Every time I meet with Rick Thau, my mentor, and advisor (@thaughtful innovations), his wisdom and pragmatic thinking enriches my thinking and outlook. I had a nice ride to Monterey today to meet with Rick and our conversations started from his experience of selling time-share systems (sound just like selling cloud services today!) couple of decades back, to building and selling continuous application/data protection technologies, and then to real-world wisdom from many innovative companies he founded or on the boards of, to today’s cloud computing, to challenges faced by 21st century CIOs their challenges of making them still relevant to their CEOs, to BUs autonomy in procuring Software as a Service, and to CIOs lack of visibility and controls across Information systems domain.

Looking back to 2 decades we moved away from mainframe computing to client-server then web based application delivery mechanism primarily due to cost and simplicity reasons. After 2 decades, now we are at the crossroads again (major platform shift) with over grown complexity of our IT infrastructure, more daunting than the mainframe era. As you walk through the data centers, you can see stockpiles of servers sitting there and waiting for the workload to come! The server sprawl is going to continue. Many companies are getting ready for their tech refresh – replacing their old computing infrastructure with new ones. The cost of management and data center operations, including the power, real estate, cooling, and facility management is going through the roof. If you take a look at many public companies, significant portion of their corporate spending goes for keeping the lights on for these truckloads of servers with utilization far less than 12-15%. Close investigation of these servers would reveal two important factors (1) most of the cores available on these servers are never utilized (2). Huge memory banks loaded on these in anticipation of improved performance and workloads never even needed.

30 years ago, the mainframe faced dramatic change, driven by the motivation to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Today, it is still this same motivation is driving he adoption of Cloud services. Technological advancements, bandwidth, and software is driving more innovation without really owning and operating your own data centers. Whatever technologies and solutions built to manage mainframe were quickly replicated to mini computing era, then to client-server, then to web based, and now to cloud computing. Many new companies emerged to address these challenges and became so big. With the shift to Cloud now, it opens up whole new opportunities to deliver new platform and services to enables innovation and creativity for next generation enterprises. Hopefully, this renewed interest in accelerating business innovation through integrated information and intelligence will make CIO more relevant and technology a key driver in enabling operational efficiencies, customer reach, business intelligence, logistics and market intelligence, and driving open innovation across business partners, suppliers, and customers.

“What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating-current network did for electricity: it makes the location of the equipment unimportant to the user. It also allows disparate and formerly incompatible machines to operate together as a single system. It creates harmony out of cacophony”, writes Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch.

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What a week! I have been struggling this week (and many weeks, may be months, before) to focus on too many problems – there are way too many problems. Some problems are breeding new problems. I am less than pleased with Status Quos or Sacred Cows. Nor happy with mediocre results. Since I left Oracle in 2003, I can’t settle for anything less than exceptional. I set my bar so high. All these inspire me to take the road less travelled by. This weekend I am going to force myself in a meditative state to force my mind to gather together conscious thoughts from all that is happening around me and vast unconscious information to create something radically different. I know I need to slow down and give my mind a chance to let creative juices flow in.

I know I have been living in my analytical mind and missing out on the creative musing that opens up to new ideas. It is a beautiful Saturday morning. I took a long walk. When I go on a walk, my mind leaps ahead of my educated incapacities and present me with vivid images and ideas out of nowhere. There is no doubt that walking alone leaves the mind free to observe and dream. I believe it is more important that we get out and walk whether alone or not. If you are suffering from too much of educated incapacities, take some one with you for a walk to enable you to see something unusual or particularly interesting(not just gazing at things – open your mind and heart to see things not visible to your naked eye). Sharing these things can add to our experience. Pick a walking partner who will allow quiet spaces along the way. Or simply walk alone.

This is something I do all the time. If I can’t solve any problem, I take a long walk and come back and to my surprise I can find a better solution. If I get stressed up, I take a long walk. I love to see my mind wander and come back with random bits and bytes of ideas. I am wondering all the time how should I create a space for my alpha waves in my brain and stop letting my brain take a ride on theta (drowsiness) and delta (deep sleep) waves. Walking with constant inflow of new images and ideas, give us new thoughts that nourish us. It replenishes our over tapped creative well and gives us a sense of whatever you call it. We are reminded we are a physical being who is part of something far greater. It opens our senses to the world around us and to the world within. We become larger than we were, something more. We see with perceptive eyes. We become aware of our self in the greater scheme of things. We create a fertile ground for fostering creativity, imagination, and compassion.

I am sitting in my backyard and carefully listening to the bird chirps. Every time I sit and listen to bird chirps or watch bird fly in formation, that generate huge burst of alpha waves and inspires me to wander all over the place I never wandered before. What a great refreshing morning? I can see grass grow. I can smell the things I can’t smell before. Though clouds out side pulls me back into the musings of Cloud computing, I am trying to control my thoughts to stay with me and listen to my heart.

I have a very bad habit of journaling. i write everything that comes to my mind. I let thoughts come in without an immediate purpose or with any pressure to accomplish. I write something. It doesn’t matter if I grumble about something – planning my next week or describing a view out side of my library room window musing at the mountains. I believe that writing let go of those unresolved things that fill my mind. It then gives me a tool for gathering my insights and dreams as well as sorting things out. Sometimes regrets and irritations would dominate most of my notes. As I let those accumulated latent energies to flow out, then I started to create more room for appreciation of the beauty around my creative thoughts and me. I am reading through volumes of these notes and started to see solutions to most of the problems I have been trying to solve for weeks, if not months.

I feel so relaxed! Go twoodle (I coined this term meaning “act of taking a long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering without using Twitter, Google, and Web searching to generate bursts of alpha waves to simulate creativity, imagination, and compassion“) then?

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