First, let’s start with the bad news: The Nexus One is not coming out for Verizon. 

Now, the good news: The HTC Incredible came out today for Verizon.

The Incredible’s release shakes up the Android market. Since Verizon confirmed the Incredible's release earlier this month, consumers checked the specs and realized it could live up to its name, making the Nexus One obsolete even before it came out.

Monday’s post at Technologizer, “The Verizon Nexus One is Vaporous – and That’s Okay” explains the primary reasons for Google’s golden-boy smartphone flop. Long story short, because of Android’s open development, the platform is evolving so quickly that devices age just as quickly. 

A quick look at the Incredible’s spec sheet shows a few superiorities over the Nexus One: a better processor, internal storage, a better camera and flash, and it’s a little smaller. So the odds are, if you were banking on the Nexus One as your dream phone, you’ll be even happier with the Droid Incredible.

Open development is tough on developers looking to release a cutting-edge product, but it’s great for us consumers. A developer has to fight to be the best among many products, keeping innovation cranking and prices down. In this case, Google’s smartphone operating system cannibalized their once highly anticipated hardware and sets them behind the curve in trying to capitalize on their own product. Perhaps this is a good case study as to why Apple has held a death grip on each of their products (except the ones that fall out of their pocket).

More good news: We just confirmed a demo of the HTC Incredible heading our way. Our friends at Verizon are kind enough to send one to us so we can provide you with first hand reviews, comparing it to other smartphones and how it applies to business. Stay tuned.

Any thoughts on the Nexus One flop? We'd love to hear them below.  Please share.

I’m writing this blog in response to a counter post from David Chernicoff, contributor to ZDNet, in which he disagrees that the adoption of cloud computing will parallel our society’s adoption of electricity.  As Claris Networks’ CEO, I noticed our team’s dialogue with Mr. Chernicoff and felt compelled to respond.

 

In saying that we missed his initial point, I think he missed our point.  Chernicoff’s response:

 

                Like a number of folks that responded to the initial blog, I believe this cloud services vendor missed my point…The question I asked, which is in the context of the blog entry, is how do you use technology to gain a competitive advantage, one of the goals of a good internal IT department, once you no longer have that IT intellectual capital within your company?  Once you’ve moved the need to have those IT people on-staff, those who really understand the way your business can integrate with potential IT advances, how do you effectively leverage those advances to fit your specific business model?

 

By his asking this question, it seems to me that Mr. Chernicoff misunderstands the “competitive advantage” of IT to a business altogether. 

 

With all due respect to Mr. Chernicoff, his reluctance to consider outsourced cloud computing as the small to medium business’s most strategic option is short-sighted in the same way that Clifford Stoll was about the internet.

 

What are the core things that an IT department provides?  Email, security, antivirus software, spam filtering, backups, etc.  Each of these services has become a standard commodity that is part of business IT.  So, the competitive advantage in IT no longer lies in an organization’s ability to provide itself with these services – IT has become a business enabler in exactly the same way that electricity has been for decades.

 

Early in the 20^th century, electricity was managed “strategically” within organizations with high overheads, a dedicated electricity staff, and expensive equipment, because it gave those organizations a competitive advantage through increased productivity.  Once electricity was commoditized, however, it was quickly adopted and provided almost exclusively as a utility.  The emphasis shifted from being able to produce power to electricity being delivered as a necessary part of business operations.  Thus, businesses were then free to focus on their core business instead of worrying about making reliable power. Consider the adoption rate of public utilities below:
 

 

Cloud computing does the same thing.  A large majority of small and medium businesses today under utilize their line of business applications.  They stand to gain increased productivity and profits through repurposing IT resources in this area.

 

In the past, business IT drew value from specialty, dedicated people to maintain a core infrastructure.  This core infrastructure is now being delivered from the cloud, as a service, and is faster, better,  cheaper, elastic and reliable. The IT department of the future will be focused on driving business value and profitability through the applications businesses rely on to get things done.

 

Businesses consistently operating on a fully managed, world-class network with service level agreements, response time and uptime guarantees - all without any dedicated resources - stand to gain a lot more than increased profits: namely a platform to gain competitive advantage.

 

Larry Bodie, CEO

Claris Networks
 

Is there any competitive advantage for business IT in the cloud?  Yes.

 

Recently, David Chernicoff wrote on his ZDNet blog a blog post about whether or not IT management can let go of IT operations.  He asks, “how many [CIOs] are thinking about the effect on their business when taking many traditional IT roles offsite to cloud providers?” and concludes his article by asking:

 

 

 

 

With the growth of data centers and the cloud, the concern of power usage comes into question. Energy consumption becomes a strategic factor in effective hardware utilization, especially in a traditional hosted environment where virtualization is not in place.

Traditional servers are a huge drain on the power grid, and on average operate at 5-10% utilization. They demand the same amount of energy regardless of how much they are used. So the traditional IT environment generally consumes tens of thousands of kilowatt hours, emits several tons of carbon emissions, and wastes a lot of money each year because of high-inefficiency.

As the IT industry is starting become more environmentally savvy, virtualization has become the best option for business hosting solutions. A typical data center runs hundreds of servers at a time, but a virtualized infrastructure hosts hundreds of business on just a few servers. And because virtualized servers run in clusters, when a machine isn’t needed it’s simply turned off.

In short, virtualization is good for the environment, and companies that move to a virtual hosted infrastructure are making serious advances in green business practices. To learn more about virtualization, you should click here for Claris Cares and virtual hosting solutions.

 

Monday and Tuesday were big news days between Baptist Hospital spewing smoke downtown, the horribly tragic shooting at Parkwest Hospital, and the Blount County earthquake early yesterday morning made an eventful day.

If you’re reading this blog, odds are you’re aware of the instant, real-time nature of social media. A look back provides an interesting case study on how these response times stack up. We searched local news media, Google news, and Twitter feeds to find out how quick each one was.

Baptist Hospital Downtown Fire:

Twitter: 1:24pm

News: 3:07pm

 

Parkwest Shooting:

Twitter: 5:29pm

News: 4:43pm.

 

Blount County Earthquake:

Twitter: 5:29am

News: 6:10am

Overall, Twitter was faster at reporting news events than traditional news media. We’d love to hear your thoughts on why the traditional news media was quicker. Why was twitter faster on some things but not on all?

 

And lastly, as we consider Twitter becoming a viable source for breaking news, what demographic uses it primarily for that function? How much of it is still reserved for a more technology-savvy user base?