Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Part II - Beware the Wolf in Blue Clothing
Narinder Singh
In Part I of our blog we shared our thoughts on the debate between public and private clouds. Here we want to share what to expect when entrenched vendors muddy the waters in the cloud (and reissue our offer to a public webinar to debate the topic).
The Legacy Vendor Playbook
The effort for a giant to play catch up on cloud computing (or other disruptive technology innovation) normally involves three main components.
Step 1 - Name everything the same
Step 2 - Claim progress through standards
Step 3 - Build a few real, innovative solutions, but use them as a part of many existing strategies
All the while, the center of these organizations still sound like the advocates of the previous paradigms so insightfully described in Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma."
Step 1 - Name everything the same
At one point IBM had more than a dozen (maybe 20+) products that were called DB2. SAP has similarly pulled everything into their suite whether integrated and relevant or not. This enables vendors to ensure that statements that their "product (e.g. DB2) can do X" is inevitably true.
Step 2 - Claim progress through standards
As we have noted before, a search for web services standards returns IBM as the top result with a page with over 30 WS* standards. On average a very small number of those standards are being used within enterprises to allow two systems from different vendors to inter-operate. The open cloud manifesto from IBM followed a similar pattern, it allowed them to jump closer to the center of the discussion around cloud computing without having a single proven offering related to it. The most proven demonstrable cloud innovations have come from vendors like Amazon, salesforce.com and Google. They have used proven web standards to promote interoperability without slowing innovation.
Step 3 - Build a few real, innovative solutions, but use them as a part of many existing strategies
IBM has the ability to and will deliver true, innovative, multi-tenant solutions. We have seen it before with other standards and areas of development. Yet rather than being disruptive, this innovation is cornered and primarily used to make less relevant, non-cloud based solutions appealing to enterprises and to demonstrate technology leadership in the market. Similarly, Microsoft will certainly provide interesting capabilities through Azure to allow existing .NET solutions to plug into cloud services. But their motivation is primarily to protect their investments, not their customers.
How should enterprises respond?
Now that we know what tens of millions of marketing dollars will promote, how should enterprises respond?
1. Use technology advancement from legacy vendors where it makes sense - as we mentioned, IBM (and others) will deliver some real innovation, and many of the technologies are applicable to helping you create a more efficient IT environment. In those scenarios, continue to explore offerings old and new to help reduce costs and increase flexibility. At the same time, expect incremental improvements to your current solutions - not giant leaps forward.
2. Don't believe the hype - it's one thing to use technologies where they make sense, its quite another to use them to accelerate your path towards the wrong destination. Continue to invest in exploring and deepening the understanding of the real cloud computing solutions and ecosystems (obviously we think salesforce.com, Google and Amazon are great starting points). Even if you are currently skeptical of (public) cloud computing, it will allow you to draw the right contrasts and clarify what is really different.
3. Use pure plays to increase knowledge, get real benefit and put pressure on legacy vendors - We have had many prospects and customers begin to explore public cloud
apps like Google simply to place pressure on their legacy vendors (Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes). In some cases, this resulted in dramatically lower renewal costs of those products; in others it led to a deeper understanding of and eventual selection of Google Apps. Either way, it's a clear benefit to the enterprise. And over time it inevitably increases the rate of adoption of the solutions delivering superior value (i.e. the cloud).
While legacy vendors take steps to participate in the next generation of technology, they will often do so while belittling it. SAP in the past weeks has simultaneously aggressively promoted the cloud and then deemed it mostly inadequate for enterprise solutions. To cut through this alternative approach to holding on to the past, enterprises can ask a few simple quations. Is the cloud more or less capable than it was three years ago in handing our needs; will it be more or less capable three years in the future of handling our needs? Regardless of your evaluation of where it stands today, answering these questions for yourself will indicate where you should invest going forward.
Labels: CloudComputing, IBM, Lotus Notes, SAP
Friday, March 14, 2008
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Tony Bianco
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Google continued to make its run at the enterprise last week, following up the splashy Google Sites launch with the quieter introduction of some new tools and APIs for Google Apps. These include a new tool that will enable two-way syncing between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, as well as a new Google Contacts Data API that provides secure, programmatic access to contacts in a Google address book. This enables developers to access and share contacts between different applications (e.g. social networking sites, contact managers), without providing full access to a user's Google account. There is a great Wired blog on why this is so important.
If You Build It They Will Come
This closes an important gap in Google's API coverage for Apps, and like the introduction of Google Sites last week, should increase enterprise interest in Google Apps. Not that they need much help. Google already has over 500,000 businesses using Google Apps and claims to add over 2,000 businesses each day. This easily puts them at over a million users and growing rapidly.
This kind of growth shows that customers are becoming much more comfortable moving their email, calendar, contacts and documents to the cloud. It's enough to motivate traditional software juggernauts like Microsoft and IBM to sit up, take notice and react. Last week Microsoft continued their dance toward their version of SaaS, which they call "software plus services," with a beta version of a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange.
With all the recent SaaS talk from traditional on-premise vendors, it'll be interesting to watch the battle. We believe Google has a head start for a few reasons.
- Google makes it easy for their applications to work with other systems - the new Calendar Sync tool and Contacts API are great examples of this. Google also makes it extremely simple to migrate data over from existing applications, which is critically important for enterprises.
- Google is focused solely on the SaaS model and they are well aware of the requirements to make that model work. As we've said in the past, vendors that try to split their focus between on-premise and on-demand will have a difficult time succeeding without making significant changes to the way they develop and sell their products, and how they service their customers. This is a difficult task for those who must protect existing on-premise cash cows.
- Google has made it clear that they're investing heavily in this area with new services like Google Sites and recent acquisitions like Postini. Most importantly, they have the resources and the experience to make it successful. With the rate of innovation coming from Google, we're sure competitors will need to stay on their toes.
Labels: Google, Google Apps, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, SaaS
