Social Media is obviously growing into a marketing necessity, and organizations of all sizes should take notice. In fact, a few nights ago I was watching the Denver Nuggets play the New Orleans Hornets in the first round of the playoffs and during a commercial break I got up to grab a drink and heard an NBA commercial advertising to follow the NBA on twitter. This new form of advertising social media is obviously on the rise and there are many reasons that Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter can be effective in companies of all sizes. I recently heard an analogy that I thought was a clear way to explain these forms of social media. Linkedin is the business meeting, Facebook is the water cooler conversation, and Twitter is the trade show. So with that in mind, how can you implement social media in your organization?

 The Parallels Summit 2009 is off to a strong start with great content in the keynote presentations and panel discussion regarding many aspects of Cloud Computing.  While a lot of the focus has been on how technology components enable hosting companies to integrate Cloud Computing concepts into their business models,  Andreas Gauger (Founder 1&1) summed up the opportunity for hosters by stating that service provider must find differentiated value add services to offer their prospective customers.  

I strongly agree.  To provide sufficient contrast from the large group of hosters offering Cloud Services or hosting services, these organizations can thrive by identifying a market niche (or several) that have a common business problem they must solve.  In medium to large sized organizations, one such problem is "I have this mission critical application that needs to be supported at a higher level than I have the staff to deliver in the current economic environment."  In other words, "I need my business (or SaaS) application delivered to my customers at lower cost and higher value than I have the resources to do internally".  This is a tremendous market opportunity for hosters.

Many Cloud Computing offerings today offer infrastructure as a service to varying degrees.  This solves the capex portion of the problem but does not address the application service delivery component of the equation.  To do that requires delivering or partnering to deliver significant managed services to address the whole business problem of their customers.   An approach that works well for many of our partners is Application Lifecycle Management Services bundled on top of hosting or cloud compute solutions coupled with existing managed services offerings like managed firewall, managed load balancer and managed backup.

What is Application Lifecycle Management and why is it important?

In an economic time when IT and technology operations budgets are being cut aggressively while technology is 5-10 times more important to business execution than it was 8 years ago, it is critical for business managers to understand how to make the most of their technology investments.  At the heart of maximizing existing and new investments is the concept of Application Lifecycle Management. 

It is no longer sufficient to simply build a business critical application  and throw it over the wall to a minimized IT operations organization and hope that they will somehow find a way to support the new application.  To ultimately maximize the value and investment in new technology, a more holistic approach must be undertaken.  The four key components to this approach are: