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

What is HP Thinking?

Officially I'm on vacation, but this seems like a summer without vacations!

I thought of heading this post with the title "Is HP Crazy?" but I decided that didn't quite make my point.

I've just read my way through a dozen posts (try this one from Dennis Howlett) on what HP just did -- announce that it was closing down its nascent WebOS (tablet and phone) business, say that it was evaluating whether to stay in the PC business or spin it off, and announce that it was buying British enterprise software company Autonomy for an amazing $10.3 billion.

I think the press may be covering these in the wrong order.  Here's another way to look at it.

HP must have been working on the Autonomy deal for some time.  It wanted to announce it now and use the idea of "we're becoming an enterprise company" as the cover for everything else. 

That would be nice if it were believable.  HP has been trying for some time to move into the arena of enterprise software and services, but they have yet to be a big enough player to gain critical mass and buying another niche software vendor  is unlikely to give them the traction they're looking for.  Of course, they may have other acquisitions up their sleeve.  I am concerned that they are paying too much.  Also, deciding to keep Autonomy separate which will guarantee that they can't sell integration as a benefit.

HP then  looked at their business and must have thought one of the reasons we're not taken seriously enough as an enterprise play is that too much of our business is PC oriented.  If we take that business off the table, our enterprise business will immediately become a much more important part of HP.  I think someone should have been asking how they were going to make up for the revenue loss on their PC business, but that doesn't seem to have been in the mix.

In the future, when we understand the tablet business better, we'll be in a position to judge whether their decision to bail out without ever having given the WebOS-based products a real chance was genius or a really bad idea.  So much of the tablet business right now (before the enterprises start buying tablets in volume for mainstream applications, HP) is all about competing with Apple -- and HP is in the business of building products but not so much being a consumer marketeer of premium-priced products.  I thought that the tablet business was a good fit for HP's drive to the enterprise, but apparently HP did not see it that way.  Perhaps they should have been less ambitious and positioned their tablet product right at the enterprise rather than at consumer markets?

I am putting their decision to announce that they are going to spend the year or more considering whether or not to sell off their PC unit under the "doing an Osborne" category (preannouncing something and freezing your current market).  Why would anyone buy an HP PC (or do a partnership deal) when this black cloud is hanging over the HP PCs future?  The ultimate value of HP's PC division will be plummeting while HP considers its options.  If this were the point of the recent announcements, it would have been accompanied by a statement that HP was in talks with XXX and that the details of the deal would be announcement shortly.

So I'm disappointed with HP.  Not with the fact that they're probably years away from becoming one of the top enterprise system companies.  Not with their initial poor results in the tablet business.  Not with their desire to be out of the low margin PC business and into higher margin businesses like services and software.  Rather, I am disappointed with the way they are going about it.

As it is, HP is going to provide cheer for tablet and PC vendors who now have a bigger market to divide among themselves and continue to fuel the already hot market for enterprise software, a market where there are already bigger and more successful players.

Is it Illegal to be very successful?

Watching the FTC start its investigation of Google does remind me of earlier investigations of success (such as the Microsoft Explorer browser).

As I understand the law, there is nothing that prohibits a company being so successful that it has an effective monopoly and controls a significant portion of its marketplace as long as that company is doing nothing illegal in the process -- especially not preventing other companies from entering the market and customers from using competing products.

I don't think Google does either of those things except that their success feeds on itself -- the more successful they are in their search business (which is what this is all about), the harder it is for others to be successful search companies (although Microsoft's Bing is having a fair try) and the less likely users are to try a different search engine.

Note that it is not quite like the auction issue -- where the larger an on-line auction company becomes the less attractive it is to list your items on another site because fewer people will ever see it.

For niche things (fine art for auction sites), specialized topics for search engines (medical, for example), there may, in fact, be better places to go.

Google is interesting because (1) it's so big and (2) its success in search, which allows it to collect enormous revenues in ads to the searchers, funds all of the free software which attracts users to its site -- not just to search but for everyday work.

I cn't imagine an Internet without Google (although this may merely mean I'm lacking in imagination) since I have not seen a better way to find the things I seek quickly.  But someone else can try and in the world of the Internet it would be possible for users to find them, in volume, quickly.

What will happen -- too soon to tell.  But we will all be watching.

 

What Does the Apple i-Pad Mean?

So first ship day for the Apple i-Pad came (and went), with thousands of folks standing in line to see and buy the latest New Thing.  And a very good day for Apple, with a reported 300,000 pre-orders and first day sales.

Now the focus shifts, not just to how many they'll sell in the first month or the rest of 2010, but also (and perhaps just as importantly) to what people will do with them and what apps will be available.

The usage patterns and the apps (which to some extent will determine who will buy the i-Pad and what they'll be using it for) are what I'm interested in. 

(I managed not to pre-order an iPad -- it was very hard -- because I don't want the Wi-Fi version.  I think I will order the 3G version even though I know that waiting for the next version is probably a more sensible idea.  Techno-lust!)

There's an article about the fact that Google immediately ported Google Docs to the i-Pad (I'm not exactly sure why you couldn't just get there on the browser) and the fact that MS doesn't seem to be interested in getting their new on-line apps ported (same question).  The interesting thing isn't so much the article (which is quite straight forward), but rather the comments (76 when I looked) on what it means.

Ignore the expected open source guys who hate Microsoft and always say something way over-the-top negative on every occasion.  I love open source, but it's not really the point of this discussion. 

The guys who get it are writing about the fact that Microsoft is a software company and that should mean that when a relevant platform appears -- especially one that is anticipated to offer a broad market -- software developers should get on board.

Of course, some might think that Microsoft is waiting for the delivery of its Courier tablet (which exists today, as best I can tell as a concept video).  Perhaps they're much further along with Courier than we suspect and they want to save their software for their own platform?  Even so, a software company usually writes for other platforms -- just as Microsoft writes Office for the Macintosh, even though it runs on a competitive OS.

I'll be tracking who writes for the i-Pad much more eagerly than I tracked all the pre-ship hype.  That's predictable for any hot product and Apple is a master at gathering attention.  But what applications run on the i-Pad and better yet run well, exploiting its features, will determine the size and shape of its marketplace.

Even better, of course would be an application no one ever thought of before, because it took the arrival of the i-Pad platform to spark some developer's imagination.

Some Additional Thoughts

After I read ZDNet's article (see above) I read a great article by Jason Hiner on Tech Republic on the i-Pad and business -- again, with many comments.  This is more about whether an i-Pad fits into the business environment and pros and cons of using the machine, but again applications and Apple-s application environment are a recurring topic.  More food for thought.

Surviving in Tough Times

All of us expect SaaS to be a bright spot in a dark economic picture, but Treb Ryan of OpSource points out that even SaaS vendors will have to work hard to survive in a tough market where customers are disappearing and cutting back.

I especially like his suggestion of looking for customers in new verticals where you haven't sold before - he suggested healthcare, the federal government, and bankruptcy lawyers! 

He doesn't like hybridizing your business model -- that is, moving away from the pure SaaS model of delivering on-line in order to get another customer.  I wouldn't change anything for one more customer -- it's just a distraction and you won't actually make a profit that way. 

On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with testing your market to see if customers would buy from you if you had an appliance offering, for example.  (That means loading your software on a server which attaches inside the customer'r firewall; it's optional whether the SaaS ISV manages the software or whether it becomes the customer's responsibility to manage updates and patches.)

I also think the OEM market can be an excellent "tough times" opportunity.  Look for a partner who also needs a new revenue source and who has customer for your SaaS product (or some part of it).  Let the OEM do the marketing; the two of you can negotiate who does the hosting, operational support, and so forth, at what price.

Tough times call for smart tactics.

Who Reads Page 6 of Your White Paper?

Speaking to Keith Thompson of Vitrium Systems, I discovered that whether a white paper is a success is no longer a matter of how many downloads it gets.  That, of course, is largely a matter of good PR, good location on the vendor's web site (and good navigation), and a hot topic.  Whether anyone reads the thing -- much less whether they read the whole thing is quite another matter.

Vitrium first produced Protected pdf, a product that kept pdfs from being changed or copied.  It appealed to  higher ed.

But customers asked for a product that could give them metrics on pdf documents – who read them, what was read, the amount of time spent on a page.  Docmetrics is that product.

When people get pdfs today they either have to register (which they either refuse to do, abandoning their attempt to get the white paper or they give false info) or they simply click on "free" white papers and give no info – in either  case the pdf owner knows nothing about the reader.

Docmetrics inserts a survey into the pdf (which can be mandatory or not) usually at page 2 or 3.  I suspect my colleague Jared Spool, a UI expert, would say this was one of his seducible moments.  The reader has started to engage with the white paper and giving its owner a little information for the rest of its content seems like a good exchange.

This allows the pdf owners to ask a variety of questions in a customized form which may be required or optional.  Docmetrics places a cookie into instrumented documents so if a document is passed along the survey will be presented to additional readers.  Even if they skip the survey, information about their reading habits will be included in the Docmetrics reports.

Reports include both leads as well as information on pages read or skipped, how much time was spent on each page, and so forth.  (As a white paper writer, this sounds both very useful and a little scary!)

Vitrium has been marketing Docmetrics for six months and has over 100 clients.  About 55% of readers using pdfs instrumented with Docmetrics submit information.

The product has a wide range of pricing starting at $25 per month for a small firm with one pdf and up to 5 leads per month.  Volume pricing is available for large enterprises with thousands of documents (or thousands of readers).  Pricing can be less expensive if the vendor wants to capture reading information but not reader IDs (such as name, email address, and so forth) for leads.

Docmetrics is integrated with Salesforce.com so that a company that uses SalesForce for lead management will have survey data entered directly into its CRM files and salesmen notified of new leads.  Vitrium plans to offer integration with other CRM products.

Docmetrics is hosted at OpSource.  While they intend to offer the software as a service, it is also designed and supported so that they can offer it within the firewall, should a large customer prefer to run it themselves.

At this time, they appear to be the only vendor with this type of product; they feel the barrier to entry is high since it requires intimate knowledge of Adobe pdf, Flash, and each Adobe Reader version as it comes into the market.

 

 

At Lotusphere: It's Hosted, It's On-Line, is It Saas?

IBM's Lotusphere is always an announcement bonanza and this year is no exception.  I'm not even going to try to list them all.  Lotus provides a constantly growing list of press releases here.  There are also dozens of bloggers beside me covering the event.  In fact, an amusing feature of the keynote was a special blogger section of Lotus-yellow beanbag "chairs" for the bloggers, right up front,  Don't worry.  I sat in my usual front-row seat.

Lotusphere is devoting a lot of its bandwidth to asking customers big and small to talk about what they're doing with Lotus products, especially the newest versions of Notes and Domino and the new hosted service (still in Beta), formerly called Bluehouse, now named LotusLive.

LotusLive is really the overarching brand for a set of modular services which can be offered in a variety of packages.  One of the first is called Engage, an on-line collaboration service, which includes profiles, files, activities (projects), forms (surveys), charts, and support for instant meetings.  Other modular services will be Meetings (already available) and Messaging.

Lotus is clearly most comfortable when it talks about using LotusLive to extend the services it offers to an existing Lotus customer (probably an Enterprise or other large firm), allowing them to collaborate with remote offices or with customers and suppliers outside their firewall.  But the plan is to market to SMB's as well, and Lotus has other SMB offerings already, such as their Foundations appliance.

Lotus is pretty sure (and I am, too) that most customers of any size will end up with some combination of on-premises and in-the-cloud software.  The mix will depend on what the company does, what it needs and how big its IT department is -- or whether it has one at all.  

Lotus will also need to further develop its partner channel to sell to firms too small for its direct sales force; it's started to prepare for that by its acquisition of assets from Hong Kong SaaS vendor OutBlaze, Ltd., which had created the multi-tier system which will allow reseller and customer administration as well as private label brands for large resellers, such as telcos.   We  expect to hear much more about selling into the SMB market later this year as Lotus rolls out more of its LotusLive roadmap.

These are products that are designed to let customers take advantaqge of the economics and convenience of SaaS while being able to choose from a broad and integrated portfolio, all of it at Enterprise quality levels for both product and support.  Since relieability is usally one of the three questions customers ask when they're thinking about SaaS (the others are security and cost), this could be an appealing offering,

Add that to the fact that Lotus' on-line offerings are compatible with their on-premises Notes, Domino and (IBM) Websphere offerings, and Lotus customers will find them more than just interesting, especially as Lotus continues to add in such partners as SAP, Salesforce.com, and RIM (Blackberry). 

Lotus isn't sure they want to call LotusLive SaaS because, they claim, there are so many different definitions for the term.  We did offer them a copy of our book but it is true, there are many definitions.  However, all of them agree that we are talking about an application that is run by a third-party on a remote server.  The rest is up for discussion -- who owns the server, is it shared, are payments on a month-to-month basis or on a longer commitment.

What's important is that customers now have more good choices -- never mind the labels.

Serving the SMB Market

Recently, we finished a book on the SaaS market, Succeeding at SaaS: Computing in the Cloud.  (It will be available from our web site and blogs next week.)   It includes more than 20 scenarios, stories about successful SaaS ISVs, service providers, and customers. 

One of the SaaS ISVs we interviewed and wrote about was Zoho, a company was a portfolio of 16 applications including word processing and spreadsheets, but moving beyond that to a data base product that lets ISVs, resellers, or customers create or customize their own applications.

Recently, Zoho has created a marketplace where their creators can exchange or sell these applications, putting them in the league of Salesforce.com, but in a different part of the market.  Salesforce charges for everything and focuses on the enterprise.  Zoho makes much of its product available for free, charging only for larger users, and premium features and service.

Our colleague Phil Wainewright likes Zoho so much that he thinks that it might get to be as big as Salesforce.com.  You'll want to read his comments. 

We think an interesting question (and one we got from lots of reporters last week) is whether the economic crisis is a blessing in disguise for the SaaS market, offering budget-pressured companies an alternative way to obtain software and infrastructure without the need to pay for implementation and skilled employees to manage it.  The economies of SaaS will be very appealing in a time of tight budgets.  It will also be a useful way to support companies who are coming together (all those mergers and buyouts) and need to communicate, collaborate, and share information on the way to sharing data and systems.  More SaaS.  Count on it.

Can Traditional ISVs Make the Move to SaaS?

Reading Phil Wainewright's column this morning about the move of Steve Lucas (acquired with Business Objects) from SAP to Salesforce.com reminded me that I've had a post writing itself in the back of my mind.  That's because I've been having an ongoing discussion about the subject of SaaS with some of the big, traditional ISVs.

It's been broad:

• Is SaaS a significant and lasting change in how software will be purchased and supported or a fad?
• Who is SaaS for?  Enterprise ISVs still seem to think it's for the SMB market (which they don't sell to much yet) and that the Enterprise is too complex and customized for SaaS.   (That is, that their existing market is protected from SaaS.)  Apparently they don't know much about SaaS in 2008 or who's buying it.
• What do you have to offer to be a successful SaaS vendor and when do you have to be in the market?

So, you know what side of these arguments I'm on: 

1. Yes, it's significant and enduring.  I don't fall in with the SaaS enthusiasts who believe that all software will be SaaS any minute now.  It doesn't work that way.  But I do believe that within five to seven years more than 30% of new software purchases will go to SaaS -- and maybe more.
2. We've already fought the "who buys SaaS" battle.  Of course, it's wonderful for smaller companies, permitting them access to applications they could otherwise neither afford to buy or manage.  But it's also very appealing to large enterprises, especially for mature applications that have little or no competitive advantage (think email and HR), supporting remote workers, contractors, and customers, and permitting the enterprise to offer applications that are used only occasionally or by a few workers.  That lets the enterprise use scarce, skilled IT resources to focus on developing applications that are core to the organization's mission.
3. What you have to offer and how much time you have to get into the market depends on what you do.  Very large vendors who address big markets are sure to attract additional new SaaS ISVs to their market -- the prize is just too large to be ignored.  If they wait, they risk being too late, competing with a newcomer for customers they could have brought to the SaaS model themselves (think of what Salesforce.com did to Siebel).  ISVs in narrow vertical segments have longer -- perhaps forever.

Note that offering a SaaS version of your application that is less than the real thing will not work, particularly if you are the standard bearer in a big market segment.  The customers will find it less than satisfactory and a new SaaS startup will find your mistake their lynch pin to guarantee their market success.  SaaS customers, thanks to the web, know the alternatives and want the real thing.  We can't count on marketing in little curtained cubicles to less-than-knowledgeable customers any more.

So Steve Lucas left SAP whose Business By Design is late and perhaps less than what a SaaS customer might have wanted.  In a segment as important as ERP there will be (there already is) lots of SaaS competition in the market who won't make the mistake of offering less than a full-blown product and who will understand that customers may prefer the speed, ease, and economy of SaaS to the last jot of customization.

Blog Missing in Action

Note that my other blog, Amy Wohl's Opinions, seems to be Missing in Action.  When I went to post to it earlier this week it (and its SP) had disappeared.  We have started a new site for the blog, here at Typepad, and started the laborious work of moving some of the posts from our own archives.

In the meantime, if you liked to read the Opinions blog, which is about to have a great story on IBM's new move into Service Management, please go here and sign up.

Thanks,

Amy Wohl, Editor

Many Clouds Ahead: Strangely, Future Seems Sunny

This has been quite a week (or two) for cloud computing.  If I were a "good" blogger, I'd put this into three or four different posts, but then you might lose the point I'm going to try to make.  So you'll have to read this like an article, not a blog post.

Eyes Up

The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as is usual in this stage of a new market, around just what is a Cloud.  We are now pretty sure that what we used to call Grids and what we now call Clouds are the same thing.  But we also have things called "Platforms" which seem to be very much like a kind of cloud (and are sometimes called clouds) and then there is SaaS itself which looks very much like a Cloud with some application software (and some SaaS vendors describe their offering just that way).  I'd say we can agree that a Cloud is managed computing power, often with applications, accessed across the Internet.  And I'll agree that a company can have its own Cloud, if it wants one.

IBM has finally enunciated a vision for its cloud computing which makes sense for IBM and its customers.   It offers a very high-end version of cloud computing (virtually unlimited amounts of power, up to and including z (mainframe) systems, backed by its Tivoli system management.  These clouds can be used as part of a large shared infrastructure, where the customer has access to a large pool of computing resources to handle peak activity but doesn't need to pay for all of this infrastructure all of the time.  Some customers (governments in China and Vietnam, for example), are buying and implementing their own Blue Clouds which they will use to support particular projects such as university research or computing for high-tech start-ups.  And, of course, IBM can create a Blue Cloud for an individual Very Large Enterprise, managed by IBM outside the firewall or by IBM or the customer inside the firewall.  The choices are broad.

IBM actually offers even more choices which may be less obvious.  IBM provides a platform to ISVs who want to offer SaaS applications. In that, they are very much like other platform vendors like SalesForce.com, eBay, Google, or Amazon.  A major difference here is whether the platform owner is also an application provider (like SalesForce.com), whose ISVs are related to his application offering or whether the platform provider is simply offering managed computing, perhaps with some technical assistance and/or some marketing oomph.  (IBM offers both.) 

It was reported last week that Microsoft is moving to the Cloud.  In this case, Microsoft means it is going to offer at least one of its applications, Exchange, as a hosted application (SaaS) from its own cloud.  Microsoft intends to continue on the road of “SW plus Service,” meaning that you to use a PC on your desk with MS Office to make use of the Internet-based services that Microsoft also provides.  What seems to be moving to Microsoft Clouds is not personal productivity apps (a la Google or Yahoo’s Zimbra), but shared services (Mail, Collaboration, Customer Relationship Management).  Microsoft has been quick to note that this is a big initiative and that in five years they would expect half their customers to use Exchange as a service.  This is not just something for smaller customers, either.  Microsoft already has some large enterprise like Coke, with 75,000 seats.

Microsoft also has other on-line (perhaps Cloud) services such as their Live services and their new Live Mesh service for synchronizing devices of every kind.  They are also testing a consumer version of office which will combine a basic version of desktop MS Office with an array of on-line services.

Last Friday, we spoke with Workday, a SaaS ERP company we’ve been tracking since its start.  It’s stirred up quite a bit of attention, boldly claiming last April that its feature set would be at parity with SAP by next fall.  So far, they are on schedule with their product plans, with hefty HR offerings, including Payroll and Expenses, and a substantial portion of their Financial offerings.  Look at their latest Workday 4.0 Offering at their web site.  More interesting is the fact that although they didn’t expect to move beyond the mid-market into the enterprise until more of their product was completed, they already have a number of large enterprises and more in their pipeline.

Recently I attended a Digital Transformation Forum at Penn State as a guest of its host, John Jordan.  Clouds and SaaS were definitely subjects of discussion.  There was a lot of lively commentary on whether SaaS was for big companies and whether it could provide the customization and security they needed (SAP was an attendee).   I believe companies like Workday and SalesForce.com are going to prove that SaaS is about what the application does (the solution) and not the size of the customer.  But I think we shall see – and soon.

Think of it this way. 

·         You can access a cloud as pure computing power, a place to load an application that needs lots of computing or requires cyclical peaks

·         You can find a cloud that provides a platform with APIs to support an ecosystem of ISVs who provide software that you find appealing

·         You can choose a cloud whose platform includes an application (SalesForce.com) that attracts other ISVs to surround it

·         You can simply find a SaaS vendor whose application is appealing – you don’t care about the cloud behind it, just the application

·         You can build your own cloud, managed by a vendor or your own IT staff for some large-scale purpose

And no doubt, someone, somewhere, is dreaming up some other things to do with clouds

I sense several likely outcomes:

·         A messy period with many clouds, many of them not interoperable because they’re not build to the same standards

·         An interim period of standardization

·         A period of consolidation because we really want to buy our applications in a way that they can be aware of each other and use them in a common environment.  The easiest way to do this is for each of several vendors to provide a cloud with all of the applications you need and some level of integration.  Remember that nothing keeps a cloud/platform vendor from being one of several vendors who offers a popular application if the ISV agrees

·         A higher level of standardization where (just as we do on the Internet today) any application can be used with any other application on the platform and through the portal of your choice.