Thinking Out Cloud

The Neglected Cloud Adoption Driver: Pre-Integrated Ecosystem

One of the overlooked drivers of cloud adoption is the tightly integrated, I call it pre-integrated, ecosystem you get when you choose the right provider.

Because cloud environments are generally homogenous and consistent within their own boundaries -- and this is true for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS -- and because they are tightly controlled by the provider, the cloud provider is in a position to pre-integrate other systems, components and apps to the infrastructure (or the application, in the case of SaaS). 

In traditional IT, integration is one of the most complex, painful and costly processes. A pre-integrated ecosystem allows making these integrations simply by flipping a switch.

Pre-Integration Examples

My first exposure to the concept of pre-integration was in January of 2006, when Salesforce.com launched the AppExchange. This was more than two years before Apple launched the AppStore, mind you. And the idea wasn't fully baked yet, but it was certainly an "a-ha" moment. And it goes to the heart of what's so revolutionary about cloud computing.

Today, for example, you can with a few clicks of a button, integrate between Salesforce.com's CRM app and Google Adwords, Marketo, LinkedIn, VerticalResponse, Zendesk and hundreds of other applications. Again, with traditional on-premise CRM such integrations would have been an expensive and lengthy proposition.

But a pre-integrated ecosystem doesn't only apply to SaaS. It also works well with PaaS and IaaS clouds.

The first chance I got to implement the concept was with the Heroku founders, James, Adam and Orion, in early 2009 with the Add-Ons that can be added to any app a user developed and runs on the Heroku PaaS. A perfect example of pre-integration at Heroku was New Relic, which is Application Performance Managemet (APM) as-a-Service. You basically get New Relic APM capabilities with a click of  a button. In the on-premise world, implemeting an enterprise-grade APM (Wiley, for example) takes months of professional services to implement.

In Infrastructure-as-a-Service, there are many examples of a pre-integrated ecosystem particularly around AWS and the OpenStack framework. In particular there are many management and monitoring tools that have pre-integrated with these two cloud platforms, but other software categories as well.

Daisy-Chaining Cloud Services

The notion of pre-integration can be taken even further.

When I hosted the cloud track at QCon 2010, one of the speakers was Thor Muller, CTO & Co-Founder of GetSatisfaction, and in his presentation he introduced me to a phrase I've been using ever since: "daisy-chaining services".

My favorite example, one from SaaS for small business, involves daisy-chaining Bidsketch, Freshbooks, Highrise and RightSignature.

Bidsketch is a SaaS product for creating and sending proposals. It lets an individual or company create a proposal and share it with a prospective client who can then log in and view the proposal on Bidsketch, make comments and changed and ultimately approve the proposal. As all of this happens, Bidsketch automatically updates the events in the Highrise (CRM) entry for that client ("Proposal sent", Proposal approved", etc.).

Once the proposal is approved, Bidsketch then activates another service: RightSignature, which is used for electronic, online signatures. Both sides can sign the approved proposal, and this fact is updated in Biksketch: proposal signed. In turn, Bidsketch, again updates the Highrise CRM system. Bidsketch can then automatically create an invoice in the Freshbooks invoicing service -- and Freshbooks will then update Highrise that an invoice was sent, payment was received, etc.

What Does This Mean for Cloud Customers?

Customers are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of ecosystems of cloud services -- and specifically of the value of pre-integration.

I was recently asked to recommend a CRM system to one of the startups I am on the advisory board of. As much as I dislike the complexity and poor peformance of Salesforce.com, I had no choice but to tell them it's the only way for them to go -- for the simple reason that it's the only CRM SaaS offering that is guaranteed to be pre-integrated not only with every app they need today, but also with ones they will need in the future, which may not even exist yet.

Case in point, when Totango -- another company I am an advisor to -- recently launched its customer engagement SaaS offering (an emerging category, see David Skok's post), it immediately started with support for SFDC. And you can safely assume that any other startup that launches a product that could benefit from integration with CRM, will first support Salesforce (or Highrise if it's targeting SMBs).

In summary, the breadth and depth of ecosystems is becoming a critical factor in how customers choose which cloud services to bet their business on.

I'm hoping to write a separate post on what this means to startups and other cloud services providers. Suffice it to say for now, it's something you should be thinking about...

 

OpenStack Meetup - Diablo Release

This evening I'll be giving a brief presentation at the OpenStack SF Bay Area Meetup at the Caspian Tech Center in Sunnyvale. There are some other great speakers and the event is in celebration of the OpenStack Diablo release.

Check out the agenda and Meetup group.

Join Bay Area stacker community for the second quarterly meet and drink to celebrate the Diablo release, hear from OpenStack core team members, ecosystem partners and major enterprise users.

We’ll start at 7pm with open bar, food and mingling as usual. As a courtesy of Dave Nielsen and the Cloud Center, we’ll also offerguided cloud datacenter tours at the event location prior to start of speaker sessions.

7:30 to 8:30 we’ll have four 15-minute speaker sessions:

• Josh McKenty – Co-founder of OpenStack, project policy board member and CEO of Piston – will say a few words on what’s new and significant in Diablo release.

• Geva Perry – cloud blogger, advisor at Heroku, GigaSpaces, Xeround etc. – will offer his perspective on the significance of OpenStack as the new emerging standard in open source cloud computing.

• Jason Venner – Cloud Architect at X.com & eBay – will share his experience deploying and running OpenStack for X.com.

• Marc Padovani – Director of Product Management, HP Cloud Services – will talk about hpcloud.com announcement and HP's commitment to OpenStack. 

The event is free, but we’d appreciate if you can RSVP so we can plan food, drinks and seating capacity accordingly.

 

Totango Brings the Promise of Cloud and SaaS Models a Step Further

Today, my friends at Totango announced their $3.8 million Series A funding and the public launch of their service. I've been involved with the company since the beginning (in fact, before the beginning) as an advisor and I wanted to give my take on why I think what they are doing is so significant to SaaS companies and to cloud companies in general.

As I've written many times before -- and at this point is pretty much generally accepted -- the move to a service delivery model for software (SaaS) and other aspects of IT (PaaS and IaaS) is changing every aspect of the business: engineering and operations, but even more interesting to me, the business side of the house, including marketing, sales and customer success. This is especially true for B2B companies.

About a year and a half ago, Guy Nirpaz, now Totango co-founder and CEO, and I spent an afternoon in a coffee shop on The Embarcadero in San Francisco thinking about where all this leads to. What new business needs arise from this model?

Then, as now, I had the advantage of working with multiple companies who were on the cutting-edge of this trend, companies such as Heroku, Twilio, Sauce Labs and New Relic. From that vantage point I could see a curious phenomenon. In theory, given that the entire interaction of customers with their products was online, they could truly understand what customers and prospects (in free trials) are doing. They should have been able to answer questions such as how are we doing on all of the key performance indicators of our business? Whice trial users are ramping up their activity and are ready to buy? which ones are having problems? What features of our product are the most and least popular? and many other questions.

That was one of the promises of the cloud delivery model, but in reality it didn't quite materialize. 

Don't get me wrong. Almost every company in the space, startup or established company, has some sort of "dashboard" for tracking KPIs and some aspects of customer usage, but these tools are usually done in a rush and as an afterthought. They are crudely developed by an engineering team that provides this because the business folks are demanding it but there heart isn't really in it.

This results in half-baked solutions. For example, it is very common that every time a business person asks a simple question, a developer has to stop what they are doing and work through a series of SQL queries and other coding tasks to get them the answer. And that is assuming they have properly instrumented the application to track all of the relevant activities, events and metrics in the first place.

As you can imagine, with such a high barrier (and a lot of tension arises because of this), these types of analyses don't happen often. Not only are they not being done consistently and continuously, they are not being done methodically. There were no "best practices" as to what we should be looking at and what it means. 

It is this problem that Totango addresses. 

Totango has many great things in the work but it begins by focusing on sales. And not no-touch sales, but SaaS companies that have inside and field sales people who need to sell, renew and upsell accounts.

Companies such as Zendesk and Jajah have already been using the service in private beta and proving the value. It's worth checking out (it's free for now). 

"The Heroku of..."

Tomorrow I'm paying a visit to my good friends at Heroku, one of the most exciting and successul companies I've had the pleasure of working with in the past 2.5 years, since I have become a full time advisor/board member.

The most fun to watch has been how Heroku has changed from a complete unknown, the very concept of which I often had a hard time explaining to people in the industry, to a staple of startup pitches. After the Salesforce.com acquisition, it's become a common phrase to say "We're the Heroku of..." So much so that some people are tired of it (check out this Hacker News thread). 

Some examples:

• The Heroku of PHP
• The Heroku of Django
• The Heroku of Wordpress (WPEngine)
• and the list goes on

Anyway, will be fun to visit with the guys again.

 

Appearance on Cloud Cover TV

Last week I appeared on TechTarget's Cloud Cover TV show, hosted by Jo Maitland. Basically shooting the breeze on the latest interesting developments in the cloud computing market.

If you can't see the player below, click here.

Video: Cloud Databases Panel at GigaOm Structure

Without further ado, here's he video of the cloud database panel I moderated earlier today at GigaOm Structure:

gigaomstructure on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

 

VMWare's CloudFoundry.com Announcement

Today VMWare is about to make a big announcement about CloudFoundry.com. I'm writing this post before the actual announcement was made and while on the road, so more details will probably emerge later, but there is the gist of it:

VMWare is launching CloudFoundry.com. This is a VMWare owned and operated platform-as-a-Service. It's a big step in the OpenPaaS intiative they have been talking about for the past year: "Multiple Clouds, Multiple Frameworks, Multiple Services".

For those of you keeping track, CloudFoundry is the official name for the DevCloud and AppCloud services which have come out in various alpha and beta releases in the last few months.

The following diagram summarizes the basic idea behind CloudFoundry.com:

In other words, in addition to running your apps on VMWare's own PaaS service (CloudFoundry.com), VMWare will make this framework available to other cloud providers -- as well as for enterprises to run in-house as a private cloud (I'm told this will be in beta by the end of this year). In fact, they are going to open source CloudFoundry under an Apache license.

They're also going to support multiple frameworks, not just their own Java/Spring framework but Ruby, Node.JS and others (initally, several JVM-based frameworks). This concept is similar to the one from DotCloud, which I discussed in What's the Best Platform-as-a-Service.

On the services front, they are going to provide multiple services provided by VMWare itself, and eventually, open it up to the ecosystem for third-parties (similar to Heroku Add-Ons or Salesforce.com AppExchange).

Where it says in the diagram above "data service", for example, VMWare already has three offerings: MySQL (similar to Amazon RDS), MongoDB and Redis. For "message service" they will offer their own Rabbit MQ and other messaging services.

Finally, you'll notice there is reference to a "Downloadable 'Micro Cloud'" in the diagram. This is a free offering from VMWare that lets you run a CloudFoundry cloud on a single VM, which you can carry around on a USB memory stick or run on an Amazon Machine Image (which is what Michael from RightScale is going to demonstrate today). The idea behind the Micro Cloud is to appeal mostly to developers and let them easily do development in any physical location and seamlessly load their app to a CloudFoundry cloud when they are ready.

The Micro Cloud is one more aspect of this intiative that is intended to appeal to developers and encourage bottom-up adoption for the VMWare cloud. I've discussed the idea of developers being the driving force of cloud adoption before, and you can read more about it in this post. 

All in all, a very smart, if not unexpected, move by VMWare. But it remains to be seen how VMWare will handle the inevitable conflict between being a cloud provider and hoping to be the provider of infrastructure software for other providers. Case in point: VMForce, the joint offering announced by VMWare and Salesforce.com several months ago.

Officially, both companies say everything is on track for the VMForce offering, and VMWare says VMForce is "powered by CloudFoundry". But as I am quoted in this TechTarget article, the companies were already on a collision course, especially after Salesforce.com's Heroku acquisition.

From talking to some of the folks at VMWare, it's clear that they too believe that the future of computing is PaaS -- something I believe strongly in. It will be interesting to see how they execute on this grand vision.

Video Interview on Zenoss's Cloud Management Blog

Josh Duncan at Zenoss, which makes cloud monitoring and management software, interviewed me over Skype for their Cloud Management Blog. We covered a pretty wide range of cloud-related topics and Josh split up the video interview into two parts.

The first part is now up on their blog here. (by the time I post this blog the second part may be up as well).

To quote from Josh:

Here’s what we cover in part 1 of Thinking Out Cloud with Geva Perry:

• “It’s happening now” – what are all the challenges and strategies to address
• The business case for the Cloud – from cost savings to business agility
• The operational challenges of Cloud computing
• “The CIO doesn’t matter” - democratization of IT (link to Forbes article)

See the video.

UPDATE: Part 2 is also avilable now at: http://blog.zenoss.com/2011/03/thinking-out-cloud-with-geva-perry-part-2/ 

What's the best Platform-as-a-Service?

Recently there has been a surge of interest in PaaS. It is partly fueled by the maturing of the various offerings and partly by industry developments, such as the $250 million acquisition of Heroku by Salesorce.com (disclosure: I was an advisor to Heroku) and Amazon Web Services releasing Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation. Case in point: just yesterday, PaaS player DotCloud announced a $10 million funding round from top-tier funds Benchmark and Trinity.

Not a lot of information is provided on the DotCloud web site and announcement -- they are still in private beta -- but one thing is clear: they are positioning themselves against Heroku.

In the announcement, DotCloud bills itself as a "2nd-generation PaaS" (thank god not "PaaS 2.0") and the news articles about it imply that Heroku is first generation.

Here's a quote from TechCrunch:

DotCloud’s appeal is in its flexibility. Unlike the first generation Heroku and its clones, DotCloud lets developers to build and deploy their applications rapidly by allowing them to customize components and supporting multiple languages and tools.

This is also the positioning on DotCloud's home page, where they state in one of their four key benefits points (italics mine):

Not just for toy apps.

Anyone can deploy "Hello World" in 30 seconds. But you're building a product. You need the freedom to mix and match languages, frameworks and databases as you see fit. DotCloud supports that. Our competitors don't.

I have no doubt that DotCloud has a great concept, technology and team -- if only because smart nvestors like Peter Fenton, Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Dan Scholnick and others put so much money in them -- but they are missing the point on this one.

The approach of giving a more flexible platform -- one which allows you to "mix and match languages, frameworks and databases" and in which you can "pop the hood", as DotCloud seems fond of saying -- that idea is not a more evolved or better generation of PaaS; it's simply a different one.  

It's not a new idea in tech and software that there is a trade-off between flexibility and ease-of-use; between catering to the 20% power users and the 80% everyday users; between general purpose platforms and specialized platforms. PaaS is no different. 

More than a year and a half ago I had written about the need for a variety of specialized clouds (and specifically PaaS clouds), which are different from each other on a number of dimensions, which included things like: framework support, usability, application use case, domain (i.e., functionality) and more. 

A multi-language PaaS is not superior to a single-language PaaS. There must be a trade-off in the technology itself, and also a different go-to-market approach.

From a technology perspective, a very focused platform, such as Heroku in the Ruby space, has many advantages. Everything is tightly integrated, pre-installed and pre-configured. This shields the user from much of the unwanted "under the hood" and repetitive tasks. It also makes sure that -- accepting the limitation of ruby only -- the platform can provide much richer functionality out-of-the-box and much shorter development and deployment cycles.

The DotCloud approach, on the other hand, gives more flexibility and would serve a more complex class of applications that indeed use multiple languages and frameworks. But the trade-off is more complexity, both in their own development efforts as well as for their users. Which brings me to my second point about go-to-market strategy.

As a general rule, startups need to focus on a well-segmented community of customers. For Heroku, the intense focus on ruby developers was a major contributor to their success (for more on this see my post from June 2009 Ruby Developers: The Cloud Generation). It allowed them to keep their message very focused and direct all of their marketing efforts (and budget) on a very specific audience.

I am not sure what DotCloud's market segment is yet. It's not very clear from their home page, but given that they are in private beta and just recently received funding, that's okay. They will, however, eventually have to find their focus. Displaying twenty logos of languages and frameworks on their home page is nice, but may also be confusing and off-putting to many developers.

Developers (and non-developers) now have a large and growing range of platform-as-a-service offerings to choose from. Just to give you a taste of the variety here are some PaaS examples (in no particular order), each one focused on different combinations of technology platforms and/or types of users and applications: 

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, Heroku, VMForce, Makara/Redhat, Force.com, VMWare Cloud OS (aka AppCloud/DevCloud), DotCloud, Cloudbees, PHPFog, Engine Yard, Application Craft, Morph Labs mCloud On-Demand, OrangeScape, WorkXpress, Wix.

Although we will see more players emerge in the space, not all of them will be winners. That said, to answer the question in the title of this blog post: What's the best platform-as-a-service? It depends on who you are and what you're trying to do.

[Stay tune for more on this topic and the players mentioned above].

Two Computerworld Articles on Cloud Computing

Yesterday a couple of Computerworld pieces in which I'm quoted came out. They are both authored by Beth Schultz.

The first is about Cloudonomics, or how can enterprises figure out the potential cost-savings and other financial effects of cloud computing. My basic take was that it's difficult to measure the exact financial impact of cloud computing because one of it's major benefits is business agility. See the full story.

The second is about the plethora of Cloud Services available to enterprises and how to choose among them. My take on this one was that it's not a one-size fits all game and organizations will need different tools for different tasks. Read the full story.