With ‘connected’ digital content the key mover and shaper behind today’s media tactics and strategies, it’s ironic that it should remain broadly disconnected from the ‘mainstream’ media mix in many cases…

Media. Fings just ain’t what they used to be, are they?

In fact, when you think about it, the very meaning of the word is pretty much going through wholesale change right now.

OK, so not everyone takes quite the nerdy interest in word derivations that I do (they couldn’t, frankly). But those of a vaguely etymological bent might know that media comes from the Latin medius, meaning middle. And that the word makes almost perfect sense in that context.

In many ways, media – even The Media – really is exactly that: the middle. People, places, businesses, money, ideas: it genuinely does sit slap bang in the centre of just about everything.

But – and here’s the thing – I’m not actually sure it does any more, does it? These days, thanks largely to the omnipresence of its newer varieties like digital, media is less ‘between’ than ‘through’. In front, behind, up above, down below, all around. Wherever we are. Whatever we’re doing. All the time.

That’s great news for businesses, so they tell us. An entirely new realm (medium?) via which marketing, messaging, and merchandising can be disseminated and leveraged; a whole new range of linked and integrated customer communication channels and potential revenue streams.

Which brings me to my second ‘but’. Because I’ve been wondering. With so much change afoot, are new and traditional media activities truly linked and integrated? Properly? As much as they might be? Or need to be? And chatting with a friend who runs the marcomms function for a major software vendor the other day, the answer in many cases still appears to be no.

This friend of mine (we’ll call him Dave as that’s his name) tells me that his comms strategies are increasingly shaped and driven by digital media and content – no great shock there, whose aren’t?

That being the case, in common with many of his peers, Dave retains separate specialist new and digital agencies in addition to his usual internal and external comms suppliers. Fair enough. They’re specialist disciplines.

In dialogue with those peers however, he keeps hearing a similar complaint – that there is an often significant gap between digital and ‘traditional’ campaign activities – and their results.

In other words, for something that is by its very nature ‘connected’, digital media doesn’t appear to be connecting with its ‘conventional’ counterparts as well as it should – the two often still running as more or less separate communications entities rather than a single integrated whole.

Why? Many reasons in all likelihood. But at a fundamental level the problem might very well be that new media continues to be regarded as just that – new.

Nothing new stays that way forever. However cutting edge, however fast moving, how revolutionary, sooner or later it always dovetails into the mainstream.

To become fully connected and engaged with the rest of the marketing and communications mix – and with the business itself – new media has to do the same.

Last month we announced the launch of the world’s first large-scale, production-ready next generation cloud, powered by OpenStack.

This new Rackspace Cloud represents a hugely exciting development for the company and the culmination of thousands of Rackers’ hours and quite a few millions of dollars of investment. There’s been some 140 organisations, including NASA, IBM, Red Hat, Morphlabs and Piston Cloud Computing who have helped to bring the project to where it is today – ready for unveiling.

Ours is the first cloud to launch on the OpenStack platform, but the real value will come when we’re joined by other industry giants (Hewlett-Packard are next in line after us), as the platform becomes a thriving community full of innovation, collaboration and healthy competition. The ultimate beneficiaries though will be customers, who will see outstanding performance, unparalleled scalability and custom features – covering everything from monitoring to virtual networking.

We’ve invited all our customers to sign up for Rackspace’s Limited Availability Programme  - and from May 1, we’ll begin rolling out the service. There has been some confusion among our large base of UK customers over the availability of the next gen cloud, something we’d like to clear up without further ado…

Since February, we’ve been trialling the Beta stage from the US, in a closed group, and we now have an Early Access Programme up and running, where anyone can get to know how it works. You can see the scale, you can do some testing of how it would perform in certain scenarios and you can test your code. We’ve kept this programme located in the US for the simple reason that we want to keep everybody in the same place, so instances of our next gen cloud are centralised and contained.

That doesn’t mean that our UK customers don’t have access to the service. Quite the reverse, UK customers have been some of the most active contributors to the development of our OpenStack™-powered products. We’ve been monitoring users’ feedback, and watching how everything scales. But the actual Cloud Servers are sat here in the UK, raring to go.  When we fully open them up over the next few months, the service will be available here in the UK and in the US simultaneously.

To ensure the best experience for all our customers, we will be staggering its release, initially making it available to a limited number of customers from May 1. We will then gradually keep increasing numbers, so that in the space of a few months, we expect the next gen Rackspace Cloud will be open to everyone.

Make sure you sign up and be part of this seismic shift that’s set to transform cloud computing. The future, we firmly believe, is based around open standards – ones that will give enterprises unprecedented freedom across the broadest possible portfolio of cloud products and services.

With Groupon seeing continuing commercial pressure and similar ‘holes’ appearing among some of its peers, is online discount culture facing early onset decay? Not at all, insists Clifford Jones; merely a few routine teething problems…

Some years ago – the best part of 20 years ago in fact (eeeek!!) – I wrote an article about this emerging new thing called the Internet, which some people thought might turn out to be a pretty big deal. OK, whatever.

In defining the potential commercial opportunities, I recall saying something along the lines of what makes any net ‘a net’ isn’t the mesh, but the gaps in between. Which is quite true of course. Without the holes a net really isn’t a net at all is it? It’s more of a blanket. Or something.

Anyway… It comes to mind because of the focus of this week’s blog: online discount brokering. Specifically the less than ideal press that’s been plaguing it of late and the naysaying that has inevitably followed – Groupon’s recent downgrading of its predicted revenues; the marketing and PR own goals; the fulfilment issues; the general customer disquiet… you’re familiar with the story, I’m sure.

There was no such thing as online discount brokering (ODB) back when said piece came out of course (there was barely even such a thing as ‘online’). And the Internet has seen massive upheaval and change in the intervening couple of decades.

Central to this – somewhat counter-intuitively – is that the web has tightened even as it has broadened, i.e. while there are probably just as many ‘gaps’, they look to be getting smaller and harder to spot.

The basic rules, however, remain essentially the same.

Businesses, even online businesses, still come into being because someone somewhere sees a gap in a market.

Which of these businesses will thrive, which will survive, and which will die still depends on largely the same things too. How big is the gap? Is it real or merely perceived? And how able is the business to fill it?

Also worth remembering is that every now and then a big fish comes along, tears a chuffing great hole through the ‘net’, and makes room for everyone else. Google anyone? eBay? Amazon?

Enter online discount brokering. And the likes of Groupon.

Does ODB have its issues? Of course. Will there be growing pains? Naturally: it is a new economy within what itself remains a relatively new economy. But suggesting that it is already on the wane? You might as well say there’s no future in selling books online. Or software. Or media. Or sex.

People don’t want cheap stuff because of Groupon. They want cheap stuff, therefore Groupon exists. Firms don’t suddenly want to sell more stuff because of Groupon. They want to sell more stuff; therefore Groupon exists.

Such were the basic dynamics of any market 20 years ago; such will be the basic dynamics of any market in 20 years time.

Recent Internet/UK GDP figures are a bit of a yawn for your average blogger, says Ben Sturgess, but they’re a potentially vital early wake up call for the finance sector… oh and Mr Miyagi…

So, at 8.3% of GDP, the web now contributes more towards the UK’s economy than it does to any of the others in the G20 does it? And I’m supposed to find something vaguely engaging and interesting to say about that am I? Reeeally?! Cuh!! Editors! Can’t live with ‘em, too late to shop ‘em to the Leveson Enquiry.

In fact I’m sorely tempted to ask my four favourite questions when faced with such ‘news’– Yeah? And? So? What?

Hang on a minute though. There could be a chance to salvage something here after all.

Because, come to think of it, there actually is one major UK industry – even THE major UK industry – for which this ‘issue’ could prove pivotal. Namely the financial services sector – which is certain to be impacted massively should the web now evolve into its biggest and most important strategic sales and comms channel. And in light of these figures, it at last surely must.

Moreover, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how much could be at stake.

On one hand, for instance, we’re talking about the UK’s biggest industry working in harness with its biggest marketplace. Happy days. On the other though, it also means the most tightly regulated business in the UK aligning itself with the least. Regulation? Compliance? Governance? It really could be carnage.

Then there are things like the thin line between tax avoidance and evasion currently being walked by many a web-centric ‘UK’ business. With the government upping the ante in its bid to eradicate offshore ring fencing and other such protectionism, that tightrope is only going to get longer and thinner.

Also of potentially enormous influence here – with everyone getting in such a lather over the investment opportunities in social networking – will be the new tech bubble now rumoured to be building around such technologies.
Most worrying off all though – and what has to be the priority in the context of the above – is the financial community’s continuing collective attitude and approach to the web, which in many cases still amounts to little more than dabbling.

Sure you can bank online. Buy insurance. Pay for stuff via your mobile. But, you know what? That’s kind of it right now. Same offering, different clothes.

If you ask me it’s a lot like the, er, Karate Kid (Wax on Wax Off anyone? Bear with).

“Either you Karate do yes… or you Karate do no”, intones Mr Miyagi while counselling young Laruso on the perils of ‘dabbling’.

“But you Karate do ‘so so’? get squish – just like grape. Unnerstan Daniel san?”

Where the web is concerned the finance industry has to realise that it has little option but to ‘Karate do yes’. Not if it doesn’t want to get squished like a grape.

In other words it’s about time it got in training for the big fight.

Last Thursday, we hosted ‘An Evening with Rackspace’ at Hush in Mayfair where we welcomed 40 customers and enjoyed some great conversations over good food and a few drinks. They were joined by John Morris and Scott White from our Leadership Team as well as Rackers from our Business Development and Service Delivery teams, making this event an excellent opportunity for customers to meet the Rackers that work on their account on a daily basis. Attendees also had the opportunity to network with some of our other customers, creating a real buzz of enthusiasm in the room!

Rackspace likes to hold a number of these informal events throughout the course of the year; we see them as a way of building relationships without the pressure of office surroundings. Conversations don’t centre totally on Rackspace and hosting – we often find ourselves discussing hobbies, holidays, and even surprise engagements! Its exchanges like this that make us smile. Even though technology is important to us, it’s the relationships we build with our customers that satisfy us the most.

We value our customers and their continued support and hope to see you at a future event soon.

What a difference two and a half years makes. When we conducted our No More Servers study in late 2009, almost one in five of the UK and US senior IT decision-makers interviewed didn’t know what cloud computing was. For this study, a Cloud Reality Check, we asked largely the same questions as in 2009, and among other things found that everyone now knows what it means.

We repeated the No More Servers research to allow us to understand not only the issues facing senior IT decision-makers of mid-sized UK and US businesses regarding their server management now, but also to see if things have improved. What our Cloud Reality Check report shows is that, in many of the areas investigated, things have either stagnated or got worse.

Though the data does imply that the outsourcing of servers and cloud computing is now more visible and is being entertained by a greater number of organisations, it suggests that there has not been a significant uptake of the technology. However, IT decision-makers tell us that managing their servers in-house is proving more troublesome than ever and the general environment looks poised and ready for an increase in uptake.

In 2012, less than half say that they always get their server planning right, meaning that the majority either overspend on servers or else they don’t provide their organisation with the capacity that it needs. As a result, the gripes and concerns they report about managing their in-house servers are more widely expressed than in 2009 – more people are reporting that multiple issues concern them regarding their server estates.

If this was not bad enough, IT teams in 2012 are spending more time than ever in managing the day-to-day maintenance and troubleshooting issues that having servers in-house brings. This is to the detriment of their ability to spend time on strategic, value added activities.

Compounding these problems is the fact that IT decision-makers report that business is continuing to demand more innovation and more flexibility from their IT department whilst mandating reductions in IT expenditure.

In short, we are not seeing server management becoming any less of an issue. It is increasingly becoming an expensive drain on IT decision-makers’ time and efforts, preventing their organisations from innovating and operating more flexibly than it otherwise could. The good news is that, as in 2009, the problems associated with having to manage and maintain servers are often readily solved by cloud and managed hosting services – which probably explains why 38% of respondents plan to do so in the medium term.

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