3 trends in the SaaS Space

As i trawl through pages of predictions, trends and forecasts by analysts, tech reporters and industry watchers, trends in the SaaS space stand out distinctly and are observable by me on the ground.

1. Cloud Computing driving the viability and adoption of SaaS
   • Low cost infrastructure availability is letting entrepreneurs, startups and even big enterprises experiment in the SaaS space without having to shell out thousands of dollars for infrastructure.
   • Plug and play services that dole out platforms (Force.com, VmForce, Azure), security wrappers (Navajo Systems), handle identity and federation management aspects (Okta, PingIdentity, Symplified Technologies, etc)
2. Convergence of the TV, Computer and the Mobile is creating opportunities for SaaS
   • The 3 screens we know of are converging. This means a greater leverage for software play. Write once and Run Everywhere will become the norm of the day. What better way to do this than the SaaS way. Central software that  detects hybrid screens, screen/gadget types and renders itself to optimally function in the form factor of the gadget will be the natural next thing. Roll out upgrades to your software at once across multiple gadgets. (Kony Solutions)
3. Cloud Service Ecosystems are the next big thing in the SaaS space
   • Service aggregators in the form of cloud service providers, telecom service providers are driving the next wave of SaaS adoption. Be it DreamSimplicity, JamCracker or Etelos or even TSPs like AT&T, NTT DoCoMo: all of them are creating services based marketplaces – an ecosystem that will help you pick, choose, try and buy service, provide feed back, rate services, switch service suppliers, etc. To experience how such a marketplace would look like, go to to Google Chrome WebStore.

3 places I can see SaaS in action

People often ask me about experiencing SaaS. Being a concept still taking off and the absolute resemblance to installed software, people most times are totally unaware that services they consume on the web are in fact SaaS. Hence this post to help recognize SaaS.
1. Google Docs: Go to http://docs.google.com and signup/login. You can immediately start working on a Word document, a power point presentation and are presented with an interface uncannily similar to Microsoft word. You can create word document, edit it,email it and even collaborate in real time. What’s more…You do not have to install any software.
2. Dream Simplicity Marketplace: Go to http://www.dreamsimplicity.com and sign up/login. You can subscribe to a whole set of online software from a variety of vendors/providers and create a complete dashboard of tools you find useful.
3. Google Chrome Web Store: Download Google Chrome browser and install. Search of Google Chrome Web Store on the internet.

You will be surprised to see the number of applications most of which are free that can be installed on top of the Chrome browser and you can bring them up when needed. The tools are categorized into a number of buckets like Productivity, Games, Kids, etc. Most tools are rich and pack a  lot of power in terms of features they offer. Just as good as any tool you might have installed on your PC.
Do you feel you have experienced SaaS now?

Gartner’s 3 predictions for the cloud…

Gartner has released its 2011 predications for cloud computing

1. More than half of an enterprise’s transactions will be done via cloud based infrastructure over the next 4 years - based on a survey of Chief information officers (CIOs).
2. In the Asia-Pacific, around 40 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will invest in cloud this year.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) is also projected to grow from 9% of total enterprise applications software spending in 2009 to 14% in 2014. SaaS enterprise application revenues will also more than double during this timeframe, or 15.3% of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014.

Cloud Buzz - Vol 1 - Edition 1

Cloud Buzz is a quick roundup of interesting happenings in the Cloud space

1.       Microsoft Azure extends beyond PaaS to IaaS through its VMRole offering. This puts its offering on par  with IaaS offerings from Amazon like AWS EC2 – James Staten blogs about it here

2.       SalesForce.com now offers Database as a Service. Database.com provides access to data for an application written in any language, on any platform and to any end-point device – Network Computing talks of it.

3.       Vivek Kundra, CIO of US Federal Government has unveiled 25 point plan to improve efficiency of the US government IT infrastructure. The plan hinges chiefly around the “Cloud First” policy unveiled earlier that insists that the public cloud to realize these efficiencies – Kevin Jackson blogs about it in his Cloud Musings Blog

4.    Estimates by Gartner show that the software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to grow to 18% by 2013 – Cloud Computing Zone

IT Needs Then and Cloud Needs Now....

When the digital computer age was ushered in way back in the 1960s, IBM ruled the roost with System/360, a large mainframe offering. Over a decade and half we saw the emergence of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with PDP and VAX systems, Hewlett Packard with HP-2115, Data General with its Novas. Each company had its own proprietary hardware stack and languages they supported. While DEC supported UNIX which was in its infancy then, HP supported Fortran and Algol and IBM had its own proprietary mainframe language. 

Enterprise and consumer needs drove adoption of these different stack each of which were best suited for a particular segment. Over the next 2-3 decades, enterprises suddenly realized that the computer industry had left them with a spaghetti of systems none of which were inter operable or supported cross talk. And this after millions of dollars had been poured to procure these systems. The anguish was so pronounced that it drove some of the legacy providers to extinction while others had to learn to dance to survive. Louis Gerstner, the erstwhile CEO of IBM, in his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?"  gives an account of IBM's historic turnaround between April 1993 and March 2002. Lou Gerstner led IBM from the brink of bankruptcy and mainframe obscurity back into the forefront of the technology business. He did so by reorienting the company's business to the demands of the time. One of the main cornerstones he lay was the establishment of IBM Global Services - a System Integration division whose main objective was to help enterprises stitch together the multitude of computer systems they had invested in and get them to co-work. Thus was born the huge SI industry that has seen the likes of IBM, Accenture, EDS, CapGemini and the Indian majors like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Cognizant drive business.

The reason I cited a snippet from history is to demonstrate two things

1. To draw a comparison between the digital computing era and the cloud computing world as it is evolving
2. To give the reader an indication of how transformations in the industry happen over years and decades.

Cloud computing industry was a buzz word for most part of the first decade in the new millennium. The fag end of the decade saw the emergence of Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, Go Grid, SalesForce's Force.com as some prime cloud players. We also see a lot of smaller players who serve niche needs like Service Mesh, Zuora, JamCracker, Ping Identity, etc who complement the bigger players. However, the biggest lacuna is the interoperability of clouds. Users choosing a cloud provider do not have a seamless path to migrate to another cloud.provider. What you see is a picture similar to the erstwhile era. A rising need felt by enterprise customers to ensure a fair degree of standards and interoperability between clouds. What that also means is the need for companies that would help enterprises achieve it. Whether this set of players would come from the the big league or from the small niche of players remains to be seen...What's your take on this matter?

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Understanding Cloud Computing - 2

Remember the analogy I presented to you in my last post in the series? About the cloud being akin to a giant computer. We also talked about the 3 layers of this computer. What was interesting was the fact that each of them had the "as a Service" suffix. What does this mean and what are its implications. 

Extending out giant computer analogy a little further, it is certain that such a giant computer is not for any individual or institution's use alone. Rather it is a computer that can be used by everybody who has a need for the same. Theoretically, the computer is so huge that every body could make use of it at different points of time or at the same time. While somebody might be needing just a few GB of hard disk space on this computer and some processing power, another team might be thinking of requesting several TB of space and lots of RAM and some specific applications. As each and every individual/team requests these units from the computer, these are allocated almost in real time to these individuals. Once they are done using the computer for their use, they relinquish the requested resource units that get added to the main pool for somebody else to take advantage of them. Hence the giant computer's resources are available on demand as a service. Just like how a taxi is available as a service for you when you need to get from one point to another or your when your own car has broken down. 

All three layers of the cloud, the infrastructure layer, the platform layer and the software layer are available as a service for its consumers. Hence  the suffix "as a service".

In our next post in this series, lets look at the Infrastructure layer in detail and understand its intricacies

Understanding Cloud Computing - 1

A lot of my readers ask me fundamental questions on cloud. This series of posts are dedicated to all my fans and readers who would like cloud computing to be simplified for them.

Let's start with a pictorial analogy of cloud computing to something that we are more familiar with. Consider a server or even your desktop computer or a laptop. A scratch at the surface to see what makes these computing devices tick reveals 3 distinct layers.

1. The hardware consisting of the motherboard, the memory (RAM, hard disks), the processor, etc
2. The operating system that loads when you first switch on your computer - Windows, Linux, Unix, etc
3. The software applications that you use when using your computer - Notepad, Word, Paint Brush, Winamp, Internet Explorer, etc

A cloud in simple terms is your computer multiplied sever hundred thousand times and can go beyond theoretically to infinity. More on this characteristic in my next post.

Coming back to the analogy, imagine the cloud to be one giant computer. Obviously you would need the equivalent of the 3 layers here too, right?

1. Infrastructure - IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - The hardware layer equivalent
2. Platform - PaaS (Platform as a Service) - The Operating system equivalent with more bells and whistles. Lets understand that in a separate post
3. Software - SaaS (Software as a Service) -The software applications you would use to draw on the power of the giant cloud computer.

You might have noticed that all three had the terms "as a Service" attached to them. Let's explore that in our next post in this series.