The Changing Ad Tech Landscape

Last year saw significant increase in the dollars spent on digital  versus traditional media advertising and this has prompted marketers to spend more money online. 2014 has also been an exciting year for mobile advertising as more and more agencies are trying to create a niche for themselves through evolving standards, benchmarks, and best practices. And, as the line between mobile and the desktop continues to blur, we will  likely see more dollars being spent in the mobile ad space as mobile  content continues to be consumed in an app-centric environment.

Customer Content Consumption Continues to Evolve

As a result of this shift from classic to online media, the role of the consumer has changed from that of a a spectator to active participant putting customers in control. To add complexity,  customers are shifting between devices to experience the best digital experience available. Thus, programmatic buying is the new norm as it delivers messages to end users with relevant impressions one-at-a-time thereby providing the desired brand experience. However, advertisers need far more insights on how ad tech companies go about spending the ad money and delivering value, even as concerns are raised on how digital data is being used to target customers.

Convergence will define success for ad campaigns

In a nutshell, the online ad spend will only continue to increase, but as competition grows, ad agencies and advertisers will put greater emphasis on hyper-segmentation to micro-target the right audience. In this scenario,  the key to successful campigns will be linked to content personalization. To achieve this,  digital channels, technology, and the growing amount of data needs to convulge to provide insights to better target ads. Hence, the goal for all agencies is to use technology and industry knowledge to identify the right data to provide the ideal ROI for advertisers.

Thus, the fact to be remembered is that data is not an end in itself  but a channel  to push the right message using the right media channel at the right time to ensure successful campaigns. The major challenge in this regard,  is for traditional media companies to be prepared to adapt to the changing ways in which data is being consumed by end users. Not many media companies are ready for this change though they have sufficient inventory value. What is needed is for these organizations to add value to the inventory rather than depend on the site master-head data to generate ad revenue. At the same time, for organizations ready for the change, their legacy infrastructure might become an obstacle.

To summarize,  in the complex world of  ad technology,  more clarity is evolving as time goes by. and as the world changes to a new order for accessing content anywhere, anytime, and on any device, the need now is for an always-on marketing strategy rather than those defined by start and end dates. To ensure success in this new order, advertisers need to have the right mix of channels, technology, and data to ensure a far greater success from ad money spend.

What Apple has already Achieved and What Microsoft and Google are Trying!!!

Over the last five years or so, a lot has happened in the IT industry that has disrupted the very way we use hardware and software, and to an extent it has given us alternate ways to consume information. Every year, analyst firms and IT service providers look for technologies or trends that will drive the next wave of change (or disruption). This year too, things are no different–with some overlapping trends in the numerous predictions and insights that are coming our way.

Overall, two areas stand out in having a profound impact on the way technology will be strategized and applied to consumers and the enterprise. First comes Mobility, and then comes the Disruptive Cloud. The interesting point to note is that, both these forces are mutually reinforcing the other as they evolve. All the leading IT solution and service providers today, have increased their focus on the mobility segment– which includes the mobile, notebook and everything in between. The Cloud, on the other hand, has enabled the realization of the unthinkable–to enable processing of data on devices, no matter what operating system or hardware it is running on. So anybody would agree with me when I say that the Cloud now controls the digital lives of people and extends anywhere from computing to communicating.

If the recent product and service launches are to be analyzed, the signals are clear that the primary goal of IT solution providers is to create a powerful ecosystem from both the developer and consumer perspectives. The release of the windows 8 is a perfect example in this regard,  as it is in line with the strategy being adopted by the big players in the IT domain. In a nutshell, Windows 8 is the older version in a new bottle with some features taken to the visual back-end and up come those Apps! Apps that have evolved with new usability features and behavior. Though they require a multichannel integration and interaction, the end product is so advanced that the experience can be customized to where a person is located and what they are doing. This is the same strategy being followed by Google, though not in very obvious terms, with Apps being designed for mobile and bigger devices. However, even though both the strategies might be the same in a way, the business sense is entirely different. Both Microsoft and Google are at the two ends of the OS dominance. One rules the desktop space while the other is at the mobile and both want more. For Microsoft it is about leveraging their desktop OS superiority to the not so successful mobile space while for Google there seems to be a simpler challenge – develop more for mobile and then leverage the same for larger devices. But hey, why are we not taking Apple into consideration here? Because, looks like they ‘bit the fruit’ first and did not feel anything! This strategy worked out perfectly for Apple with their scalable OS that works great on all devices. Though mobile and cloud came later, they were ready to embrace the change and leverage it to their strengths, even though they metaphorically, ‘arrived late to the party’! If you watched the WWDC2013 keynote, all this would make perfect sense as Apple lays out the plan for the next 10 years.

The fight on the other hand for Microsoft and Google is not about reaching first or about dominance but it is about who reaches the other end first. And what will help them achieve this – mobility and cloud.

Either way, ‘biting the fruit like Apple’ second causes lesser pain, doesn’t it?

PwC’s 2013 Global Entertainment and Media Outlook

Some Major Insights:

>      E&M businesses will increasingly engage with a new and more diverse global customer base, with different needs and expectations.

>      Vast consumption choices is creating confusion in the minds of the consumer and this extends to the legitimacy of the content they access.

>      As media consumption fragments across devices, consumers increasingly want personalised experiences.

>      Advertising spending is continuing to migrate to new digital platforms globally digital media will account for 37% of advertising revenues by 2017, up from 26% in 2012.

>      Rising expectation of ubiquitous access to premium and library content drives companies to focus on licensing and/or acquiring content.

Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers Press Release, 2013

 

Second-screen to Define Social TV Consumers Behavior

According to Gartner, Second-screen devices combined with customized content, interactive apps and loyalty programs will fuel the behavior of social TV consumers over the next 24 months.

Gartner believes that social TV activities can enhance the value of the TV experience for consumers and offer opportunities to add new users, drive engagement and open up new advertising opportunities through existing social networks. Connected TVs will give access to a much wider range of content via the Internet, offering the possibility of worldwide video sharing, which will also extend the social TV experience beyond local friends and into a truly global arena. In this case it will be the addition of a second screen that will drive the social experience.

Source: Gartner Press Release, 2013

EA Going Zynga Way

EA and Zynga that recently wrapped up the legal trouble between them but it is ironic that EA is taking cues from Zynga.

EA was mad about Zynga was copying The Sims for its Facebook game The Ville, but apparently it found something admirable, perhaps even respectable, about Zynga’s business practices because now it’s duplicating its moves.

Instead of charging a flat fee for the game, EA has decided to make some its games “freemium game”. Best example is  Real Racing 3 where EA decided to make it a freemium game. Players can only do so much before their cars crap out on them, needing regular maintenance and repairs. People then have to pay for these improvements. Of course paying for them is only the first step. They also have to wait for the repairs. It’s like someone’s playing a Zynga game. Pay up and you can go about your way. If you don’t, then I hope you have some other apps to kill time while you wait for your virtual car’s oil change. It’s a hallmark of social network gaming, a feature employed often in Zynga’s FarmVille and YoVille.

This strategy is in line with EA’s Chief Financial Officer’s view that micro transactions will be incorporated into all future games. Analysts believe that EA is going the Zynga way and it is a wrong turn to take. Zynga rode the micro transaction and social highway, but people got wise with shares plummeting. Hope EA does not go the same way!!!

Source: “EA games taking cues from Zynga”, Technology Tell, 2013

Digital Media Predictions for 2013

Major predictions in the Digital Media space in 2013:

• Companies will try and maximize their online advertising revenue
• More newspaper chains shuts down, Online video kills TV
• “Branded content” will help create content that delights both marketers and readers alike
• Moving digital contents across subscribers will remain a problem
• More acceptance of HTML5-based “web apps”
• Tough times ahead of New York Times Co. with declining ad revenue
• Ad money spend moves from TV to online media.

What your take on the below predictions. Comment your views below.

Source: “What we’ll see in 2013 in digital media”, GigaOm, 2012.

 

How Cloud Computing is Changing Disaster Recovery

This post is an excellent article written by  Mike Klein, President & COO, Online Tech on titled “Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing”.

There are a lot of benefits with cloud computing – cost-effective resource use, rapid provisioning, scalability and elasticity. One of the most significant advantages to cloud computing is how it changes disaster recovery, making it more cost-effective and lowering the bar for enterprises to deploy comprehensive DR plans for their entire IT infrastructure. Cloud Computing delivers faster recovery times and multi-site availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional disaster recovery.

What Changes in the Cloud?

Cloud computing, based on virtualization, takes a very different approach to disaster recovery. With virtualization, the entire server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data is encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This entire virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and spun up on a virtual host in a matter of minutes.

Since the virtual server is hardware independent, the operating system, applications, patches and data can be safely and accurately transferred from one data center to a second data center without the burden of reloading each component of the server.   This can dramatically reduce recovery times compared to conventional (non-virtualized) disaster recovery approaches where servers need to be loaded with the OS and application software and patched to the last configuration used in production before the data can be restored.

The cloud shifts the disaster recovery tradeoff curve to the left, as shown below.  With cloud computing (as represented by the red arrow), disaster recovery becomes much more cost-effective with significantly faster recovery times.

Cloud Computing and Disaster Recovery

When introduced with the cost-effectiveness of online backup between data centers, tape backup no longer makes sense in the cloud. The cost-effectiveness and recovery speed of online, offsite backup makes it difficult to justify tape backup.

The cloud makes cold site disaster recovery antiquated. With cloud computing, warm site disaster recovery becomes a very cost-effective option where backups of critical servers can be spun up in minutes on a shared or private cloud host platform.

With SAN-to-SAN replication between sites, hot site DR with very short recovery times also becomes a much more attractive, cost-effective option. This is a capability that was rarely delivered with conventional DR systems due to the cost and testing challenges. One of the most exciting capabilities of disaster recovery in the cloud is the ability to deliver multi-site availability.  SAN replication not only provides rapid failover to the disaster recovery site, but also the capability to return to the production site when the DR test or disaster event is over.

One of the added benefits of disaster recovery with cloud computing is the ability to finely tune the costs and performance for the DR platform. Applications and servers that are deemed less critical in a disaster can be tuned down with less resources, while assuring that the most critical applications get  the resources they need to keep the business running through the disaster.

Critical Path in Disaster Recovery – Networking

With the sea change in IT disaster recovery delivered by cloud computing, network replication becomes the critical path. With fast server recovery at an offsite data center, the critical path for a disaster recovery operation is replicating the production network at the DR site including IP address mapping, firewall rules & VLAN configuration.

Smart data center operators are providing full disaster recovery services that not only replicate the servers between data centers, but also replicate the entire network configuration in a way that recovers the network as quickly as the backed up cloud servers.

More on DR in the Cloud

I predict we’re going to hear much more about the changes in DR strategies with the cloud over the next year as more and more enterprises revisit their DR plan in light of the advantages of cloud hosting.

Source: http://resource.onlinetech.com/disaster-recovery-in-cloud-computing/

Cloud computing visionary John McCarthy dies at 84

Not many would be knowing John McCarthy, but he is one guy who came close to proposing something close to the cloud computing model. McCarthy has been credited with many innovations in the field of technology and more importantly as the inventor of the LISP language. Also, credited to his achievement is the contributions he made towards artificial intelligence and even credited with coining the term.

McCarthy was the first person to propose the idea that computing can be delivered as a utility. Even though there has been much debate about the actual evolution of the idea about utility computing with Douglas Parkhill coming up with the theme in his book “The Challenge of the Computer Utility” in 1966.

With cloud computing now gaining high momentum across organizations, the contributions that John McCarthy has given to the computing world is worth of high praise and admiration.

Cloud Computing Standards – Evolving

Cloud Computing is at a relatively early stage of development and the lack of standardization is a major barrier for its increased adoptions. Some of the organizations who have undertaken the effort to standardize cloud computing are listed below:

1. The Green Grid – The Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems. Its aim is to create standards for more efficient use of resources.

2. Cloud Security Alliance – Is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

3. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Standards Association – Is a leading consensus building organization that nurtures, develops and advances global technologies. This year, the organization launched an initiative to develop cloud computing standards. More information can be obtained from this link.

4. Distributed Management Task Force – Is an industry groups whose mission is to enable more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. They have created a Cloud Management Working Group to develop a set of standards to improve cloud management interoperability between service providers and their consumers and developers.

5. National Institute of Standards and Technology – Is a non-regulatory federal agency whose mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology. NIST has started a program to develop a set of cloud computing standards, with the first results being already published – NIST Cloud Computing Program.

 

GoDaddy Enters Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

The Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the delivery of IT and computer architecture over the Internet. The service involves the application of remote computers (operating systems, databases, middleware, and applications) and storage solutions to aid cloud applications. Cloud IaaS is the capability provided to the consumer to IT and computer architecture over the Internet. The end consumers are able to access these resources through the internet and use the infrastructure resources to meet organizational infrastructural requirements. The entire deployment and maintenance of the IT resources are done by the cloud IaaS vendors. At the same time the end-users through the vendor specific control panel can manage the resources by monitoring as well as scaling the resources as and when the requirements arises. Also, the increased adoption of hybrid cloud model by organizations is accelerating the Cloud IaaS market.

There are many vendors in the Cloud IaaS market, with the biggest player in the market being Amazon. The market has recently seen the entry of a new player – GoDaddy.com. This company has been known for its Domain Registration, Web Hosting and awesome Super Bowl ads. The company is expected to release its cloud computing capabilities to take Amazon and Rackspace head-on.

GoDaddy’s Cloud Service –

The Cloud IaaS offering of GoDaddy is on the lines of Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering for Data Center-On-Demand. This is good news for many end users looking to leverage their data center capabilities. The offering of GoDaddy will focus mainly to deliver large IT infrastructure resources so that organizations can utilize the resources to establish organizational IT infrastructure. The infrastructure resources will be deployed and managed by the GoDaddy while the end-users have the liberty to use the service on a pay-per-use model. Also adding to the service portfolio will be its services for load balancing, multiple networks and template creation for its cloud environments.

Also of now the Go Daddy’s Data Center-On-Demand is limited to invite-only release as the company builds out its cloud infrastructure. The official release of the service is expected to be towards the end of July 2011.

GoDaddy Cloud IaaS Service Offerings –

1. Economy Package –

Price – start at $49.99 per month

Offering – one server with 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB of storage, unlimited inbound bandwidth, 100 GB of outbound bandwidth per month; and additional a la cart resources

2. Ultimate Package –

Price – $279.99 per month

Offering – six servers — three with 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB of storage and three with 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB of storage, unlimited inbound bandwidth, 100 GB of outbound bandwidth per month and additional resources a la carte

GoDaddy’s Cloud IaaS Market Entry Analysis –

Go Daddy’s entry into the cloud infrastructure space comes at a time when Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are dominating the market. Also, the Cloud IaaS and Cloud PaaS service are witnessing an integrated service portfolio. So what the future unfolds for GoDaddy in the coming months will be very interesting to watch for couple of reasons. If the company succeeds in gaining the Cloud IaaS market much will be expected of both the Cloud Computing as well as the Data Center market. First and foremost many new vendors will be expected to enter the cloud space particularly the other Web Hosting companies much like the way many Telecom Companies in the US market are entering the Cloud space. Secondly, the service price package of GoDaddy’s Cloud IaaS is very competitive compared to the other leading vendors like Amazon and Rackspace. So the market can expect a reduction in price in the coming months which will be good news for the Cloud IaaS market considering that the market is dominated by 2 or 3 players alone.