Here's the landscape - most established cloud applications today were designed and built more than a decade ago. Think: 1st generation SaaS apps. Over the better part of past decade, the emphasis was mainstream market adoption with pioneer Salesforce.com leading the charge. That movie is over - mission accomplished. There are precious few companies that haven't bought into cloud computing, especially cloud applications in some fashion.
Driven by mainstream market adoption and the emergence of the social web, we're on the brink of a new generation of SaaS applications that look different from their forerunners. In fact, existing SaaS vendors need to reinvent themselves in this new form or find themselves extinct over the next decade. What does the next generation SaaS look like? Here are a few ideas -
(bear in mind, in looking forward, I've deliberately left out attributes that are table-stakes for any system today - web scale, high availability, etc...)
Social Enabled
SaaS applications today need to be social-enabled. This means incorporating or integrating social networking as part of the application fabric. When I say social enabled, I'm looking at two primary distinctives - 1) facilitating user created content and 2) amplifying relationships between constituents (eg. users, customers, partners). App developers will either "get it" or fall behind.
HTML5 Web Client
As designed, most first generation SaaS applications tended to have static web interfaces that led to very truncated and limited user experiences. Yes, the broad use of AJAX in the past 5-7 years has helped change this but there's no reason that today's cloud applications can't do much better. In a sense, apps today need to deliver richer experience, more akin to what desktop applications can do from a user interaction perspective. Users are demanding a Rich Internet Application (RIA) experience from applications but delivered in a standard browser. This spells the use of HTML5 frameworks that can deliver rich and robust capability - interactive user experience, auto-save powered by local side storage, etc... Big players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com have bet big on HTML5 for this very reason.
Big Data
If you haven't noticed data growth is exploding. You're seeing the "big data" effect all over - in B2B as well as B2C, in numerous vertical segments of the market like healthcare, retail, finance and even government. This is also in no small part driven by search and social networking. The collection, management and analysis of these big data sets pose both a big technical challenge and a huge opportunity for companies that can crack the code. SaaS companies have the burden of collecting massive amounts of data across entire customer base and the opportunity of leveraging this data for trend analysis and benchmarking. I suspect this is going to be standard fare for SaaS. Old relational data models may have to give way to new data capture and storage mechanisms. New methods of analysis may emerge. But make no mistake about it - big data is rapidly becoming a core competency for next-gen SaaS.
Apps as in "There's an App for That"
"There's an app for that" was the refrain for 2011. The growth of tablets in 2011 have only accelerated the demand for apps ... and more apps. In fact, the growth of tablets are outstripping the growth of lower priced e-readers. That's because people want to do more than just consume content, they want applications. The net effect for SaaS developers is this - make room for apps in your roadmap. While I wouldnt agree with Forrester's George Colony about the imminent death of the web, the fact is that the web isn't the only way to access cloud content and functionality anymore. Arguably, for some, apps running on mobile and tablet devices are a more effective way of doing so.
New generation cloud applications - socially enabled, easily handling big data and equally accessible through a rich web interface as well as apps on tablets. That's something to look forward to in 2012.
In this blog post, I'd like to draw attention to a couple of lesser known tools that provide help in profiling performance of cloud applications. The first comes from a company called New Relic (uninspiring name for an otherwise really good product). Besides the typical availability monitoring that you can get from many tools, New Relic gives you the ability to profile and monitor cloud application performance through non-intrusive instrumentation of the application stack.
The big challenge in application monitoring has always been the difficulty of instrumenting an existing application. Sure, it's always nice to instrument as you build the application but speaking from experience (I've spent years in systems management), it's not always realistic. New Relic makes it easy because they've automated a non-intrusive method for instrumenting web application code. You can profile performance and zero in on problem areas. You can build a performance profile of specific end-users and get a feel for performance challenges depending on where the user is geographically located.
Another tool to consider for cloud application monitoring is from Aternity. Aternity - recently positioned as one of the visionary vendors in Gartner's application monitoring quadrant - specializes in monitoring end-user experience. In this brave new world of cloud applications running over a public network, the only true measure of performance is what the user experiences. This is becoming especially true with the emergence of more applications utilizing RIA client where more processing occurs client side. Aternity takes a comprehensive view toward end user service level management, measuring three components - application performance, device performance and end user productivity.
Both these tools are relatively unknown but play a vital role in an emerging need - managing and monitoring cloud applications. You might want to check them out.
Perhaps there's a working assumption that monitoring cloud applications is only marginally different from monitoring internal enterprise applications. That assumption couldn't be more wrong. Undoubtedly, there are similarities in the monitoring of enterprise applications that transpose seamlessly to the cloud. But monitoring cloud applications bring new challenges that need to be addressed by the IT organization.
Here are just five challenges that make monitoring cloud applications fundamentally different from monitoring the traditional on-premise enterprise application.
Virtualized Resourcing - Virtualization in both private and public clouds pose a new challenge to systems monitoring tools. Instead of simply monitoring the key system elements of each individual physical node, the use of virtualization creates a dynamic capacity pool of compute and storage resources that needs to be monitored and ultimately managed in a completely different way. For example - monitoring the hypervisor layer for performance, resource capacity isn't something traditional systems management tools were built to handle.
Profiling End User Response Times - End user performance monitoring is different for a cloud application for two reasons. First, cloud applications operate across the open public network - a fact that poses its own challenges in being able to effectively monitor response times. Also, due to nature of SaaS, end users are often distributed across the globe - location is no longer a limitation in application accessibility. This makes determining end user response time particularly difficult. If users in Singapore experience slow performance, how do you measure the effective application response times and determine if its due to the Internet or the application? End user response times used to be easier with on premise, enterprise applications.
Web Scale Load Testing - One difference between on premise enterprise applications and cloud applications is scale - in short, enterprise scale vs web scale. Enterprise scale is bounded, predictable and measurable. Web scale experienced by cloud applications isn't. The traffic spikes with cloud application are seemingly unlimited and unpredictable. Performing load testing in web scale is a present challenge in testing and monitoring cloud applications.
Multi-tenancy - Multi-tenancy is an architectural construct that introduces new challenges to monitoring. Conventional multi-tenant architectures provide a single instance of the application, founded on common data model servicing multiple tenants (customer/client accounts). This logical abstraction makes it more challenging to monitor and profile individual client performance indicators. Application administrators need to be able to not only monitor overall health of the application but also the performance issues related to a specific tenant.
Trend to Rich Clients/RIA Clients - As cloud applications move toward richer HTML5 clients, profiling application performance will become more difficult. Finding the root cause of performance in older SaaS applications is easier in some ways due to the limited client side processing. With most of the processing happening on server side, it's within the visibility of the IT monitoring team. But the introduction of HTML5 means richer clients with more processing and potentially more systems issues happening client side. However, gaining visibility into the client side processing is near impossible - current monitoring tools are severely limited in this area. It's an example of how old models of monitoring SaaS won't work in the new world. However, due to the widespread and increasing adoption of HTML5, you can expect more tools to show up on the market to address this issue.
In a future post, I'll be highlighting some of the tools available today to handle some of these challenges. I'd like to hear your thoughts and stay tuned for more on this topic.
]]>Yep, 97% is what you call DOMINANCE. However, that might not be the case for long as signs point to increasing adoption of Android tablets.
Perhaps what happened in the smartphone market points to the future of tablets.
While iOS never dominated smartphones by market share, it nonetheless had a fast uptick in the first couple of years, slotting into #2 spot - 25.1% in Jan 2010 with Microsoft and Palm losing ground. But take a look at more recent stats from Nielsen, reporting that Android is now the leading smartphone OS with 39% while Apple iOS continues to hold onto second place with 28%.
The Android story in smartphones may play out in the tablet market as well. This Mashable writeup reports that tablet market will explode from 20M units to over 230M units in 2015. During that same period, iOS market share will shrink to 38%, mostly supplanted by Android tablets.
The point is Android isn't just a niche play anymore. Thinking iOS first may be still OK, but thinking iOS solely isn't. In the near future, you'll need to be developing with a tablet cross-platform strategy in mind. If so, what are your options?
This is nowhere near a comprehensive listing, but here are a few options to consider:
Appcelerator's Titanium Platform - one of the advantages of using Appcelerator is that it allows you to code in Javascript while retaining advantages of using native APIs. Appcelerator enables the rendering natively either as Objective-C calls into iOS API or Java calls into Android API. It also has local device storage and an extensible plug-in architecture
PhoneGap - the granddaddy of mobile cross platform development. Phonegap is opensource and has been around for a while. Phonegap allows you to build with web standards - HTML5, Javascript - and like Appcelerator provides a bridge to native mobile/tablet OS APIs.
A couple of others to note - Rhomobile (for Ruby developers), Sproutcore 2.0 (HTML5 based, refactored for mobile, currently in beta)
]]>"We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be an device. We're going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud"
This is a bold statement from a company that regained relevance over the past decade because of the incredible success of the Mac. In fact, as noted in the presentation, Macs have outgrown the industry every year for the past 5 years. Yet, if you're as successful as Apple, it's the only way to re-position for the future - you cannot do so incrementally (re: Microsoft). The statement is a symbol of commitment to Apple's new cloud strategy - head first, burn the bridges, no looking back. And, it serves notice to Google that Apple intends to compete for cloud dominance in the consumer space.
Second notable point - the iCloud announcement also highlights the difference between Apple and Google's views of the cloud. Herein lies the essential difference - how consumers will access and leverage the cloud.
- Apple's cloud is accessed via native applications, on proprietary devices.
- Google's cloud is web based, open standards (HTML5) and "commodity" hardware.
The difference is notable because it highlights the strengths and DNA of each company. Apple's approach is quintessentially Apple - founded on the idea that "we know what's best for consumer". And truthfully, it's hard to argue with the results from the company that reinvented smartphones through the obsessive attention to user experience and the success of the App Store. iPads have only serve to extend that advantage. Apple's vision for the cloud is still about the total user experience, incorporating the various elements of the consumer's lifestyle in cloud services - Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Backup, App Store, iBooks, Photo Stream, Documents, iTunes - all in the cloud. In Apple's world, native iOS applications open the door to the cloud for the consumer.
Google, on the other hand, is all about the leveraging the open Web. Consistent with it's motto to "do no evil", Google plays well with others and promotes the use of open standards. Google's vision for how the cloud is accessed is predominantly web based. It anticipates a new generation of HTML5 enabled web applications that behave and respond like native applications. Unlike Apple, Google's view is that such applications should be accessible through non-proprietary devices.
Google's vision, while compelling isn't without issues. The problem right now is that there are relatively few HTML 5 applications that can showcase the promise of web application - a new generation of applications that promote rich interactivity while effectively bridging online and offline modes are few and far between.
Regardless of who might win out, both these different views will shape the consumer cloud for years to come.
]]>Unfortunately, you might focusing on the wrong thing if you're interested in driving top line growth for your business. It's not that web analytics isn't necessary - it's just insufficient.
The big challenge for businesses everywhere is less about traditional web analytics and more about how to build better profiles of your buyers.
Over the past few years, it's quietly become a Really Big Thing. Consider the following -
Google
Let's face it - "only God knows more about you than Google". Think about how Google can gather information from their various properties/services to construct a shockingly accurate view of your profile - what you search for (Google Search), what you view online (YouTube), the paths you travel (Google Maps), your private communications to friends and family (Gmail).
The first step toward building this integrated profile began several years ago with the launch of Gmail beta (2004). At the time, Gmail's revolutionary features like unlimited storage and lightning fast email search captured most of the hype at release. While at the time, some questioned Gmail's ad model and expressed privacy concerns, few realized that Gmail's strategic coup was really around identity capture. The Gmail account provided the common user identity, unifying the tracking of all the Google related services you might use. With a unified identity, constructing the buyer profile suddenly became a lot easier.
Facebook
Not withstanding Facebook's current challenges related to the relevancy of their ads, cracking the code on buyer identity is the primary way that social media channels will be monetized in the future. Consider that the world's largest social media channel (over 600 million users and counting) has visibility to your content and interactions within their network. However, instead of simply building profiles from interaction within their network, a year ago, Facebook extended the now ubiquitous like button for the rest of the Web through the Open Graph Protocol.
That simple move extended Facebook's ability to observe behaviors and preferences outside of their network - all toward the goal of building a better buyer profile. Here's an example of its significance: While your Facebook connections may reveal that you as a parent of high school teens...the fact that you liked the WSJ's Tiger Mom article may shed light on your Type-A ambitions for them. That just might make you a prime candidate for a slew of SAT prep products and educational services. Targeted ads, anyone?
Linkedin, Jigsaw, Zoominfo, et al
There is an ecosystem of companies that make a living offering insight into the business-oriented buyer (as opposed to end-consumer). Instead of simply seeing these as contact lists, this information is begging to be leveraged for building buyer profiles. Linkedin is chief among these offerings with their business community social network. Data sourcing services like Jigsaw, Zoominfo and the like, make a thriving enterprise of mining profiles of business users.
There are numerous sources of data on potential buyers but the question is - how do you take advantage of this slew of data in a meaningful way (read: drive revenue)?
Here are three essential steps -
1. Think Buyer Profiles, Not Web Analytics
I've said enough about this but understand that this is a fundamental shift in mentality - new world (buyer profiles) vs old school (web analytics - clickthrough rates/visitors).
2. Unify Buyer Identities and Profiles Under a Single Platform.
You need an application platform that can unify these identities (email, social media handles, etc...) and integrate both explicit information (title, demographics) as well as implicit information (behaviors, preferences) on the buyers from a multitude of sources. And the platform had better scale - we're talking about a LOT of data.
3. Instrument, Monitor and Benchmark the Buying Cycle
Instrument your buying cycle - do the data capture on average durations on each phase, conversion rates, overall cycle times, etc..
Monitor progress - tools and reports that can give you insight into the integrated sales and marketing funnel
Benchmark - measure yourself against past performance or better yet, track how you're doing against best-in-class in your category.
The point is that building better buyer profiles isn't just a game for the big boys like Facebook, it's a game smaller enterprises can, and arguably, must play. So get in the game!
It's the issue of complexity. Could it be that much of the problem with cloud computing adoption has to do with the fact that it's still too difficult and inaccessible to the average developer? In this Information Week writeup, Charles Babcock relates his experience at the CloudConnect 2011 event where the Jinesh Varia, technical evangelist for Amazon EC2 had problems guiding the audience through a hands-on session on how to deploy code on the cloud. Now it's no crime to have a hands-on demo go south on you (I've experienced a few scenarios like that myself) but apparently, when asked, no more than 10% of the crowd had previously deployed on EC2 successfully.
One conclusion you could draw here is that cloud computing isn't yet accessible to the majority of the developer population.
Hold on, you say - what about those extremely encouraging statistics and promising predictions on cloud computing adoption. For instance, like this one. My guess is that much of the adoption metrics on general cloud computing products have to do with SaaS applications which have been out for a decade and widely accepted ( this Gartner finding supports the view). As an example, no one implementing CRM/Marketing Automation/Revenue Performance Management today would typically prefer an on-premise solution to a SaaS solution unless they were restricted by regulatory requirements. The point is this - SaaS is mainstream.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) however, aren't anywhere close to mainstream yet and making it simpler is an imperative. I think there are a couple of cloud providers that "get it" and see it as an opportunity. VMWare is one with the introduction of Cloud Foundry and it's possible that others will follow suit. The idea with Cloud Foundry (besides being built on open source technologies) is to make it simpler to write and deploy code on the cloud - all without the need to spin up instances, etc...
I think the theme of simplicity for cloud computing has legs. Yes, providers need to make it simpler but that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There's also much work to be done in understanding how to re-engineer existing on-premise applications for the cloud. What are the best practices, techniques and technologies to make that easier for the masses?
That's a big question - now who's got an answer?
Over 500 million Facebook users and growing.
50% of them are logged in on any given day.
71.2% of all Internet users in US has a Facebook account
Approx. 70% of Facebook users are outside the US
48% of young Americans get their news from Facebook
On top of that, bear in mind that Facebook leads all other web destinations in hits and more importantly, time spent online. The trendline on both favor Facebook.
Here's what it means in practice, even though, we're not quite there yet:
Soon, a growing population of Internet users will spend more time on Facebook than on the "rest of the the Web". Think of the four basic functions, the typical Internet user engages in today:
- Social content sharing/consuming (Primary players: Google, Twitter)
- Email/Messaging (Primary players: Google, various)
- Search (Primary players: Google)
- Purchasing/Transacting (Primary players: Amazon)
Not satisfied with being the dominant social content site on the planet, the introduction of a new Facebook Messages (w. @facebook.com email) in November 2010 means that Facebook is making a play to dominate the email/messaging arena as well. While the verdict is still out on the new Facebook email/messaging, don't count it out. Given time, it isn't hard to imagine that 500 million users might consider an email/messaging system, linked to their social community and relatively free annoyances like spam, to be quite appealing.
The point is that Facebook is already halfway to encompassing the total Internet experience for their huge and growing user base. If I'm right about this, you can expect Facebook to drive search and commercial transactions through their platform. When this occurs, Facebook users will not only share content and message each other, they will also transact over Facebook. As far as they will be concerned, Facebook = Internet. This isn't just random speculation. On the contrary, if growth rates for Facebook continue at their torrid pace, it may actually be inevitable.
The only question that remains is this: If Facebook represents the new, emerging Internet, what does that mean to you and your business?
The first challenge is that E2.0 needs to tackle is to focus less on internal efficiencies and more on driving customer facing activities - how to get customers and keep them. It needs to be about topline revenue and not simply about operational expense management.
The second problem - thanks to Web 2.0 and social computing, the lines between external, market facing initiatives and internal collaborative initiatives are blurring....fast. Social computing drive companies to a higher degree of market engagement and corporate transparency. Companies with social media teams will listen on specific social media "channels" to respond to questions, complaints and opportunities. For this to be effective, this will drive corresponding initiatives within the corporate walls. Framing E2.0 as not simply internal collaboration technologies but a seamless engagement model that links customer interactions with internal collaboration is a step forward.
The final piece of the puzzle is measurable ROI. The challenge in the use of social computing both internally and externally is measurability. Whether it's the use of Jive for collaborative projects or the man-hours poured into corporate responses on Twitter, many companies are still struggling with the right way to measure ROI. Old-school metrics like page views, click-throughs are no measure of true value. Ultimately, the challenge for the enterprise social computing community is to measure the value of these initiatives in terms of revenue generated, customer satisfaction scores increased and man-hours saved.
However, just because you can't measure it, doesn't mean you shouldn't start engaging in these initiatives. The good news is that whether it's called E2.0, Social Business or simply Web 2.0 (which sounds so dated), the recent McKinsey report indicates that companies that adopt these paradigm changing technologies are growing faster relative to their peers. And, that's something worth adopting.
Here are my top 5 predictions for the 2011.
1. Open Cloud Standards Makes Slow Progress
I'd love to see open cloud standards and the benefits that come with it - portability, interoperability and robust security. Manifestos have been written and industry debates have continued. Yet, notwithstanding the work of the Open Stack group, real progress toward an open cloud stack has been slow coming. Actual interoperability and data portability will likely be driven by major cloud providers responding to commercial pressures rather than standards groups. When it comes to the future of the cloud, proprietary de-facto standards, rather than open standards will rule the day.
2. Mobile + Cloud = Explosive Growth
Mobility will drive the growth of cloud computing in 2011 and beyond. With the wealth of research data (like this report by Mary Meeker) pointing to the growth of mobile Internet access, this hardly represents a bold prediction. Furthermore, according to ABI Research, the mobile cloud computing market will grow to $5.2B by 2015. With not only a plethora of smartphones already in the market, but also the emergence of the tablet as the favorite form-factor, 2011 will mark a critical tipping point for mobile cloud computing. Much of this growth has thus far been driven by social cloud applications but 2011 will see the introduction of more mobile cloud applications/tools for collaboration and mobile commerce.
3. HTML5 is the New Face of the Cloud Application
Most of these new mobile cloud applications will be written as HTML5 web applications. Expect HTML5 to gain momentum and mainstream adoption, fueled once again by the broad acceptance of tablets/iPad. HTML5 is the UI standard for the mobile cloud and it's here to stay.
4. Make or Break Year for Enterprise 2.0
Over the past 3-4 years, much has been made of Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0), by both boosters and detractors alike. Proponents highlight it as revolutionary while detractors call it a marginal change to enterprise application model. Yet, if there's been an E2.0 revolution, it's been a quiet one. This is a make or break year for E2.0 - it'll either fade into the sunset as an old, misunderstood concept or stake its place as a game-changing enterprise model. Could 2011 signal the year that the enterprise cloud application finally gets social? There are signs that indicate it could be - Salesforce.com's Chatter product is just the beginning of a wave of business applications that will incorporate social networking principles into its design and feature set. If you're interested, check out what I've written about the socialization of the enterprise cloud.
5. NOSQL Gains Momentum
The NOSQL movement made waves in 2010 but I expect to see this pick up momentum in 2011. As cloud applications grapple with internet scale and application performance, many software developers are rethinking the data tier in new ways - often eschewing relational databases in favor of new NOSQL options like Hadoop, MongoDB and Amazon's SimpleDB. Other vendors while not abandoning RDBMSs completely, are finding ways of incorporating these NOSQL technologies in the data architecture - it's becoming mainstream as leading companies like Facebook and Amazon promote its virtues.
Today, much of the promise and fulfillment of the E2.0 vision is centers around generalized benefits of knowledge sharing and collaboration. We're talking about implementation of micro-blogs, wikis and enterprise search in corporate life. However, as long as the promise of E2.0 is captured in terms of generalized benefits, it will be viewed as peripheral and discretionary, rather than centrally important to the business. Guess what else - when times are tough, it will be at the front of the line at the CFO's office, subject to budget cutbacks. So what's next for E2.0?
For E2.0 to move into the realm of being business critical, three things have to happen -
1. Move toward specific business solution patterns. Instead of pitching E2.0 as a means to improving collaboration and communication, it needs to be viewed as critically enabling specific business workflow patterns within an organization.
2. Move from back-office knowledge sharing to front-office revenue generating. Building on point #1, when E2.0 starts to impact not simply back-office efficiency, but become a key part of closing business and improving customer experience, it will become business critical. I believe the key to unlocking this is the incorporation of social computing into the entire lifecycle of the revenue engine - from marketing to sales to customer service.
3. Move from process to people. E2.0 has the potential to transform a company as long as we understand its essence. The great potential of E2.0 is in its ability to capture what some have called "tacit knowledge" (as opposed to well-formed, structured, explicit knowledge). This is particularly important in the creative activities like designing user interfaces or teaming to close a complex sale. This idea of getting tacit knowledge to work for you cannot be captured by a process-centric view of the organization but rather a people-centric view.
Making the next leap for E2.0 will require solutions that speak to all three points. To this end, I think Salesforce.com is uniquely well positioned to transform E2.0 as we know it today. With the release of Chatter, Salesforce provides the social technology platform built for the enterprise. Additionally, Salesforce's huge CRM customer base offers a natural opportunity to tap into the front-office revenue engine that will move the relevance needle for E2.0. All that's left is to discover are the front-office business process patterns that will lead to widespread adoption.
Is this just a needed dose of reality or does it suggest that cloud computing is entering what Gartner calls the "trough of disillusionment" in the hype cycle. For those who may be unfamiliar, the Gartner hype cycle is the five phased progression of market response to the introduction of new technology. You can read about the hype cycle here but as it relates to cloud computing, it's not difficult to see how it may have reached the "peak of inflated expectations". The question is whether cloud computing is now entering the trough of disillusionment where the naysayers come out to roost and it becomes "uncool" to tout the cloud.
McHugh's comment is just one data point but maybe we should take notice. After all, check out the Google Trends on "cloud computing" and you'll notice that the trendline appears to have flattened out over the past 12 months or so. A more subjective measure may be your own response when you read another article touting the benefits of cloud computing. I suspect at least some of us may be a little fatigued from reading yet another article (or blog post) about how cloud computing is revolutionizing the industry. Yeah, right - come back when you can tell me something interesting.
If cloud computing is indeed entering the trough of disillusionment, I'm betting that it'll be a shortlived stay. Here's why -
First, while cloud computing has the been the buzz at geek inspired, cocktail parties in the past three years, running applications in the cloud has been around for a decade. Since Salesforce told the world to nix running on-premise software, SaaS has become mainstream and mature.
Second, aspects of cloud computing isn't revolutionary at all. I'll maintain that the idea of private internal clouds utilizing virtualization is simply a natural extension and evolution of the corporate datacenter. This means it's easier for organizations to consume, digest and measure value - ultimately this equates to IT spend that is easier to justify.
Third, cloud computing is as much about the business model as it is about technology... in fact, it eludes a hard definition. And it's lack of definition will help sustain momentum out of the trough since it'll be redefined as something that is both palatable and validated by the masses. As the old IT adage goes - if at first you don't succeed...just redefine success.
]]>What's remarkable about the report by comscore is that just a year ago, Facebook captured only 5% of total online time. Almost doubling the share of online minutes in the past year is very impressive...but is it really surprising?
If this latest headline sounds familiar, it's because back in March, Hitwise reported Facebook as the most visited site, overtaking Google Search in total number of visits.
That's not to say that Google didn't have something to boast about either - last week, the search giant announced that they reached 1 billion weekly search visitors. But the reality is while Google still rules search, social network is where the action is and will be in the future.
Here's the two critical advantages that Facebook holds over Google that will likely mean long term dominance. First, the nature of social networking platforms is the dynamic of user created content which inherently creates more value in the network. This ultimate in crowdsourcing of content strengthens the network and creates affinity - which makes it no surprise that once Facebook gained the upper hand in "total visitors" that overtaking Google in "time spent" was inevitable. Second, Facebook has successfully developed a true platform where partners add value through widgets, games, etc... Instead of building it all themselves, Facebook has figured out the "Apple App Store" model - how to build an ecosystem that adds to the user experience and drive revenue without having to pay for product development.
Regardless of who wins out this clash of online giants, perhaps we should be a little more concerned that nearly 20% of all our time is spent either on Facebook or Google?
]]>This is a quiet revolution of sorts since you don't get the resounding hype about the advance of RIAs. Adobe were early proponents of RIAs, creating awareness and offering both technology and tools to enable the creation of RIAs . Truth be known - there would be no momentum behind the move to RIA if not for Adobe.
But herein lies the problem - the future of RIA isn't going to be built around proprietary technologies like Flex or Silverlight but rather on the about open standards - HTML5 and Javascript. Among its many enhancements, HTML5 introduces new standards for rendering shapes and images. It also provides both off-line client side storage which have a profound impact on what we expect out of cloud applications. In fact, every company building a cloud application today should be thinking about rich HTML5/Javascript clients with interactive treatments and the ability to work in disconnected mode.
This isn't simply your father's Ajax code and it's not just for the future - it's actually present reality, thanks to native web application frameworks like Sproutcore.
Sproutcore is comprehensive Javascript/HTML5 framework and it's open sourced. It's important to understand that Sproutcore isn't simply a widget library like JQuery but rather a well designed, full featured framework for building RIAs. It employs a client-side model-view-controller paradigm (MVC) and provides additional features like property bindings, event handling, and client side store w/ object-relational mappings.
Want to build applications for iPhone/iPad? Sproutcore also offers a touch interface so it's enabled for mobile development.
A number of companies like Apple, Other Inbox, Eloqua have, or are currently building applications using Sproutcore. Apple's MobileMe application is a "tip of the iceberg" example of what you can do with Sproutcore. Unlike Flex and Silverlight, Sproutcore applications run within the browser without the aid of plug-ins which can often complicate deployment.
Check out Sproutcore for yourself or alternative RIA frameworks like GWT and Cappucino.
]]>McAllister arrives at his position aided by Gartner research indicating that some customers are not deriving the expected ROI value from SaaS, especially over a longer period of time. Bad patterns from the world of enterprise on-premise software such as shelfware is starting to become a problem in the SaaS world as well Additionally, McAllister highlights challenges with uptime and performance, citing service outage incidents by Salesforce and Google.
His counsel to software developers? Reconsider... no, in fact, retreat from the cloud model, at least when it comes to building enterprise applications. After all, why take on the challenge of being responsible for uptime & performance response times when there is so little benefit?
The problem with McAllister's position is that it's rooted in fear and examples of poor execution. The question shouldn't be whether software "as a service" is more difficult and requires more of vendors than the on-premise variety. The right question is whether it's an effective model for delivering better business value.
To this point, I believe the SaaS model is unquestionably effective as long as we remember the following:
1. Bad applications are bad, no matter how you deliver it. It doesn't matter if software is shrink-wrapped/delivered to your doorstep or accessed via a browser... if it's poorly designed or buggy, it's still frustrating to use. The SaaS model isn't an antidote to poorly designed products. In the mad rush to adopt the SaaS model, many vendors have retrofitted long-in-the-tooth on-premise applications for the cloud with diminishing results.
2. Reliability & performance are not optional - choose your vendor wisely. Uptime and performance are like offensive linemen in football (not futbol) - they don't get noticed until a mistake happens. Unfortunately, many buyers of SaaS will fail to properly validate the service record of a vendor, sometimes opting for the lower cost, new entrant who has yet to cut their teeth on enterprise scale and reliability. You get what you pay for.
3. SaaS mitigates but doesn't eliminate problem of shelfware. Is anyone really surprised that some buyers of SaaS don't effectively use the application... whatever the reasons? No, SaaS doesn't cure the shelfware problem but it provides an effective model for mitigating it. Unlike on-premise enterprise software vendors who can't tell if users have even installed the application, SaaS vendors can get insight into how many users are engaging with the application, spot low usage trends and find out which features of the application are most frequently used. This is powerful insight... for the vendor that cares to make their product and customer experience better. Unfortunately, not all do.
In general, the cloud application model still delivers faster time to value, and assuming you have the right vendor, better security, reliability and performance than most IT organizations will deliver. Since the SaaS vendor assumes responsibility for the delivery of the service and not simply the quality and features of the application, t assumes tighter partnership between client and vendor -
So, is the SaaS experiment over? Hardly so.
]]>