1. Dan and I were talking about how web hosting providers could gain a better understanding of customers, the better to sell them add-on services. He suggested hiring more/better account managers, but I wonder if an Amazon-like approach might be more effective?
VentureBeat says Amazon's auto-recommendation technology is responsible for 35% of its sales. As much as Lou insists that customer want live-human attention, can you imagine how much resources it'd take to build/maintain a people-powered upselling machine that matches Amazon's track record?
2. Ditlev recently migrated 2,500 servers across London with minimal down time. Still, it was an expensive and nerve wrecking experience.
Imagine if his customers had been hosted across a seamless global utility computing fabric on which applications could auto-detect available resources and self-migrate as needed. Ditlev could unplug a server; its contents would shift elsewhere. He'd reconnect the machine; its resources would instantly be claimed.
3. Patrick was reminded of a recent FastCompany article about DayJet as he and I walked past a new retail store in Adams Morgan. Launched by IBM veteran and Citrix co-founder Ed Iacobucci, DayJet's product appears to be its air taxi service, but what sets the company apart is its flight scheduling algorithm, which Iacobucci perfected by simulating "several thousand lifetimes' worth" of operations.
As we watched the shop owner stock his shelves, Patrick said there must be some algorithm that could optimize inventory selection/product display. If such software became prevalent, this man's gut instincts and merchandising experience would no longer mean a thing. This, Patrick proclaimed, might be the last generation of retailers as we know them.
4. I think the era of Internet infrastructure providers as we know them might also be coming to an end. Whereas today's service level agreements (SLAs) promise timely access to support reps and replacement hardware, tomorrow's service level automation (SLAuto)
tools will solve problems on the fly - much like how Amazon's system auto-generates product suggestions. As James Urquhart puts it:
"Picture a world in which every aspect of the infrastructure stack, from application server to operating system to bare metal server to network fabric to shared storage, etc., can be assembled as necessary to meet the service level needs of an application (or even an application function).
Need a J2EE service to run at 4 9's up time? Choose from a smorgasbord of app server vendors running on a selection of Hardware as a Service vendors with access to any number of supporting services from a variety of Software as a Service vendors--or let a service level automation tool (whether an appliance, a software product or a SaaS offering) do it for you. Ideally, let the SLAuto determine the most cost-effective way to deliver your service at the SL's you require."
5. You don't need no SLAuto, you say, because you've got great customer service reps and data center techs? Well... 10 years ago I used to know people who prided themselves on their ability to dish out web space manually. They could charge credit cards and create customer folders faster than anyone else! Then competitors started using auto-provisioning tools and they went out of business. History will repeat itself.
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