Monthly Archives: October 2009

Recently I had a briefing from Conformity, a cloud application management platform vendor.

Conformity seeks to be the hub, managing service provision for cloud/SaaS applications for enterprise. The rationale for this, as told by Scott Bils, co-founder and CMO for Conformity, is that SaaS applications are thus far relatively siloed in terms of provisioning, user management and access control.

Bils contends that managing provisioning individually across multiple applications is simply not scalable and presents both a risk to enterprise and a barrier to the adoption of SaaS applications. As they say;

SaaS and cloud applications provide attractive alternative solutions, however, the missing piece to the puzzle is providing enterprise-class management for these on-demand solutions that will enable companies to effectively manage and comply with the increased scrutiny imposed by new compliance and governance regulations.

Enter Conformity, which provides a tool to manage the workflow associated with setting up users for service. Conformity is primarily a business process and workflow management offering, that is augmented by a partially automated offering – it is currently partnered with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, Xactly Incent, Google Apps, OpenAir and QuickArrow and for these applications offers truly automated provisioning, permissioning and de-provisioning of users.

The main functional areas of the application are as follows;

• User provisioning
• Role and profile management – normalized permission models etc
• Approval workflows – auditable workflows for change approvals
• Directory integration
• Compliance reporting
• Usage analytics
• Change management

Conformity integrates with Active Desktop, so that changes within the active desktop directory are reflected within the control dashboard, it also runs back end consistency checks to ensure that permissions and authorizations at an application level reflect those within the control dashboard.

What I really like about the Conformity approach is that it is very much workflow centric with a secondary automation play, rather than being primarily focused on the automation side of things. As I discussed with Bils, they’re never going to be able to integrate with every single application an enterprise might require, rather it is important that they document the workflows and processes for provisioning, such that Conformity becomes the hub for enterprise user management.

Conformity also provides some visibility into cloud/SaaS application spend within an organization, an efficiency boosting service that, while somewhat peripheral to their core focus, should still prove useful.

I like what Conformity is doing – their focus on workflow rather than technology is refreshing and the fact that they ease enterprises adoption of SaaS and general cloud solutions is good for all of us.

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I read an article recently on a local IT news site that had me chuckling. It seems that forest products company Carter Holt Harvey is in litigation with a couple of companies who built an industrial plant at one of its factories. Nothing too exciting in that you say… but this is where it gets interesting. In order to make their claim, CHH have to produce copies of the disputed invoices – ha you say, that’s easy, we know that CHH uses SAP, finding the invoices should be a simple process.

Not so – you see it seems that around the end of 2004, CHH changed suppliers of invoice scanning and storage services from Datacap to Datamail (not overly imaginative names it must be said). Unfortunately, and according to CHH themselves;

As part of this transfer CHH received copies from Datacap of the electronic invoices stored on Datacap’s system. However, it has since been determined that the records received from Datacap were incomplete and a number of invoices, including some relevant to this brief, are missing, despite significant correspondence with Datacap we have been unable to resolve this issue.

Stunningly around NZD 2million worth of invoices are missing and irretrievably lost in the ether – and remember, this is using a “robust” traditional ERP system and traditional physical storage solutions.

Remind me again where the risks lie with cloud computing? I reckon Shoeboxed would be interested in pitching for the CHH contract! Obviously this isn’t an issue with SAP per se – but it does second guess those who dismiss the cloud and SaaS because of perceived risks… like I’ve said before, bad stuff happens with on-premises as well.

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A few weeks ago I presented to the New Zealand Cloud Computing Summit. My presentation was titled “An overview of applications that are currently delivered via the cloud and potential applications for the future” however, taking a look at the delegate list a few weeks before the event it became clear that the average attendee was a C-level executive with very little cloud exposure – as such definitions and explanations were the best strategy for my talk.

While my presentation isn’t going to be anything new to the vast majority of readers, in my (entirely biased) opinion, it gives a good high level look at cloud computing, with enough case studies to hopefully show the value to be gained for enterprise by dabbling in the cloud.

I would have thought that the majority of us dealing with this stuff day to day but a post over on Enterprise Advocates got me wondering whether in fact I’d been naive in thinking this way. While the post itself picks up another topic, it highlights the emergence (at least from one person) of a new term to talk about Cloud Computing. The author is using the acronym SOC to stand for SaaS/On Demand/Cloud. The term had me scratching my head – cloud is, after all, an umbrella term under which SaaS, PaaS and IaaS fall. As such, both SaaS and On Demand l accept are a subset of Cloud, but shouldn’t be used in a way that suggests substitutability of the terms. As one commenter said;

The 3 [terms] are related, but Cloud Computing covers the whole topic. I think you should drop this new acronym because we already have too many confusing terms. Most organizations are happy to talk Cloud and as a sub text explain how that covers SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service

Anyway – given the post it seems that my slideshow may, in fact, be timely. It’s been on Slideshare for a few weeks now and seems to have gained a bit of a following – either than or slideshare has had a quiet few weeks. EIther way, enjoy!

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Earlier this year at the Enterprise 2.0 conference “platform” was the name of choice. Seemingly every company I spoke to was a platform player. It seems the latest “fart on demand” iPhone application is a “platform for virtual flatulence generation”, that the latest Twitter clone with negligible uptake is “a

You’ve got to hand it to box.net (read about ‘em here), fresh from their last campaign which squarely put them head to head with Microsoft (see the evidence here) Box is today announcing that it is launching an application on the salesforce.com app exchange.

While this may be a seemingly boring announcements, digging deeper into what it means for the future is much more interesting. Currently there are hundreds of organizations around the world ties to a sharepoint/Dynamics CRM platform. A platform that while (arguably) “robust” is expensive and hugely inflexible – I work with a technology company that uses just this set up, while I’ll admit it displays Ray Ozzie’s favorite feature “fidelity” that fidelity has such a wide footprint that I get frustrated doing even the simplest of tasks.

Enter stage left box.net who, with their salesforce integration, is setting themselves up to be a credible competitor to the Microsoft legacy. Salesforce users will be able to access all content in box.net, seamlessly and, most importantly, painlessly – they’ll be able to set up files and folders and assign access permissions – simple concepts made difficult in sharepoint.

User who are both box customers and salesforce customers will have unlimited storage, another reminder of how cloud based solutions unlock the constraints of the past. The video below shows how it works functionally;

Beyond the basic functionality however, this more is interesting because it’s an example of how close we’re coming to an on-demand alternative to the sharepoint stable. I spoke to Jen Grant, VP of Marketing for box.net and asked her how they see themselves differentiating in what is a reasonably busy space. She was pretty focused on what she sees as the direction for them saying that they’re “not trying to be the Swiss army knife of solutions”. Rather they want to differentiate based on their ease of use, and the difference they bring through search.

Anyone who has used box.net will vouch for its ease-of-use, and the search features they have (search works across and inside all content items on box.net) are truly valuable. However much of the “secret sauce’ comes from what I’ll call “search, sans search”. Being web based, and leveraging the aggregate information they draw from users behaviors, box.net is able to serve up context-sensitive information to users. An example of this would be a sales agent finding a new customer pricelist being served up information that customarily goes hand-in-hand with that actions (credit application forms perhaps, or customized welcome emails).

Jen and I also talked about the barriers to adoption, the same arguments all of us in this space hear on a daily basis, the concerns about security, reliability etc etc. Jen and I agreed that a two prong approach is necessary. On the one hand vendors need to target those organization that are likely to “get it” without the irrational fears. Secondly, and together as an industry, we need to ensure that we all articulate the right messages. Lastly, and most importantly, vendors need to do everything in their power to ensure their offerings are completely robust – to this end box.net will be SAS70 certified in the coming months – another security blanket for corporate IT.

IN these early stages, box.net’s alliance with salesforce will be a real credibility boost for box. Salesforce is, after all, the biggest SaaS player in town. Going forwards however it’ll be vendors like box.net, that provide the “hub of the wheel” that are seen as preeminent, the spokes out the side, in the way of distinct business applications, will leverage what the central core provides.

Bring it on!

Related posts:

• Enterprise Search From A Collaborative View: Google, Box.net and Microsoft Sharepoint
• Box.net Launches Integration With Salesforce

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OAuth, or Open Authentication is “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications”. Basically it’s a way to allow one web application to utilize another without the need for users to worry about pesky authentication keys or the like.

It’s easy for those of us who consider themselves cloud evangelists to overstate the current impact of cloud computing – every piece of literature I read that tries to analyze the market size for cloud, is always super-confident about the future potential, but somewhat subdued about current adoption. I’m always

In a couple of weeks I’ll be winging my way to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco. As part of the conference, there is a launchpad series where start-ups get to produce a pitch video and have the community vote for their favorite. It was this same launchpad program that YouCalc won at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 earlier this year. Before the Boston event I went out on a limb and predicted that YouCalc would win – I figured it would only be right to give me assessment of this years crop also.

The quarter finalists for this event are;

• CubeTree – CubeTree’s hosted collaboration suite helps companies create internal social networks. CubeTree’s social networking features include profiles, microblogging, tagging and activity feeds for 30+ types of feed items A company’s CubeTree network is private to the company, free for any number of employees and comes with enterprise-ready security and administration. To help employees collaborate better, applications like wikis, microblogging, file-sharing, link-sharing, polls and group chat are integrated into CubeTree’s social networking platform, and included for free.
• The Garland Group – A compliance and collaboration company focusing on the community bank and credit union industry. They have built a collaborative compliance management platform called RiskKey to bring transparency & legitimacy to banks and the industry that are supposed to be in the business of protecting consumers money as they were supposed to do.
• Twiki – Twiki, Inc. is the leading enabler of Enterprise Agility. The Twiki Open Collaboration Platform transforms corporate intranets and portals, creating a powerful knowledge infrastructure for the organization. Users can share rich web pages and existing enterprise documents with powerful search and connect with enterprise social networking. Twiki situational applications, dashboards and reports that model enterprise business processes can be created using a simple markup language that does not require deep programming skills, enabling true agility in the enterprise.
• XWiki – XWiki builds open-source collaborative solutions for Enterprises. The XWiki platform is highly extensible and allows to structure content and build applications on top of a Wiki.

So… to my assessment (and bear in mind that, in keeping with my traditional approach, I’ve assessed these offerings purely on their pitch videos); XWiki seems way behind the right ball, Wiki’s (no matter how much whiz bang functionality they include) are last years story, I can’t see them exciting the voting attendees. They’re also hampered by a video that, while authentic, lacks any sort of charisma.

Twiki on the other hand arguably does far too much – their intro video (and seemingly the application itself) is a veritable treasure chest of buzzwords and themes de jour – agility, social, operating system, extranet, next gen, sales automation, actionable intelligence, situational agility, continuous innovation. I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to define Twiki – beyond “everything” which helps no one really. They’re possibly a victim of their own buzz. Add to that the fact that they’re in no sense of the word a start-up and as such arguably ineligible for a launchpad competition and you can see why they’re out of the running (what’ll be next? IBM and Cisco entering the TechCrunch50?)

Moving to Garland Group – while risk management is important and timely – the barriers to adoption for a compliance product are more cultural than technical – arguably compliance monitoring can be done on a million and one platforms – but without the cultural decision to adopt – it’s something of a waste of time.

Which leads me to my pick of the bunch, CubeTree. While I’m loathe to pick an offering that is just another “Facebook for the enterprise” offering, CubeTree have done a good job of articulating the proposition in their video, don’t try and sell themselves as a cure for cancer but manage to come across as professional.

So yup – CubeTree gets my vote, we’ll see what the masses decide in San Francisco in a fortnight. Videos of the finalists can be seen here.

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