The Connected Web

Jim Goodnight, CEO of privately-owned business analytics software giant SAS, thought he was having a joke at the expense of the world's tech media last week when his company announced a $70 million cloud computing initiative. But unbeknown to him, the joke is on him and his company.

Last week's press release announced SAS to build $70 million cloud computing facility and was rewarded with a storm of publicity as yet another big software name apparently forged into the cloud computing space. But it turns out SAS was just cynically hitching a ride on the latest buzzword bandwagon. Speaking at the company's annual customer event yesterday, Goodnight revealed that the facility is just another server farm:

"[The marketing team] wrote it up as a 'server farm,'" Goodnight admitted, according to ZDNet blogger Sam Diaz. "I said, 'Eh, no let's not use that. That's old-fashioned. Use cloud computing' ... Wow, my God, we came up with that and all the papers went crazy."

Goodnight went on to poke fun at the whole notion of cloud computing, equating it to the 1960s-era practice of time sharing, when users paid to access processing time on a shared mainframe computer:

"It's funny we've gotten to where everybody wants everything delivered on the Web. So we're back to like (IBM) 3270 mainframe days ... "All the interactivity we used to have on the desktop is being sacrificed to go back a very simple static screen like we had on the mainframe. It all comes around. I don't know when we'll see punched cards again, but you never know."

The remarks are evidently meant to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it does little credit to Goodnight and his company to misrepresent cloud computing so comprehensively. And I fear that Goodnight's comments are indicative of an endemic failure within the company to get to grips with the essence of cloud computing that will probably come back to bite it in the future. Cloud is so much more than shared access and passive browser screens. Has no one told Goodnight about AJAX even, let alone Flex?

This is typical of the error of perception that many established vendors are making when they look at cloud. They try and understand it in the context of what they already know, instead of seeing it with fresh eyes. Cloud is not just a new way of letting people rent spare capacity on your server farms. If any of Goodnight's minions had been at SaaS Summit in San Francisco earlier this month they would have heard an illuminating exposition of cloud computing from OpSource CEO Treb Ryan (click on the presentations tab on the conference website to find the slidedeck), in which he set out three defining characteristics of cloud and noted that most established vendors are failing to replicate them in their own cloud offerings:

• Complete flexibility. Not just pay-as-you-go but automated sign-up, rapid provisioning and no commitments — it's as easy to turn off as it is to turn on.


• Web programmability. The ability to access and manage functionality through Web APIs are a crucial element of a true cloud platform.


• Community resources. Successful clouds encourage communities that share ideas, best practices and add-ons to enhance their use of the platform.

SAS is barely at the beginning of a long learning curve as it begins to dip its toe into SaaS provision while misappropriating cloud terminology. In later comments, Goodnight talked about some of the benefits SAS was discovering in its early SaaS offerings:

"The number of combinations of hardware that we're having to test has actually grown incredibly large," he told ZDNet's Sam Diaz. "Right now, it takes us longer to test software than it does to write it. It's gotten to be a huge bottleneck." With software as a service, he went on to explain, the supplier only has to write for one set of hardware and one set of Web services.

That awareness marks the beginnings of an awakening that I've called the journey to SaaS. Goodnight's company is still a long way from true enlightenment, and the road ahead includes plenty of false turnings to trap the benighted, but there's still a chance SAS will finally wake up to what's going on in computing before it's too late to change.