• Citrix Systems Acquires Cloud.com to Challenge Rivals VMware, Amazon

The four reasons Casey outlines as to why the cloud is not overhyped are geography, faster deployment speeds, room for growth, and frequency of updates and enhancements. Geography because companies with offices all over the state, country, world, what have you, can access the same data at the same time, without the fear that something problematic would happen to a single data center. Faster deployment speeds and room for growth are important because as businessues such as the Schumacher Group grow rapidly, the cloud services can be set up quickly, keep up with growth, and maintain high speeds better than an on-site server would. And finally, the frequency of updates and enhancements allows for more growth and simple updates without hassle.

• 4 Reasons Cloud Computing Isn’t Overhyped

According to new In-Stat research, public cloud computing “is set to grow “153% from 2010 to 2015.” IaaS is predicted to grow to about $4 billion by 2015, SaaS will grow 142%. In addition, small businesses are expected to be the fastest growing size segment, “growing from $2.5 billion by 2010 and $6.6 billion by 2015.” SaaS and IaaS are important to small businesses because of the ease of use, the accessibility, and the cost savings they provide.

• Public Cloud Computing is Set to Grow 153% From 2010 to 2015

Cloud services “can and will fail at some point,” there is no reason to deny it. However, to ensure that business runs smoothly during these times, businesses must fully understand what possible problems could arise and find out how to solve them if the event occurs. If an organization is experiencing performance problems, consider Cloudsleuth, “an open online cloud community sponsored by Compuware,” which helps uncover and solve performance problems. If companies do experience slower response times or lower network bandwidth, they should try to uncover the issue before it turns into something even larger, such as the service shutting down completely. Do not let these types of problems discourage you from joining the cloud. Just like IT services, problems will arise, but learn how to fix them and have an alternative plan prepared, and the downtime will go smoothly.

• What to Do When the Cloud Fails

VMware announced their new version of vSphere cloud operating system on Tuesday. The new upgrade is “aimed at making it easier for small and medium sized businesses to adopt cloud computing.” The upgrade included better security, storage, and recovery features. New storage features allows for companies to “pool internal storage from several computers into one secure pool” without needing to purchase additional services or hardware. VMwares announcement was juxtaposed with Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com, which puts the two companies in bigger competition with the other.

• VMware Expands Cloud Suite, Boosts Storage Abilities

• Cloud Talk: ServiceMax Builds an iPad App in Just 2 Weeks with Force.com

Recently, there have been a number of incidents in cloud security and service, including issues with Amazon, Dropbox, and Sony’s Playstation. However, despite these setbacks the cloud is still steadily growing with both companies and consumers switching to the cloud. This means that even though there are still a few kinks to be worked out, the cloud is here to stay. ”Taking advantage of the cloud is the most scalable and the most cost-effective way to provide computing resources and services.” Cost alone is a huge reason why many companies are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, but also it is quicker, often times safer, and conveniently always there when you need it.

• Why Is There a Steady Migration to the Cloud Despite Reliability and Security Concerns?

Kell touches on an important and often overlooked aspect to the cloud: choice. Cloud computing allows for choice in almost every way. Consumers are free to choose which platform they use, can pick between many different cloud applications, and if they don’t love any, there are many resources out there to help you design one yourself (or even have a company like Delivered Innovation design it for you). You “are free to choose from any and all available technologies at any time.”  Moreover, not only are there many choices in the cloud, but these choices are only growing. Every day new applications are developed, technology gets wiser, and the cloud becomes easier to use.

• Interoperability in the Cloud

Carlberg highlights some newly released apps from last week- The Chatter Game, salesforce.com CRM Dashboards, and Mass Lead Converter. With The Chatter Game, you can “reward target behavior with points” to those employees who use Chatter often and effectively, which motivates employees to use the app. salesforce.com CRM Dashboards provide reports and dashboards for Marketing and Sales Executives, Managers, and Salespeople, making it easier to manage business. Lastly, Mass Lead Converter allows you to convert multiple leads at the same time, cutting down on time. All of these apps are easy to understand, install, and make our lives a little easier.

• Apps Aren’t Just for Kansas Anymore

The two most desirable features of PaaS are revenue generation and commodity pricing, according to Warfield. “PaaS vendors need to embrace these two features and nail them before worrying about much else.” If your company’s PaaS is not producing traffic and thus, not delivering revenue, that must be fixed. However, this is usually the hardest thing to do, and if you do not have a solid traffic stream, Warfield suggests either repurposing or looking into partnering opportunities. Give it some thought, and add your input to the discussion.

• The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service

• Five Reasons Why Cloud Computing is Essential For Health Care

Quickbooks announced Intuit Anywhere, a PaaS with pre-built integration to other cloud-based services. “With one-click, [customers] can “Connect to QuickBooks” from an Intuit Anywhere enabled app, sign-in with their Intuit Account, and instantly have QuickBooks data available to them.” A few well known Quickbooks partners are already signed up to use this application, including eBay and Concur. The idea of PaaS with pre-built integrations to other cloud based services is new in PaaS technology, and we cannot help but ask whether this was what PaaS was meant to do from the beginning, or is Quickbooks breaking new ground?

• Announcing Intuit Anywhere

This week, VMware announced that they intend to acquire Digital Fuel, an IT Financial Management SaaS solutions. Digital Fuel provides solutions to optimize IT cost and value, by enabling companies “to plan, manage and optimize cost and value in the emerging world of cloud based dynamic IT.” Digital Fuels’ mission corresponds with VMware’s, in the sense that VMware is constantly coming out on top as the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions in IT. Details of the acquisition were not announced, and is schedule to close this July.

• VMware to Acquire Digital Fuel, IT Financial and Business Management SaaS Company

GMO, Japan’s most sought after name in cloud hosting, announced their intention to move into the US with GMO Cloud America Inc. GMO decided to move to the US because of “the growing demand created by businesses that are embracing the scalability and portability of cloud hosting and computing.” At it’s launch, GMO will provide three different packages: GMO10, GMO20, and GMO30 at low introductory prices for the next six months. GMO10 will be free during this period. With more companies moving to the cloud every day, it isn’t a bad idea to open up more options for cloud hosting.

• GMO Launches Cloud Computing Solution in U.S. Market

Contendo raised $17million from partners Citrix and Juniper Networks to support the company’s growth. Contedo specializes in cloud-based acceleration technoligies, including site and mobile acceleration. Contedo expands to grow overseas with their funding, moving into Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Citrix stated their investment in the company was driven by, “the synergy between the services and technologies of Citrix Systems and Contedo blend on-premise physical and virtual appliances… thereby improving end user experience from any location to any device.”

• Cloud Technology Startup Contendo Raises $17 Million From Citrix, Juniper, VCs

• Appirio Acquires Infowelders, A Salesforce.com Consultancy

Home networks are most likely going to be moving towards the cloud, possibly leaving room for new opportunities for startups. What home networks will need are simple, easy to navigate “cloud-based services for novices to manage and better utilize their home networks.” While there are home based networks such as Open Flow available, these networks may still be too complex for the average user.

• Are Home Networks Destined for Cloud-Based Networking?

What is the best Platform as a Service? According to Perry, “it depends on who you are and what you’re trying to do.” Users have private and public PaaS systems to chose from, all with differing market segments. For example, DotCloud is a relatively new PaaS, which is looking promising and offers more flexibility than a PaaS system such as Heroku. When shopping around for a PaaS system, remember to keep your focus “well-segmented” and chose a service that reflects your customer needs.

• What’s the Best Platform-as-a-Service?

IBM is really stretching with its latest cloudwashing, trying to somehow rebrand mainframe technology as “cloud.”

• Not So Fast: IBM Pushes Mainframe Towards the Cloud

Jonathan Rico, a Force.com developer, gives his list of 20+ “Force.com Commandments.” Some of our personal favorites include, “Thou shall not assume a 75% coverage is good,” “Thou shall not create all of your classes with ‘Without Sharing’ keyword unless you know what you are doing,” and “Thou shall not use Chrome and not use the ‘Force.com utility belt’ and ‘Force.com Logins’ extensions”. To sum it up with the words of Rico, “Amen.”

• Force.com Commandments

Groupon attributes most, if not all, of their business scaling success to working in the Cloud. The company uses both Amazon and salesforce.com to keep their site powered up and running smoothly. “Salesforce was chosen not just because of the company’s experience in supporting large business types, but because of the types of tools that can be integrated or built-on-top of the platform.” Groupon’s backbone is their daily deals offered to customers, and in order to keep these deals coming Groupon sends them out through the salesforce.com platform. This way, all employees have the opportunity to review it, discuss it through Chatter, and make changes.

• How Groupon Uses the Cloud to Scale its Business

• Cloud Meet Crowd- A Match Made for the Enterprise
  

The Federal Government has began taking advantage of the cloud with their launch of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. The government can now consolidate data, making it easier to navigate and quicker to get to, as well as “reduce [their] data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30%,” up to $20 million, which could be spent on new cloud technologies. Every week, companies are switching over to the cloud, and the Government’s shift is just the beginning.

• Federal Cloud Computing Strategy Officially Launched

In the Public Cloud, PaaS has become somewhat of a middle ground between SaaS and IaaS. PaaS combines the positive qualities of SaaS, such as low costs and customization options, and the positive qualities of IaaS, such as efficiency and high amount of data storage. “As these capabilities become more sophisticated and their complexity increases, the drive to abstract and re-simplify pushes IaaS toward PaaS.” Ultimately, PaaS is advancing quicker than SaaS and IaaS, and will continue to do so.

• IaaS and SaaS Lead to PaaS

2010 was the year where everyone shifted towards the cloud, and 2011 will be the year everyone understands how to use it. Urquhart believes that cloud applications will greatly impact companies in three ways: making data and analytics faster and easier to swift through, allowing companies to more easily try out new business ideas without investing too much money, and by allowing companies to back up their data via context systems.

• Cloud Computing’s Killer Applications

With large corporations such as Google and Facebook hiring immense amounts of engineers, combined with an increasing number of US graduates pursing jobs oversees, a shortage of good engineers is underway. Which is why, Reddy suggests, graduates should look into working at a startup company. “The downside risk is relatively low. With lots of venture capital funding, salaries and benefits at startups are competitive to those at large companies.” Startups give engineers the opportunity to do what they actually love doing, as opposed to the bureaucracies of a larger corporation. At this point, we would like to give ourselves and other startups, a firm pat on the back.

• Why Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups

• Salesforce Mimics Twitter and Facebook; Adds Likes and Replies to Chatter
  

Charles Seybold looks back at the beginning of his software designing days to see what lessons still apply. As he says, “the guidelines for software design leadership are the same as ever.” He dives deep into the three largest influences on today’s software design as well as five guidelines for developing software correctly.

• Confessions of an Old Software Designer
  

It’s no surprise that small-to-medium sized businesses are turning to the cloud, given the enormous advantages the cloud gives in business agility and cost models.  Ben Kepes delivers this case study of how and why a non-profit turned to the cloud.

• Cloud IS the Choice of the New SMB Generation
  

As the layers of cloud computing continue to expand, sub-layers within the stack become exposed and require classification.  Dave McCrory uses his blog to divide PaaS into four distinct models.

• Current PaaS Patterns – Types of Paas

Jeff Kaplan’s rundown is comprehensive, both in the headline events and announcements as well as in its aim. “Salesforce.com used the event to beat back the recent efforts of Oracle and Microsoft to gain a share of the Cloud Computing market with a new round of initiatives aimed at building on its phenomenal momentum and success.” He also examines the impact of several announcements, including the unveiling of Database.com, demonstrating salesforce.com’s dedication to the maturation of the force.com platform in the developer world.

• Soaring Clouds at Dreamforce

Phil Wainewright examines the impact of Database.com on the competitive marketplace “as Marc Benioff throws salesforce.com’s cloud platform weight around.” Smaller PaaS competitors will have to work harder to differentiate themselves in this new landscape, he notes.

• PaaS Bystanders Squished as Database Giants Spar

A day later, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff announced the acquisition of Heroku, the Ruby based application development platform, a move that should add even more developer credibility to the platform.

• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Buys Heroku for $212M – Shows Commitment to PaaS

Quietly, on Tuesday morning, FinancialForce acquired a PSA solution from application builder Appirio. “Importantly, this is the first complete ERP/PSA/CRM solution built on the same platform” and gives service organizations the ability to “run all of their core systems on a single solution.”

• FinancialForce Acquires Appirio PSA

Reid Carlberg, developer evangelist for salesforce.com and excellent tweeter (@ReidCarlberg), delivers his roundup of the event and gives attention to some of the unique touches that made a 30,000 person event feel so personal, including his impromptu one-on-one sessions with fellow platform users, Reid monitoring Chatter to answer questions, and personal code consults, all of which inevitably led to him losing his voice. Reid embodies the enthusiasm and forward-thinking that everyone brings to Dreamforce and makes Dreamforce such a success.

• Once Upon a Dreamforce

I’ll substitute “downsides” with “risks” because some of these may be viewed as half empty / half full arguments, but I see the biggest current risks as:

1. Market confusion. As Peter mentioned, it is a mad dash to the cloud right now. And since nobody wants to feel left out, just about every company in the B2B tech space has re-branded itself as a cloud computing company. I’ve heard this referred to as “cloudwashing,” and the result is that companies will find it more difficult to find services specific to their needs, because of the tendency of providers to water down messaging into cloud buzzwords and ignore basic positioning and value statements.
2. Cloud sprawl. With the rapid proliferation of cloud services, IT is struggling to adapt corporate service delivery strategies. The results that we have seen have included duplication and overlap of processes and functions due to services being provisioned directly by business units; loss of control of the billing for services because no single entity within the company is responsible for the procurement and management of them; and the equivalent of “shelfware,” a situation where cloud services are orphaned after the champion leaves the company or the business shifts focus.
3. Lack of cohesive integration strategy. There is no doubt in my mind that the cloud model of service delivery is the one that we will adopt for at least the next 10-15 years of technology cycles, but until the integration of all of the pieces is thought through, the sum of the parts will never add up. My company has standardized our core service offerings around the Force.com platform from salesforce.com to provide the “glue” that holds all of the pieces together, and we “mash up” other cloud services into composite enterprise business systems through API integration, business process orchestration, and data integration using services such as Boomi. But if companies just provision cloud services for siloed requirements up and down the cloud stack (from infrastructure to SaaS), the disaggregation of these services will prove to be a value destroyer.

With regards to the testing aspect of Force.com application development and delivery, I have observed some emerging patterns that warrant further study and discussion:

1. Unit testing is real-time and automated.  The Force.com IDE for the Eclipse SDK has been a solid development tool for some time, but the real-time feedback that you get using version 16.0 (Summer ’09) of the IDE with the Eclipse Ganymede release (3.4.x) is of tremendous value.  Granted, the Salesforce API will let you know if there is a problem with your code, but now we’re seeing potential issues called out in Eclipse prior to pushing code to Salesforce.  If you think of unit testing in the traditional sense, where you are testing the validity of snippets of code, the very act of the Salesforce API accepting code that you push to the environment provides immediate validation in an intelligent and automated fashion.  And with the line-item feedback provided by Eclipse, you can catch code validation issues long before saving to the server, significantly reducing the time required to track down and fix invalid code.
2. Integration testing has combined with QA to become a metafunction.  I will be the first to admit that I initially viewed the Apex 75% code coverage requirement imposed by salesforce.com as more of an annoyance than anything.  Now I have come to see test classes not as a necessary evil in deploying apps to production environments, but as a tremendous opportunity to bundle elements of integration testing and end-to-end application QA into a single overarching process.  While most developers dread having to write Apex test classes, we include them in our design specifications as a best practice.  If you think about it, what we are doing is taking the use cases that are fleshed out during the design process and building out test cases from the onset of the development effort; this is a fundamental shift from the traditional role of QA in outdated waterfall-based methodologies that build and execute test cases and QA plans only after development, unit testing, and integration testing are completed.  I have worked with far too many organizations where QA was considered an albatross – the development effort was complete for all intents and purposes, the finish line was in sight, and here comes QA adding weeks, if not months, to the Gantt chart right before that final milestone.  By making QA an iterative process that is tightly integrated with development processes, there are no downside surprises at the end of the development cycle; QA is already done along with integration testing, and it can be argued that the most important aspect of this is that QA is no longer a discreet process – it becomes a living, breathing overlay of the entire development methodology, producing test classes that live alongside the production Apex classes.
3. User Acceptance Testing is a combat sport. What we have found with many Delivered Innovation clients is that if a prototype meets functional requirements, it’s considered “good enough” at that point.  The reality of the situation, 9 times out of 10, is that “good enough” is not quite good enough for a number of reasons.  Namely, demonstrating a prototype in a controlled environment with use cases that are designed to show successful outcomes does not flesh out the true functional capabilities of the app; only when users start beating on an app do we start to see where the stress points are in the functioning of the application.  This is why we encourage what we half-jokingly refer to as “break testing” – we encourage users to “break” the app by any reasonable means.  Realistically, we want this to happen upfront and not two months after production deployment.  Another reason why UAT becomes critically important in the testing process is because the execution of test classes is constrained by governors and limits far more conservative than production governors and limits.  For example, while you can retrieve 10,000 records in a production (non-trigger) SOQL query, you are limited to 500 records when executing tests.  While you may be able to write test classes that execute within governors and limits, once you release the app into the wild you just never know when Salesforce users will find the “unknown unkowns” and use the app in a way that could not have been anticipated…followed by the dreaded ‘Script Exception’ email alert showing up in your Inbox.

How has Force.com, or PaaS in general, impacted your testing and QA processes?

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.

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