August 24th, 2009

Packaged software, an accident of history

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:28 am

Categories: Business applications, Business models, Development, Software licensing

Tags: Software, Accident, Tools & Techniques, Management, Phil Wainewright

Everyone takes it for granted that the natural order of business is to sell software just as though it were a physical product, shipping it out as a manufactured item and charging a one-time perpetual license fee. In contrast, selling software as a continuously updated service, on a pay-as-you-go subscription, seems like an anomaly. But the accepted status quo is in fact merely a quirk of history, brought about by government action.

It was a ruling in an anti-trust suit against IBM in 1969 that gave birth to the independent software industry, as Rubicon Consulting’s Michael Mace relates in a fascinating blog essay published in May. Independent software vendors (ISVs) are so-called precisely because they were defined by their autonomy from the vendors of computing hardware platforms such as IBM. And since the platforms were physical products, the newly independent software vendors adopted the same product metaphor.

In other words, the genesis of the packaged software model and its one-time perpetual license fee was a government-engineered fork in the history of software. Or as Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software, put it when he and I were chatting about this when we met in November last year, the concept of software that everyone takes for granted today was designed by an IBM committee at the behest of Washington DC.

That hardware product metaphor also gave rise to the whole waterfall methodology of defining and building complete software products and then launching them into production as finished artefacts, Martens pointed out. Hardware, of course, has to be built like that, but software doesn’t, as agile development practices (such as those supported by Rally’s application lifecycle management software) allow a more iterative approach. When combined with a SaaS delivery model, the feedback loop Read the rest of this entry »

March 31st, 2009

LongJump puts PaaS on-premise

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:03 pm

Categories: Development, Platform as a service, Software licensing

Tags: Phil Wainewright

In a move that will horrify purists but bring a smile to the face of many conventional ISVs desperate to launch SaaS offerings of their own, platform-as-a-service provider LongJump is today making its platform available as customer-installable licensed software.

The move is designed to meet demand from enterprises and ISVs that want to run their own cloud development platform rather than entrust their fate (and a monthly per-seat subscription) to a cloud provider. But it will prove controversial with rival platform-as-a-service providers such as Salesforce.com and Zoho, whose argument has always been that the unique benefits of their multi-tenant platforms can only be realized by running on the cloud provider’s own shared infrastructure.

LongJump takes a different view, and will offer its software for customers to install under either single-tenant or multi-tenant licenses, for an annual fee ranging from $60,000 to $240,000 per CPU. Customers will also be able to choose their preferred degree of multi-tenancy, for example whether to assign an individual database to each downstream customer, or how many different application instances they operate (allowing them, for example, to operate regional instances to cater for variations in data privacy requirements). LongJump is restricting support to its preferred operating environment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the mySQL database, and customers will have to keep pace with the company’s quarterly release cycle, as it will only support the current and most recent version.

The most unique element of LongJump’s proposition lets developers adopt a hybrid strategy, using LongJump’s servers as a development or pilot platform while maintaining larger-scale production applications on their own in-house servers. This means an enterprise can Read the rest of this entry »

February 28th, 2009

Appirio, shafting the global SIs

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:09 am

Categories: Development, Ecosystems, Platform as a service, Venture capital

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

VCs placed another $10 million bet this week that global SIs will crumble in the face of the enormous change being wrought on their businesses by the advent of SaaS and cloud computing. Jeff Richards of GGV Capital, who is joining the board of cloud integrator Appirio after the VC backed a new $10 million funding round, told me this week that Appirio is “building a leadership position” at the expense of established big-name integrators. [Disclosure: Appirio is a recent client].

“Appirio has very large customers that are signing on for multi-million dollar contracts,” he said. “When a company like Japan Post wants to do something [in the cloud], they’re turning to Appirio and not to the global SIs.”

A recent blog posting by Appirio’s CEO Chris Barbin discussed this phenomenon under the heading, Short the Global SIs, and inspired my more aggressive title, above. Forget shorting, these BigCos are utterly shafted (along with some others I could mention). Barbin recounts several examples of how woefully out of their depth they show themselves to be when pitching for SaaS and Paas implementations, summing up:

“Global SIs such as Accenture, Cap Gemini, TCS and others are still shackled by their dependence on old-school, on-premise partnerships with SAP, Oracle & Microsoft. While they may be paying lip service to cloud computing, most offer SaaS-based solutions at 2-3x the total cost necessary, are nowhere to be found in the relevant communities and developer ecosystems, and have few true SaaS enterprise reference customers to speak of…

“… enterprise executives are simply bypassing the Global SIs because of their bloated costs models, old school methods, multi-billion dollar partnerships with legacy vendors, or systemic lack of knowledge of cloud computing products and services.”

This at a time when many large corporations are starting to get deadly serious about Read the rest of this entry »

February 27th, 2009

Automated PaaS migration now a reality

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:08 am

Categories: Customer experience, Development, Ecosystems, On-demand, Platform as a service

Tags: Platform, PaaS, Migration, Coghead, Cloud Computing, Phil Wainewright

The first reports of Coghead customers having successfully transferred their applications to a new platform are starting to come through. Caspio, which was first off the blocks with the offer of a migration deal within hours of Coghead announcing its shutdown, is today unveiling its first completed migration. Hawaii-based health agency Quality Behavioral Outcomes took just days to migrate several “mission-critical” database applications and has already decided it likes the new platform better than Coghead, according to Todd Addleson, director of behavioral services.

That may seem like pretty fast work — a tribute to the rapid time-to-result that such platforms are designed to achieve, and which adds new meaning to the running (escaping?) figure in the Coghead logo — but other providers have been unveiling automated tools that instantly convert a Coghead application definition file into their own application format. As I noted in my previous post about the risks of PaaS lock-out, the Coghead platform stores the metadata that defines each application in an XML file, which users can download from their account. Upload those files to rival PaaS platforms TeamDesk or Wolf Frameworks and they’ll be automatically transformed to work with the new platform, “without any manual intervention & restore all entities, screens, business rules, complete application design & even import data thru’ an automated utility,” as Wolf’s press release puts it.

Of course, Caspio has probably been using similar tools behind the scenes to help its customers get moving quickly (its ‘Coghead transition program‘ includes free support and “expert consultation services” as well as two months’ free usage). As situational apps expert Jonathan Sapir noted in a comment on my earlier posting, “Most of these platforms store the application definition in XML and use a runtime engine to interpret the XML in order to render the application. So theoretically, if there was a way to convert from one vendor’s XML to another you could get to no-lock-in nirvana (or better still, have an open standard for this).”

To see vendors already doing this gives me a useful proofpoint with which to refute Microsoft SaaS architecture expert Eugenio Pace, Read the rest of this entry »

February 23rd, 2009

Coghead's demise highlights PaaS lock-out risk

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:22 pm

Categories: Development, On-demand, Platform as a service, SAP, Web 2.0

Tags: Software, Platform, PaaS, Coghead, Cloud Computing, Tools & Techniques, Management, Phil Wainewright

The problem with PaaS, as Coghead’s customers are now discovering to their dismay, isn’t so much lock-in as lock-out. They knew they were locked-in to Coghead’s platform, but that’s nothing unusual in the world of software development. In exchange for the convenience built into a specific platform, developers willingly give up the freedom to move elsewhere. With conventional software, they know they run the risk of ending up on a dead-end platform that’s no longer supported because the vendor lost interest or went out of business (or in the case of open source, the platform simply falls out of favcr). But although that’s a disappointment, it’s not a disaster.

What’s different with PaaS is that you don’t always have the option of staying on. Coghead’s new owner SAP will impose a lock-out from April 30, leaving all its current customers suddenly in the impossible position of having around eight weeks to completely rewrite all their applications on an entirely new platform. It’s small comfort to know that your data’s accessible if all the automation you’ve built up to process it is about to disappear. I would be crushed right now if I had built any kind of functionality using Coghead (and I’ll be honest, I had been considering it). The long list of rival PaaS providers offering a new home for my application would be small consolation.

What this highlights is the lack of any standard for transferring not just data but application logic between such platforms. As Coghead’s erstwhile CEO Paul McNamara ruefully admitted to InformationWeek last week, “Customers can take the XML out that describes their application, but the reality is that only runs on Coghead, so customers will need to rewrite their app with something different.”

There’s never been a compelling need for this type of capability on conventional software platforms because there’s less urgency to move functionality elsewhere. With PaaS, the lack of such mechanisms could become a huge barrier to adoption as customers Read the rest of this entry »

February 11th, 2009

Sage shows why bigcos can't be trusted with SaaS

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:42 am

Categories: Development, ERP, Europe, Security, Uncategorized

Tags: Security, Accounting, Software-as-a-service, Software Company, Sage Live, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

The first of my promised SaaS stories from Europe ends with an uplifting David-and-Goliath twist, but is first and foremost an object lesson in how not to introduce a SaaS offering, courtesy of one of the world’s leading small business software vendors, UK-based Sage. I know I ought to start with one of the many positive stories about SaaS in Europe, but I’m steamed up about this one, so here goes.

After a claimed 18 months in development, Sage at the turn of the year unveiled the beta of Sage Live, which combines a free-of-charge invoicing application and a simple £10-per-month accounting product for small business owners. Although to my mind I found it a bit too simple from an accounting point of view (no multi-currency support for example), it has some interesting Web 2.0 features such as integration with Google Docs and Google Calendar, keyword search across the application, support for RSS feeds in the dashboard and a Blackberry mobile client. Online accountancy watchers Ben Kepes and fellow-Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett both gave it positive reviews, while noting that this was a beta release and Sage was keen to listen to feedback and evolve the product.

But two weeks ago, Sage Live went dead after serious security flaws were exposed in the product, leading the company to shut down the beta trial. This is where the David-and-Goliath angle comes in. The flaws were exposed by the blogging founder of a tiny SaaS rival to Sage. Duane Jackson, CEO of UK-based KashFlow, which just last week celebrated passing the 2,500 customer mark, decided to have a detailed look at his rival’s offering and immediately blogged about what he discovered:

“Almost unbelievably, [Sage Live] show[s] your password on-screen when you log-in — in plain text. It’s sent to [Sage's] central ‘passport’ service using a GET rather than a POST — so your password is actually in the requested URL which is displayed in the status bar … Make sure no-one is looking at your screen when you log in …

“A little bit of prodding around the site and I found myself looking at … pages that only authorised people should be seeing.”

Russ McRee, a security analyst with Microsoft Online Services and (via his personal blog) a deadly scourge of flawed SaaS security practices, found additional problems and reported them to Sage, as did many others over the following days. A week after Jackson posted his findings, Sage took the service completely offline and it has not yet been restored.

I’m not privy to what went on within Sage during the development and unveiling of its new offering, but it seems clear that Read the rest of this entry »

November 17th, 2008

It's different, developing to the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:25 pm

Categories: Development, Microsoft, Platform as a service

Tags: Cloud, Microsoft Windows, Cloud Computing, Operating Systems, Software, Phil Wainewright, Developer, Platform, Podcasts, Collaboration

One of the hidden secrets of platform-as-a-service is how dramatically it changes the development process. Instead of expending energies on building and managing infrastructure, developers can concentrate on the end result, and they can get there a lot faster because of the collaboration and resource sharing the cloud platform allows. This was one of the big takeaways from some research I did recently for Appirio (disclosure: for a fee) that resulted in a white paper and webinar.

But don’t take it from me. Amitabh Srivastava (pictured), corporate VP of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, says the same about developing on the cloud. “It was a mental switch — it’s a very different mindset,” he told me in a recent phone interview. Formerly codenamed ‘Red Dog’, the Windows Azure cloud platform was developed on the Azure cloud — what you might call eating your own ‘Red Dog’ food — and Srivastava told me that not having to worry about infrastructure is one of the key benefits of using the cloud.

“IT at the moment spends all its time managing the machines,” he said. “In Windows Azure, we manage the service, not the machine. That’s how you drive the total cost of ownership down. That’s how you address the expense.”

Srivastava was talking after we’d finished recording a podcast interview for my new blog on The Connected Web, published at eBizQ. The podcast is in two parts: the first covers Azure’s origins and enterprise focus, while the second looks at the Azure roadmap and what developers can do with it today. During the interview he mentioned the team doing its development on the cloud platform.

The other benefit of cloud development that he singled out was the way that having a shared platform simplifies the workflow around collaboration. “Collaboration becomes easy,” he said, because developers can bring up an instance at any time and share what they’ve been working on. “You have this infinite pool of stages available to you.”

October 27th, 2008

Windows Azure: Microsoft mainstreams the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:22 pm

Categories: Development, Microsoft, Utility computing

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Strategy, Software, Management, Phil Wainewright, Mesh

Two years ago, Microsoft boosted the fortunes of on-demand vendors everywhere when it announced the ‘live era’ even though it had practically no live offerings to speak of. It’s pulled off the same trick with today’s Azure announcement (more coverage on Techmeme).

Cloud vendors everywhere (Amazon in particular) will be delighted that Microsoft has endorsed cloud services (anointing them the “fifth generation of computing” according to a slide presented today by Bob Muglia SVP of Microsoft’s servers and tools business) — while unveiling a cloud offering that’s available today only as a ‘Community Technology Preview’.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what I see of Microsoft’s cloud vision. It’s the vendor’s ability to execute that I wonder about. I liked Muglia’s demonstration of cloud status feeds showing up the Systems Center dashboard and his talk of being able to set up reporting services. This is the kind of enterprise-friendly management and visibility that all cloud providers should be enabling. I was impressed to hear so much airtime devoted to the knotty problem of federated identity. When Windows Azure chief Amitabh Srivastava talked about the underlying architecture, I instantly jotted down an approving verdict: “A classic, loosely coupled, contract-based services environment. Services are defined in XML — all classic cloud architecture.”

It’s the execution issues that take the gloss off it. Read the rest of this entry »

August 29th, 2008

Mashing up the client to the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:36 am

Categories: Architecture, CRM, Customer experience, Development, Integration, Mashups, On-demand, Rich Internet Applications, RightNow, Web 2.0

Tags: Client, Web Browser, RightNow Technologies, Office 2.0, Mashup, Framework, Collaboration, Phil Wainewright

Next week, I’ll fulfil a long-running ambition when I attend the Office 2.0 conference for the first time — I’m moderating a panel on Platform as a Service, with speakers from LongJump, Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and Zoho.

The event is now in its third year and is one of those events that brings together everyone of significance in its field — in this case, the fast-growing category of business applications served from the cloud. Naturally, that makes it a key event in the SaaS calendar, although many of the participants are a little wary of the SaaS label, which they feel is too closely associated with old-school vendors and other players who don’t fully ‘get’ the new cloud paradigm. This is definitely an event where you have to be unambiguously multitenant and cloud-centric — there’s no room for hybrids here. Like many of us, be there or be square.

One point on which I personally differ from Office 2.0 orthodoxy, however, is on the matter of client software. Organizer Ismael Ghalimi has walked the talk, having begun using (and documenting his use of) browser-based Office 2.0 applications more than two and a half years ago. His Rules for Office 2.0 are adamant: “No client application other than a web browser … No files on personal computer … No browser extension or plugin …” not even Java or Flash, if they can avoided.

My own take is that many applications work better when they can take advantage of the compute resources of powerful clients, and that cloud-serviced client platforms such as Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Google Gears are the way of the future (albeit with some caveats, which I’ll come back to later). I say ‘cloud-serviced’ because it’s important that the software for these client platforms should be managed from the cloud. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of leaving users struggling with shrinkwrapped software installs.

But I do think that there are many occasions when users want to be delighted and supported by a client experience that the browser alone simply can’t deliver (and sometimes they want or need to work offline, too). I’ve written about several vendors that exemplify this approach: SlideRocket, Entellium (see disclosure), DreamFactory (see disclosure) and RightNow.

This week, CRM vendor RightNow has brought out a new release of its software and several of the new features impinge on this question of whether smart clients have a role in the Office 2.0 landscape. Mashups are also an important part of this release, and the way RightNow has implemented mashups cast some additional light on the smart client issue. Read the rest of this entry »

August 20th, 2008

SaaS mashups shape up

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:38 am

Categories: Development, Ecosystems, Integration, Mashups, Platform as a service, SFA

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, Amazon.com Inc., PayPal, Mashup, Xactly, Appirio, Collaboration, Phil Wainewright

Much has been written about the promise of mashups to become serious business tools — as well as the obstacles and challenges they must overcome along the way. It’s only now, more than six years since the notion of mashups first came to the fore (they acquired the name a little later), that SaaS vendors and integrators are beginning to realize the full potential of the mashup for enterprise applications. As this first wave of commercial enterprise mashups comes to maturity, it is making clear once and for all the mashup’s seminal role as the disruptive motor at the heart of the on-demand model.

As a case in point, take Xactly’s 5-way mashup, announced Monday (image courtesy of Xactly). Using Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform as the foundation, the SaaS vendor has mashed up its own sales compensation application with Amazon.com’s retail catalog, the Paypal payment system and an iGoogle gadget. The mashup creates an enterprise-class incentive rewards management and fulfilment application that at the same time is economical enough to be affordable for smaller businesses — subscriptions will be $10 per user per month, at the end of a 90-day free-of-charge launch window that ends December 1st.

Using the application, an organization can set up award targets to incentivize its sales, marketing or contact center teams, with points instantly convertible to retail purchases from Amazon’s online catalog. The awards are paid for out of a Paypal account, which the organization maintains in credit to match its awards budget. Users can view their incentive targets and tallies from within Salesforce.com, or using the iGoogle gadget.

This five-way mashup is a substantive proof point for applying mashups to enterprise applications. It pools the disruptive economics of at least three separate giants of on-demand: Amazon, PayPal and Salesforce.com. Will any ZDNet reader dare argue with me that you could/should do this in-house and do it better and cheaper? It’s simply not tenable. Nor is it any more practical to think of implementing a similar mashup to Amazon, Paypal and the rest from an on-premise application — leaving each individual customer to negotiate their own gateway access to Amazon, Paypal and the rest, along with the necessary security precautions. It’s a recipe for multiple implementation disasters.

In this respect, the Xactly mashup makes the case for multitenancy more convincingly than any other example I’ve come across. It’s crystal clear that making any one of these five components single-tenant instead of multi-tenant would instantly destroy Read the rest of this entry »