January 20th, 2010

Why Microsoft and Intuit need each other's clouds

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 5:09 pm

Categories: Development, Ecosystems, Integration, Intuit, Microsoft, Platform as a service, Service level management

Tags: Software, Intuit Inc., Platform, Microsoft Corp., Software Platform, Tools & Techniques, Management, Phil Wainewright

Today’s announcement that Microsoft and Intuit are to marry up their cloud platforms with a software development kit makes perfect sense to me. Some of my ZDNet colleagues have been less impressed — Dennis Howlett calls it more PaaS to put in your aaS environment while Mary Jo Foley says it’s to shore up Redmond’s small-business cloud play. I don’t argue with either of those viewpoints (TechMeme has more) but I think there’s a lot more to it. To understand why, we need to delve under the covers of a cloud platform.

Last year, I started a long-term project to develop a framework for evaluating cloud platforms (disclosure: Intuit funded some of the initial work, which was published as an analyst report in October, Redefining software platforms, but it’s progressed independently since then). It’s timely today to discuss some of the core principles and what they tell us about the marriage brokered between Windows Azure and the Intuit Partner Platform.

Cloud platforms share many of the ingredients of conventional software platforms, but they add several crucial new ingredients. One thing that hasn’t changed is the need to build momentum among developers and customers for the platform. Intuit and Microsoft have plenty of both, which guarantees attention for what they’ve announced today. But the tie-up between these two giants is important too for the light it shines on the special characteristics of cloud platforms and how they change the game in so many ways for ISVs, developers and platform vendors. Read the rest of this entry »

December 28th, 2009

Cloud delusions at the turn of the decade

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:40 pm

Categories: Amazon.com, Architecture, Microsoft, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Year in Review

Tags: Cloud, As-a-service Business Model, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Software As A Service (SaaS), Hardware, Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

Continuing my series of posts about the big themes on this blog over the past year, I now turn to the topic of cloud computing. My views on how to implement cloud and SaaS have hardened considerably over the course of 2009. Halfway through the year, I took a conscious decision to promote multi-tenancy as the only acceptable architecture for cloud and SaaS infrastructures. You might expect that from someone who makes a living consulting for multi-tenant vendors. But I’ve deliberately chosen a hardline and controversial stance, intended as a counterpoint to the many siren voices that argue for a more hybrid approach.

I still see migration to the cloud as a journey, but I’m concerned that too many people, especially with the advent of platforms like Windows Azure, have decided they can achieve all the benefits by going just some of the distance. This is a risky self-delusion, and the more people fool themselves this way, the more the cloud model will be discredited, not because of inherent weaknesses, but through implicit association with the disasters and disappointments these half-hearted implementations will bring in their wake. There are several different cloud delusions to beware of.

Amateur cloud. The year’s third most highly trafficked post on this blog was The cloud, no place for amateurs. It picked out two examples of established, reputable computing companies that had let down customers who were depending on them for computer operations — in one case the victim was a single large airline, in the other it was a large number of mobile phone subscribers. Many reputable providers (and their customers) believe that enterprise size and computing experience are in themselves guarantees of the reliability of any cloud services they operate, whether for enterprise or consumers. This is a gross self-delusion. My follow-up post gave advice on How to avoid the amateur cloud.

Firewall jealousy. A related delusion is to put more trust in your own organization’s security measures than in those of a cloud provider’s — even if the cloud provider employs many more security staff in round-the-clock shifts, has significantly more security expertise and operates much better processes based on the highest level of best practice. This ‘not my firewalls’ mentality — a variation on ‘not invented here’ — is especially egregious if your Read the rest of this entry »

December 18th, 2009

The battle for your email in 2009

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:12 am

Categories: Collaboration, Google, Microsoft, Social computing, Year in Review

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Microsoft Corp., E-mail, Online Communications, Phil Wainewright

In my next few posts over the coming holiday period, I’m going to highlight some of the big themes that have been running through this blog over the past year, as well as flag up some important emerging trends that are going to be big in 2010. There are several stories I didn’t get the chance to write up, too, and I’m hoping to mention some of those in the course of the next few weeks.

Looking back, it’s obvious that one titanic struggle has loomed large over the SaaS and cloud landscape: the battle for your email. The year’s most highly trafficked blog post here was the story in March, Microsoft pumps cloud, trumps Google with GSK, when Microsoft Online Services revealed a 100,000-seat deployment by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) of its hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting service. Of course, any headline that mentions both Microsoft and Google is always going to attract a lot of traffic, but the icing on the cake here was some rombustious comments by Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services, about Google’s enterprise credentials, dismissing Google Apps as “a consumer service that’s not enterprise-ready.”

There’s no doubt that Google desperately wants to be taken seriously as an enterprise-class provider. The Google Enterprise team, whose product portfolio includes Google Apps and extends across the search appliance and a couple of other offerings, spare no expense to get the word out about their corporate wins. I was astonished a few months back to have a courier hand-deliver a press release the day Google announced a 35,000-seat roll-out of Google Apps at business services conglomerate Rentokil Initial. The box also contained a white mouse made out of candy, which, since it was lying on its side (see pic), I assumed was deliberately designed to represent a dead mouse (Rentokil is best known for pest control). My tweeted reaction inadvertently pushed the boundaries of good taste, incorrectly describing it as a “candied dead mouse,” which would have been totally gross.

Yet there’s still a question mark over whether Google is spending as much on actual investment in beefing up its Google Apps infrastructure as it is on promoting news of its customer wins. I know Google can point to its huge, seemingly infallible search and ad serving leviathans as living evidence of its planetary-scale infrastructure capabilities (in stark contrast to Microsoft’s recent 45-minute outage of its Bing search engine). But in a mirror-image of Microsoft’s Bing problems, Google is Read the rest of this entry »

December 7th, 2009

Windows Azure and the many faces of cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:26 am

Categories: Microsoft, Platform as a service, Utility computing

Tags: Asset, Platform, Use Case, Microsoft Windows, Enterprise, Windows Azure, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil Wainewright

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to satisfactorily define cloud computing is that people have many different needs and expectations from a cloud platform. To start a conversation about cloud — especially one that seeks to evaluate the relative merits of competing cloud platforms — without first identifying what needs are being met is to invite misunderstanding and confusion. So before I come to my analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform and the hidden danger lurking there for many ISVs looking to embark on a SaaS strategy, I’m going to segment cloud computing into several important but separate categories.

First and foremost, we need to be clear whether we’re talking about cloud as a service or cloud as an infrastructure asset. I often find myself halfway through a conversation about cloud computing, in which I’ve made the natural assumption that we’re talking about delivery of cloud computing as-a-service by a third-party operator, when it suddenly dawns on me that the other person has been talking about buying software and hardware in order to implement their own cloud infrastructure.

There’s a huge cognitive gulf between these two perspectives. In my view, most enterprises that invest in their own cloud computing projects are on a Fool’s Cloud mission. Unless you intend to set up as a cloud provider in your own right, it’s unlikely in the long term to be a good use of your funds. But I have to recognize that my point of view currently represents a tiny minority compared to mainstream opinion. Most enterprises are convinced the best way to take advantage of cloud computing is to implement it themselves. Many will find they achieve significant short-term savings from doing so, simply because moving to a virtualized data center architecture with automated provisioning is a much more cost-effective means of rapidly provisioning new servers than what they used to do. The newly launched Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) at the US Department of Defense is a good, topical example. But it’s not a variety of cloud computing I want to discuss here — in fact, in many ways, I don’t define it as cloud computing at all because it’s behind the enterprise firewall rather than immersed in the public cloud.

So far, Microsoft has resisted siren calls to package up Windows Azure as a software bundle that enterprises can deploy in-house. Thus it fits firmly into the third party, as-a-service cloud platform category. Within this category, I see four distinct sets of use cases, Read the rest of this entry »

November 21st, 2009

Taming the Chatter cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 5:14 am

Categories: CRM, Collaboration, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Social computing

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Collaboration, Social Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Marc Benioff, Chatter, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

Not attending Dreamforce, it appears I missed a telling moment, the irony of which I would have enjoyed had I been there to witness it in person. It seems Salesforce.com has announced a new feature named after that most social of activities, Chatter, which aims to bring to the enterprise the functionality seen in social network tools such as Twitter and Facebook. But as Marc Benioff later told a gathering of press and analysts, it’s not a social network, oh no.

As I wasn’t there I can only go from what’s been reported. But it seems Benioff (no doubt guided by his marketing advisors) has decided to follow the advice promulgated at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco — by no less a figure than Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee — not to overuse the word social in front of business software buyers when talking about, erm, social computing. “I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to managers in enterprise organizations,” McAfee warned his audience two weeks ago.

Benioff this week was devastatingly forthright about why social isn’t going to figure in his sales team’s lexicon when they tell customers about Chatter. According to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha (my emphasis added):

“Salesforce was careful to position Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a ’social this or social that’ because there’s such a glut of social networking tools, he said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software. ‘We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,’ Benioff said.”

So there we have it. Chatter’s going to be positioned as a collaboration tool, because that’s what customers are willing to pay for. I can still see problems ahead for this product, on three fronts, but let’s deal with that positioning question first, because I have quite strong views about it.

Interestingly, Microsoft seems to share no such qualms Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2009

Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:13 am

Categories: Business models, Collaboration, Google, Microsoft

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., Microsoft Online Services, E-mail, Pricing, Public Relations, Groupware, Collaboration, Marketing Research

While most observers portray Microsoft’s sortie into online email and collaboration services as a titanic battle to keep Google off its productivity applications turf, the real target of this week’s price reductions is IBM’s Lotus unit. In a briefing earlier this week, Ron Markezich, corporate VP, Microsoft Online Services told me that most of his team’s customer wins are at the expense of the IBM division: “Seventy-five percent of our enterprise customers are coming from a non-Microsoft platform — predominantly [Lotus] Notes.”

The half-price reduction for hosted Exchange seats (from $10 to $5 per month) and a one-third cut in the cost of the full BPOS suite (from $15 to $10) is designed to keep those deals flowing through. IBM earlier this year introduced its own hosted LotusLive iNotes service at an aggressive $36 per user per year. Microsoft’s old pricing was at a level destined to give prospects pause for thought. At $60 per year, it’s close enough to raise fewer objections. The lower pricing will surely help, too, in those cases where Google’s $50-a-year service is the competition.

Interestingly, we now have a market price established for online corporate email services in the $35 to $60 per year range (indicative of a new price range for all categories of enterprise software?). As Microsoft VP Chris Capossela told CNET’s Ina Fried, “it’s the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at … We’re pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge.” You bet.

Microsoft execs were happy enough to focus on Google when it came to throwing brickbats this week. Every briefing seems to have included a drive-by shooting directed at Google. “It takes more than a few billboards to win enterprise accounts,” Markezich told me, in a reference to his rival’s current ‘Going Google’ ad campaign. “There’s been a lot of investment in billboards. I question how much investment there’s been in enterprise capabilities.”

There’s also been a concerted effort to question the size of Google’s paying customer base. While Gmail is hitting the volume mass market, Microsoft currently has the edge in large enterprise accounts. Google spent a lot of PR dollars to promote its recent win of a 35,000-seat account at Rentokil Initial, along with its 30,000-seat contract with City of Los Angeles. Microsoft Online Services is currently scoring much larger wins, including a 110,000-seat implementation at pharma giant GSK, a “large number” of which are already deployed, Markezich told me. He also disclosed the existence of a much larger, as yet unnamed customer, currently “in the midst of deployment” to more than 300,000 users.

October 12th, 2009

The cloud: no place for amateurs

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:20 pm

Categories: Customer experience, Microsoft, Service level management, Workday

Tags: Workday, Outage, Amateur, Data Centers, Manufacturing, Cloud Computing, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Phil Wainewright

The boss of Air New Zealand has given us a convenient term for companies that can’t get to grips with the realities of delivering computing as a service: “Amateurs”. His reported comments were addressed to IBM, which failed to restore operations at a mainframe data center in a responsive enough fashion after a major outage on Sunday:

“In my 30-year working career,” he reportedly emailed the hapless vendor, “I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers.”

T-Mobile is another reputable company left looking amateurish today after the catastrophic loss last week of all user data stored on its Sidekick service. But the real amateurs behind this story appear to be Microsoft and Hitachi, who are believed implicated in a server failure that took out both the production and backup databases on the storage network where Sidekick data is stored.

To read a contrasting story that shows how cloud outages get handled professionally, check out Michael Krigsman’s post last week about the recent 15-hour outage suffered by on-demand ERP provider Workday. Here, too, a network storage device caused a total meltdown, shutting itself down when it detected a corrupted node in a backup disk. Workday avoided Sidekick’s fate by invoking its disaster recovery plan. It avoided IBM’s fate by acting rapidly and going out of its way to keep its customers informed.

As I’ve often written in the past, big, established companies frequently over-estimate their competence at cloud computing and SaaS, simply because they fail to realize it’s far more than just a repackaging of what they already do. Unfortunately, their inability to grasp the emerging as-a-service business model and the demands of cloud-scale computing leave them performing like amateurs. The pity of it is, their arrogance and incompetence undermines trust in all cloud computing providers, even those that take their responsibilities seriously.

July 8th, 2009

Microsoft, hoist by a Chrome petard

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:30 am

Categories: Architecture, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Netscape Communications Corp., Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, Web Browsers, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Internet, Software, Phil Wainewright

As one Talkback commenter recalled during the discussion of my post earlier this week on free as a business model, Microsoft long ago used free as a weapon to capture the nascent Web browser market:

“Remember in 94 when Microsoft suddenly realised they had completely missed the internet boat? Netscape was THE browser, Microsoft didn’t even have a browser. Solution? Freemium it! Microsoft went to Mosiac … Then they shafted Mosaic and Netscape all in one go by giving the browser away ‘free’. Mosaic, who did all the development effort for what is now IE, were shafted. Netscape were also shafted. So there you have a lesson on how ‘free’ is done.”

Now Microsoft is shafted by the same tactic (or, in the Shakespearian idiom, ‘hoist by his own petard‘ — a petard being a medieval word for a bomb). Google’s new Chrome OS (see Techmeme discussion) will be a free-of-charge, open-source competitor to the Windows operating system, which is such a cashcow for Microsoft that its license fee is routinely described as a ‘tax’ on PC owners.

I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft worked with Intel and Compaq to make an end-run around IBM back in the late 1980’s, sabotaging the larger vendor’s abortive attempt to create a new PC operating system called OS/2 that would be a successor to the older PC-DOS developed for IBM by Microsoft. Windows triumphed over OS/2 because IBM moved too slowly and was too internally focused on its own roadmap for developing the PC to understand Read the rest of this entry »

April 23rd, 2009

Microsoft's software-plus-services disinformation

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:56 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Software, Microsoft Corp., Tools & Techniques, Servers, Management, Hardware, Phil Wainewright

My blood boils every time I hear some Microsoft executive crowing about its so-called ’software-plus-services’ model. Microsoft’s FUD around S+S is deliberately muddling up two very different things. I fumed when I read this comment in an interview last week by Chris Capossella, senior VP of the group that oversees Office, in which he singles out Google’s use of Gears technology to enable offline use of its cloud-based applications:

“I thought the whole point [of the software-as-a-service model] was that I didn’t have to download anything,” Capossella said. “These guys are totally adopting the software-plus-services approach, but they just aren’t using the term. And no one’s calling them on it.”

This is so lame as a line of attack, and yet it’s a favorite at Microsoft, as if Google’s decision to take advantage of the compute power that’s there on the client justifies in one fell swoop not only Microsoft’s entire legacy stack of desktop-bound applications and operating software but also the whole gamut of its extended server family. Extending cloud-based services so that they’ll run locally in a few limited use cases is in no way equivalent to Microsoft’s policy of encouraging its customers to keep buying and upgrading their installed base of server and desktop software in return for assurances that the vendor has a strategy of offering the “choice” of cloud-based equivalents.

My opposition to the ’software-plus-services’ mantra is that it puts the cart before the horse. If you’re going to do cloud computing right, you have to start with services. I wouldn’t be debating this with Microsoft if Read the rest of this entry »

March 2nd, 2009

Microsoft pumps cloud, trumps Google with GSK

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:50 am

Categories: Collaboration, Europe, Microsoft, Service level management

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Glaxo SmithKline, GSK New, Service Level Management, Cloud Computing, It Operations, It service Management, Phil Wainewright

Announcing a 100,000-seat deployment by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Online Services — the software vendor’s hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting division — today stepped up its validation of cloud applications at the same time as making Google Apps’ 15,000 seats at biotech leader Genentech look small by comparison.

Not only that. Ron Markezich (pictured), corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services, was scathing of Google’s efforts to make headway in the enterprise market. “Google we really do not feel is ready for the enterprise,” he said in a call briefing bloggers on the announcement an hour ago. “They’re offering three-nines SLA and they’ve missed three of the last six months,” he added, referring to last week’s Gmail outage and earlier incidents. In a sideswipe at Google’s offer of a 15-day credit for last week’s outage, he went on to add that Microsoft maintains its services at four-nines availability, while backing up its three-nines SLA with financial penalties: “We don’t just give service credits, we give hard dollars if we miss an SLA.”

He went on to dismiss Google in terms that made the search and contextual advertising giant sound like little more than a minor irritation in Microsoft’s competitive landscape. “Pretty much all our major customers are trialing Google Apps, but they’re buying Microsoft Online Services,” he said, reeling off a list of blue-chip names that have recently signed up for Microsoft’s online applications — Phillips, Ingersoll Rand, Pitney Bowes, Aviva. Those others who had chosen to go with Google had made a poor choice, he went on to imply. “They’ve just chosen to take email and use a consumer service that’s not enterprise-ready,” he said.

The GSK news has been timed to coincide with the launch of Online Services in nineteen countries worldwide (also see Mary Jo Foley’s write-up), along with the release of the Office Communications Online instant messaging and presence service ahead of its original schedule. The new services are Read the rest of this entry »