Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Jeremy Geelan, Helen Ching, Adrian Bridgwater, Pat Romanski, Jim Kaskade

Related Topics: Open Source, Virtualization, Web 2.0, Cloud Expo

Open Source: Article

Hummer Winblad Principal Speaking Next Week at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo November 19-21 in Silicon Valley

As IT spending tightens, Lars Leckie applauds the SaaS model over existing software models

Lars Leckie's Blog

In a recent report, Gartner made some bold predictions around the near-term future of SaaS. In essence they are endorsing that the SaaS model has increasing leverage over existing software models as the IT spending tightens:

Worldwide software-as-a-service revenue in the enterprise application market is
on pace to surpass 2007 sales by 27% and to more than double by 2012, a market
research firm said Wednesday. Revenue this year is on track to rise above
$6.4 billion, compared with $5.1 billion last year, Gartner said. In four years,
revenue is expected to reach $14.8 billion.

(from Antone Gonsalvez at InformationWeek)

While it is always a little dangerous to follow predictions from analysts when considering your specific market or application, this announcement is an interesting one given the current economic conditions.

We share this premise at Hummer Winblad and have invested heavily in the SaaS model...with over 15 portfolio companies to date including Omniture (web analytics), EmployEase (HR management), Aria Systems (Subscription Billing), etc. We see the model having some key strengths in this market:

1) Lower entry point customers - easier to get started, lower risk to trial, limited upfront expenditure. Also, the ability to buy or try without getting all the traditional enterprise sales points involved (IT, finance, etc)

2) Build vs Buy for business services - SaaS models become more interesting as companies debate if they should try to build out the service themselves via internal teams, or go with a known working solution where they can leverage existing best practices.

3) Lower TCO - often the best way to justify a SaaS offering is to have a customer lay out the true cost of the internal infrastructure

The SaaS wave appears to be continuing to gain momentum...lets hope we can really see the category double by 2012...

 


Lars Leckie is part of a star-studded lineup of speakers at SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. Between them, they'll be covering every aspect of the hottest IT topic for years, with not just Amazon but also IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by a Top Speaker Faculty that includes:

  • Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
  • Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
  • Steve Herrod - CTO, VMware
  • David Bernstein - VP & GM of Network Applications Infrastructure, Cisco
  • Rob Weltman - Director of Grid Services, Yahoo!
  • Peter Nickolov - President CTO, 3Tera
  • Kevin Haar - President & CEO, Appistry
  • Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
  • Patrick Harr - CEO, Nirvanix
  • Gerrit Huizenga - Cloud Solutions Architect, IBM
  • John Keagy - CEO & Co-Founder, GoGrid/ServePath
  • Sajai Krishnan - CEO, ParaScale
  • Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
  • Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
  • Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
  • Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
  • Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
  • Billy Marshall - Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, rPath
  • Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
  • Jonathan Pyke - Chief Strategy Office, Cordys
  • Jason Stowe - Founder & CEO, Cycle Computing
  • David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
  • Dave Durkee - Founder, CEO & Technical Director, ENKI
  • John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
  • Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
  • Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
  • Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
  • Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
  • Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
  • Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group

    and with a special Cloud Bootcamp on November 20 led by

  • Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon


All breakout sessions are all listed in further detail here.



Speaker Faculty - SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo


Register Today for Cloud Computing Expo and Save $100 !

Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities
Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities Offered on a First-Come First-Served Basis. To inquire about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities please contact Carmen Gonzalez at 201-802-3021 or by email at events(at)sys-con.com. Currently, a limited number of sponsorship and exhibition packages with multiple sponsorship discounts are available for the upcoming events.

More Stories By Lars Leckie

Lars Leckie is a Principal at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and has played a key role in the firm’s investments in Aria Systems (SaaS billing and customer management) and vKernel (Virtualization Infrastructure). While he spends less time programming now, he started his technical career coding and hacking computer games. He is the holder of several US patents. Prior to joining Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in 2006, Lars was involved in founding and operational roles at start-up companies. He was a co-founder of AutoFarm (now Novariant), a company focused on GPS and robotics. Lars was in charge of strategy, product marketing, business development and building the sales team across three continents. Lars has also been involved with the founding team of SportBug, a GPS and Internet fitness company.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
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...
"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.
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...
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...
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. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just 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 else h...
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...
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 ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just 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...
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? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of clou...