New tools and services for swift software-as-a-service integration in the cloud lowers the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers.
MuleSoft this week launched Mule iON SaaS Edition, providing a broad set of new tools and services for swift software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration in the cloud, and lowering the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers.
In recent commentary, Ross Mason, founder and CTO of Mulesoft, said, «The world today is moving at lightning speed to SaaS and cloud applications, and the idea of gaining competitive advantage through legacy enterprise applications is no longer relevant.»
Archivo mensual: mayo 2012
IBM’s Patterns and Its Impact on IT Services Purchasing
Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the IT ecosystem in many ways, forcing related changes in business models. Other than customers (who are always “king” and make buying decisions), the IT ecosystem players being affected by cloud includes technology providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs). One of the battles being fought right now by technology providers is to develop end-to-end cloud platform stacks attractive to ISVs. IBM announced additions to their recently launched PureSystems family at Impact 2012 with more than 125 ISVs supporting this family with patterns. Although the primary focus of this cloud platform stack is on ISVs, there is also a need for SIs to adapt to these changes, especially as it relates to custom software development and maintenance capabilities.
Cloud API Standardization – It’s Time to Get Serious
Okay – this is easy… or is it?
Lots of people continue to perpetuate the idea that the AWS APIs are a de facto standard, so we should just all move on about it. At the same time, everybody seems to acknowledge the fact that Amazon has never ever indicated that they want to be a true standard. Are we reallyIn fact, they have played quite the coy game and kept silent luring potential competitors into a false sense of complacency.
Amazon has licensed their APIs to Eucalyptus under what I and others broadly assume to be a a hard and fast restriction to the enterprise private cloud market. I would not be surprised to learn that the restrictions went further – perhaps prohibiting Eucalyptus from offering any other API or claiming compatibility with other clouds.
Cloud Encryption for Cloud Providers
As part of our cloud strategy, we’ve recently released a VMware version of our cloud security offering. It allows cloud providers using VMware, as well as the cloud users themselves, to create an encrypted environment within minutes, while eliminating the complexity around encryption key management in the cloud without compromising trust and confidentiality.
During this process we’ve engaged in many conversations with the cloud providers’ community to better understand their requirements, and equally important – their customers’ requirements. We’ve identified some interesting patterns with regards to cloud data security, which I thought would be beneficial to share.
HP Cloud Now Available In Beta – A First Look
HP have joined the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market and released their HP Cloud service in public beta. Here’s the announcement press release. The services on offer are:
Available Now as Public Beta
Guest Post: Moving business processes into the cloud
16th May 2012
With the rise of the public cloud and m-commerce, one key challenge every business will have to address is how to handle the proliferation of channels and deliver instantaneous services, without over-complicating the purchasing process. CloudSense’s MD, Richard Britton explains more.
You Say You Want a Revolution: Are we in one?
Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to be little more than a new marketing channel.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a paradigm shift.
Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Not wanting to …
Silicon Valley Should Matter More
There was a time during the height of the dot-com boom when executives in Silicon Valley believed that Washington, DC was irrelevant. As two generations of entrepreneurs strived to build The New Economy, it was laughable to think that the ancient dunderheads back in our nation’s capital had any notion about – or right to tamper with – what was going on in the tech world.
This was the era of the Clinton Administration, a time when the President himself had declared that “the era of big government is over.” Defend the shores, deliver the mail, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way – this was the thinking in the tech world during the bubble.
Clinton’s years were peaceful from the perspective of people living in the US. A few targeted attacks here and there, with even the major, US-backed military action by NATO in Serbia having little effect in day-to-day American lives. The Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia convinced most Americans that we wanted little or nothing to do with foreign military misadventure. The idea of nation building was not popular, and indeed was rejected by both Al Gore and George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign.
Keep Out
Domestically, the mindset was also to keep the government from meddling. We were running federal surpluses for the first time in most people’s memory, the economy was booming, and we were all discovering the personal liberation of being able to hang out on the Worldwide Web.
With 9/11 the US entered a different reality, one in which the federal government became more important, and dominant, than ever. The whole dot-com castles-in-the-sand economy had washed away by then; that dreadful day assured that it wouldn’t come back.
But the federal government has proven in the past decade to be a poor driver of the innovation found in Silicon Valley, despite having invented the Internet a generation ago.
We are now in a new innovative era, characterized by massive social media, massively Big Data, and emerging back-end behemoths that keep everything running through increasing amounts of virtualization and cloud computing. The US government has committed itself to a Cloud First strategy, perhaps, but what true technology leadership and vision can we expect from Washington?
A Nuanced Reading
George W. Bush reads lots of books. He mentioned to author Robert Draper, for the book Dead Certain, that he was on his 87th book midway through one of his years in the White House. He reads nonfiction about U.S. Presidents and other historical political leaders.
But yet in Dead Certain, which is neither hagiography nor an anti-Bush polemic, he seems strangely unaffected by all that he reads, other than his rock-ribbed belief that he must be strong and unflinching in his decisions. He doesn’t do nuance, it’s said.
Nuance quickly becomes casuistry and sophistry, or endless parsing – think Bill Clinton. It can be the biggest obstacle to decisiveness and direction. But a little nuance here and there is not necessarily a bad thing. Diplomatic success is based on it. More to the point of our industry, a nuanced understanding of other nations – and how the people in them conduct their lives and business – is essential if American technology is expected to succeed globally.
It was horrifying to read in Dead Certain how uncertain – or perhaps obtuse – our federal government was, at its highest levels, when it came to understanding the world and the consequences that US actions bring. There was nary a word of how the spread of technology might improve the state of the world.
Dead Certain also recounts how a top Bush aid got a job as an Undersecretary of State, in which she traveled internationally with the goal of improving the perception of the United States. The passages in Dead Certain about this escapade are painful to read. They describe a high-level government official with neither an iota self-awareness nor a scintilla of knowledge about how people think in the countries she visits.
And Today?
Other than reading about the Cloud First strategy, I have no idea of how well the current administration understands the power of global IT and its ability to improve economies and the lives of people. My guess is that glib talk of the Twitter Revolution may be as deep a dive as these folks can make. The sad irony is that Washington doesn’t get technology but does matter.
All this brings me to the upcoming Cloud Expo in New York, where a substantially international crowd will gather to discuss the latest developments, successes, advances, and well, nuances of cloud computing.
I hope that during the millions of individual discussions that will happen in New York, some people will discuss the idea that Silicon Valley needs to do more than the two things it does well politically: oppose onerous legislation (like SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA) after it’s introduced act as an ATM for favored presidential candidates after they’re well established.
Somehow, Silicon Valley must learn to matter as much in Washington as Washington matters to Silicon Valley.
The Consumerization of IT: No Longer Just About Phones or Tablets
Pete Khanna is the CEO of TrackVia, a cloud-based application platform that allows business users to build and deploy their own enterprise-grade SaaS applications.
Guest Post by Pete Khanna, CEO, Trackvia
What CIOs Need to Know – And Consider Doing – About the Emergence of Build-it-Yourself Enterprise Applications
It used to be that when a department or even a single employee wanted a new business application, they submitted an IT ticket and patiently waited for an answer. IT would evaluate the request, and decide whether to buy something, build something or simply do nothing. Often, this process took weeks, months and sometimes even years.
Emboldened by the “Consumerization of IT” trend and empowered by new cloud-based build-it-yourself application platforms, more front-line workers are bypassing IT all together, using their corporate credit cards to buy, build and deploy their own enterprise-grade SaaS applications within hours or days.
Experts agree this trend is likely to continue – and even accelerate. Analyst research firm Gartner predicts that “citizen developers” will build 25 percent of all new business applications by 2014.
Early case studies showed employees were building and deploying highly specialized or one-of-a-kind ‘rogue’ applications. These were the type of applications where an off-the-shelf software or SaaS solution either didn’t do the job or simply didn’t exist. However, more and more often, workers are using these build-it-yourself applications to deploy highly customized versions of common department applications, ranging from CRM SaaS solutions and inventory applications to HR systems and even customer service software.
The benefit of building your own department solution is that it’s often as much as 80 percent more affordable than off-the-shelf software or SaaS solutions. More importantly, these build-it-yourself solutions can be designed, customized and tailored by the users to meet the exact needs and requirements of the business. So instead of departments changing their processes or workflow to match that of the solution, users can change the solution to match their own processes. Simply put, features can be added, removed, changed or tweaked with a few clicks of the mouse. This leads to both greater efficiency and satisfaction by users.
All of this poses a growing challenge to IT professionals. Namely, how does IT manage the implementation of these so-called rogue applications without impeding employee productivity? The biggest concern from IT professionals is that they don’t want to be in constant clean-up mode, fixing or supporting solutions that end-users built themselves. A close second is that they want to be assured that the application is secure, ensuring that sensitive company information isn’t being compromised.
Having worked with thousands of businesses – from small cash-strapped start-ups to Fortune 100 companies – to implement their own custom applications, we’ve complied this list of best practices.
Step 1: Surrender to Win
The first and perhaps most important (and difficult) thing to do is decide whether or not to fight or embrace the “Consumerization of IT” movement. Even in highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare, where they use airtight firewalls, employees are finding ways around the lockdown mode of their internal IT organization. Doctors are bringing iPads into the examination room with their own apps installed. Marketers within banking organizations are using social media tools to distribute information. USB ports can be used to transfer information from unsecured laptops to company computers. The simple question becomes whether or not you want to use your limited IT resources and time policing employees or educating and empowering them. Getting alignment on this critical question at the highest levels of the organization is key.
Step 2: Offer Something Secure, Scalable and Supportable
Rather than hope you’re employees find and pick a secure and reliable build-it-yourself solution, many companies get out in front of their users and identify a single platform that meets both IT’s requirements and end-users’ needs.
This is where cloud-based application platforms are showing the most favorable response from business users and IT managers alike. Most organizations have larger, more complex enterprise-level applications that on some level need some customization. By adopting and implementing a secure, cloud-based application platform, CIOs proactively meet their own requirements while still providing end-users with a solution they can use to meet their own unique individual or department-level needs.
Implementing a single platform solution also helps streamline ongoing management and support, while making it faster and easier for employees to learn. For example, if all in-house applications are built atop a single platform, employees don’t have to learn to use multiple solutions. It also means IT doesn’t have to support multiple solutions. Everyone wins.
Step 3: Consider the Reliability
Nothing gets CEOs cackling faster than an email about a server or a critical system going down and employees checking out for the rest of the day. It’s also no fun for CIOs or IT Directors who have to deal with the hundreds of emails from employees asking, “Is the server back up? When will the CRM system be back up? What’s going on?”
A recent Constellation Research study shows most SaaS vendors report internal reliability ranging from 97 percent to 99.1 percent. However, it’s not uncommon to expect or demand that your cloud vendor partner demonstrate four-nine reliability. Most vendors will bake this guarantee into a standard SLA agreement. And as always, check the vendor’s track record and ask for customer references.
The Road Ahead
Like water, businesses and workers will always find the path of least resistance when it comes to working faster, more efficiently or effectively. The role of IT has always been to help clear technical obstacles for users, and protect them along the way. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed, however, is that IT has the opportunity to get out in front of the cloud computing and the “Consumerization of IT” trends, while playing a more proactive and strategic role in the overall organization’s future, versus trying to play catch up and doing damage control.
And that’s something I think we’d all agree is a good thing.
A Funny Thing Happened on Java’s Way to the Cloud
On the surface, everything seems fine. If you do a search, you’ll see lots of people offering support for cloud-centric application frameworks. But, when I speak with companies actually moving Java applications into the Cloud or trying to create new Cloud services based on Java, I get a different story. It’s not the application in many cases that’s in the way, it’s the JVM.
An example that highlights these issues comes from one of our partners, Intalio. Intalio offers Cloud solutions based mostly on open source. They and their customers are frustrated by the fact that Java can’t take advantage of Cloud elasticity – the JVM strictly limits the amount of memory and cores an individual instance can use. To make matters worse, operators have to deploy multiple small instances (around 2-4 GBs of memory each) to keep garbage collection pauses short enough so users wouldn’t really notice the delay. Plus, managing it all is painful. Developers have to create distributed networks within individual machines, and the IT staff has to create and launch lots of new instances and tune carefully to avoid long response times delays. (Their CEO, Ismael Chang Ghalimi, describes the problem in detail in a paper called “Cloud Computing is Memory Bound – located here: http://www.intalio.com/cloud-computing-is-memory-bound.)