Internet of Things & The IP Address Shortage

The experts at Cisco calculate that total network traffic on the Internet will increase nine times (9x) by 2013 from 5 exabytes a month in 2007, to 56 exabytes a month in 2013. What does that mean in layman's terms? It means that by next year (2010), 35 million devices will be connected to the Internet. That's about six aircraft per person worldwide. By 2013, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior forecasts that the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion, up from 500 million in 2007.


How is such astonishing growth possible? Originally, computers typically were networked only to local area networks, to allow users to communicate with one another within their own companies. Today though, there is an "always on" mentality - those same past users of limited local area networks now consider it their birthright to communicate with everybody, everywhere, "always". Most of these communications now take place over the Internet, via the 1 billion (and growing) Internet-connected networked computers worldwide. With the emergence of smartphones, Android, RIM and Apple have exploded the number of Internet-connected devices even further. This global number of Internet-connected cell phones is accelerating, surpassing the number of Internet-connected computers. A tertiary wave of Internet-connected devices - sensors - is expected to overtake them both. Computers, smartphones, sensor devices - there is an Internet-connected device population bomb.

• Internet-Connected Sensor Devices

The next wave of Internet-connected devices will be small sensors embedded in just about everything... and placed just about everywhere.... For example, The 2010-2014Harbor Industry Report forecasts growth in "health monitoring devices on the body, telematics in vehicles for safety, automated service scheduling, and driver convenience as well as smart grid equipment and meters that can monitor real-time electricity usage -- all delivered via the Internet." As well, most of next year's anticipated energy management devices and water management devices will each require their own Internet address (known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address).

By being part of the Internet, these devices can connect with web services and thus can be both managed and monitored remotely. They also can connect to one another, in what is called machine-to-machine (MSM) deployments. Machine-to-machine deployments go far beyond typical business applications, reshaping entire industries. For example, one solution expected to require an M2M deployment is the creation of the Smart Energy Grid. To accomplish a national Smart Energy Grid, the United States will need millions of sensor devices to communicate with one another over the Internet. Similarly, commercial solutions involving networked security cameras and sensors connected to home appliances and HVAC equipment, ITS infrastructure for traffic and parking management, etc. each such sensor will require their own IP address (device address).

A post on Harbor's Smart Systems blog states: "As Moore's law takes over and the price of embedding intelligence and connectivity into devices continues to fall, networked devices will push further and further into the mainstream. This process is somewhat self-reinforcing as low prices are driven by high quantities, and vice versa, making these devices increasingly prevalent in our lives and businesses."

• We're Running out of Network Addresses

This is a highly desirable future, but it will come at a cost. Our current IP addressing scheme, known as IP version 4 (IPV4) was never meant to handle the coming demand for addresses! Soon, the IPV4 addressing scheme will no longer function properly, because there will be no new addresses to hand out to new devices on the Internet. The addresses will run out. A similar point was reached by the US ZIP Code addressing scheme, and so it was upgrade with a four digit extension. So too, there is an upgrade for the IPV4 addressing schema.

• The Answer: A System-Wide Upgrade to IPV6

To handle this ever-increasing need for device addresses, a new networking standard has been developed known as IP v6 (IPV6). IPV6 ensures that there will be enough IP addresses for every known star in the universe by supporting 4.8 trillion IP addresses. However, progress to this new standard is slow, so you can help by voting for IPV6 the next time you purchase a device. The transition of the Internet to IPv6 is the only practical and readily-available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion. Although the predicted IPv4 address exhaustion is approaching its final stages, most ISP software vendors and service providers were just beginning IPv6 deployment back in 2008...

Green IT: Leadership in Energy Management

Most of America, and perhaps the world, view Ricoh as a provider of office equipment and thus, are startled when they learn of Ricoh's deep commitment to climate change. To many Americans, any manufacturer of copiers must be the antithesis of eco-friendly, because to most American's printing is not eco-friendly. This couldn't be farther than the truth when in comes to Ricoh. Our corporate commitment to the environment began no less that thirty years ago, and has only strengthened over time. Ricoh has won many awards for its deep commitment to the environment, see below:I have two reasons for speaking out. First, Ricoh is an extremely green company, and one that should share its wisdom on CO2 reduction with its customers. The economic, environmental and climate costs of our current energy systems and use patterns are condemning our children to a world with serious constraints unless significant changes are started now. The scale of the global threat creates a fertile ground for innovation and meaningful action. There is great potential to improve our situation, but first we must engage the American populace with meaningful, transformational information that measures energy use and provides individualized use information that empowers personal change Such a change must include both a robust, public investment in cost-effective innovative energy technologies as well as national policy reforms to deploy technologies on a large scale. A recent report by Ernst and Young indicates that large companies are moving forward despite uncertainty.

Most plan on investing.5-5% of top line revenue into energy initiatives. The report, surveys 300 global executives, in companies larger than US$1b annually, and spanning 16 countries and 18 industry sectors.

Second, there is a vast yet untapped potential to spread innovation from the IT and data management sectors into the energy sector. Most of the technologies that underlie the current energy system were invented over sixty years ago and are understandably brittle, costly and incompatible with modern information management best practice.

I believe that new technologiescan be game changers that are worthy of research and investment. Ricoh Innovations is actively supporting Ricoh's worldwide efforts to green the planet and lower CO² levels.

SaaS, Mobility and "Shamrock" Organizations Support More Home-Based Skilled Work

Ricoh's North American market is changing -quickly. Trends such as the volatility of the job market, frequent down-sizing and the recession are behind a new organizational structure known as the "Shamrock Organization" and vast numbers of highly skilled home-based workers known as homepreneurs. New data indicates that these homepreneus class will only grow.

It represents a very real and profitable customer base that B2B players should address. These are the corporate workers who are still business people, but work from home. In the future they will create virtual organizations. They are a new demographic that is very likely to adopt SaaS + device solutions because they are simply, and mobile.



Shamrock Organizations Have Emerged, Giving Rise to Homepreneurs

Predicted by the Irish economist, Charles Handy in 1989, the three leaves of the "shamrock" represent the three components that make the organization work:

• The core staff
• A set of contractors on the fringe of the organization
• A significant temporary workforce

Shamrock Organizations Support/Harmonize with the Trend toward Self-Employment

In the "shamrock" organization, a permanent core of managers and employees inside the company is supported by independent contractors and part-time workers. To a large extent, these contractors are homepreneurs. We can define homepreneurs as white collar workers primarily working for large and mid-size firms.

Laptops, SaaS and Cell Phones Allow Support Work Anywhere -Supporting Homepreuring

As the popularity of cell phones, personal printers and other hand-held devices complemented the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, location began to matter less and less. Now, with most of the American economy performing knowledge work -- as opposed to the manufacturing of physical goods -- it's become possible for workers and entire businesses to thrive in the home setting.

That trend, in turn, is giving rise to even more new technologies that facilitate the phenomenon of leaving the traditional office behind. Cloud computing, online collaboration tools, Web conferencing, and smart phones have all become part of the modern home office.

As the technological feasibility of home-based businesses has increased, there has also been a subtle shift in attitudes. For example, the corporate world once viewed businesses run out of the home as hobbies or else as quaint, marginal operations not worth noticing. But today, large and mid-sized firms increasingly recognize home-based firms as useful suppliers and valuable customers.

More Than Half of US Businesses Are Run From the Home Today

According to BusinessWeek,¹ more than half of all the businesses in the United States are run out of someone's home, not in traditional office space -- and their employees collectively account for more workers than all the companies backed by venture capital firms

According to a report published by Business Know-How, a major factor behind the homepreneur trend is the increasing number of layoffs and the lackluster jobs market 4. Combined with new technologies and diminishing economies of scale, this economic uncertainty has caused more people to feel that they stand a better chance of succeeding by being their own bosses. Many employees see their present jobs as dead-end, due to frozen salaries and a lack of opportunity for advancement, as higher-ups stay in place for fear of entering the job market.


Home Businesses, on Average, Are More Profitable Than New Ventures or Corporations

A new report from Emergent Research² in Lafayette, California -- which is itself a home-based business -- analyzed data from the U.S. Census, the Small Business Administration, and the Small Business Success Index. It found that only 35 percent of these home businesses have revenue of more than $125,000, and yet they compare favorably to traditional small companies in the benefits they provide for workers, their approach to marketing and innovation, and their access to capital. For home-based businesses, the main areas of concentration are professional services, construction, retail, and personal services.

Home-based businesses employ more than 13 million people, usually in businesses that have only two employees. By contrast, the National Venture Capital Association reports that the traditional businesses backed by venture capital firms employ only 12.1 million people.³

Likewise, home businesses keep more of their profits -- 36 percent, versus 21 percent for conventional operations -- because they have lower overhead per dollar of revenue.

Future Forecast: Homepreneurs Will Create Virtual Corporations

According to Trends Magazine, by pooling resources in the virtual world, homepreneurs in a particular field -- say, accounting -- could garner significant market share, without having any fixed headquarters. Corporate customers will value this arrangement because managing full-time employees and temps in your office is not the same as managing far-flung entrepreneurial workers who can shift allegiance at a moment's notice. Expect to see new firms arising with the specific aim of coordinating contractors for larger companies. This is already showing up in the form of Web-based firms that provide connections between larger companies and homepreneurs.

References:

1. BusinessWeek Online, October 23, 2009, "The Rise of the 'Homepreneur,'" by John Tozzi. © Copyright 2009 by Bloomberg LP. All rights reserved. http://www.businessweek.com
2. To access the Emergent Research report on home-based small businesses, visit the Grow Smart Business website at: http://www.growsmartbusiness.com
3. To access the National Venture Capital Association report on traditional venture-capital-backed businesses, visit the PricewaterhouseCoopers website at: http://www.pwc.com.mu
4. To access a report about increased layoffs contributing to the home-business trend, visit the Business Know-How website at: http://www.businessknowhow.com

Twitter: The True Voice of the Customer on the Web

When it comes to delivering information about products and services and getting instant customer feedback, the hottest tool out there right now is Twitter. Twitter is the micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets". It s a big hit in the social media world, and many companies are benefiting from it.

In fact, 20 percent of all tweets now contain requests for product information or responses to the requests. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says follow me.

According to Associate Professor Jim Jansen, at Penn State University, People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with products and services.
And he goes on to say that "tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services".

Jansen's research team investigated microcommunicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. The results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology. The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study, looking for tweets that mentioned a brand and why the brand was mentioned, and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

With more than six million active users daily, and predictions of more than 20 million users by the end of 2009, Twitter is now seen as the "next big thing" on the Web. Even though Twitter is still in its early stages of adoption, businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it in creative ways to market their products. Jansen's study is among the first in the area of micro-communication within the business sector. And the research team is now conducting a focused study specifically on how companies manage and use their Twitter accounts.

Ricoh Innovation's WBR (Web Business Research) group is actively "tweeting" to attract users to its beta software trials. WBR is also monitoring Tweets that include the word "Ricoh" to capture the voice of Ricoh's current customers.

Information Source: businessbriefings.com October 2009 issue

SaaS Model Pros and Cons and Implications for Document Capture

I get asked frequently about the big trends : cloud computing, software as a service and cloud services. In this article I’ll expand on these ideas to explore the difference between SaaS (software-as-a-service), cloud computing and traditional software business to shed light on why apps that are “native to the web” (built for the cloud) versus simply web-enabled (built as traditional software offerings with an added web capability) bring very different customer value and require very different business models that few small document capture/processing companies can readily afford.. I’ll also give you an idea of how Ricoh Innovations is experimenting with cloud computing to offer beta-level document/image processing services that can be combined with SaaS offerings or used alone to improve business communication, collaboration and corporate workflows.

Saas – A Definition

Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS providers operate using an Internet-based multi-tenancy model. This means that all customers use a single instance of the application. Customers can only access their information — their data and unique configuration requirements are virtually partitioned from other customers. The multi-tenancy model means big servers and economies of scale, making it less costly to manage when compared to the cost of running the same software within most corporate firewalls. Furthermore, the SaaS model drives innovations in security, redundancy, reliability and increase software capabilities at levels that any individual customer couldn't do without great cost on their own.

The customer benefits of the SaaS model are clear: software rental without the burden and distraction of hardware and software maintenance, higher up time, lower start-up costs, and often, better accessibility from remote locations. The benefits of the SaaS model for providers is also clear: there is only one main system to upgrade – so upgrades can be rolled out in waves, system analytics give both the provider and the customer much better information/analytics on the system and its use, and revenue comes in monthly over a multi-year contract.

How Saas is different than the traditional software model

Software companies that provide packaged software and sell it in a traditional software model enjoy different benefits than SaaS businesses. The traditional software company must invest heavily in a direct sales/support channel, and focus only the deals large enough to support the expensive direct sales channel model. However, traditional software companies benefit from the ability to recognize revenue upon shipment and thus, have much higher revenues than most SaaS companies. This increased inflow of revenue means that traditional software companies can invest more in creating variations of their products, or add-ons to increase and deepen existing customer relationships and create new ones.

SaaS companies also require large sales/support channels, but not as large as enterpri

se software firms, and therefore do not have to limit themselves to large deals. SaaS vendors can offer their product to any size firm because it can be demoed on the web, and easily trialed by any company with an Internet connection. Thus, the SaaS model has proven to provide an enterprise-level offering on a pay-as-you-go model that small and mid-size companies can afford. This is one powerful driver for the adoption of the SaaS model.

Limitations of the SaaS Model

Now that we have a working understanding of the benefits of the SaaS model, let us round out our knowledge by discussing its drawbacks. Let’s revisit the Internet-based multi-tenency of SaaS I discussed earlier. Multi-tenancy means that all customers use a single instance of the application. Thus, SaaS is both easier to support, but much more difficult to customize. Until a compelling portion of the user base requires a new feature, the SaaS vendor may be reticent to provide and support it. Furthermore, the implicit workflow of the SaaS offering may not allow the customization required needed to provide optimized workflow for a single corporate user.

For example, let’s imagine there is a SaaS-based information management offering that is used by our corporation. It provides a solid value for the money, and unburdens our internal IT staff so they can focus on customer issues, rather than server upgrades. However, the corporate workflow, say invoice processing, that we work in, requires that paper as well as digital documents be added to the SaaS system/ The paper documents arrive as image-based data, with limited data about the document (metadata), making them difficult to properly fit in the SaaS workflow.

What our imaginary invoice processing workflow needs is the ability to string together a custom set of document/forms processing capabilities – say, identify what type of document it is (an invoice from our biggest supplier, for example, then convert the document from image to text and place it in the system both in the invoice process and tag it as related to our biggest supplier.

Unfortunately, document capture/processing software is not available in a SaaS offering today. It seems a pity that to achieve the advanced capture/document processing capabilities today we we would need to purchase, via a traditional software model the hardware consulting and software system. Why hav

e document capture vendors yet to take up the SaaS model? I posit that since most are relatively small companies, they do not have the financial fortitude to invest in a SaaS offering that would have an immediate negative impact on their profitability. Marketing a SaaS offering would dramatically decrease their current year revenue forecasts as they trade revenue today, for much smaller subscription fees for the future. . From a financial perspective, SaaS can be a nightmare for traditional software companies. How will th

ey attract and maintain their best salespeople on deals that are not recognizable in one lump? How will they explain to shareholders that they gave up software revenue today, for much lower subscription fees? And then there is the investment required for building a state-of-the-art facility to house and maintains your SaaS offering. SaaS requires a competency in running/maintaining a large software system that is not necessarily required in the traditional software business. Seen in this light, one can readily understand why niche software companies are not keen to jump to a SaaS offering. Large software companies, like Oracle, recognized this m

arket change quickly and now offer both SaaS “On demand” offerings as well as traditional software. Smaller vendors likely do not have the financial strength to do so in our recovering economy.

Ricoh Innovations Plans to “Beta” Document Processing SaaS Services

Ricoh Innovations believes that as the SaaS model continues to gain adoption, customers will need flexible ways to add processing solutions that proceed and follow the existing SaaS offerings of their SaaS vendors. Therefore, via our beta labs site Ricoh Innovations intends to offer world-class document processing services as SaaS offerings that can either be:

· integrated with Ricoh’s App2Me widgets and sent to a SaaS offering

· called as web services directly from a browser and sent to a SaaS offering

· accessed via handheld devices such as Blackberries, iPhones, etc and sent to our SaaS offerings

· strung together to create custom workflows via our IKON consulting channel

Ricoh Innovations is leveraging the emergence of cloud computing platforms to offer these services in a robust “beta” format that ensures up-time and scalability beginning officially in April 2010.

User Experience, Not User Needs Drives Real Value

Many people understand the value of identifying user needs, but this is really not the core value of what a customer research team (like mine) provides. In this entry, I'd like to explain the difference between user needs and the user experience design work we undertake at Ricoh Innovations.

The advanced customer research team that conducts in-situ customer research and prototype development/iteration at Ricoh Innovations was founded in 2003 with the goal of identifying the hidden customer needs that users cannot themselves articulate. Via this definition, user needs are split into two distinct groups:

1) needs of which the user is aware and communicates via suggestions, complaints or a service call and,

2) needs of which the user is unaware and therefore unable to communicate. Let's call this latter type of need "hidden needs". Ricoh's vast network of direct and indirect sales/support channels respond to suggestions, complaints and service calls (type 1 needs). ABC focuses on the second category of needs - hidden needs, some prominent types being:

• Needs that exist among a workgroup of users- with no one user having enough knowledge of the entire workflow to articulate or suggest possible solutions to the issues

• Needs that occur due to a lack of a simple, approachable technological solution within the customer's budget- a good example being the drudgery of re-typing information into a computer system (even though expensive systems are available to solve this issue)

• Needs that remain unsolved (even though approachable solutions exist) because the current solution is simply too difficult to discover, learn and apply for the average user (without dedicated IT help). Anyone who has tried to print when they do not have access to a network or the correct printing driver knows this type of need well.

Counter Intuitive: Identifying Hidden Unmet User Needs is Not Enough

You might ask: If one can identify these broad categories of hidden unmet needs, and provide explicit examples, isn't the job done? One might think so, but the truth is counter intuitive. Simply knowing about a problem is very different than knowing how to solve it. Our efforts have shown that reporting hidden needs to product planners is not very helpful to them. Product planners need to understand the hidden needs, but they also need to know what type of solutions the customer finds most valuable. Experience design research is the official term for this type of research.

Wikipedia defines "Experience Design as the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experiencefunctionality of the design.^[1] An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. ABC is on the forefront of this growing field and continues to improve effective transfer techniques so that valuable user experiences are available to product planners to encapsulate in the software, hardware and services that make them real. and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving

The Key Value is Experience Design

My team pioneered a rapid research process that quickly finds hidden user needs through on-site ethnographic research at customer sites. By presenting users, managers and other stakeholders (IT, etc.) with the specifics of how their work is currently done, our clients are able to imagine better ways to: work together, brainstorm things that would add tremendous value to their work, and ultimately, add value to their end customers. Our role in this process is to facilitate discussion, capture ideas and infuse promising ideas with our extensive knowledge of current technology breakthroughs, market trends and work best practice.

With our client's ideas in hand, you might think we'd end our research and report what we've learned, but we don't. We've learned through experience that what people think and say is not usually what they do or ultimately need. If we stopped here, the rest of Ricoh may very well spend millions of dollars building the wrong products and solutions. So, we push on, and quickly cobble together a very rough prototype of the concept they think they need and ask them to test it for a few weeks. Even though what we deploy is usually bulky and slow and certainly nowhere near how a commercial version would be architected, these things do not matter. The customer is enthusiastic to test "their" idea, and so they give it a try, and together we learn what they really need.

Put simply, our customers are smart people and can be considered "domain experts" at their work. They are not, however, skilled technologist, designers or engineers and thus usually do not know the scope or depth of what solutions are possible. They start with a limited understanding of their issue, and a limited understanding of the solution possibilities. Our job is to expand both their knowledge of the need and the possible solution directions. Together, we find the best overall user experience and , more importantly, identify why and how to quantify its value. Once we understand the user's needs, have a tested and accepted design, as well as data on its qualitative and quantitative value to the customer, do we pass on what we've learned. For this reason, we stay on a research theme for a few years, learning how a successful design is valuable to our customers in different industries and work group sizes.

Our past clients report that this eye-opening process is where they find real value from our work. The understanding and new ideas that come out of our conversations provide them with insight required to improve their business. We believe this is why they many want to work with us again, and recommend other potential candidates.

We Live in Exponential Times: Innovations Enabled by Technology