ABC Series - Assisting Business via Cloud - EchoSign

In this new series, charmingly titled the ABC series, we will look at innovative ideas by cloud based companies that have Assisted Enterprises to do Business by leveraging the Cloud.

The first in the series is EchoSign. A company making headlines due to its recent takeover by Adobe. EchoSign has been addressing the problem of the long and iterative cycles it usually takes for two business groups to sign and close a deal.

EchoSign has simplified the process by

1. Introducing the concept of e-signatures
2. Allowing multiple parties to sign at once and let EchoSign consolidate the signatures into a master copy
3. Provide for a physical sign and fax option if required
4. Ancillary services like ‘store on cloud’ and let EchoSign remind you and other parties concerned if a renewal is due, tracking of contracts, etc
5. Pay on the go with no need for long term contracts
6. The associated parties only need an e-mail address and do not need to download or install any software

All of this while promoting eco-friendliness!

Related Company: DocuSign

Technorati Tags: Cloud,EchoSign,Adobe,signatures

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SETI - Shutting down for lack of funds

Remember SETI? The ambitious 'Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence' program which probably was also the first of its kind public program that used distributed computing power. 

SETI program sought to use the power of millions of distributed home/office computers to process the tonnes of data that a set of radio telescopes named the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, USA collected day in and day out. Users who had their systems connected the World Wide Web could install a small client software that would take bits of data by talking to a SETI remote server , analyse this data when the computer processor was idle and send the data back to the central server.

What's disheartening is that the program is being stalled due to lack of funds. Started way back in 2007, the array of 42 radio dishes scanned deep space for possible signals that are indicative of communication from intelligence life. The SETI institute itself was founded in 1984 with NASA funding.

The $50 million array was built by SETI and UC Berkeley with a $30 million donation from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, being the biggest chunk of money. Operating the dishes costs about $1.5 million a year, mostly to pay for the staff of eight to 10 researchers and technicians to operate the facility.An additional $1 million a year is needed to collect and sift the data from the dishes.

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SaaS - Biggest Cloud Computing Growth Driver

Forrester has predicted a nearly 6 fold growth in SaaS between 2011 and 2020. The entire cloud computing trend is slated to undergo a slightly  higher growth of about 6.11. This clearly indicates the huge role that SaaS would have in the growth of the cloud computing in general.

If you refer back to the analogy of desktops, operating systems and applications that I had provided, this starts making more sense. Once you have the hardware and bare operating system in place, these two items tend to get fairly standardized and hence commoditized. What does not stagnate is the continuous need for applications for different computational needs. Each need is further driven by niche needs. This is followed by need to optimize, need for cross integration, etc.The cloud computing model is no different. It will follow a similar pattern. First essential software will be available on demand. Next would come the need for specialized software and finally lead to mash-ups, market places, etc

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Testing Services on the Cloud

While Cloud promises the elasticity, pay-on-the-go and flexibility and theoretically infinite scalability when it comes to infrastructure, the real power of the cloud is unleashed when you have applications that leverage the above mentioned advantages cloud provides to solve certain unique problems of enterprises that hitherto had no solution beyond a certain point of optimization.

One such nagging problem that IT enterprises in particular have had was specific to testing services. Testing is one aspect of software life cycle, the efforts for which cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Nor does testing infrastructure get utilized 100%. This makes testing on the cloud - on demand an attractive proposition. 

Efforts in this direction are one. One interesting effort in this direction is from SauceLabs. SauceLabs have launched Sauce OnDemand, a Selenium based on demand testing environment that rides on top of Amazon EC2 cloud. Selenium is a open source software testing framework for web applications. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language.

With such an environment at an enterprises' disposal, customers of SauceLabs can now test in hours instead of days. Steve, of SauceLabs says that many customers see a 10- to 20-fold improvement (reduction) in test times because they can simply throw additional resources at the problem. Tests can be run in parallel, saving time and allowing for agile development and continuous integration.

What's more interesting is the additional feature called SauceTV that provides continuous screen shots of the testing as it happens on different cloud based browser instances. It allows QA teams to identify failures and see how web apps look in different browsers without having to sit through the whole process. Cool, eh?