Executive Blog

We announced an alliance with VCE, a consortium of VMware, Cisco and EMC, to build public clouds for service providers. VCE sells an integrated cloud infrastructure stack built called a Vblock(TM).  A Vblock provides the compute, network, storage and virtualization to build a public or private cloud; however, it does not include the orchestration, billing, API and user controls that enable a service provider to build a complete pay-as-you-go public cloud service.  Our partnership seeks to solve this problem by creating an integrated solution made up of OpSource running on top of a VCE Vblock.

Gartner's 2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS and Web Hosting is out, and OpSource has been recognized this year as a “Challenger,” a nice improvement over last year’s position. Putting pressure on the incumbent providers, OpSource was recognized as having an enterprise-class cloud offering that is aggressively priced.

Strong growth, product innovation and competitive pricing drove OpSource to a spot in the 'challengers' corner on this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant, moving from its position as a niche player.

Published just a few weeks ago, there has already been a lot of talk about the MQ this year, with Derrick Harris at GigaOm criticizing Gartner’s ranking system, and Lydia Leong of Gartner defending it. Whatever side you support in this debate, the reality is that the Gartner Magic Quadrant is one of the most influential benchmarks for companies seeking to evaluate vendors.

Wrecking Balls and Open PO's 2009-09-23 11:38:21

Imagine this scenario. You're an IT manager and you want one of your sys admins to set up a new server in your data center. To accomplish this you do three things:

Often the two biggest concerns about using Cloud resources today is the lack of latency SLA's and the difficulty of locking down sensitive data in cloud environments. These issues of performance and security are often cited as the most common reasons users either don't adopt the cloud, or if they do use cloud resources, the reason they only use them for test/dev environments.

Much has been made lately of the fact that the cloud is not enterprise-ready. Security, performance, SLAs, support, standards and management tools are all cited as reasons the cloud isn't ready for enterprise adoption.

Many vendors are proposing Private Clouds as a solution. Private Clouds are clouds that run inside enterprise data centers, by enterprise IT, for the use of the members of the enterprise. Basically it's a way to virtualize a large swath of the IT data center. As is often the case with technology vendors, they think that the infrastructure technology, virtualization, is the end solution the user wants rather than the vehicle with which their needs are filled. While large scale adoption of Private Virtual farms will aid in the management of the data center, it will not address the value that users are getting from true Cloud computing.

Just in time for the third part of my Silo Busting Trilogy (don't be confused by the 4, the first post was just an overview) Sarah Lacy published her fantastic article On Demand Computing: A Brutal Slog. (Sara, thanks for the set-up. Let me know how I can return the favor.)

For those without the patience to read her prose, Sarah basically says, the world is going to On Demand but selling this stuff is really, really hard. CEO's are flying all over the place trying to get deals done.

The natural reaction might be, isn't this the case with traditional software as well? It is for big deals, but smaller deals (still the majority of SaaS sales) are done through the channel. The network of channels for traditional ISV's is huge, from local Mom and Pop VARs, to huge resellers such as CDW, to the big integrators like Accenture. Unfortunately none of these organizations does much for SaaS (seems like they are as addicted to up-front revenue as the traditional ISV's.)

A couple of posts ago, I spoke to the busting of the SaaS Silo with Web Services and the impact that was having on the SaaS industry. The last post spoke specifically about using Web Services to add functionality to your app. While adding cool new functionality to the app is big for the product guys and the marketing guys, the interest from the sales side seems to be driven by a whole separate set of concerns, chief among them... Integration.

Probably the simplest thing SaaS apps can do to improve their business is to use web services to improve the functionality of their application. By integrating third party applications in "Corporate Mash-Ups" SaaS companies can have the best of both worlds; a robust feature set and a complete focus on their core product.

Companies like SalesForce and WebEx have all shown the value of doing things like offering on-line ordering and billing, tracking site usage, and adding strong reporting and user management features. The problem with all of these additional features take programming time away from the core value of the apps, sales force automation and collaboration. That's fine if you have 100's of million in funding and 8 years of development. What's the new SaaS app to do?

It's time to grow up....and learn to play nice with others.

SaaS adoption in the enterprise has definitely increased. But with that organizations are increasingly asking SaaS applications to start working with both other SaaS applications and the company's legacy applications as well. According to recent studies by both Saugatuck and Forrester suggest that integration has surpassed security and compliance as Enterprise IT's chief concern with implementing (or growing) SaaS applications.

When Mike Mankowski sent me this blog post today, I figured "Yeah! My running buddy David Greenfield from Altera is writing a post about me. I didn't even know he blogged.

Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity but the post was real. This David Greenfield disagrees with my hogwash, but that's O.K., I just like getting quoted. That said, I think Mr. Greenfield's issue that function (cloud applications) and form (cloud computing) are mutually exclusive is misguided.