TOSCA may prove a prescient name for new cloud standards effort
Image via Wikipedia Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, [...]
Subscribe To Own As New Lease To Own
The Beatles are timeless and so is music and enterprise software. There’s been an ongoing innovation in the music services. iTunes with iPods disrupted the traditional CD business model and in the ever connected cloud world Pandora, Spotify and countless others are challenging the very concept of “owning” music. Spotify gives you access to a [...]
Position Paper: Five Attributes Of Enterprise Cloud Applications
Abstract: In this position paper, we define the five core attributes of a modern enterprise cloud application which includes Simplicity, Cloud Scale Architecture, Open APIs, Mobile Platform Support and Social Awareness. We expect this definition to help organizations differentiate between a true cloud application from a cloud-washed application. Such an understanding will help enterprises to [...]
Why I Think Office 365 Is Not (Yet) Ready
Earlier this week I had a Tweetbate with few folks who have a soft corner for Microsoft products on whether Office 365 (previous CloudAve coverage), Microsoft’s cloud based productivity suite, is a credible player in the modern cloud business applications space. When I say modern cloud business applications, I expect them to have, at least, [...]
SAP and SuccessFactors Acquisition Q&A
This Saturday SAP announced its $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors and even though in the recent months they had dropped some hints they were looking to make an acquisition very few had SuccessFactors being the likely candidate. I would expect a lot more information and clarity to come out in the coming months but thought I [...]
Cutting Through the Fog of Cloud Computing Definitions
In recent years, the term “cloud computing” has been used and abused by vendors and their marketing groups to denote just about anything the vendor offers other than on-premise systems. Analysts too have piled on, each offering their own definition of cloud computing. This 2009 Wall Street Journal article outlined the confusion. The result has been fruitless [...]
Flawed Analysis–On Clouds “Playing Nice”
The other day someone alerted me to a new report put out by IT news that lauds itself as a “technical study of the integration and extension options offered by the largest 20 software-as-a-service vendors serving the Australian enterprise.” The report looks at a few different dimensions including; Can I get my data in and [...]
Wave Nabs Funding–On Free vs Paid
The other day SaaS Accounting vendor Wave announced that it had just closed $5 million in funding led by well respected VC, Charles River Ventures. While yet another vendor raising a series A wouldn’t usually be cause for comment, this is an interesting case in that Wave, as I’ve written about before, is a free [...]
Disrupt Yourself Before Others Disrupt You: DVD To Streaming Transition Is Same As On-Premise To Cloud
Recently, Netflix separated their streaming and DVD subscription plans. As per Netflix’s forecast, they will lose about 1 million subscribers by the end of this quarter. The customers did not like what Netflix did. A few days back, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, wrote a blog post explaining why Netflix separated their plans. He also announced [...]
Poll: Is Google Apps Enterprise Ready?
Google has been pushing Google Apps as a cloud based alternative to Microsoft. Even though they are steadily improving Google Apps to meet the needs of the enterprise customers, there is a widespread feeling that it is not enterprise ready. In the last month alone, I have spoken to almost ten IT managers (including some [...]
Loss Of Control And Transparency In The Cloud Era
One of the biggest worries organizations have about cloud computing is the unexpected outages and the impact of associated disruptions. In fact, some of the traditional vendors use this very issue to push FUD among their customers so that they can lock them in for the foreseeable future. Similarly, if anyone evangelizing cloud tells you [...]
Freemium Is The New Piracy In The SaaS World
It is estimated that approximately 41% of revenue, close to $53 billion, is “lost” in software piracy. This number is totally misleading since it assumes that all the people who knowingly or unknowingly pirated software would have bought the software at the published price had they not pirated it. RIAA also applies the same nonsense [...]
Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce Not Only Matures But Has Plans For Enterprise Domination
Last week I attended Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce’s (previous CloudAve coverage) annual user conference which exceeded 40K attendees this year, and the blogosphere is already filled with Dreamforce posts. I am adding one more to the mix and I want to apologize straight away for my contribution to the echo chamber. I will try my best [...]
HTML5, The Enterprise Software Lingua Franca
This week not only showed the world that enterprise software can be sexy but also made it clear HTML5 is the right outfit for the sexiness. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, we are seeing the emergence of a new trend in the enterprise, employees bringing their own device and IT warmly embracing this [...]
What is SaaS? | Software-as-a-Service Myopia
It seems a little late in the game for me to be asking a question like “What is SaaS?” But, I’ve always harbored a few embarrassing little secrets on the subject and I think it’s time I came clean. There is a classic Harvard Business School case study called Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt that [...]
