SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!» Software as a Service http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com SaaS, PaaS, and Cloud Computing Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:46:57 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 ebizQ Forum: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing? http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/05/18/ebizq-forum-what-are-the-biggest-downsides-to-cloud-computing/ http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/05/18/ebizq-forum-what-are-the-biggest-downsides-to-cloud-computing/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 15:17:59 +0000 edward http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/?p=596 Delivered Innovation CTO Michael Topalovich recently provided his take on the ebizQ Forum question: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing? From the Forum:

I’ll substitute “downsides” with “risks” because some of these may be viewed as half empty / half full arguments, but I see the biggest current risks as:

  1. Market confusion. As Peter mentioned, it is a mad dash to the cloud right now. And since nobody wants to feel left out, just about every company in the B2B tech space has re-branded itself as a cloud computing company. I’ve heard this referred to as “cloudwashing,” and the result is that companies will find it more difficult to find services specific to their needs, because of the tendency of providers to water down messaging into cloud buzzwords and ignore basic positioning and value statements.
  2. Cloud sprawl. With the rapid proliferation of cloud services, IT is struggling to adapt corporate service delivery strategies. The results that we have seen have included duplication and overlap of processes and functions due to services being provisioned directly by business units; loss of control of the billing for services because no single entity within the company is responsible for the procurement and management of them; and the equivalent of “shelfware,” a situation where cloud services are orphaned after the champion leaves the company or the business shifts focus.
  3. Lack of cohesive integration strategy. There is no doubt in my mind that the cloud model of service delivery is the one that we will adopt for at least the next 10-15 years of technology cycles, but until the integration of all of the pieces is thought through, the sum of the parts will never add up. My company has standardized our core service offerings around the Force.com platform from salesforce.com to provide the “glue” that holds all of the pieces together, and we “mash up” other cloud services into composite enterprise business systems through API integration, business process orchestration, and data integration using services such as Boomi. But if companies just provision cloud services for siloed requirements up and down the cloud stack (from infrastructure to SaaS), the disaggregation of these services will prove to be a value destroyer.
]]> Delivered Innovation CTO Michael Topalovich recently provided his take on the ebizQ Forum question: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing?  From the Forum:

I’ll substitute “downsides” with “risks” because some of these may be viewed as half empty / half full arguments, but I see the biggest current risks as:

  1. Market confusion. As Peter mentioned, it is a mad dash to the cloud right now. And since nobody wants to feel left out, just about every company in the B2B tech space has re-branded itself as a cloud computing company. I’ve heard this referred to as “cloudwashing,” and the result is that companies will find it more difficult to find services specific to their needs, because of the tendency of providers to water down messaging into cloud buzzwords and ignore basic positioning and value statements.
  2. Cloud sprawl. With the rapid proliferation of cloud services, IT is struggling to adapt corporate service delivery strategies. The results that we have seen have included duplication and overlap of processes and functions due to services being provisioned directly by business units; loss of control of the billing for services because no single entity within the company is responsible for the procurement and management of them; and the equivalent of “shelfware,” a situation where cloud services are orphaned after the champion leaves the company or the business shifts focus.
  3. Lack of cohesive integration strategy. There is no doubt in my mind that the cloud model of service delivery is the one that we will adopt for at least the next 10-15 years of technology cycles, but until the integration of all of the pieces is thought through, the sum of the parts will never add up. My company has standardized our core service offerings around the Force.com platform from salesforce.com to provide the “glue” that holds all of the pieces together, and we “mash up” other cloud services into composite enterprise business systems through API integration, business process orchestration, and data integration using services such as Boomi. But if companies just provision cloud services for siloed requirements up and down the cloud stack (from infrastructure to SaaS), the disaggregation of these services will prove to be a value destroyer.
]]> http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/05/18/ebizq-forum-what-are-the-biggest-downsides-to-cloud-computing/feed/ 0 PivotLink CEO Quentin Gallivan on SaaS Business Analytics and Cloud Computing http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/03/05/pivotlink-ceo-quentin-gallivan-on-saas-business-analytics-and-cloud-computing/ http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/03/05/pivotlink-ceo-quentin-gallivan-on-saas-business-analytics-and-cloud-computing/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:15:17 +0000 edward http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/?p=561 PivotLink

Edward Schlicksup of Delivered Innovation recently caught up with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink, the leading provider of SaaS business intelligence solutions. PivotLink’s approach to business intelligence is a paradigm-shifting model within the BI industry. By combining advanced technologies like in-memory analytics, columnar data storage, cloud computing, a SaaS delivery model and unique methodologies, PivotLink helps organizations gain greater insight into the massive volumes of data increasingly at their disposal – in a highly secure manner.

Give me a little background on PivotLink – how and when did the company form?

Ching Wan founded PivotLink in 1999 after a decade long career as a BI practice lead at Cambridge Technology Partners. Ching founded PivotLink on a simple powerful idea: it should be easy for business users to securely analyze any data, any way they want and share their insights with colleagues and partners, wherever they are.
Myself and Ching Wan, along with a fast growing team have established PivotLink as one of the most innovative and trusted SaaS BI services for accessing, analyzing and sharing business insight.

When and how did you first become aware of The Cloud?

After eight years as the EVP of Sales for VeriSign, which grew from $30M to over $1.5B over an eight year period, I left VeriSign in 2005 to become the CEO of Postini, the leading Cloud/SaaS-based email security company. Postini grew to over 30,000 customers, 10 million users and we sold Postini to Google in September of 2007. After that I joined PivotLink, because I believe the BI industry is ripe for transformation to the next generation Cloud/SaaS model.

What do you envision to be your most popular product in 2010?

PivotLink’s award winning SaaS BI platform serves over 15,000 users across industries to support departmental and enterprise-wide business intelligence needs; i.e. analysis, reporting, dashboards, and collaboration. We recently upgraded the platform’s dashboard capabilities with enhanced drag-and-drop functionality, drill down capabilities and an enhanced UI.
We also launched a new family of products for Sales, Marketing, and HR that provides dynamic, on-demand solutions that enable business users to actively monitor, analyze and report at every level across the business. Fully integrated into the PivotLink platform, it will include everything users need to go from data to decisions in minutes or days instead of weeks or months.

What are the most common obstacles to bringing a company onto The Cloud?

Integrating data from multiple resources, ensuring data quality, security and gaining end user acceptance of the new BI delivery mechanism. Setting up data feeds from on-premise sources into a cloud-based solution is not an impossible obstacle (in fact it is becoming increasingly automated) but it does require thoughtful planning, the involvement of IT and assuring customers that their data will be secure. And they want to know that they can get their data back if the service were to be terminated (which we of course do).
Secondly, end users were not previously involved in the BI development/deployment process until the tool appeared on their desktop. Now they have the opportunity to be involved in the process, define what data sources they need and get them more quickly than ever before. Being able to administer BI in a self-service manner takes some getting used to. Because we are schema-less (and the market to date is trained up/expects to do analytics in a cube) business users need to wrap their heads around a more flexible model of analysis.

What are the most common reservations companies have about The Cloud? How do you address those?

Customers often have reservations that you can’t do BI in the cloud because they have so much trouble doing BI on-premise. Given the complexity of data involved with a BI implementation, it seems that SaaS BI is too good to be true. We have 15,000+ users on PivotLink who use our tools everyday to make BI more integral to their jobs. A significant percentage of our customers serve as references during the selling cycle. The voice of our customers goes a long way to inspire others users to join the SaaS BI revolution.
Secondly, security. When customers realize their data is going to be moving into another environment the security flag comes up. PivotLink takes data security very seriously and has the same rigorous security controls that financial institutions and publicly traded organizations go through. Our SAS 70 Type II certification typically appeases any security concerns companies have about doing business with us.

What does SAS 70 Type II Certification really mean for your customers?

SAS 70 Type II certification demonstrates our total commitment to constant improvement and delivering value to our customers. To date, PivotLink is the only SaaS BI service that is SAS 70 Type II certified. With more than 15,000 users worldwide, it’s absolutely essential for our customers to trust PivotLink’s ability to unequivocally protect their data. Completing the audit provides further validation and assurance to our customers.
Note: To learn more about PivotLink’s SAS 70 certification process and accomplishments go to http://www.pivotlink.com/sas-70

When companies approach PivotLink, do they even know exactly what they’re looking to find? Do they often find an answer to a question they didn’t know they had asked?

The SaaS BI market is evolving, but people still think it is “too good to be true” so we do a lot education in our sales cycle right now, plus our website is populated with valuable educational resources.
Companies don’t always know that they are looking for a SaaS BI technology solution per se, but they do know they suffer from issues like 1) it takes too long to get data and reports delivered to the business for effective decision making, 2) IT is backlogged with requests from the business to make changes to existing DWs and 3) both IT and the business struggle to keep pace with the dynamics of business today and the tsunami of information that floods into the business on a daily basis. When companies approach us, they are driven by the desire to cost effectively automate a lot of the reporting and analytics that suck up a lot of precious IT resources and don’t want to commit a massive capital expenditure to solve the problem.

What are some of the product features that PivotLink is most proud of?

We are proud of our in-memory columnar storage, schema-less analytical engine (our secret sauce!). We are also proud of our ability to securely handle large volumes of data and sources across large volumes of users (with various levels of skill). Beyond that we are passionate about the user experience and recently released some exceptional user interface innovations, which you can experience in our dashboards.

What types of business analytics did companies find difficult to access prior to PivotLink’s SaaS BI?

Before PivotLink, the types of analytics that requires combining data sources and reporting across large volumes of data were a serious challenge. The other kind of analytics that seemed elusive were analytics on historical changes to transactions i.e. order transactions in ERP and pipeline changes in Salesforce.com.

Do you find that you still have to sell the concept of “The Cloud” or is cloud computing reaching critical mass in your markets?

The cloud is well understood amongst the BI aware crowd. SaaS BI continues to steadily gain adoption in the BI marketplace thanks in large part to the speed with which it delivers an ROI. While adoption has not yet reached critical mass status, we are hopeful that it will continue to flourish as more and more companies realize its benefits.

What product or feature will do the most to increase The Cloud’s public visibility this year?

We think it will be the ability to share insights dynamically between colleagues inside and outside the organization and use that to inform decision-making. Insight as a service (IaaS) is the new BI Greenfield.]]> PivotLink

Edward Schlicksup of Delivered Innovation recently caught up with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink, the leading provider of SaaS business intelligence solutions. PivotLink’s approach to business intelligence is a paradigm-shifting model within the BI industry. By combining advanced technologies like in-memory analytics, columnar data storage, cloud computing, a SaaS delivery model and unique methodologies, PivotLink helps organizations gain greater insight into the massive volumes of data increasingly at their disposal – in a highly secure manner.

Give me a little background on PivotLink – how and when did the company form?

Ching Wan founded PivotLink in 1999 after a decade long career as a BI practice lead at Cambridge Technology Partners. Ching founded PivotLink on a simple powerful idea: it should be easy for business users to securely analyze any data, any way they want and share their insights with colleagues and partners, wherever they are.
Myself and Ching Wan, along with a fast growing team have established PivotLink as one of the most innovative and trusted SaaS BI services for accessing, analyzing and sharing business insight.

When and how did you first become aware of The Cloud?

After eight years as the EVP of Sales for VeriSign, which grew from $30M to over $1.5B over an eight year period, I left VeriSign in 2005 to become the CEO of Postini, the leading Cloud/SaaS-based email security company. Postini grew to over 30,000 customers, 10 million users and we sold Postini to Google in September of 2007. After that I joined PivotLink, because I believe the BI industry is ripe for transformation to the next generation Cloud/SaaS model.

What do you envision to be your most popular product in 2010?

PivotLink’s award winning SaaS BI platform serves over 15,000 users across industries to support departmental and enterprise-wide business intelligence needs; i.e. analysis, reporting, dashboards, and collaboration. We recently upgraded the platform’s dashboard capabilities with enhanced drag-and-drop functionality, drill down capabilities and an enhanced UI.
We also launched a new family of products for Sales, Marketing, and HR that provides dynamic, on-demand solutions that enable business users to actively monitor, analyze and report at every level across the business. Fully integrated into the PivotLink platform, it will include everything users need to go from data to decisions in minutes or days instead of weeks or months.

What are the most common obstacles to bringing a company onto The Cloud?

Integrating data from multiple resources, ensuring data quality, security and gaining end user acceptance of the new BI delivery mechanism. Setting up data feeds from on-premise sources into a cloud-based solution is not an impossible obstacle (in fact it is becoming increasingly automated) but it does require thoughtful planning, the involvement of IT and assuring customers that their data will be secure. And they want to know that they can get their data back if the service were to be terminated (which we of course do).
Secondly, end users were not previously involved in the BI development/deployment process until the tool appeared on their desktop. Now they have the opportunity to be involved in the process, define what data sources they need and get them more quickly than ever before. Being able to administer BI in a self-service manner takes some getting used to. Because we are schema-less (and the market to date is trained up/expects to do analytics in a cube) business users need to wrap their heads around a more flexible model of analysis.

What are the most common reservations companies have about The Cloud?  How do you address those?

Customers often have reservations that you can’t do BI in the cloud because they have so much trouble doing BI on-premise. Given the complexity of data involved with a BI implementation, it seems that SaaS BI is too good to be true. We have 15,000+ users on PivotLink who use our tools everyday to make BI more integral to their jobs. A significant percentage of our customers serve as references during the selling cycle. The voice of our customers goes a long way to inspire others users to join the SaaS BI revolution.
Secondly, security. When customers realize their data is going to be moving into another environment the security flag comes up. PivotLink takes data security very seriously and has the same rigorous security controls that financial institutions and publicly traded organizations go through. Our SAS 70 Type II certification typically appeases any security concerns companies have about doing business with us.

What does SAS 70 Type II Certification really mean for your customers?

SAS 70 Type II certification demonstrates our total commitment to constant improvement and delivering value to our customers. To date, PivotLink is the only SaaS BI service that is SAS 70 Type II certified. With more than 15,000 users worldwide, it’s absolutely essential for our customers to trust PivotLink’s ability to unequivocally protect their data. Completing the audit provides further validation and assurance to our customers.
Note:  To learn more about PivotLink’s SAS 70 certification process and accomplishments go to http://www.pivotlink.com/sas-70

When companies approach PivotLink, do they even know exactly what they’re looking to find?  Do they often find an answer to a question they didn’t know they had asked?

The SaaS BI market is evolving, but people still think it is “too good to be true” so we do a lot education in our sales cycle right now, plus our website is populated with valuable educational resources.
Companies don’t always know that they are looking for a SaaS BI technology solution per se, but they do know they suffer from issues like 1) it takes too long to get data and reports delivered to the business for effective decision making, 2) IT is backlogged with requests from the business to make changes to existing DWs and 3) both IT and the business struggle to keep pace with the dynamics of business today and the tsunami of information that floods into the business on a daily basis. When companies approach us, they are driven by the desire to cost effectively automate a lot of the reporting and analytics that suck up a lot of precious IT resources and don’t want to commit a massive capital expenditure to solve the problem.

What are some of the product features that PivotLink is most proud of?

We are proud of our in-memory columnar storage, schema-less analytical engine (our secret sauce!). We are also proud of our ability to securely handle large volumes of data and sources across large volumes of users (with various levels of skill). Beyond that we are passionate about the user experience and recently released some exceptional user interface innovations, which you can experience in our dashboards.

What types of business analytics did companies find difficult to access prior to PivotLink’s SaaS BI?

Before PivotLink, the types of analytics that requires combining data sources and reporting across large volumes of data were a serious challenge. The other kind of analytics that seemed elusive were analytics on historical changes to transactions i.e. order transactions in ERP and pipeline changes in Salesforce.com.

Do you find that you still have to sell the concept of “The Cloud” or is cloud computing reaching critical mass in your markets?

The cloud is well understood amongst the BI aware crowd. SaaS BI continues to steadily gain adoption in the BI marketplace thanks in large part to the speed with which it delivers an ROI. While adoption has not yet reached critical mass status, we are hopeful that it will continue to flourish as more and more companies realize its benefits.

What product or feature will do the most to increase The Cloud’s public visibility this year?

We think it will be the ability to share insights dynamically between colleagues inside and outside the organization and use that to inform decision-making. Insight as a service (IaaS) is the new BI Greenfield.
]]> http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/03/05/pivotlink-ceo-quentin-gallivan-on-saas-business-analytics-and-cloud-computing/feed/ 0 Cloud Breakfast Briefing: Cloud Computing For the Business Executive http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/01/24/cloud-breakfast-briefing-cloud-computing-for-the-business-executive/ http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/01/24/cloud-breakfast-briefing-cloud-computing-for-the-business-executive/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:27:28 +0000 deliveredinnovation http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/?p=506 Cloud Computing for the Business Executive

What is Cloud Computing and how can it help my company?

Presented by Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems

Overview

Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems are teaming up to provide business executives with an informative overview and peer-to-peer roundtable discussion of Cloud Computing and how this leading-edge technology can be leveraged to achieve breakthrough business results. Topics to be discussed include:

  • What Is Cloud Computing? How did we get here?
    • How does “The Cloud” help me?
    • Benefits
  • Risks and Mitigation Strategies
  • How does Cloud Computing change the way we do business?
    • Time to market acceleration
    • Business model enablement
  • Who are the players in Cloud Computing?
    • Amazon
    • Google
    • Microsoft
    • Salesforce.com
  • How do I determine my Cloud strategy?
  • Customer case studies
    • Adobe Systems
    • Polycom
    • School of Rock
  • How do I get started?

All attendees receive a copy of Jonathan Sapir’s book, Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Seating is limited to 12 business executives, so order your ticket today to reserve your place at the table.

Agenda

Friday, February 19

8:00 – 8:30 Continental breakfast and networking
8:30 – 9:10 Michael Topalovich, Delivered Innovation
9:20 – 10:00 Jonathan Sapir, SilverTree Systems

Location

Regus Park Ridge Plaza
350 S. Northwest Hwy.
Suite 300
Park Ridge, IL 60068

About the Presenters

Jonathan Sapir is the CEO of SilverTree Systems and the author of Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Michael Topalovich is the founder and CTO of Delivered Innovation. Prior to Delivered Innovation, Michael was a senior IT leader with Siebel Systems where in 2003 he spearheaded the systems management team for Siebel CRM OnDemand, one of the first enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

]]> Cloud Computing for the Business Executive

What is Cloud Computing and how can it help my company?

Presented by Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems

Overview

Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems are teaming up to provide business executives with an informative overview and peer-to-peer roundtable discussion of Cloud Computing and how this leading-edge technology can be leveraged to achieve breakthrough business results. Topics to be discussed include:

  • What Is Cloud Computing? How did we get here?
    • How does “The Cloud” help me?
    • Benefits
  • Risks and Mitigation Strategies
  • How does Cloud Computing change the way we do business?
    • Time to market acceleration
    • Business model enablement
  • Who are the players in Cloud Computing?
    • Amazon
    • Google
    • Microsoft
    • Salesforce.com
  • How do I determine my Cloud strategy?
  • Customer case studies
    • Adobe Systems
    • Polycom
    • School of Rock
  • How do I get started?

All attendees receive a copy of Jonathan Sapir’s book, Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Seating is limited to 12 business executives, so order your ticket today to reserve your place at the table.

Agenda

Friday, February 19

8:00 – 8:30 Continental breakfast and networking
8:30 – 9:10 Michael Topalovich, Delivered Innovation
9:20 – 10:00 Jonathan Sapir, SilverTree Systems

Location

Regus Park Ridge Plaza
350 S. Northwest Hwy.
Suite 300
Park Ridge, IL 60068

About the Presenters

Jonathan Sapir is the CEO of SilverTree Systems and the author of Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Michael Topalovich is the founder and CTO of Delivered Innovation. Prior to Delivered Innovation, Michael was a senior IT leader with Siebel Systems where in 2003 he spearheaded the systems management team for Siebel CRM OnDemand, one of the first enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

]]> http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2010/01/24/cloud-breakfast-briefing-cloud-computing-for-the-business-executive/feed/ 1 2009: The Year Cloud Computing Reached The Tipping Point http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/12/31/2009-the-year-cloud-computing-reached-the-tipping-point/ http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/12/31/2009-the-year-cloud-computing-reached-the-tipping-point/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:01:57 +0000 topalovich http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/?p=488 By most accounts, 2009 was a bad year. For some, an awful year. But for cloud computing, 2009 will be looked back on as the year the movement reached the tipping point. I don’t necessarily want to run through a year-end wrap-up, but I do want to take some lessons learned from 2009 and apply them to what I believe we’ll see in the year ahead.

The Question Without an Answer

What exactly is “Cloud Computing?” The term will probably never be fully fleshed out in terms of a common definition, and at the end of the day that’s fine with me. Yes, we need to put structure around the term and the industry, but as we noted earlier in the year with a post about cloud maturity models, we run the risk of painting ourselves into a corner if we try too hard to make things fit neatly into buckets that we can easily classify and categorize. Taxonomy will be key to understanding and adopting cloud computing, but I’ve become convinced that in order to truly embrace the cloud, we must…

Embrace the Abstract

I had the opportunity to speak at Interop Las Vegas this year with Rick Nucci of Boomi and R. “Ray” Wang of Forrester Research, and when I made the statement that “cloud computing is the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture,” I realized that I had found the unifying principle of cloud-based solution design; unifying both in the sense that the promise of SOA finally has the technology behind it to transform it from philosophy to practical design pattern, as well as in the sense that the term “cloud computing” itself was being co-opted in much the same way that traditional software vendors co-opted the entire concept of Service Oriented Architecture to sell middleware throughout the decade.

Cloud computing may mean many things to many people, but in the end its full potential can only be realized if we stop trying to think of it in terms of the “known known” and embrace the the “known unknown.” More importantly, when we think about the cloud and applying SOA design principles, we cannot continuously innovate and drive value if we are traversing connections inward to rationalize patterns and explain the abstract with the known; we must restructure our patterns and embrace the abstract in an attempt to forge new connections by moving outward beyond our comfort zones. The next generation of system design is less about creating code, and more about assembling services – innovation through extending value in what already exists rather than inventing new sources of value. In terms of practical application, this means moving up the stack and…

Learning to Describe Rather Than Prescribe

An interesting pattern that I observed throughout 2009 is the continuing tendency to try and reinvent the wheel despite the fact that not only has the wheel already been invented, but it’s right in front of our eyes and meets our needs 99 times out of 100. I saw this over and over with Salesforce CRM and Force.com projects; the value of using Platform-as-a-Service is that someone else (or more accurately, thousands of other people) has already thought about just about everything you could possibly need in a data model, user interface, and business rules. And not only have they published just about everything you could possibly want in an easily configurable platform, they host it and manage all of the operational details such as backups, upgrades, and security. Yet time and again I encountered teams that thought that their way of doing things was better, and would go down the path of trying to build Salesforce on Salesforce before realizing that the same outcomes could have been achieved by spending a little more time upfront optimizing business processes and making minor configuration changes than going down the path of creating complex custom workflows, classes, and user interfaces to achieve the same end.

Some case studies are extreme, such as the support manager that duplicated Contacts across multiple accounts and assigned multiple portal logins to customers – in one extreme case 101 times – rather than setting up sharing rules properly; I don’t have to tell you what a data quality nightmare that ended up being. In other cases, it’s simply a matter of building rather than reusing what’s already there, resulting in hard-coding of attributes and logic that should be dynamic and extensible.

What I’ve come to realize is that there is a conceptual barrier that we need to overcome when it comes to metadata and other abstracted entities; because multitenancy architecture and SOA are reaching such a pervasive state, we must shift our thinking to describe what already exists rather than trying to recreate it. Entities exist once and in perpetuity – for example, there is only one of you in the entire world and you cannot be recreated on demand – thus our ability to provide context necessarily requires us to describe the entity in a manner that provides value to the application; the ability to describe entities with deep domain knowledge and create relationships to other entities that enrich the value of the data set will become an important competitive differentiator.

This will take time and a great deal of trial-and-error until we get it right, but in the end it is the only way to leverage the tremendous potential of core cloud computing architecture patterns; our entire concept of producing and consuming services has to change, which leads me to the conclusion that…

SaaS is Dead…Long Live SaaS

Granted, the title of this blog predicates from the acronym for Software-as-a-Service, but as cloud services mature and the traditional technology stack gets blown up and reassembled, the entire concept of “software” shifts from the self-contained, monolithic packaged application to that of a delivery framework. Software was invented to make hardware useful; hardware is abstracted in the cloud and we no longer write code down to the kernel level – we assemble, configure, and code to the layer of abstraction of the specific cloud platform. The term “software” will gradually fade from our lexicon.

This was the philosophy that drove the Java language and multi-platform virtual machine concept, and will continue to evolve with next generation rich Internet application frameworks such as Adobe Flex / AIR. What we will see moving forward is the continuing shift from desktop software that interacts with the cloud, to ubiquitous frameworks that consume data and logic services from the cloud and leverage the processing capacity of the local machine to enhance the user experience.

2009 and its economic and sociopolitical malaise are now behind us, and by all accounts 2010 will be the year of the cloud. While the technology and the terminology of the cloud have permeated the mainstream, it will take significant shifts in thought processes and design patterns before the cloud can be fully leveraged. Here’s to a great New Year and the hopes that the likes of Microsoft and other relics will accelerate their fade into obscurity and stop trying to steer the cloud discussion back into a box. Until next time, here are some…

Other 2009 Wrap-ups and 2010 Predictions

Jeff Kaplan: Key Challenges Facing Cloud Computing in 2010 and Beyond
Phil Wainewright: Tips from 2009 for a prosperous 2010
Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009 (Humorous, non-cloud related)

]]> By most accounts, 2009 was a bad year.  For some, an awful year.  But for cloud computing, 2009 will be looked back on as the year the movement reached the tipping point.  I don’t necessarily want to run through a year-end wrap-up, but I do want to take some lessons learned from 2009 and apply them to what I believe we’ll see in the year ahead.

The Question Without an Answer

What exactly is “Cloud Computing?”  The term will probably never be fully fleshed out in terms of a common definition, and at the end of the day that’s fine with me. Yes, we need to put structure around the term and the industry, but as we noted earlier in the year with a post about cloud maturity models, we run the risk of painting ourselves into a corner if we try too hard to make things fit neatly into buckets that we can easily classify and categorize. Taxonomy will be key to understanding and adopting cloud computing, but I’ve become convinced that in order to truly embrace the cloud, we must…

Embrace the Abstract

I had the opportunity to speak at Interop Las Vegas this year with Rick Nucci of Boomi and R. “Ray” Wang of Forrester Research, and when I made the statement that “cloud computing is the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture,” I realized that I had found the unifying principle of cloud-based solution design; unifying both in the sense that the promise of SOA finally has the technology behind it to transform it from philosophy to practical design pattern, as well as in the sense that the term “cloud computing” itself was being co-opted in much the same way that traditional software vendors co-opted the entire concept of Service Oriented Architecture to sell middleware throughout the decade.

Cloud computing may mean many things to many people, but in the end its full potential can only be realized if we stop trying to think of it in terms of the “known known” and embrace the the “known unknown.”  More importantly, when we think about the cloud and applying SOA design principles, we cannot continuously innovate and drive value if we are traversing connections inward to rationalize patterns and explain the abstract with the known; we must restructure our patterns and embrace the abstract in an attempt to forge new connections by moving outward beyond our comfort zones. The next generation of system design is less about creating code, and more about assembling services – innovation through extending value in what already exists rather than inventing new sources of value.  In terms of practical application, this means moving up the stack and…

Learning to Describe Rather Than Prescribe

An interesting pattern that I observed throughout 2009 is the continuing tendency to try and reinvent the wheel despite the fact that not only has the wheel already been invented, but it’s right in front of our eyes and meets our needs 99 times out of 100.  I saw this over and over with Salesforce CRM and Force.com projects; the value of using Platform-as-a-Service is that someone else (or more accurately, thousands of other people) has already thought about just about everything you could possibly need in a data model, user interface, and business rules.  And not only have they published just about everything you could possibly want in an easily configurable platform, they host it and manage all of the operational details such as backups, upgrades, and security. Yet time and again I encountered teams that thought that their way of doing things was better, and would go down the path of trying to build Salesforce on Salesforce before realizing that the same outcomes could have been achieved by spending a little more time upfront optimizing business processes and making minor configuration changes than going down the path of creating complex custom workflows, classes, and user interfaces to achieve the same end.

Some case studies are extreme, such as the support manager that duplicated Contacts across multiple accounts and assigned multiple portal logins to customers – in one extreme case 101 times – rather than setting up sharing rules properly; I don’t have to tell you what a data quality nightmare that ended up being.  In other cases, it’s simply a matter of building rather than reusing what’s already there, resulting in hard-coding of attributes and logic that should be dynamic and extensible.

What I’ve come to realize is that there is a conceptual barrier that we need to overcome when it comes to metadata and other abstracted entities; because multitenancy architecture and SOA are reaching such a pervasive state, we must shift our thinking to describe what already exists rather than trying to recreate it.  Entities exist once and in perpetuity – for example, there is only one of you in the entire world and you cannot be recreated on demand – thus our ability to provide context necessarily requires us to describe the entity in a manner that provides value to the application; the ability to describe entities with deep domain knowledge and create relationships to other entities that enrich the value of the data set will become an important competitive differentiator.

This will take time and a great deal of trial-and-error until we get it right, but in the end it is the only way to leverage the tremendous potential of core cloud computing architecture patterns; our entire concept of producing and consuming services has to change, which leads me to the conclusion that…

SaaS is Dead…Long Live SaaS

Granted, the title of this blog predicates from the acronym for Software-as-a-Service, but as cloud services mature and the traditional technology stack gets blown up and reassembled, the entire concept of “software” shifts from the self-contained, monolithic packaged application to that of a delivery framework. Software was invented to make hardware useful; hardware is abstracted in the cloud and we no longer write code down to the kernel level – we assemble, configure, and code to the layer of abstraction of the specific cloud platform.  The term “software” will gradually fade from our lexicon.

This was the philosophy that drove the Java language and multi-platform virtual machine concept, and will continue to evolve with next generation rich Internet application frameworks such as Adobe Flex / AIR.  What we will see moving forward is the continuing shift from desktop software that interacts with the cloud, to ubiquitous frameworks that consume data and logic services from the cloud and leverage the processing capacity of the local machine to enhance the user experience.

2009 and its economic and sociopolitical malaise are now behind us, and by all accounts 2010 will be the year of the cloud. While the technology and the terminology of the cloud have permeated the mainstream, it will take significant shifts in thought processes and design patterns before the cloud can be fully leveraged.  Here’s to a great New Year and the hopes that the likes of Microsoft and other relics will accelerate their fade into obscurity and stop trying to steer the cloud discussion back into a box.  Until next time, here are some…

Other 2009 Wrap-ups and 2010 Predictions

Jeff Kaplan: Key Challenges Facing Cloud Computing in 2010 and Beyond
Phil Wainewright: Tips from 2009 for a prosperous 2010
Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009 (Humorous, non-cloud related)

]]> http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/12/31/2009-the-year-cloud-computing-reached-the-tipping-point/feed/ 0 Marketing Budget Management Live on the salesforce.com AppExchange http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/09/04/marketing-budget-management-live-on-the-salesforce-com-appexchange/ http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/09/04/marketing-budget-management-live-on-the-salesforce-com-appexchange/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:06:51 +0000 deliveredinnovation http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/?p=451 Marketing Budget Management, the second app that Delivered Innovation has designed and developed for our friends at Marketing Lucidity, has passed security review and is now available for download on the salesforce.com AppExchange as a Force.com native application.

Marketing Lucidity’s Marketing Budget Management application for Salesforce CRM integrates seamlessly into the Salesforce Marketing suite, enabling marketing users to establish enterprise-class marketing budgets, expense tracking, and partner marketing funds.

Check out Marketing Budget Management today on the AppExchange:

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001e80SEAQ

]]> Marketing Budget Management, the second app that Delivered Innovation has designed and developed for our friends at Marketing Lucidity, has passed security review and is now available for download on the salesforce.com AppExchange as a Force.com native application.

Marketing Lucidity’s Marketing Budget Management application for Salesforce CRM integrates seamlessly into the Salesforce Marketing suite, enabling marketing users to establish enterprise-class marketing budgets, expense tracking, and partner marketing funds.

Check out Marketing Budget Management today on the AppExchange:

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001e80SEAQ

]]> http://saaskatoon.deliveredinnovation.com/2009/09/04/marketing-budget-management-live-on-the-salesforce-com-appexchange/feed/ 0