Clouds are in the News; so is SaaS

There’s been a bevy of interesting news in the cloud and SaaS fronts. Let’s check them out:

• Cloud vs. SaaS for Small Business — A new survey shows small business is shy of the cloud. At the same time, a SaaS provider that focuses on SMBs is growing fast. Does SaaS resonate more than “cloud”?
• Oracle takes on Salesforce.com with CRM Demand Upgrade — Offering both multitenant and single-tenant versions in the hopes of attracting customers who may be leary of the former approach.
• Cloud Storage Matures — When it comes to storage, cloud computing continues to evolve and show real sustainability. HP and EMC have lent more legitimacy to the concept, which helps the trailblazers like Bycast, Cleversafe, and Amazon.
• You can also listen to the David Linthicum discuss SOA and private clouds…very well worth your time…
• Finally, check out all the Cloud Computing events for 2009 by going here…

So, until next time…

Going Green, Rethinking Middleware, and Cloud Predictions

So, as you can tell I took a bit of a break for personal reasons but now I’m back and scouring the Web for the most interesting Enterprise IT stories that will have a real impact on you and your business. These are the things you need to know because they will impact IT in fundamental ways. Let’s get started.

A recent article in Baseline with the title “Obama: Hope and Change for IT?” caught my eye. It’s an educated guess on how the stimulus package will effect IT in 2009. Aside from the fact that the White House will forever change the way we–the citizens–interact with government via the Web (a huge change to be sure) there were a few other very likely implications.

But, Beyond security and privacy and the issue of IT jobs, the one that really hit me was the convergence of IT and the Green Revolution. For instance, “Obama’s New Energy for America will seek a $150 billion investment over 10 years to encourage development of technologies that reduce energy.” And that means server vitualization and consolidation “Topic A on the green front among IT purchase decision makers, as the technology can significantly reduce energy consumption and costs.” Keep that in mind as you plan your priorities, especially if you’re a vendor trying to survive in this market. Go where the money’s going to be.

In “The Dawn of Middleware as a Service” it was posited that we’ll be seeing a lot more activity in the middleware space as a matter of course.  That’s because developers are already there building apps in the cloud and “middleware as a service will eventually turn the Internet into a mega-service bus for enterprise applications.” Pretty cool. I think this has incredibly big implications if organizations can make the leap and providers can deliver an acceptable level of security and performance. If it comes to fruition, then we’ll truly see the benefits of a services oriented architecture running across the Web.

Finally, InformationWeek put out an interesting set of “10 Cloud Computing Predictions For 2009“. For example:

• The Cloud Market Will Grow Steadily…to the detriment of traditional software, hardware and other parts of the IT market.
• Google Will Remain a Niche Player…because developers using Google App Engine tend to congregate around the startup and Web 2.0 space. Hmm, we’ll see…
• Big Companies Will Embrace the Cloud…just like I’ve been saying…
• Enterprise-Class management Tools Will Emerge…starting with Amazon EC2 management, monitoring and load balancing tools with IBM’s Tivoli not far behind…
• We’ll See Public-Private Clouds…using platforms like Elastra’s Cloud Server to devise cloud-like environments in their own data centers that work seamlessly with public cloud services…and that is very, very cool…

Hey, until my next post…have a great day…!

Kicking off the New Year: SOA, Open Source, and Clouds

Well, isn’t it just like us “media types” to kick off the new year with hype, controversy, and the belief that things will get better with IT–if we just get out of the way.

Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, blogged that “SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’.”

It’s a great read and well worth checking out. While states that “organizations desparately need” SOA, it was in the implementation (or lack thereof)–not the theory behind it–that has done it in. People got caught up in the technology and lost focus on the architecture. She continues by saying, “Although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.”

David Linthicum, at InfoWorld, has a nice piece of commentary if you want to devlve a little deeper into the subject. Essentially, he agrees with her.

In the open source front there were a couple of recent articles that are worth checking out. One that is sure to add to the controversy posits, “What if Gartner’s prediction that 50 percent of IT projects using open souce will not have a lower TCO than those using closed source products?” You can read more here.

The same crew from InfoWorld also wrote up a nice summary of the five biggest trends they see in open source for 2009. They include: more commercial open source; more experimentation with business models; more acquisitions; more power in the user community; and more mainstream.

Finally, let’s move away from predictions and controversy and let’s looks at a customer success story with cloud computing. InformationWeek has an interesting piece on Eli Lilly’s cloud intiative, whereby they’re tapping into Amazon’s Web Services. You can hear more by signing up for a related webcast. Should be well worth your time.

I think we’ll see a lot more real world successes (and some failures) in the area of cloud computing this year. Lots of things are working in its favor. And the biggest one is that there are more and more valuable services that enterprises can tap into.

Best Top Tens for 2008

Well, here we are at the final day of the year. During the run-up to New Year’s Day there are always Top Ten lists for just about everything. So, I’m giving you my favorite top ten lists that I’ve come across in the world of technology. Forget about reading all the others, here’s the ones you need to check out:

• The top 10 stories of 2008: Not business as usual
• The top under-reported tech stories of 2008
• Top 10 open source stories of 2008
• Top 12 tech embarrassments in 2008
• 10 things that won’t survive the recession
• 24 most underrated web sites of 2008
• 101 most essential iPhone apps of 2008

See, and there weren’t even ten of them. But, I assure you they’re all worth checking out. Until, next year…