One of the less appealing aspects of using cloud services is integrating various applications--both those in the cloud and those in your enterprise in an easily manageable way. A practical use case is the ability to use one CRM (customer relationship management) system and a different file storage system, both in the cloud.
So, Friday when I saw that Box.net was directly integrating its cloud-based storage service with Salesforce.com, I saw the confluence of two major trends, cloud storage and integration appear all in one fell swoop.
Salesforce.com has been the leader in cloud services and has consistently offered users ways to integrate other services into their SF.com installation. And Salesforce has also become the prime target for vendors who want to tap into their enormous customer base already using on-demand services.
But, Salesforce is far from infallible with certain aspects, such as storing files somewhat clunky and definitely costly when you start making it your system of record.
With the new offering, Box.net business users will now be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their SF.com instance. And they'll have unlimited storage for their files.
... Read moreI wrote yesterday about the case against enterprise micro-blogging. And while many people agreed with my suggestion that Yammer may not be ideal for my situation, we all agree that there is something to the notion of short-message style communications in the enterprise.
In Twitters' consumer setting, we tend to want the instant gratification with little to no follow-up on the discussion. In the business world we are looking for everything to have a meaning to our team/company and so on.
In the business world content is king, but context matters.
Besides the act of communicating, most people want is the ability to track conversations in an intuitive way. There are enterprise tools that provide context into all aspects of your business. A few examples:
- CRM -- any company that uses Salesforce.com will tell you that their CFO and sales team live and die by the data on the dashboard, using it for everything from forecasting to quarterly closing
- Marketing Analytics -- In the past I've described Loopfuse as "crack for marketers." The service provides near real-time statistics of all of your interactive traffic so you can measure and analyze
- IT Systems Management -- Products like Tivoli Netcool and HP OpenView are annoying behemoths, but they also serve a key function, ensuring that IT staff know what's going on in their networks and providing single-view and deep analytic views.
In the business world we want to see as much information as possible in the most concise and accurate way. Tweetdeck gives you a big lead in making sense of Twitter-verse surrounding yourself and your company's Twitter efforts.
I'd also recommend checking out Tr.im, a relatively new service that gives you basic analytics about the short links you include in Tweets. If you are a marketer using Twitter to announce products and such, this information is invaluable. I've found that links I include get clicked by about 10% of my followers, which is a shockingly high number.
You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
In the early days of software as a service applications like those of Salesforce.com, you were required to stick with the company's approach to processes. Users realized what the the issues were early on, but many SaaS providers still don't offer much in the way of customization.
But the lack of customization is starting to be addressed with the advent of platforms like Force.com. Through the adoption of platform-as-a-service options, businesses can customize SaaS applications much the same way one can develop software or modify an open-source product.
In outlining "7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS," Alistair Croll at GigaOm writes, "typically, the software with the most features won. Feature-itis ruled."
No more. With software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day 1 and how well it will adapt over time. Take, for example, the Family Service Agency of San Francisco, which replaced its ailing paper-based system with SaaS donated by the Salesforce.com Foundation, improving productivity and accountability along the way.
Speaking (on Wednesday) at the SIIA's eGov event in Washington, D.C., Bob Bennett, the agency's CEO, explained how the agency turned a sales force automation tool into a social-services management tool.
Illustrating the point are a set of seven critical topics to be addressed:
- Adaptability
- Reliability
- Task productivity
- Price
- Back-end integration
- Longevity
- Ecosystem
All of these elements are important to consider in addressing the SaaS-imposed challenge of modifying business processes to meet software design versus building software to match processes.
With the rise of cloud computing and Web applications, monitoring and management complexity has crossed the line from the network deep into applications. Businesses that are dependent on the web (companies like Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com) are concerned with more than just the red light/green light mentality of the client/server days.
Monitoring has evolved from "Am I alive?" to "How well is everything running?" and "Is my performance maximized?" It follows that businesses need performance data from applications, not just infrastructure, to ensure proper delivery and function (and, down the line, good user experience).
Web apps present a new set of monitoring and management challenges. I asked Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero to give me some thoughts on the evolution of monitoring networks, applications and the Cloud.
1. Frequent Innovation and Rapid Change
Web application companies deal with change hourly. The more pieces that change and the faster the changes occur, the higher the likelihood of new problems being introduced into what is already a dynamic environment.
This can happen at the largest shops, as witnessed recently when Google claimed every site on the internet was malware.
The challenge becomes keeping track of all of the changes and knowing what change resulted in what improvement (or degradation) to applications. This data is crucial to ensuring application health, but keeping pace with changes and the varied impact is a complicated process that legacy monitoring tools like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli by design are not designed to handle.
2. Specialized Technology
Web platforms that include LAMP, Java, and J2EE applications require specialized, cohesive metric collection to correlate application performance up and down the stack. This includes visibility into all the technologies that matter in Web application environments - from operating systems, Web servers, application servers, databases and virtualization - is critical.
3. Small Staff, Large Responsibility
The web ops people at any business wear many hats: monitoring 24/7, capacity planning, SLA compliance reporting, business metrics delivery to the rest of the company to name a few.
The aforementioned "rapid change" adds fuel to an already roaring (and hectic) fire. Shrinking budgets mean smaller web ops teams, and the fewer people to spread out across those tasks, the harder monitoring becomes.
Finding a solution designed to fill that gap means the difference between a band-aid (restarting an already- dead server) and avoiding cutting yourself in the first place (a diagnostic process to prevent and/or manage around a problem).
You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
With little clarity on what constitutes "duplicate functionality", Apple rejected the iPhone podcast client Podcaster on the grounds that "since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes".
No one should expect Apple to include competitive applications in it's walled garden. That would be the equivalent to Salesforce.com putting other CRM apps on the AppExchange. It's bad business for them. And it's just not realistic.
Nonetheless, this calls into question just how you can have a "platform" when the platfrom vendor arbitrarily decides to eliminate competition. The company shouldn't encourage developers to embrace the iPhone as a way to make money without clear ground rules on how to interact with the company.
As developer Fraser Speirs writes:
Let's be clear: forbidding "duplication of functionality" is forbidding competition. The point of competition is to do the same thing, but better. Worse, Apple hasn't even said which functionality is off-limits. I'm not arguing about what's legally or morally right in some abstract sense. I'm talking about common sense -- talented developers are looking at what is going on with the App Store and choosing not to write iPhone apps, out of the fear that their efforts will be for naught. If good developers are afraid to write software for your platform, it is a problem.
I've banged this drum before in relation to Facebook, another walled-garden that encouraged development then immediately replicated the functions of the ecosystem and took the monetization opportunities into their own hands. Investors who put dollars into companies whose products only run on Facebook headed for the hills months ago. Sadly, the iPhone may be the next bubble unless Apple provides some clarity.
When a platform is not open you are at the mercy of the vendor who may/may not be interested in making your life easier or making you money. While it's hard to say that Apple has been purposely disingenuous , it's clear that the company hasn't accurately represented the rules for exclusion.
Nothing kills 3rd-party developer motivation faster than unclear rules of engagement.
As the cloud continues to emerge as a serious option, many people are starting to catch on that there are limits to what can be done outside that particular platform.
Right now there only a few options if you are a cloud or PaaS provider:
1. Cordon off virtual machines and use VM images (like Amazon.com or Joyent)
2. Allow development on some programming language (like Google App Engine)
3. Force users onto your platform (like Salesforce.com)
The applications that are built on top of a particular vendor's infrastructure are locked into that provider's way of doing things. I always expect the cloud to be about freedom from vendor control--much like how open source gives control to the users.
Where is the "write once, run anywhere" ideal of Java? Sun should be the next big Cloud vendor--it's got hardware, virtualization, and Java all under one roof and yet it remains late to the game.
Over at GigaOm I read about Dreamfactory which provides some cloud-agnostic/opportunistic offerings to integrate its own applications with other SaaS vendors.
But rather than being tied to a particular cloud, DreamFactory works with many of them. Relying on a rich client that runs as a browser plug-in, DreamFactory's application only needs the cloud for storage. It can use Salesforce, Webex Connect and Amazon EC2. Quickbase support is just around the corner, with Google BigTable hot on its heels. It will even run on your hard drive.
The fact that the Dreamfactory plug-in runs locally solves a major issue--what happens when you are not connected. It also means you can move from platform-to-platform.
But this approach is merely the tip of the iceberg. When you consider the domination of the Flash plug-in, you can certainly imagine Adobe making strides very quickly. For that matter, this approach could be Microsoft's first step into being cloud-relevant.
The next stage of the cloud is the maneuverability of data regardless of its location or destination.
Phil Wainewright writes astutely today on the many degrees of multi-tenant SaaS architecture, highlighting "true" vs. "everything else." Considering that customers and end-users have little to no idea what's running at SaaS companies it's a bit ironic that the technology powering these companies is interesting--I suppose it's only so to technical people and other vendors.
Salesforce.com: First-degree multi-tenancy. In this model, all customers are served from a single infrastructure in which every component is shared, all the way down to the tables in the database.
Intacct: Second-degree multi-tenancy. Like many SaaS pureplays, Intacct uses replication much more broadly than Salesforce.com to distribute its shared-schema instances across large numbers of server clusters.
Oracle and others: Lesser-degree multi-tenancy. There are a lot of terms floating around for these lower levels of multi-tenancy, including isolated tenancy, mega-tenancy or hybrid tenancy.
Link: Many degrees of multi-tenancy
My other theory is that we can eventually get rid of Outlook. If there is any app that people are more addicted to than Outlook, it's Gmail. And now we've suckered them into using it for business.
... Read moreBefore I became a marketing wonk I was a knowledgeable technologist, which is probably why I've never once enjoyed any e-mail system that I have used or implemented. Over the last 15 years, I have tried pretty much everything, from Pine to Zimbra, to MS Exchange to Lotus Notes and several different IMAP and POP options. Every time it's the same thing--the system works within reason but is never great. And there is always something that bites you in the rear.
I first started outsourcing e-mail to managed providers in 2003 when I worked for a CEO who demanded MS Exchange and we only had Linux boxes. It was never great and it was too expensive to boot. But the offerings have gotten much better and at this point I can't see a small- or medium-sized business running its own mail server. It's just not necessary.
Here are my fundamental hopes for e-mail:
- Reliable delivery of mail (dare to dream)
- Reliable delivery of mail on mobile devices (Blackberry and iPhone)
- Shared calendaring with administrator abilities (i.e. admin access)
- Backup and recovery
- Reliable SPAM prevention
- Sync across multiple computers and devices
Salesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.
But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.
While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.
The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now.
... Read more
