It’s a testament to the times that as a new burgeoning technology is hatched by an “army of geeks” in a caffeine drenched frenzy, I can have a conversation at a party with a lawyer from a completely different field and find that he already has a rudimentary grasp of that technology - Cloud Computing.

Even if I normalize for the natural demographic skew of my location (San Francisco), it is impressive to consider how quickly this phenomenon has progressed towards the mainstream.  Clearly, the message has a lot to do with the rate of transmission.  “Software-as-a-Service”, or worse “SaaS”, didn’t catch the imagination as well as Cloud has done.  Which is ironic, considering SaaS is actually what the consumer/user really touches, and what was originally represented by “The Cloud” - a metaphor for all of the networking, server hardware, storage, and software bits and bobs that no one really wants to know about.  As I said in a previous post, it really does matter what you call something.

So I looked around for some other indicators of “Cloud Computing” crossing the chasm from geekland to consumerland, and didn’t find very many.

• Cloud computing for business goes mainstream
• Los Angeles Moves To Gmail And ‘Cloud’ Computing

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Posted under cloud, marketing

There was a time when everyone was hot about “Location-based Advertising”.  Well, everyone’s still trying to crack that chestnut, and maybe this is a way to do it - Location-based Micro-Blogging.  This is better known as an application called FourSquare, or its closest competitor Gowalla.

Think of FourSqaure as Twitter meets Google Maps with an added gaming concept that reminds me of the old treasure hunts I used to go on as a child with my parents…but without the clues.  Essentially, when you arrive at an establishment, or your home, or your office, or where ever, you use an app running on your smartphone to “check-in”.  That act of checking into that location is then published to the rest of your social network.  You also have the opportunity to receive some points and a virtual badge of honor.  Last, but not least, you can provide a Tip to visitors of the establishment (for more points), or simply post a status update.

Of course, the obvious question is, “Why?”.  But then again, why do we do anything?  Why do we Tweet?  Why do we post videos to YouTube?  Why am I writing this blog?

To be honest, that’s not a very pragmatic question (although it will lead to very deep understanding of what is driving Social CRM, or Social Customer Relationship Management).  Businesses today are trying to get their head around the “How?”, as in “How can I leverage this?”.

Before we delve into the depths of this topic, I think it fair to share some information about whether your business should care.  As usual, we’re at the very beginning of this new technology adoption curve and there’s a long way to go.  Here are some statistics put out recently by RJ Metrics.

As you will see, the numbers are not overwhelming compared to say Facebook, but my guess is that if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, this form of market engagement could get very relevant relatively quickly.

Foursquare

• Number of users: 1.9 million
• Number of registered venues: 5.6 million
• Check-ins: 1/3 of venues only once or never
• Most popular venues: Home or fast food establishments

Posted under Social Media Marketing, marketing

The folks over at Ignite Social Media have done us another great service this year - they’ve collated and published their Social Analysis Report of geographic, demographic, and traffic data from various social networks around the web.

Of course, the list in the report is not complete (there’s not Orkut, for example - and I’m pretty sure there’s a network or two in Japan that have incredible stats, but are not listed here), but anyway here they are for your enjoyment.  You can get the full report here.

For those of you that are wondering about which social network to leverage to get into a particular geography, I’ve taken the geographic distributions and mapped them into a table below.

Here are some interesting observations and questions:

• There are only four truly global properties: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube
• The survey appears US centric in its viewpoint and sampling
• What is the dominant social network in Japan?
• What is the dominant social network in China?
• LinkedIn and Plaxo appear to follow the english speaking high-tech population and its dominant outsourcing partner India (although LinkedIn isn’t as strong in the UK as Plaxo)
• I thought that Hi5 was the dominant Spanish speaking social network, but it does not appear to be very strong throughout the diaspora.
• I don’t see a social network with a distribution that falls along religious lines.  Unfortunately, this may happen in the not so distant future.

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Posted under marketing

Maybe it was just me, but the energy level at the 47th Design Automation Conference was higher than it’s been in a number of years.  It could have been a combination of things - general signs of an exit from The Great Recession; the M&A activity in the industry; a new market approach from Cadence got everyone a-buzz; and everywhere I went I heard discussions about Cloud Computing (and it wasn’t just because I was stood there ).

Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM, made a keynote speech on Wednesday that was wide ranging, but spent a great deal of time asserting that Cloud Computing is the future of IC Design.  Richard Goering wrote this up nicely on his blog here.  You should take a look.  The full keynote video is here, pick up what Dr. Meyerson had to say about the Cloud at around minute 38:00.

A crucial point to emphasize from Dr. Meyerson’s speech is the real issue at the heart of the computing challenge facing all industries, not just electronic design - IT resource overhead.  While it is tempting, as engineers, to focus on the technology of cloud computing (performance, upload time, latency, security, etc.) it is this business aspect of the equation that is the driver.  ie. The Total Cost of Ownership of data centers is out of control - driving a company’s balance sheet in the wrong direction.

If you missed the panel “Does IC Design Have a Future in the Clouds?“, don’t worry.  It was videoed and should be coming online soon.  For me, it was great fun to participate with a tremendous amount of interaction with the audience.  To the point where the Chair (Raul Camposano) had to cut off questions from the floor.  (He almost cut of Harry “The ASIC Guy“, but he was saved by the crowd.)  Richard Goering mentioned on his blog that he will put up a post about the panel soon, but in the meantime, you can catch a write-up of some of the highlights over at EETimes by Nicolas Mokhoff here.

If you were at the show, what were your impressions?  If you weren’t able to make it - did the various online channels get you what you needed?
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Posted under Xuropa, industry

Back in March I posted the original version of this video.   After only two months we need an update!  Thank you Socialnomics

Many of these trends are still just unfolding and their impacts are only starting to be understood.

Pretty cool…

Posted under marketing

Looking around doing some research, I came across this interesting research statistic from Gartner.

The statistics point clearly to something that we’ve seen for a long time, a paradox and a problem for companies wanting to move their business to the cloud - how do you do it while at the same time decreasing IT headcount?

This is the time for platforms such as Xuropa to flourish.  Value-added solutions that enable cloud deployment of your software without incurring IT overhead.  You really will be able to do more with less!

Posted under cloud, industry

I came across this cool and fun widget from Gary Hayes and wanted to share.

The values are extrapolated from data gathered manually from various sources starting in 2009, but mostly updated in February and March this year. 

If anyone out there was unconvinced of the dynamism of the environment we’re in, this should help illuminate.  It also points to the deep need of the fledgling science and art of Social Media Marketing.  How will you get your message across?  How will you compete for attention and mindshare?  How will you do either of these if you’re not online?

An interesting chart would be a graph of the rate of increase in this rate (the second differential).  Anyone want to take a crack at this?

Posted under industry

Thanks go out to Richard Goering for his recent blog post about Hybrid-SaaS.  At the end of Richard’s post he thought a definition of the different layers of the stack would help, so this is a much simplified series of summary descriptions for each of the layers.

The Cloud Computing Stack

Starting at the beginning, below is the three layer Cloud Computing stack.  We start at the application level with the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) layer.  I recently learned that the term was coined by David Thomas, (CEO and Founder of Intacct, now at TechAmerica) in a “gathering of the clans” at the salesforce.com offices in San Francisco involving Marc Benioff and a number of other early SaaS leaders in the early 2,000’s.  The objective of the meeting was to come up with a term to differentiate themselves from “ASP“s, but I digress. 

SaaS is the delivery of the end-application within a browser.  Next down is the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer and represents a collection of development tools, API’s, and resources used to create SaaS applications.  Finally, there is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS); a collection of (usually) virtualized compute, network, and storage resources.

Cloud Computing Stack

 SaaS Layer

This is the piece of Cloud Computing that we come into contact with everyday (every hour!?).  It is Facebook, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Virgin’s online booking app, Expedia, etc.  It is a remote application accessed and used via a common web browser.  There are no downloads, no installations, and no licenses to deal with.  Although consumer applications do not have Software License Agreements (SLA), many B2B (Business-to-Business) apps do have SLA’s, especially when deployed throughout an enterprise.

Implicit in the fact that SaaS is remote, and nothing needs to be installed - no servers and no IT required.  Two of the especially sweet reasons to go with SaaS.

Within each application there is the core functionality that delivers the value of the application.  The app engine, if you will.  This holds the secret sauce of an application, the core algorithms and differentiated functionality.  Outside of this, there is a varied collection of fairly standard components (see diagram below).

There are usually at least two interfaces or views of the app, and often there are more depending upon privileges .  An administrator view and a user view.  Below this layer is a collection of common services, such as Identity Management, Access Control, Analytics, etc.

All of these components need to be seamlessly integrated for usability and security purposes (why bolting something together around a Google Group, for example, doesn’t work).  Security needs to be integrated across the entire app to ensure functional and data integrity.

The entire app must be “infinitely” scalable.  Meaning that any number of users can start using the application at any given time.  In the bad-old days, in order to manage any spiky traffic, this meant leasing a whole mess of servers from a hosting provider.  Now we just develop the app on a scalable provider, such as Amazon’s EC2 and we’re good to go…as long as your credit card doesn’t max out

SaaS vs Client App Development

In my last blog post, I gave a collection of reasons why many enterprise software applications will have a hard time converting into a SaaS application.  The greatest technical reason is architectural - moving from a single-user client app (”single tenant”) to a mult-user server-based app (”multi-tenant”).  A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) may help this transition, but there’s still a lot of work to do…in fact, the reality is, the endeavor will be a complete re-write.  (As a point of reference, I was talking to an Enterprise Software developer the other day, and he said his application had 11 Million lines of code…)

Also, the languages used are different - Javascript, Java, and php (or Python).  Thanks to all of the web startups out there, php and Python (”backend”) developers are hard to come by.  And so a move over to SaaS would imply a massive re-training effort.

I hope this was a useful summary.  It is in no way intended to be exhaustive.

If you know of any useful references, please add them in the comments.

Next up, Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS.
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Posted under Xuropa, industry

“Huh?”, I hear from my friends,  ”SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) isn’t for all Enterprise Software?”  Let me explain.

This has been something I’ve been talking about from “the beginning“, but never got around to putting it up here for discussion.  I was finally prompted by a conversation I had over dinner with Richard Goering last week at the EDP Symposium and Workshop.  I could tell that he wasn’t expecting this perspective from me, and his question was a follow-up of what I’d said in my presentation earlier in the day.

The reality is, the world is not as as straight forward as some would have us believe - especially in some markets.  Thousands of software applications have characteristics that create barriers so high that delivery in a “salesforce.com“-like SaaS manner doesn’t make sense.  At least for a long time.

Now that we have a clearer definition of what SaaS is within the Cloud Computing stack, and we have a fuller understanding of the use models of software applications, we can more clearly see and articulate the nuances, layout the challenges and reasons why SaaS doesn’t make sense all the time, and what the alternatives are.

Software-as-a-Service Characteristics

Firstly, starting at the beginning, here is the Cloud Computing stack (I’ll go into more detail in a later post).

Cloud Computing Stack

The top layer, SaaS, today includes applications such as CRM , online docs, tax preparation, social networking, etc.   The characteristics of this layer most relevant to our conversation are:

• These applications were written from the beginning to be web-based
• They are applications that deal with what I consider the outer-circle of a company’s IP (a Rolodex, business processes, for example)
• They do not require interoperability with any other software application or data
• The user interface is consistent across all users
• In the main, these applications were created by market segment newcomers

Platform-as-a-Service Characteristics

The second layer, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a bundling of compute resources, storage facilities, datasets, an integrated development environment (IDE), and some proprietary APIs.  The characteristics for this layer are:

• Tools to develop, debug, and deploy new software applications
• You have to use the infrastructure of the PaaS vendor

Enterprise Software Requirements

When we step beyond the “safe” outer layer of IP and start dealing with the “crown jewels” of a company, what do we find?

• An installed base of millions of lines of code that has been used for years or even decades
• Applications that work with (or are used to generate) a company’s core IP
• IP protection concerns vary
• Applications that are part of sophisticated and complex flows of third-party applications and databases
• A varying degree of customization in order to meet customer-specific work flows, data formats, and other internal “standards”
• Vendors with shareholders and investors that base their investment upon expected business models and revenue streams

The Rub

All of the above enterprise software characteristics present challenges to a company in moving to a SaaS model.  However, the most crucial aspect of this list is that it’s not all one-sided.  If the list were purely issues for the vendor or the customer, then a straight forward migration can be imagined due to simple market forces.  But when both sides of the purchase equation have reasons to stick with the status quo, migration is stymied to the point when only a really large economic imperative causes the shift to occur out of necessity…or it takes a much longer time for the natural migration to occur.  It took Salesforce.com about 10 years to go from being an ASP startup to a $1B SaaS company.  Even though the rate of change is increasing, we’re still talking about a while.  Don’t believe me?  Have you taken a look over a bank tellers shoulder recently?  Or an airline booking agent?  Surprised to see the DOS app running there?  It’s running in a shell, but it’s still DOS.

Having said that, the transition will occur.  The question is, “How?”.  It will be a while before companies go out and rewrite their software to be “pure-SaaS”.  In the meantime, we need to look to scenarios where a move to the cloud makes sense, and we need a different type of SaaS to support the move.  Let’s call it “Hybrid-SaaS”.

The Move

I don’t think there’s any argument that we have an economic imperative and cloud computing is very attractive.  So the pieces will eventually fall into place, but what will that transition look like?  Here are two plausible scenarios:

The Little Guy

This would be a small company with a limited sales channel and a need to find growth somehow.  So they’d be more willing and able to explore mixed business models easily differentiating between product brand, level of service, market segment, or geography, etc.  If they have a differentiated product, great, but if they’re competing with an incumbent the agility of a Hybrid-SaaS model may provide them an edge in penetrating “the long tail” of a market.

The New Product

This is a new product within a large and established company.  The scenario is exactly as Geoffrey Moore described in a presentation I attended a few weeks ago.  Although the large company has a strong and established sales and support channel, the challenge to the new product is that it is essentially ignored.  The new product is risky for the sales organization as it could sour a relationship if something goes wrong, and that could impact existing business.  Also, the new product is not likely to be purchased “in volume”, and so the return on what would be a hard and long evangelical sale is not there.  This scenario kills new products and hinders large companies moving into new market segments.  Another opportunity for “Hybrid-SaaS”

There are more, but this will do to get us started.

Getting Started

So now we have a couple of realistic scenarios in which a company or a business unit would consider moving to the cloud.  The economic imperative is established, but so many hurdles remain.  In a later post I’ll go into more detail (this is already getting way too long) of what Hybrid-SaaS looks like, but for now, let’s break down the problem and go back to our friend Geoffrey Moore.  This is the Technology Adoption Curve, it’s inevitable, and we need to start somewhere.

Hybrid-SaaS

If we were to put software into the cloud, what would the solution need to look like?

• No re-write of the product code
• Easy installation of the software as-is
• Zero IT overhead
• Cloud and data center agnostic
• Manageable by marketing, sales and applications engineering
• Easy, secure, and manageable access for customers
• No change in licensing mechanisms
• No client-side installs
• Scalability across an entire market
• Collaboration tools
• Management tools

The solution needs to meet these requirements technically.  Because we’re not going to re-write our code, we need to start at the infrastructure layer (IaaS) and build up.

We also need to look at some early adopter use-models.  Scenarios that get value out of the cloud in a way that is in line with business objectives.

How do we leverage the Cloud?

Using the cloud and monetizing the delivery of software via the cloud may be too much of a challenge initially.  IP is still a concern to many customers.  Business models need to be tested, etc.  However, there are ways that the cloud can be used to materially impact a business, increase revenues, lower the cost of sales, and shorten the sales cycle.  Here are some of the usage models for when your software is on the cloud in an environment that meets the above requirements:

Pre-Sales

• Lead generation
• Self-qualification
• Self-education
• Training
• Evaluations

Post-Sales

• Account penetration
• Self-education
• Training
• Upgrade campaigns

Development

• Third party collaboration
• Beta testing
• Focus groups

Using the cloud in this way, value is extracted and existing business models are maintained and actually enhanced.

Fundamental to all of this activity is a deepening of the engagement between the vendor and the user.  From this point we can begin to approach the chasm with a greater understanding of what life on the other side should look like for both sides of the vendor/user equation…because it’s not straight forward.

Posted under Xuropa, industry

There are still many start-ups (young and old) clearing the path towards virtual worlds.  ”Portals” that allow us to dive into digital realms to inhabit new personae to slay dragons, get a date, or just IM with a sales rep.

More recently there has been a lot of work in blurring the boundary between the real and virtual in the opposite direction.  Augmented Reality is easy to spot with applications like the iPhone app from Acrossair below - a very cool app launched last year. 

Now there are companies that are taking or creating social data and transposing it onto the world around us through location.  It’s all very, very new so the data is raw and many will just scratch their heads.  But watch the video below that maps the activity at South by Southwest (SXSW) of users of Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Flickr, Bump, and a couple of other social platforms and apps.

Beyond the long touted “advertise coffee coupons as people walk past a particular Starbucks” application, there are infinite Social Media opportunities in both the consumer and enterprise world.

If you’re in an office of 5 people and you’re all using Yammer or Twitter, then it’s maybe not so interesting.  But what if you’re working at a huge sprawling campus in HP, Kaiser, or Stanford University?  Get’s interesting huh?

Imagine not only reaching out for help or information on a corporate wiki, but you could see where people are and walk over and ask as they walk down a corridor.  Or you could join in on a “water cooler” discussion about a product roadmap item that your CTO just got into with a bright-eyed intern, or the VP Product Marketing. 

You can see barriers start to be broken down in the physical as well as the virtual worlds.  And that’s a good thing for productivity and creativity.  It’s not just for selling Starbucks.

(Props to Robert Scoble for the video and inspiration.)

Posted under industry, marketing