Monday, December 22, 2008
2009 Predictions: Azure Disappoints
#2 in our series of 2009 predictions
2008 Recap
We’re not sure exactly what there is to recap about Microsoft Azure in 2008, other than the launch event, which certainly generated a lot of buzz.
A closer look by many generated more skepticism. Phil Wainewright said it best: “Whereas real cloud vendors release working services in beta on the same day they announce them, Microsoft simply announces what it’s going to do a year or two off in the future…. Ray Ozzie confessed that ‘the maturity of the things that we’ve got on them as this point in time is limited. It will be a different story a year from now. But I wouldn’t want to hold it for another year. So, we’re getting in the game.’”
2009 Prediction
So we’re keeping our expectations in check for Azure in 2009. CNET doesn’t expect web-based Office on Azure until 2010. There are only a handful of applications (nearly all Microsoft built) being demonstrated on Azure….the next generation of Live Meeting is supposedly up next.
Why the slow pace? Part of the explanation is certainly the scope and ambition of the Microsoft vision. Microsoft has a history of being late to markets that it eventually dominates, and we certainly don’t want to under-estimate the power of the resources Microsoft has at its disposal. Ray Ozzie is a visionary, and he’s charted out an ambitious course that will take decades to fully realize.
But we think there’s more to it than that. The last 2 years have shown us how challenging it is to play in both the cloud and client-based worlds. We’re written about the challenges SAP has faced building new business models without disrupting their core business. Microsoft will face the same challenges. This tension between wanting to play in the cloud without damaging its cash cows is the reason that it has taken Microsoft so long to even start talking about Azure.
Given this conflict, we don’t expect much from Azure in 2009. Microsoft will use it as a platform for some of its own services, but will face huge go-to-market conflict in rolling these out to customers. Microsoft’s developer community will face the same conflicts, and will be unsure how to focus their
investments. The hundreds of companies that make their living hosting Microsoft Exchange servers have the most to lose—Exchange and Sharepoint are likely to be the first applications ported to Azure (exhibit A of the types of conflict Microsoft will encounter as they roll out Azure).
What it means for customers
The big news for customers out of Microsoft Azure is validation of the cloud computing model. The entire IT industry is FINALLY unanimous in acknowledging that the future of enterprise computing lies in the cloud. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle—all have now told their customers that they need to be thinking about cloud computing.
So the real question for the enterprise is how to get started. That’s a question that we at Appirio love to help customers answer. Unfortunately, the answer is probably NOT with Microsoft Azure.
What do you think?
Which of our predictions do you agree or disagree with? Please let us know by voting in our poll or commenting below. And follow a rich dialog on these predictions hosted by Clint Boulton at eWeek.
Labels: 2009-Predictions, business by design, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, PaaS, remove, SAP
Monday, December 08, 2008
Force.com for Google App Engine: Apps "Native" to a Cloud Community
2. Force.com checkout is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to encourage "Native" Apps. Salesforce rightly argues that there’s something unique about applications that run entirely on Force.com. Force.com is a powerful, trusted platform, and there’s a confidence that customers can have in applications that rely on that technology. That’s why Appirio has built dozens of custom applications for our customers entirely on Force.com, offers several 100% native apps, and strives to have all of our products that interact with Salesforce run native functionality.
Here's the power of the Salesforce platform strategy: Salesforce customers can now have the best of both worlds. Salesforce is combining the strengths of multiple, complementary, on-demand platforms, delivered through applications that customers can trust.
- Force.com excels at modeling business processes, workflow and UI
- Google excels at scalable, consumer-focused applications that extend its strengths in communication, collaboration, search, and advertising
- Amazon excels at highly scalable low-level computing power and storage
- Facebook excels at viral applications that leverage a user’s social graph and its community of 120M+ participants
Labels: Amazon Web Services, AppExchange, Cloud Computing, facebook, Force.com, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, On Demand, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce.com
Monday, November 17, 2008
Microsoft and On-premise - Billions of Dollars Behind Google and Growing?
Narinder Singh
1. Microsoft would have to build and test it - Given all the different versions of their software, hardware, OS combinations facing Microsoft, they would have to make some very tough choices or severely limit the options they supported. Given the precedent of Vista compatibility, this enormity of this can not be underestimated. Conservatively, it would take them more than 10x the effort for Google to do the same thing within Exchange.
2. Customers would have to then get the new version and upgrade all Exchange instances - With Google, it basically was a couple clicks and it worked. For Exchange / Outlook customers they would have to upgrade or install completely new software. If they wanted to chat with those outside their company, they would have to hope those folks had also upgraded.
With an estimated 500M Outlook users, lets assume that the fully loaded cost of the upgrade (license, support, rollout on the server and to each client) will be just $10 per user (an incredibly conservative number in our opinion). That means it would cost businesses at least $5 billion to gain the functionality Google just rolled out in a day. The likely case is that this would also take years to take hold, severely limiting the benefits because not everyone was on the same version immediately. You would have to wait for your friends company's to rollout the "new version" so that you could video chat cross company (or naively hope that Microsoft actually built it using a standards based approach).
3. They would have to fix security and synchronization problems - What major new capability released from Microsoft doesn't create new security holes? Lets say that 500M users represented 5M companies each of whom had to spend an additional $1000 (1-2 days over a year) to deal with the security patches, and the subsequent synchronization to OS, SQL Server, Exchange version, that would be needed. That's another $5 billion down the tubes. For Google, even when problems do arise, they are fixed by Google, once, for all customers (without the customer having to take any action).
At a recent private event of medium size enterprise CIOs, one of the most senior Microsoft executives was left struggling to explain why a company should continue to invest in Exchange when Google was providing a broader (and growing) set of capabilities for 1-2 orders of magnitude less expense than Microsoft (Google Apps for mail, calendar, chat, docs, and sites lists for $50/user/year). The realities of attempting to preserve revenues from a legacy solution while promoting the new model is too much inner conflict for even Microsoft to wade through. As we have said before, the most likely path for company's like Microsoft to "transition to the cloud" is to set up an independent unit that can compete freely with their own solutions.
In the last year, Google has added more innovation to the messaging and collaboration space than Microsoft has in the last decade. To do this at a fraction of the cost for themselves and customers highlights the radical difference and inherent conflicts in on-premise vs. on-demand. With the current economic conditions, we expect to see a large set of studies and research that drill home the simple fact that real multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS solutions deliver much more value for a dramatically lower cost for both the provider and consumer. IT is simply too important and too costly to be left with solutions of a pre-Internet world.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Innovation, Microsoft Azure, SaaS, Video Chat
