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
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
There is a key missing piece for cloud computing to really go mainstream--a higher-level programming language to be able to do more advanced logic and functionality.
I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.
Maybe Sun just doesn't get it or care enough? This concept to me is the key to making the cloud a reality--and making Sun relevant again (MySQL was exciting for five minutes, but is almost forgotten already.)
I couldn't figure out why Salesforce.com developed Apex until I started looking at how difficult it is to get "real" programmatic functionality into a browser and on-demand applications. Now I get it.
Coghead and Bungee Labs offer very cool platforms for application development, but they need to be fully embedded into the SaaS offering for them to be truly valuable. As it stands, it's not great to have to go through multiple vendors applications and architectures in order to solve one problem. On the positive side, it's clear that the problem can be solved and those two have gone a long way to make it happen.
The Smoothspan blog notes that Cloud Computing may be perishable, which is an interesting way to think about it--for the moment it's a one horse race with Amazon as the leader. Google AppEngine only supports Python and you have to upload files, so, while a nice start it has very limited appeal for the moment.
Some of the big vendors like HP, Microsoft etc. haven't even began their real efforts so the game is far from over. Amazon will be forced to deal with the enterprise, which the BigCo's are already skilled at, where Amazon is not.
The SmoothSpan Blog has a very detailed article outlining the SaaS universe and the likelihood of dominant players taking on aggregation roles.
This is a segment ripe for consolidation--or maybe aggregation as users realize they are locked into individual SaaS apps.
OpSource acquired billing provider LeCayla earlier this month and odds are that won't be their last purchase. OpSource is in a unique position of having critical mass in the SaaS hosting space and there will be lots of companies that they see value in or can pick up if the company can't go it alone.
Taking the scale of Salesforce.com's user base out of the equation and the OpSource ecosystem is much more appealing, if for no other reason than the fact that OpSource can absorb acquried companies much quicker (thanks to their architecture that puts all the customers onto the Bus) something that Salesforce.com can't do easily.
