Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cloud Computing: Hummer or Prius?
Ryan Nichols
Last week we noticed a similarity in news headlines from two very different industries - automobiles and software.
In the auto industry, U.S. gas prices remain near all-time highs, and car buyers are nervous about economic conditions. The result is a dramatic shift among buyers to emerging technologies. The market for large SUVs is hurting, while the market for smaller, lighter cars and especially electric hybrids is booming. Domestic automakers are scrambling to retool their existing SUV factories to smaller vehicles, and Toyota is poised to overtake GM as the leading global car maker.
In the technology industry, we face a similar situation. CIOs are certainly nervous about economic times. And the costs of operating traditional, on-premise enterprise software is rising. Buyers are reeling from the recent Oracle and SAP price increases (does this move remind anyone else of OPEC?).
So why is Goldman Sachs telling us that CIOs plan almost no investment in cloud computing in 2009? Isn’t this the equivalent of reacting to a gas price increase by postponing your purchase of a Prius, and driving your Hummer for awhile longer?
Goldman based its findings on a set of survey results which the blogosphere has dissected over the past few days. The common theme is that CIOs don’t get it. Billy Marshall of rPath argues on Sandhill.com that CIOs are often the last to know about investments in new technologies. James Staten at Forrester has a similar take, saying CIOs aren’t the target for cloud computing anyway. Todd Ogasawara at O'Reilly claims CIOs simply don’t understand the value proposition of cloud computing.
While the shortsightedness of some CIOs is a contributing factor, we think that the thought leaders in cloud computing shoulder some of the blame. We all get so excited about the potential of cloud computing that it sometimes sounds futuristic, as if it were like some spaceship that will provide commuter service to the moon, instead of like a reliable Prius, perfect for your daily commute. The name “cloud computing” itself, with its fanciful tones, contributes to this "unreal" perception.
The reality is simple. "Cloud computing" is just a big name for business solutions and IT services that are delivered over the Internet, providing more flexibility and scalability at a dramatically lower cost. This is a proven technology with a clear ROI, especially when deployed with a pragmatic eye towards business impact. In the last 15 years consumer technologies have experienced unparalleled advancements all at a diminishing costs. In the same period, enterprise software (e.g. SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) have failed to deliver innovation and relied on their own lack of flexibility - i.e. high switching costs - to actually increase the cost for ever diminishing returns.
Appirio's customers include CIOs who understand that uncertain economic conditions, and on-premise software price increases, make 2009 a year to increase investment in cloud computing. We hope and predict that many more will follow suit.
Labels: BusinessModels, CloudComputing, oracle, SAP, Software, Software as a Service
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Who is “fit” to provide enterprise apps?
Narinder Singh
The SaaS blogosphere has been abuzz these last couple of days discussing Sergey Solyanik’s assessment that Google’s culture is “not fit” for enterprise apps. We’ll say up front that Appirio runs our internal communication and collaboration using Google Apps, and have helped customers big and small do the same. We have been highly impressed with the quality, reliability, and rate of innovation in these tools, admire and respect the culture that created them, and have no hesitation calling them “enterprise ready.”
But we think that with all this talk about Google’s corporate culture, people are missing the real point—the culture of today’s traditional on-premise technology vendors is no longer “enterprise ready.”
Let me explain-- we believe that there is a cultural mismatch between the needs of today’s businesses and the cultures of traditional on-premise technology providers:
Today’s business needs agility, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. As the global pace of change accelerates, business leaders need their IT staff and SI/ISV partners to be saying a lot more “yes” and a lot less “no.” It is no longer acceptable for an IT partner to make vague promises about a release 3 years out. When a CIO asked Hasso Plattner at the Churchill Club’s SaaS debate when he should move to SAP’s SaaS solutions, he was told to check back in “5 years, at least.” Is that what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
Today’s business needs openness, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. Traditional enterprise vendors have in their very DNA the idea that openness is dangerous to their business models. Businesses in all industries have accepted the notion of core vs. context—you focus on what you are good at and rely on seamless connections with a network of partners to provide the rest of your solution. Ironically, traditional enterprise software is one of the last industries to embrace this change. One of Hasso Plattner’s key lessons from SAP’s ill-fated experiment with SaaS is that “what is inside the system has to have a coverage level which is close to 100 percent,” he says. Openness will be there in name only—the intention is that everything you need is inside the system. Such a system has never existed, and never will. Is this what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
So what does it mean to have an “enterprise-ready” culture? Of course, every traditional enterprise vendor wants to be agile and open, and many have made admirable strides in that direction, including SAP through its Developer Community and eSOA initiatives. And there is much more required to deliver enterprise solutions than agility and openness. There are the table stakes of reliability, security, and having a solution that meets a real business need. But today’s business requires IT partners with a culture that can do both-- be deeply rooted in agility and openness while delivering reliability, security, and business value. We think that Google and salesforce.com, the leaders in on-demand, have achieved this goal: Salesforce offers both trust.salesforce.com AND ideas.salesforce.com. Google offers highly innovative applications that scale like no traditional enterprise application will ever be able to.
But whether or not you agree with us that Google’s corporate culture is “enterprise ready," the real point is that its traditional on-premise competitors are most certainly not.
Labels: BusinessModels, Google, salesforce, SAP, Software, Software as a Service
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Understanding the Difference between On-Premise and On-Demand Software
It’s difficult to touch, feel or smell enterprise software. It in a package, but definitely not one that has a bar code and a price on it. When we ask "what does it do," we’re asked in return "what do we need it to do?" Sometimes, the same question applies when one asks "how much does it cost." This sales approach, combined with zero marginal cost for the provider, results in the software industry being fraught with idiosyncrasies. In such an industry, one of the tools all of us use to understand the ethereal notion of enterprise software is the analogy. While analogies can never prove a point, they help frame our view and make software more concrete in our minds.
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Below we have taken a look at some of our favorite (hopefully humorous) analogies for On-Demand and On-Premise software. Yet there is a more serious point - your approach to solving business problems with technology is often about how you frame the question.
The past several years on-demand software has empowered line of business owners to sucessfully deploy siloed applications. Yet for CIOs, today the question is not how you wrestle back control, but how to embrace on-demand, allow lines of business to pursue their efforts, and manage the overall adoption of the technology in the business.
With that, we hope you enjoy some of our favorite entertaining analogies that frame the difference between on-demand and on-premise. In addition, we welcome you to add to our list.
Enterprises choosing on-premise software are like teenagers getting married. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, there are all sorts of unexpected costs and divorce (think "upgrades" or "migrations") are both painful and inevitable. That’s why teenagers should focus on dating (on-demand)?
People try to compare on-Premise and on-demand to buying vs. leasing a car - as if either preference were equally valid. This analogy would be true if, when buying a car, you needed to take a special class that cost twice the price of the car, and every 3-4 years the car's engine would require rebuilding while in motion; while when leasing a car, gas and insurance were included.
But isn’t it true that at some scale, its just more cost effective to buy software and manage it yourself? Sure, I think that was right under the headline of Wal-mart buying old nuclear reactors to provide power to their stores.
Long term contracts, uncertain performance and costly upgrades? Hmmmm, you're talking about either on-premise software, or the New York Knicks.
Security, quality control, our large size, the need to customize things for our unique needs and the cost of buying things each month… those are the top reasons for using on-premise software... or deciding to buy seeds and grow all our own food.
Labels: on-demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software