The future of cloud computing is not the public cloud, the private cloud or hybrid clouds. Such discussions focus too much on delivery methodologies and not enough on what users care most about: access to the resources they need to do what they want and need to do.
From that perspective, the future is one of extreme personalization. Each authorized user only wants to see what they want and need to do their jobs well and successfully, on whichever device or devices they happen to have. And each user wants this regardless of which particular part of any particular cloud happens to host each resource each user wants and needs.
No pressure. But no company can or should attempt to promise or deliver such personalization without adequate management and security. For that way lies madness, or at least some very likely corporate leadership changes.
Here's an example of how to achieve extreme personalization while avoiding potentially career-limiting decisions: VMware's Project Horizon. The goal: managed, secure access to any authorized application or resource, by any authorized user, from any supported device. The first stages: VMware's Horizon App Manager, plus the company's acquisitions of SlideRocket (cloud-based presentations), Zimbra (cloud-based, enterprise-class e-mail) and most recently, SocialCast (cloud- or premise-based, enterprise-class collaboration).
The still-evolving VMware solution set enables users to see "storefront-like" portals for access to the applications for which they are authorized, while enabling corporate IT departments to control said access at pretty granular levels, and to extend incumbent security models to embrace cloud-based resources. Users get extreme personalization, while IT gets to sleep more soundly and spend more weekends away from the office or the data center.
Other vendors, notably Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, are working on and/or promising and/or delivering slivers of similarly promising approaches to extreme personalization. Expect to see more and more offerings from more and more vendors, promising to combine simplified user access to cloud- and premise-based business resources with truly effective management and security. Fortunately, VMware has the pedigree and deep pockets necessary to establish a significant "first/early mover" advantage, and to give business decision makers solution elements with which they can and should start exploring extreme personalization now.
Showing posts with label PaaS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PaaS. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda: the Dortch on SaaS 3-Q Interview
Greetings. I’m refining and revising an interview format I first borrowed/adapted from my friend and colleague Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation. Today’s 3-Q Interview is with Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda. Apprenda sells software that helps other software companies to deliver SaaS/cloud-based solutions more easily, economically, efficiently and rapidly. Sinclair has some interesting things to say to companies seeking to deliver or to deploy SaaS/cloud-based solutions, as you’ll see right now!
Q1: What is the single greatest challenge to success for software providers seeking to deliver SaaS/on-demand solutions?
A1: Easily, it’s understanding the technical and operating transition that a product company must go through to become a successful and profitable service provider. Software companies that sell on-premises products are not accustomed to offering a service that costs money – they’re used to selling perpetual licenses that have no unit cost associated with the license. As SaaS providers, they’ll be paying for servers, bandwidth, staff, and a number of other things. How efficiently they deliver their software to leverage these costs will play into determining how profitable they are. For example, choosing to not have a multi-tenant architecture could have dire economic consequences on a unit cost level.
[Editorial Aside: there is a debate in the software industry about how relevant multi-tenancy – the ability to support multiple separate groups of users with a single copy of an application – is to cloud computing and SaaS. I recommend that you read a 2008 ZD Net blog post by SaaS/cloud veteran Phil Wainewright, “Why Multi-tenancy Matters.” I also recommend a February 2010 Information Week blog post, “Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud,” by Alok Misra, who works for a company that provides cloud-based applications and SaaS enablement services. Without getting to far into the weeds here, multi-tenancy is an important tool for every provider of SaaS/cloud-based solutions, but is not the only way to support multiple users cost-effectively, and may not always be the best way. Back to Sinclair.]
Operationally, [those software companies] need to consider a bevy of other issues: how will I provision customers to the SaaS offering? Will they self provision? Does it require manual labor? How will I track what customer owes what money based on usage? How will I roll out an update across dozens or even hundreds of servers with minimal downtime? All of these critical considerations play into the single greatest challenge: transitioning from a product company to a service company. We work with Microsoft .NET ISVs [independent software vendors] that struggle with these questions every day, so it’s given us amazing insight.
Q2: What is the single greatest challenge to success for enterprises seeking to deploy business-critical SaaS/on-demand solutions?
A2: Establishing trust. Enterprises have built significant confidence in their IT competence, and despite carrying the costs of direct responsibility, they lower their trust [concerns] since “it’s run in-house.” Enterprises need to understand that in reality (using subjective measure) deploying a SaaS offering is safer and more trustworthy in nearly all regards. After all, do these enterprises hide their money on-premises “under a mattress” or let a third-party provider – a bank – guard their most liquid assets?
Q3: What do you see as the next "great leap forward" for the SaaS/on-demand solutions market – technological, organizational, perceptual or otherwise?
A3: I think the great leap forward will be SaaS enablement. To date, most SaaS/cloud offerings have been built as “one-offs.” That is, each SaaS company re-invented the wheel by dealing with a huge amount of SaaS-specific architecture. Technologies like SaaSGrid will define the “gold standard” of architectures by defining advanced cloud middleware, allowing companies to leverage robust SaaS stacks. This will catalyze the development of new innovative SaaS solutions by drastically reducing the amount of engineering and money spent in building pure SaaS offerings. At the end of the day, it means that the end user will have many, many more SaaS applications to choose from because someone else has helped with the architectural heavy lifting.
Dortch’s Recommendations:
R1: If you are a business technology decision makers pursuing or considering SaaS/cloud-based solutions, find a partner – a reseller or integrator, preferably one with which you’ve worked before – who “gets” your business and how SaaS/cloud solutions are evolving. If you’re a small or mid-sized business, you just don’t have the resources to devote to figuring this SaaS/cloud stuff out without help. And even if your company has an IT department, it might be worth bringing in some outside perspective, and you’re going to have to buy your solutions from someplace. It might as well be someone who knows stuff, rather than someone who just sells stuff. And if you work for a reseller or integrator, make sure your company is asking the right questions and implementing the right knowledge, policies, practices and technologies that will enable it to become such a partner – or consider changing jobs.
(In this context, I highly recommend to users, resellers and integrators the “SaaS 2.0” blog by Dan Druker of Intacct, especially the recent entries on “SaaS & Cloud Computing and the Channel.” And for what is intended as a darkly humorous take on IT teams and SaaS/cloud solutions, check out my blog post, “The Cloud? You Ain't READY for the CLOUD! (Or ARE You??)”)
R2: Once you’ve identified one or more candidate partners, as Ronald Reagan so often admonished his Soviet Union counterparts back when there was a Soviet Union, “trust, but verify.” Ask questions about multi-tenancy, data center redundancy and other critical elements of the infrastructures that will be supporting the services upon which your company relies. And ask even harder and more specific questions about your prospective partners’ relevant business experience and expertise, and their track record in helping companies similar to yours succeed with SaaS/cloud-based solutions. Make sure to record the results of these Q&A sessions, for prospective partner comparisons and because they likely each contain information you can use, no matter which partner or partners you ultimately choose.
R3: When selecting SaaS/cloud-based solutions and partners alike, focus on those that are focused on combining proven and broadly supported underlying practices, processes and technologies. Integration of new solutions and processes with the resources your company already uses and understands is paramount to the success of any new solutions, SaaS/cloud-based or otherwise. And just like you likely don’t have time to become a SaaS/cloud expert and to run your business, few if any vendors or resellers can succeed by inventing and building everything from scratch. So keep an eye on companies such as Apprenda and solutions such as SaaSGrid, of which there will be more. And keep an even sharper eye on how widely supported such solutions become, and what underlying platforms are adopted by the providers of the applications and services critical to your business. (Almost forgot: the Focus.com community is an invaluable asset for relevant observations and discussions here!)
Q1: What is the single greatest challenge to success for software providers seeking to deliver SaaS/on-demand solutions?
A1: Easily, it’s understanding the technical and operating transition that a product company must go through to become a successful and profitable service provider. Software companies that sell on-premises products are not accustomed to offering a service that costs money – they’re used to selling perpetual licenses that have no unit cost associated with the license. As SaaS providers, they’ll be paying for servers, bandwidth, staff, and a number of other things. How efficiently they deliver their software to leverage these costs will play into determining how profitable they are. For example, choosing to not have a multi-tenant architecture could have dire economic consequences on a unit cost level.
[Editorial Aside: there is a debate in the software industry about how relevant multi-tenancy – the ability to support multiple separate groups of users with a single copy of an application – is to cloud computing and SaaS. I recommend that you read a 2008 ZD Net blog post by SaaS/cloud veteran Phil Wainewright, “Why Multi-tenancy Matters.” I also recommend a February 2010 Information Week blog post, “Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud,” by Alok Misra, who works for a company that provides cloud-based applications and SaaS enablement services. Without getting to far into the weeds here, multi-tenancy is an important tool for every provider of SaaS/cloud-based solutions, but is not the only way to support multiple users cost-effectively, and may not always be the best way. Back to Sinclair.]
Operationally, [those software companies] need to consider a bevy of other issues: how will I provision customers to the SaaS offering? Will they self provision? Does it require manual labor? How will I track what customer owes what money based on usage? How will I roll out an update across dozens or even hundreds of servers with minimal downtime? All of these critical considerations play into the single greatest challenge: transitioning from a product company to a service company. We work with Microsoft .NET ISVs [independent software vendors] that struggle with these questions every day, so it’s given us amazing insight.
Q2: What is the single greatest challenge to success for enterprises seeking to deploy business-critical SaaS/on-demand solutions?
A2: Establishing trust. Enterprises have built significant confidence in their IT competence, and despite carrying the costs of direct responsibility, they lower their trust [concerns] since “it’s run in-house.” Enterprises need to understand that in reality (using subjective measure) deploying a SaaS offering is safer and more trustworthy in nearly all regards. After all, do these enterprises hide their money on-premises “under a mattress” or let a third-party provider – a bank – guard their most liquid assets?
Q3: What do you see as the next "great leap forward" for the SaaS/on-demand solutions market – technological, organizational, perceptual or otherwise?
A3: I think the great leap forward will be SaaS enablement. To date, most SaaS/cloud offerings have been built as “one-offs.” That is, each SaaS company re-invented the wheel by dealing with a huge amount of SaaS-specific architecture. Technologies like SaaSGrid will define the “gold standard” of architectures by defining advanced cloud middleware, allowing companies to leverage robust SaaS stacks. This will catalyze the development of new innovative SaaS solutions by drastically reducing the amount of engineering and money spent in building pure SaaS offerings. At the end of the day, it means that the end user will have many, many more SaaS applications to choose from because someone else has helped with the architectural heavy lifting.
Dortch’s Recommendations:
R1: If you are a business technology decision makers pursuing or considering SaaS/cloud-based solutions, find a partner – a reseller or integrator, preferably one with which you’ve worked before – who “gets” your business and how SaaS/cloud solutions are evolving. If you’re a small or mid-sized business, you just don’t have the resources to devote to figuring this SaaS/cloud stuff out without help. And even if your company has an IT department, it might be worth bringing in some outside perspective, and you’re going to have to buy your solutions from someplace. It might as well be someone who knows stuff, rather than someone who just sells stuff. And if you work for a reseller or integrator, make sure your company is asking the right questions and implementing the right knowledge, policies, practices and technologies that will enable it to become such a partner – or consider changing jobs.
(In this context, I highly recommend to users, resellers and integrators the “SaaS 2.0” blog by Dan Druker of Intacct, especially the recent entries on “SaaS & Cloud Computing and the Channel.” And for what is intended as a darkly humorous take on IT teams and SaaS/cloud solutions, check out my blog post, “The Cloud? You Ain't READY for the CLOUD! (Or ARE You??)”)
R2: Once you’ve identified one or more candidate partners, as Ronald Reagan so often admonished his Soviet Union counterparts back when there was a Soviet Union, “trust, but verify.” Ask questions about multi-tenancy, data center redundancy and other critical elements of the infrastructures that will be supporting the services upon which your company relies. And ask even harder and more specific questions about your prospective partners’ relevant business experience and expertise, and their track record in helping companies similar to yours succeed with SaaS/cloud-based solutions. Make sure to record the results of these Q&A sessions, for prospective partner comparisons and because they likely each contain information you can use, no matter which partner or partners you ultimately choose.
R3: When selecting SaaS/cloud-based solutions and partners alike, focus on those that are focused on combining proven and broadly supported underlying practices, processes and technologies. Integration of new solutions and processes with the resources your company already uses and understands is paramount to the success of any new solutions, SaaS/cloud-based or otherwise. And just like you likely don’t have time to become a SaaS/cloud expert and to run your business, few if any vendors or resellers can succeed by inventing and building everything from scratch. So keep an eye on companies such as Apprenda and solutions such as SaaSGrid, of which there will be more. And keep an even sharper eye on how widely supported such solutions become, and what underlying platforms are adopted by the providers of the applications and services critical to your business. (Almost forgot: the Focus.com community is an invaluable asset for relevant observations and discussions here!)
Monday, August 3, 2009
10 Signs that It May be Time to Consider Software as a Service (SaaS)
Greetings, and many apologies -- it's been a hectic past couple of months, and I'm now neck-deep in a consulting engagement that I'm hoping turns into a full-time job soon. Said engagement is with Focus (http://www.focus.com), which aims to help buyers of business technologies to make better, more considered purchase decisions. Anyway, I've just published my first piece of contributed Focus research, "10 Signs that It May be Time to Consider Software as a Service (SaaS)," and would be extremely grateful if you were to visit the Focus Web site to read it. It's at http://www.focus.com/ugr/how-to/hosting-bandwidth/10-signs-it-may-be-time-consider-software-service-saas/. Many thanks, and more soon, I promise!
Monday, February 9, 2009
SaaS Growth Halted Immediately as Salesforce.com Executives Flee – or Not...
“SaaS Growth Thrown Into Question,” wrote my former colleague (and, despite my past influence, one of the most insightful people I know) John Foley for Information Week's cloud computing blog last Friday.
“Shakeup at Salesforce.com,” wrote Ben Worthen for the Wall Street Journal's “Digits” blog on the same day.
“Tough Times at Salesforce.com,” wrote Jeffrey M. Kaplan for “Seeking Alpha,” a fairly cool Web site devoted to stock market opinion and analysis, just today.
Do these folks know something you and I don't? Maybe – but I don't think so.
What got them all cautious was the departure from Salesforce.com of Steve Cakebread, now-former president and chief strategy officer, and two senior sales executives, Gary Hanna and Dave Orrico. Oh, and the fact that Salesforce.com canceled its European edition of its annual multi-day tent revival/prayer meeting, Dreamforce, in favor of a free, one-day event. And the fact that Salesforce.com stock fell about 5% on a day when a lot of other stocks went up.
But seriously, if you were Steve Cakebread, which would you really rather help to run right now? Salesforce.com, from which he'd already tried to retire once, or your family-owned, high-profile, high-quality Napa Valley winery? I live in Sonoma County, which is often seen as a friendly competitor to Napa, and I know which one I'd pick – and I'm a big fan of Salesforce.com and SaaS in general.
As for Messrs. Hanna and Orrico, with all due respect, it could be and has been argued by others that there might have been too many sales executives at the company anyway, especially given the current economic turbulence.
And regarding replacing Dreamforce Europe with Cloudforce London – well, I've been saying for some time now, most recently in a December 2008 blog posting, that the big trade show is probably going the way of...well, bits on disks versus SaaS, just to pick an analogy at random.
Is Salesforce.com in trouble? I seriously doubt it. Is it facing uncertainties, and the prospects of fewer, smaller deals and even some customer churn during the next few months? Almost certainly. But when I look at the range of resources the company has, particularly its ecosystem of partners, the Salesforce.com Foundation, and the team still in place, I can't help but believe the company remains a good bet for users, partners, and even investors. Yes, there will be more competition for customer dollars, from companies such as SaaS solution provider Zoho and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) purveyor LongJump. But Salesforce.com has enough irons in enough fires, and enough bright, clever people committed to its success and that of its customers, that it will weather this storm just fine.
What does it all mean, then? If you're a user considering SaaS with little to no investment in Salesforce.com solutions, it “couldn't hoit” to look at some alternatives, including those from the two other vendors I just mentioned. If your company is already invested in Salesforce.com solutions and relationships, don't panic – just ensure your contractual terms are known, well-documented, and sufficiently favorable to and protective of your company.
And if you're wondering if overall growth of the SaaS/PaaS/on-demand software market is in jeopardy? Well, I'm still predicting growth in 2009 and beyond. It may be slower than the past few months, and it may be distributed across more companies than I and others may have originally thought. But the basic dynamics remain the same – companies want to do more with less, and SaaS and its related technologies enable that more easily and economically than almost any alternative. And Jeffrey Kaplan apparently agrees with me. In his above-referenced blog entry, he states:
“I’m convinced Salesforce.com will withstand the current crisis, just as I’m confident that the SaaS and broader cloud computing market will prosper long-term despite of today’s economic challenges. Salesforce.com is still the biggest and among the most influential players in the SaaS and cloud computing market, and I’d much rather be in the on-demand services sector than in either the housing or automotive industries.”
Mr. Kaplan adds that critical to the survival and success of SaaS companies will be their abilities to focus on tangible benefits, such as cost savings or higher sales productivity, operating efficiency, and/or customer satisfaction. These are the kinds of things you should focus on, too, if you're trying to consider or promote SaaS solutions at your company, whatever its core business or size. Meanwhile, let's stop wasting time speculating, and build better business infrastructures and service level agreements (SLAs) for managing vendor relationships effectively, while we wait for credible public statements, from Salesforce.com and elsewhere.
At least, that's what I think. What about you?
“Shakeup at Salesforce.com,” wrote Ben Worthen for the Wall Street Journal's “Digits” blog on the same day.
“Tough Times at Salesforce.com,” wrote Jeffrey M. Kaplan for “Seeking Alpha,” a fairly cool Web site devoted to stock market opinion and analysis, just today.
Do these folks know something you and I don't? Maybe – but I don't think so.
What got them all cautious was the departure from Salesforce.com of Steve Cakebread, now-former president and chief strategy officer, and two senior sales executives, Gary Hanna and Dave Orrico. Oh, and the fact that Salesforce.com canceled its European edition of its annual multi-day tent revival/prayer meeting, Dreamforce, in favor of a free, one-day event. And the fact that Salesforce.com stock fell about 5% on a day when a lot of other stocks went up.
But seriously, if you were Steve Cakebread, which would you really rather help to run right now? Salesforce.com, from which he'd already tried to retire once, or your family-owned, high-profile, high-quality Napa Valley winery? I live in Sonoma County, which is often seen as a friendly competitor to Napa, and I know which one I'd pick – and I'm a big fan of Salesforce.com and SaaS in general.
As for Messrs. Hanna and Orrico, with all due respect, it could be and has been argued by others that there might have been too many sales executives at the company anyway, especially given the current economic turbulence.
And regarding replacing Dreamforce Europe with Cloudforce London – well, I've been saying for some time now, most recently in a December 2008 blog posting, that the big trade show is probably going the way of...well, bits on disks versus SaaS, just to pick an analogy at random.
Is Salesforce.com in trouble? I seriously doubt it. Is it facing uncertainties, and the prospects of fewer, smaller deals and even some customer churn during the next few months? Almost certainly. But when I look at the range of resources the company has, particularly its ecosystem of partners, the Salesforce.com Foundation, and the team still in place, I can't help but believe the company remains a good bet for users, partners, and even investors. Yes, there will be more competition for customer dollars, from companies such as SaaS solution provider Zoho and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) purveyor LongJump. But Salesforce.com has enough irons in enough fires, and enough bright, clever people committed to its success and that of its customers, that it will weather this storm just fine.
What does it all mean, then? If you're a user considering SaaS with little to no investment in Salesforce.com solutions, it “couldn't hoit” to look at some alternatives, including those from the two other vendors I just mentioned. If your company is already invested in Salesforce.com solutions and relationships, don't panic – just ensure your contractual terms are known, well-documented, and sufficiently favorable to and protective of your company.
And if you're wondering if overall growth of the SaaS/PaaS/on-demand software market is in jeopardy? Well, I'm still predicting growth in 2009 and beyond. It may be slower than the past few months, and it may be distributed across more companies than I and others may have originally thought. But the basic dynamics remain the same – companies want to do more with less, and SaaS and its related technologies enable that more easily and economically than almost any alternative. And Jeffrey Kaplan apparently agrees with me. In his above-referenced blog entry, he states:
“I’m convinced Salesforce.com will withstand the current crisis, just as I’m confident that the SaaS and broader cloud computing market will prosper long-term despite of today’s economic challenges. Salesforce.com is still the biggest and among the most influential players in the SaaS and cloud computing market, and I’d much rather be in the on-demand services sector than in either the housing or automotive industries.”
Mr. Kaplan adds that critical to the survival and success of SaaS companies will be their abilities to focus on tangible benefits, such as cost savings or higher sales productivity, operating efficiency, and/or customer satisfaction. These are the kinds of things you should focus on, too, if you're trying to consider or promote SaaS solutions at your company, whatever its core business or size. Meanwhile, let's stop wasting time speculating, and build better business infrastructures and service level agreements (SLAs) for managing vendor relationships effectively, while we wait for credible public statements, from Salesforce.com and elsewhere.
At least, that's what I think. What about you?
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