ability to adapt new technology you should be using a partner’s infrastructure such as an IaaS or PaaS provider solution.

There are also many options for building private cloud infrastructure, especially for larger businesses, but the focus should be on making it as open as possible. If you can’t taste test an application or new platform environment in a matter of days or weeks, you’re doing something wrong. Openness also helps if you need to move your work, because you want to have as many destinations to choose from as you can.

Many providers under one roof.

But even among open ecosystems there are important differences to be aware of. Ideally you will find an open ecosystem with a large number of different network, cloud, software and hardware providers under one umbrella. This allows the customer to make decisions around adoption of new technology quickly and efficiently. So instead of providing access to one or two bandwidth providers, the ideal ecosystem provides access to big and small players, and can play them against each other to get the best price and services for customers. In reality bringing together the combined customer and supplier community creates greater opportunities for both sides, in effect, a win-win.

It shouldn’t stop with bandwidth, either. An ecosystem should have not only the option of different hardware, and support services, but also different cloud service providers. If a customer wants to get cloud computing from a vendor, the ecosystem provider should invite that provider in. And if someone wants to build their own cloud, the ecosystem provider and data center provider should have an array of choices available for a customer to choose from.

The ideal delivery platform for this ecosystem is a data center provider who can create an environment that supports the needs of enterprise computing, while also lowering the costs and barriers to entry for ecosystem partners. This is an environment that removes all your risks associated with disaster avoidance, regulatory concerns, capacity and security. That location should have access to national freeways and airports as well as local government support that will help facilitate worker relocation and education, while also providing considerations for your hardware taxation risks.

It’s tough to find one place where all the above are available to the customer, but they are out there. Having these resources readily available is like having a Home Depot and a Lowes move in next to your house the day before you start a big home project. No matter what tool or resource you need, it’s all right there, immediately available, with competition, quantity and variety.

In this environment building a business that requires IT – or rethinking your existing IT doesn’t seem so daunting: With all these resources available, you virtually eliminate the risk of being forced into a “pragmatic” (read: bad but necessary) decision. You are free to experiment once, twice, three times, and then put it into production, without most of the historical baggage like “high network costs”, “no skilled staff” or a data center that is “out of capacity,” which have traditionally driven IT decisions.

So the increasing complexity and speed at which IT is moving doesn’t have to be something to worry about, instead look at it as an opportunity to roll with the technological changes without becoming too invested in a closed ecosystem.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Image courtesy of Flickr user john-norris.

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Kickstarter isn’t slowing down in 2012, but it has a high bar to reach in terms of matching its amazing 2011. Luckily, there are already some amazing new products that prove innovation isn’t in short supply at the crowd-funding site as we head into the new year.

A real pressure-sensitive iPad stylus

The Jaja is like the grail of iPad styluses. Ever since selling my beloved Wacom 12WX because it was, admittedly, too much machine for someone who only occasionally doodles for fun, I’ve been wanting to draw on my iPad with real pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity is what allows digital drawing devices to accurately mimic real-life drawing and painting implements; it allows styluses and drawing tablets to know how hard you’re pressing and alters pen and brush strokes accordingly.

The iPad in its current form doesn’t have any real fine pressure sensitivity to speak of. Sure, it can tell how hard you’re hitting the keys in Garage Band, but that’s a different kind of tech, and nowhere near subtle enough for sophisticated painting applications. The Jaja has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity built-in to its body design (that’s a good number), as well as a speaker, two contextual buttons and a rechargeable battery.

Like the iPen we’ve covered before, it’ll do more than any other stylus out there, but unlike the iPen, it doesn’t require any additional parts. It actually uses high-frequency sound to communicate with the iPad and convey info about contextual clicks or pressure info. That feature will require that apps make use of a special Jaja SDK, but talks with potential partners to do just that are already underway.

The Jaja isn’t yet funded: it’s at just over ,000 and has a goal of ,000 with 25 days remaining. Were it possible for me to wish things into existence, however, this stylus would already be in my hands.

The popping and locking iPhone case

The PopSockets looks a bit ridiculous, but its two extendable protrusions aren’t just an aesthetic oddity. They help prop up your iPhone, stick it to surfaces make it easier to hold and provide a simple cable wrap solution.

Whether you think the design is garish or stylish, the PopSockets is highly customizable, will eventually come in a variety of colors and designs, and the popping elements themselves hide away almost completely when not in use. The PopSockets project is nearing its funding goal of ,000 with 30 days remaining, so it will almost certainly become a reality. You can secure a pre-order for , but do yourself a favor and don’t watch creator David Barnett’s Kickstarter promo video.

Small add-on addresses major iPad flaw

I like watching movies on my iPad, but I hate having to cup my hand just right or prop it against a hard surface to try to get sound coming out of the speaker to bounce back at me. Without taking these steps, though, I often find that even at full volume it’s hard to pick out clear dialogue against background noise.

The SoundBender is a small, simple magnetic attachment that clips onto your iPad 2 and provides a backstop against which soundwaves redirect back towards you, the listener. It’s pocketable, one-piece, and even works with plenty of case designs. This project has just started, so it’s still far from its modest ,500 goal, but a simple pledge secures a pre-order.

I wish the iPad didn’t need something like this, but since it does, this small, unobtrusive solutions seems like the best possible fix.

Got an exciting Kickstarter project? Send it to us for consideration in our regular roundup of promising accessories.

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At the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin during the second week in October, a dozen hopeful young entrepreneurs approached our booth selling versions of the same ambitious vision. “We’re building a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s going to be the next World of Warcraft, the next Call of Duty. It’s gonna be huge,” they said. These hopeful game mavens were seeking insight on exactly how you build an MMO infrastructure. Not surprisingly, many of them were woefully unprepared. They didn’t know what a load balancer was. They had no idea about data transport costs between data centers. They hadn’t really thought about the impact of hardware at cloud providers on the user experience of their game customers (hint: old servers usually mean unhappy or lost customers).

A few years ago we would have shaken our heads, wished them good luck, and figured we would probably never see that game released. Today there is a far greater chance that these folks can bring the next MMO to market. What’s changed? The arrival of specialized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. In a nutshell, a PaaS allows an entrepreneur to focus on building their cloud application, avoiding upfront capital expenses through outsourced management of their IT infrastructure to a third party.

This is a level up from the cloud itself, which provides outsourced compute power in a more raw fashion. PaaS providers offer database as a service (MongoLab, MongoHQ) or runtime environment as a service (Heroku, Nodejitsu, AppFog), for example. A PaaS can also deliver even more advanced capabilities. StackMob, for example, puts in place a suite of PaaS offerings that radically streamline mobile application development, launch and hosting by providing in one integrated package an environment to code up, host, and run in the cloud mobile applications.

What’s more, a PaaS can even be taken to the point where it eliminates almost all technology skill requirements. GameSalad allows designers to quickly design and publish game applications that even include animation purely using visual design tools. Eliminating technological complexity serves to eliminate a critical barrier to innovation and new company foundation. We’ve all met someone who felt they had a great idea for a new application of some sort. “And I’m looking for a developer or a CTO,” is inevitably the next thing out of their mouth after they pitch the idea.

If that same great idea could be built far more easily and quickly with a far smaller tech team and nominal capital expenses, then, logically the cost of bringing that idea to market drops considerably. This is the value of the PaaS. And its not just a value to guys with no tech chops. Someone that is a very solid designer and front-end coder may be highly technical but may not be comfortable at all with designing and managing a NoSQL database.

Even highly skilled developers with both front-end and server-side chops usually turn to network engineers for help with load balancing, DNS and other infrastructure aspects that are critical to ensuring a cloud-based application runs fast and clean on any device anywhere in the world. Dennis TK, founder of Foursquare, is fond of explaining that as soon as he got funded, he hired an ex-Googler to completely recode his app to keep it from breaking. If Dennis had been building Foursquare in the present, he could have probably built a more reliable, faster app by leveraging a far more robust PaaS ecosystem to remove many of the software development and infrastructure management requirements that probably caused Foursquare to be so buggy and break all the time in its initial inception.

How many more kids like Dennis are out there with whizbang innovations that could be the next WoW, the next great service for medical records delivery, or the next amazing tool for crowdsourced scientific problem solving? We don’t know but we are a lot more likely to find out in a new era of PaaS-fueled cloud innovation.

Lisa Petrucci is the VP of Global Marketing at Joyent. She started out as a network engineer for Lotus and has held senior sales, marketing and business development roles in enterprise computing companies for the past two decades at companies including IBM and SixApart. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user ansik.

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Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just set the stage for what should be a big year full of new companies, new users and new techniques for analyzing big data. That’s not to say there isn’t room for alternative platforms, but with even Microsoft abandoning its competitive effort and pinning its big data hopes on Hadoop, it’s difficult to see the project’s growth slowing down.

Here are six big things Hadoop has going for it as 2012 approaches.

1. Investors love it

Cloudera has raised million since 2009. Newcomers MapR and Hortonworks have raised million and million (according to multiple sources), respectively. And that’s just at the distribution layer, which is the foundation of any Hadoop deployment. Up the stack, Datameer, Karmasphere and Hadapt have each raised around million, and then are newer funded companies such as Zettaset, Odiago and Platfora. Accel Partners has started a 0 million big data fund to feed applications utilizing Hadoop and other core big data technologies. If anything, funding around Hadoop should increase in 2012, or at least cover a lot more startups.

2. Competition breeds success

Whatever reasons companies had to not use Hadoop should be fading fast, especially when it comes to operational concerns such as performance and cluster management. This is because MapR, Cloudera and Hortonworks are in a heated competition to win customers’ business. Whereas the former two utilize open-source Apache Hadoop code for their distributions, MapR is pushing them on the performance front with its semi-proprietary version of Hadoop. This means an increased pace of innovation within Apache, and a major focus on management tools and support to make Hadoop easier to deploy and monitor. These three companies have lots of money, and it’s all going toward honing their offerings, which makes customers the real winners.

3. What learning curve?

Aside from the improved management and support capabilities at the distribution layer, those aforementioned up-the-stack companies are already starting to make Hadoop easier to use. Already, Karmasphere and Concurrent are helping customers write Hadoop workflows and applications, while Datameer and IBM are among the companies trying to make Hadoop usable by business users rather than just data scientists. As more Hadoop startups begin emerging from stealth mode, or at least releasing products, we should see even more innovative approaches to making analytics child’s play, so to speak.

4. Users are talking

It might not sound like a big deal, but the shared experiences of early Hadoop adopters could go a long way toward spreading Hadoop’s utility across the corporate landscape. It’s often said that knowing how to manage Hadoop clusters and write Hadoop applications is one thing, but knowing what questions to ask is something else altogether. At conferences such as Hadoop World, and on blogs across the web, companies including Walt Disney, Orbitz, LinkedIn, Etsy and others are telling their stories about what they have been able to discover since they began analyzing their data with Hadoop. With all these use cases abound, future adopters should have an easier time knowing where to get started and what types of insights they might want to go after.

5. It’s becoming less noteworthy

This point is critical, actually, to the long-term success of any core technology: at some point, it has to become so ubiquitous that using it’s no longer noteworthy. Think about relational databases in legacy applications — everyone knows Oracle, MySQL or SQL Server are lurking beneath the covers, but no one really cares anymore. We’re hardly there yet with Hadoop, but we’re getting there. Now, when you come across applications that involve capturing and processing lots of unstructured data, there’s a good chance they’re using Hadoop to do it. I’ve come across a couple of companies, however, that don’t bring up Hadoop unless they’re prodded because they’re not interested in talking about how their applications work, just the end result of better security, targeted ads or whatever it is they’re doing.

6. It’s not just Hadoop

If Hadoop were just Hadoop — that is, Apache MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System — it still would be popular. But the reality is that it’s a collection of Apache projects that include everything from the SQL-like Hive query language to the NoSQL HBase database to machine-learning library Mahout. HBase, in particular, has proven particularly popular on its own, including at Facebook. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR all incorporate the gamut of Hadoop projects within their distributions, and Cloudera recently formed the Bigtop project within Apache, which is a central location for integrating all Hadoop-related projects within the foundation. The more use cases Hadoop as a whole addresses, the better it looks.

Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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