ThinkMSP Summit 2014

I accepted an invitation from Mark Potter, the publisher of Canvas magazine, to attend the first instance of a new conference, called ThinkMSP Summit 2014.  Mark is a really exceptional guy who serves with me on the board of the Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation.  I've known him for a few years now, and he always has great ideas.  This conference is definitely one of them.  It was an invitation only, very intimate event. I met a lot of new, interesting people, which for me is a rarity at printing industry related events (other than Dscoop, that is.)  There was a tremendous amount of interaction at the event. It was held at the Marriott Evergreen Conference Resort in Stone Mountain, Ga, which is a very nice property in a beautiful setting.

Gene Farrell
In a talk entitled, "The Art of Business Development", Gene Farrell, GM of Amazon Web Services, talked about all the ups and downs of launching the awesome FreeStyle soda machine at CocaCola, then moving over to launch a major new cloud-based software initiative, called Amazon Workspaces, which went from zero to 5000 customers in 40 days after launch. Even more interesting is that Workspaces is a product delivered with Microsoft Operating Systems running on AWS.

Kmberly Lyles Folkman
“There is a new paradigm shift in education and in business. Visual thinking and learning is at the forefront. It has brand impact for businesses, social and global impact for individuals and consumers. As a digital visual culture, we have to know how to think visually to communicate. We now have to fuse images and text to communicate ideas.” – Kimberley Lyles-Folkman, Ph.D., The Art Institute (Atlanta)

Kimberly's talk, "Visual Thinking and Learning in the 21st Century" was fascinating. But her student Dustin Kemptner, was even more interesting. It is just so thrilling to hear a student talk about graphic design work, and new ideas. He's won a few Addy awards.

Dustin talked about a rebranding experiment he did for a German restaurant in nearby Cumming, Ga. His idea was to make the restaurant an exciting and fun destination, pointing out in a tongue and cheek way that that no one ever says, "Let's go get German", like they do about Italian, or Mexican food, for example.  His campaign would definitely sell this idea.  A new logo, menus, a website and mobile app all tied in the new branding effort. Print and digital media. He also created a "Boot" for beer, which employed temperature sensitive ink on the glass, and as the patron consumed more beer, it revealed new messages egging the drinker on, such as "You're really going to drink the whole thing, aren't you?"  The final message on the boot revealed a QR code that provided a free ride home via Uber.  

Greg Cottichia
Greg is a serial entrepreneur and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School of Business. He spoke about B2B marketing, and how much it has changed in the last couple of years, and used his own experience launching his latest company, Malcovery Security, as the example.

The conventional wisdom about marketing, including or perhaps especially, on the web, has changed. Salespeople knocking on doors and developing the relationships is only a small part of the equation now. Instead, according to the Corporate Executive Board, at the point of the customer's first contact with a vendor today, 57% of the process to arrive at a purchasing decision has already been completed. Customers no longer need a salesperson to enlighten them to their needs.  When they finally contact your company, they expect you to take the order and actually can be very annoyed by old school sales tactics at this point in the cycle. 

So the bottom line point Greg made is, your entire organization is in sales and marketing today.  The business is no longer dependent on one individual any longer.  It is marketing’s task to influence the 57 percent of the sale that occurs before the sales contact.  Then, sales must do their job efficiently and align their efforts (and offers) with that marketing. In Greg's case, he worked with  a technology savvy student, Megan Skiff, to implement a new set of marketing strategies for Malcovery, notably Inbound, that paid off. Malcovery was one of the first customers of her new agency, MixyMarketing.

Improv
To keep things from getting too stuffy and serious, Mark brought in an Atlanta Improv troop to encourage even more interaction, and get people thinking creatively. The session, called "Improvising to Success", conducted by Atlanta's Village Comedy was incredibly fun.  Imagine a roomful of business people pretending to throw medieval axes at one another.

Don't Miss
Mark has written a book that is available now, called Egrets, Hockey Sticks & Roller Skates. I haven't had time to read it yet, but picked up my copy at the event and am looking forward to it.

"Egrets, Hockey Sticks & Roller Skates is a creative example of why stories work.  Mark Potter has shared some of his experiences and a bit of himself to help move a group of people.  We all can benefit from the moral to his stories."

- Daniel Pink, author of "To Sell Is Human"

Following in a traditional started by Jennifer Matt, President of Web-To-Print Experts, Inc., all proceeds from the book go directly to the Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation. Click here for more information on the book, and to obtain a copy.

Seeing the Azure Cloud from the Inside

I had the wonderful opportunity last week to visit one of Microsoft's data centers. Since I am bound by NDA, I won't say where it was, and I won't talk about anything that I can't find discussed in a press release or an article on the web about Microsoft Azure and MSFT's data center footprint.  That still leaves a tremendous amount to talk about, though. And frankly, reading about a place like this is one thing, but actually going and touring it is quite another.  I'll try to give you a feeling for that here.

The company describes the number of global facilities they maintain as "more than 10 and less than 100". You can get a feeling for the global footprint by looking at this Azure Regions site, and also by reading the Azure Wikipedia entry.  Keep in mind that Microsoft hosts over 200 of their own services in their data centers, including Bing, Outlook (formerly Hotmail), the new Office365, Skydrive, Xbox, their robust advertising network, and much more. Matthew Sorvaag's website has some info on where the DCs are, although I think this is a bit out of date.

If you are like one of my many elitist techie Microsoft bashing friends, you'll be sad to know that Apple's iCloud runs on Microsoft Azure, and has since 2011.  Recall that earlier that year, AAPL had a very embarassing outage, and other issues.  Less than a year later, reports from insiders confirmed the service was running at both AMZN and MSFT. Most know that AAPL has their own data centers, too, so what parts of these services are operating on any of these facilities is a bit hard to determine, what with Apple's great penchant for secrecy and the imprudence (and likely contractually limited) of talking about the relationship for either of the Cloud vendors.

Microsoft has produced a terrific video, Windows Azure Data Centers: the 'Long Tour', describing several of their data centers extremely well. The video is a couple of years old, but does justice to the scale and approach. In fact, at least one of the facilities in the video has been substantially upgraded since the video was shot (and the description in the movie is already impressive!)

The Microsoft Quincy, WA DC, is today even bigger than this photo and as described in the movie: it has three big buildings now (new one is in the lower left, where it looks like an open field in this foto. Foto from NYT Kyle Bair/Bair Aerial)

The company is employing state of the art technologies and processes in all areas.  The locations, construction, staffing, networking, server deployment and maintenance, as well as operations are all advanced and world class.  It's worth noting that the DCs described in the video are generation 3 and generation 4.  MSFT now has gen 5 centers, and is looking forward to a day when they occupy generation 6 facilities.  If you aren't familiar with all the lingo around data centers, don't confuse these generations with data center "tiers", which generally describe "redundancy".

• Tier 1 = Non-redundant capacity components (single uplink and servers).
• Tier 2 = Tier 1 + Redundant capacity components.
• Tier 3 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Dual-powered equipments and multiple uplinks.
• Tier 4 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 + all components are fully fault-tolerant including uplinks, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, servers etc. Everything is dual-powered.

These MSFT facilities are all N+2, or in other words: whatever components in place are deemed to be mission critical, there are 2 backups in place.

Generation 4 in full operation now

ITPACs, which are being deployed in the newer MSFT data centers are purpose built, modular containers that resemble shipping containers, they are are power efficient and operationally better. Watch this great ITPAC video, which describes how they efficiently combine compute, power, cooling, and networking in self-contained modules. From an environmental perspective, the ITPACs are a great innovation. On cold days, a portion of the hot exhaust air from the servers is redirected internally through a mixing unit on top of the ITPAC where it mixes and warms the air to a temperature suitable for the servers.  I saw units with HP or Dell equipment installed, as well as storage and networking.  

One interesting statistic to note is that the many tens of thousands of servers in the facility together lose about 300 hard drives a week. In fact, this is one of the very limited number of tasks the operations personnel at the facility do-- replace hard drives.  There are several amazing magical elements to this:  first, no customer or service is impacted by the hard drive failures. Second, the techs perform the drive replacements without any knowledge of what data is stored on the servers. Finally, the hard drives are erased, and then crushed into teeny tiny little pieces.

Everyone who is anyone in the Internet has used F5 boxes at one point or another. These boxes are highly regarded. And those of you who know this, also know these devices are very expensive. I was only in one hall in this facility, and, along with many, many other of the usual suspects in Internetworking gear, I saw tens of millions of dollars in F5 gear ALONE.  Pretty impressive.

Another example is the number of generators in place at this facility, just astonishing.  I got to step inside one of the generator housings, and they aren't the cute little CATs shown in the movie above... instead they are monstrous 20 cylinder engines painted gray with fuel feed pipes as big as wide as a manhole cover.  While inside, I was praying to God that the generator didn't start because it would have been very, very scary and loud.

I was also in an electrical room with a similarly scary amount of electricity being fed through it.  This room was one of 6... remember that the facility is "larger than 10 football fields" in size. Let's face, when you've seen row after row of the same server and storage boxes, it sort of becomes mind numbing. So when you go visit the power distribution, it's a little exciting.  For example, the circuit breakers in the Siemens distribution equipment have their own cranes on the top of the rack, because they are so heavy, it takes more than one very strong person to pick them up.

Crazy giant Siemens Circuit Breaker that comes with its own little crane.

One debate I've had with many colleagues in both IT and in Printing over the years regards whether it is prudent to operate your own data center, or to outsource.  Cloud aside, when you visit a facility like this, you understand that an operation like this, with billions of dollars of investment, and run like a top secret military facility, you realize this is something that most companies cannot do.

When you then add in the economics of the Cloud, assuming you can determine that it makes sense for your business, it is hard not to come to the stark realization that you are getting capabilities that truly will provide an enormous competitive advantage for your company. There are numerous choices, and they need to be examined very thoroughly but it is pretty clear that these services are game changers. We must embrace them for as much of our IT infrastructure as we possibly can.

The Era of the Hard Drive in the Sky has Begun!

Yesterday, Google announced Google Drive, a cloud storage system that is among the most anticipated features of any software system, ever. Industry analysts, pundits and gadflies have been predicting the eventuality of this capability for years. In it's initial launch incarnation, Google drive is simple to install and easy to use, and as far as I'm concerned, totally lives up to the expectations built-up around it! Out of the gate, anyone who signs up gets 5GB of online storage for free. Upgrade to 20gb, 100gb or even a terabyte for very affordable incremental fees. It makes storing files to the cloud and syncing them among multiple devices seamless (PCs, Macintosh and Android Smartphones today, Apple iOS and other OS/devices later). Google Drive acts just like another drive on Windows or the Mac. You can copy or move files to it, and even create new files and folders in it. I installed it on my Macintosh first, and when I logged in, I just saw all my Google Docs files in a native OS window on my MacBook Air. It could not have been simpler.

The timing of the Google announcement may have been planned to steal the thunder of a Microsoft announcement only two days earlier-- of a similar solution, the new version of SkyDrive, which gives MSFT a competitive offering in the cloud storage arena. Notable in the announcement are new storage applications, new support for devices running Mac OS X Lion and iOS, as well as support for Windows phones. SkyDrive automatically synchronizes the devices to which it is connected. Files and folders are organized in SkyDrive in the same manner to which we've all become accustomed on our local devices.

While Google and Microsoft are well-known as rivals to one another, they are both equally wary of startups who might come along and eat their lunch. In this case, those companies are Dropbox and to a lesser extent Box (formerly box.net). Dropbox was founded in 2007, and has a good head start on both of the (in the case of MSFT relatively) new competitors. Dropbox has more than 25 million people using the service, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as well as with mobile apps on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Drew Houston, Dropbox's Co-Founder and CEO, upon hearing the announcement of Google Drive, tweeted, "In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine." I'm not sure if this response is hubris or real fear. Prior to the announcement, Dropbox's private company valuation was speculated to be about $4 Billion. It remains to be seen if it can maintain that sky high valuation in light of the fact that two of the biggest tech companies in the world just came out with respective "features" that come close to duplicating Dropbox's entire business. That is sort of the key: for MSFT and Google, this is a feature among many thousands of other features, not the whole company or even the most important part. On the flip side, though, Dropbox has been expecting this kind of competition for a long, long time. Now its here and it is formidable. For example, Google Drive's pricing is roughly 1/4 of Dropbox's pricing today. That could dramatically change the game, in terms of acquisition of customers for Google, and loss of revenue for Dropbox. Furthermore, the integration between Google Drive and Google Apps, though a bit minimalistic today, is already very useful for companies like my own who have been using Google Apps almost exclusively for the last couple of years.

For consumers of this technology, it's going to be exciting to watch this competition between industry giants. In addition to simple storage and backup in the cloud, these services offer great collaboration and sharing possibilities-- both intracompany and between companies. It's hard to believe that in this day and age high-tech companies would still be using technologies like FTP to share files, but they are. Replacing such primitive services with these new technologies is good for everyone-- the creator, the user, the printer, the IT guys, everyone. With the large files we consume daily in the graphic arts industry, these services offer a really affordable and easy to use alternative to old fashioned, error-prone methods that our customers don't want to understand and shouldn't have to!

Breakthrough Open Source JDF Toolkit

Recently, On Point On Demand, a small company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, did something none of the larger industry vendors have yet done. They took source code from currently relevant commercial software, and made it available as Open Source.

The company has several popular commercial products and is led by Tom Cabanski, who was previously a partner in the well regarded and pioneering JDF automation firm Objective Advantage. The products make for logical partnerships with Web2Print vendors whose print service provider (PSP) customers require back-end automation for an increased volume of work coming in from the web.

Commercial products available from the company include On Point Connect Shipping, which automates shipping via UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, company truck and local courier, is integrated with WebToPrint solutions from Aleyant Pressero, PageDNA, Printable nee PTI, and PagePath solutions; as well as On Point Symbio, which is a POD production automation system for commercial printers that automates many of the steps in the prepress, production, finishing and shipping process for POD jobs.

On August 5, 2011, Onpoint On Demand announced that it released its Fluent JDF for .NET toolkit as open source, "making it quick and easy for PSPs and ISVs to create valid JDF for client applications."

According to the company's press release, Fluent JDF is an "expert in-a-box, providing all the rules, syntax, packaging and structure to make JDF creation and delivery very easy for software engineers."

"We've released Fluent JDF under a commercial-friendly, open source license to make it easy for our customers and partners to create JDF client applications", stated Tom Cabanski, VP of Technology. "This is another way Onpoint On Demand is helping the industry take advantage of the power of JDF to build fully integrated supply chains that enhance productivity and profitability."

Fluent JDF is delivered as a .NET Library and is available for download at Microsoft's online open source repository CodePlex. There is some very "getting started" documentation, with good suggestions for new developers, and there is a discussion group (albeit, with not much activity since at this writing Fluent JDF has not been available very long.)

This announcement didn't get a lot of press coverage, most likely because many industry journalists don't understand what it is! Alas, in addition to this particular software being targeted at techies exclusively, this lack of real understanding has been JDF's problem in the PSP community for a long time now. Early on, it could be said that JDF wasn't actually useful; those days are long past (i.e., like 8 years ago at this point) -- JDF is SUPREMELY useful today. But it is hard to implement and still has a lack of understanding among printers as to the benefits and how to deploy (this, despite much work done on education by the CIP4 Organization.)

It's very much worth noting that a lot of the work and code samples that are available (such as JDF examples CIP4's own toolkit) are not coded for the .NET framework and since MSFT is the dominant player in the desktop and networks of most printing companies, this in itself creates a barrier to use.

Bottom line, this is a breakthrough development by little On Point On Demand. We haven't used the Fluent JDF software at Mimeo, but we are becoming a major JDF developer across our platform, and we are a .NET shop. A couple of our engineers took a quick look at Fluent JDF recently and told me that it looks like it could be very valuable. Stay tuned for future updates on this important development!

While we're on the subject of JDF, I should mention that Mimeo is hosting the Printing Industries of America's Automated Solutions Network meeting at our facility in Memphis, TN, next January. We're also in the process of arranging a tour of the amazing FedEX Memphis global hub for the same event.

From the Printing Industries - "The Automation Solutions Network has established itself as the premiere event to exchange ideas and solutions for JDF workflows. The Automation Solutions Network focuses on the development and practical implementation of JDF-enabled systems and cross-vendor implementations. The group welcomes a wide range of users of JDF-enabled systems as well as the suppliers of those systems. The steering committee of the Automation Solutions Network is made up entirely of printers who have either implemented systems or are in the process of doing so."

Silverlight and Printing

Microsoft had an amazing opportunity for Silverlight to provide the most robust printing support of any RIA platform, based on XAML and XPS technologies. Unfortunately there isn’t even a native ability to robustly support local printing in Silverlight 2. They will probably address these issues eventually (and maybe sooner rather than later, but apparently not in Silverlight 3.)

To print from Silverlight to a local printer, you basically have to control HTML/CSS in browser and print via browser to local printer (good enough output, some challenges to implement.) Jonas Follesoe has provided great detail regarding Silverlight printing, here on his blog: jonas.follesoe.no

Our interest here is Printing to the Cloud (i.e., to an Internet-based print service provider like our company Mimeo.com), more than printing to a local printer-- although you have to start somewhere, and the desktop is a good place to begin! Since Silverlight basically uses XAML as its imaging model and XPS is a subset of XAML it would seem to make sense that one could create methods for converting Silverlight content to XPS, then send this data to the Cloud for processing and/or printing. XPS is not (yet) universally accepted, but then again neither is Silverlight. That said, it is just as feasible to generate PDF from Silverlight as it is from Flex.