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Out of Left Field: Vmware Acquires Sliderocket

sliderocket logoQuick initial reaction: scratching head.

Vmware recently shook up the Cloud Computing world with the launch of Cloud Foundry and I think most of us would have pegged them as an infrastructure company.  Then all of a sudden they buy Sliderocket, the great collaborative presentations company.  Why is this a big deal?  Probably not for the $ value, but it may show Vmware’s intentions of getting in the Cloud Apps business big time.

After all, they already have an almost forgotten asset, Zimbra.  Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Zoho … watch out! Smile

P.S.  I guess the phones are ringing at Vmware, with every single Cloud App startup trying to get bought…

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve » Zoli Erdos)

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Internal Email on Why a Software Company Migrates Away from MySQL

Twitter is abuzz this morning with MySQL news:

mysql witter

What these messages refer to is that Oracle dropped InnoDB from the free Classic Edition, it is now only available starting with the $2,000 Standard Edition.  A few days ago we heard support prices were increased – none of this should come as a surprise, the writing had been on the wall ever since Sun’s acquisition by Oracle.  And of course it’s not only MySQL, all Open Source products are on uncertain grounds – there’s a reason why many of the OpenOffice folks split off and are now supporting the new fork, LibreOffice.

I don’t pretend to be the Open Source expert, thankfully we have one, Krish, who recently chimed in on the issue.  What I want to do this morning is to take this opportunity to publish an internal email from a smart software CEO who instructed his teams to migrate away from MySQL several months ago.  While he wishes to remain anonymous, this is not a leak, I am publishing it with his permission.  (Yeah, I know, a leak would have made this story a lot juicier…).  Here’s the email:

I posted this internally to an employee question why I am asking our company to move away from MySQL towards  Postgres (instead of Ingres).


I would answer the “Why not Ingres” with one word: GPL.

Let’s step back and think about the  “People are angry with what Oracle is doing with MySQL” statement. Actually why could Oracle do this with MySQL? How was it possible for Oracle to do this? After all MySQL is “open source” and could be “forked” right?

To be honest, I had long anticipated this move on the part of Oracle…

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Multi-tenancy, the Holy Grail of SaaS. Do Customers Care?

Two recent posts by Enterprise Social Software  vendors Jive and Atlassian set up a huge debate amongst my fellow Enterprise Irregulars.  Here’s the money-quote from Jive:

It’s not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "SaaS" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it’s been an industry mantra that it’s  simply impossible to have a scalable SaaS business without multi-tenancy.

Both Jive and Atlassian went single-tenant. That’s a red flag with many SaaS purists.  But there’s more then just tenancy. What if customer data stays behind the firewall, while the application is still provided over the web?  Is that still considered SaaS?    Do customers really care about such issues, or do they look for innovation in features and services?

And a bonus: the #1 SaaS icon supposedly delivers on-premise, if the deal is big enough…

Read more here

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Is the USA Really the Broadband Leader?

The US is not exactly the leader when it comes to Broadband or even Mobility – in fact we’re way behind several Asian and European countries.

But is that really true?  Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School disagrees.  He published a study on the World’s Connectivity Scorecard.  His key thesis is that penetration and connection speed is not enough to measure true connectedness: we have to consider to what extent the Consumer, Businesss and Government sectors put broadband to productive use.

The compound index reveals a few surprises: the USA is actually #1, closely followed by Sweden and Denmark, and in fourth position (surprise!?!) is Malaysia, leaving countries like Japan, Korea, Norway in the dust.

I am not entirely convinced about the US position, especially if we take a look at the Consumer vs Business segmentation … and don’t get me started on Government.

Read more

Update:  Vinnie Mirchandani points out the serious flaws in the Study Methodology.

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The Dawn of SaaS-on-SaaS – Even While Amazon S3 is Down.

TechMeme is great in threading together relevant posts, but is largely based (so I think…) on direct linking, so of course it could not auto-detect the ironic relationship between:

Phil quotes Greg Olsen, CTO of Coghead, a web-based development platform which moved its servers to the Amazon infrastructure recently:

“As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves”

“The move to SaaS applications built on SaaS is a much more profound shift than the move from on-premise applications to SaaS applications …”

“Ironically, some of the first victims of this new economy may be some pioneers of the software-as-a-service movement. Today, many established SaaS application providers are applying much more of their precious focus and capital to infrastructure issues than newer competitors that are aggressively utilizing service-based infrastructure … the build-it-all-ourselves SaaS application vendor … will ultimately end up as [an] anachronism.”

Today’s Amazon outage appears to rebuff Phil and Greg’s point. Reality check: this is the first time Amazon S3 went down, and it’s already back up. Salesforce.com had its fair share of outages, so did other SaaS providers, and so did just about any in-house systems companies run their own installed software on. I’m a big believer in focus, specialization and I trust the few mega-cloud companies that will emerge can maintain a more robust infrastructure than we could all do individually. (So yes, if it’s not obvious, I do buy into Nick Carr’s Big Switch concept.)

Another approach is to look at where value can be added: the consensus view from a quick Enterprise Irregulars chat is that infrastructure will be commoditized faster (or it already is) than software, where there is a lot more room for innovation by new and – thanks to outsourced infrastructure – smaller players.

And if acronyms were not ugly enough already, here’s to entering the age of SaaS-on-SaaS. smile_shades

Update: What better confirmation of my point than today’s rumors about EMC hosting  SAP’s system  – I assume it’s Business ByDesign, the new On-Demand offering for the SMB market. (Side-note: I’ll be traveling and be time and Internet-challenged for the next three weeks, but SAP’s BDD is one of the subjects I will come back, as it seems to be largely misunderstood. Oh, and I just love the fact how Mozy, my favorite online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story).

 

Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter.