A few weeks ago, a bunch of us at Roundarch went down to Austin Texas for the yearly new media conference, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. Although SXSW started out as purely a music festival to fill in the void in business during the spring break, it is now the highest revenue producing special event for Austin. It’s music festival has over 1,400 performers at over 80 venues over four days. The event now has an interactive conference and film festival all bunched up in the span of a bit over a week.

SXSWi seemed really big this year. It seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year and quickly becoming the “it” event for anyone in new media whether it’s digital marketers, social media folks, tech entrepreneurs, web technologists, bloggers, venture capitalists, publishers, agencies, etc. SXSWi is the one place where one can run into successful tech entrepreneurs and CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, famous authors like Guy Kawasaki and Tim Ferriss, and twitter whales like Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Evan Williams of Twitter. It’s a really great conference for those interested in hearing what the thought leaders of the online interactive industry and the herd are doing. I recall last year I didn’t meet that many people from Chicago but this year it seemed like everywhere I turned I met someone from Chicago. Many of them were SXSW first timers. My overall impression was that companies are starting to have a social media budget and sending these people down here.

Panels at the SXSWi conference typically fall under business, web design and development, nonprofit, or emerging technology. I stuck mostly to the web design and development track. Some of the notable panels I went to include scaling web applications, iPad, designing seductive interactions, and game mechanics. One of the things I really enjoy about SXSW is seeing and learning how others are doing things and their willingness to share.

Two big themes of this conference were mobile and social media. Just the sheer number of people whether they be social media enthusiasts or professionals doing some sort of social media work for companies was astounding. The demographic is definitely skewed towards the people with iPhones and it almost always guaranteed to bring the AT&T network down. Last year AT&T had to have a mobile antenna nearby. Location based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla also made a big splash this year. Last year people were using solely twitter to find out where their friends were at SXSW. This year, one of the most useful tools was the trending feature of Foursquare that showed you which venues had the most checkins.

Some people come down to SXSW as much for the conference as for the parties. Companies ranging from big software corporations like Microsoft as well as startups like Gowalla make an effort to throw big parties in order to please the vocal and active online crowd. On any given night, there’s probably around 3 different parties going on and lines are usually ridiculously long. Personally I’m a bit too old for that and it’s not how I roll. I prefer a more intimate and quite setting so that I can really get to know and connect with the people I hang out with. One evening, a small group of us ended up in a Thai restaurant with one of the Backupify guys (another great midwest startup) Ben Thomas. One another night, a small group of Chicago folks met up with some Youtube engineers to have a great private barbecue. In this type of setting I am able to learn more about what they do, converse and connect. In short SXSW is a great way to develop connections you otherwise wouldn’t make. Your mileage may vary depending on your age and tolerance for alcohol. I personally like going to the sessions. I think the early morning sessions separate the men from the boys and you typically see some hardcore technical ones in the morning.

This year’s keynote with Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter was a bit of a let down. The one big Twitter announcement of the new @platform was covered only very briefly. First of all, the person doing the interviewing is probably a better writer than a speaker and should have probably stuck to his day job. Many people in the audience complained and even Guy Kawasaki made a jab. Personally I think Guy should do all the keynote interviews. He is entertaining and gets right to the point.

The SXSW experience is what you make out of it. You can go to tons of sessions and learn a lot. You can make friends and lifelong connections at various parties. You can spend time with vendors and learn what their product roadmaps are. Five days is definitely on the long side and by the third day, I feel pretty exhausted but I recommend it if you are in the industry.

From March 9-12 I attended the 2010 Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration (PCC) Summit held in Baltimore, MD.  The summit’s keynotes, track sessions, and vendor case studies covered many topics central to Roundarch’s business:  User-experience, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture, Social Computing, Mobile Computing, and Cloud Computing.  Veteran Gartner Analysts such as Ray Valdes and David M. Smith offered a cohesive perspective on portal, content, and collaboration technologies, while dazzling the crowd with Gartner’s trademark techno-market-futurism, replete with Magic Quadrants, Hype Cycles, catchy phrases such as the “Consumerization of IT,” “Monday morning action plans” for anxious CIOs, sharp insights into industry giants such as Google and Apple, and bold predictions of what tomorrow has in store for business and consumers.

Since I work at a company immersed in the stream of ideas explored by Gartner, the dialogue at the PCC Summit did not surprise me significantly.  In fact, in most cases it merely re-affirmed observations of trends I’ve experienced in work with commercial and government clients.  I did not depart Baltimore unaffected by the conversation, however.  One concept Gartner mentioned at the PCC Summit managed to invade my brain like a selfish meme, hatching a few thoughts about the significance of Web 2.0 and how we might experience the internet once “the future is evenly distributed”– to paraphrase sci-fi novelist William Gibson.

Gartner Managing VP, Gene Phifer said repeatedly that “Context-Aware Computing” would be a major research thrust for Gartner in the months ahead.   While the format of the PCC Summit, meant treatment of big themes was constrained by time and PowerPoint, Phifer made it clear that “Context-Aware Computing” involved the following:

-          A richer user experience leveraging information about the end user and new context-sensitive human-computer interfaces to improve the quality of the interaction and overall user engagement

-          Context-enriched services that use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions

-          Deeper collaboration that integrates identity, location, task, and social relationships

-          Building on previous concepts of personalization and advances in established technologies such as RIA, networks, mobile hardware capabilities, social computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA)

-          Mobile devices and the Cloud that provide the ubiquitous sensors and the network that capture and propagate context exploited by computers to proactively react to user’s needs

-          The emergence of new software, infrastructure and architectural approaches that support “Context-Aware Computing: and “Context-Orientation”

At first I didn’t think much of the outline of “Context-Aware Computing.”  It sounded a lot like pervasive computing meets semantic web, meets One-to-One Marketing. Then I started thinking about it in light of another term with which I have a love-hate relationship: Web 2.0.  In that context, the concept helped me to resolve a pestering problem I’ve had with our industry’s lingo.

Most industry insiders – taking their cue from the seminal article “What is Web 2.0?” by Tim O’Reilly  – likely would accept a definition of Web 2.0 that synthesizes rich user interfaces, mashable software services, and the idea that the Web is a Social/Participatory platform.  Yet, bundling these three distinct concepts together and calling them “Web 2.0” always seemed arbitrary to me.  Since reading O’Reilly’s article, I have been looking for a unifying theme that made these ideas hang together cohesively.  Another way to say this is that I have been seeking a singular foundation that explains the key qualitative difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  I believe contemplation of Gartner’s material on Context-Aware Computing has allowed me to rest the distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 on the varying primacy of content and context in the two models of the Web.  I now think that the unspoken concept that glues together rich user interfaces, mashable services, and the social web is the increased importance of context over content.  In Web 1.0, content was king.  In Web 2.0 (and beyond?), CONTEXT is king.  Let me explain by posing and attempting to answer three questions…

What’s behind the explosion in RIAs, mobile applications, and other rich user experiences on the web associated with Web 2.0?

Physical and digital context — I believe it is the realization that existing technologies and approaches can be leveraged to keep the user in the context of what he or she is doing physically or digitally and to enhance the experience by adding the context of related information or alternative representations such as visualizations — all with increasingly natural gestures as input.  We want computers to work in a way that is more consistent with the context of our physical reality and technology is allowing us to close that gap.

What’s behind the excitement about mashups and software services associated with Web 2.0?

Semantic context — I believe it is the realization that technology and evolving approaches for describing our services are enabling every node on the network to create content that can be freed from a contributor’s original intent and used in infinite contexts — as long as we agree on a few core things (i.e. the interface, or service contract).  This leads to efficiencies flowing from re-use (which is just applying a component in a different context), but on a deeper level it creates a fabric for each of us to create meaning out of the digital world with the flexibility we employ in our mental world.  Services and service approaches lay the foundation for enriching semantic context.  This transcends human-authored hyperlinks; as standards and software agents improve, machines will be able to automatically combine information that is increasingly meaningful to humans as well.

What’s behind the buzz surrounding the social applications associated with Web 2.0?

Social context – I believe it is the realization that the Web is the most flexible medium for initiating, facilitating, expanding, and persisting our social interactions that has ever evolved.  Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook capture our species’ most valued form of context: social context.  The content we create, seek, and find is a function of our identity, memberships, and the power of our connections to other members of our species.  Web 1.0 enabled many of us to surf a sea of content and capabilities and then take separate steps to connect and share outside the context of our immediate web experience; content was primary.  Web 2.0 integrates social context seamlessly into the digital experience and allows more of us to participate – multiplying the social value of the web.  This social context will be interwoven to a greater degree in future evolutions of the web.

In my next post I will explore further this concept that “context is king” in Web 2.0.  I will also make some predictions about how Context-Aware Computing will impact the way we design and develop digital experiences at Roundarch.

This was a panel of people from different industries: gaming, print, and publishing and their take on the iPad. Unlike Apple’s existing products iPhone and Macbook, which entered existing markets, the iPad is creating a new market for a device that is neither mobile nor desktop. One speaker defined it as the recliner app or toilet seat app. There are currently 75MM+ iPhone OS (iPhone + iPod touch) devices in the market with a hockey stick growth curve.

The panelists include:

• Bill Jensen @billjensen, director New Media at Village Voice. 14MM pageviews/week across 14 newspaper sites. 90% of business is local advertising with a 70% growth over the past 3 years.
• Shervin Pishevar @shervin, CEO of Social Gaming Network, one of the leading social and mobile gaming companies, and over 11 million installs on the iPhone and tens of millions of users on Facebook.
• Jason Grigsby @grigs, co-founder of CloudFour, a web and mobile development firm.
• Katherine Tasheff @tasheffka from Hyperion Books

Shervin actually got to spend some time with the iPad and he was amazed at how fast he got used to the virtual keyboard. Pundits question whether or not people would get used to typing on the screen, but Shervin said he was able to get to 85 words per min in 10 minutes. He also noted that the chip is fast and that there is a significant performance improvement compared to the current iPhones. This will translate well into the gaming space.

• Of the top grossing apps in the iPhone app store – 76% of them are games
• Estimated to be $30 billion industry by 2013
• iPad preorders – estimated 51,000 in first 2 hours
  90,000 in the first 6 hours
• Estimated to be 20MM iPads in the market by 2013

Katherine noted that ebooks already outnumber games in the Appstore. However since most of the top grossing apps are games, one could hypothesize that the phone form factor is not as conducive to reading and that ebook content in general do not perform as well as games. Essentially books haven’t changed since the 1400s. The industry is very slow to change because their model has worked so well for so long. However book sales have declined 5% over the past year. The ebook represents an opportunity for those who can come up with compelling content and experiences that fit the ebook model.

iPad is a great web browser. It’s got a new super fast Javascript engine. It’s resolution is that of a standard browser. It will support the latest CSS and HTML standards. Basically web apps are going to look great on it. This opens up opportunities for developers to make great iPad apps that bypass the Appstore distribution and let them keep their 30%. Also it will lower the barrier to entry as far as having an app for the iPad. Also iPad makes for a great dashboard appliance for scenarios such as the manufacturing floor.

In summary, the three industries see great opportunity since it’s a new product entering a new market reaching potentially a whole set of new users.

One of the more remarkable talks I attended at SXSWi (pronounced South By South West eye – not es-ex-es-double-you), was a talk by Matthew Smith from Squared Eye, a boutique web development firm.

Here are some takeaways:

• Design around the content. Don’t let your design aesthetics dictate your web design. Content is why the audience is there.
• It is not YOUR site – it is the site owner’s site. Your design must serve the goals of the site owner. As designers we are often emotionally attached to our work and often think of our work as an extension of us.
• Great web design helps content get stuff done (with pleasure).
• Spank that niche. I thought that this was hilarious.
• Knowledge
  • Know the Client
  • Know the Audience
  • Know the Medium
  • Know the Content
• Design Techniques
  • Use size to help design hierarchy visually
  • Establish a visual language (green for action, blue for links, features is 15pt font, etc)
  • Use color to draw people’s eyes
  • Design for pleasure – ex. Gowalla’s custom icons, motion, etc

Here are his slides although they are really best viewed along with the talk.

My second day at Microsoft MIX10 centered on a focus group dealing with building connected applications that span multiple device types and form factors. The ability of MIX10 to bring people together in a room to talk about a particular topic is such a great feature of the conference.

Notable members of the Microsoft planning team, Windows phone team, and Windows SDK team came together to chat about concerns surrounding developing and designing a user experience for multiple devices—desktop, browser, mobile, etc. Great insight was provided as to how Microsoft gathers feedback from its partners.

We had a very interesting discussion about the modality of software where we broke mobile devices down into two modes: an ID to label your identity and a conduit for pushing content and serving as a control point. Keeping these two modes in mind, we spent a lot of time on how user experience is specific to devices, which is generally accepted as a benefit by end users.

Similarly, capturing context dominated a large portion of the conversation.

• Social context- at work or at home and differentiating work time from family time.

• Geographic location –traveling or commuting.

• Surrounding environment –in front of the television, at your desktop or without a mobile devise.

It’s incredible how much depth there is to context and how it informs the user experience.

What an amazing meeting of the most discerning minds in the industry. It was so great to see Microsoft focusing on user experience, technology, and design—which happens to be the core focus of Roundarch. I took away a lot from today’s roundtable, a definite highlight of MIX10.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

This week, I’m in Las Vegas for MIX10, a conference for web designers and developers to mix and mingle ideas about how to create superior user experiences. Now in its fifth year, MIX10 attracts the very best in the industry by exposing conference-goers to new Microsoft technologies and serving as a catalyst for inspiration to create the next generation of rich web applications. Some of the sessions included in the conference this year are: Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient Web Services, Securing Microsoft Silverlight Applications, Building Web Applications with Windows Azure Storage, and Stepping Outside the Browser with Microsoft Silverlight 4.

One of the biggest announcements at MIX10 came today in the form of new details surrounding the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7s). This is Microsoft’s new power play in the world of mobile media. This series is a reset from Windows Mobile 6.5, which left a lot to be desired as a phone operating system. The new mobile platform, however, simplifies development by tying in well to the Microsoft ecosystem. The WP7s also features unified application and game development that creates synergy between products and services from the living room to the desktop to cloud to mobile and beyond. The applications and games are built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend, two free designer and developer tools for phone development.

The WP7s platform possess many features common to most mobile platforms such as: touch gestures, accelerometer awareness support for direction and movement, maps integrated with Bing, push notification. My favorite feature, uniquely supported by WP7s, is try and buy awareness built into the application programming interface. This streamlines the process of converting trial to full versions of applications for developers and end users alike. The software development kit includes Silverlight support for building applications and XNA support for building games.

Another important announcement is the milestone release of Silverlight 4 next month. It will deliver features that combine with Microsoft’s existing tools for designers and developers, Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend, to create a substantial vehicle for application development. The workflow between designers and developers utilizing these two tools is the same across all platforms, a major bonus. The application development story continues to evolve as Silverlight deploys to browsers, desktops, and mobile media.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more from MIX10 …

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Many people are turned off by iPhone app development because they don’t want to learn another platform (Objective-C). In many ways, learning Objective-C is taking a step backwards. Things like memory management and pointers are not something the modern web developer thinks about anymore. Also the idea of having to have different code bases for different mobile environments can be a huge deal breaker for adopting a platform. Nobody wants to create an application and maintain different versions of the app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Not only is it a developer’s nightmare, but the costs can be huge. New development frameworks attempt to solve this problem by abstracting the specific phone platform so that the developer can write in one codebase (usually one that is familiar to the web developer) and deploy to multiple platforms. Here are some of those frameworks:

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. It is free to use and can deploy to iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is another free and open source development tool. You can build cross-platform apps that deploy to desktop, iPhone and Android using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I’ve personally tried Appcelerator and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Monotouch

MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices. This is great for your typical Microsoft shop or enterprise that has a strong .NET skillset. A 1 year corporate license will run you about $1000.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to do cross platform mobile development while leveraging existing web development skills. It represents an exciting time because as traditional web developers we can quickly and easily create mobile applications. Speaking from my own experience over the weekend, my friend and I created an iPhone app in less than 12 hours using Appcelerator Titanium for the Day of Mobile Hackathon, and we went on to win Best iPhone app. Not too shabby for 2 people who didn’t know any Object-C walking in.

Last week I had the chance to give a presentation at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate. I got a chance to listen to Alan Warms, founder of Appolicious, Phil Di Gulio, co-founder of WellcomeMat, Bruce Payne, Director of SEO at Tribune. If I had to sum up the conversation at the conference it would be mobile. With the advent of web enabled location aware phones, mobile applications have the potential to be more relevant to the user’s context than ever before. Almost every speaker talked about or mentioned mobile. The audience was even familiar with apps like Foursquare.

Alan Warms mentioned that on his site Appolicious, a mobile apps directory and review site, there were over a 1000 listings of mobile apps under real estate. Phil talked about his latest project Pegshot which was very exciting. To quote his site:

Pegshot is a photo/video service that enables friends & family to experience what’s happening where you are.

It lets you annotate your life based on location. For example, I can take a video of my lunch and post it to Pegshot. My friends can then see my video, complete with a Google Maps that annotates just where I was having lunch. It’s a service that basically rolls something like Twitter, twitpic, qik and maybe foursquare all in one integrated service.

Another topic that was mentioned by no less than 3 people, including myself was augmented reality. It was a topic that needed no explanation, since most people were familiar with it. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s starting to enter into people’s vernacular and gaining adoption. There are many apps on both the iPhone and Android platform that do AR. Yelp Monocle is a particularly cool one that integrates w/ Yelp reviews. By pointing your iPhone around, the screen will show what you see, overlayed w/ Yelp star ratings of the venues.

Speaking of the audience, even though most people were from the real estate industry, most were also very familiar with social media and services like Twitter. In fact more than half of the audience were on Twitter and a few were live tweeting.

I think the overarching theme that we see happening if we take a step back is that computing will no longer be tied to desk. People are able to access information everywhere now and with more mobile devices equipped with even more sophisticated sensors and technology, mobile computers will be able to serve peoples’ needs better by being aware of the context of the user. Also, people no longer need to interface with machines in the traditional keyboard entry way. New devices like the iPhone and Google Android all support some sort of touch capability. A new class of users are using the internet without ever having to go through a desktop computer.

Taking it a step further, apps like Siri combine context awareness and voice recognition.

In short, the field of mobile is super exciting to be in now. Speaking of mobile, yours truly will be participating in the hackathon at the Day of Mobile Conference in Chicago this weekend.

Bringing Style to Flash Camp Chicago

Just last week I had the distinct honor of speaking at Flash Camp Chicago, the annual conference hosted by the Illinois Technology Association. Adobe Flash Camp events are great because they are a single day where the community brings together denizens of the Adobe world such as James Ward, Jeff Tapper, Kevin Schmidt, Michael Labriola, and fledgling member Ben Schmidtke. The opportunity to network with the top contenders in the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) makes this style of conference one of my absolute favorites.

Flash Camp Chicago served as the maiden voyage for my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I’ll continue to present and refine throughout 2010. I started out the talk by introducing lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continued by exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wrapped up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk was to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

I always enjoy my trips to Chicago and would like to thank Roundarch for sponsoring my talk and the Flash Camp Chicago organizers for inviting me back to speak this year.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Part I:  A Little Background

Saas – Software as a Service
Paas – Platform as a Service
Iaas – Infrastructure as a Service

If you are already familiar with these three acronyms, skip to Part II…

Software as a Service is the most common form of interaction with the cloud.  As previously mentioned, Salesforce.com, a pioneer in this category, has an API that enables you to write programs that extend the features of its service.  In other words, you could write a program that automatically pulls your account leads from Salesforce.com, scans the status of each account and conducts a relevant news search (using other APIs) for idle accounts.  Reports can be generated based on the aggregated data.  The news search service API could be google,  reuters, blogs, rss feeds etc… This type of API-enabled service is widely available across many websites.

Once you have a program that accesses services using an API, then you may have a problem because you want the program to run all of the time.  You can’t run it on your machine, because you don’t want your machine to be running the program all day.  You can’t run it on a web server because it will impact the performance of your website (same with the app server etc…).  You could however write the program and run it in the cloud on a virtualized platform.  This type of the cloud is known as Platform as a Service.  You have essentially chosen a provider that runs the platform you develop on and are comfortable with.  You therefore lease some computing space to execute your program.

Now that you have a report being generated by a program being run in the cloud, what about the distribution of that report?  If you want to make the report available to the very edge of the network across the world as quickly as technically possible, then you could leverage a provider that distributes and caches the report file on servers throughout the world.  This is an example of leveraging Infrastructure as a Service.  Services like Amazon Cloud Front maintain distributed servers for just that purpose.

Part II:  Opportunity

Another way to view the different cloud concepts is to recognize that they are mainly about how systems interact with other systems.  Why is this important to me?

Opportunity

• You should know your options
• Demand for real-time data is growing
• Tech-savvy departments can have more freedom to roam in the cloud, without IT constraints
• Diversification- resell your own data processing services in the cloud.
• Make your services more widely available
• Integration- once an ecosystem of services exists, complete with service adapters between standardized formats, integration efforts can be reduced.

Potential Cost Savings

• Pro-rated licensing charges on a per use basis
• Scale on demand- provision new servers as needed
• Consolidation of resources to manage
• Start-ups may use the cloud to keep costs down and to focus on core competencies, rather than buying equipment upfront
• Larger IT departments with a data center can get more breadth of range using the cloud without hiring a system admin for a new/different platform

Source: Gary Larson’s The Far Side

There are many factors to consider when looking at the cloud.  Greg Shipley, CTO of Neohapsis, a risk management firm, reminds me that choosing a provider is not simple from a risk management perspective. “The potential for cascading failures increases as cloud providers construct technologies and services on top of other cloud providers.”  In other words, if you use a service that culls demographic information for consumers in China, but you don’t realize that the service relies on Facebook APIs, then you could be inconvenienced if China decides to block Facebook.

Not every problem has a solution in the cloud.  Even if there is a viable solution for your business, there may be a fundamental hesitation.  “As the importance of a service to a business grows, there is the perception that the business is at the mercy of their provider”, Griffin Caprio – Founder & President, 1530 Technologies, Inc. What if the service goes down?  Perhaps the provider is sold to another company and the new owner starts increasing your costs.  Maybe your service provider stops supporting the service you are using for lack of customers.  Whatever the situation, you should be prepared.

So how do you avoid these pitfalls?  Planning and asking the right questions.  These are all manageable issues that are can be properly addressed when you consider each step in our Nine Steps to Cloud Nine.

Part III:  Nine Steps to Cloud Nine

The following steps should help you avoid costly mistakes as you inspect opportunities to leverage or build services in the cloud:

1.  Goals defined
2.  Roadmap
3.  IT involvement / governance / SLA
4.  Choose platform/provider

• Security (user admin access, network, storage, encryption)
• Integration (seamlessly integrated to your systems)
• Portability (migrate a virtual instance between private VPN)
• Vendor lock-in / flexibility
• Marketplace longevity/stability

5.  Lightweight prototype of a core feature
6.  Test thoroughly
7.  Measure/extrapolate against goals (Until success – repeat step 4-7)
8.  Architecture defined
9.  Build the application

The next step is the fun part- determining which strategic goals may have a solution in the cloud.  Look for future posts that discuss some example strategies in more detail.