Phil Wainewright hardly needs an introduction to SaaS followers – he’s long been one of the commentators noted as a thought leader in this space. It was nice to have him sit in on the panel I moderated yesterday and today it was his turn to present a keynote.
Phil started with a historical perspective of SaaS – going back a decade to the ASP days. Phil doesn’t want to talk about technologies per se, but rather the bigger picture situation for discrete, but connected, applications.
Not knowing the purpose, while building an offering is just plain wrong Phil contends. But this isn’t just about SaaS or even about cloud computing, this is about the web and in fact the world – a move from monolithic organizations and jobs for life to ad-hocracy and portfolio careers.
The web is fueling this by providing context and the ability to work remotely. As he said “We’ve had real time for a long time…the web puts it in context”.
What does this mean for enterprise?
- The ability to access data from anywhere – to “tear down those walls”
- The need to reconcile structure with flexibility
- IT as custodians – doesn’t go away, merely changes. Morphs the relationship that IT has with its service providers
- Inspection and update me – need some visibility for cloud providers and the ability for them to update you
- SNMP for cloud services – potentially a need for an open management and reporting API to increase this visibility
- Change management
- Risk tolerance
- Trustworthiness of data
- Process change management
- Metadata semantics
- Value for money
- Reliability, consistency
- Reporting and compliance
So what is the right class of glue for our requirement? Think about the requirements for any particular function and its context.
To summarize the world and the web are changing – but as technologists there are things we need to get right in order to get the benefit from that change.
