A Cloud Platform for Data Collaboration?

Hewlett-Packard today announced the availability of a Cloud Computing Platform for the Manufacturing Industry on the back of its product recall partnership with GS1. The product recall approach consists in a cloud based service providing access to product track and trace information across the supply chain and is primarily focused at the FMCG and Retail industry. It allows them to collaborate and exchange data across the ecosystem while not having to invest in a private environment to do so. The real interesting part is that, working with GS1, HP immediately secures a consistent identification of the products, as this is precisely what GS1 stands for. Otherwise one could say this has already been done, but not in the cloud neither with GS1.

The benefit for companies is that the service allows a faster and more effective way to identify the products that have to be recalled, resulting in both a cost and a risk (liability) reduction. The service is available on a subscription basis.

Now, could this be a first example of how companies could collaborate in the future? Rebecca Lawson seems to hint that way. I also found a blog entry on the HP site labeled “A Cloud ecosystem for inter-enterprise visibility” that hint into the same direction. What additional services could be delivered, well Mick Keyes hints at counterfeiting efforts and hazardous materials as other areas.

If I understand correctly and the platform consists in a development and runtime environment that provides data, analytics, management and security services, then I can see many opportunities. In a couple earlier blogs I spoke about the need to exchange structured data across companies. This might be the backbone that would allow us to do just that. Let’s dream for a moment and assume we have available a service allowing us to share information across our supply chain without requiring upfront investments, just “pay-as-you-go”. This would allow us to more easily motivate our partners to participate and experience for themselves the advantages of sharing. It would demonstrate how sharing allows to reduce inventory, to optimize capacities etc.

To date it may just be a dream, but definitely worth monitoring how HP will evolve this platform.

A Vision for an Integrated Collaboration Environment

Developing the global community I talked about in my previous entry, turns out to be a little more challenge than originally expected. This has nothing to do with the community itself, but with how the developers are working together. Indeed, we are developing this with people from different companies, sitting on both sides of the ocean. So, you would think we just need a little collaboration space and everything would be resolved, isn’t it. Well wrong, first the traditional file sharing tools do not allow to share some types of files (eg. java scripts generated by our PowerPoint to Flash conversion tool), do not allow us to make documents publically available (e.g. Google Docs and PDF documents), and I could go on like this.

As the world becomes global, increasingly companies and people need to collaborate virtually. Unfortunately the tool providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are looking myopically in silos, addressing collaboration aspects in isolation. What we really need is for a company to take the problem from a different angle, starting by asking itself what is required to collaborate and then develop the integrated environment to just do that. So, let’s think a minute, what do we need to collaborate?

• Well, first we need to share documents either with a know community, with a larger group who’s names and e-mails we do not all have, or be made publically available. These documents may just be looked at, may be downloaded, may be commented upon (with notes or voice) or may be edited by particular members of the community. Obviously we would want to keep track of any activity around the documents.
• Second, we may have to interact, either asynchronously or synchronously, using text, sound or video, or any combination of those. Interactions may be private (between two people) or with a group. During those interactions, documents may have to be referred to and shared. Data may be made available also.
• Third, we may have to work together at a common task, in that process we may share real-time information, documents, and we may use a common application that can be on one of our systems or in the cloud. Here again this can happen between two people or with a larger group.

A number of supporting functions should be available. These include a group calendar (that links with the calendars of the members to identify availability etc.), action item lists, a parking lot, participant information, version control, etc.

Most of what I describe here is available in one form or another on the internet, but there is  no consistency, no easy way to cobble it all together, and even if we managed, we would spend our life login on to different systems. Why is nobody looking at the collaboration needs of globally dispersed people and addressing their needs, rather than continuously coming up with incompatible tools.

Cloud computing and collaboration

Cloud computing is definitely one of those buzzwords that is currently found all over the Internet and the concept has nearly as many definitions as there are people to write about it.  So at the beginning of this post, let me explain what I understand by the concept. I recognize two different concepts behind the term cloud computing.  First, it consists in a number of IT resources that are made available in near real time over the Internet.  These resources can be compute cycles or storage space or combination of those.  Second, a set of services are made available over the Internet and can be orchestrated together by the user to perform a particular functionality.  Software as a service, often referred to as SAAS, is one instance of such services.  However where things really get interesting, is when services on the Internet can be integrated with proprietary services running within the enterprise IT infrastructure.  The two categories described in my mind represent cloud computing. The first category has appeared  a couple years ago and is being proposed by companies like Amazon and others.  What is really interesting from a collaboration perspective is when we will see the second one appearing.  Today there is not really a valuable collaboration offer.

What I am looking for is an environment that allows companies to quickly create business processes using available services, that low them to do the key collaboration activities they require. These go from planning & forecast collaboration, to inventory collaboration, status information sharing, sales & order planning (S&OP), master data management and the management of orders and invoices. What I envisage may happen is that cloud computing is first used to do things that are not done today. This could be hazardous material reporting, CO2 emission reporting or tracking of counterfeiting. What is important in each of those is for companies to make available proprietary information in return of obtaining a grander picture. However, they would like to keep that proprietary information as much as possible under their own control. Cloud computing and its capability to approach distributed data as if it was an integrated database, is ideal for such type of reporting. But we need standards, and standardized ways to approach the data.

If I am looking at Amazon ACS tools, they are proprietary and incompatible with other environments. As such they do not allow applications to address multiple environments in a seamless and transparent way. It’s what limits the current generation of cloud environments. A lot has still to happen for truly integrated and collaborative environments. But its worth looking at what will be needed as this is the only way we will get people looking at how to address our needs.