Hard Drives That Stretch to Infinity

Silicon Valley startups used to tremble when Google (GOOG) released a product similar to their own. Now? Not so much. On April 24, Google unveiled its long-awaited Drive service, which lets people store files online and synchronize them across all their devices. Drew Houston, the chief executive officer of file-syncing service Dropbox, goaded the juggernaut with a tweet: “In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine. :)” Box, another cloud-storage provider, hosted a previously planned party on a Manhattan rooftop on April 25. CEO Aaron Levie shimmied in suit and sneakers while Elijah Wood (yes, that Elijah Wood) manned the turntable. If the Box chief was panicked, he hid it well.

Houston and Levie have earned the right to be confident. Their companies have lured Silicon Valley’s premier investors and tens of millions of customers. Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and even Bono have contributed to a total of $257 million in funding for Dropbox, valuing the company at about $4 billion. Box has attracted $162 million from firms including Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Andreessen Horowitz. (Bloomberg LP, the parent of this magazine, is an investor in the latter.) “This is the kind of technology—a la the phone, Web browser, and e-mail—that everyone needs, and there just aren’t many products like that,” says Josh Stein, a DFJ managing director.

Box and Dropbox—along with about a dozen other startups as well as Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Apple (AAPL)—are engaged in a fight with huge ramifications for the future of computing. Every year people create more and more photos, videos, Word documents, and other files. Increasingly, those data are scattered across phones, tablets, computers, and other devices. The storage startups and their competitors are vying to be the central control panel for all this information. “All of these companies see this future where your devices are basically portals to all your stuff,” says Tom Kleinpeter, the former chief technology officer at FolderShare, a file-syncing service acquired by Microsoft in 2005. “And whoever holds on to all that stuff has a huge advantage.”

The story of FolderShare shows how hard it is to get a simple-seeming technology such as cloud storage to work properly. Founded in 2002, the company let people sync as many folders as they wanted between multiple computers—a freedom that was overwhelming to some. “One of our big mistakes was letting people do whatever they wanted,” says Kleinpeter. Many customers failed to even grasp the basic syncing concept: that their computers needed to be online at the same time to swap files.

Dropbox, founded in 2007, picked a simpler approach. When users install its desktop or mobile apps, the service creates a single folder—a dropbox—on each device. Anything saved in that file is available on every other device. While FolderShare required an Internet connection to work, Dropbox stores copies of each file on the computer or mobile device where it was created and on servers the company rents from Amazon. That means users can work offline and sync everything later. “Dropbox was brilliant picking that single folder thing,” says Kleinpeter. The startup now has more than 50 million users, though it doesn’t disclose how many people pay for storage above the 2 gigabytes given away.

Box’s Levie opted not to focus on the consumer market—rightly foreseeing that it would place him in a brutal cost war with giants such as Google and Microsoft—and has instead aimed to help office workers. Companies pay about $15 per worker per month so their employees can store such things as PowerPoint presentations, pictures for marketing campaigns, and legal documents. Box’s tools allow them to grant access to select co-workers, customers, and partners and collaboratively edit documents.

At the Manhattan party, Levie was hyping the Box Innovation Network—the universe of third-party software apps that rely on Box for storage or collaborative editing. Finished tweaking the font size on a memo using Quickoffice for iPad? The app connects with Box so you can send the final result to a co-worker or LinkedIn (LNKD) contact without resorting to bulky e-mails. Levie sermonizes about this post-PC functionality; the 27-year-old college dropout basically thinks he can replace decades of business software produced by industry veterans—Microsoft, IBM (IBM), and Oracle (ORCL)—with this new breed of nimbler software that tightly ties together mobile and desktop computers. The saying used to be that no one got fired for buying IBM products, Levie tells his troops. “We’re not quite there yet, but we’re moving to a world where you will get fired for buying IBM.”

Both startups have fended off acquisition bids—including Citrix Systems’ (CTXS) more than $500 million offer for Box—and say they want to remain independent in anticipation of initial public offerings. Such ambitions make it all the more important for the storage stars to outpace offerings from the tech giants. While Dropbox gives away 2GB of storage space today, Google and Microsoft give away 5GB and 7GB, respectively, and charge lower prices for expanded memory. The startups’ hope is that customers care about more than sheer storage capacity. Box offers security features prized by corporations in addition to its collaboration tools, for instance. Dropbox, so far, has focused on usability. “The general philosophy at Dropbox is that it’s OK to write lots of extra code if you can get rid of one choice the user has to make,” says Tom Meyer, a former senior software engineer at Dropbox. “You don’t want people to have to make any decisions at all.” Especially the decision to switch.

The bottom line: Buzz-worthy startups Box and Dropbox are fending off tech giants such as Google by focusing on usability, collaboration, and security.

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What Drives Information Technology

Business & Technology Crack - Does Business Drives Technology or Technology Drives Business?

Information Technology and the move to a computerized infrastructure model are bringing great changes to many industries. Often it is the CIO of the company who escort this fundamental shift in the business revenue stream. Leading others through modernization, revolutionize and transformation means you must be able to make changes yourself.

Forget about asking whether technology drives business or business drives technology. Stop perturbing about whether or not technology is strategic. Silence all the confusions about how advance this technology is to that technology. In technology, there are numerous questions that if you have to ask, you probably already know and don't like the answer. A more satisfying line of inquiry is how much of your technological horsepower is actually being used to turn the wheels of innovation.

Some people says that Technology drives business modernization, novelty, success & Innovations that opens up new doors of opportunities, improves the company's performance on the whole, sharpens the company's market intelligence, and makes new things possible for the clients. Another school of thought is that the Business Drives Technology, as such integration is about assisting business to facilitate their profitability by utilizing technology and other resources available to the enterprise. But realistically speaking, the driving force comes from the CEO and CIO of the company, who both endeavor to leverage technology to its fullest potential.

In a society that has become entirely dependent on computers and immediate communications, technology is becoming the heartbeat in the process of office design as decisions on layout and services. Some aspects of technology, like the computer animation & communication, are highly visible demonstration devices. But more of it is in the largely unseen infrastructure, with the emphasis on sophisticated wiring and smart communication devices to provide for an ever greater flow, and on communications and power facilities to keep operations running through almost any anticipated calamity.

In the modernization of the today's businesses, Common business drivers include; Mergers and Acquisitions, Internal Reorganizations, Application and System Consolidation, Inconsistent/Duplicated/Fragmented Data, New Business Strategies, Compliance with Government Regulations, Streamlining Business Processes. To achieve the success in the accommodation of these business drivers, the sturdy and smart input would be required from both the parties i.e. the business as well as the technology.

In a company, you could cover every surface in your office with how to manage change. But one aspect of change management that often dodges IT Managers is how to better influence corporate colleagues. If information technology drives business decisions, the IT executives must communicate and be persuasive with other department heads on key project management issues.

Strategic planning for Information Technology is one component of an overall company vision for success. This psychoanalysis facilitates IT professionals to successfully define short and long-term goals and ascertain the resources necessary to apprehend such goals. To ensure success, the strategic plan should be developed in a thorough but rapid manner, consist of a brief, succinct compilation of analyzed data, and provide opportunities by which additional planning and analysis can occur.

Several important benefits occur as the result of a successful strategic IT plan. First, employees are provided with an understanding of how their role fits in with the overall company structure. Also, this planning allows managers to realize additional opportunities for growth and success. Finally, important relationships between technology investment and positive outcomes, such as increased market share, are revealed.

It's now become the industry dilemma that IT people need to know more about business. They need to understand the disciplines and the lingo of business process management, business performance management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, financial management, human resources management, operations management, etc. Lacking that knowledge, communication with business people and understanding of business requirements will forever be troubled.

On the other hand the Business people should also drive their efforts to know more about information technology. As with all communication and relationship issues, this is not a prejudiced problem. Just as IT people need to become more business-oriented, business people need to be more IT-oriented. They need to understand the roles and relationships among the many different kinds of technology upon which their information systems depend, and they need to understand the dependencies among those technologies. Business people need to have a working knowledge of the technology stack as it affects their capability to get information, perform business analysis, and make informed business decisions.

Beyond the relatively straight-forward needs of business becoming IT-oriented and technologists becoming business-oriented, there lies a new challenge. We must develop common understanding and shared perspective of value, an issue that is both a business concern and a technology consideration. When business and IT have different meaning and outlook for value, conflicts are certain to arise.

Business and IT organizations often have two evidently different perspectives of value. IT expert generally take a data-to-value approach. Where Data produces information, information enhances knowledge, knowledge drives action, action produces outcomes, and favorable outcomes deliver value. Business management typically uses a goals-to-value system. Business drivers and goals determine strategies, strategies drive tactics, which in turn produce results, and positive results produce value.

Effective business/IT relationships are ultimately a question of alignment. New IT skills, new business skills, and new perspectives that sets the stage for business/IT alignment. But it doesn't assure alignment. To achieve genuine association there are several things that must be done; some by IT, some by the business, and some collectively.

Conflicts between business and IT organizations have existed from the very beginning of automated Information Systems. We have accelerated in so many ways both in business and in technology. However, the problem still pestilences most of the businesses. The Business/IT crack must go away. The cost is high; the value is null; and the barriers that it crafts grow bigger each moment. The problem can be fixed, and the time to fix it is now!

Pervaiz Pyar Ali holds advanced degrees in both Business Management and Computer Science. Having worked in the Banking industry for the last five years in Pakistan, Pervaiz has formulated several projects in his organization. Currently, Pervaiz is working as a Senior System Administrator in Saudi Pak Commercial Bank Limited, Karachi, Pakistan.