How fast can your company move?

How quickly can you innovate?

How do you take your company’s best ideas and make them real?

One of the surest ways to generate a constant stream of above average profits is to generate a constant stream of great new products. An innovative new product, such as the iPod circa 2002, is a perfect example. When it was new, Apple could charge a premium. Since then, Apple has continued to innovate, adding the mini, the shuffle, the nano, the video ipod, the itouch and iPhone. Each new product gave them a 1 to 2 year opportunity to charge another premium.

Apple has got this constant stream of innovations down to a science.

That same goal of achieving a constant stream of innovations explains why an increasingly large number of departments within Fortune 1000 companies are starting to use Joyent’s cloud computing infrastructure.

Vinnie Mirchandani over at Deal Architect has just written a great post about what these light engineering departments are doing. He calls results of their efforts LEAPs or Lightly Engineered Application Products .

The idea is simple. Get an agile team together and build a highly focused application. Maybe it is for a specific department, maybe it is a new product/service idea. Use something fast to build it. Something like Ruby on Rails.

When you are ready, don’t work to get buy in from your entire organization. Don’t fight a lengthy battle with an internal IT department that is focused on managing the infrastructure for your core systems of record. Instead, deploy the application on a Compute Cloud.

Today, a significant proportion on the new applications being deployed on Joyent fall into this category. Because you get root access to our Accelerators , you can set up all the security and access control needed to support a highly sensitive departmental application. You can takes advantage of advanced solaris security features like account audting, role based access control, and process rights management. For example many customers lock down external access to services and setup a SSH based VPN. Because Joyent offers massive scale solutions, complete with hardware load balancers, light engineering teams know that if their application takes off, we can easily support them up to millions of users and over 1 Billion page views a month.

The timing on Vinnie’s post is interesting because it directly answers a question posted by Forrester’s James Staten. He asks simply Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise? The question is answered by the fact that Light Engineering departments are already starting to use Joyent’s Cloud Computing infrastructure to deploy innovative internal and external solutions. These are not core system of record type applications. Those are still being deployed in traditional IT controlled data centers. But, there is certainly a move to use Joyent for things like innovative CMS solutions or highly dynamic Web 2.0 style apps that point back to e-commerce engines as part of their work flow.

You can read a little more about the Forrester paper is an article by C|Net’s Martin LaMonica entitled Study: Cloud computing to brighten future of data centers

How do you create a constant stream of innovation?

The business imperative that is driving the adoption of Cloud Computing is a need for constant innovation. If you are a CEO or CTO of a large company that wants to drive web based innovation, you do two things:

1) You set up light engineering teams capable of delivering new products.

2) You give them access to a flexible infrastructure that can be used to turn their ideas into reality.