Stefan Ried

Google’s Office SaaS Apps @ Jaguar and their new business version.

Google plays in various categories of cloud computing at the same time. Google Docs, Spreadsheets and GMail are software applications as a service (SaaS) and more in the category of other dedicated SaaS applications like NetSuite for ERP or Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud for CRM. Google’s offers also more platform centric services such as Google App Engine which moves more into a Platform as a Service (PaaS) category where Salesforce.com with Force.com is also a leader. While this is well known to many cloud experts meanwhile, there is still confusion around this in the market. Forrester established a cloud taxonomy which give a clear guidance and actually helps a lot to avoid confusion. Beyond this, thought it would be helpful to layout the hard facts of the recent announcement and the Jaguar deal.

See Google’s announcement of the business edition of google applications. Here are the hard facts:

Features unique to Google Apps Premier Edition include:

• 10 GBs of storage per user
• APIs for business integration – APIs for data migration, user provisioning, single sign-on, and mail gateways enable businesses to further customize the service for unique environments.
• 99.9 % uptime – Service Level Agreements for high availability of Gmail, with Google monitoring and crediting customers if service levels are not met.
• 24×7 support for critical issues – Includes extended business hours telephone support for administrators.
• Advertising optional – Advertising is turned off by default, but businesses can choose to include Google’s relevant target-based ads if desired.
• $50 per user account per year – Simple and affordable annual fee makes it practical to offer these applications to everyone in the organization.

In addition to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Start Page, all editions of Google Apps now include:

• Google Docs & Spreadsheets – With this addition, teams can easily collaborate on documents and spreadsheets without the need to email documents back and forth. Multiple employees can securely work on a document at the same time. All revisions are recorded for editing, and administrative controls allow organizations to define limits on document sharing.
• Gmail for mobile devices on BlackBerry – Gmail for mobile devices provides the same Gmail experience – such as search, conversation view and synchronization with desktop version – on BlackBerry handheld devices for users of Google Apps. Gmail for mobile devices joins a list of other mobile options for Google Apps and BlackBerry users that already includes a Google Talk client and a variety of calendar sync tools.
• Application-level control – Allows administrators to adapt services to business policies, such as sharing of calendars or documents outside of the company.

The deal with Jaguar which is announced at the same day, claims the following benefits:

• Increased storage capacity with 25GB of storage per user
• Significant savings from lower infrastructure and support costs…. although the deal size is not disclosed.
• 99.9% service level agreement…  although a full transparency like with trust.salesforce.com is not available to my knowledge
• Improved data security and administrative management… although no details are disclosed

Interesting is the adoption model that Google and Jaguar agreed on: Jaguar Land Rover has selected a kind of in-house evangelists and has selected 250 users for a first wave across its departments. These users get trained on all necessary aspects of Google Apps and will assist the other employees to get up and running without further training.

Comparing for example the storage limit of the above business version and the Jaguar details shows another important trend. Google starts to tailor the configuration or at least these kind of storage or traffic limits based on customer demand.

Please feel free to leave a comment below with your experience using Google apps.

Stefan

Cordys Key Note Presentation

I had the pleasure to contribute a presentation to an extraordinary event in the Netherlands yesterday. A lot of innovation looking for its way to the market.

Download the presentation here: StefanRied-Forrester-Cordys.

Cheers

Stefan

Dear Software Vendors,

I’d like to point you to an short but excellent blog post of Roman Stanek, entrepreneur and currently founder and CEO of the SaaS BI vendor Gooddata:

Back in the old good days … We delivered bits on DVDs… Throwing software over the wall … that’s how we did it. Sometimes almost literally…

I now live in the SaaS world….… But there now seems to be a new way how to “throw software over the wall” again. Many software companies have repackaged their software as Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and relabeled them as SaaS or Cloud Computing.

There is obviously some value in offering prepackaged images, eg. for pre-integrated middleware stacks into development and test clouds. This is what IBM and others are offering. However if a software vendor simply takes a traditional software package, boils it down into an EC2 image and let the customer alone with it, we lost one of the most important accomplishments of the SaaS deployment approach. That’s what Roman’s words of caution are all about and I couldn’t agree more.

The EC2 image is a one time snapshot, like a DVD in old days. However, the real SaaS business application or a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a consistently and ongoing maintained software availability – not a one time deployment.

Customers should therefore be very careful if vendors are simply talking about a cloud deployment. Ask for the real value and ongoing services. It looks like that a multi tenant stack like force.com can be maintained easier in many cases that a deployment of a single image per tenant, multiplied for thousands of tenants into an hypervised environment. Companies like vmware are heavily investing now to avoid the IT management overkill in such environments. Also IBM is aware of the challenge similar to vmware and enables their WebSphere cloudburst appliance to deal even with incremental changes in hypervisor images, while they are still missing to enable a multi tenancy on the higher level of their middleware stack.

That’s the reason why PaaS and SaaS goes much beyond of the value of an “simple” infrastructure as a service “IaaS”.

Stefan

Application Performance Management – a Must-Have if you use VOIP or cloud services over your corporate network.

Once you networks are complex and you have many different services running on the same IP infrastructure, you need to deal more intelligent with bandwidth. Reasons for complexity could be VOIP, distributed WAN networks between multiple subsideries or simply the usage of cloud computing services.

See a replay of the webcast discussion with T-System from Sept. 30, 2009 here.

Also the nice parody on Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey saga. T-System asking “PAL”  why there is no performance.

Enjoy.

Stefan

Salesforce.com Gets Kids: Attack to the Small Business Market

Salesforce.com introduces today the Salesforce.com Contact Edition and is approaching for the first time the small enterprise segment. This edition is basically a easy-to-use and simplified UI to a subset of SFDC’s existing CRM business logic. It is targeting small enterprise customers that are currently using for example ACT (owned by SAGE), Goldmine, SOHO or others. The Contact Manager Edition comes with import and synchronization capabilities to the most common PIM systems like Outlook, Lotus and can also deal with CSV files.

Salesforce.com is going to market with an extremely aggressive pricing of only 9$ / months / user, but early users should read the terms and conditions carefully, the subscription run for min. 12 months.

It does not only offer similar features to the competitors in this space, the Contact Manager Edition leverages also the cloud computing paradigm. The application is operated as a SaaS application and all data stored at SFDC’s datacenter. And even more – new to the small enterprise segment – social network links such as linked-in, facebook and twitter are seamlessly integrated in the environment. Further more mash-up scenarios with Google applications are considered. All together an attractive mix of capabilities.

However, Salesforce.com is attacking the first time this market segment and will face a couple of challenges:

• Sales Channels are different for small enterprises. Many large enterprise vendors such as SAP had to learn painfully, that sales in the small enterprise segment works totally different. A lot of local freelancer or one/two people IT shops help the small enterprises locally. SFDC has to learn from both successful small enterprise vendors like Intuit and form SaaS channel experience such as Google’s App-Channel program.
• The Platform market momentum in small enterprise works different. While Salesforce.com is the market leader in Platform as a Service with their force.com platform, the small business have totally different requirements and infrastructures. A personal cloud perspective could be a orchestration of traditional software, packages SaaS apps like their Contact Manager edition and specific extensions on a PaaS platform. However Salesforce.com is not leading, or even visible in this emerging PaaS market for small enterprises. Thus they have to partner and collaborate not only with Google’s apps, but also with PaaS vendors like Intuit.
• The competitive landscape is new to Salesforce.com. Back to start-up mode, SFDC might have to establish a new salesforce to approach this new market segment. Existing sales reps would always try to achieve their quota with large enterprise deals of an significant deal size. Only dedicated sales reps that know the local small business lobby, can help to turn this into a success.
• Small Enterprises and SMB/Large Enterprises are collaborating. One tenant in salesforce.com runs always in one specific edition. However, larger enterprises have subsidiaries, supplier, or partner and like to convince them to run the “same” system. SFDC is currently missing the ability to turn some users only, or a subsidiary of one tenant into a simpler edition. The basic communication between SFDC tenants avialble today has much room for collaborative clouds across company size and organizational boundaries in the future.

Let me know if you subscribe to this new edition or or you are considering to use it in one of your projects. I am curious about user and developer feedback.

Thanks

Stefan