
Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem
While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”). API First – The move to the […]

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, […]

AWS, VPC And Impact On The Ecosystem
No, this is not yet another post about Amazon’s new VPC announcement. Christian has already done a great job from the technical angle. This is about the chatter that came out from Clouderati immediately after the announcement from Amazon. During Cloud Connect 2011, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels went extra mile to emphasize how ecosystem is […]

Can We Ever Have Too Many Startups?
My recent post on the diatom bloom in the startup ecosystem prompted calls for me to dig deeper and provide more data. Far be it from me to disappoint!Chris Tacy asked, are we seeing too many startups? It’s a loaded question, but a good one.My instin…

AWS CloudFormation: Poaching The Ecosystem?
Amazon Web Services (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced AWS CloudFormation, which lets developers and system admins use recipes to create and provision resources in Amazon cloud. This is conceptually similar to Opscode’s Chef Recipes which lets ops folks configure some aspect of the systems in their ecosystem. Clearly, AWS must have seen how Chef […]

SaaS And Inverted OEM Channels
One of the things that I love to do: keep meeting the entrepreneurs to better understand the market and the challenges that they face. Recently, I met an entrepreneur that I highly admire. His company has SaaS components that other ISVs would OEM. Let’s say, you are an ISV that would OEM his components and […]

Heroku Ramps Up Its Ecosystem Play
Heroku (See our previous coverage of Heroku here), the poster child of PaaS, has taken steps to ramp up their support for 3rd party service offerings by making it very easy for these providers to offer their service as add-ons to the Heroku platform. In this cloud based world, the very success of a cloud […]

An Investors View on Twitter’s Announcements – I’m not Abandoning the Ecosystem
I have read much commentary on my Twitter stream (ironically) and in the press about how investors are going to abandon investments in the Twitter ecosystem because they seem to appear hostile to ecosystem partners. Let me be the first to say that I don’t agree with this notion. Let me explain. 1. Regarding protecting […]

FUD in the House of SaaS – More on Suites
Recently I wrote about the evergreen Best-of-breed vs. Integrated All-in-One Suite debate again, arguing: Call me “old school”, but I also believe in the value of having one tightly integrated system for most business needs, and I believe it’s true not only for large corporations but much smaller businesses. I don’t have CIO’s to back […]

Twitter’s Acquisition, Chirp & Managing Developer Relationships
So Twitter is buying and building Twitter clients. I don’t find this surprising at all. In fact, I said as much in September 09 at a Twitter conference in LA on a panel that Guy Kawasaki was moderating. I said in the following video that I thought Twitter would by Seesmic, the company that makes one of […]

App is Crap (why Apple is bad for your health)
Absolute Power Corrupts, Absolutely I was living in Europe in 2000 when the first WAP phones (Wireless Access Protocol) were introduced. These phones were so over hyped. They were going to bring the Internet to your mobile phones ushering in the era of “m-commerce.” Gag. I had just returned from living in Japan where I witnessed […]

If it Swims Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck, then it Probably is a Duck. The Anti-SAP Duck.
Two SAP-related conferences will run literally next door to each other in Boston next week. One, which I am attending is the SAP Influencer Summit where analysts and the media get to meet SAP execs – the other is what some of us quickly dubbed the Anti-SAP Conference. The Sapience conference is focused on “Alternatives […]

Distributing Innovation
In case it’s not obvious by now, you get a lot of differing perspectives at Defrag. You’re just as likely to run into a guy that runs a hedge fund, as a gal that’s responsible for a multi-million dollar budget around “social software,” as a pair of co-founders who are barely legally able to order […]

SAP Does Not Do Your Laundry
I found a hilarious story @ The Daily WTF (thanks Devan for introducing me to the site) Except for the dryers being infamous for not performing their most basic task – drying –students at the Sogn Student Village near the University of Oslo were happy with how the laundry system worked. Just swipe your laundry […]

Services, The Very Critical Part of the On Demand Ecosystem – Appirio
Yesterday I had a great conversation with one of the founders of Appirio, a new age services organization founded in 2006. They are an 80-person company with an additional 20 people offshore through a partner. Their original investors include Salesforce.com along with a couple of angels. More recently Sequoia capital invested in them. Appirio is […]