Category: Mashups
October 16th, 2008
Integration migrates to the cloud
Integration vendor Cast Iron, which for years has offered its product packaged as a hardware appliance, this week unveiled a cloud-native integration service. The introduction of Cast Iron Cloud is the culmination of a transition begun earlier this year when Cast Iron began offering cloud hosting of its upgraded appliance product. Customers can now choose between an on-premise appliance, a dedicated cloud-hosted appliance or the multi-tenant cloud service.
Organizations that still have a lot of their own server infrastructure will continue to opt for the on-premise appliance, VP of product marketing Chandar Pattabhiram told me in a briefing last week. The cloud service has been created to serve what Cast Iron sees as a growing market of ‘SaaS-centric’ organizations — mostly smaller businesses — that use several different cloud services and have little or no servers in-house. “If you’re a SaaS-centric enterprise, you’ll probably want to choose integration-as-a-service in the cloud,” he said.
Cast Iron is also betting that SaaS vendors will increasingly be under pressure to show they can offer integration from the get-go. It has simultaneously unveiled a partner program that encourages SaaS vendors to pre-integrate their products and earn a Powered By Cast Iron accreditation. The program is open to ISVs, system integrators and VARs.
“The aim is to take integration off the table for them,” said Pattabhiram. SaaS customers are wising up to the likelihood that they’ll want to integrate cloud-based applications to each other and to on-premise systems, and they want to know the vendors are ready to support that, he explained. “They’re saying, show us how you can integrate into my environment.” If vendors can’t readily answer that question, then it makes it a whole lot harder to close the sale, he added.
Cast Iron is offering a sophisticated range of partner support services under its program. Read the rest of this entry »
September 4th, 2008
Zuora gets PayPal president on board
Zuora, the SaaS billing startup that was pitching itself as “the PayPal of online business services” when it launched in March, has snagged PayPal’s president and former CTO, Scott Thompson, as a board member, it announced yesterday. The addition is a feather in the cap for the young vendor, which only went live with the first version of its product in May, yet already says it has signed 17 customers. (Fellow ZDNet blogger and EI Dennis Howlett wrote up the product here in July).
I had a quick call with Thompson (pictured) yesterday to find out what had drawn him to get so closely involved with Zuora. He cited two motivations.
One thing that came out very strongly was that Thompson loves the pay-as-you-go model of on-demand services like PayPal and SaaS, based on his experiences on the enterprise buyside in senior technology roles at Visa and Barclays Global Investors. “There was a recurring theme,” he explained. “You were always buying everything ahead of what you needed for where you were, in order to allow the business to scale.
“All these enterprise software vendors sell you a chunk of stuff, most of which you don’t want,” he said — and it becomes a burden, he added. “Your business is slowed down because you’re dragging along this big anchor.”
Thompson is delighted to see the pay-as-you-use model being extended into aspects of SaaS infrastructure like billing. The other strong aspect of the on-demand model that he sees Zuora exemplifying Read the rest of this entry »
August 29th, 2008
Mashing up the client to the cloud
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
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 »
August 4th, 2008
SuccessFactors plugs Google Apps into HCM
Google has teamed up with SaaS vendor SuccessFactors to bring its cloud-based collaboration suite into the human capital management (HCM) arena. In a low-key announcement today, SuccessFactors launched five separate Google integrations that customers can choose to activate in its talent management software, including integrations with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Also linked are Google Maps and Google Book Search.
Earlier this year, Google teamed up with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM vendor, for the launch of Google Apps for Salesforce. Although the integration to SuccessFactors is not as deeply embedded as in Salesforce (there’s no link to Gmail, for example), it has the potential to touch even more users. If early adopters find value in tapping the Google integrations, SuccessFactors claims a 4-million-plus user base that would have a new reason for accessing Google Apps. At the same time, SuccessFactors, which had its IPO last November, stands to gain from becoming the first HCM application to link to Google Apps, which, as BusinessWeek reports today, has already signed up more than 500,000 organizations.
Rob Bernshteyn, VP of global product marketing and management at SuccessFactors, said that SuccessFactors views the integration with Google as a differentiation from competitors that don’t have the same shared services architecture. “We’re the only vendor in HCM that’s truly multitenant. We’re the only one that has one code base,” he said. “The huge advantage this gives us — that we’ve only just started to realize — is the opportunity to take advantage of web services out in the Internet cloud.”
The Google integrations are just the first of many with other providers, he continued: Read the rest of this entry »
July 29th, 2008
Serena Software's dash to SaaS
Two years ago, private equity firm Silver Lake Partners paid $1.2 billion to take formerly Nasdaq-listed Serena Software private. Last year, a new management team took the reins and forged an ambitious plan to transform the software tools company into a SaaS powerhouse. But they’ll have to be quick. “When you go through an LBO [a leveraged buy-out like the one performed by Silver Lake] you have 4-5 years to treble your value,” explained René Bonvanie, senior VP of worldwide marketing, when I met him earlier this year. “We have to run fast.”
Serena — which acquired its UK-based rival Merant in 2004 — has a strong cash flow of around $100 million a year from its established products, which are mostly used to keep mainframe applications up-to-date. The plan is to use that cashflow to fund investments in its new SaaS product lines and thus drive rapid growth of an all-new SaaS business.
Today the company launches release 2 of its first SaaS product, the on-demand project and portfolio management (PPM) tool Serena Mariner. As befits a SaaS product, Mariner is now on a quarterly release cycle, having first launched in April. There are two other products in Serena’s SaaS portfolio: its Mashup Composer, which empowers business users to connect up applications and data sources, is currently in beta and will go to general availability in September; while at the end of the year Serena will bring out an application lifecycle management tool based on the Scrum agile development methodology (John Scumniotales, one of the originators of Scrum, is Serena’s VP of product management).
Key to today’s PPM release is an upgraded user interface designed to be more user friendly, which is essential to reach the broader market Serena is now targeting with its SaaS offerings. Last week CEO Jeremy Burton told me that, in its previous on-premise guise, the application had acquired Read the rest of this entry »
April 11th, 2008
Is Facebook a PaaS contender?
Nate Westheimer’s observation about Google’s App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not Amazon set me thinking. Should Facebook’s F8 platform be considered a contender in the platform-as-a-service wars?
Since my perspective is firmly on PaaS in the business world rather than as a consumer play, Facebook isn’t really on my radar (I’ve always firmly resisted any passing urges to set up an account), but that doesn’t mean it should automatically be discounted. After all, many individuals and some organizations do use Facebook for business purposes. Most famously, Serena Software, which last year adopted Facebook as its intranet. I was somewhat skeptical when I first heard this but the company’s SVP Rene Bonvanie assured me when we met a few weeks ago that 740 out of 820 employees are active users, which is a lot better participation than Serena’s former intranet ever managed. The Facebook platform of course constrains applications into a social networking framework, but that’s no different from the functional constraints imposed by a lot of other PaaS application builders (the topmost of my five-layer categorization of PaaS). Marc Andreessen’s Ning is another platform in the same mold.
The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise. Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off. Bonvanie shrugged when I put this point to him, saying that very little of what Serena’s employees post to the Facebook intranet is proprietary to the company, but at the same time he admitted that Serena stores its company confidential documents elsewhere than Facebook, so its role as an intranet platform is more limited than you would typically look for in an enterprise setting.
Where Facebook will suffer in competition with Google App Engine is in developer mindshare. The App Engine is going to take a lot of the shine off Facebook as the hot new platform for budding developers to try next [update: Niall Kennedy has posted a useful developer's-eye assessment of App Engine]. It could be an especially potent competitor if Google Read the rest of this entry »
February 27th, 2008
SaaS and the global virtual stack
When people argue that SaaS is just another deployment option for software, they really are missing the bigger picture. It’s as hopeless as a carriage-builder in the early 20th century saying that using motors instead of horses is just another locomotion option for carriages. It ignores the wider revolution that’s going to transform the way software gets used, just as the internal combustion egine revolutionized the way people moved themselves and their goods about.
The bigger picture is this: the entire framework of how businesses consume computing and thus automate their information and communication processes is moving to a services model that runs on the global Web infrastructure. Within that software stack, SaaS is a component. But not as an alternative to conventional on-premise packaged software. I don’t believe that conventionally licensed packaged business applications will feature in the stack at all. Here’s why.
First of all, let’s define the stack. The diagram below is based on a slide I recently presented at an Oracle SaaS seminar for ISV partners.
The stack specifically addresses the issues that SaaS providers need to be aware of, but there’s nothing in here that shouldn’t be in the architecture of any enterprise doing business in the Web era — more on that point after a quick run-through of the five layers in the stack, working from the bottom up. Read the rest of this entry »
October 29th, 2007
A pain in the -aaS
The tendency to slap ‘-as-a-service’ on the end of anything that’s offered as a shared service is now starting to rival the over-used ‘2.0′ meme, notes SaaS Week’s Krissi Danielsson. She’s assembled a quick glossary of more than eighteen different variations, ranging from the faintly bizarre (’Ethernet-as-a-Service’!?) to the utterly world-weary (’Whatever-as-a-Service’).
The good news is that the concept of delivering business technology in a services idiom is hitting the mainstream. The bad news is that slapdash use of contrived modifiers like -aaS, -oriented and ‘2.0′ makes it all sound like gobbledegook to the average Joe in the street. This kind of specialist jargon only serves a purpose when the people using it are familiar with the context that gave it meaning. Now that these ugly suffixes have crossed over into the mainstream, their linguistic contortions are obscuring a simple truth: It’s all about services, doh! Here’s my take:
“The common unifying factor here is a services idiom, in which providers autonomously deliver results according to contracts. That describes SOA and SaaS and Web 2.0.”
So why can’t we just talk about ’services’ and be done with it? Businesses have always delivered services — from long before software and the Web came along to help them do it better, cheaper, faster. Do we really have to call that business-as-a-service? Service-oriented business? Business 2.0? Let’s not make it such a pain in the -aaS. This is how forward-looking organizations do business in the modern world.
PS: I’ll be discussing the rich lexicon of aaS-oriented 2.0, among other matters, in a webcast discussion tomorrow with fellow ZDNet bloggers Dana Gardner and Joe McKendrick (who once courted infamy by invoking the tautology Mashups as a Service (MaaS)).
October 23rd, 2007
SAP SRM, another brick from the wall
The contrast could not be more stark between yesterday’s launch of Coupa’s Amazon-hosted SaaS e-procurement system and SAP’s decision on Friday to cancel the upcoming release of its spend management product. Another beneficiary of SAP’s misfortune is SaaS vendor Ketera, which earlier this month added a new supplier management application to its spend management suite.
Ketera’s recent product launch history makes a telling comparison to SAP’s woes with the canceled SRM 6.0. In the time it has taken SAP to fail to deliver its much-needed release, Ketera’s rival product has gone through two release cycles, gaining a completely new user interface and extending it into a major new area of functionality. I wrote about Ketera’s consumerist makeover to its user interface last year — a release that brought Amazon.com-like ease of use to the process of raising a purchase order. This is the exact opposite of what SAP’s customers are now stuck with for two more years, as spend management expert Jason Busch explains on his blog:
“SRM 6.0 was to address many of the weaknesses of 5.0 which included a kludgy UI, a challenging interface that made it hard to search and find POs, a cumbersome process to define filters, and workflow which forced users to go through multiple clicks to launch actions (I once heard it referred to as the ‘anti’-one-click-Amazon).”
Busch provides another unflattering comparison in his coverage of Coupa’s launch:
“… comparing SAP SRM 5.0 to Coupa is like doing a side-by-side with a green screen mainframe application next to a client/server one.”
Busch has speculated that the reason for SAP’s ignominious withdrawal of its release is overengineering. The curse of established enterprise software vendors, of course, is that the more sophisticated their solutions become, the more complex they have to make them if they are to persuade customers to upgrade. SAP will argue (and probably believes, too) that upstart SaaS vendors like Coupa and Ketera won’t make serious headway into their customer base because their products lack all the enterprise-class credentials that its own software delivers. It will worry far more about having opened up a weak flank where its arch-rival Oracle will be able to attack it.
In the case of Coupa, SAP might well point to Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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