Understanding the "as a Service" Revolution
I recently wrote a piece that was published on Datamation that outlines 5 guidelines for implementing private PaaS in the Enterprise. Check it out here!
What do you think?
If you’d like to mingle with others in the Cloud space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 4200+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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It wasn’t curiosity. It was thinking that the “good old” ASP model would cut it. It was thinking that little by little, they’d get away from labor intensive provisioning, manual billing, and some day refactor the Rube Goldberg contraption that made their “hosted” model work. Sound familiar?
Software as a Service has quickly become the preferred method of application delivery and consumption. Why is it that while many ISVs claim to provide some flavor of SaaS today, few are doing it with the same cost of delivery profile and operational agility as SaaS leaders like Salesforce.com, or Taleo?
Join Apprenda and Savvis on August 9th at 1:30PM EST for a webinar covering the most dangerous pitfalls that ISVs fall into time and time again. You’ll learn:
- The unprofitable truth about the ASP model
- Why multi-tenant infrastructure isn’t enough
- The real-world economics of SaaS leaders and laggards
- How to avoid building dozens of custom SaaS operations systems
- Key business and technical pitfalls when making an infrastructure choice
You’ll come away with everything you need to either “save the ship”, or leap frog your competitors with a SaaS strategy that rivals the best of the best.
Date: Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Time: 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
We hope you’ll join us!
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Let’s face it. There’s a lot of hype around “the cloud.” Lots of promises, lots of claims, lots of vendors, and lots of lackluster results. All the while, software engineers and architects are getting sick of it.
If you’re a software engineer or architect, what does the cloud do for you? It’s elastic and infinitely scalable, so you just put your app up there and everything magically works, right? The cloud solves all of your scalability challenges, all of your app delivery challenges, and it just plain works, right?
Wrong. You’re the one responsible for building the software that the cloud exists to host and deliver, and you know full well that there’s a lot more to it than that.
What about onboarding new customers or business units to your app? The individual end-users – how do they get access, and to what are they entitled? What about charging for different features, or different transactions? What about managing the application lifecycle, and rolling out updates? What about the underlying architecture to make use of the cloud in an intelligent way? To actually take advantage of the raw compute power at your disposal, and not just use the cloud like it’s the late 90′s again and people are throwing their apps online like it’s going out of style.
These are the types of things that software engineers and architects are thinking about.
There are many significant engineering challenges associated with building and delivering applications today. This is very similar to when we first started developing applications for the desktop PC. Back then, everyone wrote code to manage memory, to interface with specific hardware, etc. Then the desktop OS came along, and made all of that complex and time consuming (but CRITICAL) work a thing of the past.
While the challenges themselves were different, they were still challenges that were specific to the delivery method, rather than challenges associated with building the actual software functionality. Those challenges will always be there, because the passion to innovate and develop applications that help facilitate better business performance, and meet the needs of end users is what drives great engineers/organizations. HOWEVER, the challenges associated with the delivery method/paradigm go away in time, as layers of abstraction come about to solve those problems for us.
Now let’s get back to today. Shouldn’t we expect that all of these challenges associated with building and delivering next generation software applications in this new cloud era will become a thing of the past? Won’t we be able to focus on building great software again, and not worry about all of the complexities of the delivery method? Someday? Maybe?
Yes. We can today!
A large and increasing number of organizations and developers have discovered the “Cure for the Common Cloud“. They’ve found the abstraction layer that handles all of the complex engineering challenges associated with building and delivery applications today, and truly leveraging private or public cloud infrastructure in an intelligent way. They’ve found the one technology that decouples apps from infrastructure, developers from IT/Operations, and business execution from IT implementation.
The Cure for the Common Cloud is here. Do you have it?
OK, it’s already 2011 and I’m a bit late on providing some predictions for 2011 – but now is better than never! I sat down and thought about events in 2010 and whether those events have created a meaningful disruption with near term potential to affect 2011 outcomes, and this is what I came up with. Some of it is based on intuition, some on knowledge, and some experiences I’ve had at Apprenda in working with customers, prospects, and others in the industry. This is more of a mental exercise in subjective extrapolation rather than “prediction”, so don’t hold me to these;-)
1)Adoption of SaaS by ISVs will pick up more steam in 2011
a.Overall, an overwhelming majority of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) deliver their software via the on-premises “packaged software” model. Consumption of software as a service (SaaS) offerings continues to grow at an amazing pace, but most of the demand has been satisfied by a couple of hundred companies that have surfaced in the past 10 years as wild success stories, such as Salesforce.com. As a result, I expect that on-premises player will continue to take notice and make the switch.
b.Competitive pressures within major verticals are becoming more and more real due to successful SaaS entrants, which will drive adoption of SaaS delivery as a market response. Existing software ISVs will start respond by moving part of their product lines to SaaS, or by choosing to offer down-market offerings as an initial experiment.
c.Counter to the perspective of many experts, packaged software ISVs will find strategies that work in their transition to SaaS. Transitional “poster-children” of each vertical will give confidence to other ISVs in the market that the transition can be made successfully.
d.Continued adoption of new technologies such as platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud application servers will bridge technical gaps that will ease the overall transition burden, fueling adoption of SaaS by more and more ISVs. I do not think SaaS is the nail in the coffin for existing ISVs, particularly with technologies like SaaSGrid in the mix which flatten the technical curve for both new application development as well as migrations.
e.Continued explosion of mobile usage creates further pressure (and significant opportunity) for companies to move to a SaaS delivery model. Most business applications that have a mobile angle typically need back-end systems to reconcile the data into primary applications, and SaaS is the only architecture that makes this feasible at scale across many customers.
2) The Upstack Scramble Intensifies
a.Big players continue to make big moves to seize the opportunity to control the new software battle ground in the cloud. Traditional platform vendors will realize that the application development and architecture tiers are huge opportunities, and that infrastructure virtualization and infrastructure tier technologies are not the competitive landscape of the future. Deals like the Heroku and Makara acquisitions make a lot of sense for players like Salesforce.com and Red Hat, respectively.
b.2011 and 2012 will be a make or break years for these big players, and the moves they make over the next 12 to 24 months will ultimately determine the next decade of control and leadership.
c.Commodity players, or players that have become commodity, seek to buy value up-stack through acquisitions.
3) Real Traction with Private Cloud/Internal Utility Computing and SaaS delivery
a.Mistakes and failures experienced in 2010 will be the lessons learned to drive the real solutions and seed private cloud and private PaaS adoption over the next 12 – 36 months.
b.Organizations want a unified and scalable platform for software delivery, and the vision of private cloud will begin to include technologies that sit above the virtual tier to give significant architecture and services value to internal development assets. A paradigm shift in how software developed internally for business units will kick off.
b. Enterprise projects will continue to explore leveraging Cloud architectures such as multi-tenancy for internal use. The cost savings and agility potential presents enormous savings profiles that push their way into enterprise development shops.
4) Cloud Washing Reaches Critical Mass and Collapses by EOY 2011
a.After attempting to cloud wash offerings, a number of small and mid-market ISVs will close shop due to competitive pressures and no real tactical response. This will help identify cloud washing as a poor strategy and that only real, measurable attempts to convert a SaaS model will lead to success.
b.Forces vendors to articulate how their strategies and solutions that is unique and truly “cloud.” Continued success of pure-cloud/SaaS plays will evidence that cloud washing adds no value.
5) Force.com Starts to Realize Momentum Potential
a.Force.com/Apex’s stuttered start begins to gain true rhythm now that Salesforce.com has diversified its cloud to be competitive outside of its proprietary track, particularly in Ruby and Java arenas due to Heroku and VMForce.
b.Force.com will continue to show strong among those extending Salesforce.com’s CRM functionality and potentially within the enterprise where it can be used to displace situational “spreadsheet” applications.
6) Cloud Middleware Provides Democratized Access to Complex Software Architectures
a.General development/programming skills declining, coupled with a continued increase in architecture complexity creates a gapping void that new middleware needs to fill
b.Just like the years when desktop OS’ spurred innovation by enabling companies to focus on their software and not the underlying complexities associated with its delivery – new solutions will fill the gap and catalyze a similar era of innovation once again.
c.Middleware solutions like SaaSGrid will drive multi-tenancy as a defacto standard since the primary concern of difficulty and cost to implement is trivialized.
7) QE[pick your number] won’t be a panacea for the economy – but SaaS and Cloud will help
a.Economic factors will continue to put pressure on operating budgets. Companies will be looking to do more with less; that is, they’ll want to boost efficiency while slashing budgets in order to survive in the modern economic climate. Due to size, IT budgets will be scrutinized and IT managers will be challenged to come up with solutions.
b.SaaS will be seen as a means of democratized access to solutions that drastically improve efficiencies while driving down the cost of IT. Infrastructure as a service will be leveraged to reduce the operating burden associated with in-house infrastructure.
c.Doing more with less, optimizing business performance – SaaS based B2B solutions will grow significantly in 2011 as a result.
I’d love to get everyone’s thoughts. Agree/disagree? Why? Did I miss something or does this seem to cover the right surface area?
If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 3600+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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I had the pleasure of reading a Structure 2010 follow up article written by Stephen Lawson titled “VMware’s Maritz: OSes are having their jobs stolen.” In it, Lawson outlines VMWare’s CEO Paul Maritz’ position that modern applications are relying on frameworks farther up on the stack for abstract services that used to be provided by the operating system, and that those frameworks insulate the application from even knowing what the operating system is.
This “commoditization” of the server OS is expected to some degree and is a case of “what’s old is new again.” Looking back through history, we’ve seen software development take on an evolutionary path of abstraction. Starting from assembly (x86 is my personal reference point) through higher order abstractions like C++ through byte code targeting virtual machines (as in the JVM and .NET CLR), we’ve always looked to move away from various OS level complexities in an effort to boost productivity, increase maintainability, and reduce coupling risk. However, these benefits were only considered OK so long as it didn’t jeopardize the programmers’ ability to express complex solutions to complex problems because of functional crippling that might arise from being too abstract. Typically, two things have held true:
What we’re seeing today in that Cloud is that scale of technology coupled with the introduction of new application architectures and delivery needs that operating systems were not built for. OS’ are general purpose beasts with explicit and valuable capabilities and coordinating a fundamental execution platform. They are not specialized enough to really understand the upstack pressures being exerted on software developers. Clearly, they could be modified to do so, but were never meant to constantly evolve in that fashion. Instead, they are participating as a critical component at the bottom part of a stack.
When we look at SaaS and some of the architecture dimensions specific to SaaS such as multi-tenancy, the need to be able to achieve web-scale, and have operating tools in place to manage the application, we start to see that new modern frameworks, and in many cases, new types of middleware, are needed. This is the whole motivation behind why I helped co-found Apprenda and we set out to create SaaSGrid. In the early days, my co-founders and I frequently had conversations about how today’s applications need not know about OS specifics in order to function properly, which lead to some of the early architecture decisions of having SaaSGrid act as a mechanism that would leverage the decoupling of app components from their underlying network and OS dependencies to help facilitate scale-out (many details, of course, which go beyond the scope of this post.) As SaaSGrid matured, it took on a number of architectural dimensions on a guest application’s behalf, such as providing baseline single instance, multi-tenancy at all tiers or scaling out by offering partitioning services that can help reorganize application component distribution across a network of servers without reconfiguring or rewriting parts of the application. In effect, SaaSGrid started to manifest a number of “OS-like” capabilities, which go far beyond the frameworks that Maritz describes. It seems inevitable that upstack pressures will also hoist value-add solutions away from the core machine/VM OS, but we should all remember that a stack isn’t a stack if the bottom-most piece is missing or instable.The traditional server OS has simply transformed from necessary and sufficient to necessary but not sufficient.
Do you agree that the server OS is becoming commoditized with respect to cloud offerings, or is this an over-dramatization of what’s happening? If you feel the OS is fading into the backdrop, is there an opportunity for the OS to “modernize,” and if so, how?
