Posted by: drmiw | July 16, 2009

Dropbox – cloud computing at its simplest and best

I’ve been using Dropbox for four or five months now and I think it’s great as it is, but it’s going to get even better, I found out yesterday.

What is Dropbox and why is it so great?

On the Dropbox website you can create a user account and download a small client for your computer, whether it’s running Windows, MacOS or Linux. This client creates a folder on your file system under which you can save files, and these files are automatically and securely backed up to the cloud via Amazon’s Simple Storage Service(S3). If you log on to the dropbox website you can browse through your files, and restore old versions of files or deleted files – your ‘undo history’.

If you install the Dropbox client on any other computer and sign in with your user account then it downloads any new or changed files from S3, and any changes you make get saved back to S3 (it only uploads binary changes so it’s pretty efficient as well). So you can have your favourite files synchronised between multiple computers; and you can share files with other dropbox users, too, or even provide public web links.

It’s just so easy to use and I think it’s a great example of what cloud computing should be all about for the end user: a nebulous IT service that just works.

Did I mention that it’s free for your first 2GB of data?

How is the Dropbox service improving?

I’m an iphone user and I’m almost always online, but I don’t want to be downloading files all the time so I’ve been longing for Dropbox to develop a native iphone application that synchronises local copies of my favourite files so I always have them to hand, as it where. And according to an email I received yesterday from Dropbox, that day is coming very soon! They’re also making file sharing more efficient on LANs, but that’s not quite as exciting to me.

On a slightly less positive note they also announced that free users’ undo history will be restricted to 30 days rather than the forever it was before, but that’s good enough for most users and it means more free space for new files.

Hopefully Dropbox will continue to develop their service, which, as a died-in-the-wool Linux lover, I much prefer to Windows Live. In my opinion it’s cloud computing at its simplest and best!

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Posted by: drmiw | May 8, 2009

Green IT and Cloud Computing

I have just spent a couple of days at the second annual Green IT conference and exhibition in London and the presentations made it clear that cloud computing has a key role to play in making private and public sector organisations greener.
Christopher Mines of Forrester Research speaking at Green IT 2009 in London
The conference was opened by Christopher Mines of Forrester Research. In Chris’s presentation he said: “The economy over the last twelve months has been dominating headlines – how can we as Green IT strategists sharpen our pencils and continue to make the business case in our industries that sustainability matters?”. Forrester’s research shows that venture capitalists are no longer investing in green technologies and that, in the US especially, cost savings are now more important to companies than their corporate brand image or ‘doing the right thing’ for the environment. Despite this mood shift, leading companies are still going green, he claimed, and it goes hand in hand with cutting costs.

He then went on to list four top tactics for a green IT strategy, which I’ve paraphrased below:

  1. Start at the business end with software applications and work your way down to back-end hardware, rather than the other way round;
  2. Save on storage through server virtualisation, data de-duping and tiering;
  3. Think beyond the data centre – look at the printer to person ratio, for example;
  4. Build green metrics into business plans and KPIs so salaries are linked in to green initiatives.

In a later presentation Chris went on to say that IT, as an enabler for green business processes such as teleworking and energy management, has an opportunity to provide strategy input rather than just services to businesses. And Vince Kelly, CIO of Orange Business Services, made the point that “Green IT has to deliver ROI for business”.

I heard a few great case studies for `old-school’ cloud computing technologies, and the only difficulty they reported was with the complexity of software licensing in a virtualised infrastructure:

  • VMWare was used to virtualise servers and save £40,000 on energy per year at Bracknell Forest Council – they are now looking to sell the rack space they’ve freed up at their data centre
  • Cluttons now use Citrix-based hosted desktops for their 650 users, saving one third of their 3 million pound IT budget which can now be reallocated, and they outsourced the problem so they don’t need an internal IT team anymore
  • Berkeley Group Holdings use both Citrix and VMWare for their 800 users

Another Forrester analyst, Euan Davis, gave a talk on IT service providers saying that it is only the co-location hosts who are currently including green terms in their SLAs, and they are really motivated by their own rising costs – apparently co-location costs in London rose by 118% in London in 18 months due to lack of space. He predicted that the demand for thin client terminals is going to take off this year due to efficiency and simplicity, meaning that IT can be delivered to end users with low support costs.

There was a bit of talk about the UK government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment, which is going to have a major effect on businesses, encouraging them to ’sweat’ their hardware assets and use less data centre power; but I’ll discuss that another day.

Finally, I enjoyed William Fellows’s presentation on ‘employing cloud computing to drive energy and cost savings’. He called it ‘the third way’ and predicted an increase in companies “sharing resources for the common good”. He said that Green IT and cloud computing trends are converging and their synergies are now becoming apparent, with virtualisation being the key. He said that we’re now in a time of `cloud washing’ which followed a period of `green washing’ and the market will get flooded with suppliers, but there is a huge opportunity for innovation in this space, he reckons, and I for one am counting on him being right about that!

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Posted by: drmiw | April 8, 2009

Cloudforce London report

Yesterday I attended Cloudforce in London’s Excel centre, allegedly the “biggest free cloud computing event in history”. The approach to the venue was festooned with banners bearing slogans and I was greeted by a lively costumed character, a white disc on legs carrying the familiar saleforce.com software message.

In the main exhibition hall the host’s keenest partners manned stands, demonstrated products and gave trinkets to amiable visitors in exchange for a scanned event pass. Partners represented there included BT, Fujitsu and IBM, along with smaller players, while Accenture and Deloitte held court in the Platinum Suite for the Executive Summit.

But what all the early birds like me were really there for was the keynote speech from Marc Benioff, the CEO and chairman of salesforce.com, and it didn’t disappoint.
Photo of Marc Benioff giving his keynote speech at Cloudforce
I claimed a seat in the General Session auditorium and watched a spinning software frisbee flying through the clouds on the biggest non-cinema screen I have ever seen, followed by a sequence of customer endorsements and messages, accompanied by rousing guitar music. As the ‘Welcome to the Real-time Cloud’ blurb flashed past yet again I realised that Mr Benioff was running late and even U2’s wild horses didn’t herald his entrance, but then an animated short on ‘Enterprise Cloud Computing’ replaced the music, the crowd was silenced and the main man entered stage left.

Benioff began by saying this was the first time he’d given hand-outs of his slide deck and asked for email feedback, and then launched himself into a steady stream of sound bites like a seasoned politician. He said that “the old way is not working”, that businesses need to “break out of enterprise software” and “do a lot more with a lot less”. Then he explained the title of his talk, ‘Welcome to the Real-time Cloud’, saying that with salesforce.com a business can change applications and expand and contract its user base in real time, which isn’t the case when they buy hardware and software.

Benioff sees cloud computing as a “big shift in the industry” because “it is not just applications but application development platforms that are moving into the cloud”. Moreover, “cloud computing is the democratisation of technology”, he says, levelling the playing field for small, medium and large businesses.

As for salesforce.com, Benioff talked proudly about their ten years of growth – they now exceed 1 billion dollars in revenue – and their 1% contribution of capital and human resources to non-profit organisations, which is commendable, before describing the components of the Real-Time Cloud, which rests on the force.com cloud infrastructure and platform.

Sales cloud

Firstly there is the Sales Cloud, that is, their core CRM solution, which now has three new features, all ably demonstrated by VP of Product Marketing, Kraig Swensrud:

  1. Mobile Lite, which was announced that day, provides native applications for iphones and Blackberrys;
  2. Integrated Content for viewing and cloning documents and presentations in a browser, and delivering content as a private website rather than email attachments, with trackable URLs;
  3. and Genius, which intelligently suggests related opportunities.

Bill Murphy, Managing Director of BT Business, took to the stage and reported that they had chosen salesforce.com’s CRM because of the “velocity, agility and utility” it affords, which has enabled them to improve prospecting and grow their sales volume by 25% in the last year. Their e-signature application has led to 25,000 contracts being signed online within an average turnaround time of 40 minutes, and they also announced Ribbit, which stores phone calls as mp3s and text files in salesforce.com. As Mr Murphy left the stage Beniofff said “I love you Bill” and they hugged.

Service Cloud

According to Benioff the Service Cloud enables salesforce.com to “do for customer service what [they've] done for sales”, and he proudly announced that Gartner has now placed their product in its Magic Leaders Quadrant. “It’s time for a dramatic change in customer service”, he claimed, and their product is certainly innovative.

Demonstrating the product, Kraig Swensrud, said it enables businesses to “service customers where they are: right in the cloud” and the application, which has all the usual features of an online service desk, has also been integrated with Twitter, Facebook and Google so that anyone looking for information there can be identified and interacted with, with any interactions recorded without resorting to cut and paste.

A video was shown of Orange customer serverice representatives saying nice things about the application. They have 40,000+ Service Cloud agents, it was claimed.

Your Cloud

Benioff said “We run our company on our technology; ask our competitors if they do the same with their technology – you’d be surprised”. In fact, he claimed, “I run my whole company on my Blackberry” using the native Mobile Lite application to get real time updates. Moreover, saleforce.com customers “use the same exact tools as our developers in San Francisco”, he said, and “the net result is there is no faster way to build an application than in force.com”.

Examples of applications developed using cloudforce.com:

  • Kimberley Jansen, Director of Global CRM Applications for Misys, spoke briefly onstage about their product and likened the force.com platform to playdough because of its flexibility and versatility.
  • Benioff and Narinder Singh, Chief Marketing Officer of Appirio, then told how they responded to a New Years Day request from Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, to develop what became Pledge5, a volunteerism portal, in time for Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, and they delivered it in 18 days using force.com, with 1 million pledges logged within days of the launch.
  • Jeremy Roche, CEO of Aggresso, talked about CODA, an accounting application built on force.com

Benioff said “cloud computing is the fastest growing market in the world for new software” and “the financial cloud is here”.

Salesforce.com technology

Parker Harris, co-founder and inventor, shared the limelight for a while to talk about the technological foundation of salesforce.com, saying “we have a number of patents filed and issued”. Comparing it with Google’s search engine he said “we invented the right algorithm for multi-tenancy” and “we have one code base for everyone so my developers can focus on innovation”. He also revealed that they have just 500 primary servers and 500 backup servers for all their customers. But “managing databases is hard”, he said, “and even harder is managing an application that is customisable, and harder still is making it fast”. He then hugged Benioff as he left the stage.

Final observations

The major selling point of salesforce.com is the time saved working and developing in the Real-Time Cloud. Benioff reiterated this point and it was neatly exemplified by the final guest star, Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of Telegraph Media Group. He told how they started with the Service Cloud and then used force.com to develop applications, which has freed up 25% of his team’s time so they can concentrate on other more interesting projects as they no longer have to worry about servers. His vision is to run their entire back office in the cloud, and since they have already replaced Microsoft software with Google Apps they are well on their journey.

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Posted by: drmiw | February 19, 2009

Cloud computing commuters and the future of London

Last Sunday night I found myself watching The Victorians, a new BBC TV documentary series. The first episode described the sudden migration of London workers to the newly built suburbs and smog-free, garden-enhanced homes as British cities ballooned at the peak of Empire. Commuting to work was made possible in Victorian times by the first horse drawn buses, or omnibuses as they were then called.

Britain is in a very different position now; its Empire has vanished and it’s suffering the current global financial crisis more than most, with predicted job losses of one million. Within Britain, London’s small businesses are dealing worst with the recession and the banking crisis may last a decade.

So it seems there may be another migration of London workers away from the centre, but this time they won’t be commuting back by omnibus. With revenues down, London firms are laying off employees, which is the obvious thing to do, but perhaps they should be looking to cut other overheads, too, and keep more of their people so their businesses have a better chance of survival.

New startups will not find investment easy to find so they will, by necessity, keep costs down and avoid capital expenditure where possible. These new companies will naturally use pay-per-use, cloud computing technologies, and their staff will more often than not be contractors, working mostly from home. With their established competitors losing money and people, clever startups have a great opportunity to gain market share quickly.

As for established companies that were around in the boom years before the credit crunch, they will have to adapt or die, and that means mimicking the business models of startups, writing off old investments and keeping their best people, even as contractors.

Despite the inevitable upheaval, I think that London – thanks to its history, its pool of talent and the prevalance of the English language – will still remain a major centre for global commerce; but I may be letting sentiment cloud my predictions for London’s future. For Extrasys I coined the tagline ‘For Business Beyond Buildings‘, but when it comes to cities and countries, business, thanks to the Internet, is beyond bounds.

I can predict with more confidence that, although there will always be value in face-to-face meetings, there will be far less time, money and energy wasted on commuting in the decade to come. London’s workforce will comprise increasingly of virtual commuters, doing ever more complex business in the cloud. Whether London itself, or cities in general, will still be as important in the business world is another matter, and it may all depend on those cloud computing commuters.

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Posted by: drmiw | February 11, 2009

The Force is strong in Cloud City

I made it into London just once last week, during a brief blizzard break. I took part in an open forum breakfast meeting on Reaching the Cloud on the 24th floor of Tower 42, hosted by SaleForce.com — along with representatives from prestigious organisations like BT, IBM, Visa, and The Guardian. Cloud computing is certainly being taken seriously by big enterprises now, and Salesforce.com are marketing their Force.com software platform to them with a vengeance; but is their technology any good?

As I looked out at the City from high up on its tallest building, I thought of its proud past and present as a world centre of international commerce, and I wondered what the future holds for the Square Mile and the rest of London. What does geography matter when business heads are in the clouds? Will talent migrate away from the traditional centres as travel becomes more expensive and less necessary and virtual meetings become more like the real thing?

Anyway, returning to the there and then I was reporting on. The forum was interesting, although it mostly consisted of success stories from Saleforce.com customers and a few words from the sponsors. Simon O’Kane, Salesforce.com Sales Director, said:

We have a vision for businesses to replace their whole IT infrastructure and run it in the cloud.

But they have no plans to go beyond CRM themselves, their product map is focussed on what they do best, and they are relying on partners and customers to take their software platform and extend it. And I must say that I was impressed by the 30 minute demo that followed the open forum as an expenses application with workflow, alerts and authorisation functionality was built from scratch using only a web browser. The application development layers from the high level Build-it-Now, to Visual Force, and, finally, the Apex code at the bottom, are a potent and powerful combination.

It had been quite a while since I had had any dealings with Salesforce.com, but I’m glad I braved the elements for this event. A few years ago Extrasys pitched an idea to them for hosted Microsoft applications to be added to their AppExchange, but, unsurprisingly, their board rejected this opportunity because they have always positioned themselves as the anti-Microsoft rebels. Now they are competing directly with Microsoft for cloud computing market share as the Empire strikes back with its Software plus Services offerings. (Did you get the Star Wars references in this post’s title?)

It’s going to be fun watching the race for cloud computing dominance in the months and years to come, and, just like BT with its multiple partnerships, Extrasys will work with all the big players to help customers choose the hosted IT services that are right for them.

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Posted by: drmiw | February 2, 2009

UK cloud commuters crack on as snow falls

Rather than trekking in to London as usual, I’m working from home today as South-east England has the worst snow it has seen for 18 years — and UK public transport websites like National Rail and London Midland (the train company I use) cease to handle any traffic, just like the roads. I may have had to postpone a couple of meetings but I can crack on with the projects I’m working on just as if I was in the office. That’s the beauty of cloud computing.

I have my Extrasys hosted desktop for Microsoft Office applications, shared data and email etc; and I’m also logged into one of our Linux development servers via an NX Client. My bottom-of-the-range DELL laptop acts as a top-notch thin client terminal for me.

So, while many of my fellow commuters struggle to get to work, or work from home as best they can, I’m just picking up my work where I left it before the weekend. The only downside for me today is that my central heating system broke down as a pipe froze, but I fixed that with a hair dryer, step ladder and an umbrella (to avoid electrocution!); and I’ll lag the offending pipe later using the time I’m saving by not travelling today.

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Posted by: drmiw | January 26, 2009

Cloud computing market size forecasts

Is Cloud Computing a storm in a marketing teacup or will it go the way of the last ‘next big thing’? Last week one of my fellow BCS Elite Group members posted the following question about it on LinkedIn: Is it here to stay and how big will the market become within the next 3 years?

Now, I’ve written before about the drivers for cloud computing in the credit crunch, but I haven’t backed up my words with third party numerical predictions for market penetration so I did some Googling and here is what I found:

  • In a May 2008 research note entitled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake”, Merrill Lynch analysts wrote that by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity would amount to $160bn, including $95bn in business and productivity apps (email, office, CRM, etc.) and $65bn in online advertising.
  • In an October 2008 IT forecast IDC predicted that over the next five years spending on IT cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and account for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year.

But can you ever trust what analysts predict? From past experience, no, but I think that the current bubble of interest in cloud computing will grow and last a good while, whereas the very similar ASP and SaaS marketing bubbles quickly popped and disappeared. Yes, there are strong drivers, the market conditions are in its favour and the technologies are maturing fast; but the main reason for my faith in the future of cloud computing is its name. The word ‘cloud’ stirs the imagination, conjures up mental pictures, and when customers are inspired to imagine they are more likely to change.

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Posted by: drmiw | January 16, 2009

Silver lining the computing cloud for Softcat

I attended the first Softcat hosting summit in London this week with Paul and many of our competitors. Before bringing on the first act, Dave Simpson, Softcat’s commercial director revealed their linear growth in monthly pay-per-use software licenses since 2003, which started to really bubble up above the straight line in 2008. Meanwhile, their revenue from owned licenses has stayed steady, and they expect this to be surpassed by monthly licenses by next year. Until recently the monthly licenses sold have mostly been Microsoft SPLA ones to hosted service providers like Extrasys, but more and more software providers are getting in on the act, which is good news for Softcat and Extrasys both.

Graham Crich, VMWare’s UK Hosting Manager gave the first talk, ‘Introducing the VSPP Program’, in which he outlined VMWare’s new hosted pay per usage pricing model – and also revealed that it is currently illegal to host VMware machines for clients! There is a minimum commitment to user numbers over three years, but it’s not too scary. Citrix were not present at the event but apparently even they – who have built their business on an inflexible, unscalable licensing model with big first year costs – are in talks with Softcat to provide a pay-per-use licensing model. It’s about time too!

Softcat’s Dave Simpson says that “cloud computing is the business to be in” and I couldn’t agree more, and it seems that software license providers are realising too that hosted pay-per-use IT services are becoming more and more popular with businesses, especially in the current economic climate.

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Posted by: drmiw | December 8, 2008

Cloud Computing calls in the Credit Crunch

I have been resisting writing about the credit crunch phenomenon until now because it’s been particularly crowded on that band wagon. Marketers have been scrambling to take advantage of the global panic, saying that their product or service is just what you need to weather the financial storm; and with hosted IT (cloud computing) services this is certainly true, but how can I say such a thing and why am I writing now?

Cloud Computing in credit

Reducing capital expenditure on IT infrastructure has always been an argument for hosted services, but when investment and loans were readily available, economies were growing and you could make long term business plans with a degree of confidence, this argument was not as strong. Now, of course, capital is hard to come by and the near financial future is bleak, but businesses still want enterprise grade IT systems.

Paying for hosted IT software and services per user per month as and when you need them – from a company like mine, Extrasys – makes particularly good sense when growth and revenue are not assured. Your company can quickly expand and contract, and your IT costs will vary accordingly. If you hire a temporary employee for one month and she needs Microsoft Visio and Project just for that month you don’t have to buy the software licenses outright, which would be expensive, you rent them for her for a single month. If she has a laptop or home computer of any type then that’s hardware covered, too.

Another strong driver for adopting cloud computing in these times is overhead reduction. Do you really need an office when most of your workers can work from home and you can hot desk the rest? Do you really need an IT manager to look after an office full of computers, their software, and a server or two when you could be computing in the cloud?

Not a lone voice when it comes to the crunch

The spur I needed to write this post was Kenny MacIver’s lead article in November’s Information Age magazine, crunch time for the IT industry. Writing about IT executives he says:

“In many cases, with cash in short supply, they will have to rethink some of the ways that IT purchases are currently financed and delivered to the business, swapping classic upfront capital expenditure on hardware and software licences for operating expense-based equipment leases, pay-as-you-go software subscriptions and all manner of outsourced services.”

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Posted by: drmiw | November 21, 2008

Four ways to a successful SaaS business

As mentioned in my previous post on Software + Services, David Mitchell, Ovum’s Senior Vice President of IT Research in the UK listed four ways to a successful SaaS business, which I’ll address here with Extrasys in mind.

1: Be industry specific

This is particularly good advice. In the past we targeted SMBs with the same marketing messages, and that’s not very effective when you have a product that is not trivial to explain. So at the end of last year we held a series of value proposition workshops to work out which industries our product is best suited to and that approach is now bearing fruit.

2: Have an intellectual property portfolio to gain margin in IT services

With competitors springing up everywhere in the SaaS market, prices for hosted services have fallen quite dramatically in the past couple of years, and margins are much smaller than they were, so it is indeed important to be able to develop skills and tools in house to add value to commodity products. The Extrasys team are constantly innovating, improving and learning, and we provide our customers with a range of services beyond application hosting from business modelling services through to bespoke software solutions, using industry best practice methodologies.

3: Have a portfolio of services, but don’t give too many choices

I think it’s important to give potential customers relevant options, including alternative solutions to your own, but when you get to the bidding stage those options should be reduced to one or two. It’s all about listening to the customer and solving their problems if you can, and that applies to any sale of a technical solution, SaaS or otherwise. Our sales team has been well drilled in simple techniques for requirements gathering and our technical team do the rest.

4: Focus on customer benefits – time to net cash

Return on Investment (ROI) for SaaS, and IT in general, is notoriously difficult to quantify. With SaaS the initial savings are through the capital that would otherwise have been invested in hardware and software systems, but also in the people required to support those systems. Even then there may be no cash saving over a three year period, say, but if you take into account the benefits of outsourcing enterprise-grade IT to experts, while you focus on what your business does best, then the returns are potentially great. Nevertheless, it behooves the IT supplier to demonstrate real ROI in cash terms, short term and long, especially in the current economic climate.

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