DellがMessageOne社を買収し、データセンタ自動化、障害回復きのうを強化

Dell Acquires MessageOne

Computer manufacturer Dell has announced its $155 million purchase of MessageOne.

The company is an on-demand service for business continuity and disaster recovery and Dell says the acquisition is part of its strategy to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to deliver services to commercial customers over the internet.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Global Services, said: "Companies currently spend 70 per cent of their IT budgets maintaining their current infrastructures and dealing with routine issues.

"We are building a services supply chain that integrates the world's leading SaaS-based technologies to simplify the purchase, delivery and management of IT infrastructure services for companies and improve its price/performance."

MessageOne estimates that 75 per cent of companies experience a major email outage each year and the company claims its services of managing, archiving and long-term storage of email is an important addition to Dell's portfolio.

In other news, WebWire has reported that Dell has chosen the top five finalists in its International Green Computing Technology Design competition.

Over 500 design professionals and students took part in the competition, with the winner being announced on May 15th.

Desktone社、デスクトップ仮想環境をSaaSモデルで提供開始。 Desktop As A Service（DaaS)としてマーケティング

Desktone's virtualization desktop-as-a-service

Massachusetts based Desktone is claiming that it is the very first provider of a system that enables delivery of virtualized desktops, calling it the Desktone Virtual-D Platform.

The newly unveiled Desktone Virtual-D Platform is designed to enable service providers the ability to offer hosted, subscription based virtual desktops, dubbed as "desktops-as-a-service" or DaaS.

Desktone streams the graphical interface of an entire operating system and all of the applications from a service provider's data center down to a PC or a thin client. As of right now, the service works with Microsoft Windows XP, but the company hopes to add Vista support soon enough. The product is also architected to support other operating systems like Linux or MAC OS, and will provide that service sometime in the future as well - a time frame I assume will be dictated by consumer demand.

"There's a tremendous amount of industry interest in virtual desktop computing. It can reduce desktop costs, improve manageability and enhance security. However, because it is very difficult for enterprises to implement, wide-spread adoption has been slow," said Harry Ruda, CEO, Desktone.

"Desktone eliminates the complexity and speeds the on-ramp to virtual desktop computing by transforming desktops into a cost-effective, highly scalable subscription service. We're extremely excited about the opportunities this affords enterprises and service providers."

Desktone's approach separates the virtual desktop infrastructure into two tiers which are tied together with the Desktone Access Fabric – a set of distributed services that provides the association between authorized users and their virtual desktops.

Enterprise Tier:

• Desktone Virtual-D Enterprise Center: Web-based management interface for the enterprise desktop administrator, which enables IT staff to leverage the same administration tasks they use in a physical desktop environment. Designed to support large user populations, it provides virtual resource management, virtual desktop administration and template lifecycle management.
  
• Desktone Virtual-D Portal: A self-service, policy-based portal that enterprise users can access from any browser. With the Virtual-D Portal, users can access their existing virtual desktops as well as manage those virtual desktops or even create new ones, without relying on a system or desktop administrator.

Service Provider Tier:

• Desktone Virtual-D Element: The building block of a virtual desktop utility grid, Virtual-D Elements are racks that include all the hardware, virtualization resources and software required to support virtual desktops. Built by Desktone partners or service providers, as self-contained, independent modular units of desktop service delivery, Virtual-D Elements make it easy for service providers to scale DaaS environments.
  
• Desktone Service Grid: A framework that ties individual Virtual-D Elements into a virtual desktop utility grid. The Service Manager creates a loosely coupled "federation" of Elements, manages pools across Elements, and collects data on Element status.

The company has a strong management team who knows what it takes to deliver a product to market. The company has already signed up several hosting companies to pilot the DaaS offering. The question that remains in my mind is how much will this service cost? I understand the premise completely having been involved in my own ASP business back in 1999.

Desktone claims that this solution will help SMB's realize the benefits of centralized virtual desktops without having to build and deploy the infrastructure internally. Thereby reducing desktop TCO and transforming computing costs from a fixed CAPEX to a variable OPEX.

As organizations continue to adopt the cost savings of server virtualization, solution providers and organizations are still looking at the possibilities around the desktop, where desktops greatly outnumber servers and in many cases have a greater cost of managing.

Sun Microsystems社が自社のSaaS事業を発表、ISVに対してサービスを開始

Sun Microsystems helps ISVs with SaaS model

Sun Microsystems introduced a new virtualization service called Solaris On Demand, a software as a service (SaaS) program created to help the independent software vendor (ISV) community.

Solaris On Demand helps convert traditional installation applications into a software as a service model. By leveraging Sun's virtualization technology, ISVs can offer their applications on-demand without having to use a multi-tenancy application architecture and without having to make any code changes.

To make this transition from a traditional software to a SaaS architecture, Sun is offering a 90-day free trial to its customers to ensure success. Joining the program, ISVs will have access to hosting, hardware, managed services and backup, with a 99.5 percent guaranteed uptime service level agreement through either Sun or one of its partners, which include AT&T's USi Communications, NTT Europe Online or NaviSite. In addition, Sun also provides technical, budgetary and marketing support.

"Working closely with our community of ISVs, we developed a program to meet the new needs of ISVs as they move from on-premise solutions and business practices to an on-demand model," said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of global market development and engineering, Sun Microsystems.

"The Solaris On Demand program combines Sun's expertise and leading network computing technologies such as the open source Solaris OS, xVM virtualization technology, and energy-efficient systems with high availability hosting solutions from Sun partners. In the end, we eliminate the risk for ISVs as they transition to delivering their SaaS applications."

To join the Solaris On Demand program, sign up on Sun's Web site.

Costs can vary based on hosting needs but a company can get an idea as to the cost during their 90 day trial period before they make a long term commitment.

SunがSolaris環境上のアプリケーションをSaaSに移行するプログラムを開発、発表

Sun Launches SaaS Conversion Program For ISV Partners

Sun Microsytems is launching a program to help ISVs whose software runs on the Solaris operating system convert their products to software-as-a-service applications.

In addition to providing technical assistance and an application test environment, Sun, through the Solaris On-Demand Program, is offering counseling for making changes to such business processes as sales and customer billing that can be very different when selling SaaS services instead of on-premise applications.

More than 6,500 commercial ISVs have applications that run on Sun's Solaris 10 Unix operating system, said Juan Carlos Soto, Sun's Vice-President of global market development and engineering. Soto leads Sun's efforts to promote Solaris adoption among ISVs and the executive says the new initiative is in response to demand from partner ISVs that want to extend their on-premise applications into the software-as-a-service world.

"We want to make sure ISVs look at Sun's network computing infrastructure as they consider an on-demand model," Soto said. Some ISVs may develop SaaS applications from scratch while others will adapt existing applications, he said.

The program includes technical assistance and computing infrastructure for developing and optimizing the applications for a multi-tenant architecture. "Porting the application is non-trivial, in some cases," Soto said. Sun is also providing use of an "on-demand sandbox" test environment for up to 90 days for conducting proof-of-concept testing of converted applications, using servers and networks in data centers managed by several service providers, including NaviSite, AT&T's USi Communications and NTT Europe Online.

Sun doesn't plan to charge ISVs for the services, although Soto said Sun could levy fees if deeper, more custom consulting services are needed.

Callidus Software, a developer of sales performance management applications, has already run through the program to develop its products for software as a service. "We needed an easy way to implement SaaS with unparalleled scalability and flexibility," said Jeff Saling, Senior Vice-President for the company's Callidus On-Demand product, in a statement.

FW: Zoho Launches an Enterprise CRM Tool

Zoho社がEnterprise向けのCRMツールを発表した。 Salesforce.com、NetSuite等のベンダーが提供するCRMソリューションに加え、自社のオフィス関連アプリケーションを連携させた機能で他社と比較してより統合された環境を提供する事が狙い。

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Zoho Launches an Enterprise CRM Tool

Zoho is announcing the launch today of Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition. Their business suite now includes: CRM, Invoice, Projects, Meetings, People, DB and Creator. Zoho has created a full specifications overview of the new CRM product along with a demo video that I've embedded below. Mashable has more on the launch.

Role-based Security Administration is the major addition to the product which helps managers provide the correct permissions and data rules to the right people. Zoho defines role-based security with the following chart:

Other new features include multi-language support, larger data imports, SSL availability and an overhaul of the interface. Here is the demo video of Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition:

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Salesforce.coms社とGoogle社が協業し、SFMアプリケーションとGoogle Appsの統合を発表。 両アプリケーションのデータ共有や処理の連携等を実現、CRMに加え、各種オフィスツールもクラウド化へ

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Salesforce and Google team to conquer the enterprise

Salesforce has just released (see all coverage) the long-awaited integration of its CRM applications with Google Apps, embedding email, documents, online chat and integrated calendaring directly into its core sales force automation, marketing and customer service applications. I've had advance warning of this move, as [in a paid engagement — see disclosure page] I wrote the white paper for today's launch. Here are the key takeaways in my view.

This is a huge validation for Office 2.0 — the whole notion of collaboration and productivity applications delivered from the cloud. Salesforce.com has more than 41,000 customers, including a growing number of large enterprises. It's now saying unambiguously to all those customers that Google Apps is its preferred productivity suite. The integration is far in advance of anything achievable with MS Office. Product manager Kraig Swensrud, who has been closely involved with the project, described the Google Apps components to me as 'first-class citizens' within Salesforce.com.

This will spread faster than people expect or realize. When it takes just a mouse click to open Gmail and have the message saved with the prospect record, it won't take long before Gmail becomes the default email system for most Salesforce users. The Google Talk integration is just as compelling. The ease of storing and sharing documents along with prospect records will make people want Google Docs to become the system of record for sales and marketing documents, even if they still use MS Office to create and edit the originals — but many users will feel just as comfortable working natively in Google Docs.

The viral effect within enterprises is going to be significant. Once one or two people within a workgroup start sending others links to view and share their Google Docs documents, it'll reinforce usage of the online apps by everyone in the same group. They'll also share documents with colleagues in other departments and with partners, customers and prospects, exposing many more to the experience of using Google Docs.

Much of this will happen under-the-radar. David Armstrong, product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise in EMEA, told me yesterday that Google Apps already has half a million organizations — not individuals, organizations — signed up worldwide, with 2000 more signing up every day. But that astounding adoption rate is visible only to Google. There are no shrinkwrap packages passing through distributors' warehouses or flying off retailers' shelves. There's not even any money changing hands for sign-ups to the free version. It's just an invisible stream of bits in the ether. Adoption will be mostly unseen, until one day it will suddenly have become too big to ignore.

I know some of my ZDNet blogging colleagues are skeptical that enterprises — particularly the larger, most established organizations — will be comfortable using Google Apps. Josh Greenbaum dismisses the relevance of Google Apps to Salesforce.com users because "Google's terms of service severely hamper the usability of its Apps in the real world of corporate computing," a view seconded by Dennis Howlett, who also criticizes Google's release cycles: "Google is among the slowest to get things done. Even when it does, there seems to be no development strategy or roadmap that discerning buyers can assess. That's not comforting to business buyers."

When I put those criticisms to Armstrong on Friday, he wouldn't be drawn, stressing that, "What we're announcing here is fundamentally a reseller agreement." Google evidently won't be rushed on resolving these defects until it becomes convinced of the need, which may put a brake on announcing larger deals. But let's not forget that similar criticisms were advanced a few years back as reasons why enterprises weren't going to adopt CRM from unproven on-demand vendors like Salesforce.com. Part of the genius of the company's strategy was in picking a core application where business decision-makers have a great deal of autonomy. Sales and marketing departments tend to get what they want, and if they want Google Apps, there are very few organizations out there where IT will override them (added to which, many individuals within corporations are already using these tools unofficially for aspects of their work anyway).

This is a showcase for on-demand integration. Salesforce for Google Apps is a close integration of two distinct on-demand application stacks, in which both applications can continue to follow their separate upgrade and evolution paths without breaking the integration. All the integration is based on APIs (in fact both Salesforce and Google have added some extra APIs to round out the integration). Like all APIs in the on-demand world, they've been designed to allow each application to upgrade separately. They'll also permit other applications to be linked in, making it possible to build a completely integrated suite of applications to run a whole company. Later today, the first integrations built in that way will be announced by three partners of Salesforce.com and Google, and it'll be a key message of the launch. As Google's Armstrong told me, "We're really excited about the opportunities this creates for the developer community to build a set of applications, tools and integrations that we can only imagine."

Salesforce for Google Apps is a PaaS offering. Because of the two APIs and Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform (I'm excluding Google App Engine because Google itself has already ruled it out for business use), it's possible to build on top of Salesforce for Google Apps to create additional functionality and — most important of all in an enterprise context — to create workflows and business processes that flow and leverage collaboration, email and documents across multiple applications. This is potentially one of the most powerful attributes of the combination.

It's worth recalling for a moment the enormous disappointment a year ago when Salesforce first unveiled its alliance with Google. The announcement had been overhyped and rumors had swirled for several weeks prior, including my own speculation whether Google might buy Salesforce.com. With far less hype this time (apart from an over-enthusiastic Reuters report, which Salesforce.com can hardly bear responsibility for), I believe today's release has fulfilled many of those early expectations. It's taken a while, but that's because the two companies' developers have worked together to create a solid integration that is live and ready to use now — except for certain aspects including several of the new API hooks, which won't be available for custom use until Salesforce.com's summer release.

For Google, the combination brings Google Apps into big enterprise accounts and also expands its footprint among smaller businesses. For Salesforce.com, it expands the reach of its Salesforce application and further validates its Force.com integration and development platform. But more importantly for both of them — and for the rest of us who are committed to the on-demand model — it puts extra weight behind the gathering trend towards running business applications and computing in the cloud. Marc Benioff is fond of saying that we often achieve less than we expect in a year, but more in a decade. In the past year, it may seem that little has been achieved. But in a decade's time, we may look back on this moment as one of the key turning points in the shift to on-demand.

UPDATE [added 4:40 am PDT, plus Sxip para at 6:20 am]: Some links of note. On the Appirio blog, Ryan Nichols has introduced the four applications being launched today by the Salesforce and Google integrator. The post also makes a strong argument for the business value of integrating the two application stacks together.

Also Astadia, probably the largest specialist on-demand integrator, has just issued the press release announcing its two new applications for Salesforce for Google Apps.

The full list of add-ons is at a new AppExchange category page for Google Apps. Also included on the list is a potentially invaluable free utility from Sxip Identity, the Sxip User Manager, which "allows administrators to provision and manage users to both applications from a single screen" and also gives users single sign-on to the two application stacks.

Henry Blodget does a good job of outlining the Innovator's Dilemma position that Microsoft is getting squeezed into as Google Apps accelerates its penetration of the enterprise. It dovetails with my own argument outlined above and in my white paper why this combined offering will make strong headway even while people continue to argue that it can't.

Finally, my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan debates Google and Salesforce.com: Why don't they merge?. I've added my take in a comment. I'm not sure that Google would stomach the price. I'm also doubtful whether Google has yet accepted how much it needs to learn to sell effectively in the enterprise — it may even be arrogant enough to believe that it doesn't have to, because it's changing the rules of the game. I think Benioff would be wise to hold out for now if the approach did come.

NetSuite社が OneWorld Edition を発表、グローバル企業向けの 共通ワークフロー、為替変換、等の機能を搭載してSaaSベースのERPソリューションを提供

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Business systems for a faster, flatter world

One of the biggest problems facing enterprises today is that the world is communicating faster than their IT systems can keep up with. This is particularly obvious in businesses that operate multinationally. Their managers collaborate and communicate daily across timezones and geographies by phone, email and Web conference, but their business applications don’t. Those applications were designed for an older, slower-paced world, in which business metrics were rolled up on a monthly schedule and it was quite an innovation to actually analyze last month’s data to look for emerging trends.

In today’s faster, flatter, world, that kind of monthly batch reporting style seems distinctly old-fashioned, but it’s quite a challenge to graft new real-time reporting capabilities onto the older generation of software applications. It’s even more of a challenge in organizations that operate internationally.

This is an opportunity that on-demand application vendors seem to be realizing is tailor-made for them. Today, NetSuite launches its OneWorld edition, describing it as the company’s most biggest announcement since it introduced its first release in 1999. Dan Farber on CNet appropriately headlines his coverage NetSuite finds a sweet spot.

What struck me when VP of product management Craig Sullivan outlined the concept to me on a visit to London last week was how similar it sounded to the pitch delivered by another ERP cloud vendor, Workday. Intriguingly, one of NetSuite’s announced charter customers is online customer service vendor Kana, which Workday also announced as a charter customer at its launch in November 2006. It seems Kana is using Workday for people management and now NetSuite for financials and sales force automation.

Business decision-makers in today’s highly connected world feel a pressing need to have access to accurate, real-time data when they make decisions, and conventional midmarket business software doesn’t give them that, especially if they operate internationally or across multiple business units. Only the largest multinationals have the resources to fix those integration challenges with costly consolidations of their SAP or Oracle infrastructures. Move down a tier into mid-size companies that still have to operate across multiple locations, and you’ll find that each separate business operation has its own business systems and the data from each system has to laboriously aggregated at the end of each month before it can be evaluated. This time lag is going to be even more keenly felt now that everyone is nervous about the effects of the credit crunch. If your sales have suddenly reversed the rising trend of the past few years, you need to know that straight away, not six weeks after the fact.

The new NetSuite OneWorld system gives managers much-needed instant visibility into the business (see screenshot above), aggregating real-time information all the way up the management chain so that the CEO can get a constantly updated real-time view of how the business is doing, and can instantly drill down to look at regions, countries or even individual sales orders. All of this is done with real-time currency conversion and role-based views, which means that the CEO in California can pick up the phone to discuss a deal with a regional sales manager in France and they’ll each see the same information on-screen, presented in their local language and currency.

Another intriguing side-comment: NetSuite gets its real-time exchange rates from a third-party on-demand service, Xignite, which is one of those under-the-cover Web service ventures that seems to be doing quite well for itself. The arrangement is a great example of the back-end service provider opportunities opening up on the Web. NetSuite doesn’t want to get into the business of providing exchange rate data, and its customers certainly don’t want the bother of sourcing it themselves. Having a specialist service like Xignite built into the NetSuite application solves the problem for both parties.

Of course it’s open to conventional on-premise software vendors to pursue the same opportunity that NetSuite and Workday have each latched onto (note, though, that the Xignite service would be individual to each customer implementation, highlighting one of the innate benefits of the on-demand model). However on-demand vendors are more alert to the potential, and their customer base is probably skewed more towards companies with this mid-size-but-multinational profile. “As a SaaS vendor, we’re predisposed to having customers with multiple geographical locations,” Sullivan commented. Such companies of course face greater infrastructure challenges implementing conventional on-premise software than those that operate within a single location.

Sullivan also mentioned that it was NetSuite’s move into Europe five years ago that first set in train the development of the OneWorld suite. “When we landed here in 2003, the first thing I took back to the team was, we’ve got to have a multinational version.” It was a much bigger issue for European companies than for US ones because the individual country markets are so much smaller, forcing them to go multinational to expand. The story illustrates how long NetSuite has been working on this capability, and its maturity seems to be assured by the news that there are already 30 customers already live on the system — including some well-known tech industry names such as Kana and blogging software vendor Six Apart, but also from industries as diverse as airliner leasing and TV production. NetSuite itself was running on the OneWorld code through its IPO last year, I’m told.

The OneWorld option is available for a monthly per-organization fee of $1999, paid as a supplement to the per-organization and per-user fees paid for the core application and other optional modules. The option enables the organization to then deploy multinational subsidiary units. Organizations that already operate internationally with their existing NetSuite implementation will require some professional services help to migrate their existing records to the new architecture.

Software as Services / Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:33:03 GMT

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Intuit社が自社の会計処理製品 QuickBase をAdobe FlexでSaaS化し、事業展開開始。 クラウドコンピューティングの新規事業として注目

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Intuit's Radical New Flex + QuickBase Cloud Platform

Posted by smoothspan on April 16, 2008

The Cloud Computing Platform News just keeps on coming.  I got a briefing (under embargo) on Intuit's new Cloud Computing Platform based on Adobe Flex with QuickBase.  The new platform will be formally announced in a press release tomorrow morning, but I wanted to go over what I learned from the briefing.  I spoke with Bill Lucchini, VP and GM of Inutit QuickBase and Peter Vogel, Group Manager of Intuit's Developer Network and came away very impressed: this thing has legs!

Timing:  As I mentioned, formal announcement is tomorrow, and this will be accompanied by a private beta.  Intuit will limit this beta to folks that are capable of doing something interesting on the platform, like Adobe's Flex, and are willing to commit to building a real app.   This will not be the first 10,000 or 20,000 served like Google's AppEngine beta.  It's invite only.  Things will open up more with a live Version 1.0 in the Summer.

What's different about this platform versus Amazon, Google, and the gaggle smaller companies in the Cloud Platform space like Bungee, Coghead, Rollbase, et al?   Intuit went out to a series of focus groups drawn from their developer community and other sources and came back with 3 requirements for the platform:

- What Intuit calls "Table Stakes":  You have to be able to create great apps for business.  There can't be something limiting about the platform for this market.

- It has to be possible to create a profitable business on the platform.  Intuit wants to help out with Demand Generation via their already very large ecosystem, and they want to set their pricing at a level that makes it possible to create a reasonable business around the platform.  I've written about this problem before with Force.com being too expensive.

-  It has to save significant development costs and pain by doing all the stuff that everyone keeps reinventing.  Billing, integration with QuickBooks, provisioning, email connectivity, and all that sort of thing.

Bill Lucchini is very focused on the importance of the ecosystem and the economics for customers that choose this platform.  In his words:

This is about opening it up to a huge ecosystem of developers.  People have been aware for a while that we're all building the same stuff over and over again.  We've brought a lot of assets together to fix that.  Competition is good: it will drive even more innovation for platform users.

The ecosystem that Intuit brings is indeed huge.  There are 3.6 million QuickBooks users, 250 thousand QuickBase customers, and the Intuit Developer Network sports 75 thousand developers.  These are not just tire kickers, these are folks in the business of developing around QuickBooks and other Intuit properties.

Some things I notice about the platform:

- It's got both "easy" and "powerful":  You can write your clients in Flex.  That's power.  Hard to identify a stronger client platform.  On the server side, QuickBase offers "easy".  All sorts of issues are automatically handled for you with a point and shoot declarative interface.

- The server side needs further development:  "easy" is cool right up until you can't do what you need to do.  This is an open issue for the platform, and one they're aware of.  I told them server side Flex processes for business logic and custom SQL of some sort (ala Force) against the tables would cover the bases.  They wouldn't say what they plan, but didn't object to my thoughts.

Where does it fit relative to the competition?

- Amazon:  Still the most proven and flexible of the Cloud Platforms.  But, if you need to integrate with QuickBooks data (which you will if you target small business with a business app!), or if you want a much simpler development environment, Intuit has a clear win if they deliver what they promise.  The services Intuit will offer are much higher level than Amazon.  They are true SaaS application services.  I think it makes sense even to partner the two.  For example, we discussed that QuickBase has no S3 equivalent, so if you want to host a lot of data, it might make sense to have you app on the Intuit platform use S3 for large objects like streaming video.

- Google:  AppEngine is a simpler and less capable vision as it stands than what Intuit is talking about.   Yet, there are some similarities.  If they keep beefing it up, AppEngine will be more focused towards Web 2.0 consumer apps and Intuit is more in tune with SaaS business apps.

- Salesforce.com:  Force.com is the closest analog to what Intuit is doing.  As I've written in the past, there are significant economic barriers for Force–it simply costs too much for ISV's.  The impression I get is that Intuit is well aware of this and plans to commoditize that pricing to a much lower level.  Their model is to be priced competitively with Amazon.  Like Salesforce, Intuit is bringing a platform with an ecosystem and data already in place and considerable market momentum.  Which one makes more sense for your application?  I would think that building around QuickBooks is a little more strategic, but that Salesforce will carry you higher in the foodchain to larger businesses.  It's an interesting comparison.  Either way, Intuit brings serious competition into Salesforce's world that they'll have to respond to.

-  The Little Guys:  Bungee Labs, Coghead, Rollbase, and a number of others are in this category.  It's hard to see how this announcement is good news for them.  As Lucchini says, "What they're doing is innovative and interesting, but they're creating a toolkit.  We're focused on creating successful profitable businesses.  These platforms are going to be about network effects.  Good apps bring users to a platform.  It's a chicken and egg business, and we have both the chicken and the egg."

- Collateral Damage:  Not sure how companies focused on having ERP-centric suites with a platform will react.  It can't be great news for a NetSuite or competitors like little Intacct to see this.  Likely they'll view that QuickBooks is for smaller businesses than they're serving and that they're the next step when you outgrow QuickBooks.  Remains to be seeen how true that is.

The Demo came next after the positioning discussion.  Honestly, we covered all the bases above very quickly since we were all on the same page about the state of the market.

Someone mentioned that the standard for Cloud Platforms was to bring up an app that everyone in the audience can log into within 5 minutes or less.  No problems here.  We had the good old "Hello, World" up and running very quickly.

The process went like this:

- Start a new Flex project.  Their stuff is fully integrated with Eclipse and Flex Builder via the Intuit QuickBase SDK.

- Drop their library into Flex Builder.

- Respond to a brief connection data dialog that establishes where in the cloud your stuff is connecting.

- They then selected the Master Sync App template, which includes synchronization with QuickBooks.

- Select a Developer Key and login.  Developer Keys are connections to the cloud or to a project there.

-  A Model/View/Controller framework is automatically generated in Flex.

-  You can then select fields from QuickBooks or your other QuickBase tables.  Data transfer objects and business delegate objects are automatically create for your Flex code to access.

-  Deploy the app.

-  Connect to it.  There are multiple datasets available.  In this case for Sample and Live data.  Test data is another option.

Done!  Here is the Hello, World app they created for me:

Given more time, say 1 hour, they can create a much more sophisticated Customer Service application:

Neat!

After the demo, I was prompted to dig into The Techie Stuff.  I wanted to understand what some of the use cases were.  In other words, what kinds of apps were their "insider" early customers working on?

- Customer Service

- Employee Scheduling

- Existing software co's looking to add new modules

- Solution providers looking to move from 1:1 custom work to converting their domain knowledge into applications so they can sell products 1:M.

Pretty typical business apps.

As mentioned, the server side is limited currently to what can be done with QuickBase.  That involves quite a lot, BTW.  All the usual lookup fields, snapshot fields, formulas and such are all there.  Deeper server side processing will require more development, but Intuit are thinking about it.

I asked about SOA.  I build an app and I want to release API's for my customers to use in accessing my app.  Their story is pretty good hear.  The interface between Flex and the Cloud is RESTful.  You can use the same API's to allow outside apps to access data you make accessible.  Pretty straightforward.  Accessibility is tied to a developer key.  Publish that key to folks using your API, set the right permissions, and you are there.

Two other key issues are multitenancy and scalability.  Apps created on this platform are multitenant from the get-go, and there is a lot of great support.  For example, suppose you change the DB schema and need to roll out the changes to all your customers.  They have a DB Migration Wizard that automates that chore.  Metadata is there that lets customers add fields or whole tables to their tenant.  This can be enabled as self-service in an app and does nto require a develoepr to handle it.

In terms of the services the platform offers, it's quite a comprehensive list:

- Login/Security/Permissions Management (Row/Field level access)/Provisioning

- Database:  Handled by QuickBase.  Includes full metadata customizability.  Create new tables or access QuickBooks.

- Reporting:  Automatic report creation with point and click customization.

- Email notifications

- Billing and Provisioning:  This is a lot of work that Intuit has already figured out and will undertake on your behalf.

- REST-based SOA

Parting Thoughts:  What's not to like?

Not much.  It's a remarkably complete offering based on developers I talk to in the SaaS world.  We briefly discussed Lock-In, and I think Lucchini has the right attitude:

We never want to lock anyone in. But we want the customer to choose us because we offer more value. That's why we didn't create our own language like Apex, we chose Flex. We won't stop anybody from leaving. Vendors have to double down and work harder to keep customers loyal.

No question.  Lock in doesn't really work anyway unless everything in site is proprietary.  Look at how fast Google AppEngine got hacked to run on Amazon Web Services.

Another question I have is what impact this new offering will have on the uptake of the SaaS version of QuickBooks?  My wife is a CPA and is very aware of QuickBooks.  She tells me that in the classes and seminars she follows, customers are told that SaaS QuickBooks is less capable and less flexible.  I can't say whether that is a current opinion or not, but wanting to be a part of this new ecosystem may be a new driver for customers to move from installing QuickBooks to SaaS QuickBooks. 

These are exciting times in the Cloud Computing world.  Another big player has thrown its hat into the ring with a lot to offer.  I'm also glad to see Abode and Flex are playing, though I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone at Adobe.  We're still waiting on Microsoft and any others to show themselves, but the bar keeps getting higher for what they'll have to deliver!

Affinity Platformのコンセプト： アプリケーションの成功事例をベースにSaaS事業を展開するアプローチ

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Get Ready for the Affinity Platforms!

Posted by smoothspan on April 17, 2008

What's an Affinity Platform?  That's what I'm calling the mix of a Cloud Computing Platform with an already-successful application.

Geoffrey Moore says that you dare not launch a platform until you have a successful application.  There are, of course, counter-examples to this.   Amazon Web Services is my favorite case where there was no already-successful application.  Amazon EC2 and S3 had little to do with Amazon's core business from the perspective of the customer.

But in the main, Moore is right.  Why adopt a platform unless there is synergy beyond the platform making your developer's lives easier?  If it is attached to a successful application, the platform can offer so much more.  For starters, customers hope to gain some demand generation (e.g. sales leads and faster adoption) by drafting behind the already-successful application.  That's very valuable when you look at the cost of acquiring customers for most businesses. 

Who Has An Affinity Platform?

Intuit are the latest to the party.  See my breaking news blog post for details.   The application here is QuickBooks, and to a lesser extent QuickBase (lesser only because there are fewer customers!).  QuickBooks has a base of 3.6 million users according to Intuit, so it is indeed a very successful application.  What Intuit has done with their SaaS platform is to provide instant integration to data in their SaaS QuickBooks, as well as to make the community available to developers on the platform.  It's hard to imagine not wanting to tap into that SMB installed base if you are building something remotely business-oriented.

Salesforce.com is probably the original Affinity Platform (Cloud Computing + Successful App).  Force.com lets you build apps that seamlessly connect to Salesforce's CRM data.  They have a thriving ecosystem in terms of numbers, but most of the developers I talk to find the cost of Force.com is prohibitive to build a company around.

Facebook:  Yep, they have a platform, hugely successful applets, and a wildly successful application.  The formula works on the consumer side too, not just business.

FlickR just announced a new website dedicated to developers, and they've had API's for quite a while.  I'm not sure I would quite call it a platform, but a healthy set of API's to help spur an ecosystem is a worthwhile start for any company that owns a thriving application whose data is online.

Who Should Get An Affinity Platform?

Amazon:  Funny, but why wouldn't AWS tie in much better with the retail business?  Perhaps Amazon would say it does, and that is somewhat true, but the tie in goes out not in.  I can use the billing service (outbound to me), but I can't write cool apps that work well for Amazon's retaillers.  What if, for example, I wanted to write an app that gives the retaillers up-to-the-minute competitive pricing and let's them adjust their offering prices in real time? 

Adobe:  I was thrilled to see Adobe get involved with the Intuit announcement.  But, there's a lot more they could be doing.  They have a growing coterie of SaaS apps including BuzzWord and PhotoShop Express.  They've got Flex, which is very valuable for any platform.  It'll be interesting to see how Adobe plays it.  If they run too headlong out there, they may be in competition with those they want on their side.  For example, both Intuit and Salesforce are involved with Flex.  Sarah Perez has a great post on Adobe's Online Empire.

Oracle/SAP:  Interesting conundrum for these mega-players.  Traditionally, they want to own an awful lot, so it's a bit hard to completely trust them.  Yet, they clearly have ecosystems.

Google:  Yes, they have a PaaS offering in AppEngine, and a killer app in Search.  How can they get the two together?  With Yahoo cutting search engines out, Google can do the opposite and be more inclusive.  One of the issues for interactive apps is getting everything indexed.  Dynamic content is a lot harder than static, and indexing inside something like a Flex application is also hard.  Google could fix these problems in interesting ways.  Search inside a database is also a common problem that Google has the means to fix.

Microsoft:  Another dilemma for these guys.  They'll argue they're already doing it (as big companies often do), but the problem is that they don't really have a cloud platform yet and most of the data from their successful apps is not in the cloud and is therefore not very accessible.  I think the best starting point is Exchange and Sharepoint.  Again, they'll argue they already do this.

EMC:  You've got a ton of backups from people's PC's and small businesses inside your cloud via Mozy.  Backup is your killer app.  What can you do for them as a next step?  What apps would you write for people to access if EMC had a platform that tapped into this stuff?  Seems like it might make the ultimate desktop/mobile/whatever else syncing environment if nothing else.  Maybe you could also seamlessly migrate people to cloud apps if they wanted to go there.

Anyone else that has a highly successful application with tons of data in the cloud should be looking at how to leverage that in the platform world.  BTW, you don't have to build a soup-to-nuts platform, you just need a way for people's apps to be enabled to what you have to offer.  Most of the app may even run somewhere else and just call on your platform for services. 

eBay:  Hugely successful app, but seemingly plateaud.  So many things work well as auctions, eBay could launch a platform play.  For example, frequent flyer miles and other affinity programs.  I can't remember the last time I got a First Class upgrade from my miles.  It should be possible to bid miles and auction off the benes to whoever bids the most.  Better for customers as they can get stuff they need.  Better for airlines as they get the miles off their books faster.  Better for eBay because it opens up whole new lines of business.

Who Should Use an Affinity Platform:  Sales 2.0 Opportunity

Anybody that needs customers and demand generation for starters.  Forgot rewriting your entire app for any of these platforms.  What is a minimal module that plugs your business into the ecosystem?  Everyone I talk to that is plugged into Salesforce looks to them for this purpose.  They get two benefits.  First, there is a halo effect from being connected to a successful application and platform.  Second, they get sales leads from the ecosystem.

Network Effects

The Cloud Computing world is rapidly growing up.  There's tremendous new functionality that's been announced in just the last six months or so, and no doubt a lot mroe is on the way.  There's been talk and concern about lock-in.  Overt lock-in isn't going to work, but Affinity Platforms have a more insidious kind of lock-in. 

Ultimately, there isn't just one cloud, there are many.  And, it's costly to shift data between clouds.  The best advantage will be had if apps run in whatever cloud hosts the system-of-record data they need to operate on.  Companies like Intuit control hugely valuable data of that kind.  Once your app and customers are used to easily plugging into that data, it'll be pretty hard to go elsewhere even though it will likely be technically feasible.

SaaSを成功させる重要要件は単純明快な価格構成を提供する事。 複雑な価格構成で導入を遅らせることは避けるべき、とのコラム

A SaaS Lesson for Microsoft: Simplify the Licensing

Whether an enterprise has purchased a SaaS solution or still kicking the tires, the feedback I continually get from clients is, "Boy, you gotta like the simple licensing model."

In the office applications space, Microsoft has built an empire out of complex licensing. The sales rep patter goes like this. "Oh, you want e-mail? Well, you're going to have to buy a Microsoft Exchange Server license, a number of Microsoft Outlook licenses, and then a group of Client Access Licenses (CALs) so the Microsoft Outlook clients can legally talk to the Exchange Server. Or, if you want other stuff, we could set up an Enterprise Agreement and you could get a discount on a wide variety of Microsoft products. Let me fire up my spreadsheet so I can figure out the discount we can give you."

In other words, an enterprise is sent back in time to more than 160 years ago, when buyers and sellers haggled over prices. (For the historians in the crowd, fixed prices and price labels on products arrived in the 1850's, coinciding with the arrival of the first big department stores: Bon Marche, Macy's, and Marshall Field.) When enterprises look at the time they spend with Microsoft negotiating terms (weeks or months) versus the time they spend with Google (seconds: multiply $50 per user per year by the number of users and then click "Yes"), they much prefer the Google model.

To highlight the real world frustration with Microsoft's pricing model, following is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to me by a Burton Group client at a Fortune 500 company:

MS has miles to go in terms of simpler pricing. That's another thing I'm looking for this year. We have spent 6 months now trying to master SharePoint pricing and even our MS account team can't give a clear answer. Server OS licenses. MOSS license per server. Product license - Project web access, Excel calc services... - are they for EVERY server in the farm, or only those where we've enabled that product? Heap-o-synergy design means we MUST install every piece of software on EVERY web & app server in the farm, regardless. Then the CALs - Server OS, MOSS, MOSS Enterprise, Project, Excel... Compare with Google - $50 / year / person buys everything on the menu, and no hardware required. Archiving is extra. This means everything Google introduces is instant value-add for us without complicated arithmetic or lengthy justification, budget, PO, invoice... cycles.

Microsoft is not the only offender here: any large enterprise software vendor--IBM, Oracle, SAP--is "easy pricing" challenged. However, given Microsoft's new mantra--software and services--it's going to have to figure out how to simplify its pricing sooner rather than later. The whole point of SaaS is that it's instant on: you don't need to spend weeks or months buying the servers or installing the software. However, if you still spend months haggling over the pricing, one of the major advantages of SaaS--fast deployment--goes out the window.

Microsoft has said that in the long run it wants to get where whether you're running software or services really doesn't matter. For example, headquarters and large subsidiaries could be running software, while smaller subsidiaries could be using SaaS solutions. Furthermore, moving back and forth between the delivery models--e.g., a fast-growing subsidiary decides to move from SaaS to software--would be a non-event. Simplified pricing would go a long way to making that vision a reality.

FW: CIOZone.COMが発表した米国市場で高成長を続けているトップ６０社を見るにあたり、SaaSにかかわる事業が多い事が判明

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SaaS is driving the 60 fastest-growing software companies

CIOZone.com has ranked the top-60 fastest-growing (public) software companies of at least $150 million in revenue, with VMware leading the pack and Red Hat claiming 12th place with a 33.6 percent growth rate. Not bad for a company that gives away its software for free.

But then, perhaps it's not surprising since Google, ranked second on the list, largely does the same.

What's most impressive in the list, however, is the growth rate being sustained by Oracle and Microsoft, because they're growing from a much larger base. It's fantastic that Red Hat is growing at 33 percent on a ~$500 million base. But Microsoft is growing by 25.7 percent on a $57 billion base, and Oracle is rising 24.9 percent on a $20 billion base.

That's amazing.

For smaller companies (more than $50 million in sales and less than $150 million), Omniture (Utah-based - hurray!) leads the pack with a 79.5 percent growth rate on a $143 million base. Not too shabby.

While the list is predominately comprised of proprietary-software companies, CIOZone points out that these vendors are succeeding precisely because they, too, are changing the game from a proprietary license model to a subscription model:

Software that increases the efficiency of corporate data centers, or that runs as an Internet-delivered service, is on a roll. Most of the fastest-growing software companies are doing one or the other....

While it was a good year for many software vendors, it was particularly good for companies that have discarded the older paradigm of install-and-maintain and are making their products available as online subscriptions.

This bodes well for open-source companies, for two reasons. One, many SaaS companies depend on open source (and will pay for it) to run their businesses.especially as an increasing number operate with a dual-mode model wherein they make their software available as an open-source download, with a pay-for-SaaS model to complement that. Kaltura, Loopfuse, and others are adopting this model, and I think it promises to be a highly profitable model for those that can pull it off.