Home > IT Blogs > Uncommon Wisdom >

Uncommon Wisdom:

cloud-based services

Jul 16 2009   12:10PM GMT

SaaS impact felt on software market



Posted by: Tom Nolle
software as a service (SaaS), cloud-based services, Google, managed services

Showing that oversimplification isn’t unique to network reporting, there’s recent discussion that SaaS will have a major impact on the software market by making it harder to justify incremental functionality in “resident” versions of software to promote upgrades. In fact, Novell was the original poster child for the notion of “function value slip”; its network operating system could not create valuable new features beyond file/printer sharing and thus failed to generate upgrades, eventually pushing Novell to a second-tier player.

Productivity software is already showing a similar problem; fewer companies upgrade to each new version of Office, and it’s not that they’re adopting a competing product; they’re simply continuing to use what they have. The impact of SaaS is really the same as the impact of open source or freeware products: A lower-function version of a tool is fine if the area where functions are being lowered isn’t one a given user depends on.

One truth about the impact of SaaS is that the TCO for desktop software is increasingly the cost of supporting it, not the cost of the software, and that cheaper hosted models may be the way of the future. Whether enterprises would elect to host their software on somebody like Google, however, is another matter. Right now, enterprises believe they would be three times as likely to use their own private cloud for centralized application hosting. Google’s Chrome OS and Microsoft’s Gazelle project may be aimed at supporting these users.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button     0 Comments     RSS Feed     Email a friend

Jul 1 2009   6:44PM GMT

Cisco talks cloud offerings, focuses on Microsoft, Google



Posted by: Tom Nolle
Cisco, cloud-based services, hybrid cloud, unified communications, Google, Virtualization

Cisco is talking a lot at its annual user conference, Cisco Live, but it’s not always being definitive. Cisco is said to be considering an expansion to its WebEx collaboration suite to include document authoring and management that would compete, in part, with Microsoft Office, but also with Google Docs and other online applications. Cisco also said it would be virtualizing voice and making it a cloud offering, and announced some WebEx support for private clouds, departing from its original strategy to support it only as a Cisco-hosted service.

The moves come as Cisco reorganizes its development council along more traditional lines (enterprise/commercial, service provider, consumer) and largely eliminates the high-level software group that contained the WebEx products. Cisco is shifting its original everything-hosted strategy to a hybrid-cloud model in our view, which is smart given that’s what enterprises want. The question is whether Cisco wants to be the public part of the hybrid cloud or wants to empower service providers to take that role.

The comments made by Cisco’s CTO suggest that Cisco doesn’t want to be an infrastructure-as-a-service provider but isn’t ruling out platform-as-a-service and certainly not SaaS. Cisco also indicated it was ready to meet the challenge of Google Voice and Google Wave in Unified Communication, which at least shows that Google knows that Wave and Voice are UC challenges. We wonder if Cisco might not get too diverted in a battle with Google; it would be better to simply adapt Cisco UC to work inside Wave and to integrate it with Voice using APIs.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button     0 Comments     RSS Feed     Email a friend