Thinking Out Cloud

More on Bottom-Up Adoption of Cloud Computing and SaaS

A quick follow up on my previous post on cloud computing adoption patterns. I have been guest blogging on Compuware's CloudSeluth blog and have written a post on this topic titled Cloud and Bottom-Up Adoption. In it I reiterate some of the points I wrote about in the last post and which I presented in my CloudConnect keynote, but I added another angle, comparing the first attempt of creating a true public cloud, the Sun Grid, to the first successful attempt: Amazon Web Services.

The main difference between the two? You guessed it. 

While the former (Sun) targeted the traditional IT customer, the CIO, Amazon went after developers, and that was the secret to their success.

For more, check out the full post here.

 

Cloud Computing and SaaS Models Are About Bottom-Up Adoption

Last week I gave a keynote presentation at the CloudConnect conference in Santa Clara. The title of the presentation was: "Surprise! Your Enterprise is Already Using the Public Cloud."

Regular readers of this blog (or those who work with me) know I go on about this a lot: In the enterprise, cloud computing services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) are being adopted bottom-up. In other words, by the rank & file (developers, IT admins, business folk) and not top-down with a big strategic decision by the CIO.

That's what the keynote was about and the title was addressing the CIO, who is the last to know about cloud computing adoption within his or her organization.

If you're interested in this topic you can watch the video of the presentation (you need to scroll down to get to it) on the CloudConnect web site. 

You can also read this very good summary of my talk by Rich Miller on Data Center Knowledge.

UPDATE [March 1, 2012]: Charles Babcock at Information Week wrote a nice piece about CloudConnect, including coverage of my keynote: 4 Cloud Computing Pain Points That Still Hurt.

And finally, here are the actual slides via SlideShare:

CloudConnect 2012: Surprise! Your enterprise is already using cloud computing

View more PowerPoint from gevaperry

 

The Importance of Customer Engagement in Cloud and SaaS Models

In July I wrote about the public beta launch of Totango and how it promised to help increase SaaS sales by better understanding customers, and especially their interaction with online channels, including the SaaS service itself.

Now, Totango has announced that it has analyzed and optimized the sales engagement or interaction with over one million prospects and customers of SaaS businesses. That’s a big number.

When looking at the research published by Totango here are some important takeaways for SaaS sales:

Next best action and next best channel for each customer

If you can, use a zero touch (self service) or low touch (inside sales) model. Using an inside sales rep (phone and email) is exponentially cheaper than using classic enterprise sales (somebody who gets on an airplane and wines & dines customers). And using a self-service sales model is exponentially cheaper than inside sales.  David Skok has published some of the math in his presentation on building a sales and marketing machine (see slides 18, 19, 20). As I know from my own experience with many companies, and as Joel York has pointed out, some B2B sales are too complex for zero touch or low touch selling, but generally modern buyers expect to be in charge and don’t always appreciate a call with a rep. The trick is to figure out which prospects would benefit from a sales call and which would actually be hurt by it. Big data from solutions like Totango can help: A/B testing batches of leads can help you figure out what is the best next action for each specific situation.

Know how your customers are using your service from day one

Not all prospects are created equal. Totango found that the single most important indicator of a prospect’s likelihood to sign up for a paid service is his or her activity level during the free trial period.  So if you know who your most active trial users are you can direct your inside sales team’s attention to these prospects. Free trial users who are still active during day 3 of their trial were 4 times more likely to convert into paying users than the average customer.  Active trial users who were contacted by a sales rep were 70% more likely to buy the paid service than those who weren’t (but of course sales reps are likely to choose the best looking prospects to begin with). Since a sales rep doesn’t have enough hours in the day (and is too expensive as noted above) to contact ALL trial users, it’s important to have each rep start their day by calling those prospects most likely to convert. This will increase sales effectiveness and sales efficiency: Zack Urlocker from Zendesk is quoted on the Totango website as saying that they were able to increase free to paid conversion by more than 30% using this approach.

Focus on customer success

By definition, the all-important customer lifetime value metric in SaaS is determined not by the value of the initial sale, but by the value of ALL sales made by a customer over its lifetime including expansion sales and subscription renewals. The key to success upselling an account is to know what value the customer has received from the solution to date. If you know that a customer has been successful, it’s an easy sale. If you call a customer and find out they have discontinued using the service months ago, it’s an embarrassment. You should really receive an early warning indicator that an account is no longer using the service and proactively address and turn a customer before they cancel the service. Totango’s research found that most cancellations are followed by a period of non-use and that non-use is more prevalent than you might think: a full half of paid SaaS customers log in less than once a month or do not use their paid service at all. Another 19% is using their paid service less than once a week.  

In summary, it seems to me that knowing your customer is rapidly going from a “nice to have” to a “must have”. Those early adopters of customer engagement software will be able to:

• Dramatically increasing sales by analyzing customer data and deciding on the best next sales action for each customer
• Exponentially lowering sales costs by routing prospects to the lowest cost sales channel

 

And those who don’t pay attention will very soon be at a very significant competitive disadvantage…

Check out this very cool infographic from Totango:

10 Predictions About Cloud Computing

Next week in Tel Aviv I'm going to participate in a panel about "the future of clouds", moderated by the legendary Yossi Vardi. In preperation, I wrote down a few of the concepts I've been thinking about for the past several years and I thought I would share them with my readers to get some feedback. Keep in mind these are long-term predicitions and trends (in no particular order).

1. PaaS Rules :IaaS becomes niche. In the long-run, IaaS doesn't make sense, except for a limited set of scenarios. All IaaS providers want to be PaaS when they grow up.


2. Public Rules: Internal clouds will be niche. In the long-run, Internal Clouds (clouds operated in a company's own data centers, aka "private clouds") don't make sense. The economies of scale, specialization (an aspect of economies of scale, really) and outsourcing benefits of public clouds are so overwhelming that it will not make sense for any one company to operate its own data centers. Sure, there need to be in place many security and isolation measures, and feel free to call them "private clouds" -- but they will be owned and operated by a few major public providers.


3. Specialized Clouds: There are many dimensions to an application: the pattern of its workload; the government regulations it must adhere to; the geographic access to it; the programmig language and framework it supports; the levels of security, performance and reliability it requires; and other more specialized requirements. It's not a one-size-fits-all world. At least, not always. There will be big generic clouds, and then, many specialized clouds. I've written about this in the past.


4. Government Regulation: The largest cloud providers will become nationally strategic infrastructure (like utilities, financials, telcos, airlines and shipping companies in the past). Given my "public rules" prediction above, cloud providers will become crucial infrastructure to the economy and the interests of their respective nations. They will become "too big to fail". Any change in their pricing will have a profound effect on the economy. And they will also hold the risk of a "cloud run" (similar to a "bank run", a sudden surge of demand they haven't anticipated. Not to mention the fact that they will maintain the sensitive data of consumers, corporations and government agencies. Any way you slice it, it spells regulation. But if history teaches us anything, this regulation will only come after "The Great Cloud Catastrophe" (use your imagination to figure out what that will look like). 


5. The Control vs. Freedom Debate: This sums up the story of cloud computing so far. Freedom is the catch-all phrase for drivers of cloud adoption (no upfront costs, on-demand, self-service, empowerment of the rank & file - e.g., developers), but control (or lack thereof) is the catch-all phrase of barriers to adoption by large enterprises. Every democratic country experiences this: there is sometimes a contradiction between the so-called sacred principles of rule-of-law and personal freedom. It's a matter of drawing the line -- and we're just in the beginning stages of understanding this issue when it comes to cloud computing. This debate will be with us for years to come and will shape the variety of enterprise cloud computing offerings.


6. Cloud Federations - While AWS has enjoyed tremendous international success, in any business that relies heavily on trust, such as IT, nothing beats a local brand. So people will flock to the cloud of their trusted national telco or big IT provider. But on the flip side, they will need to reach a global audience and will want servers around the world. As a result, we will see the formation of cloud federations, similar to what we see in airline alliances, such as Star, SkyTeam and Oneworld.


7. Financial Efficiency and Sophistication: Computing is a commodity, and every commodity ends up being traded, future-traded, brokered, arbitraged, speculated and manipulated with derivative instruments. The good: the market becomes very efficient. The bad: the market becomes complex and opaque. We are already seeing spot markets 


8. Cloud Standards: About two years ago there was a strong wave of interest and discussion about the need for cloud standards. I wrote then, and still believe, it is too soon. But it is also inevitable. We will, however, see multiple competing standards. At least one formal stanard specification from a standards body and several de facto standards from large commercial players such as Amazon and VMWare. 


9. The Ecosystem Wars: I've recently written about the importance of ecosystems in cloud computing. Success in building an ecosystem will be a determining factor in who wins and loses in the cloud. It is not just about the size and breadth of the ecosystem, but how well it all works together. In many ways, Amazon has done a poor job of this so far, but it has the one big compelling factor for an ecosystem: a very large install base. 


10. Horizontal and Vertical Consolidation: As with any industry, as cloud computing matures, it will consolidate. This will happen both horizontally, for example large IaaS players will roll-up regional and smaller IaaS and hosting providers, as well as vertically, for example IaaS providers will acquire cloud management system providers such as RightScale and enStratus.

I'd love to hear some feedback on these trends. Do you agree? Disagree? Have I left something out? Please let me know in the comments.

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). 

Death of an (Enterprise) Salesman

Zack Urlocker wrote a nice piece on GigaOm about the Consumerization of IT, a topic that's near and dear to my heart, as readers of this blog probably know. The main focus of Zack's post was that enterprise software needs to be more simple and with less features, similar to consumer software and electronics.

But he also writes:

In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic, revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep. That’s astonishing.

Again, as regular readers of my blog probably know, this is a pet peeve of mine, which I write about often (for example, here, here and here). And it's not that astonishing if you know what's going on at many cloud and SaaS companies. You need only look at companies such as Amazon Web Services, Heroku and Twilio, to name a few,  who are enjoying similar or greater efficiencies in their sales and marketing efforts, and whose customers include large enterprises, not just SMBs (as do New Relic customers).

As full disclosure, I've worked as an advisor with New Relic, Twilio and Heroku, and am now working with companies such as Xeround, Sauce Labs and others (including large publicly-traded telco and hosting vendors), and we are successfully building similarly effective no-touch sales models.

The reason I mention this is because despite the fact that there is a now a growing list of companies wh are having success with this model in the B2B/Enterprise space, there is still much resistance to this model by boards and investors and it's a shame because they are giving their portfolio companies bad advice.

More than a year ago I wrote Marketing Cloud Computing: Uncharted Territories, but these territories are now a lot less uncharted, and we're starting to see a playbook emerge for this model. I am going to write more about this playbook in coming posts.

 

Oh, SaaS, Is There Anything You Can't Do?

In APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers I wrote about three general eras in software business models: High-Touch, Open and Cloud.

In the so-called "open era" we saw many startups disrupt an existing market by simply taking advantage of the open model -- and specifically open source -- with either the (more common) "open core" approach or the "open crust" approach.

So the idea was (and to some extent, it still is) that you pick any established software product category and you come out with a similar product that freely provides the source code and almost always makes available a version of the product for free download.

Now, we are in the midst of the same trend but with cloud computing. Just pick any IT product category and provide it as a service in the cloud. As expected, when the trend started there were many skeptics who consistently said that for THIS product category, cloud computing won't work (whether software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service, as the case may be).

So 10 years ago when Salesforce.com just started with their SaaS CRM app, people said that enterprises would never put their most sensitive lead, opportunity and sales information "on some web site." I remember reading for the first time the news that Salesforce.com landed Merrill Lynch as a customer. Sure it was a tiny deal made by some small division within the company, but I knew it was all over.

A similar thing happened not too long ago with Zoho landing a deal with GE, and since then both Zoho and Google Apps have won many deals with large enterprises replacing Microsoft Office with their SaaS offerings.

In the case of productivity apps, such as Office, Google Apps and Zoho, the naysayers said that the SaaS offerings are severely lacking in features. They neglected, however, to realize a few things:

• With a SaaS product, rolling out features is an incremental low-effort process, so that new features will be rapidly added
• For the vast majority of users, and the majority of uses, a relatively rudimentary set of features are good enough
• The SaaS offerings had a new set of features that desktop-installed applications would find it extremely difficult to replicate, for example, collaboration and sharing, automatic backups in the cloud, accessibility from any computer, etc.

I am increasingly convinced that there isn't any category of software for which the cloud is not a good delivery method. Here's another example:

I recently spoke to Tom Greenhaw, founder of Cashier Live. Cashier Live provides a software- as-a-service offering for point-of-sale (PoS): in other words, cash registers. What I found interesting about Cashier Live is that it requires non-commodity hardware and the software needs to interact with the hardware: open the cash register, print receipts, accept credit card and bar code scans, etc. Something that you wouldn't think is an optimal fit for SaaS.

But Cashier Live is doing well with hundreds of customers. They have overcome the technical challenge of hardware integration (for now using proprietary browser capabilities of Internet Explorer, but they are working on solutions for other browsers). And they provide compelling benefits, particularly for small and medium retailers who do not have an in-house IT staff and find it difficult to make big upfront expenditures on software licenses.

Do you have an example of another SaaS offering that is seemingly a bad fit for its category but makes sense to you? Please share in the comments. 

Salesforce.com: An Example of the Bottom-Up SaaS Model

In APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers I mentioned the bottom-up sales and adoption model. That post, naturally, was focused on developers, but I said that the model can apply equally to any type of "rank & file" users.

I was flipping through Salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff's book, Behind the Cloud, and came across the following passage, which is a good (and classic) example of how the model works well with products targeted at business users:

[Sales executives] Jim and David had been with us for only a week or two when an incredible opportunity unfolded at SunGard, a NYSE Fortune 1000 company. Cris Conde, who had just been promoted to CEO, was looking for a way to integrate the data systems giant's eighty different business units and saw CRM as the "unifying glue." The possibility of our biggest customer to date, and the thousand-user deal David had guaranteed, was right in front of us. At the time, SunGard's various divisions were working on myriad systems, but Cris noted that salesforce.com was the only one that was spreading virally. "The sales people were buying it on their own credit cards and going around their managers to purchase an account," he said.

That "vote" from the users was significant to Cris, and meeting with him to discuss our service's capabilities not only yielded our biggest customer at the time but also helped build a blueprint for selling to all enterprise companies.

Salesforce.com, as you may well know, went on to become the world's first $1 billion pure-play Cloud/SaaS company.

APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers

On June 17 I gave a lightning presentation at the Open API Meetup, along with Evan Cooke of Twilio and Oren Teich of Heroku. It was a really nice event, well-organized by Sam Ramji and Shanley Kane of Sonoa/Apigee, and hosted at Twilio's beautiful new digs.

The title of my presentation was "APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers".  The gist of my presentation takes many of the elements I have written and spoken about in the past and puts them together in the context of the meetup's topic like this:

Just as we have seen with B2C, we are increasingly moving towards a "frictionless business model" with B2B products, including those targeting enterprises. This means that as a vendor you are trying to remove any barrier from the customer to acquire and succeed with your product.

To succeed with the frictionless business model, you have to adhere to a couple of principles:

Zero Touch

The idea here is to look at every phase of the customer interaction -- from demand generation, through customer acquisition and product delivery to customer success -- and eliminate touch points which create friction. A zero touch model has several benefits: it removes friction for the prospect/customer, making it easy to buy and use your product, and it also significantly reduces customer acquisition costs (CAC) and operating costs.

In the demand gen phase you want to rely heavily on inbound marketing such as SEO/SEM, social media etc. You're then bringing the prospect to your web site where they should be easily able to self-educate (with short video tutorials, easy documentation, etc.), sign up for a free trial and get up and running with something that provides value within minutes. You also remove barriers by providing flexible pricing (such as pay-as-you-go).

In the last phase, which I'll call "customer success", you want to find ways to provide low-touch/no-touch support, upgrading and up-selling/cross-selling.

There is a lot more to say about this topic and it's probably worth several dedicated blog posts, but you get the idea. I will add that although it sounds fairly obvious, it is not trivial to implement successfully.

Bottom-Up

This principle is less obvious. One of the implications of the frictionless model is that it relies on bottom-up adoption. So you are targeting not the CIO, business executives or central IT, as in the old days of enterprise software sales, but on the rank & file, whether business users, IT ops personnel or developers -- depending on the nature of the product.

With this point, I wanted to establish the fact that developers are becoming increasingly important when marketing your software (something I have written about several times before).

Product Delivery and the Frictionless Model

Given that the meetup was about APIs, I focused my presentation on product delivery. Over the years, software delivery has changed, increasingly removing friction from the process.

We can generally think of three main periods, I'll call them: High-Touch, Open and Cloud.

High-Touch Era

In this "classic enterprise" era, folks at big companies who had an interest in a certain software product couldn't touch that product without talking to a sales rep from the vendor. In addition, pricing was never revealed on the vendor web site and contracts were always one-offs that required prolonged negotiations.

You can easily see how this is a top-down model. It requires the involvement of legal, procurement, management authorizations, budgets, etc., and that's only to run a proof-of-concept.

But the delivery of the software product itself was an extremely high-touch approach. Software vendors "darkened the sky"¹ with professional services folks in an implementation project that would take weeks, months or sometimes years.

Open Era

But slowly, things started to change, especially as the Internet had started to become a mainstream, commercial medium. Some startups, such as WebLogic² (before it was acquired by BEA, before it in turn was acquired by Oracle), started offering B2B software for downloads on their web site. And as they did that, they were targeting developers, not executives. And they had to make it easy for people to help themselves with documentation freely available online (a novel concept then) and with easy access to support via email (another innovation).

I intentionally called it open era and not open source era, because source code was just one element of making B2B software products more easily accessible to developers. but certainly, the open source movement is an important part of this phase.

It is because of the removal of these adoption barriers that developers had access to software like never before. First, they downloaded and played around with it, the started developing with it -- next thing you know it's in a production application. I call this phenomenon "enterprise creep-up"³, and it explains much of the success of open source software such as MySQL and JBoss.

Cloud Era

(Not to be confused with Cloudera) 

Eventually, as both the business thinking evolved and web technology matured, we came to the realization that software doesn't need to be "delivered" at all. Instead, it's provided as a service. With the concepts of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, the idea expanded to raw IT resources, infrastructure software (OS, VMs, middleware, databases, etc.) and applications.

With this phase, almost any friction involving product delivery is removed. The user/customer does not need to download, install, configure and maintain software. There are no issues of OS and hardware versions. There is no hassle in upgrading -- upgrades happen behind the scenes and you benefit from them every time you log in.

This explains the massive success of Amazon Web Services, and particularly EC2. Developers had unfettered access to IT resources, which they could pay for by the drink and expense to their credit cards, without the need for any approvals. They started by kicking the tires, the prototyping, then developing -- next thing you know, there is a production application on the public cloud.

Software Delivery Models in the Cloud Era

So we now have a range of software delivery options, many of which I listed in Software Delivery Models in the Era of Cloud Computing. The list goes something like this:

• Professional Services 
• CDs 
• Downloads 
• Physical Appliances
• Virtual Appliances 
• Images for Internal Cloud 
• Images for External Cloud 
• Add-on/Plugin/Extension
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via Client 
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via GUI 
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via API 

Developers and APIs

As we are moving to a world where software is delivered as a service, if you want developers to use or integrate your service with their applications, the preferred access method is an API (and as other speakers mentioned at the meetup, a RESTful API at that). An API is a programmatic (i.e., automated) way to access the service, and therefore, the most frictionless delivery method of all (at least when it comes to developers).

Tying It All Together

So with all this background out of the way, the point of my talk was quite straightforward: As developers are growing in influence in the purchasing cycle of software, and as we are trying to move to a frictionless business model, and as APIs are the most frictionless approach to deliver your service to developers -- providing an API to your cloud service is critical.

What's your take on this? As a developer? As a vendor? Let me know in the comments.

Footnotes:

Footnote 1 - At the meetup I mentioned that I borrowed the phrase "darken the sky with professional services" from former Sun Microsystems CEO Scot Mcneally, who used to say this about IBM. That phrase always reminds me of the screaming flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz so I showed the picture below.

Footnote 2 - As I mentioned at the meetup, a few months ago I exchanged some emails about this with my friend Weblogic co-founder Bob Pasker. As a homage to the Weblogic guys I showed a screenshot of their web site circa 1996, which I picked up from Archive.org:

 As a footnote to the footnote, someone on Twitter got excited by the use of Papyrus font!

Footnote 3 - At the meetup I had a slide titled "The Tale of PTB". PTB, or Ponytail Boy, is JBoss founder Marc Fleury's nickname for former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz (the only Fortune 500 CEO in history with a ponytail). I talked about this blog post from Schwartz that describes the "enterprise creep-up" phenomenon nicely:

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it."

Not exactly a buying signal.

I was stunned. I asked, "why?" He responded, "Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules." I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products. Until he interrupted me, "...but my ban failed." What? "We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship."

In a nutshell, that's adoption in action. Change in IT isn't just a top down phenomenon - it's more often bottom up*.

CloudChasers Podcast: Battle of the Public Clouds

A couple of weeks ago the good folks at Novell invited me to participate in a podcast they are sponsoring called CloudChasers.

You can listen to it here or on iTunes.

Here is the description:

Battle of the Public Clouds: Who is Winning? – April 22, 2010

Many prognostications about the public cloud focus on three key vendors: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This week on cloudchasers, we’ll check out the numbers, platforms and competing visions as we look at each vendor’s place in the market today and in the future. Also, with so many companies jumping on the cloud bandwagon, are there others who are more appropriate for this list? Who do YOU think will be the winner? Will there be just one winner?

Host: 

• Matthew T. Grant

Guests:

• Geva Perry, cloud computing blogger, Thinking Out Cloud 
• Ross Chevalier, CTO, Novell Americas