Okay, the ubiquitous use of the term ‘cloud’ or ‘cloud computing’ is already getting annoying. It seems practically every other marketing offer, industry analyst and sales exec is adopting this nebulous term as if it has specific meaning to them. Very quickly this is squeezing the last drop out of what meaning there was to the term. I am drenched in a deluge of offers and admonitions to get ‘into the cloud’.  It’s enough to make you wish for a cloudless day.  Already the backlash has begun - just search on ‘cloud computing’ to see the griping.

The silver lining?  However the term is used, business models that allow you to subscribe to software are of great benefit to us, the consumer. (more…)

 

Ben Kepes penned a nice summary of the Office 2.0 conference and one complaint I liked is that the session on going 100% SaaS still focused a bit too much on justifying “why SaaS”.  This has been nagging at me as well lately - all the chatter about whether or not 100% SaaS makes sense, and whether or not there are 7 myths about SaaS, etc.

The Vision Thing

All the time spent debating positions which are already clear does take time away from the “vision thing”.  In fact I suppose we are in a bit of our own “silly season” in this debate about how to provision IT!  So here is the vision in my view: we are now in a position to run a reasonably sized business in many industries without building a data center and without traditional “outsourcing” of IT for that business. (more…)

 

Have been preparing to be on a panel at the Office 2.0 Conference September 5th. This looks to be an excellent place to find out more about the future of online productivity and collaboration. Our topic is “Going 100% SaaS” on Friday at 9:45 am. In preparation for the conference, I joined the panel online to work on an outline using Google Docs. Even though internet explorer failed in the middle of making my first edits, the changes had been saved when I returned via Firefox. So first impression is positive with only a few reservations until off-line processing for desktop documents is delivered - looking forward to learning more at the conference!

 

At Ingres, we have talked a lot about our strategy for delivering IT services via 100% SaaS and open source software solutions. There has been an interesting discussion on Phil Wainewright’s blog site regarding multi-tenancy and why it matters when deploying SaaS solutions. What we seek from SaaS solutions is to get out of running our own copy of a vendor’s software, so we can then focus on strategy, vendor alignment, implementation, training, and process excellence.

In order to accomplish this, we expect our SaaS vendors to manage and upgrade the environment - a shared, multi-tenant environment in every possible case. We expect them to provide the most extensible, configurable software possible so that we can tailor it to our specific use cases, but in doing so not modify core code in the application. This is how our vendors unlock the potential of the SaaS model. This is how I know they can focus on extending their own solutions, and not become buried in managing unique customer deployments. There is a difference between this approach and the ASP world and that is why the new breed of SaaS solutions will take over the applications industry in due time.

 

I’ve just come across this blog at CIO Weblog, and the entries related to SaaS, which are very well done. A question posted recently there is whether or not the new wave of SaaS vendors can overtake the legacy providers. My views on this have been shared - business application software is going to be delivered as a service or be left in the dust. Legacy providers such as Oracle have found it very difficult to properly move into a valid SaaS offering. Oracle has been working on this for years, beginning with Oracle BOL, OnLine, etc. The problem is, these are not true SaaS, multi-tenant offerings, designed from the start with the properties of the consumer web in mind. The new SaaS players coincidentally have newer software (!) which has been designed as multi-tenant architecture that can take full advantage of what the web based SaaS model offers. Their challenge is in fact to take that advantage while it exists and become the new standard.

On the music front, and speaking of newer players, last week I took my son to see Linkin Park and others on their Projeckt Revolution tour. I had not been a fan but this was an amazing performance approaching the likes of Radiohead and Muse. It was easy getting past the shredder vocals given that practically the entire audience was singing along. At the end of the show I thanked the group behind me for teaching me the lyrics!

 

I talked to Chris Lynch yesterday from CIO Magazine about our 100% SaaS and Open Source strategy for sourcing IT solutions at Ingres. The article Chris posted is titled: The Benefits of the All-SaaS Shop: Money, Application Integration, and Did We Mention Money? Thanks to Chris the quotes are accurate and I appreciate the time to discuss our strategy. The “money” headline focuses quite a bit on the savings inherit in the SaaS model, and probably my only additional comment would be that what we really look for is cost effective, variable based pricing for our solutions rather than something cheap. Semantics yes, but a distinction. Thanks Chris - glad you are “on the bus”!