Dortch on SaaS & Cloud Computing: The Blog!

Of Turkeys, Traffic and Testing: Cloud Computing Lessons from My Hometown

2012-04-10T11:45:00.001-07:00

You've got backup systems and power in place. What else could you possibly need? Testing routines -- and maybe cloud-based backups for your backups.

Sometimes, blog posts almost write themselves. As an example, let me quote directly from a front-page story from today's edition of my local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The headline of the story in the print edition of the paper: "County's 911 system knocked out by turkey."

"A wild turkey that flew into power lines knocked out Sonoma County's high-tech emergency 911 dispatch system Sunday night and crippled operations at the courthouse and county jail Monday.

"The power blackout was compounded when the county's massive and expensive emergency backup power system failed.

"On Monday, with computers out, traffic court was greatly curtailed, court calendars and proceedings had to be recorded by hand and jail inmates missed morning court appearances."

"With the blackout, the [emergency services] dispatchers' computers and every computer connected to the county system went black, officials said. At that point, the county's uninterrupted power supply, or UPS, should have kicked in.

"'The UPS failed,' said Chris Hentz, who supervises tech support for the county's computer dispatch system. 'It's just that simple.'"

The Lesson Here: If your systems are indeed critical, consider renting and configuring some cloud-based computing and communications resources as "warm spare"backups you can activate quickly should your primary systems fail, for whatever reason. (A favorite company of mine, 2600Hz, is doing some interesting things around cloud-based E911 and disaster recovery, for example.) Regular testing of back-up systems, including supposedly "uninterruptible" power supplies, is also a good idea. But you're already doing that. Right?

Amazingly, in another section of the same day's paper, this headline: "Traffic control system crashes." The story, adapted from a March 30 post at the Press Democrat's "Road Warrior" blog, goes on to report that on March 23, both primary and backup servers running the software that coordinates Santa Rosa's traffic signals crashed. "This force signals at major intersections to revert to a dated program that isn't nearly as efficient as the current one," the story added.

"When the server that housed the software program crashed, the backup files were also corrupted, [city traffic engineer Rob] Sprinkle said. So instead of just rebooting the program on a new server, city staff have spent two weeks essentially rebuilding it, he said. He estimated that the fix is 95 percent complete."

The Lesson Here: At the risk of repeating myself (again/still), if you can't or aren't prepared to move a critical application to the cloud, at least put a backup version there. And test both your primary and backup solutions, especially the connections that are supposed to make that cloud-based backup readily available. (How many of you are using a cloud-based backup service such as Carbonite, Google Cloud Storage, iCloud or Mozy to back up your personal or business files? And how often have you tested the file-restoration features of your chosen solution?)

The Bottom Line: Don't be a turkey, wild or otherwise. Add cloud-based backups to your technology toolkits. And trust, but verify. Test everything regularly enough to let you and your colleagues sleep well at night.

Fishbowl Pipeline: A Big Step Closer to Consistent Customer Satisfaction in the Cloud

2012-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

As I've opined previously here and elsewhere, I believe that inventory management is a critical element of making customers happy and keeping businesses agile and competitive, especially in "the mobile, social cloud." One of the companies that I think gets this better than most is Fishbowl, makers of the popular Fishbowl Inventory solution. Well, in response to widespread customer requests, the company has announced Fishbowl Pipeline Contact Manager.

It's Web-based, and it integrates directly with Fishbowl Inventory 2012. So users of that solution can add Pipeline Contact Manager's features immediately, with no re-entering of customer information required. Sales people can track tasks, leads and opportunities seamlessly and get the information they need to close deals in real time from anyplace they can get online.

And not to get too geeky, but Fishbowl Pipeline Contact Manager also supports an application programming interface (API) compliant with the widely used Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This technology forms the heart of most of the popular Web services in use today, as well as their abilities to interoperate. What all of that means is that Fishbowl Pipeline Contact Manager not only works with Fishbowl Inventory but should be relatively painless to integrate with other Web-based applications and services as your business needs and goals expand. Think of it as a kind of "future-proofing."

Superior customer care requires the ability to deliver what the customer wants, when and where the customer wants it. By integrating core customer relationship management (CRM) features with its market-leading Fishbowl Inventory solution, Fishbowl is empowering companies with limited budgets and IT expertise to deliver "enterprise-class" customer care and fulfillment. And as it has done so successfully with Fishbowl Inventory, Fishbowl is offering Pipeline Contact Manager at "SMB-friendly" pricing.

Given the laser-like focus of Fishbowl management on helping their customers to succeed, I fully expect Fishbowl Pipeline to become the Fishbowl Inventory of CRM solutions. That is to say, an offering that rapidly gains broad user adoption and high levels of user satisfaction.

Not that I have any strong feelings about any of this…but I obviously do. And if customer satisfaction matters to your company, and it does, you should, too. And you should check out Fishbowl's solutions and ways of doing business. Drop'em an e-mail at VIP@fishbowlinventories.com. I think you'll be impressed and motivated to learn more.

Inventory Management and the Mobile, Social Cloud

2011-11-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. "Inventory management" and "the mobile, social cloud" seem about as related as chalk and cheese. But hear me out (or whatever the literal equivalent is for readers of my blog).

It turns out that how well you manage inventories of the things customers buy is often the prime determinant of how those customers perceive that business. It doesn't matter how appealing it is to do business with you if you don't have or can't find what I want in a timely fashion.

It also turns out that how well your business leverages information technology (IT) directly affects how well it manages inventory. And that if yours is like many if not most businesses, 60 to 80 percent of your IT budget is being spent just to keep what you've got working. Which doesn't leave much room for innovation. Or even improvement to critical business processes such as delivering what customers want in a timely fashion.

Meanwhile, your customers, partners, prospects, competitors and purchase influencers are all increasingly inhabitants of that mobile, social cloud. Which means your company has to be there too.

So what you and your company need is a way to free up more IT resources and to be able to channel more of these to the challenges of better infrastructure management.

Turns out cloud-based resources can help in both areas.

Cloud-based infrastructure management solutions and processes can help your company to automate and offload much of that stuff on which your company's spending most of its IT budget. This will free up dollars and human bandwidth to do other things.

And there are a growing range of premise-based, cloud-based and cloud-enabled inventory management solutions. You can find a great rundown of several of these in an article published by Inc. in May 2011. My favorite: Fishbowl Inventory. It integrates with Intuit's QuickBooks and offers options that can take a company from better inventory management to more and better sales, fulfillment and resource planning and management, as recently covered by eWeek.

Inventory management may sound boring, and often is boring when done manually or using traditional tools. But if you think about and act upon it as the business-critical performance metric it really is, and look to the cloud for help, inventory management could be the coolest challenge you take on in 2012 and beyond.

A Special Offer: If you're interested in Fishbowl Inventory, drop a line to vip@fishbowlinventory.com. I've negotiated a relationship with the company that guarantees that every one of my readers who uses that e-mail address will get priority treatment and help getting started with their free trial of the software. And if you promise to share your feedback with me for possible inclusion in future blog posts or research (anonymously if you prefer), you'll get undying gratitude from me -- AND a five-percent discount from Fishbowl if you purchase Fishbowl Inventory! A win for everybody!

Cloudera and SGI: Hadoop for Geeks AND Suits

2011-10-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be too young to remember it, but there was a time when business technology decision makers looked askance at open source solutions such as Linux and the Apache Web server. These and others are now common components of many business technology infrastructures.

What happened? Some pioneering companies such as Red Hat and Ubuntu began wrapping packages of supporting technologies and services around Linux and related offerings. And those packages began to overcome the fears and objections of the "suits" who approved the budgets of the "geeks" already sold on the technological advantages of Linux, et al.

Fast-forward to today. Apache Hadoop is a combination of a distributed file system and nifty behind-the-scenes software. Hadoop makes it easier and faster to build and run applications that require lots of data and the shared power of multiple computers. And so far, Hadoop has followed a trajectory similar to that of Linux in its early days as a viable business computing platform. The geeks already love it or are champing at the bit to take it out for a spin, but the suits are largely unfamiliar and wary.

Enter the alliance of Cloudera and SGI, the venerable Silicon Graphics International. Cloudera is doing for Hadoop what Red Hat, Ubuntu and others did for Linux and related technologies. Its Cloudera Enterprise offering combines a suite of management software with support services to make Hadoop adoption and realization of its benefits faster and easier. SGI, meanwhile, combines the strengths of its server hardware with its strengths in markets that have proven strong for high-performance computing (HPC) and are likely to be equally enthusiastic users of Hadoop. These markets have included government, research and telecommunications segments, according to SGI.

Providers of cloud-based business applications and services will become one of these key markets very soon. Hadoop-powered computing clusters as a service, and the kinds of applications those clusters can support, should prove irresistible to users with advanced requirements, and to Cloudera, SGI and their partners.

Meanwhile, the Cloudera-SGI alliance is presenting itself as equally appealing to technical and business decision makers. For the geeks, SGI announced yesterday that it had set new Hadoop performance records by running Cloudera software on SGI servers. For the suits, the companies announced yesterday the availability of SGI Hadoop Clusters with the Cloudera Enterprise Management Suite already installed. "The relationship will also enable the two companies to jointly build, sell and deploy integrated, high performance Apache Hadoop-based commercial solutions," the announcement said. I can't imagine that the two companies will take very long to turn their collective expertise and experience into packaged solutions and services designed for the suits and the geeks in specific markets and/or facing specific challenges.

If you work at an enterprise that you think can benefit from business-enabled, purpose-built Hadoop deployments, keep an eye on Cloudera and SGI, especially as they ramp up competition with Oracle's software and its Sun hardware. And whether your company needs or wants Hadoop or not, look at the Cloudera-SGI alliance as a harbinger of more such relationships to come.

Vendors understand that users prefer solutions that let those users focus on running their businesses, not any particular technologies. Responsive vendors will increasingly deliver combinations of purpose-built, pre-configured physical, cloud-based and cloud-enhanced "appliances" that are easy to deploy, require minimal user management and deliver benefits rapidly. And for the solutions that meet those criteria, the inner workings matter far less to buyers and users than how well those workings work. Whether those buyers and users are geeks, suits or geeks wearing suits, a rapidly growing demographic segment...

Cloud-Enabled Infrastructure Management: A Two-Way Need

2011-10-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

Is the technology infrastructure upon which your business relies ready for "the cloud(s)?"

As with every meaningful one-on-one relationship, cloud-enabled infrastructure management (or "CEIM," as in "things are not always as they…") is definitely a bidirectional exercise. (Or, if you must, a "two-phase commit.")

Why? Because you've not only got to manage cloud-based business resources alongside any premise-based resources -- the computers at your facilities that are running the applications your business needs -- critical to your business. You've also got to figure out whether and how best to add cloud-based management resources to your current infrastructure management portfolio.

Whew. A step back, upwards and outwards seems appropriate here.

Your business relies upon its technology infrastructure to survive, let alone to thrive competitively. This is increasingly true given the growth of "the mobile, social cloud." Even if your business does no business online (yet!), people are influencing how your business is perceived online, likely even as you read this. Which means you need an infrastructure that enables your business to know and respond to what's being said about it online, in addition to all the other things necessary to make your business work.

Also, neither your technology budget nor your technology staff is infinite, if you even have any of either. Which means you've got to focus on solutions that maximize benefits while minimizing cost and complexity. Which means you either are looking at cloud-based solutions or will be soon. Especially if you own or work for a small or mid-sized business or "SMB." Which means you've got to be able to manage them at least as well as you're managing your current business technology tools.

And no, the tools and processes you've been using to manage premise-based resources are not adequate by themselves to manage cloud-based services too. And yes, there's a growing range of cloud-based infrastructure management services you need to consider. Especially if you're using or considering cloud-based business computing services as adjuncts to or replacements for any premise-based resources.

How to begin? Focus on what infrastructure management is supposed to help your business to do. Run better.

From that perspective, here are four things every infrastructure management solution and process must do, wherever it happens to reside.

Collect all relevant data on use and performance. (Process point: be clear on what's really "relevant.")
Refine that data into actionable information.
Optimize that information based on business-specific goals and processes.
Promulgate that information across all affected constituencies, via reports they can all understand and use.

Then, lather, rinse and repeat. Think of it as a "CROP circle" for the infrastructure that enables and empowers your business. Only less mysterious and controversial than other similarly named items.

Your business' need for an effective CEIM strategy creates a great opportunity to ensure that all of your infrastructure management efforts meet your specific CROP requirements and goals. Take full advantage of that opportunity, and make sure that Sales, Marketing, Operations, IT and all other directly affected constituencies have a seat at the table.

A Request and An Offer: If you'll spend fewer than 10 minutes answering six questions about cloud-enabled infrastructure management and including at least an e-mail address, I'll send you a complementary summary of the results and my analysis and recommendations. You can find the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZKSRM9M -- please take it and tell everyone you know to do the same. Thanks!

Online Experience Optimization: The Next "Big Idea" in the Cloud

2011-09-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

Every modern business does business online. This means that every modern business decision maker needs the answers to five key questions.

Do we know what customers, competitors and competitors' customers are saying about our company online?
Do we know that every online interaction with our company is equally compelling, fluid, frictionless and fulfilling, regardless of the user's device or connection type?
Do we know what colleagues, customers, partners and prospects really think about doing business with us online, especially compared with other companies?
Do we have solid, defensible evidence for all that we know or think that we know?
Can we act on what we know in ways that help our business to succeed and grow?

To be able to answer these questions with confidence, business decision makers must integrate multiple previously separate initiatives ranging from content management and social networking to analytics and infrastructure management. Here's a high-level look at just some of the elements involved in every user's online experience with a company – such as yours.

The user's access device – whether PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
The network connection – whether wireless or wired, dial-up or broadband, etc.
The company's Web site or sites (and the equivalent portal or portals for internal users).
The content displayed by the Web site and/or internal portal.
The tools used to create, edit, curate and manage that content.
The tools used to measure and analyze all aspects of the online experience, from the performance of the Web site to who's accessing which content how often – plus more.

A holistic view of these and other relevant elements is essential to achieving a critical goal of every modern business: online experience optimization (OEO), for both external and internal constituencies.

The perceptions of those "from without," including competitors, customers, influencers, partners, and prospects, directly affect multiple human factors that in turn directly affect revenues, profits and competitive positioning. The perceptions of those "from within" affect things like employee job satisfaction, loyalty, referrals of superior new employees and overall business agility and responsiveness.

OEO touches every aspect of every type and size of company that does business online or plans to do so. Business stakeholders include advertising, marketing, public relations, sales, internal and external support teams and business performance decision makers, among others.

Technologies involved range from Web site construction and management tools to content management systems, analytics tools and support for “the mobile, social cloud.” Example relevant vendors include IT stalwarts such as Adobe, IBM, Oracle and SAP, disruptive upstarts such as Consona, Medallia, Nimble and Zoho and even so-called "digital agencies" such as 311 Media and Surge.

OEO is clearly a "big idea" that demands immediate and sustained attention from business and technology decision makers – and from the vendors hoping to sell to them. And based on the initial findings of continuing OEO surveys, that attention is needed now.

When asked to rate their companies' abilities to know and respond to what's being said about those companies online, only 18.5 percent of respondents chose "Excellent." Some 44.4 percent chose "Good," while approximately one-third said their companies were "Fair" (22.2 percent) or "Unsatisfactory" (11.1 percent) at this critical OEO element.

Respondents were also asked when they believe that decision makers at their companies will start to collect and act upon what's being said about them online. Approximately one-third of respondents expect this to happen within the next six months. But a quarter of respondents don't expect it to happen within the next year, and 41.7 percent said they didn't know when it might happen.

I'll have lots more to say about OEO here and elsewhere, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can take those surveys I mentioned in approximately three minutes each, anonymously if you prefer, and request summary findings at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JJVTC6J and
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WFCM2KR. Thanks for your help – please tell everyone you know!

SafePeak: Faster SQL Server Applications, On the Ground and In the Cloud

2011-09-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- legendary U.S. baseball catcher and malapropism master Yogi Berra (who also reportedly said "I really didn't say everything I said.")

What happens when a business application is a victim of its own success?
To deliver maximum business value, applications need users. But too many users, and applications can slow down or stop altogether. Which can mean anything from non-productive workers to suddenly former customers, depending on the applications.

For the millions of Microsoft Windows applications (including Web sites and SharePoint collaboration tool deployments) that rely upon Microsoft's SQL Server database software, there are a few alternative ways to speed up and scale out. One is to acquire more processing and storage capacity, but that gets expensive and difficult to manage quickly.

Another is traditional application caching -- extracting smaller, faster subset copies of the most-used data from larger, slower databases. But traditional caching methods can be difficult to implement without requiring changes to applications, databases or both. And analyzing and determining precisely where to apply caching and where not to apply it can take months. Also, some caching solutions are vulnerable to creating out-of-synch copies of critical data, especially in response to a system failure or disruption.

Another performance improvement method is called "database tuning." There are applications that purport to ease and speed this process. But there's no avoiding that it takes time to analyze current application performance, and money to engage the expertise necessary to decide precisely what to tune and how to tune it.

SafePeak (www.safepeak.com) offers an alternative with some compelling differences. First of all, it's software that runs on exactly the same types of hardware on which SQL Server and many of those database applications are running. SafePeak can even run on cloud-based virtual server instances or hosted servers. And SafePeak is designed specifically to be "plug-and-play" with all Windows and SQL Server environments, including custom-built, hosted and cloud-based applications.

Once SafePeak is installed and running, it basically "watches" and "listens to" an application for a couple of hours, and begins to learn and map the queries and dependencies that govern how that application accesses and uses data. SafePeak uses this information to cache data dynamically, in ways that speed performance significantly while avoiding inaccurate or out-of-synch copies of data.

SafePeak was also designed specifically to support business-critical applications that simply cannot fall victim to incorrect data. The solution is being used to make Web sites, SharePoint deployments and financial services, health care management and hospital knowledge management applications run faster and support more users.

The SafePeak management interface is Web-based and straightforward. In addition, the software generates considerable information about how SQL Server databases and applications perform "in real life." This information can help application and database administrators and their teams to identify and pursue additional opportunities to improve application performance, reliability and scalability.

If your company uses SQL Server databases and applications, including Web sites, SharePoint or Microsoft Dynamics, you should look closely at SafePeak. You can download a free trial of the software at the company's Web site, and begin test-driving it with your own applications. And if you're running most or all of your critical applications in the cloud or some other company's hosting facility, talk with your provider(s) about test-driving SafePeak for themselves. It won't solve all application performance challenges. But it can do a lot to improve performance of those applications reliant upon Microsoft SQL Server, rapidly, affordably and transparently -- wherever those applications may run.

Cloud Extend for Salesforce: Jedi Mind Tricks for More and Better Sales

2011-09-06T17:27:00.000-07:00

In the very first "Star Wars" movie to be commercially released (as opposed to the first episode in the saga, which was the fourth movie to be released, I think -- but I digress), the first Jedi mind trick shown was Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi getting a security droid to replace what it was planning to say with what Obi-Wan wanted the droid to say. ("These are not the droids you're looking for.") No muss, no fuss -- the security droid just followed the script the Jedi wrote for him, word for word, with no objections, and the process of escape proceeded according to Obi-Wan's plan.

Would that salespeople were as easily manipulated. Once an Obi-Wan had been identified, he or she could write the script, then distribute it to all of their colleagues, who would follow it perfectly and generate more sales faster than ever before.

If this scenario appeals to you, you should take a look at Cloud Extend for Salesforce, introduced by Active Endpoints at the Dreamforce conference/revival meeting/festival in San Francisco last week.

Here's what Cloud Extend for Salesforce let you do. And by "you," I mean "almost any sales manager or other business-savvy decision maker unafraid to perform basic editing tasks on a typical modern networked computing device. You know, like with a Web browser." You can create guides -- step-by-step recipes for specific sales-related tasks, such as lead nurturing. Active Endpoints calls these "guidance trees," and that's an apt visual description. Remember flowcharts? They look a bit like those, only sideways. They result in scripts users can be instructed to follow explicitly or to treat as suggestions, depending on the sophistication of the user being guided.

You can then easily add specific Salesforce.com actions to specific steps in each script. You can then publish the script, which each user can access and follow from within the already-comfortable Salesforce.com interface. Without leaving the specific task that user is doing. And the scripts capture all kinds of useful information about how well the scripts and their users perform.

Sales managers can build customized scripts that automate and help to improve key business processes. Users get scripts to follow based on proven processes and practices. The adoption and business value of Salesforce.com increases. And little to no IT involvement is required.

If your company uses or is considering using Salesforce.com to support sales efforts, you must look closely at Cloud Extend for Salesforce. Active Endpoints boasts that the solution can "make every sales rep your best rep." If you add Cloud Extend for Salesforce to a well-working Salesforce.com environment and use the information produced to improve and extend your sales processes, that boast will prove true. And likely encourage you to explore opportunities for similar successes beyond sales. As I'm sure Active Endpoints is doing even as you read this…

Sococo: Real Teamwork in Real Time, in the Cloud

2011-08-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

When Gene Roddenberry created the original "Star Trek" television series, he was adamant that the starship Enterprise be big enough to hold hundreds of people. Why? Because then it would be like a street, a large dormitory or an office. A random walk could lead to an unexpected adventure, conversation or great idea.

That's really the only remaining justification for making people come to a common workplace anymore. But it's a powerful justification -- one that's been impossible to replicate faithfully online until Sococo.

I could spend thousands more words, most of which you'd probably skim or skip, trying to explain what makes Sococo so cool, special and fraught with implications for cloud computing and collaboration. Instead, let me try to summarize just enough to get you to try it out.

With Sococo, your computer screen, and that of each of your teammates, is transformed into what looks like an overhead view of the layout of a set of offices, complete with a lobby, conference rooms and common areas, if you want. You can see everyone, know their status, arrange and hold formal meetings and engage in informal spontaneous collaborations. You can also share computer screens and put other applications from the Web, the cloud or elsewhere up on "walls" visible to everyone at your meeting. Oh, and you can communicate via voice or typed on-screen chat, public or private. All within a single interface you can learn well enough to teach others in about the time it'll likely take you to finish reading this blog post.

Neither too many more words nor even a screen shot can do Sococo justice. A poke around the company Web site will help, but only a little. What you need to do is to sign up for the free trial, download the Sococo client software and invite two, three or more colleagues to join your "team." Doesn't matter where they are as long as they have Web access. In less than 30 minutes, you'll start thinking about more and more ways you can use Sococo, in concert with and instead of almost all of the communication and collaboration tools you're using right now.

Sococo adds to online, location-independent collaboration almost everything that's good and useful about collaborating in a shared physical space in real time. Especially including opportunities for spontaneous, ad hoc collaboration, idea germination and cross-pollination. And it enables a level of social interaction among collaborators I've never seen done quite as well online. And I'll wager it looks almost nothing like any cloud-based collaboration tool you're using now. Check it out, and do let me know what you think.

The Future of Cloud Computing: Extreme Personalization and VMware's Project Horizon

2011-05-31T14:24:00.000-07:00

The future of cloud computing is not the public cloud, the private cloud or hybrid clouds. Such discussions focus too much on delivery methodologies and not enough on what users care most about: access to the resources they need to do what they want and need to do.

From that perspective, the future is one of extreme personalization. Each authorized user only wants to see what they want and need to do their jobs well and successfully, on whichever device or devices they happen to have. And each user wants this regardless of which particular part of any particular cloud happens to host each resource each user wants and needs.

No pressure. But no company can or should attempt to promise or deliver such personalization without adequate management and security. For that way lies madness, or at least some very likely corporate leadership changes.

Here's an example of how to achieve extreme personalization while avoiding potentially career-limiting decisions: VMware's Project Horizon. The goal: managed, secure access to any authorized application or resource, by any authorized user, from any supported device. The first stages: VMware's Horizon App Manager, plus the company's acquisitions of SlideRocket (cloud-based presentations), Zimbra (cloud-based, enterprise-class e-mail) and most recently, SocialCast (cloud- or premise-based, enterprise-class collaboration).

The still-evolving VMware solution set enables users to see "storefront-like" portals for access to the applications for which they are authorized, while enabling corporate IT departments to control said access at pretty granular levels, and to extend incumbent security models to embrace cloud-based resources. Users get extreme personalization, while IT gets to sleep more soundly and spend more weekends away from the office or the data center.

Other vendors, notably Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, are working on and/or promising and/or delivering slivers of similarly promising approaches to extreme personalization. Expect to see more and more offerings from more and more vendors, promising to combine simplified user access to cloud- and premise-based business resources with truly effective management and security. Fortunately, VMware has the pedigree and deep pockets necessary to establish a significant "first/early mover" advantage, and to give business decision makers solution elements with which they can and should start exploring extreme personalization now.

RIM's PlayBook: Four Key Vulnerabilities

2011-04-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the popular BlackBerry family of mobile devices and services, is expected to launch formally its long-awaited PlayBook tablet computer tomorrow. Here are four reasons why I think RIM's new tablet may be hard to swallow for business users.

PlayBook Vulnerability #1: its proprietary operating system. In business servers, there are two largely dominant operating environments: Microsoft Windows and the converged Linux/UNIX ecosystem. In mobile networked devices for business users, it's largely Apple's iOS and Google's Android -- and RIM, at least in some segments. (Sorry, Symbian and Microsoft, unless Nokia's decision to replace Symbian's software with Windows Phone spurs growth for that platform.) In PCs for business, it's largely Windows and Linux, plus Mac/iOS in some segments. The point is, few if any segments demonstrate much if any need or demand for an operating system other than those that dominate the segment in question.

But the PlayBook will run a proprietary operating system. A marketing challenge at best and a support and integration non-starter at worst.

To users, value is all about available apps. And application developers have limited resources, which means many can't afford to develop and support versions for more than one or two operating systems. Which does not augur well for original apps written for RIM's operating system. While the BlackBerry faithful may be satisfied by a unique set of available apps, others will wonder if there aren't PlayBook versions of apps already popular on the dominant mobile operating systems.

This makes support for Android apps even more potentially important to the PlayBook's success. But so far, all RIM is offering in emulator software to run (at least some) Android apps. In this light, any perceived or actual performance degradations or incompatibilities could present as many opportunities for criticism and frustration as the iPad's lack of Flash support. And business technology decision makers and their teams are looking for fewer interoperability challenges, not more.

PlayBook Vulnerability #2: its form factor. RIM is touting the PlayBook's ability to run games and other multimedia, something about which even business users increasingly care. The PlayBook's 7-inch form factor, like Samsung's Galaxy Tab and other tablets, means current BlackBerry users can likely continue to type with their thumbs on the PlayBook. But the device isn't as comfortable for two-handed typists, or for gamers, movie watchers or Web surfers who prefer more visual real estate. And the riotous popularity of the iPad amply demonstrates that more visual real estate makes even a larger device worth carrying around to a lot of business users.

PlayBook Vulnerability #3: its connectivity limitations. While the PlayBook seems likely to support high-speed networks from AT&T, Verizon and others at some point, it's being shipped initially with support only for Wi-Fi. (A version for Sprint's WiMAX network is expected within, say, 60 days of the official PlayBook launch.) Which means only users of both PlayBooks and BlackBerry devices with corporate network connections can see real-time updates to their calendars, contacts or e-mail. At least until and unless RIM and/or its developer partners and/or savvy users begin to create and propagate effective tethering arrangements that support other mobile phones and carrier networks.

Also, AT&T and Verizon are increasingly dominating the mobile networking market in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the PlayBook not to support either carrier from Day One will be a deal-breaker for technology decision makers and mobile users at many companies. It's a situation likely to turn off users who don't already use BlackBerry devices as well.

PlayBook Vulnerability #4: it's too little, too late. Had RIM announced and delivered the PlayBook a few months earlier, the dynamics of the discussion would likely be different. However, with the iPad 2 and numerous Android tablets already available and more coming soon, RIM will have a difficult time reaching beyond BlackBerry loyalists with the PlayBook.

I'd love to be wrong about any or all of this, but I don't think I am. Whether or not you believe in signs or portents, it is interesting to note that published reports have said that the PlayBook was delayed in part because of the catastrophe in Japan and in part because challenged manufacturers had previous iPad 2 commitments. It's also not helpful to RIM's prospects that its CEO abruptly ended a recently attempted BBC interview when questions strayed beyond the PlayBook and into possible network security concerns. Not great pre-launch PR.

RIM could be in trouble long-term if the PlayBook isn't successful. At the very least, anything that smacks of lackluster adoption will cement perceptions of RIM as an also-ran in the evolving market for tablet computers and other mobile networked devices.

The BlackBerry ecosystem risks becoming the mainframe of mobile devices. That is to say, venerable and respected, and remaining in use long after being superseded, but relegated to the status of "coulda been a contender." Who'd have thought?

Viewfinity Beefs Up Privilege Management in the Cloud(s)

2011-03-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

Got business-critical IT resources? Got users? Got mobile users? Got or getting Windows 7 across your enterprise?

If you answered "yes" to any or all of the above questions, here's something else you've got: a need to manage user access privileges and administrative rights. Especially if any of those users are being moved to Windows 7 and/or are mobile.

Windows 7 comes with AppLocker, a set of features designed to enhance the software restriction policies (SRPs) supported in previous Windows releases. (Windows Server 2008 R2 also supports AppLocker.) I'm not going to go into details about AppLocker and SRPs here; instead, I'll refer you to two great pieces by IT and Microsoft expert Greg Shields of Concentrated Technology. One is on AppLocker itself. The other is on a security philosophy AppLocker and related offerings can enable and support: approved execution. After all, malware can't hurt your systems if you've got blacklists and whitelists that can determine what code, malware or otherwise, actually gets to run.

Approved execution is one element of a larger set of challenges and solutions some vendors refer to collectively as "least privileges." Basically, this means giving each user the minimum amount of access privileges needed by that person to do their work, to reduce unauthorized execution of malware or access to IT resources. And moving to Windows 7 provides a great opportunity to review and improve the policies and technologies your company's using to increase security and to control access privileges more effectively. But it's unlikely that every user on your network(s) will be moved to Windows 7 at the same time, and it's very likely that AppLocker alone won't solve all of your privileges management challenges.

Some potential help: Viewfinity, a leading player in this market, just announced version 3.5 of its Privilege Management solution. There are three things I really like about Viewfinity's approach. One is that it provides granular, role-based privilege management that you don't have to be an IT or security expert to make work. Another is that interoperates with Microsoft Active Directory but does not require or rely upon it. This means greater flexibility and continuing functionality even if Active Directory fails. The other is that it's Web/cloud-based. This means it's easier to incorporate protection of authorized mobile users (and rejection of unauthorized access or execution attempts).

There is no single solution that is going to guarantee complete security for any business computing environment. However, tools such as Viewfinity Privilege Management can give you a significant leg up on the continuing "arms race" between malware developers and those attempting to defend their environments against malware. Check it out and see if it can help you to protect your environment, especially if you're facing a move to Windows 7, a growing requirement to support mobile users or both.

ERP in the Cloud, and Beyond: Expandable Software's Bob Swedroe

2011-01-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

Bob Swedroe is President and CEO of Expandable Software. Expandable provides solutions for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business functions, with three key twists.

First off, Expandable offers on-site or cloud-based implementations, depending on user preferences and business needs. Secondly, the company promises seamless integration with what Bob calls "best-of-market solutions." Third, the folks who actually get Expandable solutions up and running for customers are Expandable employees. This gives the company more direct influence over how these implementers do their jobs. This, in turn, lets Expandable offer some pretty impressive levels of support and service.

Bob's a big believer in cloud-based and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, but his perspective is refreshingly different from that of some of his industry peers. So I thought I'd ask him three pointed questions about the business software market. Please enjoy!

Q1: What is the single greatest challenge to success for software providers seeking to deliver modern business software solutions?

A1: The single greatest challenge is a level up from integration…I’d say flexibility in meeting business [requirements] while continuing to reduce the infrastructure worries. Businesses of all sizes want to focus on business rather than systems. This is driving force [behind] SaaS momentum.

Market trending is toward new business models of marketing and selling. We see this with our own business and with the [history of all] business software. We’ve come from point products to integrated business functions. ERP [solutions] by definition are single platforms that have integrated many business functions [originally performed by] point products. Now we are swinging back to point solutions as obviously there is a market for robust point solutions that bring a focused and higher level of complexity and flexibility to solve the issues at hand.

Software providers need to remain true to their core vision AND learn to integrate seamlessly (really seamlessly) with other applications such that the combined applications work together and [are] flexible enough to provide the best-of-breed solution. While the delivery method of the particular application is not important (i.e., on site or SaaS), the application must be able to integrate seamlessly and efficiently with other key applications residing in the cloud.

Again, companies don’t want to worry about the infrastructure. They just want it to work; and it will, because those that don't won't survive.

Q2: What is the single greatest challenge to success for enterprises seeking to deploy business-critical modern business software solutions?

A2: Probably the single biggest challenge is to be able to create a solid, dedicated, focused team [that] includes the company employees and the business solutions provider's employees. In addition, there needs to be complete executive-level support for the implementation to have a good chance of success – and the implementation of a review and monitoring process for the implementation.

Very often, unrealistic demands are set as employees are expected to do their normal job and also to "suck it up" and be on the deployment team. Execs need to be at least aware of the risks and consequences of taking employee’s [personal] bandwidth for granted.

One critical element that is so often overlooked is to find a software solution provider that is a true business partner. As a business partner they should be engaged and concerned about the success of your business. In essence, they become a valued extension of your internal team. The only way to know for sure how good a business partner is a software solution provider, is to perform a very thorough job of due diligence on the software provider. (Editorial Note: you can register to receive a free white paper from Expandable on checking vendor references at http://dortchon.it/gInN9J.)

Sage [an Expandable competitor] just recently created and appointed a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), but many ERP companies and business solutions companies sell, then “drop” their customers. To further add complexity to the issue, if the application is sold, delivered and implemented by a reseller, then the [purchasing] company not only has to perform proper due diligence on the software provider, but also on the reseller as well.

Salesforce.com realizes this as well and has a transfer after the sale to a Customer Success Manager that has primary focus on the customer success with the product. Expandable has a model where everyone [from the company] is/can be involved with the success of our customers.

Q3: What do you see as the next "great leap forward" for the modern business software solutions market - technological, organizational, perceptual or otherwise?

A3: The next "great leap forward" will be driven by the organizational/social changes that are coming as the "new generation" of employee comes through the ranks and the "Baby Boomers" leave. Essentially, the new ways versus old ways of how people work [and] socialize, and their comfort level with new technology will force this change – ubiquitous computing, networking, and real-time information access. The changes will happen. The question now is, how fast? The rate of change will be different for [different] applications and…functions (i.e., sales versus manufacturing.

For many modern software solutions, changes will happen faster than we think. The next generation of successful companies (and their employees) is driving this [change] hard and fast – and it will be adopted. Just 10 years ago there was a war of ATM [Asynchronous Transfer Mode] vs. IP [Internet Protocol]. The big companies drove the adoption [choice] and IP won.

Now the "war" is [between] the cloud or on-site [software deployment]. The younger generation and the now-popular new big companies on the block – Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, etc. are the new, exciting and upcoming. The old [guard] – Microsoft, IBM (although they are very resilient and probably will continue to be), Oracle, SAP,…etc. [will] be less of a "mover and shaker" and either move with the flow and adjust or move to the background…. This is happening in the marketplace. I believe this trend will increase as the big leap toward more cloud [computing swings us] back to centralized computing to some degree….

Bottom line: there will be ubiquitous business tools available anywhere, anytime for a world that is moving very fast toward a mobile and remote workforce. However, having said that, a key point to consider is [that] the importance of ubiquitous and mobile computing will be dependent on an employee’s role/function in the organization.

Dortch's Recommendations

The more mobile, social and collegial Web is not coming. It's here, and getting bigger, faster and more important to more businesses every day. In this brave new online world, business agility and success will be determined largely by a company's ability to adapt business processes and infrastructures as necessary to identify and meet customer needs most effectively.

Whether your company sells business software, uses business software or both, these trends are going to affect what's available to you and your business. Increasingly, where your applications are hosted will matter less, while the ability to deliver ready access to them where, when and as needed will matter more. And your chosen providers are going to have major if not primary impact on your company's ability to succeed with its chosen technological solutions.

If you haven't already, begin now to focus on due diligence, regarding both your chosen solutions and providers and with your organization's stated goals and plans. Make sure that all of the above are aligned closely and correctly with what your customers and prospects care about most, and with your company's core strengths. And if your solution providers can't provide the assistance and support your business needs to succeed, consider replacing them – based on careful due diligence, of course.

Private Clouds: First, There Is a Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain, Then There Is…

2010-12-20T16:33:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about having savvy, articulate friends is that I can occasionally appear savvy and articulate (at least a little) merely by commenting on what those friends have to say. Who could resist? Not me, certainly…

My learned industry colleague and friend Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com recently opined that the idea of a private cloud – a cloud computing infrastructure owned and operated by and for a particular company – is a choice that doesn't really exist. If you own and operate the infrastructure, it ain't cloud computing in its most true sense, Peter said. (Of course I'm paraphrasing. You can read his exact words at http://dortchon.it/PrivateCloudQuestions.)

But another learned industry colleague and friend, Andi Mann of CA Technologies, has opined recently that the public cloud – THE cloud, according to Peter and many others, I'd wager – is not for everybody, and certainly not for every business or government agency. Andi makes many cogent and salient points, which could be taken in summary as an argument in favor of private clouds. (You can read Andi's exact words at http://bit.ly/fZS0dN.)

The thing is, I agree with Peter and with Andi. At least partly.

I think the core issue here is a need to, as they say in parliamentary procedures, "move to divide." There's the issue of IT service delivery, which is separate from IT service consumption.

If I own an IT infrastructure and I configure and manage that infrastructure in a converged, unified way, I can deliver services that can be consumed "by the drink" or per user/per month. So to my users, it looks a lot like cloud computing. Users get authorized and simply use the services they need, as they need them. But what I've built and am operating isn't THE cloud, and may or may not be a cloud. It's what some savvy vendors such as Egenera and more and more savvy analysts describe with terms such as "unified computing" and "converged infrastructure."

Make no mistake – converged infrastructures are incredibly valuable, especially if and when they help companies to manage IT more efficiently and economically. But there's nothing written in stone that says a converged infrastructure has to result in cloud-like on-demand service delivery or consumption. Convergence and unity can, at least metaphorically, stop inside the data center door and still help to reduce operational costs, improve operational responsiveness or both.

So, as Andi Mann argues, not every business can or should make the wholesale leap to public cloud solutions. However, as Peter Coffee said, it's not clear that such businesses need, want or even can build private clouds. So what do business decision makers really need and want?

What many need is a set of effective processes for evaluating and comparing current and candidate solutions. Those processes should be used to decide if, when and where it makes sense to adopt and integrate cloud-based services into incumbent environments. (Maybe we can call such adoptions and integrations "cloudbursts." Maybe not.) Those processes can and should also be used to decide if, when and where it makes sense to deliver on-demand utility-like IT services to users. Whether those services originate from premise-based, cloud-based, physical and/or virtual computing, storage or network platforms.

With such processes in place, business and technology decision makers can collaborate to evaluate, compare and select the best available service and resource management solutions. These, in turn, will help businesses to deliver consistently efficient and economical services to users, again wherever those services may reside. (This is why Network World recently opined that private clouds are "not for the faint of heart" in its comparison of five cloud management solutions, as you can read at http://dortchon.it/PvtCloudMgmt.)

If you're at a company that's serious about building a private cloud, you should look at the Network World comparison. You should also look at what analysts and users are saying about how Egenera, Cisco, HP, IBM and other vendors are approaching the growing need for converged, integrated management of physical, virtual, premise-based and cloud-based resources. I think this is the real goal of many if not most efforts focused on private clouds. I also think that "private cloud" is an unfortunate term that is likely more helpful to vendors trying to sell stuff than it is to business decision makers trying to run their businesses better. But I don't think the term or the debate over its definition and validity is going away any time soon…

Private Clouds? Can They Exist? Are They Necessary?

2010-12-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

An incredibly popular concept amongst those of us following business use of cloud computing is the private cloud. As near as I can tell, it's basically supposed to be a kind-of "cloud with benefits," combining the advantages of the public cloud with "enterprise-class" data protection, manageability, security and/or other features, depending on who's asking, who's answering and when.

But here's a thing -- is the idea of a private cloud an oxymoron?

My friend and fellow MIT escapee Peter Coffee is Head of Platform Research at Salesforce.com. He recently collected several disparate blog entries and related thoughts into the following, which I find to be interesting, well reasoned and thought provoking. He gave me permission to distribute it, so the text from it appears below in its entirety. (Peter adds: "this material is freely usable under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States as specified at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/")

===
Private Clouds, Flat Earths and Unicorns
Peter Coffee | Head of Platform Research, salesforce.com inc.

A “preference” is not a choice unless the “preferred” thing actually exists. I might “prefer” a flat earth (literally, not in the Tom Friedman sense) to this pesky, not-quite-spherical planet that requires us to have time zones: I might prefer to have the whole world doing business on one common clock, and flipping between day and night like a planet-sized coin, but that's not a feasible option.

In the same vein of confusing fantasy with reality, I've lately seen dozens of statements asserting that IT managers “prefer a private cloud.” It's time to insist that a preference is only relevant when there's actually a choice to be made. The label of “private cloud” is more associated with a desire than a choice.

When someone says that they would “prefer a private cloud,” the actual attributes of desire seem to be physical possession of the data and operational control of the infrastructure. It’s impossible to have these things and still enjoy the defining benefits of the cloud.
• If you have physical possession of the data, you also have to own and maintain the data storage hardware and software.
• If you have operational control of the infrastructure, you also have to employ and supervise a team of expensive experts who spend too much of their time on tasks that add no competitive advantage to the firm – while wasting costly skills as they wait to respond to events that are critical, but in practice are quite rare.

In either case, you're structurally embedding unproductive costs – and blocking yourself from enjoying the massive economies that the cloud should be providing.

If desires are on Side 1, fears of lost capability are on Side 2 of the broken record of oft- repeated excuses for shunning true multi-tenant clouds. People routinely express concerns, whether real or pretended, about security, compliance, and the customization and integration that enterprise IT capabilities require. Let’s bust some myths.
• Security in cloud services can be constructed, maintained and operated at levels that are far beyond what's cost-effective for almost any individual company or organization. Further, it's inherent in multi-tenancy that security must address the sum of all fears of all customers: in satisfying the most demanding customers in every respect, the enterprise-grade cloud service provider will wind up exceeding the needs of almost every individual organization while sharing the costs of security on a massive scale.
• Compliance with regimens including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and other commonly encountered laws and regulations is more a challenge of policy and practice than of technology. The discipline and clarity of service invocations in true cloud environments can greatly aid the control of access, and the auditability of actions, that are dauntingly expensive and complex to achieve in traditional IT settings.
• Customization and integration of cloud services are neither intrinsically better nor inherently worse than the capabilities of an on-premise stack. There are rigid and inflexible systems, and there are powerful and productive process engineering environments, available in either kind of setting. Buyers will do best when they ask for what they need, instead of asking for what they assume they have to tolerate.

When a survey asks IT buyers to express a choice between public and private clouds, it's like asking a fairy-tale princess whether she'd rather ride a horse or a unicorn. The unicorn sure sounds better, and survey results will likely reflect that appeal.

In this or any other situation that invites a choice between a reality and a fantasy, the fantasy can be expected to get more votes – except from grown-ups, who are expected to know when something is not actually an option. Professionals do their job by making the best possible choice – among the options that are actually at hand.

Independent industry experts have lately added their voices to the debunking of the “private cloud” label. In November 2010, blogger and consultant Phil Wainewright offered this forthright advice to CIOs who are being offered a “private cloud” proposition:

The whole point of cloud computing is to be able to operate in the cloud — in that global, 24×7, connected universe where you can instantly reach and interact with your customers, your partners and your mobile employees, as well as tapping into an expanding cornucopia of third-party resources and services that can help you achieve business results faster, better and at lower cost.

Those who say that cloud is just a deployment choice, just a technology option, have shut their eyes to the wider opportunity and potential that the cloud context opens up. They’re still building application platforms and business systems that are designed without any acknowledgement of that global web of connections and resources — as if in today’s business environment, being connected is just an afterthought, an optional extra. Maybe for some applications it is, but their numbers are shrinking daily.

Further, this is now becoming a global and even geopolitical conversation. In Canada, for example, I recently read a warning against turning that country into a "technology ghetto" whose industries will be constrained "to a standard of technical stagnation and inefficiency" by failure to use the cloud to best advantage. If financial capital is wasted on imported technology that doesn't yield economic advantage, and if intellectual capital is wasted on complex tasks that are necessary but not differentiating for employers or entrepreneurs, then enterprise and national goals will not be met – or will, at a minimum, be deferred.

===
Peter's thoughts inspired me to post a discussion question about private clouds at Focus.com. You can join that discussion by visiting http://focus.com/c/EDa/. Or you can share your thoughts and reactions here, or with me directly via e-mail to medortch@dortchonit.com. I have a feeling this is an issue that isn't going away any time soon. Should be fun!

SpotCloud: Worth Watching (and Perhaps Using)

2010-11-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

SpotCloud is a "cloud capacity clearinghouse," a "spot market" for cloud computing capacity. Want to deploy an on-demand server instance to test or tinker with something? SpotCloud will sell you pre-configured Linux or Windows "virtual machine (VM) packages" with defined profiles and capacities, by the hour, and let you pay as you go. Got extra server capacity? SpotCloud will help you sell access to it. A kind-of brokerage for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on demand.

The details are always the challenge, of course, but frankly, this is an idea for which the time has in fact arrived. For the right workloads and projects, SpotCloud can reduce significantly or eliminate entirely the barriers to entry into cloud computing. If you or your company have been on the fence, take a look at SpotCloud. It may provide the push you need to replace apprehension and uncertainty with some real-life experience.

Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda: the Dortch on SaaS 3-Q Interview

2010-07-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

Greetings. I’m refining and revising an interview format I first borrowed/adapted from my friend and colleague Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation. Today’s 3-Q Interview is with Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda. Apprenda sells software that helps other software companies to deliver SaaS/cloud-based solutions more easily, economically, efficiently and rapidly. Sinclair has some interesting things to say to companies seeking to deliver or to deploy SaaS/cloud-based solutions, as you’ll see right now!

Q1: What is the single greatest challenge to success for software providers seeking to deliver SaaS/on-demand solutions?

A1: Easily, it’s understanding the technical and operating transition that a product company must go through to become a successful and profitable service provider. Software companies that sell on-premises products are not accustomed to offering a service that costs money – they’re used to selling perpetual licenses that have no unit cost associated with the license. As SaaS providers, they’ll be paying for servers, bandwidth, staff, and a number of other things. How efficiently they deliver their software to leverage these costs will play into determining how profitable they are. For example, choosing to not have a multi-tenant architecture could have dire economic consequences on a unit cost level.

[Editorial Aside: there is a debate in the software industry about how relevant multi-tenancy – the ability to support multiple separate groups of users with a single copy of an application – is to cloud computing and SaaS. I recommend that you read a 2008 ZD Net blog post by SaaS/cloud veteran Phil Wainewright, “Why Multi-tenancy Matters.” I also recommend a February 2010 Information Week blog post, “Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud,” by Alok Misra, who works for a company that provides cloud-based applications and SaaS enablement services. Without getting to far into the weeds here, multi-tenancy is an important tool for every provider of SaaS/cloud-based solutions, but is not the only way to support multiple users cost-effectively, and may not always be the best way. Back to Sinclair.]

Operationally, [those software companies] need to consider a bevy of other issues: how will I provision customers to the SaaS offering? Will they self provision? Does it require manual labor? How will I track what customer owes what money based on usage? How will I roll out an update across dozens or even hundreds of servers with minimal downtime? All of these critical considerations play into the single greatest challenge: transitioning from a product company to a service company. We work with Microsoft .NET ISVs [independent software vendors] that struggle with these questions every day, so it’s given us amazing insight.

Q2: What is the single greatest challenge to success for enterprises seeking to deploy business-critical SaaS/on-demand solutions?

A2: Establishing trust. Enterprises have built significant confidence in their IT competence, and despite carrying the costs of direct responsibility, they lower their trust [concerns] since “it’s run in-house.” Enterprises need to understand that in reality (using subjective measure) deploying a SaaS offering is safer and more trustworthy in nearly all regards. After all, do these enterprises hide their money on-premises “under a mattress” or let a third-party provider – a bank – guard their most liquid assets?

Q3: What do you see as the next "great leap forward" for the SaaS/on-demand solutions market – technological, organizational, perceptual or otherwise?

A3: I think the great leap forward will be SaaS enablement. To date, most SaaS/cloud offerings have been built as “one-offs.” That is, each SaaS company re-invented the wheel by dealing with a huge amount of SaaS-specific architecture. Technologies like SaaSGrid will define the “gold standard” of architectures by defining advanced cloud middleware, allowing companies to leverage robust SaaS stacks. This will catalyze the development of new innovative SaaS solutions by drastically reducing the amount of engineering and money spent in building pure SaaS offerings. At the end of the day, it means that the end user will have many, many more SaaS applications to choose from because someone else has helped with the architectural heavy lifting.

Dortch’s Recommendations:

R1: If you are a business technology decision makers pursuing or considering SaaS/cloud-based solutions, find a partner – a reseller or integrator, preferably one with which you’ve worked before – who “gets” your business and how SaaS/cloud solutions are evolving. If you’re a small or mid-sized business, you just don’t have the resources to devote to figuring this SaaS/cloud stuff out without help. And even if your company has an IT department, it might be worth bringing in some outside perspective, and you’re going to have to buy your solutions from someplace. It might as well be someone who knows stuff, rather than someone who just sells stuff. And if you work for a reseller or integrator, make sure your company is asking the right questions and implementing the right knowledge, policies, practices and technologies that will enable it to become such a partner – or consider changing jobs.

(In this context, I highly recommend to users, resellers and integrators the “SaaS 2.0” blog by Dan Druker of Intacct, especially the recent entries on “SaaS & Cloud Computing and the Channel.” And for what is intended as a darkly humorous take on IT teams and SaaS/cloud solutions, check out my blog post, “The Cloud? You Ain't READY for the CLOUD! (Or ARE You??)”)

R2: Once you’ve identified one or more candidate partners, as Ronald Reagan so often admonished his Soviet Union counterparts back when there was a Soviet Union, “trust, but verify.” Ask questions about multi-tenancy, data center redundancy and other critical elements of the infrastructures that will be supporting the services upon which your company relies. And ask even harder and more specific questions about your prospective partners’ relevant business experience and expertise, and their track record in helping companies similar to yours succeed with SaaS/cloud-based solutions. Make sure to record the results of these Q&A sessions, for prospective partner comparisons and because they likely each contain information you can use, no matter which partner or partners you ultimately choose.

R3: When selecting SaaS/cloud-based solutions and partners alike, focus on those that are focused on combining proven and broadly supported underlying practices, processes and technologies. Integration of new solutions and processes with the resources your company already uses and understands is paramount to the success of any new solutions, SaaS/cloud-based or otherwise. And just like you likely don’t have time to become a SaaS/cloud expert and to run your business, few if any vendors or resellers can succeed by inventing and building everything from scratch. So keep an eye on companies such as Apprenda and solutions such as SaaSGrid, of which there will be more. And keep an even sharper eye on how widely supported such solutions become, and what underlying platforms are adopted by the providers of the applications and services critical to your business. (Almost forgot: the Focus.com community is an invaluable asset for relevant observations and discussions here!)

The Cloud? You Ain't READY for the CLOUD! (Or ARE You??)

2010-07-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

Maybe you are and maybe you aren't. I mean, I have no way of knowing, really. But I've been hearing...things that are making me...nervous.

I mean, it's not like I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything. (I lean more toward Harry Shearer's thinking on conspiracies, which he has publicly deemed unlikely, given the difficulty of getting people to work together in simple, small teams.) But still, I've been hearing...things...

Things like that there are companies out there for which cloud-based solutions would make a lot of sense, if those companies had processes in place for accurate, fair and balanced evaluation and comparison of such solutions, with one another and with their premise-based alternatives. Or if those companies had IT solution acquisition policies and processes designed with only premise-based solutions in mind.

Now, it's not as if the business IT solutions vendors are making any of this easy. Microsoft representatives have said publicly and repeatedly that delivering purchase and support agreements that gracefully embrace premise- and cloud-based solutions is very much still a work in progress. And Microsoft isn't the only vendor that needs to address this problem rapidly and effectively.

But I can't help but think that IT people who really, really want every dollar of company money they spend to deliver business value would be pushing their companies to become more able to assess, acquire and deploy cloud-based solutions. Unless those IT people had...reasons to complicate or make impossible the assessment and adoption of cloud-based solutions at their companies.

What might those reasons be? Well, I'd hate to speculate. But I remember when minicomputers, PCs, client-server computing, the Internet and the Web were all poo-poohed by IT decision-makers who saw these new technologies as irrelevant to "real" business computing at best and threats to the comfortable status quo at worst. ("Why should I be forced to learn to manage new technologies or vendor relationships when I already understand the ones we have?" I'm just sayin'...)

So is it a conspiracy? Are IT people, individually or collectively, secretively taking arms against a sea of cloud-based threats, hoping by opposing them to end them? (That's generations of Shakespeare fans moaning in the background.) I sincerely doubt it...but I keep hearing these...things...

Anyway, enough of my semi-paranoid, only-partly-tongue-in-cheek ramblings. What do you think about all this? There's a discussion going on right now at Focus.com and another on LinkedIn in the IT Focus Expert Group. Or feel free to leave a comment here, or to drop me a line at medortch@dortchonit.com.

Carbonite vs. Mozy: My Real-Life Cloud-Based Backup Experiences

2010-06-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

I, like many of you, lived in fear of reaching for my trusty MacBook one day, only to have it not respond or to have lost all of my precious work and personal information and files. So when Mozy started advertising on TV (and I got my wife a new MacBook and she started loading important stuff on it, too), I signed us both up. (I thought Apple’s MobileMe offered features I didn’t want or need, and Mozy was cheaper.)

Why cloud-based backup? Two reasons. One, if I bought an external hard drive and backed all of our data up onto it, the data was still at risk, if something catastrophic struck our home. (This is why I also eschewed Apple’s Time Machine application.) Two, cloud-based backup means that at least in theory, I could recover critical files from almost anything running a Web browser. A nice safety net in case my laptop failed while on the road, thought I.

I was a very happy Mozy user for a good while – the software downloaded and installed with almost no intervention from me, and after the first backup, which took place over several days, everything would be updated invisibly to me and my wife, as Mozy promised. But then, a few weeks ago, stuff just stopped working. And the same software that had been backing up our stuff invisibly was now not doing so, and not telling me anything useful about why it had stopped working.

So I dutifully visited the Mozy online support portal. Or rather, I tried to, but kept getting weird errors referring to Salesforce.com, the cloud-based software Mozy apparently used for customer care and relationship management. To make a long, painful story short, once I finally got into the online support portal, I discovered that Mozy had released a new version of its Windows software, and that both Mac and Windows users were complaining in large numbers and backups that had been working but were no longer.

I posted a note about my problem, and found out that mine was not the same one the other Mac users were having. Wonderful news. I e-mailed Mozy support twice, got automated acknowledgements of my e-mails, then radio silence. Meanwhile, I went without regular backups for days, then weeks.

Finally, I broke down and downloaded the free Carbonite software, which also downloaded and installed with minimal intervention from or confusion for me. And I have to say that Carbonite was even more invisible than Mozy had been during the initial multi-day backup. But I wasn’t really excited about starting all over again with a new vendor. So I visited the Mozy support portal and e-mailed Mozy support again. This time, though, I found the name and e-mail address of Mozy’s press contact and copied him as well as the support address.

Within a day, I got an e-mail from an actual human being, one Brittney Mitchell. With Brttney’s intervention, everything changed, and changed quickly. She apologized for my problems, inspected my log files and determined that my account was misbehaving because I had failed to update an expired credit card. (Why their software wasn’t smart enough to tell me this explicitly from the beginning of my problem is still unclear to me. Brittney said that part of the problem was that I signed up without going through a salesperson, who would have flagged such a thing. I countered that not having to go through a salesperson was one of the reasons I’d signed up in the first place. Sigh.)

Once I updated my credit card information and downloaded the latest Mozy client software, backups started happening again for me and my wife. Meanwhile, Brittney informed me that part of the reason for Mozy’s initial lack of responsiveness was that the company was moving support call handling from India to the US and dealing with a deluge of requests and a lack of trained responders. (Brittney had only been with the company for a month when she took up my issues, she wrote.)

Meanwhile, the Carbonite software was working just fine – but no one ever responded to the e-mail questions I sent to that company. All I got was the automated reminders that my free access was about to expire and that I should subscribe – messages I received after cancelling my trial account. Sigh.

The bottom line: I’d have to recommend Mozy over Carbonite, not because I know of anything particularly lacking in Carbonite, but because Mozy finally came through when I had support questions that needed answers. I also believe that Mozy moving support to the US should improve things for all users, not just me or those using Mozy for the Mac. (I don’t know where Carbonite user support is based, because I’ve never received a personal response from them.) Also, Mozy is owned by EMC, a company that knows a bit about backup, at least from the enterprise perspective.

Carbonite make have a slight edge over Mozy because Carbonite offers an app with the ability to restore individual files on demand to an iPad, an iPhone or a Wi-Fi-equipped iPod touch, but I don’t expect Mozy to allow this gap to exist for long. Ultimately, the Mozy-vs.-Carbonite discussion may come down to distinctions that make little difference. But to me, either is far better than no cloud-based backup at all. But what do YOU think?

EnterpriseWizard: A, If Not The, Future of Business Applications

2010-06-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

Where business software is concerned, last year’s big question was, "Why can’t business applications be as easy to use as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?"

This year's question should be, "Why aren't business application development, alignment with key business processes and process optimization as easy as building Facebook pages or blogs and Web sites with Weebly or Google Sites?”

I know, it's overly long, but it's still a good question.

As I see it, two key obstacles stand in the way of legacy/traditional approaches to business applications and business process automation.

Adaptation – legacy/traditional approaches are notoriously difficult, expensive, time-consuming or impossible to adapt to specific business processes, needs or goals.
Adoption – in part because of their adaptation limitations, legacy/traditional approaches almost never achieve sufficient user adoption levels to drive high, consistent or sustained business value.

A more modern approach should enable rapid development and deployment with almost limitless adaptation abilities, to drive high, rapid adoption and measurable, significant and sustainable business value. Such an approach should also enable creation of applications for key business tasks, aligned with and driven by easily captured, executed and automated business processes.

I believe that one of the first real-life examples of such an approach is being taken by Colin Earl and his merry little band at a software company called EnterpriseWizard. And that's all I'm going to tell you here, at least for now. You can read more about EnterpriseWizard and why I think what I do about the company in a Brief I wrote for Focus.com -- "Integrated Collaboration, Communication and Process Automation in the Cloud: EnterpriseWizard." Then, you should visit the EnterpriseWizard Web site, paying particular attention to the user success stories, which span a range of use cases and company sizes.

EnterpriseWizard isn't for every company's every software need. But I believe it is a bellwether for how many business applications are likely to be built and delivered in the future. And I mean the near-term future, as is starting...oh, pretty much now.

Can CA acquire its way into cloud management market leadership?

2010-02-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

Since mid-2009, CA (the former Computer Associates) has acquired data center automation assets and expertise from Cassatt, as well as the companies NetQoS (network performance management and service delivery management solutions) and Oblicore (IT service level management software). This week, CA announced plans to buy 3Tera, a pioneering provider of solutions for building and deploying cloud-based services.

CA is clearly positioning itself as a "one-stop shop" for solutions to manage both cloud-based and premise-based IT infrastructures. But CA faces a growing range of competitors, particularly where cloud-based infrastructure management is concerned. (See the Focus Brief "Infrastructure Management 'In the Cloud:' Why Now May Be the Time at Your Business" at http://bit.ly/HostedITManagement.) And CA has a long and decidedly uneven history of successfully integrating and leveraging acquired companies, their people and assets.

So can CA extend its leadership in premise-based IT management into the cloud successfully?

Well, I'm not convinced. And I'm not the only one asking. As Matthew McKenzie, Senior Editor at Enterprise Efficiency, a site you should check out and bookmark, wrote in his piece, "CA Builds a Solid Strategy on Cloud Acquisitions, "It's up to CA to put the pieces together and build a truly valuable software stack for its customers. I see that happening, and I also see CA offering a lot of long-term value for IT executives with private- or hybrid-cloud development plans. But this time around, one thing is clear: Milking these acquisitions like a bunch of sickly cash cows simply is not an option."

True and well said. Having followed CA since its inception, I am both cautiously hopeful and at least a little wary. But I have no real stake in what happens. If you do or your company does, however, I'd advise you to watch CA closely, especially for signs that top people from its acquisitions are leaving or have left. I also recommend that if you do business with CA, you demand a briefing about its cloud-related road map, under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) if need be. That will at least help you to set a baseline for comparing what CA says to what CA does. Close alignment between the two is good; non-alignment is a cause for concern -- as is a lack of useful, actionable information from the company.

Lots has happened and continues to happen at CA. Whether all this activity translates into actual change or progress is still an open question. Caveat emptor. And in the meantime, come on over to Focus.com to discuss, at http://bit.ly/CAandtheCloud. Thanks!

Sendside: Sales Automation and Acceleration as a Service – SaaaaS!

2009-10-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Let’s start with some disclosures. Before I became Director of Research at Focus, I consulted with Sendside, and am a big fan of the company and its management team. So it’s with at least a small dash of personal pride that I write about the company here – but you can and should still take my opinions at least semi-seriously.

That said, observers and pundits, including Gartner, are increasingly saying that if and as the economy begins to improve, one of the first things areas in which companies are going to re-start spending is in sales. Specifically, companies seem likely to invest in solutions that will help them make more sales more quickly and more inexpensively.

Hard to argue with logic like that. No better way to accelerate economic recovery than to shorten sales cycles and increase sales numbers. But how best to do so?

I would argue that anything that helps to engage, inform, persuade and invite prospects to take further action – like, for example, to give your offering a try – is a likely winner here. And I believe Sendside has developed a platform and an architecture that can help almost any company do all of these things, in ways that are automated, repeatable, scalable, economical and effective.

With Sendside, you can combine traditional e-mail with all kinds of other communications, in a variety of formats. What’s really cool, however, is that you can combine these into packages that are as easy to send, receive, open and share as a typical e-mail. No more convoluted combining of documents, spreadsheets, marketing collateral and what-have-you. No more bulky, slow-to-send-and-download giant e-mails. And no more concerns about whether or not your recipient has all of the software necessary to read/see what you’ve sent the way you meant for it to be read/seen. Your electronic outreach is faster, easier, less intrusive and confusing and more likely to be more readily consumed and more effective.

What’s more, Sendside can tell you who’s received what, who’s opened what, and when they did so. This makes following up – what sales and marketing people sometimes refer to as “lead nurturing” – easier, more consistent, and more effective. It can also greatly accelerate sales cycles and prospect conversion.

You can learn a lot more by visiting www.sendside.net and downloading one or both of the white papers I wrote for them before joining Focus. One takes an IT-centric view, while the other is more business-focused. Then, check out the Sendside solution itself. Ask the Sendside team to send you a Sendside package, then maybe get yourself a personal Sendside account so you can send some packages to your colleagues. Then, let the Sendside team and me know what you think.

(By the way, if you haven’t read them yet, I also have some thoughts on Microsoft’s new Office Web Applications and their implications for Web-based collaboration. They’re over at my DortchOnCollaboration blog. You might find those interesting as well.)

10 Signs that It May be Time to Consider Software as a Service (SaaS)

2009-08-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

Greetings, and many apologies -- it's been a hectic past couple of months, and I'm now neck-deep in a consulting engagement that I'm hoping turns into a full-time job soon. Said engagement is with Focus (http://www.focus.com), which aims to help buyers of business technologies to make better, more considered purchase decisions. Anyway, I've just published my first piece of contributed Focus research, "10 Signs that It May be Time to Consider Software as a Service (SaaS)," and would be extremely grateful if you were to visit the Focus Web site to read it. It's at http://www.focus.com/ugr/how-to/hosting-bandwidth/10-signs-it-may-be-time-consider-software-service-saas/. Many thanks, and more soon, I promise!

3Qs, 3As and 3Rs with Treb Ryan of OpSource

2009-06-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

So I'm wondering, where best to get some interesting insights (beyond my own, of course!) on SaaS and cloud computing right now? And I figure it makes sense to ask someone who makes a living helping to enable commercial pursuit of those technologies.

(See, it's out-of-the-box thinking like that that's why we industry analysts and commentators garner the hug e levels of r espect and remuneration we enjoy. But I digress.)

So I came up with three basic, yet insightful questions, and ran them by my respected industry colleague Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource. Treb's company provides solutions that enable “cloud operations for serious SaaS and Web businesses,” as it says at its Web site. OpSource has a strong partner ecosystem, a pragmatic business focus, and as you'll see below, a pretty sharp CEO.

Dortch: What is the single greatest challenge to success for software providers seeking to deliver SaaS/on-demand solutions?

Ryan: The single greatest challenge of success for a SaaS company is the cost of customer acquisition. Traditional sales models when applied to SaaS [are] very expensive [ways] to grow your business. SaaS companies should look at low-cost customer acquisition strategies, such as free on-line trials, “freemium” products or a robust channel base, to help lower the cost of customer acquisition.

Dortch: What is the single greatest challenge to success for enterprises seeking to deploy business-critical SaaS/on-demand solutions?

Ryan: For companies deploying mission-critical SaaS [or cloud-based on-demand solutions] it [is] usually integration with your existing SaaS and non-SaaS data – ensuring, for example, that you don't have a separate employee record for example in your Taleo [on-demand talent management solution] implementation than you do in you payroll system.

Dortch: What do you see as the next "great leap forward" for the SaaS/on-demand solutions market – technological, organizational, perceptual or otherwise?

Ryan: Ubiquitous APIs [application programming interfaces]. All SaaS data and interactions will be available as standardized API calls to any other cloud application. This will solve the integration question, open up new channels in the form of value-added solutions and really open the SaaS world [up] to whole new levels of innovative cloud applications based on multiple data sources and interfaces. Think of the unified contact [management features] on the new Palm Pre that brings in information from Facebook, LinkedIn, your personal [contacts] and [Microsoft] Exchange. Very cool.

First off, big thanks to Treb for the time and the interesting observations and insights. Now, my recommendations.

If you are or wish to become a successful SaaS or cloud-based solution provider, unless your solutions focus specifically on IT infrastructure management and optimization, try to stay the heck out of that business. Getting into it if you aren't there already is not only asking for trouble, it's almost guaranteed to make customer acquisition and other operational imperatives more expensive and difficult. It also flies in the face of the primary benefits of SaaS and the cloud.

If you are deploying or wish to deploy SaaS or cloud-based solutions, you should start with a clear, detailed plan of what specific business goal(s) or benefit(s) you're trying to achieve. That plan should include a detailed assessment of current relevant assets, including the information driving business decisions, actions and processes today. You may find that you need a foundation of accurate, consistent and timely information before you need any new SaaS or cloud-based solution. (See my SearchSAP.com column, “For MDM, start by getting to know your enterprise data” for more on this – it's importance extends way beyond SaaS and the cloud.)

Whether you are or want to be a SaaS/cloud-based solution provider, user or both, focus your attention on technologies, providers and partners that support open, well-documented APIs. Even if you never write a line of code, APIs represent a safety net of interoperability and integration that can smooth and increase the business value of your SaaS/cloud-based solution. It can also help keep you away from that nasty infrastructure stuff I mentioned earlier.

More from some of those I consider “the few with a clue” in upcoming outings. If you've got subjects or people to suggest, or questions or comments, do please let me know here and/or at medortch@dortchonit.com.

Heard of Rearden Commerce Yet? You Will...and Soon!

2009-06-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

How about an on-demand, electronic personal assistant that can help you and your company save money – as much as 40 percent – on travel, shipping and almost everything else you and your colleagues do or use?

Is that a value proposition that gets your attention, or that of your CFO or CEO? If not, either I'm not being sufficiently clear, or you should be seriously considering a job change. I'll try again; you do what you think you need to do after reading a bit more.

Rearden Commerce provides an on-demand platform linking business users with services ranging from hotel, air travel and car rental reservations to airport parking, conferencing, shipping, international mobile telephony and expense management and reporting.

Rearden forms alliances with providers, negotiates discounts wherever possible, and sometimes acquires companies outright. For example, Rearden now owns ExpenseWire, developers of the expense management solution resold by leading payroll processing provider Paychex and the Orbitz for Business travel service. It also owns Global Ground Automation, developers of software that automates ground transportation reservation management. Strategic allies include American Express, JP Morgan Chase (watch this one!) and the above-mentioned Paychex. Rearden claims that more than 160,000 suppliers and partners are using its platform to deliver services to more than 4 thousand corporate customers and 2 million users.

All this means you or your company can take advantage of in-place discounts negotiated directly or by Rearden, or price-shop among available competitors Rules-driven software ensures spend management and the best available price on each purchase. And it's all accessible via a single interface, the Rearden Personal Assistant, which runs on computers and a growing range of mobile devices.

Unified business service access and spend management as an on-demand service. If reining in costs while providing easy access and choice gets any better than this for business users, whether corporate or individual, someone please show or tell me – but until that happens, if you run a business, work for a business, or are a business and you consume business services, you've got to check out Rearden Commerce. I think it's a prime example of a SaaS solution that delivers business benefits across the entire value chain, from service providers to the companies and individuals that do business with them – with (almost) no IT infrastructure required.