 |
 
|
Microsoft provides more information about cloud computing support at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Some are reporting this as a wholesale strategy shift and in any event it is a significant move for the folks from Redmond. While we are waiting for several items, such as pricing, licensing and deliver dates, some platform information is readily available from many places such as ZDNet.com.
In their weekly news summary SandHill.com reported some very good growth expectations in SaaS, cloud computing, and open source. In the open source category, Forrester Research believes there will be a 24% growth in 2009 with sales totalling $1.3 billion in 2010.
A CIO Research study had 47% of IT and business leaders claim they were already using Cloud Computing. And an IDC study predicted that spending on the cloud will grow from $16.2 billion in 2008 to more than $42 billion by 2012. During this same timeframe, Gartner predicts SaaS spending r will go from $6.4 billion to $14.8 billion.
Cloud Computing and more specifically Utility Computing will put pressure on hosting and co-location service providers. In a move to get ahead of this Rackspace is acquiring Slicehost and JungleDisk.
It is good to see that Amazon and other behemoths cannot expect to simply enter this market and drive out smaller vendors. These may also be models for other early stage vendors. JungleDisk built it’s backup service using Amazon’s S3 services for storage. You actually sign up for Amazon’s services directly and use the JungleDisk software to easily access your data. Now this will support both Amazon’s and RackSpace’s storage services.
SliceHost’s model is more difficult because scale is so important to be cost-effective. However, it appears they were able to focus on ISVs and prove they could deliver a cost advantage versus hosted offerings. RackSpace seems to believe with the right backing the SliceHost technology can reach scale.
ElectricApps uses Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) and are very happy with it. However, we have continued to ask for a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and information on future features. We never doubted these were coming, we simply did not know when. Today Amazon announced both and placed the Elastic Compute Cloud in the realm of enterprise computing services.
In only a few short years, Amazon has taken this offering from a simple way to store things online to a flexible computing platform that is ready for many corporate functions. More importantly for customers, they have grabbed the attention of every major vendor and significantly hastened the move to utility computing.
AWS is not ready for all of computing. In fact, it is not ready to handle the majority of most companies computing needs. There seems to be little doubt that it will be able to handle more and more and to do that very soon. Therefore, all of us need to think about every IT investment we make with an eye toward the cloud. Much of our future computing should be done there.
The Open Source Census Organization has made available a ranking of open source projects found on computers they survey. The top ten include:
firefox 84.31%
zlib 65.79%
xerces 61.28%
wget 60.97%
xalan 58.21%
prototype 57.01%
activation 53.09%
javamail 50.21%
openssl 46.37%
openoffice 46.1%
Does this speak to the use of these products across the spectrum of users or to what the users who would download and run the census tools on their computer? It is too early to tell, and I commend the organization for putting the tools out there for computer users and managers to know exactly what is running on their computers.
James Urquhart, the very capable editor of “The Wisdom of Cloud” provides a good look at the cloud offerings announced during VMWorld. In Let the Cloud Computing OS wars begin! Urquhart outlines these three announcements and breaks down the pros and cons of each
uting”
We like to read what James is writing and hope you will also.
Dion Hinchcliffe in his ZDNEt review of seventeen mashup platforms points out that end users solving their own information integration needs is truly powerful, “Tools that could let thousands of workers solve their situational software integration problems on the spot themselves, instead of waiting (sometimes forever) for IT to provide a solution, is indeed a potent vision.”
At ElectricApps, we could not agree more. Getting to the long-tail of user’s information needs simply requires that users do more for themselves. What is needed is for users to have access to easy-to-use, easy-to-learn tools that enable them to solve many of their own requirements while being “good corporate citizens”. That is to say they must meet the corporation’s need for information reliability, security and availability and they must NOT add a significant maintenance and management burden to scarce IT resources. In fact, we think they should add no burden to IT resources.
Hinchcliffe outlines these five things platforms need to achieve in order to provide a save, friendly do-it-yourself environment for data integration:
1) access to existing enterprise services and data
2) web-based mashup assembly and use
3) truly end-user friendly assembly models
4) a credible management and maintenance story for IT departments
5) mashup products that address important questions about enterprise security
The Google Web Toolkit - Google continues to gather steam as it takes the error-prone process of writing JavaScript for AJAX applications and replaces it with Java code development. This puts a host of tools for writing, testing and debugging Java code into the AJAX developers hands, it also provides modularity for sharing and reusing AJAX components. Now rich web applications can be built around solid development techniques driving better accuracy and efficiency.
Google claims as much as 90% of JavaScript development is spent debugging applications. With GWT, the manual writing of JavaScript now is replaced by writing pure Java client code, and all the advantages of a robust, object-oriented language can be brought to bare on these applications. The GWT takes this client-side Java code and generates browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
The next step with Rich Internet Application (RIA) development is to remove the capture much of the code writing process in development tools and push the capability down to the average user.
Some of the most exciting changes in information creation, aggregation and sharing evolve around the concept of users doing it for themselves (and others). These concepts often are grouped as Web 2.0 discussed by Tim O’reilly in What is Web 2.0?
Andrew McAfee took these concepts and in his seminal article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, described Enterprise 2.0 in this way:
“There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. ”
Going further, McAfee described the key concepts via the acronym SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals).
After the coining of these phrase, there have been two debates regarding the importance of both the term and the concept. The initial debate waged within the Wikipedia community as to whether Enterprise 2.0 was a unique term and therefore was worthy of a listing in the community encyclopedia. It has earned it’s own listing and continues to evolve significantly from the initial McAfee definition and even from month to month.
The second debate has centered around the importance and potential impact, if any, Web 2.0 technologies will have on the enterprise. Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport took their blog debate to the floor at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
No doubt, technology alone solves few corporate issues and drives little, if any, changes. Both blogsmen described the need for organizational changes to include incentives, measures and culture. At the same time, companies providing employees with the ability to quickly and easily solve their own information management needs stand to increase the impact these people have on the company’s performance. For us, this includes not only Enterprise 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networks, it also includes tools for collective intelligence and user built database applications.
You can read the details of the debate as written by the moderator, Dan Farber, for ZDNet in McAfee and Davenport debate the value of Enterprise 2.0 and in, Rivals Face Off In Enterprise 2.0 Debate, by Sharon Gaudin for Intelligent Enterprise.
In his 2007 predictions, Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet, discussed Enterprise 2.0 platforms providing do it yourself tools for solving many business users’ needs. He went on to discuss how this leads to companies moving well down the long tail demand for IT applications.
The time is right for business users to take on a much larger role in creating, publishing and sharing custom applications. The growing IT backlog, coupled with a tightening IT labor market and a workforce with broader computer use make it necessary for business users to meet more of their own information management needs.
