Adapted from my notes from a recent DeployAdpot podcast discussion.

Vic Gundotra summed up this deal by reusing the "Two turkeys do not make an eagle" quote. However, I think he is likely channeling some angst over losing it and may be missing the bigger picture that Microsoft and Nokia together may actually amount to the phoenix rebirth of both their mobile strategies that they both desperately need.

In the past week at their own press conferences and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced a deep partnership with Microsoft to build Windows Phones. There’s been lot of speculation on why Nokia decided to go this route rather than either adopt Android in a similar strategy or to continue to develop their own platform strategy. The introduction of Steven Elop, a former Microsoft executive, as the CEO is fueling some speculation that the Nokia decision may in part have been based on his former relationships rather than the objective best interest of the company. That seems to me to be a red herring.

I think this was exactly the right move for both Nokia and Microsoft (and Nokia’s employees and customers.) Here are some of my thoughts:

• Magic 8 Ball says "Outlook not so good": Microsoft has had trouble getting back into the mobile space and has needed bolder moves and stronger partnerships for some time. Word is that Nokia’s internal predictions for smart phone market share showed them diving into single digits before too long. Their "platform" (current state strategy) is burning and is taking them in the wrong direction.

• The Android Morass: I see the Android market as alive and vibrant, but also crowded and fraught with peril for anyone trying to differentiate. Android is becoming the mobile platform of choice for not only well executed devices but also for low end barely-smart phones. Nokia jumping on that bandwagon would have the potential to get them lost in the noise very quickly.

• Better Together: Microsoft and Nokia need each other in ways that Google doesn’t. Microsoft sells software and Nokia sells phones. Both of them need the other to make money to be successful and they can compliment each other that way. Google sells advertising and could care less if you have to give your stuff away for free as long as they get they eyeballs. They want a slice of every device out there, good or crappy, and a race to the bottom for hardware makers is just fine. Microsoft has much more to gain from a strong Nokia than Google would and building best in class devices that unite each of their strengths is aligned well with what they both need.

Will they succeed? Signs so far point to MSFT continuing to move too slow and being hamstrung by current partner relationships in some ways. Unless they break that cycle and get their development and engineering velocity higher than both Google and Apple they are going to have trouble keeping up. This is a big challenge for them that they are falling down on so far since the launch of Windows Phone 7. Hopefully a tight partnership with a premier hardware vendor can help them drive reference devices that will push the rest of their partner/carrier relationships forward and drive higher velocity.

Enterprise/Business Perspective

• iPhone is Bad for IT: My thoughts for some time is that iPhone and Android have been bad for business IT. Not because they aren’t capable platforms but because they come from a consumer oriented mindset and a lot of the best talent in the market place is getting tied up right now trying to build the next Angry Birds app. You can get business apps on those platforms but that isn’t where the energy is at right now. That coupled with the fact that the iPhone is not compatible with the development model of most IT departments and it’s a pain to get apps on outside the app store and you have a mobile platform that sets back business IT mobile development by years.

• MSFT Enterprise Roots: MSFT and their mobile platform has at least a little bit of business IT DNA. Microsoft is downplaying that for now, but hopefully not excising it all together. My expectation is that anything better than a total failure of the platform will provide an outlet for real enterprise class mobile application development to flourish once more.
• Calling All IT Devs: Bring on my ERP, CRM, HR applications… why aren’t I interacting with my core business tools via rich custom applications yet? There are a smattering of commercial applications in some of the marketplaces but my IT department should be making its own packaged and custom tools available, driving real business value to their mobile workforces.

Am I missing the mark here? What do you all hope to see from this partnership? What top apps from your IT department do you need on your mobile devices today?

There is a huge opportunity right now for business software developers to capitalize on the emerging "Software As A Service", or "Cloud" application leaders by building extensions and cooperating services. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform provides an ideal platform for these types of complimentary solutions.

For example, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM Live and a slew of other CRM cloud services are only one class of cloud applications begging for add-on services. Each of these has strengths and weaknesses and most are targeted at the core use cases specific to their horizontal solution space. Software product developers working in complimentary horizontal spaces, like Marketing Automation, or in verticals like Manufacturing, Professional Services, etc. are well positioned to tap into these enormous customer bases and offer their solution extensions if they can host them in a cloud of their own and integrate effectively.

At Technoligence right now we are working on a project that will use Azure to extend a CRM Live solution with a custom quoting and proposal generation engine. It looks something like this:

Similarly, some of the work our partners are doing with Marketing Automation could be implemented like this:

Why Azure?

So why do I think Azure is the right cloud platform to build these businesses on, as opposed to something like a hosted datacenter or clouds like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine? Here are a few main reasons:

• Platform, Not Plumbing: Azure provides software developers a clean computing platform for implementing solutions without having to worry about the plumbing needed to get their solutions in place. The combination of Web Roles and Worker Roles provide a highly scalable container set for implementing workloads.

• AppFabric As The Bridge: A huge advantage that Azure has, especially as a compliment to many of the SaaS solution clouds, is the ability to deeply integrate into customer on-premise computing infrastructure through what Microsoft calls the AppFabric. This service bus allows cloud applications and on-premise platforms to easily and securely connect and interact.

• Codename "Dallas" Data Feeds: A very exciting component of the Azure platform that Microsoft is in the process of bringing online are the "Dallas" data APIs. Imagine having access to map, weather, traffic, AP news, financial data, etc. to draw on that a custom add-on solution can use to extend a core SaaS application. I think this is going to be a huge opportunity for complimentary services and mash-ups in the near future.

I’m compiling a list of add-on solutions that could be started today on SaaS platforms plus Azure. Let me know your ideas and I’ll write up a post listing the best.

In looking to try out yet another social service this weekend, I was presented with the following choices for login:

I never liked the idea of letting one of the major brands own my web identity so I’ve always set up a new ID on every site I’ve every gone to. As a result, I manage over 96 primary passwords and another 152 old or less used passwords, all different. This is crazy, of course, so I finally decided to look into OpenID since it was offered in this case.

The way OpenID works is that you set up your identity an OpenID provider and allow websites that you are attempting to use to use a URI (web link) specific to your identity to communicate to that provider and verify that you are who you say you are. OpenID isn’t used a ton of places yet but the list is growing.

You can get an OpenID from several well know providers and many web users already have one without realizing it. Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, etc. all have OpenID providers that your login with them can be used through. However, the geek in me was most interested in setting up my own.

Since this blog site is self-hosted and runs off a convenient domain name that I can easily associate with my OpenID, I figured it would be a great place to run my OpenID service and host my identity. Luckily for me, most of the work necessary to set this up has been done before and is laid out in what seems to be the definitive web reference on rolling your own provider, by Sam Ruby.

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers

I won’t go into all the detail unless anyone has questions but here are some of this high points, including some tips for doing this on a Wordpress site that aren’t covered by Sam’s reference.

1. The most commonly use PHP code for running a PHP OpenID provider of your own, is at: http://siege.org/projects/phpMyID. It consists of two PHP files that you add to your site that do most of the work. It also includes a detailed README that outlines the specifics of what you’ll need to do beyond what Sam has described.
2. Once you have the phpMyID.php and the phpMyID.config.php in hand, you fiddle with the config to set up your username/password hash, to start.
3. In order to get the username/password hash you’ll need to run an MD5 has function on it. Unix users have built-in options for this but I had to go get it from: http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5 Since this is security that we are into I reviewed the source and built my own EXE to do the hash. Once you have the hash you add it and the user name into the config.
4. I did some of what Sam suggests to clean up the URI by sticking these files in a subdirectory can ID and renaming the config to index.php. In doing that you no longer have to reference the particular PHP source as the ID URI and my ID is instead: http://jeffvilimek.com/id
5. For the final steps to get this working, some specific to Wordpress, I had to do the following:
   1. I did have to modify the .htaccess to include one of the "RewriteCond" options included with the phpMyID code. The first option worked and allowed 3rd party sites to access my server correctly.
   2. The second thing I did was to get this Wordpress plug-in(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yadis) and set it up on my site. In order to insert the "link" tags in the <head> HTML of my site I was looking at either hacking my Wordpress install, writing my own plugin or addition to the Wordpress PHP, or just using this plug-in which basically takes care of it for you.

Once those steps were complete my OpenID service and ID were online and usable. I used it to login to the crowd-source Q/A test site set up by @ChrisPirillo and was off and running. (His site is http://test.lockergnome.net/account/signin, let me know separately if you want details on that.)

Enjoy!

This post is the third in a series on virtualization: Introduction, Platform (Servers and PCs), Desktop, Application, and Cloud

A special case of platform virtualization is the ability to run a server or desktop operating system in a virtual environment on a PC or Mac. Running Windows on a Mac via Parallels is a key example and represents one of the common uses of this. The main categories of uses include:

1. Alternate OS for Access to Apps: Since software is typically OS specific there are often cases where the right or required piece of software for a particular job just doesn’t run on the primary OS you may be running on your desktop. Windows-based business software in a Mac environment or Linux-based network tools in a Windows environment are examples. In these cases it may be useful to host a virtual OS to run these specific tools.
2. Legacy OS Versions for App Compatibility: A related example of this may be the need to run applications that don’t run on your current OS but do run on a previous version. Many business are running into this today with old Windows XP compatible applications that don’t run on Vista or Windows 7. "XP Mode" in Windows 7 is a built-in virtual platform feature in some versions of Windows for solving this specific problem.
3. Development/Testing/Support: This is the same as one of the reasons I described for server virtualization. For specific development or testing scenarios it is often useful to run a specifically configured OS environment on a developer/tester workstation. This gives you the flexibility of switching on and off these specific environments and even resetting them to a baseline state as needed.
4. Demonstrations: I and many of my colleagues have used desktop/laptop hosted virtual machines for product or solution demonstrations. I’ve run multi-server virtual environments on a laptop to show off enterprise solutions this way. Many software vendors are even beginning to distribute test and demonstration versions of their latest software products as virtual machines, making this very useful. Microsoft has done this recently with SharePoint 2010, as an example.

Vendor Round-Up

Microsoft – Virtual PC/Server

• Windows offering that will run current version of Windows as guests as well as some others (OS/2, Linux), though they may not be officially supported.

• In most versions of Windows 7, Virtual PC is offered free as XP Mode (with a Windows XP license) for running older Windows software, or as a full Virtual PC solution. This is well suited for running Windows guests.

Oracle/Sun – VirtualBox

• Runs on Mac, Linux, Windows to provide workstation virtualization

• Originally developed by Innotek and bought and distributed by Sun until their acquisition by Oracle, this is a full featured desktop solution that provides good performance and compatibility

Parallels – Desktop

• Although they offer both Mac and PC virtual machine software they are best known for their Mac support, allowing Mac users to run needed/favorite Windows software in their Mac OS sessions.

• Similar to VMWare’s offerings there are trials available but the full versions must be purchased.

VMWare – Workstation

• VMWare offers this full featured virtual PC solution for either Windows or Linux hosts. The Fusion version of their workstation product is available for Macs.

• This solution officially supports over 200 types of guest operating systems including most Windows and many Linux variants. However, beyond a 30 day trial, VMWare charges for the product and is the most expensive of the offerings.

Anyone else have interesting uses for desktop-based virtualization? Any new key vendors I missed off this list?

This post is the second in a series on virtualization: Introduction, Platform (Servers and PCs), Desktop, Application, and Cloud

Of my four rough categories of virtualization, platform or server virtualization is usually what comes to mind first. I use the term platform since this can be done in special situations with PC operating systems, not just server, but I’ll cover those in my next post.

Typically, instead of running a server operating system like Linux or Windows Server on its own hardware, you instead run it inside an already running server. Usually this is done on a special server set up to run many virtual servers on a single box. This can also be done on a PC or laptop, but usually with only one guest operating system running inside the main operating system.

So why would you do this?

1. Consolidation/Cost: Typical IT datacenters have many, many servers but many of those servers don’t work very hard. There’s lots of spare processing cycles to go around. Consolidation of these servers into less physical boxes saves hardware cost, power, and space. In large datacenters this can add up to huge cost savings for a company, if the profile of the servers being consolidated is right.
2. Flexibility/Dynamic Capacity: Sometimes servers don’t need to be around all that often. A company may need to add capacity only occasionally (like during tax season) or may keep special application servers around only for particular projects. Virtual servers   can be moved around much more easily than physical servers and can be stored as images in large data storage. Some companies keep a virtual library of special use server images that can be set up when needed.
3. Development/Testing/Support: Sometimes a PC user may have a need for a special use operating system on their own PC. I’ve done this often for demo purposes, even running a virtual server OS on my laptop at times to show of some scenario or capability. This is also often used to host special development or testing environments. Finally, some critical or interesting pieces of software may not run on your main operating system and so a virtual guest environment may be useful (e.g. Windows on a Mac or Linux on a Windows PC.)

Server Virtualization – Industry Roundup

Here’s a rundown of some of the main players in platform virtualization and a high-level analysis of each:

Citrix – XenServer

• Was focused on the open-source Xen project but now provides Hyper-V management
• Base, relatively full featured version available free as Xen
• Enterprise support and advanced management provided at enterprise cost
• Seen as enterprise class and a viable competitor to VMWare and MS Hyper-V (as well as a MS partner against VMWare) especially at lower price points, but requires Citrix management tools to be used effectively

EMC – VMWare

• Market leader with majority market share and high penetration in large businesses
• Known for unique (for now) advanced enterprise features like memory overcommit
• Free starter-style version available as ESXi
• Seen as the market leader though costs can be high and alternatives may have strengths in specific circumstances

IBM – z/VM

• Traditionally a mainframe based OS virtualization technology

• Based on deep history of OS virtualization development dating back to the 1960s
• Focused on UNIX/Linux OS support

• Seen as a strong UNIX/Linux solution for datacenters already managing large IBM platforms or datacenters outsourced to IBM but not typically considered for new implementations

Microsoft – Hyper-V

• Second place in market share and gaining on VMWare
• Near feature parity with all other vendors, requires MS management tools for full capabilities
• Free console managed version and full version available with Windows Server
• Seen as a strong contender for leadership in virtualization in the future and often wins on price but still lacks some of the enterprise capabilities of competitor offerings

Open Source – Xen

• Capable, open-source virtualization offering
• Feature parity at the hypervisor level with other enterprise offerings
• Lacks management tools and support needed in most enterprise environments
• Seen as a strong hypervisor platform but mostly adopted through enterprise vendors building solutions around it, like Citrix and Oracle

Oracle – VM Server

• Xen based offering targeted at Oracle solutions
• May be a stronger offering in the future with the integration of Sun multi-OS solutions
• Seen as a follower in this space but a viable alternative for heavy Oracle shops

With that roundup I’ll break for now and cover PC level platform virtualization in my next post. Until then let me know if you have any comments or see any gaps. Enjoy!

I’m focused here on the "social" not the network, and the average user. Twitter may very well be the foundation of the real-time web and possibly an enabling component to a future semantic web. However, it has become clear to me that it is not a very good social network.

The realization that this was the case came over time while increasing my use of Twitter, putting messages out there and watching what came back. I noticed that the people responding were not the people I was following. I expect this is counterintuitive for many new users and likely leads to confusion. The people you follow are often not the people who follow you. Your view of Twitter, the people you see, is not where your updates are being directed.

Contrast this to Facebook, where nearly everyone you "follow" also follows you back. The only way for these two groups to not be the same on Facebook (followers vs. friends you follow) is to use the "hide" features of Facebook to completely block the updates of people in your friends list. From my informal survey this week I found that hardly anyone hides friend updates.

If you really look at who you follow and who follows you on both Twitter and Facebook, for most users it looks something like this:

For Facebook, your updates go out to the same people you are getting updates from. They see your updates and you see theirs. Further, given the ability to comment, "interaction" happens. This is the "social" part that Facebook makes work.

For Twitter, your updates go out to a different group than those whom you are watching. There usually is some overlap but that overlap tends to be less than you think and is effectively minimized even further if you are following any number of the popular and prolific Twitter stars. These users or feeds tend to fill your view of Twitter updates but have a very small percentage of users they follow back.

Twitter is like standing in the middle of a crowded party where everyone faces one way. You get to listen to the people in front of you but only talk to the people behind you.

Take this case of some tech blogger early adopters of Twitter. I wrote a tool this week that goes out and looks at their followers and friends and then compares the two lists to find the overlap. They look like this:

Take the case of Robert Scoble, a popular blogger, a very early adopter of Twitter, and a proponent of "following" as he has discussed in the past. Only 43% of Twitter accounts that Robert follows follow him back. Further, his list of followers is nearly 7 times his list of friends. If you follow him, chances are he is not following you back. This is even more extreme in the cases of Tom Merritt, Leo Laporte, and Molly Wood (some of my favorite webcasters/bloggers) who’s lists of followers are 70, 131 and 185 times bigger, respectively, than their friend lists.

A picture of some of the more average users from my friends and followers that I sampled looks like this:

The conclusion is pretty clear, without a lot of work to push those two circles together, Twitter is not much of a social network. Instead, it is a micro feed service which exhibits some of the characteristics of a social network and in special circumstances can be made to act like one. Twitter is more of a one way fan/feed service where only some limited interaction with your fans or people you are a fan of typically happens. Experienced users are able to hammer this model into some semblance of a social experience, but for many the "social" will be elusive. Understanding this will hopefully help users get what the service is and is not, and allow them to use it for what it does well without getting turned off by missed expectations.

Here’s a quick review of business related podcasts that I’ve been listening to recently. Spring road construction has done wonders for my podcast listening time!

Side tip: I now listen to almost all informational podcasts and audio books at 2x speed. I found that you quickly get used to the pace and get through more content. I’ve been doing this for months now and I already wish I had more speed control and could go faster.

Harvard Business Review IdeaCast

http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast

This weekly cast has the feel of a business school lecture series, each featuring a business expert or leader of industry talking on a single topic. The 15 minute length is easily consumed and I always feel like there are at least a couple ideas I can take away from each.

Wall Street Journal Podcasts

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/podcast.html?mod=WSJ_footer

The WSJ has a huge collection of daily and weekly casts. There is plenty of good business content. I’ve been regularly listening to Wall Street Journal on Small Business and will often save up a few of these 5 to 10 minute casts and listen to them all at once.

Business Week Podcasts

http://www.businessweek.com/search/podcasting.htm

Business Week also has a pretty good collection of casts with Behind This Week’s Cover Story being one I check out pretty often. This is a casual 15 minute walkthrough of the weeks cover story. Another highlight from Business Week is The Welch Way, which is series of short discussion on business and management topics from Jack and Suzy Welch.

37signals

http://37signals.com

For something slightly different, 37signals offers a weekly podcast that reviews their unique business perspective as a small, agile, highly successful web software company. They draw on material from their day to day operations best practices as well as information published in their recent book Rework, which I listened to recently from Audible and liked.

Any standouts that I’m missing? Enjoy!

Microsoft provides at least two solution platforms in the cloud that I’ll talk about here to address some recent questions I’ve gotten. The first is Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s premier cloud application platform. The second is Dynamics CRM Online, which I see showing signs of developing into a special case cloud-based business application environment of its own.

First a definition of "cloud" in this context: There are various ways to virtualize platform layers in hosted internet services that can qualify as "cloud." You can virtualize the traditional infrastructure, the server hardware, and provide a virtual server environment hosted in an internet connected datacenter. Beyond that, you can move the level of abstraction up a layer and virtualize the application or solution platform as a service, and build custom solutions on it. While infrastructure virtualization is interesting, the development teams using it still need to configure or build the application platform plumbing. Greater value is provided by offering a cloud solution platform environment, as less plumbing needs to be implemented (even if it still does need to be considered.)

So what does Microsoft offer?

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is a complete set of custom application plumbing available as a cloud service. The core services are a layer above the idea of a virtual server, providing a scalable application platform for developers to build out custom solutions without having to worry (much) about platform configuration and scaling issues. Adjunct services of the platform provide SQL data services in the cloud as well as the ability to extend application integration to on-premise solutions.

While there is a cost to using application services like these, the benefits are often great and come in the form of reduced application plumbing complexity, faster time to market, better application/service scalability, etc.

However, Azure is merely a platform, similar to a .NET application server or a WebSphere server. It is up to application developers to build custom applications from the platform up. It’s on this point that CRMLive has something slightly different to offer.

Dynamics CRM Online and xRM

What Microsoft has provided with Dynamics CRM Online is a hosted version of their CRM solution. What has come along with that is the ability to customize the solution down to its roots, building completely new business applications, if desired, that may have no relation to CRM. Microsoft calls this customization xRM (where the "x" stands for whatever you want it to.)

In CRM Online the level of customization is slightly more constrained that in the on-premise installations of the product, but there are ways around that. Integrating additional application functionality from outside CRM Online (e.g. from a separate could based application service) can round out the customization possibilities. A custom engineering configuration and quoting system I’m working on now uses this approach.

xRM is great for entity relationship based custom business applications. Reporting, workflow, and business user customization are built into the platform. xRM doesn’t makes sense for a wide variety of custom services and solutions (where you would use something like Azure) but for the class of business solutions it does make sense for the benefits are huge. The strong business application framework is a whole additional layer of plumbing that is already done, allowing the architects and developers to focus directly on the business problem.

Microsoft seems to be downplaying the apparent strengths of the xRM solution approach from their initial marketing messages a year or two ago. I’d expect this is in an effort to not confuse their development platform messaging (which I may be doing right now.) However, I think the feasibility of xRM, especially in the cloud, is huge under the right circumstances.

Let me know if anyone needs more details and we can talk further on either of these or any other cloud computing  platforms.

This post is planned to be the start of a series of posts on the various types of virtualization, helping to address some questions I’ve been asked recently on the topic. I’ll start things here with a high level view of virtualization in general and will do a deeper dive into each area in future posts.

At its root, virtualization involves creating a special software environment to run a computing service (a server, desktop, application, etc.) that is a step removed or isolated from its typical target location. In a simple example, instead of spending a bunch of money to buy a new computer to run a new web server you might instead run it in a virtual environment on an existing physical computer.

While some types of virtualization date back to the 1960s, newer types are continuing to be developed and evolved. I view the current state of virtualization as breaking down into four main categories: platform virtualization, desktop virtualization, application virtualization, and cloud computing.

Here’s a quick breakdown on each and what they are typically used for:

Platform Virtualization

Platform or "server virtualization" is taking a computer operating system (like Windows, Linux, etc.) and running it in a software host instead of directly on a physical machine. The virtualization software runs on the physical machine and handles the hardware requests of the "guest" operating system in a way that makes the guest think it is running on a physical box. This can enable an IT department or an individual to do some interesting things like:

1. Run many servers on a single hardware box, better using the computing power, allowing dynamic creation of new servers easily from pre-configured images, and allowing dynamic save or removal servers to conserve resources when needed.
2. Run guest desktop operating systems on running desktop or laptop PC for: special case testing (test or development operating systems), running alternate operating systems (e.g. Windows running in Parallels on a Mac), or running an old operating system to get some old application to run.

Desktop Virtualization

In the case of desktop virtualization you get a special case desktop operating system running elsewhere (typically in a data center) that allows remote access to the desktop environment. This can be used to do things like:

1. Host a personal desktop for a set of users that don’t use a computer that often during the day, and allow them to share physical computers but still have a personalized experience.
2. Allow users to get to a personal workspace from many different locations like from a home PC, a work PC, and/or a public library PC.
3. Allow users to get to their personal desktop from a variety of devices like laptops, thin-client terminals, or something like a terminal app on an iPad.

Application Virtualization

Application virtualization allows users to get to one or more applications that aren’t installed on the main operating system of the computer they are using. Applications can be specially packaged and hosted either locally or remotely and made to appear as if they are just installed and running normally. This allows scenarios like:

1. Rarely used business applications can be hosted in a datacenter and streamed real-time to a user’s computer for use without having to be physically installed.
2. Non-compatible applications can be run in a special "sandbox" and made to appear like they are executing normally. No local installation need to occur, limiting the impact on the local operating system setup or any other locally installed, potentially incompatible, applications.

Cloud Computing

Applications or even server services in the "cloud" are in some ways an extension of virtualization, though this pulls in other types of computing solution domains as well. I now include it in a discussion of virtualization because the types of problems being solved are often similar. The definition of "Cloud Computing" is continuing to evolve but usually means using a set of virtual resources over the Internet as a utility type service. An application might be hosted or servers might be partitioned in a cloud service as if the host environment is an infinite pool of virtual computing resources. This enables scenarios like:

1. Applications, like a web shopping site or a service like twitter, can scale up dynamically as traffic load increases, relying on the virtual infrastructure of the cloud service to provide the needed computing power.
2. Business can set up virtual server services, like file sharing and data storage, in a virtual cloud infrastructure and avoid hardware and platform management costs, instead paying by usage, e.g. amount of data transferred in and out or amount of total data stored in the service.

With that as background, I’ll break for now and leave the deeper dive into each of these four types of virtualization for future posts. I’ll likely be presenting a view of the current state of each of these areas, a look at the key vendors and what they offer, and a little "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of what each means to businesses trying to get benefit from virtualization.

Here are a couple additional resource of interest that will play into this analysis:

Microsoft Virtualization and Cloud – http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization

Citrix Virtualization – http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148

VMWare Virtualization – http://www.vmware.com

Oracle Virtualization – http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/index.htm

IBM Virtualization – http://virtualizationconversation.com

IBM Cloud – http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud

Amazon Cloud – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2

Google Apps – http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

Salesforce.com – http://www.salesforce.com

Enjoy!

My partner David Micksch is going to be co-hosting a webinar on Technoligence’s behalf with SalesFUSION this week. We’ve been working a lot with SalesFUSION lately to add deep marketing capabilities to Microsoft CRM. Click here to get to the registration page for the webinar and check out the invitation specifics below:

Here is the text from the original invitation. Let me know if you have any questions:

Best Practice Webinar for MS Dynamics CRM

Integrating Marketing into your Dynamics CRM

As a Microsoft Dynamics user, you may be considering implementing a marketing solution/add-in product for your CRM deployment. Many companies are beginning to explore an integrated approach for marketing and sales that goes beyond simple email blast integration.

Join SalesFUSION and Technoligence for this valuable online web clinic that will explore the best practices leading companies follow for integrating demand generation, marketing campaign automation and lead management directly into their Microsoft CRM deployment. This session will feature real-world case studies and cover the hottest topics in Marketing for Microsoft CRM.

Session Topics Include

  Email Marketing for CRM – to movement to nurture marketing

  The growing importance of web visitor tracking

  Lead scoring defined and how to implement it without a PhD

  CRM data as a driver for nurture marketing

  Understanding the B2B lead life cycle

  Understanding where….and WHY to integrate marketing/sales data in CRM

About the Speakers

Kevin Miller serves as EVP Marketing & Sales for SalesFUSION and has over 17 years of retail and B2B database marketing experience as well as CRM experience. Kevin is a principle for SalesFUSION, a leading B2B demand generation platform that integrates marketing and sales for Microsoft CRM.

David Micksch is the VP Marketing/Sales at Technoligence, a software solutions company specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. David has extensive experience managing complex B2B sales and currently specializes in working with organizations to improve their implementation of CRM to optimize their sales and marketing processes.