Saturday, May 15, 2010

Imagine new Cloud world

Over the weekend I had chance to chat with an Accenture person, whom I worked with in past by an larger customer implementation project, we talked about our work and the challenges we faced. By transitioning into Cloud computing world, the adoption process among different ECO system partners in the enterprise software world will be interesting to watch, it will most likely change some of industry practice from today. Imagine this, an AT&T is asking Accenture to deploy its (Oracle) FI module and its (SAP) Procurement module in Amazon EC2 instances.

Software vendor is among (software ECO system) the first to adopt to Cloud world, its ability to adopt will be decided its own future. The transition of shipping software via CD to delivering (free) deployable software component (for any Cloud), is challenging for especially large software company in many ways.

First challenge: Deployable software. Have you download software from download.com and uploaded and installed into a hosting service, which hosted your website? How long does it take you to finish all these work? Or, question is more like, how long do you have patient to read install guide and understand it? I admit, max. time I'm willing to spend is 20 minutes. So, easy to deploy is the very basic foundation within Cloud world.

Second challenge: Integrable software. Its not hard to imagine, within the Cloud(s) there will be different PaaS and IaaS. Your software must be able to integrate with different platform almost instantly.

Cloud computing will reshape software landscape so dramatically, that some of the fundamentally best practice like software upgrades is no longer 'important' and nasty for consumer, it is given in a Cloud world. And things like new functionality and new process is no longer 'hard to get' for consumer, it is given in Cloud world. Software vendor feeds the Cloud every day/minute with new features and consumer decides what to enable, what not to.

PaaS and Vitalization is an essential part of Cloud world, it is in-fact the game-changing play ground for everyone now. Microsoft has been rolling out Azure and VMware and continues to push forward with its SpringSource acquisition. Amazon, though generally labeled as IaaS is also a “player” with its SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queue Service) and more recently, its SNS (Simple Notification Service). But there’s also Force.com, the SaaS giant Salesforce.com’s incarnation of a “platform” as well as Google’s App Engine. Software vendor might need all 3 elements in your offering: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS to be considered as Cloud player.




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