In response to yet another mainstream press bungling of “cloud and cloud computing”, Lori MacVittie offers a clear and concise cloud computing delineation: “Users use Applications. Applications use clouds.” Lori expands on this point:
“Cloud computing is not a synonym for cloud. And vice-versa. Cloud computing is perhaps the first case of “technology for technology’s sake” that is actually a good thing. That’s because cloud computing is for applications. It’s not for users, it’s for applications. A cloud computing environment without an application is pretty much useless. A dynamic collection of compute resources that remains unfulfilled, idly spinning disks and catching CPU interrupts willy nilly without purpose.
Users, i.e. consumers, never really interact with a cloud computing environment, they interact with an application. Many folks identify SaaS (Software as a Service) as “cloud” because many of the properties associated with cloud computing – scalability, multi-tenancy, on-demand usage and dynamic adjustment to capacity – are inherently part of the offering. That may – or may not – be because the underlying infrastructure on which those applications are deployed is, in fact, a cloud computing infrastructure.”
“…Let’s say that again: an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.” An application may be a cloud-based application or service, but it is never, ever a “cloud” itself nor are you using “cloud computing” by simple virtue of accessing that application. You are using an application, the application is using cloud computing.”
After a much appreciated reference to my cloud-o-gram, Lori continues with an analogy to the SOA-world:
“A “cloud” is really an architecture that exhibits particular characteristics (on-demand, multi-tenant, rapid elasticity, resource pooling) that enable applications deployed atop that architecture to appear “infinitely scalable.” Saying an application is or is not cloud is like saying an application is or is not SOA. The application may leverage a SOA, it may be comprised of services (a “composite application”) but it is not SOA. It can’t be because SOA is an architecture, a design and deployment model, a means of interaction between services.”
So, the next time you witness cloud / cloud computing bungling, repeat after Lori: “an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.””
Tagged as:
F5,
Lori MacVittie
Posted by brenda michelson at 1:47 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS, cloud computing environment (cce), cloud-o-gram, fundamentals, services architecture | Permalink
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Salesforce.com just added a powerful new tool to its Force.com development platform, a Visual Process Manager:
“The Visual Process Manager brings the power of Cloud Computing to Business Process Apps. Now you can visually draw any business process and instantly deploy it in the cloud with no code, no software and no infrastructure. The Visual Process Manager helps companies easily automate specific business process like call center scripting, sales quotes, and new employee on boarding.”
According to a post on TechCrunch:
“The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.
The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses more >>
Tagged as:
brenda michelson,
SalesForce.com,
Visual Process Manager
Posted by brenda michelson at 2:56 pm in Blog, PaaS, SaaS, business capability offering, business process management, business process services, enterprise architecture, enterprise integration, services architecture | Permalink
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The Chicago Tribune is reporting that “Orlando became one of the first cities in America to switch all of its employees to Google e-mail.” The savings are impressive:
“If Orlando were to keep its current system, city officials estimate it would cost $133 a year for each of its 3,000 employees — or $399,000 — including annual software licenses.
Google is charging $45.50 per user, or $136,500. In return, everyone from city planners to police officers will use a Web-based e-mail system similar to Google’s popular Gmail, but without the advertisements that support the free consumer version. Google servers will store all city e-mail and run the application, and Google technicians — not city employees — will make sure it runs smoothly.
"The costs and IT support are someone else’s nightmare, and that’s what we’re paying for," Chief Financial Officer Rebecca Sutton said.”
More interesting is the confidence, dare I say “trust”, in using a cloud-based solution:
“[Google’s] Lock said Google will archive Orlando records, which must be kept and accessible under state public-records law, in "super-secret data centers."
And Cross [Orlando’s Chief Information Officer] said he’s confident city records, including sensitive law-enforcement and legal documents, will be safe from loss or cyberattack. Google has greater security resources, from people to money, than Orlando could muster on its own.
Besides, Cross said, the city last year contacted other e-mail providers, including Microsoft and IBM, about moving to the cloud.
"They gave us pricing that couldn’t compete with Google," he said.”
While the Los Angeles Google deal is much better known, Orlando led the way:
“Los Angeles became Google’s crown jewel in October, when that city approved a $7.25 million e-mail contract with the Internet giant, but Los Angeles has not yet moved its 30,000 employees to the Google system.
Google cited its deal with Orlando, which had already been signed, in its pitch to Los Angeles.”
In a reversal of classic technology adoption patterns, government agencies are cutting the path to cloud computing. Interesting times.
Tagged as:
Google,
GoogleApps,
government,
IBM,
microsoft
Posted by brenda michelson at 4:41 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS, adoption, business capability offering, use cases | Permalink
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Bessemer Venture Partners published a winter release of their 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and SaaS. These laws are written for cloud computing providers – potential investees. However, the laws are also interesting to anyone interested in the cloud computing marketplace.
As I was reading the full whitepaper (pdf), I found one law to be pertinent for potential cloud computing customers. Law #8: Leverage and Monetize the data asset. (emphasis is mine)
“BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #8: Leverage and monetize the data asset. While Cloud Computing is about providing a subscription service to your customers, one of the happy consequences is that you end up hosting their data. This becomes a critical asset that you can monetize by increasing the value of your offering; by leveraging it across your customer base in the form of benchmarks; or for specific businesses, by using the data to generate leads (within the contracted obligations). In these difficult economic times, where prices are under pressure and customers are tightening their budgets, data can be a difference maker.
As a Cloud Computing service, your company captures a lot of business information on each individual customer, information that is typically peripheral to the delivery of your service, but could be very interesting for your customer’s executives. This information can generally be packaged and synthesized into a set of management dashboards that you can provide to your customers, potentially for an incremental subscription fee, or as a way to expand usage and increase product stickiness. Within our own portfolio, successful examples include the “CMO dashboard” (Eloqua), “Merchandising Dashboard” (Retail Solutions), “CFO Dashboard” (Intacct), and “HR Dashboard” (Cornerstone OnDemand) .
A second way to monetize your data is to identify the key performance indicators that you can derive from them – typically the ones that you have identified for your executive dashboards – and develop benchmarks across your customer base. These benchmarks can be customized along several dimensions (e.g., by company size, sector, geography) and be provided separately to your customers and even included in the executive dashboard. One of the early companies to sell benchmarks was Concur, the leading public company in the expense management space. With Concur reports, customers can compare their travel costs and business expenses against their peer group and track the evolution over time. We believe this “data-as-a-service” model has a lot of potential and will become more prominent as companies mature and need to find additional revenue streams.
Finally, another way to take advantage of your data is to use it to generate leads. While we recognize that this may not be possible for many of the B2B businesses for obvious reasons, this practice has proven to be successful for the lower end of the market, including small businesses and consumers. A company like Mint for example (now part of Intuit), even based its business model around it. Mint launched a SaaS financial application for consumers, competing against Quicken, but while the Quicken and Quicken Online business models used a license or a subscription fee, Mint was free and generated revenue by using its consumer insights to generate leads that were sold to service providers. For example, if Mint identified that your savings account had a 2% rate, it would notify you by email that another bank could offer you 2.5% and sell your click (or whatever action you would perform if interested) to a provider. Mint was so successful in this customer acquisition model that it ended up being acquired by Intuit in 2009 and will now replace the Quicken Online product.”
Certainly, there is no malice or wrongdoing here, as the above Law explicitly states “within the contracted obligation”. And, there can be great value to your organization to receive benchmark, trend, lead or other aggregated data. However, the use of your hosted data must correspond with your organization’s privacy and IP practices. Therefore, it’s critical to understand, and if necessary, negotiate any data usage components of your service contracts.
Tagged as:
Bessemer,
data
Posted by brenda michelson at 6:15 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS, compliance, customer-provider agreements | Permalink
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Today’s Wall Street Journal had a short Dow Jones Newswire piece entitled "Microsoft Exec: Customers Embracing "Cloud Computing". The lead-in:
“Corporate customers are switching to "cloud"-based technology more rapidly than Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) expected, a senior executive at the company said Monday.
"People are embracing cloud computing faster than we anticipated," Stephen Elop, who heads Microsoft’s business division – which includes the ubiquitous Office tools – said in an interview.”
The interesting thing though, was the article went on to suggest that Microsoft finds itself chasing Google, and that is what drove Microsoft’s recent price reductions:
“Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is ramping up competition, offering hosted versions of familiar services like email and Office for its corporate customers. Last week, it cut the price of its Exchange Online email services. The move was seen as in part a reaction to some accounts Google has won recently, such as a contract to run 30,000 email accounts for employees of the City of Los Angeles.”
This of course, Microsoft denied, and attributed the price reduction to economies of scale:
“Elop said wider take-up of services like hosted email had prompted Microsoft to introduce the price cuts, because Microsoft was increasingly able to offer such services at large scale without impacting profitability. He said Microsoft was confident it could offer such services profitably on an ongoing basis. Some analysts have expressed concern that the need to compete with rivals could lower margins.”
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Why is interesting? The early leaders in cloud computing, both in innovation and offering adoption, are not traditional Enterprise and Agency IT Vendors. Rather, they are a search company and a bookseller. And neither is going away.
Tagged as:
Amazon,
Google,
microsoft,
WSJ
Posted by brenda michelson at 5:51 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS | Permalink
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Jeff Bauer from Forbes.com starts by describing his business challenge: Make real-time quotes available the website, do it fast & cheap and the history of real-time quote availability and how the owners, availability and price of real-time data has changed overtime.
Decided to use BATS exchange for real-time data, gave them access to streaming data, but the data was in a raw format. Forbes didn’t have the infrastructure to transform the raw data into response to real-time stock quote requests. Forbes is a publishing company, not a technology provider.
Forbes.com decided to partner with Xignite. more >>
Tagged as:
Amazon,
archives,
CCExpo,
Forbes,
live coverage,
RightScale,
Xignite
Posted by brenda michelson at 6:58 pm in Blog, SLA, adoption, data services, use cases | Permalink
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