SaaS lost in the Cloud Computing
Michael Barker, Managing Director of Revolution Partners, headed up this panel at AlwaysOn examining the distinctions between SaaS, cloud computing, on-demand, and grid computing in order to clarify the differences and review their relative merits. The panelists were:
Vance Checkett, COO, Mozy, EMC Russ Daniels, VP & CTO Cloud Services, HP Drew Clark, Director of Strategy, IBM Venture Capital Group Polly Sumner, President, Platforms & Alliances, Salesforce.com Rich Zippel, VP Technology, Chief Technologist Office, Sun Microsystems
Zippel: some IT services are best delivered off some form of homogeneous infrastructure… every few years we see a different name for it and it takes a different form…
Sumner: a whole new set of business SaaS applications are moving to the cloud; over-regulation will drive some of this – e.g., Y2k, Sarbanes-Oxley.
Zippel: Cloud computing is very good for ”average case” latency stuff… but there are some applications where the operation MUST succeed… e.g. payroll, stock transaction clearing… but just about everything else is going to the cloud. However the core piece that runs the business will remain in the enterprise.
Checkett: SaaS has helped us to get beyond traditional hosted applications to get into what we call multi-tenancy infrastructure…. (Clark)… yes, running at SCALE… web scale. Our customers are pushing us to achieve that kind of scale, from high performance computing, to grids and now to clouds, the key question is how do i get efficiency to scale.
Zippel: Anyone involved in web 2.0 realizes the market is changing very quickly… doing this with traditional architectures is very difficult. Virtualization and abstractions (an example being Google’s “Big Table”) are key. Sun is seeing pressure to deliver that same sort of capability and value.
Sumner: the notion of sharing; being able to address a “no-upgrade” policy… I can’t take anything down to upgrade the infrastructure for cloud computing opens up a whole new world for system integration and management tools… Salesforce and other SaaS providers are learning from the consumer world this time around, applying it to business applications; it is a new learning paradigm shift.
Checketts: we’ll see many different types of virtualization platforms.
Clark: startups are rising to the occasion, providing highly-customizable SaaS applications… this used to be a key critique leveled against SaaS applications.
Checkett: Mozy (now part of EMC, offers an unlimited online backup storage service) has 10 PetaBytes of storage online, with large enterprises down to consumers running on a single platform, application, code base. Think of the cloud as like a “bank”… the same thing will happen with information as with $. We are beyond the “initial fear of SaaS” now.
Daniels: Privacy is a huge issue for cloud computing.
Summary: extreme bullishness expressed on this big trend in tech. A lot of statements were thrown around, but this panel never really engaged or defined it’s topic. Zippel had a lot of sharp and penetrating observations. But honestly, this never turned into a cohesive discussion.
It’s difficult to achieve a real debate in a panel discussion, only a minority of panel sessions succeed in doing so. This is just a bit too big of topic, as defined, to get the job done inside of an hour. One thing is for sure, the term “cloud computing” is a great name for the current phenomena of running applications on servers located in data centers. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that these are brick and mortar data centers, and their actually is no “cloud”. Now THAT is some great hype! But it’s a very real phenomena, of course.
We’ve come a long ways since the days of the debate over minicomputers and mainframe computing vs desktop computing… right?