Live Blog -- Cloud Launch: Peter Coffee

Peter Coffee kicking off this afternoon by NOT talking about cloud directly... And talking about social media and email. More importantly, Coffee said that Canadian brands can be global brands today because of social media. As a measure of this theory, Facebook traffic has exploded whereas coporate website traffic has declined markedly. Google "Yourfavoritedomainname + sucks" and you'll find out exactly how much customers don't like an organisation.

A few thoughts from Coffee on social customers:

• Prospective service providers seek public feedback
• Buyers collaborate on competitor research
• Customers tell the world when they're not happy

Companies need to react and adapt to this new competitive environment and push the customer satisfaction metric to the lowest possible level in the organisation.

Coffee also peered into the future by using a healthcare model that used event driven demand to shape the dlivery of services. He gave another example of using educational modeling by using instantaneous quizzing of students to determine whether the content is effective. This could be interesting because the nature of our demand for services has changed: service providers are being asked to provide services when desired. This is important for healthcare because on-demand healthcare is causing the congestion we see in emergency rooms and walk-in clinics.

IT departments, according to Coffee, do not adhere to the concept of social customers and are basically the opposite of social. Of course, this is the ultimate reason why cloud computing still faces adoption challenges in Canada and continues to do so, albeit to a lesser extent, in the US. How does IT adapt to this in order to become a purveyor of value instead of a consumer of capital?

Even though we haven't heard much about community clouds recently, Coffee brought up the concept of securing environments to the highest common level as a way of showing value to a given market segment and quoted Forrester as stating that multi-tennant architectures can be more secure than individual VMs. Luckily, he qualified this by saying transparency is the key to earning trust from customers. Trust is an important concept because cloud + security are not commonly understood yet even though AAA and the CIA triad are basic concepts that can be applied to cloud computing. Shock! Horror!