November 15th, 2009

Can the Economist entirely be trusted?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:16 pm

Categories: On-demand, Utility computing

Tags: Economist, Cloud, Phil Wainewright

I think a publication with the renowned integrity and impartiality of The Economist would have the sense to put its hand on its heart and say, ‘We try our best and we’re the best there is, but no, you can’t entirely trust any source.’ But if it were put in a position of asserting its trustworthiness against alternative publications it would surely have no choice but to speak out with a resounding voice in its own favor.

Thus I ask all my readers to vote a resounding ‘no’ to the proposition in the current Economist Debate, “This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.” I’ve written here about many of the pitfalls to be avoided in the cloud, as with any computing platform, but the alternatives to a good cloud provider are far too flaky to be worth considering.

As fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani recently posted to the debate (and to his own blog), “the incumbent, on-premise establishment … can overprice, under-deliver, cause massive overruns, suck out 80% of our IT budgets for routine work — but we need to keep trusting them.” It is no surprise that the heritage of buggy, unproven and unwarrantied software that businesses and individuals have been saddled with by the established vendors over many years has led us to instinctively mistrust any computing that forces us to rely on a third party.

Yet despite our understandable caution, it is far better to trust the cloud, where security and performance are continuously open to public scrutiny, where costs can be predictably mapped to actual value delivered and where the technology is constantly kept up-to-date for no extra cost or disruption to the customer. Provided the buyer makes proper due diligence and precautions, there is in my view no alternative form of computing that is more trustworthy.

October 29th, 2009

Cloud cuts everyone's cost of ownership

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 8:14 pm

Categories: Customer experience, On-demand, Platform as a service, Utility computing

Tags: Software-as-a-service, ISV, Infrastructure, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

Speaking in the opening keynote of SIIA OnDemand in San Jose this morning, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard let slip a statistic that set several attendees a-twittering. He revealed that the SaaS provider’s multi-tenant application infrastructure supports its 2,850+ customers and 5.4+ million users on just 150 servers.

The ability to achieve such enormous economies of scale demonstrates the huge power of multi-tenancy and gives the lie to the line, so often peddled by the conventional on-premise software vendors, that SaaS is just a delivery option. SuccessFactors would not be able to run its operations with anything like the same low overhead if it had to separately maintain the ability to ship on-premise instances of its software.

The conventional software model perpetuates a scandalous wastage and duplication of resources. Every single customer of an on-premise platform or application installs their own custom implementation. Every one of those implementations builds in enough spare capacity to support unexpected usage spikes and peak load at the organization’s busiest period of the year — yet remains idle the rest of the time. Its IT staff acquire a huge store of learnings and experiences that are solely revelant to their own environment. All of those needless investments and expenses are replicated across thousands of an ISV’s customer base. The aggregate waste adds up to a burdensome cost of ownership spread across its customer.

With SaaS, the customer base shares a single infrastructure, eliminating Read the rest of this entry »

October 19th, 2009

Beware the allure of Fool's Cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:57 am

Categories: Utility computing

Tags: Innovation, Information Technology, Allure, Cloud, Cloud Platform, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Strategy, Hardware, Management

Even more insidious than the perils of Amateur Cloud (which I covered in my last post) is the allure of a phenomenon I’m calling Fool’s Cloud. The more familiar name by which this is known to many enterprises and IT vendors is ‘private cloud.’ It’s what happens when people look at the phenomenon of cloud computing, latch on to a few of its features, and implement something within their IT infrastructure that appears identical in their eyes, even though it omits some of the most crucial elements of cloud computing.

I’m not saying that privately-hosted cloud computing look-alikes aren’t useful. All I’m saying is, don’t fool yourself that they’ll deliver all the benefits of cloud computing.

What’s really insidious is the way that Fool’s Cloud deteriorates so rapidly in comparison to true cloud computing. It starts off all shiny and new, sparkling with state-of-the-art capabilities and value. But because it’s cut off from the cloud that it attempts to emulate, it quickly falls behind, tarnishing the competitiveness of your IT infrastructure and becoming as resistant to decommissioning as a lump of radioactive waste.

These captive, private clouds fall into obsolescence because they’re not exposed to the continuous, collective scrutiny and collaborative innovation of the public cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

October 16th, 2009

How to avoid the amateur cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:16 am

Categories: Architecture, Customer experience, On-demand, Service level management, Utility computing

Tags: Data Center, Data Centers, Cloud Computing, Storage, Virtualization, Hardware, Data Management, Phil Wainewright

Someone this week asked me, what’s the cloud equivalent of SoSaaS? What do we call it when people take outdated data center management practices and label them as cloud computing, even when they fall far short of what’s required? We already have the name, I replied, thanks to the events of the past week: amateur cloud.

There’s going to be a lot of amateur cloud in the market for the next few years, and businesses of all sizes will have to be intensely wary of the pitfalls when they go shopping for cloud services. Amateur cloud won’t be easy to spot, and often it’ll be operated by huge, reputable companies with long, honorable track records in computing and data center operations. In many cases, businesses will knowingly choose amateur-cloud providers for reasons of cost or habit. As a result, the transition to the cloud computing era is going to be lengthy, troubled and painful.

The past week’s Sidekick debacle has been an object lesson in the full perils of amateur cloud. The hit to the reputations and brand image of Microsoft and T-Mobile has been massive. To its credit, Microsoft has pulled out all the stops and seems well on the way to recovering the lost user data, which will go a long way towards restoring its cloud credibility. But at what cost? — not only in direct resource costs but also the unseen cost of top-level crisis management that has had to be devoted to the rescue exercise. One silver lining (though scant comfort for those who suffered directly) is that every such failure has the welcome side-effect of driving home to all cloud providers the risk exposure that amateur cloud represents. Many will now be re-examining their vulnerability and tightening up procedures or strengthening their infrastructure, all of which helps raise expected operating norms a few notches higher.

One can’t help feeling sorry for venerable, established players like IBM, berated by Air New Zealand’s CEO for last week’s data center outage, and Hitachi Data Systems, caught up in the incident that caused the Sidekick data loss. As several of the Talkback commenters to my previous post have argued, it’s not as if they’ve done anything different from what they’ve always done in the past. They weren’t even attempting to operate as cloud computing facilities (although Sidekick’s users certainly regarded it as a cloud service and trusted it as such).

Yet somehow in the space of a few short months, the world has changed. Suddenly, every online service is being measured against cloud standards. What was once Read the rest of this entry »

October 2nd, 2009

Blind to the elephant in the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:18 am

Categories: Oracle, Utility computing

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, Elephant, Larry Ellison, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Tools & Techniques, Internet, Emerging Technologies

It always happens with new technology. People can’t quite get their heads around it, so they latch on to some feature or another and assume they’ve understood the whole thing — a modern replay of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

So we have Larry Ellison in fine form at the Churchill Club last week, the audience apparently rolling in the aisles in this edited video clip at his assertion that cloud is just “a computer attached to a network … it’s databases, and operating systems, and memory, and microprocessors, in the Internet.”

We also heard last week that Oracle, the company Ellison leads, is planning to offer the option of subscription-based pricing for its midmarket JD Edwards line of business software, responding to customer demand for more SaaS options. (Whether the plan will see the light of day is another matter; the proposal is stalled while Oracle co-president and finance chief Safra Catz crunches the numbers).

Meanwhile, any number of software vendors are adopting Amazon EC2 or similar platforms as a new cloud-era take on what I used to call SoSaaS. As Gooddata founder Roman Stanek wrote yesterday, this is a backward step:

… a new way how to ‘throw software over the wall’ again. Many software companies have repackaged their software as Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and relabeled them as SaaS or Cloud Computing. It’s so simple, it’s so clever: Dear customer, here is the image of our database, server, analytical engine, ETL tool, integration bus, dashboard etc. All you need it is go to AWS, get an account and start those AMIs. Scaling, integration, upgrades is your worry again. Welcome back to the world of enterprise software …

So what is SaaS and cloud computing? Is it Read the rest of this entry »

September 14th, 2009

Sage dresses SoSaaS in cloud clothing

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:53 pm

Categories: CRM, SFA, Utility computing

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

The software industry’s equivalent of ‘mutton dressed as lamb‘ is a phenomenon I tagged in the early days of this blog as SoSaaS: Same old Software, as a Service (SoSaaS). This is when established software vendors “take any old software package, run it up on a server in a data center, do a bit of financial engineering so customers can pay on a monthly plan, and hey presto!” They imagine they’ve introduced a competitive SaaS offering, but all they’ve really done is demonstrate their complete failure to understand what SaaS and cloud computing is all about.

Rather than fading away, this kind of self-delusion has been given a second wind by the advent of cloud computing, and is now more prevalent than ever. People seem to imagine that implementing a conventional software package on Amazon EC2 or some other cloud platform magically transforms it into a state-of-the-art SaaS stack. I’m afraid not.

Unfortunately, some vendors are so backwards in their comprehension of the SaaS model, they actually believe there’s some advantage for customers in perpetuating the long-winded implementations, painful upgrade paths and orphaned customizations of conventionally licensed packaged software. Here’s Sage CRM chief Joe Bergera talking up his company’s announcement today that “it is piloting a cloud computing edition of the Sage SalesLogix CRM suite for commercial availability in early 2010.” He enthuses:

“While first generation Software-as-a-Service generated a lot of interest, people will look back on this era as a period of big-iron, centralized operations that restrict the ability to customize the solutions … The next wave of Cloud Computing will benefit customers by providing a highly distributed and flexible deployment model that shifts control of the service to their favor, rather than SaaS vendors, so they can better tailor their CRM experience in a way that optimally suits their business.”

The press release goes on to reveal that what he is actually describing is nothing more than a “full-featured, single-tenant cloud edition of Sage SalesLogix using Amazon’s EC2.” Yes, this revolutionary new proposition is just a sorry pile of SoSaaS, dumped in the cloud. Go figure.

September 10th, 2009

Survival of the fit-most

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:18 am

Categories: Ecosystems, On-demand, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Web 3.0

Tags: Web, Survival, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Channel Management, Virtualization, Marketing, Hardware, Phil Wainewright

In the emerging Web era, connectedness reigns supreme. Competitive survival is no longer the preserve solely of the strong, the quick and the nimble — the attributes popularly associated with Darwin’s adopted motto, survival of the fittest. The Web emphasizes connections, sharing and community, enabling a further advance in the evolution of homo sapiens as a social creature.

In this environment, the individuals, tools and organizations best adapted to thrive are those best able to connect. Not the fittest so much as the fit-most.

This change may seem to be the consequence of technology innovation — in this case, the Web — having an impact on society. But perhaps the rise of the Web is itself a reflection of a change that was already taking shape, a reaction against the individualist creed that culminated in the 1980s notion that ‘Greed is good.’ Today we see a generational shift towards shared endeavor and a backlash against excessive intellectual property protection.

A fresh example of this emerging collaborative mindset came last week when online backup vendor Backblaze published the specifications it uses to build low-cost storage devices for its data center. Ten years ago, this would have seemed a crazy revelation of a proprietary secret. Today, it looks like a smart move because we have a better understanding of the notion of crowd-sourcing. We realize that Backblaze aims to tap the collaborative expertise of the Web community to hone and refine the savings it can make on its physical storage costs. It’s a rational decision because the company isn’t giving away the operational details of its core service offering — it may even strengthen its selling power by publicly demonstrating the viability of its prices compared to such low capital spending costs (”three-tenths of one penny per gigabyte per month over the course of three years”).

Yet making the most of the doctrine of the fit-most means overturning long-held instincts to act privately and secretly, and instead making a conscious effort to share and use communal assets, whether as providers or consumers. The pressure to conform to deeply ingrained behaviors and customs is hard to resist (Zoho recently became the latest in a long line of SaaS and cloud providers to cave in to the clamor for a ‘private cloud’ option). We know why we want to keep things private — the arguments are well-rehearsed and almost a universal folk memory — whereas the impulse to share is much less well documented and understood.

Sharing and community are nevertheless at the heart of our success as a species, and ’survival of the fit-most’ is all about replicating that success in the cloud computing environment. Instead of trying to do everything alone as a hermetically sealed entity, the cloud encourages us to reach out and utilize the services of others that do what they do better than we can do it ourselves — which is exactly how human civilization works. We are all individually stronger and more potent when we rely on each other.

In cloud computing, survival of the fit-most emphasizes attributes such as: Read the rest of this entry »

August 28th, 2009

When is a cloud not a cloud?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:42 am

Categories: Amazon.com, Architecture, Utility computing

Tags: Cloud, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Internet, Hardware, Phil Wainewright

The answer to the question I’ve posed in my title is blindingly obvious, yet it seems to be one of those things that never hits you between the eyes until one day, something makes you stop and just think it through.

For myself, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the past 6-12 months, and recently I delivered a talk on the topic at CloudCamp London in July, called Captive Clouds Can’t Connect (the clue to the answer is in the title). I’ve been thinking about it some more this month because OpSource [important disclosure] is paying me to write a white paper related to the launch today of its enterprise offering. Together with Amazon’s announcement less than 48 hours ago of its Virtual Private Cloud, it has all brought this topic to a head.

So what is the simple, blindingly obvious answer to my headline question? It’s this:

A cloud is not a cloud when it’s not in the cloud.

OK, evidently, to make some sense of this answer, you need to be clear in your mind what you mean by ‘cloud’. A lot of people — often for quite understandable reasons — feel very uncomfortable about the ramifications of moving computing to the cloud, and therefore they try and confine it within familiar boundaries where they feel more comfortable. They persuade themselves that, so long as they include some of the recognized characteristics of cloud computing, such as a virtualized infrastructure and some notion of metered usage, then they’ve still captured its essence, without having to stray beyond the confines of their existing enterprise infrastructure.

So let me take you back for a moment to the origins of the term ‘cloud’ and show you the flaw in that line of thinking. In the early days of the Internet, when people first started connecting their computer systems to this unknowable, amorphous, globally shared, wide area network, they Read the rest of this entry »

July 1st, 2009

WebEx augurs ill for Cisco's cloud ambitions

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Ecosystems, Platform as a service, Utility computing, Web 2.0, WebEx

Tags: WebEx Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Phil Wainewright

Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today’s Cisco Live event hasn’t matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I’m highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of ‘intercloud’ interoperability standards — ending lock-in by individual cloud providers — and talks about ‘federation’ between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I’m struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I’ll discuss below.

First, there’s what Cisco calls the ‘IT Foundation layer’ — the underlying hardware and virtualization platforms on which cloud services run. Cisco expects to play a big role here with its Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m sure there’s a huge potential market for UCS among enterprises, telcos, IT services providers and many other established data center operators that want to transition their existing enterprise infrastructure into more of a quasi-cloud environment. But I can’t help thinking that most of them are missing the point when they try to scale up familiar enterprise technology instead of scaling out to a more web-scale architecture.

I’m also suspicious that Cisco is falling into the trap of over-engineering UCS so that it ends up too-clever-by-half to really deliver the promise of cloud computing. I would be more convinced if Cisco had productized the existing web-scale infrastructure that it acquired with WebEx. But just as Microsoft has developed its Azure cloud platform with a whole new set of design objectives rather than productizing the existing web-scale infrastructure it had already built for its Live properties, so Cisco is shoe-horning UCS Read the rest of this entry »

February 26th, 2009

Another outage, another dashboard

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:09 am

Categories: Amazon.com, Customer experience, Google, Salesforce.com, Service level management, Utility computing

Tags: Google Inc., Software-as-a-service, Dashboard, Outage, Status Dashboard, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Manufacturing, Emerging Technologies

From the I-told-you-so department. Finally, Google has followed a long line of leading SaaS and cloud providers trying to break into the enterprise market in introducing a status dashboard for Google Apps.

I called on Google to do this in August last year, warning that if the company didn’t do so, it would not only be bad for Google’s reputation but also for the rest of the industry:

“If it doesn’t take suitable action, the snowballing subscriber volumes of businesses that are signing up for Google Apps are going to get a poor introduction to SaaS, which is no good for Google and bad for the industry as a whole.”

So, yesterday there was a Gmail outage and today, guess what? Google rolls out a status dashboard it just happened to have waiting in the wings. Why oh why do providers always, always have to wait until after a damaging outage before they do this? Wait, didn’t I already say that exactly one year ago? Read the rest of this entry »