SaaS

Why is Larry Ellison afraid of the cloud?

I just finished watching Larry Ellison’s conversation with Ed Zander at the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum. While these type of dialogues are not rare in the industry, I found this one to be particularly insightful. I think we will look back at this conversation as a watershed moment regarding the role of hardware, software, integration, and the cloud.

In case you missed seeing this video on YouTube (I recommend that you watch it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmrxN3GWHpM). In case you don’t have time, let me summarize the key points that I heard and give you my take.

In essence, with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is hoping to put the right pieces in place to position itself as an equal to IBM in the IT market. Clearly, Oracle likes the software stack that Sun has built including ownership of Java and a lot of interesting distributed computing technology. And if we are talking about the cloud, Sun has a lot of good technology it picked up through various acquisitions. While many prognosticators assumed that Oracle would sell off Sun’s hardware assets, it is becoming clear that Oracle wants to make good use of Sun’s hardware. On some certain level, I think this is crazy since the hardware business has low margins and a complex business model. However, if you listen to Ellison’s talk it is clear why he wants to keep the hardware. He envisions a world where customers want to buy in a more straightforward way – no complex integrations, no piece parts from hundreds of different vendors.

Clearly, customers do want to have fewer vendors to deal with but it is not clear that they want 100 percent one-stop-shopping. It’s sort of like back to the good old days of computing in the 1970s – one mainframe, integrated applications, and simplified management.

What Oracle envisions is to be able to ship a system to its customers that comes bundled with everything including packaged applications, bundled with its database, middleware, — all the bells and whistles. It would be tuned and configured as a black box. The customer benefit would be that there would be no need for any integration of component parts. It would act like a complete system. There are clearly benefits to Oracle in being able to grab total share of wallet from the customer. For the customer there is benefit in not worry about so many moving parts.

The only thing that could possibly spoil the vision is cloud computing. Customers looking to a future of cloud computing would increasingly rely on software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service to meet many of their computing needs. Increasingly companies are looking to a new generation of applications that leave upgrading software to the SaaS provider.

Larry Ellison decries the cloud because it assumes that there is no middleware, hardware, chips, etc. But, of course, this is not true. There are lots and lots of hardware and chips but they are configured and used differently than Ellison’s vision. There are lots of middleware and business services that will be available to customers but it is offered in a new economic model that the cloud represents.

I think that Ellison is uncomfortable with the cloud because it could have an impact on Oracle’s vision of deeper control over the customer. In time, the cloud could also dramatically impact maintenance revenue.

Of course, the cloud won’t take over the world of computing in the short run. It will evolve over time until more and more computing is based on the cloud. The cloud will have a disruptive impact on the way everything from hardware, software and services is delivered. And if I had to bet on outcomes, Ellison will be plotting a comprehensive cloud strategy just in case.

Paglo goes whole hog to lift log fog; this blog agog

Cloud-based IT management provider Paglo has busted out with an interesting twist on managing network log files: Google-style browser search, cross referenced over time. Paglo says it’s the first of it’s kind. It’s definitely unique. Here’s a sample of the dashboard:

Anyone who’s ever had to slog through truckloads of log files will see Paglo’s utility instantly. With its intuitive search interface and comprehensive set of data analytics, this screenshot will make admins mouths’ water.

Paglo is an example of a strange new beast that we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of: a pure cloud-based management tool. To get started, simply download the open source Paglo Crawler to your network and it will get start gathering data from WMI or syslogs and feed them back to an individual index on Paglo’s infrastructure.

Paglo CTO Chris Waters said the idea for Paglo sprang from seeing the ubiquity of search (everyone know how to use a search engine, right?) and applying it to the user demand they saw for log management.

“We know there’s latent demand in the market for logs.” he said. Since Paglo was already collecting, massaging and delivering complex data in real time, adding searchable logs to customers’ data was a natural fit. (Click here to read about about folks running new kinds of databases in the cloud.)

Aside from its bravura log search tool, Paglo also has a fairly standard set of MSP features that will be familiar to any IT pro, including performance and network monitoring, and patch management for Windows. It’s thin on other standard features, though, like remote desktop access or remote control. Clearly, it’s biggest strength is the way it aggregates network information.

Most importantly, though, Paglo requires no initial investment — it’s pure pay-as-you-go. More tradtional MSPs require onsite hardware and a hefty licensing fee to get started. Waters is banking on making it cheap and easy to get started and scaling out Paglo’s virtualized, hosted infrastructure to keep growing. All of which, naturally, is only practically possible for a small business “in the cloud.”

10 plugs for Salesforce.com by the New York Times

Acknowledging that a vendor paid for your hotel and travel does not excuse shameless reporting. It just makes it pointless. I’d rather read a creative Salesforce.com ad than a re-written press release. Writing for the New York Times, here’s what Bernard Lunn had to say about Salesforce.com after his free trip to Dreamforce, the company’s user show.  His points are in bold, mine are underneath.

1. They are ambitious.

Really? Find me a tech company that isn’t.

2. They have a good shot at meeting this ambition.

If the crumbling U.S. economy and worldwide recession don’t hold Salesforce.com back, nothing will.

3. They are a marketing machine with flair.

How sweet. Has Mr. Lunn met EMC or Cisco or Oracle or any other tech company with marketing machines the size of small planets? There’s plenty of flair, trust me. That’s not the problem.

4. Their biggest issue is maybe price.

Only maybe?

5. They see today’s troubled economy as their moment to win big.

As does every underdog.

6. Their vendor ecosystem is making money and acting bullish.

Interesting. Which companies, exactly, are making money and acting bullish today?

7. They believe good software design matters to the core economics of cloud computing.

Good software design matters to everyone. No business or consumer service survives long term without it.

8. They know how to partner with big companies to make themselves look bigger.

Wheeling out Amazon, Google and Facebook to conservative enterprise IT buyers probably makes them nervous, not comfortable. How many outages has Gmail had in the past month? How many outages has Amazon S3 had since it launched? Bigger is not necessarily smarter.

9. They have focused research and development.

Care to share the roadmap?

10. They will need to be careful about usability issues?

He mentions that the Software as a Service (SaaS) world is “lock-in resistent with low switching costs” meaning users can move to other providers easily.  I am pretty sure he has this entirely the wrong way around. From my understanding, it’s actually extremely difficult to move customer relationship management data out of Safeforce.com and into another SaaS provider should you be unhappy with the company’s service.

Symantec ‘cloud’ service patchy

This week, Symantec Corp. launched a service that pushes configuration updates to Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Storage Foundation users specific to that user’s environment. It’s called Veritas Operations Services and is supposedly “cloud based,” according to Sean Derrington, the director of storage management and availability at Symantec. But it’s more like Software as a Service than cloud computing. Here’s a snapshot of our Q&A with Derrington:

How does Symantec push out alerts to users?

Sean Derrington:  When a customer creates an account through [the Veritas Installation Assessment Service at] VIAS.Symantec.com, they have the option to “opt in” for notifications. The alerts are sent via email and the specifics of the alert (e.g., maintenance pack, hot fix, new technical documentation) are included and unique to the customer’s server/storage environment. (For example, a Sun Solaris customer won’t receive IBM AIX updates.) Once the customer receives the notification, they can take the appropriate action at their discretion, timing, and incorporate it into their change-control processes.

How is this a “cloud” service other than in name?

S.D.: This is a cloud-based service, as it fundamentally alters how organizations can understand best practices, known supported configurations and identify hidden risks in their environment. The process would be as follows:

1.      An IT organization visits VIAS.Symantec.com.

2.      A user downloads an agentless data collector that gathers detailed server and storage configuration.

3.      The user securely uploads the information to VIAS.Symantec.com (note: no application information or customer information is securely transmitted, simply configuration details).

4.      A customized XML report on the server(s) that were analyzed is sent back to the customer, providing dynamic links to pertinent information regarding server and storage configurations.

5.      This process can be repeated each time an organization is planning to go through a Veritas Storage Foundation and/or Veritas Cluster Server installation or upgrade and real time valid configuration information will be used for comparison.

Without this service, how did users go about patch management and so forth?

A:   There are two ways that customers have historically been able to understand Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server patch management.

1.     Symantec sends an email notification based on customer’s license subscription (e.g., Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle Real Application Clusters). This isn’t platform-specific, because the detailed configuration information isn’t known; only the type of license is.

2.           Alternatively, customers can visit the Symantec support site, search for the software version and platform version in their environment and determine if there are valid patches that should be applied.

Can you offer real-world examples of how the service has improved things for users?

S.D.: Yes. Currently there are more than 500 customers using the Veritas Installation Assessment Service, and they have analyzed thousands of server and storage configurations.  And of the servers that have been assessed, about 40% of the servers were found to have configuration errors. The top two invalid configurations (constituting about 70% of the total errors) were (1) storage subsystems that weren’t configured properly and (2) insufficient disk space. The insufficient disk space error is for the Veritas Storage Foundation and/or Veritas Cluster Server software, not application/database data capacity.

How much does the service cost?

S.D.:  It’s $500 per physical server and is available now.