I had the opportunity to participate in a SaaS expert panel at Interop in Las Vegas last week, and I came away with some thoughts on the event, on the future of IT, and a number of other topics. Rather than rehash what Jeff Kaplan has already posted in a great writeup on Interop and other events he has attended recently, I will focus on some key observations and opinions.

• The folks that put Interop together did a nice job, as always.  The thing that I found interesting about the SaaS panel that I participated in though, and the entire SaaS track for that matter, is that it was mutually exclusive of the Cloud Computing track.  In my mind SaaS and cloud computing are not only inextricably linked, but one and the same.  SaaS is just one of many services provided in the cloud, so from a context perspective it seemed like SaaS should have been a subset of the Cloud Computing agenda; after attending a number of sessions and the Cloudcamp unconference, it became apparent that most of the attendees were focusing on cloud computing as not much more than an infrastructure paradigm, which misses the point completely.  Obviously “the cloud” needs infrastructure to operate, but after watching a presentation where Sun jockeyed for positioning in the cloud infrastructure space, I realized that I was probably in the wrong conference.
• Continuing with the infrastructure focus, I noticed a troubling theme in presentations and private discussions that I had throughout the day on Monday and Tuesday – far too many IT folks are slapping the “cloud” term on anything and everything, following the lead of vendors that are co-opting the term to describe traditional technologies and services.  Having been an IT manager for the better part of 12 years, I’m familiar with how the game is played when it comes to justifying the existence of IT; in this case what I saw was the “lipstick on a pig” approach where projects were re-branded with the cloud moniker to get budgetary approval and organizational prioritization, but at the end of the day were still infrastructure projects that added little business value.  The other pattern I noticed was the “if you build it, they will come” approach to IT projects, where folks were discussing their “private cloud” strategies and on-premise SaaS (oxymoron) solutions; the long and the short of this tactic being that IT goes off and stays busy implementing new technology without a clear business directive, and then tries to get business function and process owners to buy into the new infrastructure by shoehorning systems into whatever IT has run off and built on its own.  I’ve been guilty of that one, too.  9 times out of 10 a vendor is the culprit, having done a great job selling wares to an IT director who then has to go off and find a way to justify the expenditure after the fact.
• When I put my agenda together for Interop, the session with Treb Ryan of OpSource and Narinder Singh of Appirio sounded like a must-see, and it didn’t disappoint.  Although I have heard Narinder speak numerous times at salesforce.com events, he was as good as usual.  But I had never heard Treb speak, and he stole the show.  Very entertaining and insightful, and his assertion about the majority of new SaaS applications not offering API access was fairly shocking because it flew in the face of my assumptions about the openness of SaaS and cloud computing.  Treb also eluded to how the next generation workforce will expect more openness, which he wrote about in his Sandhill.com piece.
• Jeff Kaplan moderated a session in the SaaS track that focused on taxonomy and defining terms associated with SaaS, PaaS, and cloud computing.  This was also my first time hearing Jeff speak, and he lived up to his reputation.  There was a point in the session where a question from the audience regarding service level agreements (which I will talk about in the next bullet) threatened to derail the momentum of the session, but Jeff masterfully captured the spirit of the question and wrapped it in a more philosophical question regarding the impact of SaaS on IT resources.  My takeaway from Jeff’s session is that IT is still fighting SaaS tooth and nail, and that the remaining bastions of resistance are trying to project unrealistic expectations on SaaS providers in order to set SaaS up to fail – as if this will somehow delay the inevitable transformation of IT service delivery.
• After having joked to a colleague not a half hour before about how IT managers throw out “five 9′s” requirements to SaaS providers despite the fact that 99.999% of them have never achieved the metric themselves, when the SLA question was brought up during Jeff’s session, I almost spit out my coffee; not just because of the coincidence, but because it was being brought up in a session that was designed to define key industry terms, not define performance or availability targets.  The paranoia in traditional IT circles is pervasive, but it misses the bigger picture completely; IT jobs are not going away, they’re just changing with the shift in service delivery models.  But this SLA discussion was particularly fascinating because it focused on punitive measures for service disruption, which in itself is misguided; we are talking about a maturing but still relatively new technology, and although availability metrics from providers like salesforce.com have been excellent, as Jesse Robbins made abundantly clear during his 5-minute lightning presentation at Cloudcamp the night before, failure happens.  But rather than encouraging SaaS providers to improve service availability through adoption and innovation, there is a weird tendency to use negative reinforcement as a means to enforce compliance.  Is this a survival tactic for the status quo?  Is it just small minded thinking?  I don’t know for sure, but unfortunately as strong as Peter Coffee’s presence was on this panel, I think he missed a golden opportunity to deliver a knockout blow to this tired argument by taking a somewhat confrontational approach and expecting saleforce.com’s numbers to speak for themselves, which despite their consistent excellence obviously still are not enough to convince the skeptics.  I think as a community, we need to attack the SLA / five 9′s argument and put it to rest – it’s still killing deals despite the fallacious roots of the logic.
• I used to be a huge Microsoft proponent…ten years ago.  Now I find myself asking, “Are they serious?” anytime I hear someone from Microsoft speak to their “cloud computing” strategy.  It’s the most aloof and dismissive messaging I have ever heard, and the Cloudcamp presentation and SaaS track that I attended where Microsoft gave their “vision” of Azure were agitating.
• The entire concept of an Expo Floor will be dead in five years.

There were some very thoughtful and insightful questions posed to the panel that I participated in, and I will write about some of these topics in subsequent posts – namely “The Cloud” as the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture, and reconciling the “stickiness” of service offerings to monetize intellectual property with the openness of the cloud.  Right now I’m looking out the window at a beautiful day on St. Pete Beach realizing that despite my promises to myself, I’m working on vacation…

Michael Topalovich

I tend to have very spirited philosophical discussions with Jon Sapir from Power in the Cloud / SilverTree Systems, and as much as he tries to get me to blog about some of this stuff, I tend to put it off indefinitely.  Just came across this thread and thought there were some important thoughts to build off of:

The old / traditional approach had a lot more players involved…I always envision enterprise IT as two funnels connected at the most narrow point, with one funnel being IT and the other being “the business.”  On the IT side, the fat part of the funnel is web programmers, platform programmers, DBA’s, etc.; the connection to the business side is the program manager, who takes specs from the business program manager and hands it off to a lead architect, who then disseminates pieces to platform / application / database architects, who then give specs to the relevant coders, who are then checked by a parallel QA organization that is segmented similarly by function.  On the business side, the program manager is connected with a business process architect who assembles requirements from lead business analysts representing the business functions involved with the system, who then fan out to all of the end users of the specific functions / departments to gather feature / function / interface requirements / feedback.  And scattered throughout is about a dozen project managers, each running their own project schedule for their piece of the world.

Force.com disconnects the business users from the stack, eliminating the direct involvement of IT and changing IT’s role to one of data / process governance + management.  In some organizations IT may still provide the programmer, but in many cases the business architect will directly design the system, and the analysts will configure the system to the specific needs of their constituents.

The future piece further abstracts the business from IT, pushing governance to the periphery of the business where it is managed by analysts and designed by the business architect to overlay horizontal, end-to-end processes rather than a vertical / function-driven organizational structure.  IT may provide technical services, but the internal IT organization, for all intents and purposes, is just one of many service providers that the business provisions IT services from.  In the most likely scenario, IT manages the connectivity to the cloud, data/information security policies and overall governance, and potentially manages the service delivery / financial relationships with cloud providers.

Does this sound like a reasonable description of most enterprise service delivery processes?  Is management and governance the role that IT will take on?  Will IT simply become a service provisioned directly by business process owners?  Does SaaS / PaaS / cloud computing really make such a significant impact on organizational and business process structure?  For every answer we come up with, there are about five new questions.

Interop is here, and based on the preparatory discussions that I’ve had with fellow panelists on the ‘Honeymoon and Divorce: Changing SaaS Providers‘ session, I am excited about the topics we will be covering and the insight that Jerry Smith (Symphony Services), Rick Nucci (Boomi), and R “Ray” Wang (Forrester) will be bringing to the table.  I will be approaching the topic of migrating both data and SaaS code / logic from PaaS providers with a service-oriented mindset, giving real world examples of migrating applications from the now-defunct Coghead platform to the Force.com platform by salesforce.com.  Delivered Innovation migrated both customer apps and our own strategic marketing suite of applications to Force.com over a period of several months with great success.  I am confident that the panel will provide a great deal of value to attendees, as the topic of SaaS / PaaS “lock-in” is becoming more relevant with the proliferation of cloud computing services.

Please stop by if you are attending Interop.  We’re scheduled to present at 4:00PM on Tuesday, May 19 in “Breakers L” at the Mandalay Bay conference center.  I will also be attending CloudCamp this evening, let’s talk about ‘The Cloud’ over beers.

Michael Topalovich / blog @ deliveredinnovation.com

Gartner Blog Network: Four Myths About Cloud Computing

Thomas Bittman from Gartner cuts through some of the cloud computing hype and gives us a tempered viewpoint on mainstream cloud adoption.  Overview of the four myths:

1. Bittman takes on Nick Carr’s “Big Switch” view of rapid proliferation of cloud-based services and argues that adoption will be substantial but gradual.
2. We’ve heard many SaaS and cloud computing skeptics try to minimize cloud computing by calling it a redressing of other philosophies / technologies, but in fact it is the culmination of many concepts and technologies.
3. Bittman gives us a great line with, “We’re not going to have a handful of megaproviders, we’re going to have thousands of providers, and it will be very Darwinian.”
4. The fourth myth cuts to the heart of a common cloud computing argument – some see cloud computing as simply a large-scale commodification of traditional IT infrastructure and platform services, whereas the bigger picture view of cloud computing is that the standardization of the lower stacks of the IT architecture will enable a focus on more innovative applications of technology to build new business models and solve once daunting business challenges.

Russ Daniels: A Cloud In Every Garage

We always love posts like this from mainstream mags such as Forbes.  This one is penned by Russ Daniels, described as the “Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Services Strategy” at HP.  Some very interesting points, including the parallel between the evolution brought upon by Henry Ford’s assembly line concept and the economic shift that we are experiencing now as the world transitions to a knowledge-based economy.  The HP “MagCloud” example he gives is very powerful, demonstrating how cloud-based services (and to a greater extent services delivered in a SOA framework) can open up services that were once so cost prohibitive that their availability was constrained to those with the deepest pockets.

Key quotes:

1. “The cloud makes it possible to deliver everything as a service–from business processes to personal interactions–and to create altogether new business models across industries.”
2. “…with this underlying infrastructure in place, both large and small companies can use technology to expand or invent services, open up markets and address some of the biggest challenges we face as a global society.”
3. “The cloud is making once-expensive information technology available to a mass market through a pay-per-use model. This promises to increase productivity and drive growth. Small and medium-sized businesses can leverage data to drive efficiencies and improve products and services.”

Phil Wainewright: Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge?

Some really interesting things jumped out in Phil’s post, but what really stood out was the second paragraph.  The insight into the challenges of evolving to a cloud computing mindset is worth at least a few reads, as some of us that live in the Cloud tend to forget the seismic shift in thinking we have to go through when detaching from the ‘enterprise’ model.  One line in particular has me waxing philosophic about why SOA tends to be viewed as a software package or vendor offering rather than as a design principle:

“A constantly recurring theme in the evolution of SOA, cloud and the Web has been the misplaced imposition of trusted, existing structures onto emergent patterns of interaction.”

Specifically, I began to wonder whether SOA is inextricably linked to “web services” software just because  we tend to try to rationalize complex and unknown structures with what we already know and are comfortable with, or if my initial belief that SOA’s adoption (or even understanding for that matter) has been co-opted by traditional software vendors is more defensible.  Or is there really a difference between the two – i.e. are the blind leading the blind?

In any case, SOA and cloud computing are starting to be mentioned in the same breath by many of the visionaries in the space, so it will be interesting to see whether we can drive to a point of widespread mainstream adoption of the view of cloud computing as the technology manifestation of the SOA philosophy, or if the Cloud will also be co-opted by the traditional enterprise players with deep marketing pockets and short-sighted intentions.