With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...| By Peter Laird | Article Rating: |
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| July 18, 2008 10:30 AM EDT | Reads: |
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Peter Laird's Enterprise Software Blog
This is a reference guide to what each of the major software vendors are doing in the SaaS space. I won't be sensational and predict the demise of any of these vendors. I think it's far too early to tell how the future will pan out. I can say subjectively that I am impressed with Larry Ellison's pioneering efforts in the space. I can also say that SAP is currently the media whipping boy in the space, with delays in their Business ByDesign program costing them credibility. But this revolution is far from done, so let's not waste time trying to speculate the distant future. Note: I am now an employee of Oracle, via the BEA acquisition
Oracle
Strategy
Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, has be talking about on demand software for a long time (10 years I believe), so it is clearly on his radar. In fact, he was an investor in both SalesForce and Netsuite, showing his belief in the business. Charles Phillips, Oracle President, has also spoken to the topic.
Larry and Charles Phillips have articulated a strategy on how Oracle can deliver SaaS and retain its focus on its core market (large enterprise). Larry does not intend to make a major push into the lower end of the SMB market.
- Larry Dignan interviews Larry Ellison: he discusses why SAP's move downmarket is a big mistake, explains Oracle's strategy
- Larry Dignan: Does Larry Ellison have the best SaaS strategy?
- Dan Farber: Charles Phillips talks about Oracle's On Demand business
Current SaaS Initiatives:
Oracle supports the following SaaS initiatives:
- On Demand Managed Applications
- A SaaS offering, with Oracle hosting its applications on behalf of customers
- It is a successful program, on track to gross $700 million this year, growing quickly
- Oracle SaaS Program
- Technology and business support for SaaS ISVs
- Partner program with many ISVs already signed up
- Oracle SaaS Platform
- A product offering to help ISVs build and host their own SaaS applications
Weaknesses
Critics have primarily focused on the lack of end-to-end multitenancy in the On Demand business. The argument is that Oracle will not be able to provide a cost efficient solution unless the entire stack is multi-tenant.
- Phil Wainewright: Oracle’s misconceived SaaS strategy
Further reading:
- InfoWeek: Oracle Plans Utah Data Center To Support SaaS Business
- Oracle's SaaS Blog
- Aberdeen Group positions Oracle as the leading software giant in the SaaS space
- Phil Wainewright is excited about Oracle CRM On Demand
- Oracle CRM On Demand summary
Microsoft
Strategy
At an architectural level, Microsoft is promoting an S+S model, instead of a pure SaaS model. S+S stands for Software+Services. The idea with this is that Software as a Service is most useful when pared with local software (like Office). Microsoft obviously has a major incentive to make sure desktop software is not left behind in the SaaS world, so this makes for good strategy. Whether consumers will buy into it is another matter. See the weaknesses section below for more on this topic.
- Mary Hayes Weier: Steve Ballmer explains the S+S strategy
- Springboard Research: Microsoft updates its SaaS strategy
Current SaaS Initiatives
The following is a selection of the SaaS offerings from MSFT:
- SaaS On-Ramp Program - aids ISVs in building out SaaS solutions
- Microsoft Online Services - its businesss applications ondemand offering
- Hosted versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, and LiveMeeting
- Dynamics CRM Live - hosted version of the Dynamics CRM offering
- Windows Live - a family of hosted offerings for the small business/consumer
- Live Mesh - touted as a SaaS solution, it currently is just a file synchronization service
- Messenger (IM), Windows Live ID, Virtual Earth, Search, Spaces (blogs), and Gadgets
- Architect Center - provides architectural guidance for ISVs
- Lead by Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong
- Have produced a SaaS reference application, LitwareHR
- While some of what they write is MSFT centric, most of the articles are generally applicable
- As an architect myself, I admire the work that they do
There are more services listed here, but not all are really SaaS.
Weaknesses
Critics contend that Microsoft will struggle to succeed in the SaaS market while preserving its existing franchises. It already stumbled with its business model when a European partner began offering Office as a service:
- Phil Wainewright: Microsoft in a twist over SaaSy Office deal
- Phil Wainewright: Microsoft disappoints on SaaS. Didn’t you see it coming?
- Larry Dignan: Microsoft to SaaS: We (are going to someday) have you surrounded
- Barb Mosher: Will Microsoft Office Have Go To SaaS to Survive?
Its Office franchise is already being eroded by service based offerings (Google Apps, Zoho, Adobe, etc). Somehow it has to prevent Office revenue from being decimated by pure SaaS players.
See next page for IBM, SAP & Intuit
Published July 18, 2008 Reads 7,414
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
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Peter Laird is the managing architect for the Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Portal products at Oracle. He comes to Oracle via the BEA acquisition, where he served in various engineering roles on WebLogic Portal for 8 years.
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Brian 07/10/08 06:54:02 PM EDT | |||
This is a comprehensive post that pulls together a tremendous amount of information. It is interesting to note that the majority of the movement in SaaS continues to be by companies that are focused on either the front or back office. There is precious little being said/done by the major players in the infrastructure and operations management categories (e.g. HP, BMC, CA, and IBM as you point out). It appears that the greatest opportunity for massive market disruption will come from companies delivering SaaS offerings here. Businesses have been hurt by massive enterprise software implementation failures and are generally fatigued by the lack of innovation that is taking place by the traditional vendors. Brian de Haaff, |
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2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
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Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
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With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where ...
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Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services?
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