The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a full-day analyst briefing and attend the kickoff session of Parallels’ 2011 Partner Summit. [Disclosure: Parallels paid my travel expenses to attend the event.] This year’s Summit built on the momentum of last year’s conference by unveiling numerous enhancements to its portfolio of Cloud enablement solutions, including:

Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hosted PBX
Microsoft System Center Hyper-V Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Syndication

Parallels also promised to make an increased investment in its Application Packaging Standardization (APS) Program to permit greater portability of Cloud services.

What I especially liked about this year’s … Read More »

The year of the Cloud has come to a climax at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where over 30,000 registrants converged to celebrate the rapidly expanding world of ‘on-demand’ solutions and collaboration tools.

Salesforce.com used the event to beat back the recent efforts of Oracle and Microsoft to gain a share of the Cloud Computing market with a new round of initiatives aimed at building on its phenomenal momentum and success.

The two most significant announcements on Day One were Salesforce.com’s offer of free Chatter accounts across its customer base along with a public version of the social networking service in February, and a new Database.com offering as a spin out of its Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Day Two began with the news that Salesforce.com plans to acquire the Open Source oriented, Ruby-based application development platform, Heroku, for $212 million in cash. Salesforce.com and BMC Software also announced that … Read More »

Dell’s acquisition of Boomi today is the latest example of the tech industry’s herd mentality.

In the same way that Dell followed HP’s example when it purchased Perot Systems after HP acquired EDS, Dell is now copying IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems with its own move into the integration business.

Besides trying to keep up with other ‘systems’ vendors, Dell is also attempting to fortify its Cloud Computing capabilities which hinge on helping potential customers cost-effectively migrate and integrate data from various legacy applications and databases into a new set of cloud services.

Dell indicated at an analyst briefing in Boston last week that it wants to ‘move up the stack’ and build a platform which can help enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) develop and deliver applications. Dell can’t compete with the other major Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors — including Salesforce.com, Google and Microsoft … Read More »

Yesterday’s announcement that Ray Ozzie is retiring from Microsoft is newsworthy because he has been at the heart of the company’s efforts to keep pace with the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader Cloud Computing movement.

Ozzie joined Microsoft when his company, Groove Networks, was acquired in 2005. Groove was an independent software vendor (ISV) trying to commercialize the groupware ideas which Ozzie had pioneered with Lotus Notes.

Around the same time as the acquisition, Bill Gates warned Microsoft’s employees of the far-reaching implications of the coming “Internet Tidal Wave” in an infamous internal memo which quickly became public and stated,

“This coming ‘services wave’ will be very disruptive…Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.”

Ozzie issued his own memo warning about the “The Internet Services Disruption” shortly after he arrived at Microsoft … Read More »

NetSuite has unveiled a great video to promote its new Hairball Institute for Business and associated Award program aimed at curing “Software Hairball Syndrome” (SHS).

The video is a fun and effective way to bring attention to the fundamental flaws of pulling together an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, including the endless integration, customization and support issues.

However, NetSuite’s video and award program takes aim primarily at applications focused on the individual piece-parts of an ERP system in the small- and mid-size business (SMB) segment of the market, specifically inventory and project management represented by Microsoft Great Plains and Project, financials illustrated by Intuit QuickBooks, and eCommerce exemplified by Websphere. It also can’t help itself and includes its sibling rival, Salesforce.com, as a ‘standalone’ CRM solution vendor.

Yet, the real culprits of this syndrome are the bigger players–SAP and Oracle–along with a myriad of like-minded legacy software vendors. Unless NetSuite has … Read More »

When Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems in April 2009, CEO Larry Ellison proclaimed the acquisition, “transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems.”

Although he was not ready to use the term at the time, it didn’t take long for Oracle to refer to its combined capabilities as a Cloud Computing solution set, which it recently put on full display at its annual OpenWorld conference.

The event was also a coming out party for its new President, Mark Hurd, the high flying former HP CEO who departed in disgrace only a month earlier. Hurd’s appointment wasn’t hard to understand given his hardware experience at HP and NCR, and now gives Oracle’s move into the system business even more significance.

HP has retaliated by announcing the appointment of Leo Apotheker as its new CEO, along with Ray Lane as its non-executive chairman of the board. Apotheker comes to HP … Read More »

For the past two weeks, I’ve been debating whether to respond to a commentary in InfoWorld by Neil McAllister which asked, “Is the SaaS Experiment Finally Over?”

But, I couldn’t hold back any longer when one of the many online publications where I’m a contributor, eBizQ, posed the question in a more provocative fashion, “Is SaaS Dead?”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond to McAllister’s column when it was first published because his argument was so ludicrous. He alluded to a variety of past SaaS and cloud vendor service outages to raise concerns about the overall viability of these rapidly expanding markets. And he used a series of Gartnerisms to warn against developer migration to the SaaS model.  

Yet, McAllister ignores the pervasive failures of traditional on-premise software which has inspired organizations of all sizes to explore and increasingly adopt SaaS alternatives to better meet their corporate needs.

The … Read More »

Seven weeks of traveling came to an end in Florida today after attending SAP’s Sapphire user conference and speaking to Tech Data’s TechSelect executives about the channel implications of the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing market.

Prior to this week’s events, I traversed the country from Boston to the Bay Area six times to speak, host and moderate sessions at SaaScon, Under the Radar, AlwaysOn OnDemand, Pervasive’s Metamorphosis and the SIIA/OpSource All About the Cloud conferences, and conduct strategy sessions with a wide range of clients in between.

The common theme of all these events and client meetings is that SaaS has become a viable alternative to legacy on-premise software across nearly every application segment, and a newer wave of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing services is quickly disrupting traditional data center models across nearly every industry.

Concerns about hyperbole outdistancing today’s realities are being pushed aside by a growing number of customer success stories … Read More »

My travels this week have taken me from Miami to San Francisco, for Parallels Summit and Pacific Crest Securities’ Emerging Technology Summit to hear and see the latest developments in the ‘clouds’.

In Miami, I witnessed the emergence of a key new player in the rapidly evolving cloud computing industry. Parallels is not a new company, but it has recently realigned its various corporate capabilities into a singular focus on cloud computing enablement.

The company is specifically targeting the vast community of service providers — hosting companies, VARs and telcos — that are supporting the IT needs of small businesses with limited or no IT staff.

In short, Parallels is seeking to help these service providers replicate the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the mainstream small business marketplace.

Although AWS has found a very receptive audience among start-ups and enterprise developers, it hasn’t generated much interest with mainstream small businesses which lack … Read More »

In my latest column for E-Commerce Times, I suggest that “once again, Microsoft may be a late entrant in the market with a set of solutions that lag those offered by today’s industry innovators, but it is still in a good position to regain its momentum and become a dominant force in the rapidly evolving cloud computing marketplace.”

Click here to read why.