September 6th, 2008
The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA
Over the summer the enterprise IT blogosphere was swept up in a conversation around the concepts that many are calling Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extolls a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our daily business challenges. WOA offers the exciting and fast-growth promise of the Web 2.0 world, while SOA has been seen as struggling and encountering low engagement in most organizations.
For those just joining the conversation, SOA is the most common set of top-level organizing principles and technologies that enterprises use to organize and connect their IT systems. However, SOA is increasingly in the firing line for less-than-stellar results and lack of business alignment. Few promising solutions for this have emerged lately, with the increasingly notable exception of WOA. WOA describes a compelling new focus that can address many existing SOA issues, but is sometimes at odds with traditional IT and business thinking.
Along with different technology emphasis, WOA offers a compelling new perspective on service uptake and consumption and offers potent ways of thinking about business models that can directly drive innovation and growth. Even better, we can now point to existing WOA success stories, albeit most of them in the online world. In short, SOA (of which WOA is a part) hasn’t looked this interesting in years. But like most new ideas, it inevitably faces challenges from the old guard.
For its own part, far from being a boring, back-office story about plumbing and infrastructure, SOA has actually seen better results than most of the enterprise architecture models that came before it. However, these returns have been fairly lackluster compared to what most business were actually looking for and what SOA practitioners wanted and were actively trying to achieve, certainly when any measurements of the ROI were taken. My detailed WOA overview last April tells the story: The Burton Group ultimately concluded earlier this year that “that SOA is not working in most organizations” based on extensive conversations with clients.
I’ve covered this territory a number of times in the past, most notably with an in-depth exploration of What is WOA?, but the story remains the same: WOA is being driven by the widespread success that lightweight Web services — and particularly their use in open APIs — are having on the open Web. The broad lesson that has been dawning on the enterprise architecture world this year is that this is what’s actually working in terms of what SOA has been trying to accomplish, but with a uniquely different approach.
Explore several WOA success stories and how they are driving SOA.
The tide seems to be turning in terms of the industry’s perspective of WOA as well. Respected SOA expert David Linthicum recently asked “SOA out, WOA in?” and seemed to think it was, noting it will take a long time, like SOA did, to make inroads in the enterprise despite its widespread adoption on the Internet. ZDNet’s own Joe McKendrick recently noted that “WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest” and Dave Rosenberg recently discussed WOA on CNET and took it as a forgone conclusion. And this is a key point: Many organizations I talk to are already using some WOA to some degree on the ground today, it’s just not being promoted like traditional SOA is, thereby missing the benefit of the support, documentation, guidance, management, and infrastructure/tools support needed to fully flourish.
We have started to see traditional organizations begin to offer WOA-friendly services to the world at large. For example, the World Bank recently opened its Web API to developers using the increasingly popular Mashery service, which allows an organization to outsource their WOA. Of course, WOA can be used solely inside the firewall but some of the most interesting scenarios involve integration with business partners, on demand in a very agile, lightweight fashion.
And in the end, this is the challenge. The use of WOA on the technology side is only interesting if there is support for the business for the scenarios it encourages. You could convert all your Web services from SOAP or REST and be fully ready for the resulting stream of consumer and enterprise mashups, API customers, and hundreds of new business partners, but not if you’ve not redesigned your business a bit. This is also one key reason WOA isn’t synonymous with REST. WOA is architecture, both technical and business, while REST is a style building WOA services. The implications of WOA also go beyond REST to include other Web-oriented scenarios such as widgets, browser-based interfaces, and so on.
WOA entails both technology and business change
Unfortunately, many businesses have not yet absorbed the lessons of the Web 2.0 era and still look at the Web simply as a way to deliver Web pages. This limited view and understanding of the Web’s potential means that most organizations do not have it on the radar to link themselves together in the enterprise-wide and Web-wide ecosystems of creation and integration that WOA can enable. SOA has always been about connecting systems and people together and — at long last — we have a clear path to potentially wonderful outcomes in terms of unintended uses. This includes the ability to access business opportunities inside of time windows which would previously have been unattainable with our traditional, heavyweight SOA models. But only if we truly change the way we think about how to leverage the network.
One last thing, it’s important to remember that no small system can sustain contact with a large system for very long without being fundamentally changed by it. This is what is happening with businesses (the small system, not matter how large) and the Web today (the big system.) The intrinsic nature of the Web is driving major changes in how we create network-based products and services and is inexorably turning us into Web-oriented businesses. Businesses that want to be successful on this network without understanding its fundamental nature and capabilities are only delaying the time it takes to reach the full potential the Web offers.
In this way, WOA often describes network business models (such as open Web APIs) that often seem very foreign to non-Internet businesses but are powerfully aligned with the way that the Web works. These models are almost certainly essential to be successful and flourish in the modern competitive landscape on our networks today. In this way, too many organizations will ignore adding a WOA aspect to their SOA work until it’s too late and the ability to generate strong network effects in their industry is greatly reduced.
WOA is just one of a set of transformative new distribution models for network-based systems.
So how do organizations start down this route to investigate the WOA way of doing SOA and seeing if it works for them?
Like many aspects of Web 2.0, WOA is not complex or overly expensive, it’s a way of thinking about interacting over the network and all the classic SOA principles still apply, which just create and expose them differently.
- Learn about WOA. Study the technology (HTTP, REST, syndication, open Web APIs, widgets, metadata documentation, Ajax, mashups, JSON, etc.), as well as the business and implementation side, including partner ecosystems, developer support sites, monetization, and chargebacks.
- Adapt WOA to your organization. Every organization will have a landscape of existing SOA approaches and technologies that WOA approaches will need to be added to. Furthermore, WOA does little good unless you’re willing to use it for what it does well: Provide the fuel for RIA-powered portal applications, enterprise mashups, your public APIs, and so on. Begun working through how WOA security will work in your organization (inline or through HTTPS, for example) and other key starter issues that are (hopefully) already described in your SOA governance documents.
- Conduct a pilot. Validate the items in #2 with a small pilot. Select a mashup platform that works well for your organization and try it out. WOA enables SOA to be used in a much more agile, open, and effective manner, with the right tools involved but only in an environment that supports it all the way through the “stack” from browser, server, database, development tools, and management infrastructure.
What are your thoughts on WOA? Will this finally be where the rubber meets the road for many SOAs?
September 4th, 2008
Ten leading platforms for creating online communities
Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.
Learning how to design an effective community is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years.It’s beginning to be understood that communities aren’t just for socializing but for getting things done.
The open source world has been using vast collaborative online communities to develop complex software products successfully for nigh unto a decade. That communities produce robust results is hardly news to them. So too with other early examples of community like some newsgroups and wikis, particularly Wikipedia. The rise of social networking and fundamentally user-powered Web 2.0 applications as a common daily activity has further helped move online communities into a mainstream business topic this year. Social media — and blogs in particular — are also helping raise awareness of the power and reach of community-based communication and collaboration.
Like many technology advances, network-based communities are taking a while to trickle down to the business trenches in a meaningful way, but it is now clearly getting there.
I covered some compelling examples of online customer communities in my recent best practices post and by all accounts, too many online communities today exhibit worst practices such as lack of sustained community management, a tendency to use communities for “push marketing”, cross wiring business and consumer motivations, and lastly, starting with the technology first. Part of this is that we’re in the early days yet and online communities are a new discipline for most of us, having only recently begun a large-scale move form the edge of the network and more into the center of our daily work.
That most of us are not fluent community facilitators is something that will almost certainly be addressed as a vital new workplace ability and one that we will have to acquire diligently to work effectively in the future. Those that can reach out, engage, and elicit useful participation over the network will increasingly have the advantage when it comes to achieving directed, collaborative problem solving, often known as tacit interactions.
Note that this also informs the Enterprise 2.0 story since community is a particularly important issue when we talk about the success of social software in the workplace. This is because community forms the foundation and virtual tent within which network-based collaboration occurs.
Learning how to design an effective community, whether it’s on-the-fly for a small, ad hoc team effort on an upcoming project or a large-scale, long-term customer community of millions of users, is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years. A good place to start to see the type of subject matter we have to master is the online community entry on Wikipedia. This means delving into academic subjects such community membership lifecycles (show in diagram above), Kollock’s Framework, the diffusion model of user adoption, and other esoterica.
One can also just dive into a community and learn the ropes with
August 22nd, 2008
Are we ready to declare the “time of death” for the enterprise data center?
The announcement this week of the launch of Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) has added another vital piece to the overall cloud computing picture. The EBS announcement is particularly significant since it takes the gloves off when it comes to meeting the demanding needs of enterprise class computing requirements. We can now source our software, computing, storage, and applications where it makes the most overall sense.The Elastic Block Store finally makes it practical, cost effective, and relatively easy to put traditional storage and processing of very large amounts of data in the cloud from a credible vendor.
While Amazon has been offering extremely inexpensive, highly flexible, on-demand computing power over the Internet for several years, up until now their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had a maximum associated storage capacity of less than two terabytes or required the use of their powerful but non-standard storage services, either S3 or SimpleDB. More significantly, though Elastic Compute cloud instances had decent amounts of storage for some organizations, they could not load up and run in a practical amount of time, on-demand. The Elastic Block Store now makes it possible to have dozens, and potentially hundreds, of terabytes of readily-accessible persistent network storage in a traditional format of choice, particularly relational databases, all at commodity prices.
The Elastic Block service also considers reliability and backups first class citizens (as do enterprises) and effectively offers all storage in a replicated, RAID-like environment. EBS also has an innovative snapshot capability that allows block storage to be imaged quickly onto S3, so that a time-sequenced set of backups can be created and made available whenever needed for restores.
Amazon’s CTO, the esteemed Werner Vogels, took a deep dive into the Elastic Block Service on his blog this week.
Economies of Scale: The New Cloud Commodity
Amazon has been consistent about the purpose of its infrastructure Web services from the beginning; they are committed to redefining the economics of computing by using their massive infrastructure to achieve best-of-breed economy of scale. In this, they have been quite
August 1st, 2008
Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam
The days when organizations carefully cultivated vast data centers consisting of an endless sea of hardware and software are not over, at least not yet. However, the groundwork for their eventual transformation and downsizing is rapidly being laid in the form of something increasingly known as “cloud computing.” This network-based model for computing promises to move many traditional IT capability out to 3rd party services on the network.
The promise of cloud computing has captured the industry’s imagination this year for two big reasons. The first is the growing realization that cloud computing can successfully be used to strategically cut costs and drive innovation. And the second is that current offerings are getting very close to being ready for prime-time use in enterprise environments.
When Web behemoth Google officially entered the cloud computing arena back in April of this year, the space became a hot topic in IT circles almost overnight, despite the long history of availability from major vendors such as Amazon and Sun as well as a number of pioneering smaller vendors such as 3Tera and Egenera.
Other major IT players include IBM, Dell, HP, Intel, and Yahoo are all making serious investments in cloud computing research or major infrastructure Om Malik reported this week. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley is also tracking Microsoft’s movement in this space with project ‘Midori’.
Why was Google’s entry a signature moment in cloud computing? Most likely because it brought the necessary critical mass to an industry which was growing steadily but had yet to break out into the mainstream. Google has a well-known reputation for globally scalable applications that can reliably service millions of concurrent users while successfully controlling costs and efficiency in everything from power and bandwidth to storage and processing power. So when they claimed that anyone can now “build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure” it received considerable attention.
Cloudy IT: Increase efficiency while innovating
The twin challenges of driving the high costs of information technology down while providing innovative new solutions to improve the business are two forces that often come into direct opposition in the modern IT shop. Businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive while at the same time investing in new ideas that will offer compelling new products and services to those same customers.
These two objectives come into opposition since new spending (on things like R&D) is usually required to successfully innovate while at the same time the pressure is on to provide the same services for less than it cost last year. Companies have come to expect to reap the cost dividend from trends such as Moore’s Law, outsourcing, and year-over-year productivity improvements.
Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears
July 25th, 2008
Twelve best practices for online customer communities
One of the more significant Web 2.0 trends in business this year has been the advent of the Web-based customer community, where groups of like-minded individuals focus around a brand or a set of product and services come together and interact online. Far from the cynical marketing ploy that it can sometimes seem, customer communities often sprout up on the initiative of passionate customers. Successful examples of this include XMFan around XM Radio, HDTalking for Harley-Davidson, and IKEAFANS on IKEA products.
It’s imporant to note that the communities above are vibrant, active, and absolutely not affiliated with the businesses that the communities are focused on. As a result, business are increasingly realizing they can reap benefits by attempting to foster these communities themselves, rather than hoping that a group of users will do it on their own. While this can be a risky proposition — garnering an active community of users successfully is still more art than science at the moment — the rewards are increasingly clear for those that are successful.
Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.
Despite the growing body of research and studies, exact numbers for customer communities are still pretty hard to come by yet it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse. A couple of recent examples that demonstrate the kind of customer community initiatives that are emerging include Hyatt’s new Yatt’it community for frequent travelers and the decidedly back-from-near-death Member’s Project by American Express. Both are highly produced and attractive-looking communities, especially compared with the three successful grassroots communities I listed at the beginning of this post, but are struggling for customer engagement and participation nonetheless.
Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study is getting a lot of attention. View a Slideshare summary of the findings.
What then is the secret formula for building successful communities for your customers? Certainly there are well known success stories to examine for clues. One good example is Dell’s online community which it famously used for a corporate image turnaround last year and remains one of the most highly regarded and highly trafficked customer community properties. Another is SAP’s various customer communities, with over a million registered business and technical users and a high degree of participation.
What can we learn from these success stories and a rapidly emerging set of business practices? Quite a bit as it turns out. I’ve taken as as many lessons learned as possible from the available outcomes of customer community efforts, as well as my hands-on experiences, and the synthesis forms the list that you see below. Please note that like any of my lists, it’s not exhaustive, and you are welcome to add your own in Talkback below.
Best Practices for Online Customer Communities
1. Put the needs of the community first. Communities exist to serve the needs of their members, and in customer communities businesses can elect to become close-knit participants in good standing or keep the community at arm’s length. The most vibrant communities such as Dell’s or XMFan have a good relationship with at least a few key leaders in the sponsoring organization. But making sure the community has truly free rein to serve itself — even if it ends up recommending competitor’s products in some cases or becoming a venting zone for
June 16th, 2008
Enterprise 2.0: Lively conversations driving change
Last week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston has been over for a few days and coverage continues to pour out in the mainstream press and the blogosphere, including here on ZDNet where fellow bloggers Dennis Howlett, Oliver Marks, and others have had excellent coverage. I was there early in the week and there was a palpable sense of interest from attendees to understand the current state of this emerging industry.
How well software providers address the needs of this growing marketplace is one of the open questions as a host of startups bring fresh new products that are full of the latest Web 2.0 ideas arrive on the scene, unhindered by legacy baggage. These new offerings are facing off against the “old guard” of established software vendors such as Microsoft and IBM that have enormous operational experience and an amalgam of offerings aimed at the Enterprise 2.0 audience. Unfortunately, the aforementioned baggage means they frequently lack some of the most important aspects of Enterprise 2.0 applications such as being truly social or enabling emergent structure and behavior, though the gap is also closing fairly quickly in most cases.
However, like many Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 verticals such as social networking and mashups, there are currently few market leaders and a lot of players, something that’s very common in any newly formed product space. This by itself isn’t too interesting, except for those who have made the decision to start using blogs, wikis, and other social computing tools in the workplace which, as we’ll see, is starting to happen.
What was most fascinating about last week was the stories from the field that I heard at my workshop on the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference as well as subsequently at Web 2.0 Strategies in London on Thursday where I gave a keynote and heard even more stories from those in the trenches that are grappling with Enterprise 2.0. These stories relate what people are actually facing as the forces of emergent collaboration begin to “rewire” their organizations and connection people and information together in a similar way to what we’ve seen in the Web 2.0 world, but with it’s own twist.
Get a full perspective on what Enterprise 2.0 is and why it’s important in The State of Enterprise 2.0.
As we often discuss, wisdom of crowds tells us that “all of us is smarter than one of us“, and so here’s some of the collective intelligence on Enterprise 2.0 that I
May 15th, 2008
Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature
There were a great many product announcements at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, but it was the number of announcements around Web-based mashups in particular that received a large share of attendee and media attention. By my count there were at least nine significant announcements in this space, many around the business flavor of this emerging new type of ad hoc Web applications. These are often referred to as enterprise mashups and the growing number of offerings in this space run the gamut from Web widget assembly platforms for end-users to data-only swizzlers and remixing applications created specifically for IT professionals.
Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.
And its a space that is expected to grow into a serious one in the next five years. A widely covered new report from Forrester estimates, however, that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry, depending on how you define mashups and which types of tools are included.
For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what’s facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise.
Figure 1: Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008
However, the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions. Combined with the consumer Web’s intensive focus on ease-of-use to gain adoption, and this has paved the road for low barrier, low cost effective assembly of software mashups instead of the time consuming and expensive design and coding of largely new applications. In this sense, mashups are probably the next major new application development model as well an increasingly popular approach for achieving better ROI with service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Mashup Standards Emerge: Read how a number of new mashup standards have appeared recently.
But while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the
April 22nd, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
Some of the big IT news over the weekend was the announcement that Forrester predicts that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan had the full breakdown yesterday on Forresters bullish outlook while Dennis Howlett immediately took umbrage with Forrester’s conception of the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace using a “loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything between.”
Certainly that’s the challenge of pinning down something with a term that still doesn’t have industry consensus after two years, yet seems destined to be a vitally important space that our businesses are going to be moving to over the next few years. Enterprise 2.0 itself was originally defined by Harvard’s Andrew McAfee a couple of years ago in careful detail (early timeline) about something he called freeform, social, emergent software applications (such as blogs, wikis, but many others as well.) The enterprise software industry began carrying the banner ever since, applying Enterprise 2.0 to the next generation of countless marketplace offerings, often whether or not they were any of the things that seemed to make this new type of application unique and special.
Read The State of Enterprise 2.0, a thorough summary of this new software space.
The intent of creating this new term, however, was to capture a very significant change in the way that people use networked software, regardless of it was the genuine retooling of “big box” traditional IT software suites or the infiltration of subversive Web 2.0-style consumer applications across the firewall. Careful market segmentation for research tracking purposes and the debate over the inclusion of traditional, top-down IT systems into the definition of Enterprise 2.0 can be interesting exercises. But such efforts also miss the big picture and the long-term potential of this potentially potent new generation of enterprise software applications.
In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to Read the rest of this entry »
April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA
The striking contrast between the stories that we’ve been hearing lately about the slow going of SOA initiatives in the enterprise and the vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystems similar to them on the consumer Web has been generating a lot of debate and discussion in the enterprise IT community recently. This discussion was brought into sharp relief when ZDNet colleague Joe McKendrick recently reported on Burton Group’s Anne Manes stating that it “has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations“, based on a wide ranging study they performed.
It’s become clear that the SOA world will have to change some basic assumptions.This is just one data point of many recently showing the continued shortfalls we’ve experienced in trying to get our enterprise systems to work together in the ways that we would like. Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.
Looking for answers on how to improve SOA
This has driven a search for new models since there’s little question that the core ideas behind SOA seem to be the right ones. Rather, it’s been how we’ve gone about designing and implementing SOAs that appears to be at the crux of the issue. As we look at the most successful examples of SOA actually working, we keep being drawn back to the Web itself, with companies such as Amazon and their highly successful Web Services Division (with hundreds of thousands of business consumers of their global SOA), Google and its numerous and varied open Web APIs from Google Maps to Google Data, eBay and billions of dollars in listings it generates through its public SOA, or the rise of applications like Twitter (which gets 10 times the use through its APIs than from its user inteface) and applications that are primarily used via their SOA presence. Then there is the increasingly widespread adoption by millions of users of a sort of “visual SOA” with Web widgets and gadgets as well the rapidly growing story of software mashups, aka composite applications in the SOA world. There are many more SOA-ish success stories like this on the Web, but few in the enterprise.
John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb remains the best directory for finding all the APIs that Web companies have contributed to the Global SOA. Over 700 APIs are listed currently.
So if so-called Web 2.0 companies — which value participation almost above all else, both from consumers and organizations that want to integrate them into their offerings — are seeing highly desirable levels of adoption and significant ROI, how can this help understand how to improve our efforts in the enterprise? Most new Web 2.0 applications start out life with an API since getting connected to partners that will help you grow and innovate is a well-known essential for success online today. Despite years of SOA, we still don’t focus on consumption and openness as fundamentally essential characteristics to building an internal partner ecosystem that have beat a path to your door to use the services you are offering to them to build upon.
One big issue, as I’ve written about in the past, is
April 11th, 2008
Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings
The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Google’s renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today. Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the “cloud” of the Internet.
Google’s entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud — as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku — has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. What makes these offerings so interesting is their promise to turn enormous amounts of operational competency and accumulated economies of scale (which are enormous in Amazon’s and Google’s cases) into a highly competitive new software platform, akin to Windows or Linux, except entirely hosted off-premises and on the Internet.
Figure 1: Amazon and Google both offer comprehensive PaaS solutions
In this way, instead of just offering applications over the Web in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Amazon and Google are actually offering an entire Platform-as-a-Service because they provide the foundational upon which to build highly scalable and robust Web-based applications in the same way that the traditional operating systems like Windows and Linux have done in the past for software developers. But what’s very different about this model is that no longer is the platform itself “sold” to the customer who then takes responsibility for running and maintaining it. In this model, it’s the very operational capability of the platform hosting that is the primary value here (and it’s how such platforms are typically billed). This has far reaching implications to both the business models of PaaS vendors as well as their customers.
In the traditional world of software platforms, the cost of the first copy of the platform was enormous, often requiring companies to invest hundreds of millions before they could offer the platform to their very first customer. And while that’s still true with PaaS, now the economics of these new online platforms extend to 24×365 operations, which of course, is the core competency of the Web 2.0 era and. The potentially ruinous continuous expense of not only providing the platform but providing all the computing resources (and facilities, power, and bandwidth) upon which your customers run their apps changes the rules of the game. Whoever can drive the most costs out of their supply chain while offering a rich, robust, and easy-to-use platform is likely to rule the roost.
This takes us to the capabilities of these platforms, which are just now being fully fleshed out and offered to the marketplace in a form that’s relatively complete (though we’ll see which pieces are still missing in a minute.) What’s interesting is that Amazon and Google have strategically built up an extensive set of services over the last few years and have made some very interesting assumptions that will determine who their customers are (consumers, startups, enterprises) and what type of business models can sit on top of them (advertising, subscriptions, cheapest source of outsourced computing resources).
For its part, Amazon’s Web Services Division has continued to grow regularly with new introductions on a regular basis with strategic components like SimpleDB to highly innovative services like
A veteran of software development, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
