Rackspace subsidiary Mosso this week relaunched its hosting platform as a pay-as-you-grow cloud computing service. There have been noises recently about hosting provider Rackspace’s ability to compete with Amazon’s EC2 service and similar cloud offerings. Mosso is its answer to those critics.
Briefing me on the announcement last week, Rackspace’s senior VP of strategy Lew Morrison told me, “This is a very important strategy for Rackspace … This idea has really blossomed into something we feel is the future of hosting — we really think it’s going to bring something new to the market.”
Rebranded as The Hosting Cloud, the Mosso offering brings cloud attributes to the commodity Web server hosting market. Web developers can select the server stack they want to deploy — including Linux and Windows (both on the same website if they want), plus higher-level components such as PHP, mySQL, Ruby on Rails, Microsoft SQL Server and IIS7 — and the Mosso system implements it on demand. Its slogan: “Code, load and go.”
Once it’s up and running, the site developer never again has to worry about scaling up infrastructure as traffic grows. The company says its cloud platform will “automatically configure and provision each layer of the technology stack in order to maximize performance so that web applications automatically scale as traffic surges.”
Mosso’s new pricing, announced on Tuesday, is designed to scale just as gracefully. Read the rest of this entry »
Every cloud computing vendor I meet makes a point of telling me how long it takes the average enterprise these days to provision a new server (for the record, they tell me anything from 2 weeks to 3 months). Last week I met a vendor that made precisely the same point, but its solution isn’t yet another compute cloud. CohesiveFT, whose Elastic Server On-Demand service launched in public beta last week, assembles virtual machines to order within minutes, and deploys them to the cloud of your choice — be it Amazon EC2 or your own implementation of VMWare, XenSource or Parallels (see screenshot, after the jump).
The support for data center (and desktop) virtualization platforms is a sign that CFT (full name: Cohesive Flexible Technologies) doesn’t believe that the world is about to consolidate its computing onto a small handful of giant compute clouds. Certainly larger enterprises are much more comfortable deploying to their own data centers (or to colocation facilities) at present, using Amazon (if they do at all) as purely a short-term tactical deployment option. The CFT team sees cloud platforms proliferating, with others besides Amazon emerging — and it’s ready to support any of them, if that’s what customers want. “We are virtualization agnostic,” co-founder Alexis Richardson told me. “[We’re] just a giant packaging system in the sky.”
CFT’s ‘elastic server on demand’ concept envisages production-line assembly of virtual machines, manufactured to order. “Elastic servers are custom application stacks, built from components, virtualization-ready, that you download to test, or deploy to a cloud,” says the company. Another tagline is “Z2V — zero footprint provisioning to virtual servers in minutes.”
The insight governing this is that the stack deployed at most enterprises today is multi-sourced. However much enterprises want to single-source, the technology proliferates faster than vendors can consolidate. This ongoing complexity is driven not only by continuing innovation, Read the rest of this entry »
Sooner or later, it was inevitable that a server outage would expose Amazon’s lack of preparedness for failure. It’s ironic that this should have happened within hours of my posting an item here arguing that SaaS vendors should all rely on cloud providers for their infrastructure. Those that do rely on Amazon will be looking for far better outage management and service level reporting in the future than they’ve tolerated to date.
What I can’t understand is, why do providers only understand this after they’ve suffered a major outage? Salesforce.com learnt its lesson two years ago, and as a result its partial outage on Tuesday aroused little reaction. Why on earth Amazon couldn’t have invested in a similar system to keep customers informed is beyond me.
At least I can say, ‘I told you so’. This is from Time for Web 2.0 to get real, posted in June last year 2006:
… a complete disregard for accountability to their users among service providers … is nothing new. An article I commissioned from my Loosely Coupled colleague David Longworth in October 2004 reported on Web services without warranties. Here’s what [program manager for Amazon Web Services] Jeff Barr had to say about service level guarantees back then:
“We have not found it necessary to offer any kind of formal guarantee in this regard. What works best is to realize that our interests are aligned with the interests of our developers — if the service is not running then their sites are not running, and no transactions are occurring. Clearly, this is bad, and we do all that we can to make sure that it doesn’t happen.”
In other words, ‘If you’re down, we’re down, so trust us to stay up — after all, if you can’t trust Amazon, who can you trust?’ As I pointed out at the time in a blog posting entitled Rips in the Web 2.0 fabric, such breathtaking arrogance is characteristic of a vendor in the grip of what Geoffrey Moore called ‘the tornado‘. We all know where this kind of thing leads, as I wrote back then:
“Sure, there are going to be a lot of headaches when everyone has standardized on Web 2.0 services in a decade’s time. Gartner will come out with a damning report on the unrecognized TCO of on-demand services, and [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos will suddenly launch a ‘Trustworthy Services’ initiative in response to corporate concerns over alleged performance glitches …”
After all this, do I really think SaaS providers are going to trust cloud infrastructure? I think it keeps the debate open, but I think what today’s outage shows is not that the model is broken but that the execution needs fixing.
We may be approaching the end of the road for established SaaS vendors — like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Concur, Taleo and RightNow — who build their own data center infrastructure instead of consuming infrastructure as a service. That’s the message posed in a guest column on GigaOm titled How Not to End Up as an Anachronism.
The column is by Greg Olsen (pictured), founder and CTO of Coghead, a cloud-based development platform for creating Web-facing business applications, which moved its servers to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 platforms a few weeks ago. So Olsen is preaching what he’s practised. In his column, he wonders why other SaaS providers aren’t eating their own dogfood in the same way:
“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. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.”
But SaaS alone isn’t enough, he goes on to argue. It’s SaaS-on-SaaS that’s truly disruptive:
“We are now at point where implementors of SaaS capabilities are being disrupted by newer SaaS capabilities. Services that are built largely from other services are a reality, and offer many clear advantages …
Read the rest of this entry »
A UK hosting company is offering Microsoft Office for £4.99 (around $10) a month with no contract commitment, and Microsoft doesn’t like it — even though it seems Microsoft approved the arrangement.
Launched last week by popular web hosting provider Fasthosts, the service uses streaming technology to download the application to the customer’s PC, where it runs for as long as the customer continues to pay their subscription. The headline-grabbing £4.99-a-month price point (’less than a fiver’ we Brits would say) is “for any household that has a user engaged in educational activities (such as school, college, night classes etc)”, and includes the 2007 versions of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Business users pay £14.99. Both prices are before UK VAT (sales tax) of 17.5%, which most businesses reclaim but private individuals cannot. A higher-priced service also includes Publisher, Access and Infopath.
Understandably, Microsoft was somewhat taken aback when this pricing was announced, and on Friday, Michala Wardell, head of anti-piracy at Microsoft UK, told ZDNet UK’s David Meyer that “streaming Microsoft products like Office 2007 via the web infringes our licence regulations. Fasthosts have been informed of this and we are currently working with them to rectify this situation.”
But Fasthosts is holding its ground. In a statement issued Friday, it said that European officials at Microsoft last month signed off “an addendum” to the vendor’s current Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) which permits it to stream Office. The statement concludes: Read the rest of this entry »
Compared to the furore that used to greet Salesforce.com outages, yesterday’s problems on three of its eight instances — including one of the five North American instances — has aroused little ire [disclosure: Salesforce.com is a client].
eWeek’s coverage illustrates how difficult it is to stir up a storm of discontent when all the available information about the outage is published on the trust.salesforce.com console, which the vendor established in the wake of its earlier problems.
Tipped off by a customer, the only research the journalist had to do was click the link and cut-and-paste the information posted there:
“… at 8:22 a.m. Pacific time, the company’s internal server information Web page said, ‘NA5 Service Degradation: The technology operations team has been made aware of intermittent service disruptions to NA5. Please check back for further updates.’
“Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, subsequently reported similar ’service degradations’ at 9:26 am, 10:19 am, 11:23 pm and 12:20 pm before announcing at 2:04 pm that ‘the Salesforce.com Technology team has restored the service issue with NA5 at 22:11 UTC. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.’”
All instances are operating normally today, according to the status console. The latest report on yesterday’s NA5 problems Read the rest of this entry »
Specialist SaaS hoster OpSource today has announced the acquisition of SaaS billing vendor LeCayla Technologies. OpSource has a number of partners that offer services to its customers, some of them integrated into its real-time service bus — including Aria Systems, another billing vendor — but this is the first time it has acquired a partner. [Disclosure: OpSource is a client and is covering travel costs for me to attend and speak at its SaaS Summit conference in San Francisco later this month].
By pure coincidence, this is the second acquisition of an Irish technology start-up by a San Francisco Bay area SaaS venture within a few days. Last week, SaaS vendor Workday announced its acquisition of Dublin-based Cape Clear Software. LeCayla is also based in the Irish capital, and in both cases, the acquisitions — although made for technology reasons — provide a ready-made European headquarters as a platform for expansion in the European market. LeCayla’s CEO, Conor Halpin (pictured), who is well known as a speaker and SIIA contributor on the SaaS conference circuit, has been appointed OpSource’s senior VP of EMEA. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
I happened to get a briefing last week not only by telephone from OpSource management in San Jose, but also face-to-face from Halpin, who like me was attending the European ISV Conference in Frankfurt. Like his new colleagues at OpSource, Conor has a unique appreciation of the complexity and potential of billing for SaaS vendors and can speak with conviction and passion about the role his company’s services can play. But to really make headway in the market, his company had needed to build a US presence, and becoming part of OpSource was the simplest way of achieving that, he told me.
I put it to OpSource’s CEO Treb Ryan that this acquisition presented a potential conflict with partners participating in its services bus such as Aria Systems, a direct competitor of LeCayla. Read the rest of this entry »
Responding to my recent assertion that Microsoft’s software-plus-services mantra is bunkum, Gianpaolo Carraro — the company’s chief thinker about SaaS architecture — wonders if he’s drunk too much Kool-Aid.
The answer, my friend, is ‘yes’. Here’s Gianpaolo’s justification for still wanting to buy an Office licence and run Microsoft’s productivity software on his PC at home:
“… as far as user interaction is concern[ed], I am a big believer in bringing it as close to the user as possible. Why would I ever want the cloud between me and my work?”
I totally agree with this point of view. But instead of going to all the trouble of buying a licence, installing the software locally and then having to maintain it, why not let the cloud bring the application to your desktop whenever you need it? That’s why Adobe developed AIR, why Google has Google Gears, and why Microsoft has developed Silverlight (in addition to investing in Softricity’s desktop virtualization software).
All that Kool-Aid that Gianpaolo is drinking gives him the illusion that the cloud is something that exists out there, beyond the existing desktop and enterprise infrastructure. In today’s connected world, Read the rest of this entry »
I was in Frankfurt, Germany, earlier today, attending the opening sessions of the European ISV Convention, which is organized by the folks at IT Europa. Inevitably, SaaS is a hot topic here just as it is for ISVs in the US, and one of the big unanswered questions is, what’s the channel to market for SaaS applications? Having heard this morning’s panel session (pictured below), I can safely say that no one on either side of the Atlantic has a clue what the answer is.
There’s general agreement that the traditional solution provider channel isn’t the place to start. David Hurley, managing director of Anglia Business Solutions, which provides a vertical solution to the UK food industry, summed up the nub of the problem: “The channel won’t get the large turnkey projects. What they’re expected to sell goes down in value. You’re going to get kick back.” That’s not exclusively a SaaS problem, of course. All vendors these days are packaging up their applications for rapid implementation and configuration, middleware included, which eliminates much of the technology implementation work that used to be the solution provider’s bread-and-butter. But SaaS compounds the problem by removing the opportunity for selling ancillary hardware, at the same time as switching from an up-front one-off licence payment to a continuing subscription model.
So ISVs are wondering who else they can work with to take their SaaS offerings to market. Read the rest of this entry »
The scale may be different, but the same market forces that fueled Oracle’s acquisition of BEA have sealed another acquisition announced today: that of SOA middleware vendor Cape Clear Software by on-demand enterprise applications vendor Workday (also covered today here on ZDNet by Dan Farber and Dana Gardner). Increasingly, customers want their middleware bundled with the application stack. The less integration work they have to do themselves, the more they like it. Middleware is disappearing as a standalone software category.
Workday’s acquisition sends many other messages too, but the rest of them offer far less comfort to Oracle [disclosure: Cape Clear and Oracle are both recent clients]. I recently visited Workday and learned that most (though far from all) of the company’s account wins are PeopleSoft customers who have fallen behind with upgrades and can’t stomach the cost and upheaval of moving to the latest version to get the functionality they need. They turn to Workday because implementation is rapid, the upfront cost is low and the on-demand model takes them off the upgrade treadmill for ever. (Read previous coverage of Workday).
Packaging integration into the proposition can only make the appeal even stronger. It reinforces that get-off-the-treadmill message, transferring responsibility from the customer to the vendor for implementing and maintaining integration as well as the application itself. In fact this always was the case — Workday has worked with Cape Clear as its integration partner since launch, so merging the two companies is merely a cementing of that working arrangement. But consummating the arrangement in an acquisition removes any ambiguity.
Just like a SaaS deployment, this private transaction will be complete in around a month’s time. The contrast with Oracle’s mega-bid for BEA couldn’t be more stark. Read the rest of this entry »
Rebranded as The Hosting Cloud, the Mosso offering brings cloud attributes to the commodity Web server hosting market. Web developers can select the server stack they want to deploy — including Linux and Windows (both on the same website if they want), plus higher-level components such as PHP, mySQL, Ruby on Rails, Microsoft SQL Server and IIS7 — and the Mosso system implements it on demand. Its slogan: “Code, load and go.”
