SaaS

Cisco: Google Wave ‘validating’ WebEx work

Since I wrote about Google Wave’s UC potential, I’ve been curious as to Cisco’s response. After all, as Frost & Sullivan analyst Vanessa Alvarez pointed out, Google and Cisco could be the best of frenemies.

After chatting with Cisco directly however, it looks like that friendship will have to wait at least a bit to blossom (they contacted me as a direct response to the article). Grace Kim, a senior manager of marketing for Cisco’s WebEx collaboration suite, told me first and foremost the announcement of Google Wave was a sign Cisco was leading the way.

“I think, number one, they’re validating the growth and potential of our SaaS-based applications,” she said. “We’ve been in this space and they’re coming aboard the web-based application model.”

Google’s “coming aboard” the SaaS model? Google IS the SaaS-based business model: Its strikes against Microsoft have come in search, sure, but it was only when the search giant unveiled Google Docs that it truly encroached on Redmond’s territory. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007, while GMail was launched (in Beta, naturally!) in 2004, with more and more UC features added regularly since then, including chat, video, text … Is conferencing that far behind?

Grace said the WebEx team hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to the Wave news, however, beyond reading some of the news as it came up, and re-iterated that Cisco was committed to interoperability (without signaling Wave or any other product in particular) as a cornerstone to success.

“We’re always looking at all the vendors and where the market’s going and to interoperate with what our customers want,” she said. “We’ll continue to evaluate it as opportunities arrive.”

Cloud computing vs. SaaS: What’s the diff?

We’ve all heard the terms “cloud computing” and “SaaS,” and not unlike the term “unified communications,” there is considerable disparity as to what the terms actually mean respectively – especially when paired side by side. The answer, it seems, depends on who you ask.

Don Van Doren in his blog The Definition Dance Moves from UC to Cloud Computing wrote about a session he attended at the recent VoiceCon show in Orlando that he was bemused in the “Summit on Cloud Computing” session when Eric Krapf asked the panel of network and CPE suppliers, “How does your organization define cloud computing?” AT&T, Avaya, IBM, Verizon and Cisco all had rather generic responses you can find in Don’s blog.

Jason Stamper says there’s really no difference at all between the two terms. He cites Gartner’s definition that defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.

So, if we accept Gartner’s definition of cloud computing, where does that leave us with SaaS?

According to Praising Gaw, SaaS is software that’s owned, delivered, and managed remotely by one or more providers. It also allows a sharing of application processing and storage resources in a one-to-many environment…on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription.

So do the differences between SaaS and cloud computing boil down to size? Cloud computing being “massively scalable” and SaaS falling somewhere below the “massively scalable” benchmark? Or is there even a difference between the two?

What do you think? How do you make sense of the two terms? Do we need two terms or can we pick one and start to make straight the circuitous path of IT terms and acronyms?