Seven Pillars of Wisdom to Enchant Cloud

This March in Bay Area is truly cloudy, full of raining, plus, it kicked off the annual Cloud Connect conference event, to make the cloud enchanting than ever.

I am Cloud evangelist, participated this cloud show four years on the row, this year it's surely reaching the tipping point: about 100 vendors standing on the cloud, and no vacancy to listen to the keynote speech, cloud has been transformed from the buzz word into the essential phenomena, and Cloudification is on the right path leading into the Cloudeconomy.

Unlike the last couple of year’s show, most of players are SAAS model, try to scratch the cloudy skin, this year, cloud become thicker and multi-dimensional, not only you see many IAAS and PAAS players, but also blue elephant players such as IBM and HP, and virtual tiger player like VMware are eager to climb into the cloud.

Cloud becomes the mainstream, besides what we defined cloud as SAAS, IAAS and PAAS, and more specifically, there’re seven pillars of wisdom to enchant the cloud:
1.Security as Cloud Service

2.Data Infrastructure as Cloud Service

3.Storage & Network as Cloud Service

4.Agile Platform as Cloud Service

5.Performance Analytics as Cloud Service

6.Cloud Brokerage as Service

7.Application Software as Service

This year’s theme is hybrid Cloud, most of the vendors would like to define their cloud hybrid. Well, I think the most important thing is not just treat Cloud as the fashion promotion, more essentially, Cloud is becoming the most invisible but powerful framework to deliver the agile enterprise and help us reinvent many legacy industries and organizations.

Cloud as a sustainable innovation, will be embraced by both fresh startup and industry giant, to create the new dynamic solutions from every IT perspective.

Cloud as a disruptive innovation, may get resisted by those conservatives, finally it will help simplify the software licenses hassles, create new business model and deliver the value at real time.

In summary, Cloud will enchant not only the technology, but also the business vision, and nurture the next generation of leadership, it could become one of the enchantments to win back growth from the recession.

Last but not least, there’re two improvements could be made in this phenomenal show:
1)The show has been hosted on 3/8, the international women holiday, however, there’s no female keynote speaker invited to make a splash.

2)Surely more BI Cloud vendors could be invited to the show to make the Cloud more “brainer”.

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Celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day: 7 Essentials to Future of Leadership

It takes a decade to grow a tree, it takes a century to cultivate the talent Chinese Proverb

  Google inspire the “Women on the Bridge” event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on 3/8, and Forbes has published a series of articles to initiate the discussion on reinventing the management, the most encouraging one is: Women: is not about diversity, it’s the future.
http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/03/02/women-its-not-diversity-its-the-future/
And the other insightful one:
http://blogs.forbes.com/jennagoudreau/2011/03/08/on-international-womens-day-good-bad-and-really-bad-news/

What can we learn from the articles, many other resources, and most importantly the historic women movement in the whole century?
1Authentic Leadership
The economic tsunami make s all of us to rethink the root cause of leadership failure. The answer is: we may need more authentic leadership.
What is authentic leadership?
It’s all about 5”I”s: Insight, Initiative, Influence, Impact and Integrity.

Since female only take 2.2% of chief executive position in major US company, the male dominated leadership culture may lack of this 5 in some way.

The other “I” we may ask is “Incentive”: When men reach the power, usually they may gain the world (worldly prosperity); But when female climb the ladder, they make a lot of sacrifice, incentive matters.

Still, leaders from both gender should think BIGGER than themselves.


2.Leading by Influencing
In 20th century, agricultural and even early industrial society, stereotypical command & control supermen leadership make sense; in 21st century, human society has been transformed into internet, social computing era, the authentic leadership will be more focusing on the cultural influencing. : When women are 60% of talent and 90% of customers, they are BIGGER influencers in many perspective.

3.Better Communicator
Social media and enterprise 2.0 technology make the world open battle ground and small global village, women are natural better communicators and evangelist for promoting the collective intelligence and democratic disciplines.

4.Practitioner for Humanity and Humility
Humanity and humility is part of mother nature: it’s the strength with modesty, self-confidence without arrogance.

5.Continue to Make Academic Progress
Great to know in 2010, more women than men in the United States received doctoral degrees, Women have long outnumbered men in earning master’s degrees, especially in education. Women earned nearly six in 10 graduate degrees in 2008-09.

The authentic leadership may also expand into :Intelligence Leadership.

6.Colorful Vision
It may be shallow to “Judge the Book by its Cover”, however, from the cover, we may predict some rhetoric of the book.

Female attire could have all spectrum of color theme, to reflect the beauty of nature; Usually men’s suit are either black or grey; Does that indicate female leadership may have warmer, more natural colorful vision, and sometimes men may have somewhat heavy preference or more “black & White” with gray area mindset?

Though the true visionary leaders are from both genders, it’s about authentication, delegation, global thought leadership and cultural intelligence

7.Social Responsibility
The other article today lists top 100 corporate citizens today: http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/07/best-corporate-citizens-leadership-managing-100.html
Well, I am not sure, how many senior female leaders on board in those companies, definitely via mother nature, female leadership will inspire the new wave of CSR campaign.

Today, the Cloud Connect conference has kicked off, the number of audience and vendors maybe tripled compared to last year’s, more men and women stand on the Cloud now, however, I think the meeting facilitator should at least invite one female cloud leader to make a splash in this holiday.

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