Amy Wohl's (Archival) Opinions on Cloud Computing and SaaS

Connecting to the Cloud - The HP TouchPad

HP has finally announced his webOS-based tablet, the TouchPad.  You can read a description here, and view some pictures.  But Tony Wolverton's fine article says it may be too late for the TouchPad, which won't ship until summer.

I beg to differ.

New markets can take a long time to form.  So far the tablet/slate market is mainly Apple, and a bunch of vendors (especially Motorola with its Xoom and RIM with its Playbook) who have announced products for late spring.  Apple has had a magnificent start in this market and is likely to continue with a Version 2 of the iPad coming, perhaps in the 2nd quarter.

But there's plenty of room in the market, particularly in a market we don't understand very well.  Let's keep a few critical points in mind.

1. We don't understand the tablet market very well yet.  Are tablets a replacement for laptops and netbooks or simply an alternative format for some users? So far, tablets are a small fraction of the overall portable PC market.
2. Who are tablets intended for?  Mainly consumers?  Businessmen as consumers (individual buyers)? The corporate market? 
3. How will tablets reach their market?  As individual purchases with downloaded software?  Or as corporate buys, with specially developed software for business applications?  Probably some of both, we'd guess.  This is important, because the TouchPad, with its unique OS, will need its own developer ecosystem and applications and this is more important for the consumer market.
4. How does a tablet relate to a smartphone?  Is it a replacement?  If it doesn't replace the phone function of the smartphone, does it mean users will eventually move toward a tablet plus a very small, mainly voice function, mobile phone?
5. What about in emerging markets, where the smartphone is emerging as the main connection to the Internet?

To me, the tablet is all about a world in which we need a lightweight (physically) device which easily connects to the Cloud and provides a great user experience (interface, battery life, choice of applications, etc.).  It also needs to provide an appropriate computing environment for its target users.  That means some of us need keyboards that aren't on glass and all of us need easym, cheap connectivity for this to work.

A lot depends, of course, on pricing and features.  So the new HP TouchPad seems to have new features, but we don't know much yet about pricing, telco partners, and connection costs.

In fact, we're going to have a chaotic year in the portable device market as vendors introduce at least a dozen products, some consumer, some business and some (as Apple hopes) cross-over products for both markets.  Until we've had a chance to see more of the players and offerings I think it's a little soon to look at anything that seems to be attractive and useful, backed by an existing vendor with a strong distribution scheme in place, and write it off. 

I'm taking a wait and see attitude.

Remembering Ken Olsen

I posted a brief remembrance of Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, on my Opinons blog.

Social Software means Business at Lotusphere

At Lotusphere, Social Business is the main theme.

That means using business versions of social software (Lotus has a full and growing portfolio) to add a valuable social element to both internal collaboration with your employees and external collaboration with contractors, suppliers, business partners, and – most importantly – customers.

New VP of worldwide Sales for Lotus and IBM Collaboration Solutions, Sandy Carter, considers herself an Evangelist for social business.  She noted that IBM is itself a social business and that it wants to take that experience and be a mentor for its customers. IBM saves $50 million for every 1% increase in its retention rate and social business software, successfully implemented, is a significant factor.  With high performing firms 57% more likely to use social business tools, Carter says it doesn’t make sense to wait to develop a perfect 5 year plan – just get started.

This is mainly based around LotusLive software, a SaaS collaboration application which is getting significantly updated for function, but the real story is that it’s not a consumer application, but rather a business application, built to enterprise standards.  Lotus believes that the key to getting more business organizations to put more applications onto the cloud, particularly public clouds, is to make the secure and reliable, with the kinds of functions and features businesses require.

So, for example, while Lotus can support mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and iPad, it also embraces business platforms like the BlackBerry phones and, soon, its tablet, Playbook.  In fact, Jim Basille of RIM was there as a speaker (and I wanted to mug him for the Playbook he carried, but he kindly demonstrated it for me and promised that delivery would be soon.

At Lotusphere, LotusLive Symphony was announced as ready for a test ride.  This is Lotus’ on-line version of Symphony, its Open Office-based office suite.  The shared word processor and spread sheet are up and running and the presentations segment will follow it shortly.  This is the first on-line editor that has enough function, I think, to lure more “writers” (as opposed to readers) to try and perhaps use it.  In case there’s a function missing in the on-line version of Symphony, it’s compatible with the off-line version (which is free), but it’s intended to be robust enough for most writing (except, I think, heavily formatted documents). 

It includes neat features, like an ability to segment a document into sections and assigning writing/editing responsibilities to different members of the team.  Other features include real-time co-editing, author presence awareness, a revision history, and contextual community and discussions.

With all the talk of on-line collaboration, the cloud, and the new LotusLive Symphony, one could think that the traditional, on-premises Notes/Domino product might be less important.  “Notes is core, core, core,” said Alistair Rennie, GM of Lotus, when I asked him that question.  He pointed to enhancements to Notes, comments about its next version (called Notes Next), and an on-line Notes client.  The message was, the cloud and LotusLive are great new ideas, but Notes users get to pick and choose what goes where.  In fact there is a Collaboration Assessment Tool for potential customers to use and an IBM workshop for customers designed to help them plan a customized roadmap.

IBM believes Social Business is transformative in that it changes both how your employees get their work done in a more interesting and productive way and in how it deepens relationships with customers, all while staying within the corporate need for security, reliability, governance, and compliance.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  More tomorrow about the goodies Lotus is sharing from the research labs!