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:

• Amazon’s S3 service outage this morning (news of which I’m sure will attract dozens of blogs in the next hour), and
• Phil Wainewright thought-provoking writeup: SaaS vendors, eat your own dogfood, or die

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.

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.

Tags: A1S, amazon, bdd, big switch, business bydesign, cloud computing, emc, infrastructure, mozy, On-Demand, S3, SaaS, SaaS-on-SaaS, sap, software as a service, software innovation, web services

A few years ago this would have been a crazy question. A bookstore against a search engine? Apples and oranges… not anymore. Still, we’re more used to pitting Google against Yahoo, Amazon against eBay. But think about it:

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

The above quote is from Amazon’s earnings release. There are more then 330,000 developers registered to use Amazon Web Services. Some of these new Web 2.0 offerings will actually take off, in fact some will get mass adoption. That translates to tens of millions of users whose online activity flows through Amazon, and this is where Google comes in the picture.

Forget Search, Google is the world’s primary Advertising engine. They need to have (I did not say own!) all our data. Nick Carr is right:

For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income.

The business models are different: for Google everything you do is secondary (and largely free to you), since they make their money on the ads, while Amazon directly charges for their individual services (albeit not much). Amazon will have tens of millions of users, and Google wants them, too.

If we buy into Nick Carr’s “Big Switch” vision of utility computing (and I do), are these two giants competing to become “The Cloud computer”? Or perhaps one of the 5?

Related posts: ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Between the Lines, Data Center Knowledge, ProgrammableWeb.

Tags: amazon, cloud computing, Google, internet, SaaS, web services