Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click herehere to see the series.
If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).
Membership has its privileges and for me this meant being sent one of the first run of the new look Zendesk t-shirts (and yup – my kids got one each). Interestingly enough this run, while still made by GMTee, has moved to a much more subdued Khaki than the previous super-bright lime color.
Hot
It may not be tantric, but having a Buddha on your chest is the next best thing
Heavy weight, high quality cotton
The cool labeling (including a screeprinted care label – wow)
The Zendesk meetups are legendary!
Not
Probably not the think to be worn in Iran (or some mid-Western US states for that matter)
Made in Honduras – what ever happened to first world manufacture?
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.
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.
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!
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 platform for global collaboration” and the maker of a time tracking widget is “a platform for enterprise efficiency and ROI generation” – I can’t help but rail against that and yell “enough of the platform already!”
One of the sessions at the conference included half a dozen or so vendors of microblogging products, true they all had various takes on the theme and offered different services, but they shared the common feature of providing microblogging. Somewhat surprisingly every one of them proclaimed that they were a platform. I couldn’t help but ask a somewhat tongue-in-cheek question – when every single product on the web calls itself a platform, we’ll have to invent a new word to let wannabe players impress VCs.
The inimitable Phil Wainewright recently released an excellent report looking at different aspects of PaaS, I thought I’d try and bring a philosophical bent to the discussion.
In my mind, to claim the moniker “platform” a service needs to have a number of attributes; an ecosystem, critical mass, beachhead status and openness. So what different types of platforms do I see out there?
Monotheistic platforms
What I’ve playfully called monotheistic platforms leverage one particular business process and attempt to build a platform around that. It’ll always be a niche but so long as it’s a big enough niche it’s worth following. Force.com is the originator of the PaaS moniker. It’s clearly gaining an ecosystem, with third parties developing applications that live within its world and it’s also seemingly gaining some critical mass. Force.com however is less than open – it dictates how applications can be written, it dictates (to a certain extent) how applications look and it’s central view of the world is CRM-centric (although admittedly less so now than even a few months ago). Force.com is a platform but it’s what I’ll call a niche platform.
Like Switzerland, only different, and bigger
Platforms that span the divide between on-premises and SaaS and that do so in a neutral way are arguably something of a nirvana. These platforms interact seamlessly with the web environment, while also federating to on-premises applications. They also broaden the offering such that vendors can chose parts of the stack to adopt (billing, authentication, data models etc). As for size, like anything in business, reach is critical and this is where the incumbent players have an edge – having the ability to leverage an existing customer based but introduce them to a platform is the gold many platform plays would die for. I’ve written before about the Intuit Partner Platform (disclosure – IPP is a client) and I contend that it’s an exemplar of this type of platform play – both from a vendor perspective and an end-user centric viewpoint.
Ego Platforms – The Id
To use Freud’s term, these platforms cater for the Id part of our personalities – these social platforms are built around individuals core desire to connect and find meaning from the people around them – exhibit one, Facebook. One can’t deny that Facebook has true critical mass, it also has a plethora of third parties creating offerings surrounding it. It’s beachhead proposition is “the social graph” but again it’s fairly closed. I’d temper that last statement however to say that Facebook Connect is a move towards becoming a more open, amorphous platform.
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God. Without talking about the utility or otherwise of Twitter, it is the ultimate pantheistic example. To continue the pantheistic analogy, it is a platform that doesn’t focus at all on the anthromorphic expression of itself, rather it’s an abstract expression – the “tweet” is a semi-abstract thing that takes on different shapes and forms at different times. The ecosystem that has built up around Twitter is phenomenal – this is precisely because it’s a platform that doesn’t dictate where players are or how they look. From this point of view Twitter is ultimately open. The critical mass they have is a little debatable looking at statistics of users who are actual active. Twitter’s beachhead status is communication – often vacuous communication it must be admitted but communication nonetheless.
Co-operation
Co-operative platforms attempt to build critical mass through symbiosis. The Small Business Web is a good example of this. The Small Business Web, according to its founding partners
is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. While there are many products available for small business owners on the Web, the approach we’re taking is to use each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.
In other words a bunch of small SaaS start-ups got together to try and build an alternative to the single site best-of-breed application. By working together on integrations, they’re slowly build the ability for small businesses to pick and mix functionality according to their specific needs.
Summary
Not eveyone can be a platform, but everyone sure wants to be. I’d be keen to hear readers thoughts about this post and how they see the platform battles shaking down over the next year or two.
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.
If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps)..
I was meant to go running with one of the guys from Financial Content during the Web 2.0 expo this year. Sore legs precluded that from happening but instead I went to their launch party and scored one of their t-shirts. This white crew neck is from a reputable brand (Fruit of the Loom) but alas continues the trend of being manufactured ina low-cost economy.
Hot
The Financial Content guy was really friendly
It’s great for the end of the week when clean laundry is scarce
No logo on the back – at least it’s half subtle
Not
Meh – it’s just a shirt
Financial content? I mean the name’s not exactly sexy is it?
Made in Honduras – what ever happened to first world manufacture?
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.
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 also allows for data interchange without the passing of account credentials. Or to put it another way, OAuth allows a user to grant access to their information on one site, to another site, without sharing all of their identity.
Despite being conceived only a couple of years ago, and notwithstanding that one of the originators of OAuth, Ma.gnolia, had a well publicized and ultimately disastrous story, OAuth saw the light of day around the end of 2007.
In part due to the exposure that they gained from their initial implementers (Digg, Jaiku, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Plaxo, Pownce, Twitter, Google and Yahoo), OAuth has rapidly become the accepted way to authenticate users quickly and easily. I’ve utilized OAuth, OpenID and traditional authentication key methods – OAuth is by far the easiest, cleanest and most elegant solution.
In the past few weeks a number of vendors in the accounting software space have rolled out OAuth space. First FreshBooks announced it had begin supporting OAuth and came out with a strong recommendation that all third-party add-ons to FreshBooks implement OAuth as well as FreshBooks “may eventually require it for all future add-ons”.
Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker at FreshBooks sees OAuth as the way of the future. He told me that, in his opinion;
Everyone exposing a public API should be using OAuth as their method of authenticating third parties.
As Shah sees it, OAuth gives vendors the ability to protect their customers from a compromised integration, as recently was the case when Twitter shut down OAuth after discovering a vulnerability. OAuth also gives users control over who exactly has access to their data and when.
Shah raised an interesting point for SaaS vendors trying to create an ecosystem surrounding them. As he said;
…these days, everyone wants to build an App Store. Because every access key is a license that you can turn on and off, OAuth makes it easier for your integrations to generate revenue, and that means more and better integrations
Similarly, and in the same week, Xero announced support for OAuth. They did so however under the overarching developer preview release of their version 2 API, a much broader offering that, they say, furthers their aim to become “the Accounting Engine for the Internet”. I’ll post some more detail when it is rolled out en masse but in the meantime (and as an aside) check out one of the early integrations using OAuth, the very cool little time tracker application MinuteDock - built specifically as a Xero add-on.
It’s exciting times in the authentication space – with plenty more to come!
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 happy to hear of industry players putting competitive differences behind them and connecting for the sake of the industry. It’s a connection suited to a term my fellow-commentator and leading light in the SaaS world, Phil Wainewright, coined – “The Loosely Coupled Web”.
I’m right behind industry initiatives like this and am part of the group putting together CloudCamp Christchurch. Coming out of the CloudCamp we’re hoping to form a regional industry group of “cloudy” companies in our area – it’s a nascent idea, but one with real merit on so many levels….
Given this background then it’s hardly surprising that I was excited to hear from Phil himself that he’s part of a group setting up Eurocloud. EuroCloud is a;
European network of local SaaS and cloud computing communities from Denmark, UK, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, France and Spain, including vendors and industry experts. It is aiming at developing the next generation of added value applications. EuroCloud plans to create further local communities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, and will set up its headquarters in Brussels. Through its diverse membership, EuroCloud will promote cloud computing in Europe, including current state of the markets and future innovations, and will become a critical exchange platform across the different continents.
EuroCloud is led by Pierre-José Billotte, President and Founder of the French ASP Forum, with a team of SaaS & cloud computing players from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain, EuroCloud gathers together leading SaaS vendors, enablers, integrators and industry experts to share best practice and expand their businesses across the continent.
They’re calling for participation and inviting cloud players to create a regional communities. Candidates can create a new local organization under the EuroCloud brand. EuroCloud’s launch is already supported by major companies in Europe and in the US. Including: Amazon Web Services, Cloudberry Associates, Cloudmore, Compubase, Dassault Systèmes, E-Kenz, Emailvision, Esker, Huddle, INES, Ipsca, McAfee, Microsoft Corporation, Mimecast, MrTed, NTRglobal, Odyssee Mobile, Oodrive, OpSource, Panda Software, Procullux Ventures, Qualys, RunMyProcess, Saas-it Consult, salesforce.com, Servoy, STS Group, SuccessFactors and Twinfield.
Some commentators have questioned the need for yet another industry grouping, contending that it’s both a busy space already, and one which puts vendor interests before customer ones. While I understand the perspective, and the risks involved in being vendor-centric, I’m also aware that there is a vast market out there that, for the most part, has no knowledge of, or exposure to, “the Cloud”. As such a body which seeks to both educate and negotiate some shared standard cannot be a bad thing.
While there could be a risk if the EuroCloud members use the organization as a front to avoid actually having to be transparent and define common standards, I’m optimistic that the grouping will be used for the right reasons – to iron out the chinks that need to be sorted before cloud goes mainstream. I’ll be watching EuroCloud progress with interest.
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.
Membership has its privileges and for me this meant being sent one of the first run of the new look Zendesk t-shirts (and yup – my kids got one each). Interestingly enough this run, while still made by GMTee, has moved to a much more subdued Khaki than the previous super-bright lime color.
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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. 
