As I wasn’t there I can only go from what’s been reported. But it seems Benioff (no doubt guided by his marketing advisors) has decided to follow the advice promulgated at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco — by no less a figure than Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee — not to overuse the word social in front of business software buyers when talking about, erm, social computing. “I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to managers in enterprise organizations,” McAfee warned his audience two weeks ago.

Benioff this week was devastatingly forthright about why social isn’t going to figure in his sales team’s lexicon when they tell customers about Chatter. According to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha (my emphasis added):

“Salesforce was careful to position Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a ’social this or social that’ because there’s such a glut of social networking tools, he said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software. ‘We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,’ Benioff said.”

So there we have it. Chatter’s going to be positioned as a collaboration tool, because that’s what customers are willing to pay for. I can still see problems ahead for this product, on three fronts, but let’s deal with that positioning question first, because I have quite strong views about it.

Interestingly, Microsoft seems to share no such qualms about naming its shiny new add-on the Outlook Social Connector — perhaps because its customers already have a SharePoint budget. Elsewhere, though, it seems large segments of the Enterprise 2.0 vendor community are colluding with their customers to deny the social component of social computing.

Back in the day, I guess Darwin had the same problem when he came along with the theory of evolution and its somewhat discomfiting conclusion that human beings are just another species of animal. Sure, we can do civilization, but we’re still animals at heart. Similarly, we do business, but we’re also social creatures. Isn’t that something to celebrate rather than trying to deny it? As I wrote in response to McAfee’s talk, it would be better to be upfront about the enterprise impact of embracing social:

“Ultimately, it’s the people that assess risks, do deals, manage change, take decisions and earn the rewards of success (or carry the can for failure). Corporate management and business itself are essentially social activities in that they depend on interactions between people. That’s why computing has to evolve to become social — to become people-centric instead of merely machine-centric. We need to redefine the word social so that it’s no longer perceived as the antithesis of business and instead acknowledge the degree to which organizations rely on human interaction to achieve their objectives.”

However much Salesforce.com may try to gloss over the social component of its new functionality, the name of course betrays its true intent. And of course, at the heart of resistance to social computing in the enterprise is the suspicion that it’s simply encouraging people to engage in purposeless timewasting. Will Chatter be just as meaningless in the enterprise?

To this point, Dion Hinchcliffe has just published an interesting exploration of what he calls The Three Waves of Enterprise 2.0. I think it highlights a huge hurdle that every enterprise will have to get across as it extends its IT infrastructure to embrace the social dimension: that is, how to deal with information overload. Just as individuals often hesitate to sign up for Twitter or Facebook because they worry whether they’ll have time to cope with the constant torrent of information (something I’ve always struggled with, certainly), so enterprises face a similar challenge, but on an enterprise scale — with implications for systems, processes and training needs. As Dion explains (inevitably I’m truncating liberally here — go read the article):

“Once active social computing communities start generating shared knowledge, the act of browsing the intranet or using enterprise search engines causes much more information to be discovered, some of it relevant in the moment but most of it probably not … Ultimately, this will lead to an information explosion that enterprises will have to figure out how to deal with … consumption efficiency in this new world of information abundance … will therefore be the measure of your ability to access business value with Enterprise 2.0.”

Building Chatter into the Salesforce.com application stack means the vendor is going to have to think carefully about how it’s going help its customers manage that information overload challenge. It seems to be doing that, but it may prove to be a huge undertaking. (By the way, Dion Hinchcliffe and I will be discussing Enterprise 2.0 adoption and business value in a webcast roundtable coming up on December 10 (see disclosure) — it should be an interesting 45 minutes).

My third area of concern for Chatter is that I’m frankly a little embarrassed that, while I was berating Microsoft for the slow pace at which its customers will be able to adopt Outlook Social Connector, the availability of Chatter was being announced as calendar 2010, whatever that means. I expect better delivery schedules from on-demand vendors, and I wonder why it’s being pre-announced quite so early. Cloud vendors don’t usually do vaporware, and surely it would have been better to introduce this more incrementally rather than committing to a vision that may turn out a tougher nut to crack than it first appears. We’ll see how it turns out.

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Thus I ask all my readers to vote a resounding ‘no’ to the proposition in the current Economist Debate, “This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.” I’ve written here about many of the pitfalls to be avoided in the cloud, as with any computing platform, but the alternatives to a good cloud provider are far too flaky to be worth considering.

As fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani recently posted to the debate (and to his own blog), “the incumbent, on-premise establishment … can overprice, under-deliver, cause massive overruns, suck out 80% of our IT budgets for routine work — but we need to keep trusting them.” It is no surprise that the heritage of buggy, unproven and unwarrantied software that businesses and individuals have been saddled with by the established vendors over many years has led us to instinctively mistrust any computing that forces us to rely on a third party.

Yet despite our understandable caution, it is far better to trust the cloud, where security and performance are continuously open to public scrutiny, where costs can be predictably mapped to actual value delivered and where the technology is constantly kept up-to-date for no extra cost or disruption to the customer. Provided the buyer makes proper due diligence and precautions, there is in my view no alternative form of computing that is more trustworthy.

The half-price reduction for hosted Exchange seats (from $10 to $5 per month) and a one-third cut in the cost of the full BPOS suite (from $15 to $10) is designed to keep those deals flowing through. IBM earlier this year introduced its own hosted LotusLive iNotes service at an aggressive $36 per user per year. Microsoft’s old pricing was at a level destined to give prospects pause for thought. At $60 per year, it’s close enough to raise fewer objections. The lower pricing will surely help, too, in those cases where Google’s $50-a-year service is the competition.

Interestingly, we now have a market price established for online corporate email services in the $35 to $60 per year range (indicative of a new price range for all categories of enterprise software?). As Microsoft VP Chris Capossela told CNET’s Ina Fried, “it’s the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at … We’re pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge.” You bet.

Microsoft execs were happy enough to focus on Google when it came to throwing brickbats this week. Every briefing seems to have included a drive-by shooting directed at Google. “It takes more than a few billboards to win enterprise accounts,” Markezich told me, in a reference to his rival’s current ‘Going Google’ ad campaign. “There’s been a lot of investment in billboards. I question how much investment there’s been in enterprise capabilities.”

There’s also been a concerted effort to question the size of Google’s paying customer base. While Gmail is hitting the volume mass market, Microsoft currently has the edge in large enterprise accounts. Google spent a lot of PR dollars to promote its recent win of a 35,000-seat account at Rentokil Initial, along with its 30,000-seat contract with City of Los Angeles. Microsoft Online Services is currently scoring much larger wins, including a 110,000-seat implementation at pharma giant GSK, a “large number” of which are already deployed, Markezich told me. He also disclosed the existence of a much larger, as yet unnamed customer, currently “in the midst of deployment” to more than 300,000 users.

The ability to achieve such enormous economies of scale demonstrates the huge power of multi-tenancy and gives the lie to the line, so often peddled by the conventional on-premise software vendors, that SaaS is just a delivery option. SuccessFactors would not be able to run its operations with anything like the same low overhead if it had to separately maintain the ability to ship on-premise instances of its software.

The conventional software model perpetuates a scandalous wastage and duplication of resources. Every single customer of an on-premise platform or application installs their own custom implementation. Every one of those implementations builds in enough spare capacity to support unexpected usage spikes and peak load at the organization’s busiest period of the year — yet remains idle the rest of the time. Its IT staff acquire a huge store of learnings and experiences that are solely revelant to their own environment. All of those needless investments and expenses are replicated across thousands of an ISV’s customer base. The aggregate waste adds up to a burdensome cost of ownership spread across its customer.

With SaaS, the customer base shares a single infrastructure, eliminating all of the redundant capacity and wasted effort of the on-premise model. The aggregate cost of ownership is dramatically reduced, as illustrated in the diagram above. Those lower costs translate into savings for customers as well as better margins for providers. With cloud platforms and PaaS, where ISVs share a common infrastructure, even more waste and cost is squeezed out.

These savings aren’t just a one-time phenomenon. Having all its customers on a single, shared infrastructure allows a SaaS ISV or cloud provider to continually analyze usage and performance so that it can carry on innovating to enhance the value it delivers. Salesforce.com recently announced it is moving to a maximum five minutes of customer downtime for scheduled upgrades. I met today with LiveOps, a provider of on-demand call center services, which manages its upgrades in a way that means customers suffer no downtime at all. It achieves a stellar four nines of uptime including scheduled maintenance. And of course this is within infrastructures whose security and firewall strength is far superior to those of most enterprise data centers — and which is constantly tested and validated by customers and prospects to an extent no single enterprise data center experiences.

This is what the cloud delivers: hardened, high-performance, reliable infrastructure far superior to that of any single enterprise — at an aggregate cost of ownership and operation far lower than those enterprises would collectively spend across hundreds or thousands of separate private infrastructures to achieve a much worse result.

Disclosure: the diagram shown is excerpted from Redefining software platforms — How PaaS changes the game for ISVs, an analyst report produced with funding from Intuit Partner Platform.

“… businesses will be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to quickly access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their CRM … businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net …”

The move is a first step in a strategic direction for the company, its VP of marketing Jen Grant told me on Tuesday: “We’re moving towards a broader look at how the cloud can help a business. Now we really want to start connecting clouds together,” she explained. “Today, we’re connecting the Box.net cloud with the Salesforce.com cloud. In the future, we’re looking at partnering with many other services.”

The unlimited storage is a key part of this offering, which is designed to act as a single, permanent home for users’ data as they move between online applications. If Box.net succeeds in its ambitions, it will become the “Switzerland” of online data storage — the one neutral location where everyone feels their online valuables are safest.

Of course one vital component in winning that role will be the trustworthiness and reliability of Box.net as a cloud repository (especially in light of recent failures elsewhere). With $14.6 million venture funding to date (almost half of it in a round announced last month), Box.net is not yet in the topmost league of cloud providers so may need to continue its expansion before it can afford a fully redundant architecture. But convenience and competitive pricing are also important considerations in the small-to-mid-size business market that produces most of the customers of this service. Here’s what Grant told me in an email when I followed up our conversation on Tuesday with a question about security and disaster recovery at Box.net:

“Here is a detailed outline of our current security measures in place: https://enterprise.box.net/features/security

“In the short term, we’re adding encryption on files at rest (among other initiatives) in addition to the encryption in transit that we already have; you can expect this to be complete in the next few weeks.

“For the long term, we’re currently undergoing the SAS 70 certification process within the company, which will ‘officially’ endorse our standards regarding both security and privacy. This is above and beyond security implementations that most companies have on an internal server or collaboration tool.

“… keeping our customers’ data safe and secure IS the core of what we do, and we know that our very business depends on us maintaining that level of security. Because of that, we spend a great deal of time thinking through how to implement and maintain the highest level and latest advances in security technology.”

Box.net has produced a useful YouTube video explaining how the new Salesforce.com integration works.

I’ve written in the past about the difficulties European SaaS vendors face in expanding across borders and getting the visibility they deserve. There are a huge number of highly successful SaaS vendors in Europe, who are thriving in spite of the challenges of expanding across borders into different languages, cultures and business jurisdictions. The lack of established European-wide tech industry networks and media leaves them doubly sidelined — unable to command visibility against better-known US-based peers with the global tech media, yet sidelined by local tech media in their own countries because SaaS isn’t considered part of the mainstream software business.

EuroCloud changes that by creating a ‘go-to’ destination across Europe where everyone will be able to see, just by scanning the membership list, the breadth and depth of indigenous SaaS and cloud players. Today EuroCloud issues its call for membership so the names aren’t there yet (apart from the 70 members of the pre-existing EuroCloud France) — however I know from the responses I can already see coming in to just the UK group how quickly that’s going to change. Membership is open to any SaaS or cloud ecosystem participant, and those who want to take an active role in taking EuroCloud forward have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and help drive its momentum.

Meanwhile, we already have 29 companies listed as ‘European Launch Partners’, all of them organizations with a presence in at least two European countries. Some of my US fellow-bloggers and writers may say, ‘But I’ve never heard of most of these companies.’ Well my friends, that’s partly because some of you are too ready to dismiss what’s going on without bothering to look, but we in Europe also bear some of the responsibility for not promoting ourselves with a loud enough voice. EuroCloud will give the European industry that voice.

Even more important than all of this, though, is the role that EuroCloud can play in shaping the future of cloud services in Europe:

• Firstly, by acting as a facilitator of partnerships and ecosystems between cloud and SaaS providers across Europe — making it easy, for the first time, for providers to find each other from Spain to Poland and from Norway to Bulgaria.
• Secondly, by speaking with a collective voice that can influence lawmakers and administrators at the European Union, which now originates more than half the laws governing business in member countries, and which affects cloud providers across diverse topics ranging from broadband access to privacy regulation and software patents.
• Finally, by helping business decision makers in Europe understand how best to take advantage of cloud and SaaS to ensure they stay competitive in the connected Web era.

That last point I know is a little contentious. Some, including fellow ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett, have wondered how such a broad group can articulate a common vision. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we might not all see eye-to-eye in our assessment of what cloud computing is and where it’s going. But I think that may usefully force us to keep our debates about the underlying technology between ourselves, and focus on the top-level business benefits of cloud services in our messaging to the outside world.

I’m not saying that privately-hosted cloud computing look-alikes aren’t useful. All I’m saying is, don’t fool yourself that they’ll deliver all the benefits of cloud computing.

What’s really insidious is the way that Fool’s Cloud deteriorates so rapidly in comparison to true cloud computing. It starts off all shiny and new, sparkling with state-of-the-art capabilities and value. But because it’s cut off from the cloud that it attempts to emulate, it quickly falls behind, tarnishing the competitiveness of your IT infrastructure and becoming as resistant to decommissioning as a lump of radioactive waste.

These captive, private clouds fall into obsolescence because they’re not exposed to the continuous, collective scrutiny and collaborative innovation of the public cloud.

A public cloud platform is under constant competitive pressure to renew and refresh itself, whether by adding new capabilities or reacting to new threats. With a broad cross-section of organizations sharing use of the infrastructure, the platform has to continuously evolve to meet the varying demands of all those customers — demands that keep it both at the leading edge of innovation and at the highest level of threat preparedness.

Whereas at a privately-hosted platform serving just a single enterprise customer, all but the most pressing of those renewals and refreshes just get added to the wishlist — things to be done when time or budgets permit. Of course, in theory, it doesn’t have to be like that, but who’s going to argue for implementing features if there’s no demonstrable business case for deploying them right now? Public clouds spread the shared cost of innovation across all their customers, but a privately hosted platform bears all that cost on the shoulders of a single enterprise.

Although I said earlier that privately-hosted implementations have their uses, they should only ever be considered as a transitional platform and enterprises should make sure they fully understand what they’re missing out on when they opt for private hosting as opposed to public cloud alternatives. John Treadway at CloudBzz yesterday published a very helpful blog post about private cloud and the benefits it can deliver if implemented effectively. Done well, it really does produce a huge step forward in enterprise IT modernization, automating many of the provisioning and management processes and eliminating a lot of duplication and wasted resource in the IT infrastructure. But he also points out a salient proviso: “this is bloody difficult to pull off.”

I wonder how many organizations really can justify the investment required to achieve a fully automated internal cloud infrastructure as a throwaway resource? — one that’s sure to rapidly lose effectiveness in comparison to public cloud alternatives, simply because it’s not exposed to the same competitive pressures and economic leverage for innovation.

Unfortunately, many enterprises will ignore these factors and allow themselves to be seduced by the allure of Fool’s Cloud. It can only lead to disillusion and disappointment — which they’ll blame on cloud computing instead of their own failure to fully grasp it.

[Disclosure: I'd like to acknowledge funding by vendors of recent work that helped to develop the above concepts, in particular a white paper for OpSource, Enterprise Meet Cloud. Companies contract my services not to influence my opinion but because they know I'm already on their wavelength. Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my incipient bias in favor of cloud services.]

There’s going to be a lot of amateur cloud in the market for the next few years, and businesses of all sizes will have to be intensely wary of the pitfalls when they go shopping for cloud services. Amateur cloud won’t be easy to spot, and often it’ll be operated by huge, reputable companies with long, honorable track records in computing and data center operations. In many cases, businesses will knowingly choose amateur-cloud providers for reasons of cost or habit. As a result, the transition to the cloud computing era is going to be lengthy, troubled and painful.

The past week’s Sidekick debacle has been an object lesson in the full perils of amateur cloud. The hit to the reputations and brand image of Microsoft and T-Mobile has been massive. To its credit, Microsoft has pulled out all the stops and seems well on the way to recovering the lost user data, which will go a long way towards restoring its cloud credibility. But at what cost? — not only in direct resource costs but also the unseen cost of top-level crisis management that has had to be devoted to the rescue exercise. One silver lining (though scant comfort for those who suffered directly) is that every such failure has the welcome side-effect of driving home to all cloud providers the risk exposure that amateur cloud represents. Many will now be re-examining their vulnerability and tightening up procedures or strengthening their infrastructure, all of which helps raise expected operating norms a few notches higher.

One can’t help feeling sorry for venerable, established players like IBM, berated by Air New Zealand’s CEO for last week’s data center outage, and Hitachi Data Systems, caught up in the incident that caused the Sidekick data loss. As several of the Talkback commenters to my previous post have argued, it’s not as if they’ve done anything different from what they’ve always done in the past. They weren’t even attempting to operate as cloud computing facilities (although Sidekick’s users certainly regarded it as a cloud service and trusted it as such).

Yet somehow in the space of a few short months, the world has changed. Suddenly, every online service is being measured against cloud standards. What was once state-of-the-art in data center operations has now become second-rate — and it’s happened almost overnight, as though someone flicked a switch. Not so long ago, the IBM team would have won plaudits for bringing back an unexpectedly powered-off mainframe transaction system in less than six hours, especially on a Sunday morning. But now, the old standard operating procedures are no longer acceptable for today’s always-on, ultra-connected, high-throughput cloud computing environments. Today’s higher cloud computing standards mean any failure is exceptional and top management had better be on the phone apologising profusely for any disruption from the get-go.

So what are the missing features to look out for when assessing whether you’re being offered amateur cloud in place of the real thing? The key attributes that tend to get overlooked by conventional providers fall into three main categories:

• Cloud-scale operation. A cloud data center has to serve hundreds or thousands of separate businesses and this requires an infrastructure far beyond the capabilities most individual enterprise data centers aspire to. We’re talking resilient, high performance that’s always on, ready to flex up or down on demand and able to sustain high-volume peak loads to support users in their millions across all hours, business cycles, geographies and timezones. Even planned downtime is kept to a minimum, using redundant capacity where possible to apply patches and upgrades. Naturally, there’s the highest level of hardened security, and a fully tested disaster recovery plan.
• As-a-service model. As well as scaling up and down on demand on a pay-for-usage basis, the as-a-service model emphasizes a customer’s need to have:
  • visibility into operational performance;
  • enough choice to ensure proper governance of the environment;
  • a fine degree of delegated control over matters such as provisioning, configuration and service level commitments.

  This depends on a higly instrumented and automated service delivery infrastructure that few conventional data center environments support.

• Web-scale infrastructure. A true cloud operates a pooled, multi-tenant infrastructure — sharing not just the compute platform but every aspect of the infrastructure, including connectivity, service delivery components and integration services. This is a very different environment than you’ll find in a data center designed to support individual enterprises using single-tenant architectures. It requires that all infrastructure resources be rigorously componentized and flexibly accessible via a web API. Pooling the infrastructure produces huge savings in aggregate cost of ownership and operation, while its exposure to the varied demands of many different customer requirements ensures it is tuned and strengthened in the most cost-effective way to deliver optimum security, reliability and performance to all.

One of the biggest problems facing the industry today is that customers expect all this extra availability and customer service at no extra cost. Real-time failover capability to a fully functional alternative data center doesn’t come cheap. Many providers are meeting market price pressures while keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs in the hope of avoiding catastrophe until they can afford to invest in higher resilience. Few are prepared to come out straight and tell customers the true cost of adding full redundancy — and if they did do that, many customers would still choose to forgo the extra cost in favor of cheaper options. Just like the subprime mortgage market, there’s a conspiracy of silence around the true long-term risks as providers and customers alike both close their eyes to the underlying fundamentals.

Meanwhile, many of the best-known and most trusted operators of enterprise data centers are running infrastructure that dates from up to a decade ago. Old-school data center operators, especially the likes of IBM, EDS/HP and Accenture, are lumbered with acres of costly, out-dated plant that’s rapidly becoming unfit-for-purpose in the cloud computing era. This leaves them in an unenviable position, outclassed as amateur cloud and yet facing a huge hit in profitability or write-offs if they’re to upgrade their facilities to meet today’s expectations.

That’s why I’m warning that we’ll see many more failures of so-called cloud services in the next couple of years. Not because of fundamental flaws in the cloud model itself, but because few providers and customers are economically or culturally ready to properly embrace cloud computing. That will perpetuate confusion about what the cloud really is and what standards and architectures are required to implement it. It’ll take a succession of amateur cloud failures before we arrive at mainstream acceptance of what constitutes an acceptable standard and best practice for cloud infrastructure. Until that time arrives, many cohorts of unwary or ill-advised enterprises and individuals will find themselves unwitting victims of the amateurism of would-be cloud computing providers.

[Disclosure: over the past few months I've explored the concepts outlined above in several white papers or analyst reports funded by consulting clients, all of whom operate cloud services. I'd like to acknowledge their funding and in particular cite The Acid Test for the On-Demand Data Center (NetSuite), Enterprise Meet Cloud (OpSource) and Redefining Software Platforms (Intuit). These companies contract my services not to influence my opinion but because they know I'm already on their wavelength. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my incipient bias in favor of cloud services.]

“In my 30-year working career,” he reportedly emailed the hapless vendor, “I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers.”

T-Mobile is another reputable company left looking amateurish today after the catastrophic loss last week of all user data stored on its Sidekick service. But the real amateurs behind this story appear to be Microsoft and Hitachi, who are believed implicated in a server failure that took out both the production and backup databases on the storage network where Sidekick data is stored.

To read a contrasting story that shows how cloud outages get handled professionally, check out Michael Krigsman’s post last week about the recent 15-hour outage suffered by on-demand ERP provider Workday. Here, too, a network storage device caused a total meltdown, shutting itself down when it detected a corrupted node in a backup disk. Workday avoided Sidekick’s fate by invoking its disaster recovery plan. It avoided IBM’s fate by acting rapidly and going out of its way to keep its customers informed.

As I’ve often written in the past, big, established companies frequently over-estimate their competence at cloud computing and SaaS, simply because they fail to realize it’s far more than just a repackaging of what they already do. Unfortunately, their inability to grasp the emerging as-a-service business model and the demands of cloud-scale computing leave them performing like amateurs. The pity of it is, their arrogance and incompetence undermines trust in all cloud computing providers, even those that take their responsibilities seriously.

An article republished yesterday on paidcontent.org is by guest author Mika Salmi, former president of Global Digital Media at Viacom/MTV. Time To Change The Lens: Media As A Service discusses the impact of digital distribution on the media industry and argues that the software industry’s transition to SaaS illustrates what lies ahead:

“Shipping or downloading a static physical or digital product is a dying business. Pioneers like Salesforce.com, and now Google with their office apps, are showing how a ‘product’ is not a discrete thing. Rather, it’s an ongoing relationship — with continuous updates and two-way communication — with customers and even between customers.”

Sometimes it takes someone outside our own industry to be so clear-sighted about what’s happening within it. Salmi gets right to the point without getting distracted by discussions of virtualization or subscription pricing. He identifies the core of the as-a-service business model as being the way that it changes relationships with customers:

“This is not just about putting up a pay wall and charging a subscription fee … The ‘S’ in MaaS is not an afterthought or tacked on, it is the entire ecosystem attached to the content.”

If only there was so much refreshing clarity within the software industry, where, as I mentioned in my last post, most people seem to believe they can simply plonk their existing software on the Web or into a pay-as-you-go subscription plan and be successful without having to make any other changes to the way they do business. The as-a-service business model is much more than that, requiring a real-time service infrastructure and culture, able to interact with and respond to the needs, interests and dynamics of customers and their own connected networks.