Thinking Out Cloud

"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.

 

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.

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].

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.

 

AutoCAD in the Cloud Launches Today

Although it announced it a few weeks ago, today Autodesk is launching its cloud service, AutoCADWS, and its iOS apps (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) for storing, editing and sharing Autocad DWG files in the cloud.  

It's a nice follow up to my Oh, SaaS, is there anything you can't do? post from a couple of months ago. This isn't quite a true SaaS application (yet), but it shows, once again, how cloud computing can apply to a wide variety of applications and how companies are re-thinking the delivery models of their products.

At the time of me writing this post the link to the cloud service, AutoCAD WS, wasn't live yet, but according to the company it should be launched today. My wife is an interior architect and I'm sure she's going to want to play around with this new service. The iPhone and iPad apps are already available on the iTunes store (for free).

I am looking forward to speaking to some of the Autodesk executives to better understand what their plans are for the cloud, as I understand they have a lot more goodies in store.

UPDATE: The AutoCAD WS site is now live.

Have Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure Surpassed Rackspace?

Today Zenoss released a survey it conducted about cloud computing and virtualization. It has some interesting data and they created a very nice looking Infographic with the key findings.

Here's the data point I found most interesting:

 

I have followed many cloud surveys and reports that measure cloud traction of the different providers (see for example Guy Rosen's State of the Cloud). It has consistently been the case that Amazon is ranked #1 and Rackspace #2 (which is what prompted my Rackspace: The Avis of Cloud Computing post). The Zenoss survey suggests a different story with Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure coming in at #2 and #3 respectively, pushing Rackspace to #4.

Also, GoGrid's penetration, as well as RightScale's (which is a very different animal than the other players on the list) is very impressive.

Note that the wording of the question in the survey was a bit ambiguous: "What are your cloud computing plans for 2010?". I say ambiguous because the survey was conducted Q2 2010, so probably close to the middle of the year. But in any case, it has a forward looking element to it, which gives a little indication of the trends as they are happening.

Anyway, lots of interesting info on both cloud and virtualization. Check out the full survey results (requires registration).

Shopping the Cloud: Performance Benchmarks

As cloud computing matures -- meaning it is being used by increasingly larger companies for mission critical applications -- companies are shopping around for cloud providers with requirements that are more sophisticated than merely price and ease-of-use. One of these criteria is performance.

Performance has consistently been one of the main concerns enterprise buyers have had about cloud computing, as indicated from the chart of the responses to a survey conducted by IDC in Q3 of 2009.

To address this concern, and help potential cloud users in selecting their cloud provider, a number of research, measurement and academic groups have initiated efforts to actually measure and compare the performance of various cloud providers under a variety of circumstances (application use case, geographical location and more).

Here are some of the more interesting performance benchmarks out there today:

Compuware Gomez: CloudSleuth

Still in beta, Gomez CloudSleuth is likely to be one of the more important reference points for customer and media cloud performance testing. Gomez has developed a benchmark Java ecommerece application and measures the end-to-end response time of various cloud providers and locations. The tests are run from 125 end-user U.S. locations in all 50 states and from 75 international locations in 30 countries and are conducted 200 times per hour. Gomez is planning on adding the ability to benchmark a user’s own application.

CloudHarmony

Although just a startup, if it succeeds CloudHarmony is likely to be an important resource for customers and the media for evaluating cloud provider performance. CloudHarmony has a service called Cloud SpeedTest, which allows users to benchmark the performance of a web application across multiple cloud providers and services (servers, storage, CDN, PaaS). This service is currently in beta and is quite simplistic, but CloudHarmony is working on a more sophisticated version with additional features.

In addition, the CloudHarmony staff conducts a variety of performance benchmarks for specific scenarios such as CPU performance, storage I/O, memory I/O or video encoding and publishes them on their blog.

UC Berkeley: Cloudstone Project

Cloudstone is an academic open source project from the UC Berkeley. It provides a framework for testing realistic performance. The project does not publish as of yet comparative results across clouds, but provides users with the framework that allows them to do so. The reference application is a social Web 2.0-style application.

Duke University and Microsoft Research: Cloud CMP Project

The objective of the Cloud CMP project is to enable “comparison shopping” across cloud providers -- both IaaS and PaaS -- and do so for a number of application use cases and workloads. To that end, the project combines straight performance benchmarks as well as a cost-performance analysis. The project has already measured computational, storage, Intra-cloud and WAN performance for three cloud providers (two IaaS and one PaaS) and intends to expand.

BitCurrent: The Performance of Clouds

BitCurrent conducted a comprehensive performance benchmarking study commissioned by Webmetrics and using their testing service entitled The Performance of Clouds. The study covered three IaaS providers (Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark) and two PaaS providers (Salesforce.com and Google App Engine). It measured four categories of performance: raw response time and caching, network throughput and congestion, computational performance (CPU-intensive tasks) and I/O performance.

The Bit Source: Rackspace Cloud Servers Vs. Amazon EC2

According to its website, The Bit Source is an “online publication and testing lab”, which appears to be a one-man show and may not play a significant role going forward. It conducted a one-time benchmark comparing Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2 performance. 

What are your thoughts about cloud performance and these benchmarks? Please share in the comments below.

[P.S. I added a new category to the blog called "Shopping the Cloud", which will include posts that discuss various aspects of comparison shopping for cloud providers.]

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*.