SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!

I had the opportunity to participate in a SaaS expert panel at Interop in Las Vegas last week, and I came away with some thoughts on the event, on the future of IT, and a number of other topics. Rather than rehash what Jeff Kaplan has already posted in a great writeup on Interop and other events he has attended recently, I will focus on some key observations and opinions.

• The folks that put Interop together did a nice job, as always.  The thing that I found interesting about the SaaS panel that I participated in though, and the entire SaaS track for that matter, is that it was mutually exclusive of the Cloud Computing track.  In my mind SaaS and cloud computing are not only inextricably linked, but one and the same.  SaaS is just one of many services provided in the cloud, so from a context perspective it seemed like SaaS should have been a subset of the Cloud Computing agenda; after attending a number of sessions and the Cloudcamp unconference, it became apparent that most of the attendees were focusing on cloud computing as not much more than an infrastructure paradigm, which misses the point completely.  Obviously “the cloud” needs infrastructure to operate, but after watching a presentation where Sun jockeyed for positioning in the cloud infrastructure space, I realized that I was probably in the wrong conference.
• Continuing with the infrastructure focus, I noticed a troubling theme in presentations and private discussions that I had throughout the day on Monday and Tuesday – far too many IT folks are slapping the “cloud” term on anything and everything, following the lead of vendors that are co-opting the term to describe traditional technologies and services.  Having been an IT manager for the better part of 12 years, I’m familiar with how the game is played when it comes to justifying the existence of IT; in this case what I saw was the “lipstick on a pig” approach where projects were re-branded with the cloud moniker to get budgetary approval and organizational prioritization, but at the end of the day were still infrastructure projects that added little business value.  The other pattern I noticed was the “if you build it, they will come” approach to IT projects, where folks were discussing their “private cloud” strategies and on-premise SaaS (oxymoron) solutions; the long and the short of this tactic being that IT goes off and stays busy implementing new technology without a clear business directive, and then tries to get business function and process owners to buy into the new infrastructure by shoehorning systems into whatever IT has run off and built on its own.  I’ve been guilty of that one, too.  9 times out of 10 a vendor is the culprit, having done a great job selling wares to an IT director who then has to go off and find a way to justify the expenditure after the fact.
• When I put my agenda together for Interop, the session with Treb Ryan of OpSource and Narinder Singh of Appirio sounded like a must-see, and it didn’t disappoint.  Although I have heard Narinder speak numerous times at salesforce.com events, he was as good as usual.  But I had never heard Treb speak, and he stole the show.  Very entertaining and insightful, and his assertion about the majority of new SaaS applications not offering API access was fairly shocking because it flew in the face of my assumptions about the openness of SaaS and cloud computing.  Treb also eluded to how the next generation workforce will expect more openness, which he wrote about in his Sandhill.com piece.
• Jeff Kaplan moderated a session in the SaaS track that focused on taxonomy and defining terms associated with SaaS, PaaS, and cloud computing.  This was also my first time hearing Jeff speak, and he lived up to his reputation.  There was a point in the session where a question from the audience regarding service level agreements (which I will talk about in the next bullet) threatened to derail the momentum of the session, but Jeff masterfully captured the spirit of the question and wrapped it in a more philosophical question regarding the impact of SaaS on IT resources.  My takeaway from Jeff’s session is that IT is still fighting SaaS tooth and nail, and that the remaining bastions of resistance are trying to project unrealistic expectations on SaaS providers in order to set SaaS up to fail – as if this will somehow delay the inevitable transformation of IT service delivery.
• After having joked to a colleague not a half hour before about how IT managers throw out “five 9′s” requirements to SaaS providers despite the fact that 99.999% of them have never achieved the metric themselves, when the SLA question was brought up during Jeff’s session, I almost spit out my coffee; not just because of the coincidence, but because it was being brought up in a session that was designed to define key industry terms, not define performance or availability targets.  The paranoia in traditional IT circles is pervasive, but it misses the bigger picture completely; IT jobs are not going away, they’re just changing with the shift in service delivery models.  But this SLA discussion was particularly fascinating because it focused on punitive measures for service disruption, which in itself is misguided; we are talking about a maturing but still relatively new technology, and although availability metrics from providers like salesforce.com have been excellent, as Jesse Robbins made abundantly clear during his 5-minute lightning presentation at Cloudcamp the night before, failure happens.  But rather than encouraging SaaS providers to improve service availability through adoption and innovation, there is a weird tendency to use negative reinforcement as a means to enforce compliance.  Is this a survival tactic for the status quo?  Is it just small minded thinking?  I don’t know for sure, but unfortunately as strong as Peter Coffee’s presence was on this panel, I think he missed a golden opportunity to deliver a knockout blow to this tired argument by taking a somewhat confrontational approach and expecting saleforce.com’s numbers to speak for themselves, which despite their consistent excellence obviously still are not enough to convince the skeptics.  I think as a community, we need to attack the SLA / five 9′s argument and put it to rest – it’s still killing deals despite the fallacious roots of the logic.
• I used to be a huge Microsoft proponent…ten years ago.  Now I find myself asking, “Are they serious?” anytime I hear someone from Microsoft speak to their “cloud computing” strategy.  It’s the most aloof and dismissive messaging I have ever heard, and the Cloudcamp presentation and SaaS track that I attended where Microsoft gave their “vision” of Azure were agitating.
• The entire concept of an Expo Floor will be dead in five years.

There were some very thoughtful and insightful questions posed to the panel that I participated in, and I will write about some of these topics in subsequent posts – namely “The Cloud” as the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture, and reconciling the “stickiness” of service offerings to monetize intellectual property with the openness of the cloud.  Right now I’m looking out the window at a beautiful day on St. Pete Beach realizing that despite my promises to myself, I’m working on vacation…

Michael Topalovich