More on SAP, Microsoft, and Google; Plus SOA vs Cloud: More Clarity

A little bit of thought goes a long way when it comes to SAP’s acquisition of Coghead and what it means for customers when their platform as a service (PaaS) vendor goes bust and support has been dropped. The thoughts belong to Richard Watson, of the Burton Group. Before offering up some “advice for mitigating the development risk,” he questions whether or not SAP may have missed an opportunity by not extending support to existing Coghead customers — some of whom certainly were joint customers too.

Still confused by cloud computing? Find yourself scratching your head because it sounds so similar to SOA? You are not alone. Luckily, we have David Linthicum because, as he states, “we need to understand cloud computing in the context of SOA.” And what would that be? SOA is the “architectural pattern”, while “cloud computing is a set of enabling technologies as a potential target platform or technological approach for that architecture.” So, again, be careful and focus on the architecture that’s best going to enable your enterprise to take advantage of services offered via the cloud.

Finally, here are two quick updates on Google and Microsoft. As InfoWorld reported, Google will institute new billing services for its App Engine hosting service. By the way, did you know that Google estimates that 45,000 applications have been built on App Engine? Pretty impressive. On the Microsoft front, Steve Ballmer stated that the Windows Azure cloud computing platform will be released by the end of the year.

Cloud Event Summary, Plus SAP’s Move

I think Charles Babcock’s provocative question posed to a panel at the Cloud Computing Forum deserves a few minutes of your time. He asks, “why it was necessary for every hypervisor vendor to launch its own virtual machine runtime format?” Then he asks rhetorically, “What will it take…a user revolt?” The answers he gets are, sadly, not too encouraging.

But never fear, there’s always another way of perceiving the situation. Jason Brook’s takes a look at how “the cloud computing world today resembles the early days of Linux, during which dabblers with a surplus of time and motivation could assemble and integrate their way to a Linux platform.” He then points to announcements from Red Hat and Ubuntu underscore how this just might come to pass. It’s well worth reading.

Another worthwhile panel discussion at the Cloud Computing Forum centered on “Security, Privacy and Compliance in the Cloud.” Check out Roger Smith’s synopsis of that discussion.

SAP made news after announcing that it bought Coghead, a cloud-based startup that offered Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to developers and others who wanted to create custom web-based applications. As InformationWeek reported, SAP will bring Coghead’s IP in-house to help bolster its own applications, though it will shut down the service to outside customers.

There’s an interview with Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of web services at Amazon, on TechFlash that you may want to check out. John Foley, over at IW’s Cloud blog, critiques it and sums it up by saying, “Amazon’s Cloud is Too Cloudy.”

David Linthicum has two interesting posts this week. One talks about SOA “becoming a part of IT, rather than just a new destination.” And it repeats his empahsis that we need to shift away from all the technology and focus on what matters — the architecture. His other post talks about an increased interest in SOA, albeit in a more incremental, and possibly more reasonable, approach.

Serious Thinking: Clouds, PaaS, and Open Source

It’s the architecture, stupid! Another attempt by David Linthicum to get people to realize cloud computing will fail (arguably, like SOA before it) if we continue to be enamored of the technology and wrapped up in the hype, at the expense of serious thinking about the architecture. This drum must be banged.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the cousin of SaaS, whereby developers take advantage of free programming tools offered by a “service” provider to create and deploy applications in the cloud. Given the aforementioned caution, it’s critical that the same issues be resolved, before we have a host of disillusioned developers and disappointed customers. Of course, PaaS might be a way to circumvent some of these bigger issues since Google’s App Engine may by definition alleviate the architectural headaches because the architecture can be defined by Google. You either want to play there or not and, if so, then you’re buying into their definition of an architecture, roadmap, etc.

Meanwhile, over in the open source world (which is closely related to the trends in SaaS, PaaS, and cloud computing) there was an interesting post about OpenLogic’s year-end stats. It poses the question, “Are customers starting to shift from relationship with vendors behind OSS projects to OSS support consolidators?” The answer appears to be yes, up to a certain point. The reason is that it’s easier to have a relationship with a consolidator, like OpenLogic, than 10-20-30 individual contracts. But, the dynamic changes depending on the mission critical nature of the OSS.

Microsoft’s Latest Moves Open Up Possibilities

Microsoft and Red Hat have agreed to support each other’s server OS on each other’s hypervisors. The driving force? Customers and partners. Now that was refreshing. Moreover it points to Microsoft’s evolving open source plans, as well as, its potential direction in cloud computing.

As Rodrigues and Urlocker blogged, “Whatever its history with open source, Microsoft keeps showing that they can evolve their thinking to remain relevant to their customer base.” They also suggested that this could mean Microsoft will open up their cloud to “non-Microsoft environments,” which would certainly seem like a wise move.

A more detailed take can be found on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ blog. Or you can take it from the horses mouth by checking out Red Hat’s announcement and FAQ.  Similarly, you may want to read Mike Neil’s explanation on his blog. He’s the general manager of virtualization at Microsoft.

Shifting gears to the bigger picture, let me point you to a fairly rich InfoWorld article, Cloud options for IT that IT will love. It take a more prosaic look at the (early) value that cloud computing can bring to IT. That is, things that “provide a slew of labor- and cost-saving options for harried IT managers.” For example, “help-desk ticketing, network management, vulnerability assessment, and enterprise knowledge bases are just a few of the applications you can spin up in the cloud in just minutes.”

The article then gets into the emerging platform-as-a-service discussion and how developers will, ultimately, write for the cloud “bypassing the traditional sever-OS-storage platform.” Google,  Microsoft, and Amazon are, in turn, discussed. It then ends with a note of caution, as any self-respecting article that attempts to see the future should, before sounding a final note of optimism.

Speaking of optimism, check out what SugarCRM is doing to help ThyssenKrupp weather the economic storm. It’s pretty impressive what you can achieve today, even as these technologies are emerging.

Amazon and IBM Link Up; What HP Has to Say

IBM and Amazon have teamed up on EC2 with a pay-as-you-go model for development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products. You can read Jeff Bezos’ announcement  on the AWS Blog. You may also be interested in IBM’s press release.

For an analysis check out CNNMoney.com and InformationWeek. This is big given the relative strength and customer base of each company. I don’t think its surprising and I expect that we’ll see more of these partnerships throughout the year.

A more sobering view of IBM’s strategy can be found in John Foley’s recent blog entry IBM Drifts Slowly Toward Mainstream CloudComputing. Although it’s a day before the big announcement, it is interesting because he wonders if the big guys can deliver on their announcements, while smaller players are more nimble and disruptive.

For example Savvis and DataSynapse are two such vendors that may appeal to developers and small businesses, in addition to enterprise customers. They’re both referenced in an InfoWorld article that includes the Amazon/IBM link up.

Yet another view came from Russ Daniels, HP’s CTO for cloud computing and VP of cloud strategy, as he tried to explain and contrast his approach and view with Google, Microsoft and Amazon. I wouldn’t say that his view is totally unique — that there will be public and private clouds. But, other statements are. For example: “If you use virtualization [internally], you will gain a significant reduction in cost. If you move the workload to the cloud, you have to redesign the software architecture of the workload” to realize another “order of magnitude” cost savings.”

Mixed Signals for SaaS

I suppose it’s not surprising that uncertain times add up to mixed signals regarding just about everything. And the world of IT is no exception. Consider the following:

A recent report by EquaTerra showed that ERP outsourcing was on the rise. Their report shows that firms intend to outsource more in the first three quarters of 2009, even after a drop in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Similarly, an IDC report concludes “the harsh economic climate will actually accelerate the growth prospects for the software as a service (SaaS) model” for 2009. It notes some very interesting survey findings, including one big splash of cold water: “cash-flow short falls” and “liquidity challenges” could put a dent in adoption.

Meanwhile, John Foley’s recent InformationWeek blog has the eye popping headline: “SaaS Growth Thrown Into Question.” This after it was reported that “Steve Cakebread, president and chief strategy officer of Salesforce.com, has resigned, and two other execs are out.” Apparently, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that this may be a precursor to slowing sales at the SaaS juggernaut.

Well, this is definitely a harbinger of things to come. The question is: which way is the needle going to move? Will the economic climate push more companies to embrace SaaS and all its variants? Or, will organizations think twice and maybe focus elsewhere, like data center consolidation and the like?

Good questions indeed.

Contrast in Approaches: SAP, IBM, and SugarCRM

This week SAP launched Business Suite 7, citing many “functional” improvements covering most of its applications and, most importantly, puts everything under one single underlying platform. However, I think what was most interesting is what was left out — SAP’s soon-to-be announced on demand services for Business Suite 7. This further underscores the viability of cloud computing as, yet another, major player begins to step into the ring.

Meanwhile, over on ComputerWorld, Mark Everett Hall has an insightful blog on IBM’s enterprise cloud dreams. He spoke to Dennis Quan, director of autonomic computing at IBM. He draws the disctinction between public (e.g. Amazon, Salesforce.com, Google) and private or enterprise clouds (i.e. exclusive to an organization). The architecture includes scalable services, IP network access, centralized management, and a virtualized environment. “Quan believes that dynamic workload management eventually will get so sophisticated that allocating fully secure resources around the globe on the fly to applications on demand will be a breeze.”

Finally, SugarCRM held its annual user conference this week. In a summary of the event, CEO John Roberts ” talked about how SugarCRM was “born in the cloud” and introduced new cloud connectors that provide integration with third-party services such as Zoominfo and Crunchbase. There’s also a newly announced Cloud Connector framework that should enable developers to extend SugarCRM to other cloud-based applications.” An article in Informationweek is worth checking out for both more detail and to remind everyone just how far SugarCRM has come. It’s really an interesting story on how two determined people can leverage the open source model, using Sourcfore.net as a backbone, and go from there.

State of Affairs: Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM

Let’s take a look at a few of the most successful technology companies and see what their most recent results and initiatives say about the state of affairs when it comes to cloud computing.

Amazon, once again, provides proof that cloud computing is not only viable but also highly profitable. Late last week, Amazon posted fourth quarter results that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations with an 18% increase in revenue to $6.7 billion. That, in and of itself, is great in this environment. But what’s most intriguing is that “Amazon Web Services Help Fuel Blow-Out Quarter“.

A few of thought provoking articles appeared around Microsoft, including “Why Windows Must Go Open Source” and “Remaking Microsoft: Go All-In The Cloud“. The case for Windows going open source rooted in the needed for Microsoft to maintain its developer base, the impact of virtualization (loosening the grip on hardware and OS), and the need to extend and open their systems into the mobile — and rapidly emering — netbook space.

Of course, all this leads into a discussion about cloud computing, as all the aforementioned things are impacting and threatening Microsoft’s fortress of strength. As the second article states: “Microsoft’s customers might be ready for cloud computing before it is. If Microsoft wants to lead the way into cloud computing–and it should–it needs to move more aggressively with its considerable talent and assets.” It’s an incredibly interesting time to watch Microsoft and the moves they make will without question pave the way for its relevance over the next decade.

Finally, IBM continues to make advances in the cloud and SaaS areas. Their latest announcements centered on a “new ISV partnership, a move which, on the heels of cloud-related agreements penned last week with several universities, advances Big Blue’s cloud and SaaS realm.” Adding that IBM has tripled the number of partners in their SaaS program and said that they are continuing to sign up paying customers to their cloud infrastructure offerings.