Building applications in the cloud

/ Robert Pease / 1 Comment

Interesting announcement and coverage today (here, here, and here) from Bungee Labs about the public beta of a new version of BungeeConnect.  Essentially this is a pure SaaS application development environment for programmers. They are defining "platform-as-a-service" slightly differently than Salesforce.com as:

"a single environment for delivering the entire software lifecycle as a service to increase productivity, shorten time-to-market and reduce overall costs for enterprise-class applications."

…and pointing out that the Salesforce approach requires a plug-in for working off-line whereas they do not.  Is that the right approach?  I’m not sure yet but the Bungee folks point out that although "off-line access has been a high discussion point" the "developers" told them "that if they are building live apps with interact services they couldn’t imagine why they would want to develop offline."

The off-line/on-line debate is an interesting one especially if you look at how Google launched Google Gears almost a year ago to enable off-line usage of its on-line apps like Gmail and Google Reader because "One of the most frequently requested features for Google’s web applications is the ability to use them offline."  Maybe this is an application usage (end-user) vs. application development (developer) argument?

Time to buy?

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I believe I once heard the best time to get into the stock market is when everyone else has gotten out…a capitulation of sorts.  Are we at that point in time?  I don’t know as I am not one to provide financial advice, but this nugget from Merrill Lynch certainly points that direction (via Paul Kedrosky).

"…41 percent of fund managers are overweight cash, the highest since September 2001’s terrorist attacks…"

 

A brief interview with Jim Rogers

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I recently discovered a new tab on Yahoo! Finance entitled "Tech Ticker."  I don’t use Yahoo for much (sorry Microsoft) but do use the Finance section as well as maintain an email address although it is not my primary one.

The anchor content is a video blurb and over the past couple days there have been a couple snippets of an interview of Jim Rogers by Paul Kedrosky (I posted one below).  I have proclaimed my fan status of Paul previously, but I am also a fan of Rogers.  He is not so much a financial markets pundit as he is a (wealthy) pragmatist with pretty defined views.  I’ve read his first three books and am planning on picking up his newest "A Bull in China" as soon as I have some time.  His others are great reads combining travel stories (the first two listed here) with a bit of capital markets education.  Check out Investment Biker , Adventure Capitalist, or Hot Commodities.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop_wrapper.swf?id=6321955&autoStart=0&prepanelEnable=1&infopanelEnable=1&carouselEnable=0

SaaS integration….sorta

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

We are seeing more and more companies with SaaS integration needs out there.  What the heck is that you may ask?  Well, consider the scenario where you use an on-demand application like Salesforce.com or Netsuite AND you happen to have a premise-based application that you use for other functions like SAP or Oracle.  You need to connect what is in the cloud with what is behind your firewall or you need to connect to your trading partner’s SaaS or premise-based application.

Meet the next generation of application integration challenges.  Proving again that there really are no new problems in enterprise IT, just shades of the same ones over and over, we now have an "extra-enterprise" application integration challenge that further blurs the line between EAI and B2B.  This is an emerging need as companies seek more and more capabilities from their SaaS applications and have to actually integrate them into existing infrastructure. 

An interesting development in this area…and the reason for my post title has to do with Salesforce.com’s new "Salesforce-to-Salesforce on-demand services" detailed in this article.  An interesting embrace of social networking concepts to allow different users of Salesforce to connect and share information.  Pretty cool. 

This is certainly one way to avoid the complexity of integration by standardizing the same application on both ends.  While technically this is a two-way connection, a complete approach to SaaS integration will have to accommodate the disparate systems that exist out there.

Not another political post

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Although the backdrop on this is political, it is not about any candidate rather another clear example of the "benefits" email brings to our lives.  In this case, we have the exchange between Clinton campaign press secretary
Philippe Reines and MSNBC reporter David Shuster about his questionable comments made on air.  These two gents had a snarky exchange that at least Shuster was engaged in via his Blackberry.  Here’s the link to the full exchange and note the
"Sent using BlackBerry" signature. 

What strikes me most about this is that here we have two public figures shooting nastygrams back and forth via email and now it is published for us all to see.  This type of scenario plays out every day in every organization.  Email is at best a one-sided conversation and certainly not a substitute for meaningful dialog.  Maybe someone should have picked up the phone.

Predictions for on-demand services

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Top 10 lists are sure fire way to get some on-line coverage and chatter, so I will further reinforce that by referencing this "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008" from consulting firm THINKStrategies.  You can read the entire write up via the link but I thought #9 was particularly relevant to what we are doing at Hubspan and the value we provide:

9. IT Discovers Services are the Solution: In the past, the IT
department was the biggest barrier to managed services and SaaS
adoption. Many IT professionals were afraid these on-demand solutions
would eliminate their jobs. Now, a growing proportion of IT people see
managed services and SaaS as a way to out-task mundane work or overcome
complex application/technology deployment and maintenance
responsibilities. As they learn to take advantage of these on-demand
solutions, IT departments will finally be able to put their daily
firefights aside and focus on addressing the strategic needs of their
business users.

Can Google be a serious contender in messaging security and e-discovery?

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I saw this a few days ago and have been meaning to do a post on it.  Google has finally packaged and released the functionality picked up via the Postini acquisition.  As anticipated, pricing is pretty reasonable but Google still needs to prove it can actually sell something besides ads:

  • Google Message Filtering ($3 or €2.00 per user/year) provides basic spam filtering for any email server.
  • Google Message Security ($12 or €8.00 per user/year) provides
    comprehensive email security and policy management for inbound and
    outbound messages.
  • Google Message Discovery ($25 or €17.50 per
    user/year) provides comprehensive security, policy management,
    archiving, e-discovery for any email server.

Will companies take their approach to message security, filtering, and e-discovery seriously?  To be determined.   Safe to say there would be some hesitancy to having ads served up based on the indexed content of a company’s email archive (not part of the offering…but one must wonder).  Given what I repeatedly learned about the sensitivity and seriousness around corporate email, I’d imagine these needs will continue to be addressed by companies like Orchestria and MessageGate (I previously worked at both).