Targeting Midsize and Small Businesses: The Latest from IBM, Microsoft, and SAP

Recently, three of the biggest players in the enterprise and business applications market made announcements targeting midsize and small businesses with unique approaches by each vendor. Let’s take a closer look.

SAP announced what is more of an evolution than something entirely new with their program and brand called Enabled By SAP® Business One which essentially puts together SAP’s software for small and midsize businesses together with industry-specific implementation solutions from business partners. The program leverages SAP’s broad partner network with the stated goal of helping customers identify, purchase, and implement pre-packaged solutions so that the customer can get a better and faster return on their investment. To start there are already 18 industry or “micro-vertical” solutions available in 20 countries.

Similarly, IBM expanded its offerings for midsized businesses with the latest IBM Express Advantage offerings – combining hardware, software, and services – delivered by its partner network. They also announced new tools to help partners shorten the sales cycle, while increasing value added services, and a new software toolkit to sharply reduce and ease implementation time. But IBM didn’t stop there. Recognizing the tough economic climate, they also announced new financing offers under the “Why Wait” umbrella, which include no interest payments for 90 days.

But, perhaps the most interesting and most anticipated announcement came from Microsoft. After nearly three years of work, Microsoft announced Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform. It is nothing less than their formal entry into cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, hailed it as “the systems that we’re building right now for cloud-based computing are setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems, both outside and inside the enterprise. It is being pitched as a direct competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. It is aimed at not just customers, but also developers, startups, and consumers.

One of the more interesting comments came from Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president of the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft, when he said, “There’s this notion out there that all of technology will be sucked up in to this thing called the ‘cloud,’ and the cloud will virtually replace all the other technology or render it irrelevant. The reality is that the cloud only complements existing technology and provides people with flexibility and another way of doing things. Our intent with the Azure Services Platform is to seamlessly extend Microsoft’s platform out to the cloud so customers don’t have to choose, or deal with silos of Web-based information.”

I couldn’t agree more. Whether Microsoft can execute against this reality and deliver their next generation platform as stated will remain to be seen. But it’s a heck of a start.

Web-Oriented Architecture: SOA Enters the Cloud

In my previous blog I discussed two seemingly different approaches enterprises could take to deliver on the benefits of Web 2.0 computing – delivering business services and solutions efficiently and effectively – either through an enterprise services architecture (SOA) or via cloud computing. Each approach has its pluses and minuses. But, the reality is that most SOA efforts are uneven at best; whereas cloud computing is just getting off the ground.

Enter the Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) a concept that’s an extension or evolution of SOA in the midst of the Web 2.0 world. As Dion Hinchcliffe explains in The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA, “A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extols a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our daily business challenges. WOA offers the exciting and fast-growth promise of the Web 2.0 world, while SOA has been seen as struggling and encountering low engagement in most organizations.”

So, it looks like I was right to draw the line between SOA and cloud computing and continue the conversation since it’s perhaps the critical decision that most enterprises, of all sizes, will face in the year ahead and beyond. David Linthicum, in his recent piece SOA out, WOA in? for Infoworld, summed up his thoughts by saying, “What’s attractive about WOA is the fact that it’s just sexier and easier to understand than SOA. Moreover, it incorporates many new other cool buzzwords such as cloud computing and mashups. I think what’s most attractive is that it represents the movement of critical and core business processes from the datacenter to the cloud.”

I think that’s exciting too. It leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities for enterprise vendors and many new startups if they can take hold of the conversation and steer it in the new direction of WOA. Again, Hinchcliffe sums it up with a bit of caution:

“One last thing, it’s important to remember that no small system can sustain contact with a large system for very long without being fundamentally changed by it. This is what is happening with businesses (the small system, no matter how large) and the Web today (the big system.) The intrinsic nature of the Web is driving major changes in how we create network-based products and services and is inexorably turning us into Web-oriented businesses. Businesses that want to be successful on this network without understanding its fundamental nature and capabilities are only delaying the time it takes to reach the full potential the Web offers.”

Stay tuned. It’s getting interesting. And just in time.

Enterprise SOA and Cloud Computing: Which Way for IT?

The premise and benefits of enterprise SOA and cloud computing are compelling and, at times, confounding. In their simplest terms enterprise SOA keeps things “in-house” whereas the resources that make up the cloud are outside the enterprise. Both approaches have their pluses and minuses.

But, at the end of the day what a business and their IT department want is a more flexible and efficient way to spin up new ideas and get them into the hands of their customers, partners, or employees. The best path to this goal is the one that can make it happen with the best return on investment. The ROI is effected by both the cost it takes build the new service and the success of the service. Whether the service is delivered through a SOA or cloud computing initiative isn’t going to matter if the user experience is less than promised.

Jason Brooks’ blog, Questions for the Cloud, does a good job of summarizing the viability of cloud computing as a business and IT alternative. But the same critical questions keep coming up, as he states, “Many of the reader concerns I’ve fielded boil down to wariness over surrendering control over organizations’ application and data to some Web-based business: How can I trust my business with these providers; what happens to my data if the provider goes belly-up; what happens when I wish to take my business elsewhere?”

Of course, to say “organization” or “business” is to generalize, while we know that organizations and businesses come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to thinking about the cloud or SOA the adoption rate may differ whether those choosing one approach over another are a startup or an enterprise or a midsized organization.

Dion Hinchcliffe, writing for ZDNet’s Enterprise 2.0 blog, sums this up nicely. “The decision for many startups will be an easy one; the benefits of using these platforms for their new products are compelling across the board,” he comments. But, he cautions that “…the decision for enterprises on how far to leverage computing platforms in the cloud will be much more complicated…But the issues around governance, security, privacy, and control will be hard to overcome.”

Enterprise SOA offers more control of these critical issues because they remain in the hands of the business itself. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP each have strategies, solutions, and partnerships to help enable SOA. They have been investing in the evolution of their products and platforms to bring to fruition a complete set of deployment offerings to enable enterprise-wide SOA. They also have a large customer base that has invested in their technologies, often forming the basis of their IT infrastructure, making it easier to justify further investment in business-level enterprise services.

I think what we’ll see in the coming years is a greater willingness to explore both enterprise SOA and cloud computing as options for delivering a better customer, partner, or employee experience. Both have their place within the enterprise and both should get better at delivering on their promise as both vendor and business adapt to possibilities of each.

Open Source in the Enterprise: Here to Stay?

Kendall Square is an online media outlet focused on information technology in the enterprise. I can’t think of a better way to start off our blog than by taking on the subject of open source. Perhaps what’s most interesting about open source and its impact on the enterprise is the extent to which open source projects have already penetrated the walls of IT with the private and public sectors.

In fact, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, shows proof of this after a recent meeting he had with the head of IT for a major corporation. He talks about it in a recent blog titled MySQL Wins at LinkedIn!. The executive had just completed an audit of their current projects and found “hundreds” of open source projects that were either completed or underway. Hundreds. That’s in one company alone.

Or check out the stats on SourceForge – dubbed the world’s largest development and download repository of open source code and applications – which hosts more than 180,000 projects, more than 1.9 million registered users, and has seen over 250,000 downloads per month. That is a lot of activity. Surely, a fair number of these projects have a direct or indirect enterprise component.

One other simple test might be to look at the response established vendors are taking as they position themselves with the open source movement. Notice I said “with” rather than “against”. We already know Sun’s position, especially with their acquisition of MySQL. Every major technology player – whether IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, or any number of others – has a strategy and set of offerings related to their open source initiative.

Depending on how you want to view these data points will probably effect whether or not you think open source in the enterprise is here to stay. I think it’s not only here to stay but that it will further propel the IT industry further because, after all, open source represents competition for proprietary solutions. In the end, the customers come out the winner. And there’s no turning back the tide when economic, social, and competitive forces are at work.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue to explore the impact of open source on the enterprise while keeping up with the latest products, solutions, and initiatives from the technology vendors that you use and rely on to keep your business or organization running a step ahead of the competition.

Stay tuned and thank you for reading.