Dark clouds and silver linings
Post Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:37:11 -0700
Cloud computing is getting hot, as in hot promises, hot press releases, and some hot contentions about who?s platform is going to win the latest battleground in on-demand/SaaS. The answer my friend, is largely blowing in the wind. But not for long?.
To be sure, there?s a never-ending set of promises and a growing set of [...]...
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/Greenbaum/~3/...
Dark clouds and silver linings (Abstract text format)
118d7
Dark Clouds and Silver Linings | Enterprise Anti-matter
| ZDNet.com
@import url(http://i.zdnet.com/css/v2/base.css);
@import url(http://i.zdnet.com/css/v2/ads.css);
@import url(http://i.zdnet.com/css/v2/blog.css);
On CBS.com:
Christine maybe a racist
BNET Business Network:
BNET
TechRepublic
ZDNet
ZDNet
all ZDNet
in Blogs
in News
in Downloads
in Reviews
in Whitepapers
in Dictionary
Go!
Members Log In
Newsletters
Site Assistance
RSS Feeds
Home
News & Blogs
Videos
White Papers
Downloads
Reviews
Popular
Enterprise Anti-matter
Joshua Greenbaum
Get Enterprise Anti-matter via:
Mobile
RSS
Email Alerts
Pick a blog category
Uncategorized
February 15th, 2008
Dark Clouds and Silver Linings
Posted by Joshua Greenbaum @ 10:37 am
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Cape Clear Software, On-demand, Vision, Workday, Microsoft Corp., Cloud, Sales Force Management, Strategy, Sales
Cloud computing is getting hot, as in hot promises, hot press releases, and some hot contentions about who’s platform is going to win the latest battleground in on-demand/SaaS. The answer my friend, is largely blowing in the wind. But not for long….
To be sure, there’s a never-ending set of promises and a growing set of expectations about how fast and how readily enterprise software – real enterprise software, not toys, relatively simple online shopping systems, and other consumer playgrounds – can be built to run in the cloud, and how fast some vendor’s cloud will start to show the critical mass that is needed to say that enterprise cloud computing has arrived. Problems are looming as the model confronts reality. But this market is clearly poised to take off: the question is more when than if.
Leading this clouded field is Salesforce.com, which wants to upset the world of software and services with its Force.com vision, based on an orthodox vision of cloud computing as a pure play, and predicated on the premise that being a disruptor of the common wisdom about application development and provisioning might be enough to keep its number one position alive.
Contending for the role of upsetting the upsetter is Microsoft, which is moving forward with a grander vision to make services ubiquitous wherever the customer wants them: in the cloud, on the desktop, in the server. Or on Yahoo, if they get their way in what looks like a classic takeover battle that I believe will resolve itself in Microsoft’s favor. Microsoft’s vision, along with the growing success of its CRM offering, which has a growing on-demand following, is clearly making Salesforce.com nervous. And defensive, which isn’t a position that I think Salesforce.com plays very well.
Meanwhile, there’s some interesting new contenders, in particular Workday, which has garnered headlines with a well-considered, albeit less-than-fully-baked, vision of offering on-demand integration through the acquisition of Cape Clear. The idea of ERP in the cloud, along with integration in the cloud, looks good on paper, but, at least for Workday, it’s going to take some time to really make this vision a reality.
What ties all these offerings together is the notion that customers don’t want to muck around with the management of complex software systems any more than the average driver wants to be a mechanic, or, for that matter, a civil engineer or urban planner. All great notions, which if realized, threaten to bring us back to the good old days of time-sharing, which depended on large, centralized blocks of computers doing the heavy lifting for users scattered far and wide. The line going around these days is that the world only needs five computers – again. As long as they are in the cloud.
Where do these visions come up short? Salesforce.com’s vision of disruption requires learning a new development language, Apex, which I’m assured is very easy and intuitive, just like all new development languages that, despite their ease of use and intuitive nature, fight an uphill battle for adoption by programmers who are just too enamored of the dev tools they know best to want to drop everything and learn something new.
And Salesforce.com’s vision requires a little patience: there’s just not a lot of critical mass in Salesforce.com’s infrastructure. As of last month, there was a total of 1.6 million lines of code written in Apex, which sounds rather miniscule by enterprise software standards, even if, as Salesforce.com contends, there’s a lot efficiency in the language. There are also a tiny amount of services available to be accessed, based on the company’s CRM core. It’s an infrastructure in waiting, more than anything else.
To be fair, that pretty much summarizes my other two examples. Microsoft’s status as a cloud player has been widely touted by the company, but there’s a huge amount of work — much of it in marketing and messaging – to be done before its offering could be said to compete directly with what Salesforce.com is up to. That’s how it is with clouds, more wispy and ephemeral than real sometimes.
But Microsoft is Microsoft, with millions of developers, and a very robust set of services, both at the system level – a la Sharepoint, Biztalk, Exchange, etc. – as well as at the business process level – as in CRM, much of the Dynamics family of enterprise apps, and all that fun capability lying around in Office – that, are now positioned in the cloud. With all this capability programmable in the cloud or on premise using Visual Studio, it’s a pretty robust offering.
This hybrid model that Microsoft is supporting – the whatever, wherever approach to the cloud vs. on premise debate – makes a tremendous amount of sense in my mind. Partly because choice is what it’s all about, and partly because orthodox approaches to on-demand are largely predicated on a false perception of a rational decision-making process when it comes to deployment options.
That so-called rational process is a cornerstone of many a disruptor’s strategy, Salesforce.com among them. But being right sometimes isn’t enough, sometimes being the easiest option – not even the cheapest, just the easiest – gets a lot of institutional inertia moving in its favor. That’s Microsoft’s incumbent advantage at work, and Salesforce.com has to worry about what happens when cloud computing a la Microsoft becomes available at your fingertips.
Which brings us somewhat disjointedly to Workday. I like their moxie, mostly because they have a broader vision of what a vendor can offer in the cloud than Salesforce.com’s CRM-only strategy. I also like the idea that the Cape Clear acquisition can bring application integration to the cloud. This ability to leverage interconnectivity – and its cost – across multiple customers is a hugely important part of the on-demand story.
When done right – GT Nexus is my favorite example – many-to-many connectivity is ideal for hosting in the cloud. An integration hub in the cloud lends a cost-effectiveness and level of productivity to complex processes that depend on lots of connectivity – like GT Nexus’ global trade logistics management – that simply cannot be done on premise.
Workday’s Cape Clear vision clearly lies in this direction, even if it’s not actually available today. Right now, a customer running HR in a multi-tenant cloud using Workday has to have a dedicated instance of Cape Clear in the cloud to run its integration requirements – there’s no multi-tenancy in Cape Clear today. This leaves the leveragability of Cape Clear a future capability, and one they recognize as important, but not ready for prime time quite yet. Wait a year.
While there are many other cloud contenders in the market today, I think there aren’t really any that have surmounted these essential problems. Either the vision is there but the execution lacks (SAP and its Business ByDesign is the category winner here), or the choices are more difficult than they should be (Salesforce.com), or there are still massive holes (like this one from my fellow blogger Phil Wainewright) that need to be filled in (Everyone). But don’t be confused by this pessimistic-sounding ending. Cloud computing is the future of the industry, plain and simple. We just have to sort out what kind of future it’s going to be.
Joshua Greenbaum's opinions on enterprise software have annoyed enough vendors that he now checks under the hood of his PC every morning before he boots up. For disclosures of Joshua's industry affiliations, click here.
« Previous postNext post »
Talkback
Most Recent of 2 Talkback(s)
Thread View
Flat View
BBD Awating A Full-blown Launch
The lack of execution I mention relates to the fact that SAP is still building a channel and a business strategy for Business ByDesign. As such there's still a lot of work on the execution side before BBD is a legitimate competitor in the market.Josh... (Read the rest)
Posted by: josh@eaconsult.com Posted on: 02/18/08
You are currently:
Logged In as: a Guest | Login | Terms of Use
Why Does SAP's product have the vision but lack in execution?
j2468new@... | 02/18/08
BBD Awating A Full-blown Launch
josh@... | 02/18/08
What do you think?
Subject (max length: 75):
Reply:
7 Trackbacks
The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Greenbaum/wp-trackback.php?p=15 2
The Dawn of SaaS-on-SaaS - Even While Amazon S3 is Down.
...news of which I’m sure will attract dozens of blogs in the next hour ... Salesforce.com had its fair share of outages, so did other SaaS Trackback by Anonymous — February 16, 2008 @ 3:17 am
john m willis ESM Enterprise System Management Blog
Enterprise Open Source Must 'Play Nice' with Proprietary Products | IT Business EdgeAmazon S3 web services down. Bad, bad news for customers. | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.comWhat happens when the cloud doesn’t work? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.comDark Clouds and Silver Linings | Enterprise Anti-matter | ZDNet.comBTL podcast: Amazon’s dark cloud, Microsoft shuffle and more… | Between the Lines | ZDNet.comBreakdowns: Amazon S3 goes down, taking twitterati with itAmazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It Trackback by Anonymous — February 16, 2008 @ 3:17 am
Blog Comments Need to Be Simple
Twice in four minutes, I ran across an interesting blog post that caused me to want to comment, and extend the conversation, and in both cases, it was just too difficult to jump through the right hoops. This baffles me. ... Trackback by [chrisbrogan.com] — February 17, 2008 @ 3:01 am
Applications in the Cloud
The cloud, of course, is the Internet. Applications delivered via a web browser are on the rise. No software to buy, no hardware to invest in, knowledgeable customer service teams to support you. It's a great model. ... Trackback by Harris Technology's Blog — February 18, 2008 @ 3:54 pm
Zoli’s Blog
online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story). Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter. ShareThis Trackback by Anonymous — February 28, 2008 @ 3:16 am
Zoli’s Blog
online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story). Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter. ShareThis Trackback by Anonymous — February 29, 2008 @ 3:16 am
Blog Comments Need to Be Simple [from "[chrisbrogan.com]"]
Twice in four minutes, I ran across an interesting blog post that caused me to want to comment, and extend the conversation, and in both cases, it Trackback by Anonymous — April 12, 2008 @ 3:20 am
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
Real-Time Capacity Optimization Solutions Storwize
IBM System Storage DS - Reliable data storage for financial institutions IBM
Small Business Phones: The Basics and Beyond Cisco Systems
Recent Entries
See You in the Cloud
Microsoft, Creative Financing, and the Bank of EAC
SAP Makes A Dramatic Move: Ex-Oracle Exec John Wookey To Head up SAP’s New On-demand Market Effort
Maybe CRM for Facebook Does Make Sense :)
Social to CRM to Enterprise: Not So Fast….
Top Rated
Léo Apotheker’s Leadership Opportunity: SAP At the Crossroads+1 voteDark Clouds and Silver Linings+1 vote
Follow ZDNet on Twitter
Archives
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
All "Enterprise Anti-matter" talkbacks
Favorite Links
Blogroll
Josh
ZDNet Blogs
A Developer's View
All About Microsoft
The Apple Core
Between the Lines
BriefingsDirect
Collaboration 2.0
Community, Incorporated
CRM 2.0: The Conversation
Dev Connection
Digital Cameras
Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
Emerging Tech
Enterprise Alley
Enterprise Web 2.0
Feeds
Forrester Research
Googling Google
GreenTech Pastures
Hardware 2.0
Home Theater
iGeneration
Irregular Enterprise
IT Facts
The IT Grind
IT Project Failures
Laptops & Desktops
Lawgarithms
Linux and Open Source
Managing L'unix
The Mobile Gadgeteer
On Sustainability
Rational Rants
The Semantic Web
Service Oriented
Smartphones and Cell Phones
Software & Services Safari
Software as Services
SOHO Networking
Storage Bits
Team Think
Tech Broiler
Tom Foremski: IMHO
The ToyBox
The Universal Desktop
Virtually Speaking
The Web Life
ZDNet Education
ZDNet Government
ZDNet Healthcare
Zero Day
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
Live Webcast: Visibility: The Key to Maximizing Network Resources Blue Coat Systems
UltraDNS Services: DNS Security and Network Reliability NeuStar
The Social Enterprise: Using Social Enterprise Applications to Enable the Next Wave of Knowledge Worker Productivity Oracle
Storage Virtualization
In virtual environments, storage matters. It influences everything from application availability and disaster readiness to power consumption and TCO. Bottom line: Don’t defeat the purpose of your consolidation by skimping on storage.
From our sponsors
EMC Corporation
ESG applauds new CX4 in analyst report
According to ESG, it's hard to find much missing in the new CLARiiON CX4.
Read the report to learn more »
Blogs
All About Microsoft
The Apple Core
Between The Lines
Googling Google
Digital Cameras
Hardware 2.0
Laptops and Desktops
SOHO Networking
Storage Bits
Zero Day
Product Reviews
Home Theater
PCs, Software and Peripherals
Smartphone and Cell Phones
Digital Cameras
Videos
CIO Vision Series
At The Whiteboard
News Video
White Papers and Webcasts
Business Management
Career Development
Infrastructure Management
ManageMobile - Wireless Communications
Network Security
Webcasts
Downloads
Internet Tools and Utilities
Spyware Removers
System Optimizers and Diagnostics
System Utilities
More
2008 Holiday Gift Guide
Photo Galleries
Latest News & Blogs
Podcasts
Site Index
ZDNet
ZDNet News & Blogs
Hardware,
IT Management,
Networking,
Operating Systems,
Photo Galleries,
Security,
Software,
Web Technology,
All News,
Dev Connection,
Emerging Technology,
Enterprise Alley,
Googling Google,
GreenTech Pastures,
IT Project Failures,
Linux and Open Source,
Managing Linux,
The Social Web,
Storage Bits,
Virtually Speaking,
The Web Life,
Podcasts
Product Reviews
A/V Receivers,
Cell Phones & Accessories,
Desktop Monitors,
Desktops,
Digital Cameras,
Digital Camcorders,
Flat-panel TVs,
Laptops,
Portable Video Players (PVPs),
PDAs,
Smartphones,
Software,
Storage
Product Blogs
The Toybox,
Digital Cameras,
Laptops and Desktops,
Mobile Gadgeteer,
SOHO Networking,
Smartphones and Cell Phones,
Home Theater
White Papers & Webcasts
Cost Control / Risk Management,
Customer Support Services,
IT HR / Staffing / Training,
Resources Management,
Strategic Planning,
Webcasts
Downloads
Antivirus Software,
File and Disk Management Utilities,
Image Editing,
Privacy Software,
Shell and Desktop Management Enhancements
Site Help & Feedback
Site Map
Popular on CBS sites: CES | Spore | iPhone 3G | Katy Perry | Antivirus Software | GPS | Recipes | Macworld | NFL
BNET | CBS College Sports | CBS Radio | CBS.com | CBSNews.com | CBSSports.com | CHOW | CNET | CNET Content Solutions | GameSpot | International | Last.fm | MaxPreps | Metacritic.com | Moblogic | MP3.com | mySimon | NCAA | Search.com | Shopper.com | TechRepublic | The Insider | TV.com | UrbanBaby.com | UWIRE | Wallstrip | ZDNet
About CBS Interactive |
Jobs |
Advertise
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. |
Privacy Policy |
Terms of Use
0
|
