Thursday Aug 05, 2010
We don't have big data in Australia
Whats the biggest size database you have? Is it 500 GigaBytes or is it maybe 10 Terra Bytes?
According to Google's CEO Schimdt: "People Aren't Ready for the Technology Revolution". "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," Schmidt said, "but that much information is
now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them."
So if you work in the Australian ICT space and think 10 Terra Bytes is big data. Your wrong!
Tags google data gigabyte internet computing australia information exabyte | Comments 0
Monday Aug 02, 2010
Ideal ISVs for Cloud hosted SaaS
In 2009, we did some interesting market validation to see how potentially large the Australian SaaS (Software as a Service) ISV (Independent Software Vendor) market was. As part of this exercise, I created a chart to help me to find the ideal candidate ISV for the cloud hosted SaaS provisioning project we were working on at that time.
The following diagram is that chart:
On the vertical axis we were focusing on the characteristics to on-ramp a new customer. With the horizontal axis representing the amount of consulting work required. The ideal candidate for us would of been an ISV, where the customer can self provision through the Internet without need for upfront consulting.
The intriguing item that arises from this, is that a traditional IT company focuses on selling Consulting services, or for that matter as an ISV it is potentially the Channel that provides the consulting. Here in Australia, we found few ISVs that purely concentrated on development of a product. In fact, it would appear more so, that consulting organisations have software that helps uniquely differentiate their consulting offerings in a competitive situation.
That then means that the complexity to get a new customer onboard quickly is not a priority. There were long sales cycles, with long implementation projects, where the business grew through providing more professional services.
Now this of course was in strong contrast to what we had researched on the Internet. The growth rates were going to be coming through SaaS enablement of software (reduce post-sales signup complexity and cloud hosted) to get customers onboard quickly. Or was it?
Well it is, but not within the Australian ISV markup that was concentrating on selling just within their local markets. The volumes of customers just aren't there. For some product offerings the market is for all intensive purposes saturated and their customers, at that time were not asking for SaaS based offerings.
As we were unable to find multiple ISVs that considered onramping new customers a current or perceived future issue we were unable to find within the Australian market, our ideal ISVs. I'm sure that one day they will exist, but I'm not just not sure when!
Tags growth saas isv complexity cloud | Comments 0
Wednesday Jan 07, 2009
Is SOA really dead?
A blog post titled "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services" was directed to me by a couple of persons. It highlights, what I first started to describe a couple of years ago as "Journalist led technology"; sometimes I do believe that it is Analyst led as well. That is, that the potential promise of the technology genres and acronyms, in this case SOA, take over. Without necesarrily having the real world experiences to back it up, to cut through the hype.
We most not forget that SOA means Service Oriented Architecture. It is an architectural style, that is a different style, then what has been used in the past in the client/server world of old. "to SOA or not to SOA" which I wrote about a couple of years ago, is always an interesting question.
"What are the alternates to a SOA style architecture?" still holds true in my opinion, that if you are not using a monolithic 80s/90s style client/server model, then there will be a business tier that exposes services at some granularity to be consumed by a presentation tier or another business tier service. Its the pace layering that becomes the issue (my thoughts here on timeless software).
To me Anne has highlighted the true issue that has been missed which is the important stuff: architecture and services.
Tags soa saas middleware technology analyst cloud journalist business | Comments 0
Sunday Nov 30, 2008
Cloud computing from the couch
I found this panel discussion from a new twitter follower today lucidera. It gives great insight into how some of the market leaders in this space perceive the future of SaaS businesses.
Tags google oracle cloud salesforce saas amazon sap adobe | Comments 0
Friday Jul 18, 2008
Focus on competitiveness with SaaS, not security perils
Some are expressing concerns about the security risks and perils related to compliance, availability and data integrity of using cloud based SaaS services. James Governor, summed it up nicely here, when promoting CloudCamp London by referring also in the title to Avoiding Monsters.
I'd argue that the services that will be first consumed through a SaaS mechanism will be transactions that do not offer a competitive advantage to that particular business. That is it just enables them to work more efficiently.
If so, what benefit will other organisations, or individuals, have with accessing information regarding these non competitive transactions?
Even if they did have a glimpse, that picture portrayed by that glimpse is only representative of that point in time and will quickly change to another picture.
What may be deemed competitive information, in this case, is the aggregate information of these transactions containing a dimension of time. Therefore with careful partitioning any potential security risks can be mitigated.
So avoid the FUD, as James said "Dangers and Perils - Here Be Dragons. Ah yes the beauty of FUD."
Tags competitiveness security efficiently saas cloud | Comments 0
