Seybold and the Cloud

Andrew Seybold wrote an interesting piece on Cloud Computing: Cloud Computing -- a new version of an old idea. He identifies a few similarities between the centralized nature of cloud computing and the mainframes from many decades ago. Andrew's comments are centered mostly around centralizing data and making it available to a variety of clients. One of Andrew's biggest concerns is that he might not have network access ALL the time.

Network access is a valid concern and while wifi and broadband coverage continues to grow every day it is still not EVERYWHERE. Google has made offline versions of several of its products, most recently GMail. However, I think Andrew's mainframe comparison is not quite right. The Cloud is much more web based email and web based document storage. Openness and Accessibility are the Cloud's key disruptive drivers. 

Openness: the programmable Web lists over 1200 APIs available for any software developer. Most of them are free or free to get started. These are 1200 intelligent services that can be mashed up together to create new applications. They are open to anyone in the world without the need of any high end equipment. Technologies like HTTP, XML, SOAP, REST, and JavaScript are making this possible.

Accessibility: The programmable Web is open to anyone with the right skills but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to benefit from it. Kids in high school are building mashups to share pictures and communicate with each other but so is the Federal government. This is unprecedented. Sure there is a digital divide but the gap can't be compared to the mainframe days. Furthermore, anyone from their home computer can have access to Google's massive computing infrastructure for free. And once they go beyond their free quota, they can still serve an application with more than 5M page views a day for less than $50 a month. These conditions will power unprecedented innovation over the next 5 years.

Andrew says that the Cloud is not being pushed by IT professionals. I don't completely agree. I see a lot of CIOs looking at Cloud based solutions where possible to reduce operating costs. But in my experience the real people pushing the Cloud are actual business users that are exposed to the innovation delivered by consumer services like Facebook and wonder why can't they have the same type of tools at work.

The Cloud is successful because it represents the ultimate democratization of technology: driven by end users and open to all.

SAS, analytics and the cloud

SAS got a lot of press coverage when it announced it would invest $70M in a new data center. There is no doubt SAS is a world class company, clear market leader. In a 2008 survey by Rexer Analytics, 45% of respondents reported they use SAS. Almost 1 in 2 data miners? not bad.

I did not know SAS had a hosting service. As they said, their hosting business has grown with almost no advertising but late last year I heard they were pitching to one of the top media companies. I was surprised at first but it really makes a lot of sense and their recent announcement confirms the solid traction that business is getting.

After thinking about it a little more I'm very curious to see how their SaaS offering will play out. I believe the Analytics market is prime for a big disruption. The market is dominated by a handful of companies with relatively closed technology (at least in one direction) and significant profit margins. Open Source projects like R have shaken the game a bit but nothing earth shattering yet. I believe the Cloud -with its limitless storage and cpu power- will bring a more disruptive wave.  Will SAS take the lead? Can they embrace the power of Hadoop and in-memory databases to take their business to the next level? Or will they play conservatively, milking their current cash cow and using their market dominance to crush their smaller competitors? 

This will be a fascinating race.

Force.com thoughts, 2nd part

This is a short follow up to a previous post about Salesforce.com (SFDC) development platform. The more I work with this platform the more impressed I become: SFDC is fantastic. I have talked about their documentation and support in the past. Well, their technology is quite impressive as well.

The force.com platform has been built on a very consistent and predictable multi-tenant architecture. A highly efficient one by the way. Reports indicate that all of SFDC runs on 1000 mirrored servers, that is a total of only 500! This is quite remarkable.

Their development environment has all the features an enterprise developer can ask from a cloud provider. SFDC uses Visualforce Pages to render GUIs. These pages use a proprietary markup language that is quite similar to other frameworks like Django. By using this framework they enable/enforce a mainstream and efficient Model View Controller design pattern.

In addition to the Visualforce pages, SFDC recently added APEX, a Java based scripting language for data manipulation operations such as triggers or traditional stored procedures in relational databases. Java developers should feel right at home with APEX, it is strongly typed and the syntax appears identical to Java. APEX supports inheritance, unit testing and access to web services. Some other operations are restricted for security reasons; very similar to Google's approach with the AppEngine and Python's libraries.

Finally, the integration and customization features of SFDC are very useful and easy to use. Objects can be extended with new attributes, users can have different security profiles that apply specific privileges to different applications, custom applications can be packaged, managed and published with just a few clicks and their security requirements should put any corporation at ease. A winner all in all. What I find most impressive is how easy it is to see how all of these features are really customer driven.

Salesforce.com is definitely a role model for any other aspiring Cloud company.

Cloudera

Cloudera has created quite a buzz with its recent launch: great talent and great backers without a doubt. Business plan? I'm just not as excited as everybody else. I like Hadoop and what I have read about Cloudera makes it look like a solid business. Game changer? I find it hard to believe. This launch and press coverage reminds me of another startup from many years ago: e-pinions.com -and I'm sure there must be dozens of other examples. Great talent, tons of press, overblown expectations. I hope Cloudera has a better future.

Customer Experience and Analytics

Last year I spent some time learning about Customer Experience and Customer Interaction Management. I enjoy both topics quite a bit. More recently due to my work with predictive analytics I have come across a number of Text Analytics companies that are focusing on improving the Customer Experience. From my experience in the Automotive and Pharmaceutical industry I know there are vast amounts of unstructured data repositories buried in most corporations; and more is generated every day.

I have found however a bit of a disconnect between decision management, text/predictive analytics and customer experience management. I think the effective management of the customer experience starts with a clear strategy that defines what the desired experience should be across customer segments. This strategy needs to be aligned with the corporate goals and have corresponding financial indicators. Once a strategy is in place, analytics can be used to detect specific behaviors or recommend the next best action. These recommendations can be as a predictive score or an alert to a customer service, sales representative or customer touchpoint. But then there is the need for a decision management system that would take the analytics' result and act on it. These decision management system needs to have rules managed by those business users responsible for managing the Customer Experience strategy.

Today I see a chasm where vendors focus just on the analytics or just on the strategy or just on the rules management. It seems to me that there is a big opportunity to bring all those pieces together in a proactive, money making, recession proof solution.