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 22nd, 2009

Box.net wants to be the Switzerland of data

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:41 am

Categories: Collaboration, Integration, On-demand, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Storage, Box.net, Sales Force Management, Security, Sales, Phil Wainewright

Today, online file storage and collaboration provider Box.net launches integration with Salesforce.com. As TechCrunch explains:

“… businesses will be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to quickly access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their CRM … businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net …”

The move is a first step in a strategic direction for the company, its VP of marketing Jen Grant told me on Tuesday: “We’re moving towards a broader look at how the cloud can help a business. Now we really want to start connecting clouds together,” she explained. “Today, we’re connecting the Box.net cloud with the Salesforce.com cloud. In the future, we’re looking at partnering with many other services.”

The unlimited storage is a key part of this offering, which is designed to act as a single, permanent home for users’ data as they move between online applications. If Box.net succeeds in its ambitions, it will become the “Switzerland” of online data storage — the one neutral location where everyone feels their online valuables are safest.

Of course one vital component in winning that role will be the trustworthiness and reliability of Box.net as a cloud repository (especially in light of recent failures elsewhere). With $14.6 million venture funding to date (almost half of it in a round announced last month), Box.net is not yet in the topmost league of cloud providers so may need to continue its expansion before it can afford a fully redundant architecture. But convenience and competitive pricing are also important considerations in the small-to-mid-size business market that produces most of the customers of this service. Here’s what Grant told me in an email when I followed up our conversation on Tuesday with a question about security and disaster recovery at Box.net:

“Here is a detailed outline of our current security measures in place: https://enterprise.box.net/features/security

“In the short term, we’re adding encryption on files at rest (among other initiatives) in addition to the encryption in transit that we already have; you can expect this to be complete in the next few weeks.

“For the long term, we’re currently undergoing the SAS 70 certification process within the company, which will ‘officially’ endorse our standards regarding both security and privacy. This is above and beyond security implementations that most companies have on an internal server or collaboration tool.

“… keeping our customers’ data safe and secure IS the core of what we do, and we know that our very business depends on us maintaining that level of security. Because of that, we spend a great deal of time thinking through how to implement and maintain the highest level and latest advances in security technology.”

Box.net has produced a useful YouTube video explaining how the new Salesforce.com integration works.

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 »

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 »

June 10th, 2009

Wookey: SAP's future is on-demand

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:42 am

Categories: ERP, Ecosystems, On-demand, SAP, Uncategorized, Web 2.0

Tags: On-demand Application, On-demand, SAP AG, John Wookey, Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Phil Wainewright

Citing the spectre of long-forgotten titans of previous generations of business application software, SAP executive VP John Wookey set out the software giant’s commitment to embracing on-demand applications in a keynote presentation at the OnDemand Europe conference in Amsterdam today:

“On demand is the next stage in the evolution of application development … It is absolutely essential from SAP’s perspective that we embrace this change,” he said. “On-demand is what our customers are looking to invest in. If we do our job well and listen to our customers, these are the applications we have to be delivering. We have to drive to leadership in on-demand applications.”

As previewed by articles in the WSJ and FT today, Wookey (pictured) outlined the company’s strategy for bringing on-demand applications to SAP’s existing customer base of large enterprises. This is separate from the more widely publicised Business ByDesign offering being developed for midmarket companies and the BusinessObjects on-demand portfolio, although lessons have also been learned from those initiatives, he said. As EVP of large enterprise on-demand, Wookey heads up a team with a portfolio of on-demand products targeted at large enterprises, including CRM, strategic sourcing and expense management.

The core of the strategy, targeted for availability mid next year, is an architecture where new on-demand applications can be deployed instantly because they’ll inherit the existing policy settings from the installed Business Suite infrastructure. “The on-demand applications we deliver can behave as an extension of the Business Suite,” Wookey explained. “[Customers] just turn it on. They don’t have to redefine anything to the on-demand service.” The principle has already been tested with Read the rest of this entry »

May 27th, 2009

Intalio takes multi-tenancy on-premise

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:07 am

Categories: Architecture, CRM, On-demand, Platform as a service

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., On-demand, Customer, Intalio Inc., Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Phil Wainewright

I’ve been writing about hybrid cloud models recently, making the case for extending cloud infrastructure on-premise in certain circumstances. I did so with foreknowledge of an announcement that BPM vendor Intalio has had in the works for several months. Last Tuesday, I was in Palo Alto for the public unveiling of Intalio’s new application platform, which is available both on-demand and on-premise — but in a model that reverses the normal polarity of such offerings and challenges the received wisdoms of cloud purists and on-premise diehards alike. It does this by taking some of the core principles of multi-tenancy and moving them on-premise. Read James Taylor for a detailed and thorough write-up of the product announcement. Perhaps most surprising, this challenge to on-demand orthodoxy is led by Intalio’s founder and CEO Ismael Ghalimi, a long-term evangelist for the on-demand model and organiser of the annual Office 2.0 conference, a mecca for advocates of on-demand computing.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, there are two equally valid ways of achieving multi-tenancy. The first, espoused and evangelized by Salesforce.com, is to share as many tenants as physically possible on a single instance, right down to and including the database layer. The second model, adopted by NetSuite, SuccessFactors and many other leading SaaS players, is to replicate instances across large numbers of low-cost commodity hardware machines, sharing databases for smaller customers but having larger accounts run on their own virtual database instance. This is still multi-tenancy because the replicated database schemas are identical. There is nothing that ties any customer to a specific instance, leaving the provider free to distribute and manage instances in whatever way it sees fit.

What Intalio has done is to borrow this principle of replicated instances and apply it to its on-premise implementations, as Ghalimi explained last Tuesday:

“One of the lessons that we’ve learned in the past 20 years is that letting customers change application schemas is a very bad idea. We’ve learned that lesson and the way we implemented our CRM application is, you cannot change the standard objects. All you can do is expand them. You can add fields, but you can’t remove them. You can rename a field but you can’t change its logical name. So any modifications customers do will not break the schema. We’ve learned a lot from Salesforce.com. They did a really great job there.”

This is a perfect illustration of a principle that — in opposition to Microsoft’s ‘Software-plus-Services’ rhetoric — I prefer to call services-plus-software. In other words, architect for the cloud first, and then (if you must) Read the rest of this entry »

May 5th, 2009

Web giants and the helpless individual

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:42 am

Categories: Amazon.com, Customer experience, Google, On-demand, Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Web, RSS, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Phil Wainewright

Like many users of technology today, I have developed an essentially dysfunctional approach when things don’t work properly: I do whatever it takes to avoid fixing it. I wait to see if it ‘fixes itself’. I make a workaround. I live with it till the next upgrade. Or I just use something else. It’s only when I absolutely can’t function without resolving the problem that I take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and embark on the quest to find a solution.

My worst nightmare is to find myself in the kind of situation frequently described in anguished blog posts by victims of Google, Amazon or eBay glitches and terminations. I’ve been collecting a few samples recently:

• When Amazon fails, it does so big time ranted fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett last weekend after an ill-fated attempt to buy a high-spec digital camera from the online retailer. A security exception on his order triggered a defective process that closed his account with no viable means of getting it reopened.
• Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead wrote Louis Gray back in March when a glitch at Blogger wiped out his entire RSS feed, including all archives (among other casualties of the same glitch, Kent Newsome provided an entertaining and informative account).
• Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don’t use Google Checkout for your business wrote Amy Hoy later the same month when her website’s Checkout account was disabled with no notification, no explanation and no appeal.
• Don’t ever use Google Apps for anything important, wrote an anonymous poster to the Business of Software discussion community in January after being “stuck in this kafkaesque place” that is Google Apps support. [Updated 5 May at 22:52. An earlier version of this item incorrectly attributed the comment to Joel Spolsky, who is not having any problems with Google].
• Hello, Google, is anyone in there? I wrote last summer after several incidents when Googla Apps users were locked out of their accounts with no information.

As is the norm when these mass-market automated online services fail, the victims Read the rest of this entry »

April 2nd, 2009

SaaS channel models morph into shape

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:08 am

Categories: CRM, ERP, Ecosystems, Integration, NetSuite, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, NetSuite Inc., Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Sales Force Management, Emerging Technologies, Sales, Phil Wainewright

Mark down NetSuite’s announcement today of SuiteCloud Connect for Salesforce.com (all Techmeme coverage) as a victory for the cloud over individual vendors. Sure, this is still about who owns the biggest slice of the cloud (did you notice the resemblance between NetSuite’s SuiteCloud diagram and a pie-chart? Guess who got the lion’s share). But it represents a blow for Salesforce.com’s own-the-whole-ecosystem AppExchange model, just as much as it’s a step back from NetSuite’s former rhetoric about standardizing on a single vendor’s suite for all your needs. [Disclosure: NetSuite is a current client and I've also done work recently for Salesforce.com and Intacct].

It signals that intermediaries are going to have more power in the cloud and we’re not going to end up having to choose between just a handful of mega-vendors. Instead, interoperability (dictated by the cloud, not a self-appointed elite) is going to be the dominant meme and vendors will have to empower third parties to link their application platforms wherever customers can find the most value. The open cloud wins the day.

There’s a strong message emerging too about the importance of channels in delivering cloud and SaaS solutions to customers. While NetSuite is clearly motivated by being able to market its ERP and ecommerce platform to Salesforce.com’s SaaS-savvy customer base (and who in this market doesn’t covet a slice of that action?), it’s increasingly relying on a number of different kinds of channel partners to reach the market. At first glance, the partner ecosystem for SaaS doesn’t look that much different from the channel partners that traditional software vendors have worked with. But the detail of how they execute is much changed. 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 »