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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AT&T’s public WiFi rollout seems to be moving along rather splendidly, now that four additional New York City parks have been bathed in the golden rays of the internet. The carrier confirmed the expansion yesterday, announcing that its free WiFi service is now available at Mineral Springs and Tavern on the Green in Central Park, as well as Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park and Devoe Park, up in the Bronx. That brings AT&T closer to its goal of 26 WiFi-enabled city locations, and inches New Yorkers ever closer to networked nirvana. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading AT&T brings free WiFi to four more NYC parks, will occupy your downtime

AT&T brings free WiFi to four more NYC parks, will occupy your downtime originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, if you thought Samsung was done tweaking the Galaxy S II, you were very mistaken. The Korean company is getting ready to unveil the Galaxy S II LTE at IFA in Berlin this week, alongside an LTE version of it’s still elusive Galaxy Tab 8.9 — and we’ll be there to get some hands on time. Both devices are sporting The updated Galaxy S II sports an updated dual-core processor running at 1.5GHz, also getting a size bump and moving up to a 4.5-inch screen. The Tab remains otherwise unchanged, rocking the same 1200 x 800 screen and super-svelte (8.6mm thick) design. Honestly, we’re not sure what else you need to know — 4G LTE and an over-the-top processor? OK, maybe price and availability would be nice, but you’ll just have to make do with some PR for now. Check it out after the break.

Updated: This article previously stated that both devices have a 1.5GHz processor. As supercurio pointed out via Twitter, only the LTE Galaxy S II has been confirmed to be getting this processor.

Continue reading Galaxy S II LTE and Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE announced, set to debut at IFA

Galaxy S II LTE and Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE announced, set to debut at IFA originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Newspapers and magazines used to publish content into a kind of void: they knew how many people subscribed, but that was about it — everything else was guesswork based on consumer surveys and other mumbo-jumbo. But online, every click and interaction can be tracked and charted and graphed over time, to create a picture of what is happening at any minute of the day. Is that good or bad for the news business? Tony Haile, general manager of Chartbeat, is convinced that the more information a publisher has, the better job they can do, and he has just launched a new service called Newsbeat to help provide that data.

Chartbeat — which was launched in 2009 by Betaworks, the New York-based incubator run by John Borthwick — provides real-time analytics for websites of all kinds, with a dashboard that shows how many people are reading a particular page at any given minute, as well as where they came from and how long they have been on the site. But in an interview with GigaOM, Haile says he wanted to create something specifically designed for publishers, in the hope that more information could help the media industry through the transition it is currently struggling with from the print world to a digital one.

Not funnels but engagement

The way publishers think about analytical data, Haile notes, is very different from the way that e-commerce companies do. Anyone who is selling something is obsessed with “funnels” — in other words, how well their site moves someone to the point where they will buy the product. Publishers, however, are more concerned about where their traffic is coming from and maximizing that (as well as engagement with readers), because for the most part their business is advertising-based. Said Haile:

For me, the most interesting thing was that this is an industry in complete transition. It’s moving away from the ‘fire-and-forget’ model of publishing to one that is much more adaptive and iterative. We thought ‘What does the newsroom look like in five years, and how can we help build it now?’

While Chartbeat shows real-time analytics for a site, Haile says Newsbeat has more data that publishers would be interested in — including detailed data about every story on a site (Chartbeat only provides detailed info for the top 20 most-read pages on a site) as well as social-sharing information. For example, one tab of data for each story shows a “sound wave-style” graph of Twitter-related activity related to that story, which an editor or writer can zoom in on and see who has been posting a link or mentioning the story on Twitter. Newsbeat also ranks the tweets based on the Klout “influence score” of the user, Haile says, so that publishers can see which tweets matter.

Chartbeat created Newsbeat by working with a group of mainstream media companies, including Forbes, Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, as well as some new media entities such as Gawker and Fast Company. But won’t focusing so much on real-time data about traffic patterns create a “race to the bottom,” as everyone chases the high-traffic stories about Brittany Spears or Lady Gaga? Haile says he has heard all of these horror stories, but he doesn’t believe them.

Seeing how readers are responding is good

Traffic data might show that readers are really interested in racy photos of a celebrity, he says, which might help convince Gawker Media or some other outlet to focus on them, but it’s not going to make the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal do so. “Journalists deserve more credit than they get,” says the Chartbeat GM. “Knowing how readers are responding to what they’re writing isn’t going to change the way most of them write about the things that matter to them. This data is never going to result in the ‘tyranny of the popular’ — it’s just not going to happen.”

Haile said that even some of the most vociferous critics he has run into inside newsrooms are starting to see the value of the information Newsbeat provides. “I heard one of these guys say ‘It’s not enough for me to write about these important stories — I need to know that people have read them. I need to know if the headline isn’t drawing people in, or if they aren’t getting to the important point in the fourth paragraph.’”

One of the things the software can do, Haile says, is alert editors and publishers when something unusual is happening in the traffic pattern for a story. After ingesting enough of the data about a site, Newsbeat can predict what kind of readership a specific story will get during a day, Haile says, and if there is a sudden spike in readers it can alert an editor, so they can take advantage of that attention. He notes that Gawker founder Nick Denton has talked about how he built traffic at the network by spotting stories that were spiking in interest and then “doubling down” on them by throwing more resources at them.

The audience may be smarter than you think

And not only will this data not accelerate a “race to the bottom” with respect to content, Haile says it can actually help do the opposite: the Chartbeat GM says that one of the major publishers the company was working with looked at the data from Newsbeat and saw that two stories were getting large amounts of traffic: one about a case of infanticide in France and the other about Iraq. The number one story on the front page of the site was about season two of The Jersey Shore, and it was getting hardly any traffic at all — and neither of the two most-read stories were above the fold on the home page.

“So in that case, the site had an audience that was actually smarter than they thought they were,” says Haile. “Sometimes we underestimate our audience, and this can help websites see that and change the way they are doing things.”

Will the kind of data that Newsbeat provides allow some editors to become even more obsessed with lowest-common denominator stories? Undoubtedly. But I think Haile is right when he says it can also do the opposite, and show news publishers when they are misunderstanding what their readers are interested in — and it can let individual writers see whether what they are writing is having an impact or not, as well as showing them who their biggest fans are when it comes to referring traffic. As publishers try to become more efficient at serving their markets, that is clearly valuable information.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Steve Snodgrass

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Fisker represents one of between six to eight greentech companies that Kleiner thinks will deliver big returns for the firm (out of its 70 or so greentech portfolio companies), and potentially make back a good portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s invested into greentech over the last several years. Lane thinks over the next two years some of Kleiner’s half a dozen top bets will start to bear fruit via IPOs.

While there’s been a perception that Kleiner has been moving away from greentech investing, Lane told me in an interview after the Karma event that Kleiner is not pulling back from greentech investing. We’ve committed a third of our 12th, 13th and 14th funds to greentech, we have 14 active greentech investors, and I just did two more deals this morning, said Lane.

Here’s our lightly edited interview with Lane, who discussed, among other issues, why investing in greentech isn’t like investing in the Internet, what happened to Kleiner’s Think electric car deal, and why he’s more excited about greentech than software.

Q). Have the returns been what you thought they were going to be for greentech? Did you think when you started that it would take a long time?

A). I didn’t expect them to be any different, other than that there was a recession. When we first started investing in green heavily in the ’05 and ’06 timeframe, we went to our limited partners and we said greentech is going to have longer returns than digital. Every limited partner signs onto a 10-year contract with us and 10 years is about what they expect. They are not in a hurry, by the way.

In the VC industry, we’ve gotten used to investing in software companies, which is a lot easier development process. You get a couple of programmers, you get a product out in the first six months, and for the Internet you get customers really fast. And in a year you have a company. Google was 4.5 years. So in digital, they are used to thinking 4 to 5 years.

But when we got into greentech, we said we think it will be longer than digital, it will be more capital-intensive than digital, there will be more government policy involved, and also the fact that we’re trying to replace an existing infrastructure like coal, gas, and oil. And you have to scale it first. For the internet, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, they start small and they just keep going. But you can’t do that with a gas plant, or a car plant. The first car that comes out – my new car for example – can’t kill anybody. Facebook doesn’t risk killing anyone when it first comes out. You can’t build a car company in 3 to 4 years, it’s impossible.

Then you stick a recession in the middle of it. I don’t want to blame the recession, but it did slow everything down. Capital raising was tough. People just went to sleep and left the market. There is no question.

Our expectations were always in the 6 to 7 year time frame. That time frame would really feel good to us. We’re about to get there with some of the early companies, with the ’05 investments. We expect returns, IPOs and liquidity events over the next two years. And we’re seeing them.

Q). When you look at Zynga, and they can make back the green fund in an IPO. How does that feel?

A). Sure. So can Fisker. Fisker has the potential to be the same value as Zynga.

Q). In theory you’d think it would be the car company that would be valued higher, right?

A). Not really. Software companies have been worth more than car companies for a long time. GM was worth billion, now it’s at billion. Google at 0 billion, and Oracle 0 billion. So it’s not unusual.

The reason is, the business model of the Internet and software is unique. There are no other industries like it. You can’t apply the rules of it to greentech. It’s a totally different world. Most software companies have 90 percent margins, and after you include development, and services, maybe 50 percent to 60 percent margins. You’re never going to get that with a car company. I’d be thrilled with 20 prcent gross margins for a car company.

Q). Does that make you lean more towards green software, or green IT plays, like an OPower?

A). Not exactly lean, but yes, what we want to do as many of those as we can. But there’s not enough of them. It doesn’t make a portfolio. We’ll continue to aggressively invest in the area, but there are just not enough software companies out there.

Q). What are areas that will continue to be attractive in the greentech space for Kleiner?

A). So, we started out with biofuels, solar, wind, those are some earluy ones. We did then a lot in conversion tech, coal to gas, and thermal electrics, heat to energy, waste heat to energy. Now we’re doing a lot of storage, electron storage batteries. Weve done a lot in water. Two years ago we hadn’t done anything in water and now we’ve done 3 investments in clean water. We’re starting to do a bunch in agriculture. Everything from changing the productivity of seeds to making fuels and producing sugars.

Q). What big returns are you banking on?

A). I’m not going to comment on who files and who goes public. But I think you’ll see 6 to 8 IPOs out of our cleantech portfolio. In terms of big opportunities for companies, though not forecasting IPOs, I think there are big opportunities with Bloom Energy, Miasole, Silver Spring Networks, Enphase Energy, Macoma, Fisker, and GreatPoint Energy. These companies I think will be huge. They’ll probably all IPO but I’m not forecastin when, but these companies will be huge.

I think I’d be close if out of the 70 greentech companies we’ve invested in, 20 of them will make no difference – as in we tried and it was fun, but it didn’t work and its not going to be a big company. Maybe 15 to 20. Then I think there’s another 15 or 20 that are IPOs, big outcomes, return the fund kind of thing. Then everthing else is kindof like, we don’t know — they’re too early, or we’re still removing technical risk. That’s the profile of venture capitalists. We take so much risk so early that we never expect all of our companies to make it. The Kleiner model is that 1 or 2 will return the fund.

Q). So it’s going as you expected?

A). So far, its as expected. But again with a big headache around the recession. I would have expected some early, not on time, but early IPOs. I think without a recession, we could have seen a few of these companies IPO last year.

Q). Do you feel like the greentech investing space as a whole has learned lessons. A lot of the generalist VCs that moved into greentech investing and haven’t been as aggressive as Kleiner have moved out.

A). We had all of the challenges for greentech on the first piece of paper for our limited partners: government policy, capital intensive, regulation, that it’s tough to invent a new business. The only one we didn’t put down was a recession. Actually a recession would have been fine, this was a depression. Kleiner went out and raised extra funds just as an insurance policy, but we never used a dime of that.

GreatPoint Energy is a good example. They were on a capital intensive plan to build plants in the U.S. The combo of a recession and shale gas finds in the U.S. meant that GreatPoint was looking at a very tough time building their plant in the U.S. So we sent them China to start developing partnerships there. So that is where they are going to build their plant: in China. Where they pay three times what we pay for natural gas.

If you and I sit down two years from now and we don’t have a single IPO from this group, I’d say now we are behind. But we do expect IPOs out of a bunch of companies.

There have been other funds that followed us and Khosla in and the recession took them out of it. I also think they are feeling the overall crunch of venture capital. We have always said that the VC industry is too large. It’s got too much capacity. There are 900 VC firms in US, there needs to be 300. You’re seeing this macro trend of LP passing on new funds.

Q). So for Kleiner maybe there’s more opportunities now that there are less general investors in cleantech.

A). That’s exactly it. I like it. We don’t like to have VCs that copy ideas or be me-too. Valuations go up. There’s more competition. You have to have a thesis when you are investing in greentech. When I did Fisker and another car company, my partners thought I was out of my mind. But I had a thesis. We can invest in a car company and either have a way to get the valuation high enough so you don’t get crushed on dilution or get low cost loans that are high leverage for equity investors. Or buy cheap assets, which I did not know going in. I did not know we could go to GM Disposal corp and buy a plant for M, that as a big deal for us and Tesla at the NUMMI plant.

Q). What happened with Think?

A). I should probably explain this to the market. think did not turn out well. I did not invest in Think and I passed on it several times. And I got a call from Rockport and they had come up with an idea to invest a little bit of money, million — .5 million each — to buy the North American rights to Think if they ever come here. So right from the beginning I did not see it as an American car. I saw it as a European city car, and to this day, I think Europeans will pay ,000 for a little car to be able to park it in small spaces and scoot around the cities in it. They sold 3,000 of those – no one has sold that many EVs.

So I thought our investment was pretty cool, and we owned some of the rights for .5 million dollars if they brought it here to the U.S. Then when they were starting to restructure Think Inc, they wanted to buy the American rights back, and I said OK, for .5 million. But we ended up getting 1.5% of Think for selling that back. So I thought that was a pretty smart investment.

Q). Anything else I should know about Kleiner’s greentech future?

A). I was one of the first ones to say: this [greentech] is what I want to do. I just did two digital investments because I knew KP wouldn’t do them without me getting involve. But I’m not out there looking for digital investments. I don’t want to do them. I have no interest, I don’t go to the meetings, and I don’t follow all of those social stuff. I volunteered to lead this greentech practice. This is my day job and I like doing it.

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