Stefan Ried

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

U.S. Department of Justice Approves Oracle Acquisition of Sun

expected from most M&A experts but still a mile stone for Oracle. The regulators approved the deal yesterday.

Oracle has pulled off a series of aggressive acquisitions over the past five years, establishing a comprehensive portfolio of packaged business apps and middleware infrastructure. The acquisition of Sun Microsystems not only complements Oracle’s software stack but also secures a segment of hardware customers that typically run Oracle software. The acquisition is welcome news for most Sun customers, as long as Oracle keeps Sun as a whole. The future will meanwhile be totally undetermined if Oracle sells Sun’s hardware part of the business at some point. Other vendors will have to make significant changes to their strategies and ecosystem priorities to respond to Oracle’s move.

Read the full Forrester Report with a impact discussion on the portfolio and Oracle’s ecosystem here.