Great news from Amazon Web Services (AWS) yesterday - they’ve made it easier to get your data up into the cloud.  All you have to do is ship them the raw SATA drive and they’ll plug it in.  Easy!  And they’re now accepting capacities up to 4TB.

This is why we work with AWS - they’re constantly raising the bar higher and higher.  They take care of the infrastructure, and we deliver the Platform and Software layers to our Enterprise Software customers.

Anyone out there need more than 4TB?

This announcement got me thinking about the other direction of the data transfer that still hounds Enterprise Software vendors.  Most vendors still deliver most if not all of their products as client-side installs. 

With the goal of lowering the cost of sales, software and tools vendors enable customers to download from their website (the cloud) evaluation versions of their products.  This would be fine if these distributions hadn’t grown to be hundreds of megabytes themselves!  A very large semiconductor vendor told me that it takes a customer 3 1/2 hours to download their software over a T1 line in North America.  And of course, it takes many attempts for it to be successful.  Not a scalable model and one of the many reasons why we promote moving evaluations and pre-sales training to the Cloud using Xuropa.

The reality is, this problem is only going to get worse.   (Numbers provided by OECD.)

WW Broadband Penetration, OECD 2009

Broadband Pentration Growth, OECD 2009

Software distributions are only going to get bigger, and with broadband penetration low and not climbing at a huge rate, something needs to change.  Of course, corporations will always be at the forefront of broadband adoption, but the rise of virtual teams and off-site workers will continue to exacerbate the problem of a lagging telecommunications infrastructure.

Although a full SaaS model would remove this problem.  There are many other obstacles and reasons why a complete move would not work for many of these software vendors.  However, moving the front end of the acquisition process (pre-sales training and evaluations) just makes sense.  Doesn’t it?

Posted under Xuropa, industry

Phil Wainewright writes a very informative blog over at eBizQ that brings in his thoughts, observations, and views on Cloud Computing and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).  Really good stuff that I highly recommend.

Every now and then I need to pinch myself though.  In a recent post, he wonders if standalone Enterprise 2.0 (think, “social networking tools inside the corporation”) vendors will survive as more SaaS vendors integrate these types of features into their products.  It’s an interesting thought, but already?

For this to happen, all customers of software will have moved at least one of their “ubiquitious apps” to a SaaS vendor that has incorporated one or more of these corporate-social feature-sets.

Although Salesforce.com have made great in-roads, and Google has shown how to get into large corporations or government agencies with gmail, two numbers from Gartner should give pause:

• 2013 Revenues for SaaS: $16 billion
• 2013 Revenues for Enterprise Software: $300 billion

Given that SFDC revenues will likely account for 10% of the forecast SaaS revenues for 2013 and the huge gap between the two numbers overall, it appears likely that the Enterprise 2.0 vendors will have a large enough market to go after. 

Taking a step back a bit, considering where we are in the technology adoption curve for SaaS overall, and how much uncertainty exists around how the landscape will look ultimately, isn’t it too early to call the demise of any SaaS player?   

For some time to come, there will be a need for technologies and applications that operate at the Platform level to fill gaps and smooth interoperability between products, solutions, and platforms.  Even though ultimately many of these point solutions will be acquired or spun-out as economics and strategic positioning dictate.

Rather than looking over their shoulder for a SaaS player integrating their functionality, they should be more concerned about serving the market that’s out there, providing value, and generating revenues.

We still have a long way to go…

Posted under industry

Monterey Bay by "The City of Monterey"

Sponsored by The Design Automation Technical Committee (DATC) and the IEEE Computer Society, the event will be held in Monterey from April 8-9, 2010.  Cloud Computing is included in the “Brave New World” session starting at 4:30pm on the 8th.

Event Information

Registration

Posted under industry

The Xuropa Platform is used by Enterprise Software vendors to deliver their products via the cloud as-is. “Cloud agnostic”, the Xuropa Platform provides the web experience, user management and analytics, and sales and marketing tools to deliver your application within an engaging web experience.

The Xuropa Platform can be used to deliver remote hands-on demonstrations, evaluations, and training. The platform can also be used for full Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery and monetization of your enterprise software.

Watch the below video to find out more.  Even better, contact us for a demonstration and to take the cloud for a spin! saas at xuropa dot com.

Posted under Xuropa

It is 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 same 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” did.  Which is ironic considering SaaS is actually what the consumer/user really interacts with.  What was originally represented by “The Cloud” was a metaphor for all of the networking, server hardware, protocols, etc. that no user in their right mind would want to know even existed, never mind have to understand. 

Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, the original “Software-as-a-Service” company, writes in his letter to shareholders, “We have become the first enterprise Cloud Computing company to report more than $1 billion in revenue.”  He may argue that this is in line with their Force.com strategy - providing their compute power in the form of a “Platform-as-a-Service” (here we go again) – Sales Cloud 2.  But considering where the vast majority of those $1 billion came from, it more reflects the company’s savvy marketing team.  If a Cloud Computing company were to be defined as any company that provides compute resources as a utility, then wouldn’t Amazon have been the first $1 billion Cloud Computing company the moment they turned on AWS?  “SaaS” appears to have lost its luster and “Cloud Computing” is the “new black”.

The reality is, what you call something does matter.  And every successful company out there knows this.  To throw up your arms and quote Shakespeare is to miss the point, and likely doom your company/product to failure in the process.

To give something a name is to give it meaning.  Even better – a name should imbue the audience with a passion, an image, something that goes far beyond its function.  “Cloud Computing” does that, with very little effort….”SaaS” needed an education cycle, time, and resources, and the market really doesn’t have that kind of patience.

(If you’re curious, in 2006 SFDC was all about “CRM”, and press releases in 2008 described the company as “…the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)”.)

Posted under industry, marketing

Maybe the benefits of the technology are slightly exaggerated here

Posted under Humor, industry

Photo via Tipiro

It is interesting to see the recent commentary regarding the environmental effects of Cloud Computing, and I’m happy to see the dialog coming while the industry is still in its infancy.  If only the same could have happened with the automotive industry - what a different world we’d live in today!

As Reuven Cohen (CTO of Enomaly, a Cloud provider) writes,

“The general consensus says that reducing the number of hardware components and replacing them with remote cloud computing systems reduces energy costs for running hardware and cooling as well as reduces your carbon foot print while higher DC consolidation / optimization will conserve energy.”

But as Mr. Cohen and James Urquhart (Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Computing and Virtualized Data Centers at Cisco) agree - there is no proof.  There is no standard measurement or parameter that everyone agrees indicates that the net result is better or worse for the environment.  And so for now we’re really discussing the hypothetical and using deduction to point us in the right direction.

One point we can all agree on - as a civilization, we’re doing more computational work now than ever before.  Of course, this will only continue to grow, and exponentially. 

Think about the rate of increase in the number of people performing some sort of computation (for example, the 300+ million members of Facebook all uploading photographs and playing Mafia Wars) and the rate of increase in the amount of data to be manipulated (consider a 5 megapixel camera built into everyone’s phone, or everyone watching Avatar in HD on Hulu).  All the while, in the cloud, processors will be running algorithms to deliver the experience while constantly making adjustments as they dynamically navigate the trade-off between data size, connection speed, and client performance (processor and screen resolution).

The question is, are we more environmentally friendly doing all of this in a shared Cloud or on our own datacenters?

Mr. Urquhart’s reasoning takes us in a positive direction,

“I believe one thing to be true: the increased efficiency of the hardware components in most cloud data centers and the increased utilization of these components mean that we are almost certainly doing more work per unit of energy consumed than before.”

But on the face of it, I can only agree with part of this.  Indeed, greater efficiency built into the hardware is a good thing for the environment - the lower the power consumed and the greater the amount of work done per clock tick of the processor is good.  However, greater utilization of that hardware due to virtualization could take us in the opposite direction with respect to the environment.

Firstly, (as both Mr. Urquhart and Cohen agree) the more compute cycles available, the more we’ll use.  It’s what we do.  Therefore, increased utilization due to virtualization will actually increase energy consumption and impact the environment negatively in absolute terms.

But more subtly, how the compute power is delivered is actually more important in comparing a datacenter to a virtualized cloud.  Virtualization improves utilization, but does it improve system energy efficiency over the same workload?

Whether the hardware is virtualized or not - the processor still needs to tick.  In fact, through virtualization, the processor needs to work harder with more fetches from cache, DRAM, or the hard drive to deliver the same calculated result to the end user.  And so, on the face of it, greater utilization due to virtualization actually impacts the environment negatively…for now.

We need to go back to the hardware to turn this around.  Virtualized servers drive the high-end of the processor lines of the physical servers that support them.  The increased demands of compute power per square millimeter of the processor and parallelization/efficiency within them will drive overall energy efficiency of the system in the right direction.

One additional point to consider is data distribution.  The power it takes to deliver the compute power from the cloud/data center to the remote user has an impact.  A centralized cloud vs multiple distributed datacenters (from different service vendors) and their proximity to the users needs to be added into the equation.  If we’re talking about consumer services sharing a cloud, the impact of centralization will be significant and detrimental.  However, corporations using their own local datacenters on-site are much more energy efficient in data transport energy costs.

Clearly, the calculation is not straight forward, and when all’s said and done, it may only be interesting from an academic perspective.

Fortunately for all of us, being green is considered by many to be a tier one value proposition during the purchase process of equipment and services.  This demand will get baked into the product definition process and we’ll all move in the right direction.  One point that is without argument however - it’s a heck of a lot greener to work remotely on a cloud or datacenter, than either shipping CDROMs or getting on a plane and working on-site.

Posted under industry

It’s not just you folks - if you haven’t seen the news on Twitter, Facebook is apparently having some service problems.  Some people report that their pages have been loading after multiple attempts, but on the whole the largest social network in the world (300m+ users) is essentially down.

While most software applications only dream of having to deal with the level of scale Facebook does, it does point to a couple of key points in the transition to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

Multi-tenant Architecture

This is a fundamental premise for the business model to succeed for many SaaS vendors.  Essentially, it is the use of the same software stack by multiple unassociated users.  The challenges here are security and scale.  Security is quite straight forward once a solid user registration and management system has been put in place.  Scale is a bit trickier because it is dynamic.

Cloud Infrastructure Provider

This is the hardware (CPUs, memory, and storage) that the application runs on.  Even though the architecture of the SaaS application could be developed to scale, the Cloud Infrastructure needs to be in place to support scale robustly (both the scaling up and the scaling down).  There’s a reliance on the robustness of both the hardware and software architectures.

Facebook has their own datacenters.  According to Datacenter Knowledge, as of April this year the Facebook datacenter stores more than 40 Billion photos and users upload nearly 40 million new photos per day!  Now, that’s scale!

Multiple requests are in to FB for when they’re back up…hopefully it’s soon, or we might be forced into actually picking up the phone and talking to our mothers-in-law.

UPDATE: Facebook is back up in San Francisco as of 18:00 PST.  (Disaster averted!)  But I see from Twitter that a lot of people are still having trouble with the platform.

UPDATE II: (18:15 PST) Facebook have disabled Chat - a clever way of freeing up some bandwidth for some?  Many are still struggling to get back on the platform.

Posted under industry

There is of course still a lot of bluster surrounding Cloud Computing, and it will take some time before an agreed to set of definitions comes to light.  I particularly like the path that Phil Wainewright is charting though.  He’s been commentating on the space since the end of the 90’s and has a “no nonsense” approach I appreciate.

In an effort to simplify the discussion, a recent post of his, “When is a cloud not a cloud?“, begins to define different types of “Clouds” from the perspective of the original cloud - the internet.  He lists three different types - Captive Cloud, Public Cloud (AWS, the Xuropa Platform primary cloud provider), and Virtual Private Cloud (a “walled off” cloud within a Public Cloud, like AWS). 

The post is worth a read, but he starts to run aground on two points IMO.  Firstly, to isolate connectivity as the key defining characteristic is to emphasize what should be a “cost of entry” point, and glosses over real value differentiators (eg. resource management via API).  Secondly, he really does himself a disservice when he includes “Captive Clouds” as a type of cloud (even though he was trying to be ironic).  We already have a name for that - “datacenter”.  A collection of networked servers running something like VMWare behind a firewall is not a “cloud” of any description.  It is a datacenter with better hardware utilization than the datacenters of the 90’s.  That’s it.  To put the word “cloud” in the same sentence as “datacenter” reduces clarity rather than enhances it.

Posted under Xuropa, industry

Design and Verification Engineers Can Now Test-Drive More Software in Online Labs

San Francisco, California – October 13, 2009 – Xuropa^SM Incorporated today announced that Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS) has added Incisive® Formal Verifier and Incisive Enterprise Specman-Elite ® Testbench to its Xuropa Online Labs.

Based upon the Cadence® SoC Functional Verification Kit, approved design and verification engineers can quickly and easily try out these two additional Cadence verification products and learn new techniques online. The SoC Functional Verification Kit automates and eases the adoption of new verification technologies that increase productivity and project predictability, from verification planning to closure.

Users can now also run testbench simulation and formal analysis on example circuits at their convenience from their desktops. Using only a standard web browser, approved visitors to Xuropa Labs™ can now access the following two new labs:

• Block, Chip, and System Testbench Verification with Incisive Enterprise Specman-Elite Testbench
• Connectivity Verification, Productivity Flows, and Designer Level Formal Analysis with Incisive Formal Verifier

The service is free to Xuropa members and dramatically simplifies the process of evaluating EDA software products. Users can begin to test-drive applications in minutes vs. the days or weeks it used to take to get agreements signed, software downloaded, and license keys installed.

Simplified Initial Product Evaluation

“We have seen the value that Xuropa Online Labs bring to enable customers to test-drive Incisive Verification IP online, and we are excited to meet more customer needs by expanding our offering,” said Sarah Lynne Lundell, Enterprise Verification Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cadence. “Today’s schedules are so tight, it is important to simplify the initial evaluation process. Removing the need for a Software Product License Agreement to evaluate new software lets design and verification engineers focus on the potential productivity, predictability and quality gains for their projects.”

Face-to-face meetings are always going to be important, but as design teams are now global, software vendors need to simultaneously engage multiple locations and accelerate the engagement process.

“The Xuropa Platform uses the power of Cloud Computing and web 2.0 technologies to accelerate the software sales process and increase revenues for software vendors,” Xuropa CEO and founder James Colgan explained. “The Xuropa team is very happy to see Cadence realize the returns of the platform and make more of their industry leading technology available on the platform.”

Availability

Xuropa Online Labs featuring Cadence Incisive Formal Verifier and Specman Elite Testbench are available today and accessible at no cost to authorized Xuropa members. Go to www.xuropa.com and sign-in for access. For information about how to create your own Online Lab, or any of the other Xuropa Platform products, please contact Xuropa at the address below.

About Xuropa Incorporated

The Xuropa Platform and a Xuropa Lab™ bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Software and Software-as-a-Service business and distribution models. Xuropa^SM Incorporated was founded by veterans from the internet, IT, and electronics industries with the goal of transitioning Enterprise Software to a SaaS model to increase revenues and lower costs.  http://www.xuropa.com/

Contact:

sales@xuropa.com

+1 (415) 727-5741

Cadence, Specman-Elite and Incisive are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Posted under News, Xuropa