With the aftermath of the U.S. election in full bloom (by the time you read
this), NFL playoff races heating up and much of the country basking in unusually
warm fall weather, we're going to head back a few months and make...an Olympics
reference! Or, at least, a track and field reference, which might as well be
an Olympic reference. (Seriously, though, doesn't it seem as though the 2008
Olympics happened about 17 years ago? The shelf life for an event is short in
our YouTube culture.)
Anyway, did you ever watch one of those middle-distance races in which one
runner would dart way out ahead of everybody else, only to get caught about
three-quarters of the way through the race and finish fifth? We're fairly sure
that this runner is called the rabbit -- he or she sets the pace early in
a race but never really has a chance to win it.
We're wondering here at RCPU whether Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com -- pioneers
in Software as a Service -- are starting to grow floppy ears and a fluffy tail.
Salesforce.com has done a pretty solid job of leading the SaaS-based customer
relationship management race, but a few big-name competitors are starting to
catch up. Microsoft, of course, is among them, not only with Dynamics CRM online
-- a direct competitor to Benioff's company -- but also with the whole Azure
S+S platform.
And there are others starting to leg it forward in the SaaS scramble. SAP,
Oracle -- they should have Salesforce.com looking over its shoulder at least
a little bit. But this week, at the company's Dreamforce show in San Francisco,
Benioff spoke
with the confidence of a runner who'd already lapped his foes. He took more
shots than Sarah Palin in a forest full of moose -- at Oracle, at SAP...but
less so at Microsoft, which he (for once) treated with a bit more caution.
We like Benioff and Salesforce.com here at RCPU because the CEO is a quote
machine and because the company is a pretty genuine pioneer in what could eventually
become a pervasive computing model. But we can also see this trailblazer going
the way of Netscape...or, more likely, Lotus: snapped up eventually (although
probably not in this economy) by a larger competitor but still continuing to
produce innovative technology. That second scenario doesn't seem so bad, actually,
at least for customers and Salesforce.com partners.
But Benioff won't hear of it. Salesforce.com is building or planning to build
datacenters worldwide and ramping up its offerings to compete with the other
runners in the race. Benioff's got bluster, and he's got a lead. But does his
company have the kick to finish off the race? We'll see.
What has your experience been with Salesforce.com? Have you worked with the
company as a partner or customers? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20080 comments
Andrew McLennan finally got tired of being ripped off, so he started a security
company.
Well, it didn't happen exactly like that, but McLennan's experience as a video
game developer did eventually lead to his founding of Metaforic,
a maker of anti-tamper software. During his time at Steel Monkeys, a Belarus-based
game developer, McLennan saw the company's products hacked, cracked and available
for illicit sale literally before Steel Monkeys had released them in some markets.
"We had so much stuff pirated, it was ridiculous," McLennan said
in a robust Scottish brogue. "We had stuff available in Russia before it
was available in the U.K. We did get kind of fed up -- you'd spend nearly two
years working on something and then see it stolen from you."
So, with funding from the Scottish government, McLennan founded Glasgow-based
Metaforic, which launched in the U.S. in late October and has an office in San
Jose, Calif. McLennan, the company's CEO, said that MetaFortress, the company's
flagship product, can "stop any hack in its tracks."
But there's more to MetaFortress than just the fact that it prevents hacking,
piracy, theft and reverse-engineering, McLennan said. Not only does MetaFortress
do all of those things, but it does them in a way that's easy to deploy and
doesn't significantly affect application performance.
Instead of requiring eight weeks to six months, as some other applications
do, MetaFortress adds protection to an application in an hour by automating
the process of adding protection, McLennan said. "Because we're so easy
to use, we've become easy to adopt."
Beyond that, McLennan added, while most anti-tamper tools reduce the performance
of the applications they protect by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent, MetaFortress
clocks in at a 0.2 percent performance downgrade. And, he said, while competitors
protect an application for anywhere from a week to a month, Metaforic's product
offers three to 18 months of protection.
And MetaFortress isn't just for game developers. Metaforic is targeting the
enterprise with its product, selling not only to ISVs but also to companies
that do internal app development or want to protect critical elements of their
infrastructures. The company is looking for partners, too -- both for traditional
partners and for companies that might want to OEM MetaFortress. Channel members
in the financial and government fields are of particular interest, McLennan
said, because "they're difficult industries to get into."
Still, McLennan admitted that nobody's perfect. MetaFortress isn't un-crackable,
he said -- it just provides better protection for longer than competing products
do. "We're not claiming we're uncrackable," he said. "The hacker
has to do everything manually. All we're trying to do is bore the attacker to
death."
Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20080 comments
Identity and security might sound like topics to discuss with a therapist,
but at Microsoft they're key components in a burgeoning product line. Redmond
this week announced that it's adding some capabilities to a couple of identity
and security applications.
First off, there's Identity Lifecycle Manager, which combines identification
management and certificate management -- sort of the chocolate and peanut butter
of security, as we once
called them, much to the amusement, apparently, of some folks in Redmond.
Anyway, ILM2 -- the "2" part is just a code name for now -- is
in release-candidate mode as of this week. Scheduled for general availability
in the first half of 2009, ILM2 will include a nifty integration with Microsoft
Office that will expand ID and certificate capabilities outside the bounds of
IT to regular folks.
For example, a "knowledge worker" (as in a non-IT person, as if IT
people have no knowledge) will be able to grant or deny an employee permission
to use a network or application via, say, an automatically generated e-mail
in Outlook. In other words, an IT person won't have to do it -- a non-IT manager
will have simple, Office-based control over who gets to do what, and IT will
have control in turn over what the manager gets to do.
"One of the greatest security risks enterprises have is loss of identity,"
John Chirapurath, director of marketing for the Identity and Security Division
at Microsoft, told RCPU in a phone chat late last week. "When somebody
leaves an organization, how does IT know? It's really the knowledge worker who
knows."
There's a customization opportunity there for the channel, Chirapurath, better
known as J.G., said. "ISVs can expand and extend our solution," he
said. "At the same time, there is also a very powerful services story.
Partners can look at the problem of identity management in a holistic fashion
and design the right processes and self-service capabilities so you do identity
management right from day one."
Microsoft's also updating another product, Intelligent Application Gateway,
with Service Pack 2 for the application. "ILM is really all about identity
and certificate management and self service," J.G. said. "IAG is about
using those identities and governing access."
IAG SP2 adds virtualization to the mix, as it'll run as a virtual machine on
Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. It'll also grant partial access to certain applications,
alleviating the "all-or-nothing" nature of access that exists today,
J.G. said.
"Today, access is all or nothing," J.G. (and yes, we like calling
him that) said. "It becomes a very complex problem because either you have
to give [users] all access or no access [to an application]. IAG provides intelligence
to that access -- very fine-grained access." A customer could, for instance,
access an order-fulfillment part of an application but nothing else, J.G. said.
With SP2, IAG will also support Firefox, as well as Linux and the Mac OS. "Access
is not a Microsoft-centric problem," J.G. said. With IAG SP2, hopefully
it won't be a problem at all -- or certainly not one worth talking to a therapist
about.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 04, 20080 comments
Partners, take note: As if you didn't know this already, a new CDW survey has
found that confidence in IT spending is
on
the decline. It looks as though that nasty old economic downturn is hitting
IT...but the numbers really aren't that bad. Look at it this way: You could
be an investment banker.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 30, 20080 comments
There sure have been a lot of announcements at Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference this week. We say that with a touch of incredulity because the PDC
always struck us as being a tad esoteric and not having the broad-based appeal
of, say, Tech-Ed.
OK, granted, Azure
is more of a development platform than anything else, so it makes sense to announce
it to developers. But it's also a critical part of an overall SaaS -- sorry,
S+S -- strategy, so we might have expected an unveiling at a different, somewhat
more inclusive conference. (And that goes double for Windows
7, even though developers will take some interest in it, as well.) Oh, well...it
all ends up on the Internet, anyway, right?
Anyway, between Azure and Windows 7, PDC has been the most eventful Microsoft
show for quite a while. We've commented ourselves into carpal tunnel syndrome
this week writing about it, so for the last RCPU of the week, we're just serving
up links to stories you might have missed:
There was a Windows
Server 2008 R2 preview.
Live Mesh
and Live Framework got some air time.
Redmond Developer News's Kathleen Richards brings us a story on cloud-based
SQL services.
And here's
something about Visual Studio for the Skittles and Mountain Dew crowd (the PDC
target audience, after all).
Posted by Lee Pender on October 30, 20080 comments
It's getting serious now, this cloud computing stuff. It's not just the up-and-coming
vendors or the Web-era giants (think Google and Amazon) that are offering some
sort of Software-as-a-Service model. Oh, no.
As
of this week, there's an old-school player in this game in a serious way:
Microsoft.
Microsoft is investing
heavily in the cloud with Windows Azure. And some observers, at least, including
one at analyst firm Forrester,
believe that enterprises are ready to get serious about SaaS and start using
it for critical applications rather than just messing around and experimenting
with it. SMBs, presumably, are way ahead of their enterprise counterparts in
terms of SaaS adoption, mainly because the cloud is a good model for modest
SMB budgets.
So, there's money to be made in the cloud, right? Well, Microsoft thinks that
there is -- or will
be, anyway. And what's good for Microsoft is good for Microsoft partners,
right? Well, maybe. It depends, really, on the type of partner we're talking
about.
Pure hosting partners, if there are that many of them left out there, will
probably need to diversify their business pretty quickly or find another line
of work. Microsoft is in the hosting business now in a big way, and you know
what that'll probably mean: impossibly low pricing from Redmond that no partner
could ever match, at least not on an ongoing basis. Steve Ballmer said way back
at the Partner Conference that the partner-hosting model had a future...but
not as lucrative a future as Microsoft's
own hosting business will have. Hint, hint.
But if hosting partners didn't know by now that they needed to diversify their
offerings, they're probably not in business anymore, anyway, or won't be for
much longer. The question, really, is how much partners should invest in datacenters
and how much they should focus on hosting -- or whether they should continue
to do it at all. In any case, as with everything else these days, the cloud
is going to be all about services.
Well, of course it will be. But that brings up another question -- which
services will those be? Microsoft is in that business, too, to some extent,
with Azure. Companies can develop using tools in Azure and then have Microsoft
host their applications -- all of which sounds great for customers and for
Microsoft. But whither partners?
Oh, sure, there'll be opportunities to create custom applications, consult
on SaaS strategies and develop specific vertical functions. But how much of
those opportunities does Azure actually take away by giving customers more opportunity
to work directly with Microsoft? And what exactly will those custom apps and
vertical functions involve if SMBs prefer pre-packaged, minimally customized
applications and enterprises are doing the development themselves with Azure?
Will partners have to be content with referral fees and whatever consulting
they can manage to squeeze out of accounts?
All of these questions, of course, seem to point to a worst-case scenario of
Microsoft horning in on partners' turf and claiming the cloud for itself while
leaving the channel high and dry. But we should remember that Microsoft has
always relied on the channel to serve as its sales force and has, for the most
part, been good to partners over the years. And, traditionally, what's been
a moneymaker for Microsoft -- and Redmond clearly thinks it has a revenue
driver in the cloud -- has also been a cash machine for partners. So, there's
reason for optimism. In fact, there's probably more reason for optimism than
for pessimism.
But there's also reason for concern, as there always is when a new model of
computing emerges. It's time for partners to engage with Microsoft, to air their
concerns and demand answers to tough questions. But it's also time for partners
to get creative -- to develop business strategies that will complement Azure
rather than work at cross purposes with the Redmond giant and its ambitious
cloud plans.
The cloud is here -- whether it'll bring sunshine or rain for partners,
though, remains to be seen.
How do you plan to make money in the cloud? How will you interact with Microsoft
regarding Azure and cloud computing? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Microsoft seems ready to stop pretending that Vista will ever gain wide acceptance.
Just take a gander at
this
story's headline: "Microsoft vows Windows 7 will fix Vista mistakes."
Mistakes? Vista? Anyway, Microsoft did demo
Windows 7 at PDC this week, and it does seem kind of cool.
Vista, we hardly knew ye...and we didn't really want to.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Finally! Microsoft Office is going Live...for real this time. Microsoft announced
this week at the PDC in L.A. that there will be
browser-based
versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with a beta probably available sometime
in 2009.
But let's read the fine print from the CNET article linked above:
"Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in
two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft's Office Live
Web site, while businesses will be able to offer browser-based Office capabilities
through Microsoft's SharePoint Server product."
Hmm...so the business offering is really more of a distributed, on-premises
model running on SharePoint as opposed to a pure SaaS offering with Office running
in a datacenter. OK. Then, there's this:
"Elop said that not all of the editing capabilities of the desktop
products are in the browser versions. 'The editing we are characterizing as
lightweight editing,' he said."
Ahh...OK. So, browser-based Office will be a scaled-down version of the (very
bloated, we must say) original.
All of this gets back to what we've said here before -- for all its talk
about and investment in cloud computing, Microsoft still sees the cloud as being
very much tethered to on-premises deployments. That's a model that might work -- but
what we still haven't seen from Microsoft is a true, un-tethered, Salesforce.com-style,
pure SaaS model.
And we all know why: Office is a big moneymaker, and giving up those license
sales and replacing them with monthly subscription fees would be a shock to
Redmond's system. Hey, we're not saying that browser-based Office isn't welcome
or isn't a good model -- only that it's clear that Microsoft is having trouble
letting go of its desktop roots. That's what Redmond really means by Software
plus Services -- services plus the software revenue the company can't live without.
Hey, it could work, but it won't really be SaaS. Not really.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 29, 20081 comments
Well, they're
sort
of talking about it...mostly in press releases and earnings conference calls.
Still interesting, though.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20080 comments
So that's what Ray Ozzie was working on all this time. At its Professional
Developer Conference in L.A. this week, Ozzie and Microsoft took the wraps off
of Azure, which Redmond calls an
operating
system for the cloud.
A what? Yeah, we weren't too sure what that meant, either...and we
weren't alone. But the basic idea is that this cloud OS -- of which Steve
Ballmer has spoken a few times recently -- will provide a platform for developers
who want to create hosted applications. (Really, it seems more like a development
platform than an OS...but we digress.) Microsoft will then conveniently host
for customers those very applications in its datacenters.
There's more to it than that, of course. Azure also appears to be an attempt
to bring on-premises systems into harmony
with the cloud, something that tells us two things. First, Microsoft is
pragmatic and understands that most companies now have -- and will have for
at least a few years to come -- an investment in in-house Microsoft technology.
If companies want to dabble in cloud computing now, they're going to do just
that -- dabble, rather than shift everything outside of their walls and into
the cloud.
Second, though, it tells us that Microsoft doesn't seem quite ready to offer
a pure-cloud platform. There seems to be a sense with Azure of cloud-based applications
being tethered to traditional, in-house apps, which, again, makes sense because
that'll probably be the scenario in which the vast majority of customers will
use cloud computing. But the Salesforce.com, pure-SaaS, "no-software"
model doesn't appear to be part of Azure or of Microsoft's immediate plans.
Now, we could be reading that entirely incorrectly, as we'll admit that this
Azure stuff is kind of vague and a bit difficult to understand. From here, though,
we don't see Microsoft cutting the cord between cloud and on-premises applications.
What we do see, though, is more potential trouble for Microsoft's hosting partners.
RCP the magazine covered
this back in September, and today's announcement takes it a step further:
It's pretty clear that Microsoft wants to get into the hosting business in a
big way. Now, with Azure, it's not just about hosting partner-built apps; it's
about bringing customer-developed apps into the equation, as well.
So, again, if you're a hosting partner, now is the time to develop a revenue
stream or services business outside of pure application hosting...because Microsoft
is all over that market. Azure itself might be kind of confusing, but that point
is crystal-clear.
What's your take on Azure? Have you figured out what it is and how it will
work? If you decide to play around with it a bit -- it's available in CTP as
of today -- please let us know. You know the place: [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 28, 20080 comments