First some clarification – what Augustin is really saying is that IaaS will prove so compelling that it will force SaaS vendors to either move to IaaS or fall by the way side – in other words SaaS vendors with their own infrastructure will find it increasingly impossible to compete. In Augustin’s words;

Cloud computing is obsoleting SaaS as defined by SalesForce, NetSuite and similar single-vendor solutions. The distinction between SaaS and cloud computing is an important one. Cloud computing gives companies the ability to scale out computing resources on-demand. Rather than building data centers that can serve peak capacity for all of their applications, they can instead build data centers (private clouds) that serve the typical capacity of their mission-critical applications and then overflow to external clouds as necessary.

But to support this, applications must understand the cloud computing model and be able to scale across internal (private) and external clouds.

The next big opportunity is around interoperability and portability across the many cloud services out there (Amazon, Google, Rackspace, etc.) so customers can consume services without fear of lock-in and the high costs of being dependent on one vendor. This is where legacy multi-tenant SaaS applications like SalesForce begin to fail. They run in only the vendor's data centers, not across public and private clouds. They are unable to take advantage of cloud computing.

This assertion would seem, at face value and somewhat unintentionally, to be backed up by a slide that Phil Wainewright used in a recent Whitepaper, Redefining software platforms — How PaaS changes the game for ISVs (the writing of which, by way of disclosure for both Phil and myself, was supported by the Intuit Partner Platform who is a client of both of ours). The diagram (see below) shows the increasing duplication of infrastructure, and hence increasing inefficiency as one moves from shared infrastructure, to dedicated SaaS and through to on-premise.

It’s a powerful diagram and one which, by extension supports Augustin’s contention.

Jumping into the sphere of the discussion, if a little peripherally, comes a survey from Avanade. Hat tip to GigaOm for finding it and making the comment that the survey found that;

By a ratio of 4:1 (2:1 on a worldwide basis), respondents said they would prefer to have their applications delivered as services from internal platforms. Is SaaS the “killer app” for internal clouds?

But I came away wondering if Augustin was looking at the issue completely as a binary argument, when clearly it is not. It’s a reasonably well accepted, if seldom mentioned, fact among the clouderati that large SaaS vendors often offer their products to large enterprise customers as “private SaaS” that is SaaS applications installed on private datacenters where organizations can feel better about their qualms over security, reliability and all the other barriers corporate IT puts up to justify apprehension about SaaS.

So like many of these things, it’s very much a question of horses for courses. In the same way that Augustin’s own product, SugarCRM is available on-premise, via IaaS or any combination of the above, so to will other vendors slice and dice their products to meet the particular requirements of their customer base. For the SMB set, much more important than the on-premise/on-demand debate is the ability to utilize web apps with their existing workflows and product choices – this is where offerings like the IPP with it’s built in connection to QuickBooks on the desktop comes in. For larger customers the imperatives are different, security and reliability are top concern and, whether rightly or wrongly, their perception is that internal infrastructure gives them the best results over these metrics.

So the takeaway here is one of flexibility – as an industry, and given the nascent nature of cloud computing and it’s triumvirate of categories - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – we do ourselves a disservice by being too dogmatic about these things.

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It’s nice being able to tell a story about cloud computing being used to power some really cool projects. While Youtube is cool and all, it doesn’t come close to the coolness of exploring the depths of the oceans or outer space. It’s in this second category that this post lies – apparently the European Space Agency (ESA) currently has a project called Gaia is a project to;

conduct a census of one thousand million stars in our Galaxy. It will monitor each of its target stars about 70 times over a five-year period, precisely charting their positions, distances, movements, and changes in brightness. It is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia should also identify tens of thousands of asteroids.

Which, you have to admit, is a pretty cool thing. (oh and along the way Gaia will also provide stringent new tests of Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory)

Apparently The Server Labs (TSL), a cloud computing consultancy firm, has decided on a project to migrate the Gaia project over to Amazon EC2. The Server Labs estimates the ESA could save 50 percent in overall costs.

In May this year The Server Labs successfully completed the first feasibility study with ESA testing the potential of moving the project’s data processing to the Cloud the nuts and bolts of the project involves the processing of massive quantities of data collected in space – the sort of use-case that is tailor-made for the hyper-scalability that cloud computing brings.

In the next stage of the project, TSL will further test the capacity of its data processing, testing the horizontal scalability of Gaia’s data processing grid to limits impossible with the current in-house cluster. TSL will run ESA’s Gaia data processing in Amazon's Cloud, incorporating RightScale’s and Oracle’s technology.

Geek and science fiction fact? A match made in heaven!

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Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

Glue isn’t a tech company, rather it’s a conference (and a very cool one at that) organized by the same people who do Defrag every November. Unusually for a shirt giveaway, the Glue attendee shirt is a long sleeve crew neck in dark gray. The conference is cool but the shirts aren’t so much (sorry Eric) – the logo is a little gaudy, the fabric is partially synthetic (sacre bleu!) and the byline on the back is questionable.

Hot    

• It was free!
• My wife wears it to bed in wintertime

Not

• 50% synthetic – killing the world one thread at a time
• The logo is a little over the top
• Made in Haiti… where the water runs hot (as in Geiger hot)

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Fast forward two or three years and we have the situation where an iPhone application is a non-negotiable requirement for someone delivering software - seemingly every day another consumer application launches it’s iPhone app – it seems if you’re a consumer facing service and don’t offer an iPhone app you’re destined to be jeered into oblivion by the crowds (or at least Fake Steve Jobs).

Beyond the consumer stuff however we’ve seen a significant number of business applications develop a specific iPhone offering. Into this fray rides Netsuite who recently announced the launch of its application for iPhone and iPod touch. The Netsuite application delivers up the expected dashboard and information overviews including;

• NetSuite Dashboards including KPIs, report snapshots, trend graphs, scorecards, reminders, and recent records. The dashboards are interactive, allowing users to drill down and explore trends with the touch of a finger.
• NetSuite Calendar with support for accepting or declining events and marking tasks complete.
• Lead, Prospect & Customer records tailored to mobile sales, field service and executive leadership, including access to associated contacts, marketing campaigns, opportunities, quotes, orders, purchase history, financial history, cases, and issues.
• Productivity tools that leverage native capabilities of the device, such as click-to-call from any NetSuite record containing a phone number, click-to-email from any NetSuite record containing an e-mail address, and click-to-map (via Google Maps) from any NetSuite record containing a physical address.

What interested me more than the functionality however was to look at the uptake for the iPhone app and look at Netsuite’s reasons for building an iPhone specific application. In the month or so since the release of the application, around 5000 people have downloaded the app – it’s early days and hard to take too much from that – but it’s a significant number of downloads.

As for the decision to create an iPhone specific application specifically, and leaving other mobile device development to their mobile partners, Netsuite have made primarily a marketing move, I put this to Netsuite, and asked them for their reasoning behind the move, they told me that in their opinion;

Apple is driving a lot of innovation in the smartphone market right now… By developing for the iPhone platform ourselves and working directly with Apple, we were able to deliver features like the NetSuite executive dashboard and provide visibility across the whole ERP cloud-computing suite, while our mobile partners have so far largely focused on CRM-centric solutions. We haven't ruled out developing other mobile solutions ourselves, but there's plenty of room in the NetSuite mobile ecosystem for both in-house and partner-delivered solutions, tailored for different types of businesses and users.

It’s an interesting answer but one which doesn’t really address the reasons to focus on the iPhone in particular. No doubt Netsuite have looked at their customer mix and decided that whether for marketing reasons or functional ones, the iPhone is a good bet.

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Petouhoff gave the analogy of cave drawings from eons ago – when all else is gone the messages remain – hence her perspective that the discussion about support has to occur at a management level. Customer service is broken and we’re in the midst of a perfect storm. years and years of terrible customer service and the emergence of social media are lead to a business transformation. Social media is a catalyst for change within an organization.

Fernandez explained that Marketo had active support from its inception – it’s an essential part of their customer support portal for both inbound and self service support contact. He gave an example of case diversion during the recent release of their updated offering. The inbound support ticket mix is changing between phone, email and web. Approx two thirds are human assisted while the remainder are self-service.

Lea talked about the Get Satisfaction freemium model and that they encourage their users to build community wherever is most appropriate for them – whether it’s on their own site, in Facebook or wherever.

Warfield explained that Helpstream is trying to combine social and process – creating a repeatable process around social interactions.

The panel discussed ComcastCares and how just showing customers that an organization cares is so important. Petouhoff talked about the fact that customer service departments are continually told to do more with less – they’re not supported in their role. Lea explained that the majority of people signing up for GetSatisfaction are doing so to use it for feedback – marketing and customer support need to be integrated. Warfield explained that the customers really want an integrated experience with a company.

Warfield discussed the concept of “deflection” where customer services aim is to have their customers NOT engage with customer services. The trick is to integrate the inbound communications and therefore have customer support become an asset rather than a cost to the organization.

Petouhoff discussed the need for openness, honesty and authenticity. The conversations are occurring anyway, it’s important for companies to embrace and engage with them. She gave some statistics about customer retention in the case of good support – it’s apparently 65% higher than otherwise.

Lea gave the example of Nike running who for $8000 per annum got a GetSatisfaction widget that has drawn huge content that is invaluable to the organization for product development. Warfield used an example of InfusionSoft who have leveraged Helpstream to capture the voice and sentiment of the community.

Lea contends that social media is shifting communications to a much more “natural language” approach – less guard and beating around the bush and more openness and honesty. Again the themes of authenticity, naturalness and honesty. Warfield concurred, saying that social media is just about people – people doing what they do in real life.

A great session with much agreement around the table…

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Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know.

Five principles;

• Workforce transformation
• Business process/operations
• Intellectual property/Privacy/governance
• Religious wars (technology/generational biases)
• Bottom line business benefits

Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent talked about their desire to unlock institutionalized knowledge and enable collaboration. Berlind asks why that desire is any different now from in the past. Lowe’s answer was that tools and technologies available today enable those aims. Claire Flanagan from CSC and Bruce Galinsky from Metlife agreed that it’s the technologies that really enable the promise of sharing and co-creating.

Berlind asks how that actually transforms the workforce. Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton says this is happening no matter – expectations are higher on both the organization’s and the employee’s sides. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling that to happen faster, better and more readily.

Berlind asked about the cultural change that needs to occur within an organization. Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly agreed and said that they see Enterprise 2.0 as a gateway to moving the organization into a more open approach – it’s the “starter drug” to get the organization hooked on open communications.

Jamie Pappas from EMC mentioned that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a cure all or fix all – it’s an enabler and relies on the advocates throughout the organization to adopt it.

Much discussion about business process – have we hit the wall in terms of agility? No – it’s just baby steps and there are profound benefits yet to be realized.

Governance, there is a culture shift happening and the technology needs to keep up. One good approach can be called “participatory governance” where those who have skin in the game develop the governance models for those tools but do so in concert with the traditional governance approached.

The intellectual property concerns. All panelists agreed that organizations need to stop not trusting their employees. People are generally inherently good and those who are not will always find ways to maliciously expose data. Sure put good governance in place but beyond that trust the people to do the right thing. “I can’t stop you from doing stupid things but I can make it visible when you do them”.

In terms of the business value the difficulty is that its very hard to show true metrics for the gains that can be made form enterprise 2.0 – there are significant anecdotal benefits that need to be extrapolated to an organization-wide benefit. Booz Allen Hamilton gave an example where a 3000 employee reply-all email was analyzed and once the cost of people replying and unsubscribing was taken into account, there was an internal cost of $250000 – enterprise 2.0 can solve many of those issues. Extrapolating that up through the organization, the contention is that if a simple thing like reply-all can create such costs for an organization, high level operations can drive huge benefits.

It was very much a case of the converted preaching to the converted – it’ll be interesting to see what the originator of the title has to say about what the panelists had to offer.

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Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).

The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.

D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.

First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below, and Timo Elliots earlier coverage here.

Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.

And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.

Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.

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Those of us who have used Wave however often end up saying, after a very short space of time, “well that’s cool and all – but what do we do now?”.

Enter ThoughtWorks Studios with their integration between their Mingle project management tool and Google Wave. ThoughtWorks is demonstrating their integration today here at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco in a joint demo with the Google Wave product team (and, as an aside, it seems even Google realizes that they need to actively show users just how Wave is going to live up to its promise to reinvent the way we collaborate and communicate).

The integration leverages Mingle’s latest release which added the following major functional areas to the product;

• “Murmurs” Online Team Collaboration – using IM and Twitter-like functionality online conversations are automatically associated with a specific Mingle project artifact – then archived for on-demand retrieval and review. Uses XMPP so integrates with a variety of chat clients (screenshot below)
• Integration with Tasktop – allowing developers to use whichever task tools work with their development environment, task notifications are automatically posted to Mingle
• Program Management Capabilities – Allowing user created macros for reporting across disparate projects
• Enterprise Scalability

The idea of the integration is to show the how Wave can be applied to a real world situation, in Mingle’s case this is by using the project management tool to add structure and metadata to conversations in Google Wave. Users can create new artifacts in Mingle by selecting text within a Wave. They can view and interact with Mingle card data automatically, and they can see which conversations in Google Wave reference specific cards in Mingle. See the screenshot below)

I put it to Chad Worthington, VP of product development for ThoughtWorks Studio that this integration was a tacit admission that users want to continue using their communication tool of choice – that is email. He didn’t deny this fact and expressed ThoughtWorks desire to mold to users preferences – this is fine but it does raise some questions about ongoing revenue and charging models – if people utilize your product entirely off-platform, that begs creates some difficulties. Just the kind of the issue Twitter is facing right now.

While it’s cool to have an actual example and avoid those “well that’s cool, but what do we do now moments”, I struggle to see major differences between a cross Mingle/Wave collaboration and a collaboration using traditional PM tools – time will tell whether this particular use-case has legs. I’d also be interested to see if ThoughtWorks provides tools to do similar things in standard email as they’re powering within Wave,

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Those of us who have used Wave however often end up saying, after a very short space of time, “well that’s cool and all – but what do we do now?”.

Enter ThoughtWorks Studios with their integration between their Mingle project management tool and Google Wave. ThoughtWorks is demonstrating their integration today here at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco in a joint demo with the Google Wave product team (and, as an aside, it seems even Google realizes that they need to actively show users just how Wave is going to live up to its promise to reinvent the way we collaborate and communicate).

The integration leverages Mingle’s latest release which added the following major functional areas to the product;

• “Murmurs” Online Team Collaboration – using IM and Twitter-like functionality online conversations are automatically associated with a specific Mingle project artifact – then archived for on-demand retrieval and review. Uses XMPP so integrates with a variety of chat clients (screenshot below)
• Integration with Tasktop – allowing developers to use whichever task tools work with their development environment, task notifications are automatically posted to Mingle
• Program Management Capabilities – Allowing user created macros for reporting across disparate projects
• Enterprise Scalability

The idea of the integration is to show the how Wave can be applied to a real world situation, in Mingle’s case this is by using the project management tool to add structure and metadata to conversations in Google Wave. Users can create new artifacts in Mingle by selecting text within a Wave. They can view and interact with Mingle card data automatically, and they can see which conversations in Google Wave reference specific cards in Mingle. See the screenshot below)

I put it to Chad Worthington, VP of product development for ThoughtWorks Studio that this integration was a tacit admission that users want to continue using their communication tool of choice – that is email. He didn’t deny this fact and expressed ThoughtWorks desire to mold to users preferences – this is fine but it does raise some questions about ongoing revenue and charging models – if people utilize your product entirely off-platform, that begs creates some difficulties. Just the kind of the issue Twitter is facing right now.

While it’s cool to have an actual example and avoid those “well that’s cool, but what do we do now moments”, I struggle to see major differences between a cross Mingle/Wave collaboration and a collaboration using traditional PM tools – time will tell whether this particular use-case has legs. I’d also be interested to see if ThoughtWorks provides tools to do similar things in standard email as they’re powering within Wave,

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McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas - “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

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