Maarten Ectors

The Linux Foundation shared the below infographics recently. Click on it and you get the associated report. The short message is, if you are an expert in Linux you are in high demand because companies don’t find enough experts due to the Cloud and Big Data boom.

This article from Maarten Ectors examines new innovative ways in which providers can go about monetizing telecom services.

There are more phones sold than PCs. In the near future there will be many, many, many more phones sold than PCs. Also most of these phones will be smartphones. Tablets are also going to surpass PC sales in the coming years. In the face of this mobile revolution how can the telecom industry generate new revenues?

Mobile PaaS is the cloud computing platform that allows companies to mobilize everything easily. Mobilize their sales, their internal operations, their partner networking and their whole IT strategy. Today, most managers are traveling extensively, and working from home is becoming more popular. Being on holidays no longer means not thinking about work at all.

Google App Marketplace was the first marketplace for SaaS. However there has lately been an explosion of SaaS social niche marketplaces. Unfortunately most of them are eCommerce sites that support subscriptions and resell Microsoft 365, some cloud backup and 3 to 5 things more.

For years operators have paid billions for spectrum. Millions of man-years have been spent on building standards like GSM, GPRS, CDMA, 3G, LTE, etc. Can disruptive innovation kill this in a few years? Yes, it can. The FCC is finding out that large parts of the USA are still not covered by mobile broadband. After years of lobbying by groups like the New American Foundation, the FCC has finally decided to start with White Spaces.

Telecom operators pay millions in software licenses each year. By doing so they are sustaining an industry of “feature loading”. "Feature loading" refers to complex software solutions that in order to win RFPs add more and more features. Most telecom operators are using RFPs to compare different software solutions. Whoever has more features for the lowest price wins the deal. The end result is that telecom software is unnecessary complex and expensive. Software providers do not want to respond with “not compliant” and prefer to add some extra feature even if the one who wrote the RFP will never ever use them.

Juju is a second-generation solution that promises to deploy, integrate and scale instantly on all major public and private cloud.

Enterprises no longer have a lack of data. Data can be obtained from everywhere. The hard part is to convert data into valuable information that can trigger positive actions. The problem is that you need currently four experts to get this process up and running.

When the first television shows were made they used one camera to record a theatre play. It was only after some time that the real potential of the television became clear. Cloud Computing without multo-tenant solutions is like a race car without an engine. Making one solution that fits many and installing it once and managing it in one place is the real game changer.

If you are a VC and you are unclear where to invest, then this post might be of interest to you. Some Disruptive Technologies and ideas that start-ups might be working on or for which you might want to assemble a team.

LTE roll-outs are taking place in America and Europe. Over-the-top players are likely to start offering large-scale and free HD mobile VoIP over the next 6-18 months. Steeply declining ARPU will be the result. The telecom industry needs new revenue: telecom revenue 2.0. How can they do it?

If you compare owning your own data center to owning a car, then hosting is like renting and the Cloud is a taxi. If you have a lot of hardware and software that has been written off or highly utilized in your existing data center then moving your solutions to the Cloud might well increase your monthly bill.

Everybody is hearing Cloud Computing on the television now. Operators will store your contacts in the Cloud. Hosting companies will host your website in the Cloud. Others will store your photos in the Cloud. However, how do you make money with the Cloud?

AWS is used by more and more enterprises today but Amazon should work on several awkward “features” that make daily usage by enterprises difficult.

The idea of Lean Canvas is to put what would go into the executive summary of a business case on one page and to forget about writing the rest of the business case. The justification is that writing a business case takes two to three months and CxOs normally only read the executive summary. So instead of spending 2 to 3 months, you spend hours or days and get it in front of customers to get feedback.

If you just invested a lot of money in a Big Data solution from any of the traditional BI vendors (Teradata, IBM, Oracle, SAS, EMC, HP, etc.) then you are likely to see a sub-optimal ROI in 2013.

Innovation is a high-risk activity. You invest in something with the only certainty that you know (some of) your costs and none of your future revenues. Traditional wisdom tells managers to focus on a business case.