The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch.

WaveMaker today released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform that runs in a browser.

WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to prototype, develop and customize great looking web applications.

How easy you ask? Well, how 'bout:

• 15 second WaveMaker hello world test drive
• 7 minute WaveMaker multi-tenant SaaS screencast
• Free open source download of WaveMaker at www.wavemaker.com/downloads
  
• WaveMaker cloud edition at cloud.wavemaker.com

With all this open and cloudy goodness, it is not surprising that the momentum behind WaveMaker continues to build.

What kind of momentum? Well, how 'bout:

• WaveMaker's open source community now numbers more than 15,000 active developers
• The Cloud Quick Start Partnership teams WaveMaker with IBM, Amazon and RightScale
• Citrix makes WaveMaker available as an integrated development platform for NetScaler
  

Let the fireworks begin!

Labels: citrix, ibm, paas, rightscale, saas, WaveMaker

We recently held a joint webinar with IBM to describe a methodology for ISVs to migrate to SaaS and cloud computing cost-effectively (you can see the recorded webinar here). The key is being able to leverage existing data and logic while moving iteratively to deliver web, SaaS and Cloud capabilities that provide the biggest value to the customer at the least cost and risk to the software developer.

During the webinar, we conducted a survey of the ISV attendees that turned up some interesting results about where ISVs are along the SaaS migration path and where they would like to be in 12 months.

We defined a SaaS maturity model with 5 levels:

• Level 0: web-enabled. The ISV's application can be accessed through a web browser without requiring the end user to install anything on their desktop.
• Level 1: hosted. The ISV's application can be hosted without requiring the customer to install anything in their data center.
• Level 2: self-service. The end user can customize an application (e.g., configure dashboards, reports, data, workflow) without having to do any coding.
• Level 3: multi-tenant. The ISV can support multiple customers with a single application, database and security instance.
• Level 4: cloud scalable. The ISV can deploy their appplication within a cloud infrasctructure that automatically scales up and down based on load.

The interesting thing about this maturity model is that levels 0 - 2 are about delivering higher value to the ISVs customers, while levels 3 and 4 are about reducing costs to the ISV to scale their operations. The important take away for the ISV is that the value of levels 3 and 4 are highly sensitive to the ISVs projections about the number of customers they need to support along with the level of customization that each customer requires.

Based on this maturity model, attendees first told us where they are today. The following pie chart shows how ISVs rank the maturity of their existing products. Note that over half of the ISVs put themselves at the most basic level - web-enabled application.

Next, we asked ISVs where they would like to be in 12 months. The following pie chart shows where ISVs would like to see their product offerings in 12 months. Note that the bulk of ISVs intend to deliver self-service customization, but fewer ISVs plan on moving all the way to a multi-tenant, cloud-scalable solution over the next 12 months.

Admittedly, this survey data is more anecdotal than rigorous (there were only 35 respondents). However, it is an interesting indication that ISVs are looking for an incremental methodology for migrating their applications to SaaS, rather than a big bang approach in which the ISV does a complete rewrite of their software.

Resources:

• Click here for more about IBM's SaaS enablement program
• Click here for more about the SaaS maturity model

Labels: saas, saas development, saas migration

In addition to growing sales by a whopping 80% last quarter (worthy of another blog post on its own no doubt), WaveMaker also brought on a number of impressive new customers.

Yesterday we announced that the ECN Group subsidiary of New Zealand Post has adopted WaveMaker as their platform for delivery the next generation of their Round Trip Logistics application. ECN has over 3,000 customers and sells their SaaS logistics application throughout New Zealand, Australia and Asian markets.

WaveMaker makes SaaS simple both for SaaS vendors and their customers:

• SaaS migration: like many ISVs, ECN already has a good deal of application business logic written in Java. WaveMaker allows ECN to create a new SaaS application that leverages the work they have already done.
  
• SaaS development: just like we did with KANA 10, WaveMaker's drag and drop development platform can cut the time to develop a new SaaS application by at least 50%
  
• SaaS end-user customization: WaveMaker's unique strength is in enabling SaaS vendors to deliver applications that can be easily customized by end users. In KANA's case, this meant enabling business managers to react to changing business conditions by customizing workflows in minutes that would otherwise take months of expert IT resources.

WaveMaker's SaaS development platform shows ISVs how to build a SaaS application using an incremental approach that delivers the highest bang for the buck. Other solutions like Force.com require that ISVs completely redevelop their application - a more costly and risky approah.

Labels: saas, saas development, WaveMaker

Savio Rodriguez has a nice post on the Infoworld blog, entitled Adobe follows WaveMaker's footsteps into the cloud, describing Adobe's latest cloud announcement as a reaction to the WaveMaker Cloud launch last December.

According to ZDNet's Larry Dignan, Adobe is launching a cloud version of their LiveCycle tools running on Amazon EC/2 as a "sandbox" for developers. In contrast, the WaveMaker Cloud development tools are intended for full application development and deployment - out of the sandbox and onto the beach!

WaveMaker is turning out to have much more of a lead in this space than we expected. When we started development almost 2 years ago, we assumed that there would be a number of open development tools targeting the cloud.

Now that we are well into our beta release, we are finding that WaveMaker is more unique than we had hoped for. All the major players who launched before us - Force.com, Coghead, Bungee - have gone down the old fashioned proprietary path.

For customers, this is a lock-in nightmare:

1. Proprietary languages like Apex force developers to start fresh on yet another language and framework learning curve.


2. Lack of portability across cloud providers forces companies to pay monopoly pricing to host on a single cloud.


3. Lack of portability between the cloud and the data center limits the kind of applications companies are willing to put in the cloud.

The result is that any SaaS company that is looking for cloud-based development tools is looking at WaveMaker as a very attractive way to extend their platform. WaveMaker is an open and portable version of the Force.com tools that have helped make SalesForce the 500 pound gorilla of the SaaS world.

KANA was the first major software vendor to use WaveMaker as the customer-facing dev tool for their call center platform. Stay tuned for our next big partner announcement in the coming week!

Labels: Adobe, saas, salesforce, WaveMaker

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group has declared the death of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Like CORBA before it, SOA was a vendor-driven "market" of daunting complexity. Also like CORBA before it, SOA collapsed under the weight of its own learning curve.

I attended the Gartner architecture conference last month, where 1,000 corporate architects gathered to discuss the state of SOA. The conversation was dominated by architects quizzing each other on what SOA really meant and whether any of them had really implemented it yet. That is scary for a technology that is long in the tooth from a buzz cycle perspective.

There was exactly 1 presentation I saw that presented a strong business case for the SOA architecture. That was by the CIO of National City Bank, which was recently bought by PNC and whose SOA architecture may or may not survive the acquisition.

Anne Thomas Manes also points out that while the heavyweight SOA architecture is falling out of favor, lightweight architectures based on SaaS and cloud services are on the rise. WaveMaker and other platform as a service (PaaS) vendors are delivering increased flexibility and productivity without the huge upfront investment of SOA.

Here is why SOA died and how the more flexible cloud services approach is winning:

1. SOA blew the elevator pitch. Just explaining what SOA is takes longer than the average business manager's attention span. Like spinach, business sponsors are assured that SOA is "good for you." In contrast, the value of building cloud-based apps that work like Facebook and iGoogle is easy to convey, because business sponsors (or their kids) use useful web apps all the time.
2. SOA was more about vendor enrichment than customer enrichment. I would argue that the SOA market was driven by the need for application server vendors to find add-on products that they could charge for once JBoss and Spring took the money out of the core app server market. In contrast, cloud services are growing organically as companies like SalesForce and WaveMaker make cloud development tools available that enable architects to build business applications based on best practices drawn from successful consumer sites like gmail and facebook.
3. SOA swims against the tide of IT democratization. In retrospect, many companies that adopted SOA did so as a way for core IT to maintain control over every single computing event that occurs within an enterprise. In contrast, SaaS and cloud computing break the IT monopoly on compute cycles and deliver compelling cost and time to market benefits to the business.
   

Just as with CORBA, SOA introduced some useful concepts around enterprise integration and service reuse. However, just as Web 1.0 killed CORBA by introducing a much easier way to distribute applications, Web 2.0 has killed SOA with a much easier way to integrate web services.

Labels: CORBA, paas, saas, salesforce, SOA

I spoke at the Cloud Summit last week put on by M.R. Rangaswami and enjoyed as always the giddy enthusiasm with which Silicon Valley embraces each new technology wave. Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley).

Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing.

Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't.

Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of automatic teller machines. The whole idea is that you don't have to deal with people to get your application deployed, scaled, monitored and managed. Therefore anything that gets between your application and the API to the data center in the sky is taking you away from the cloud.

The other important - and to date largely unrealized - promise of the cloud is choice, aka freedom from lock-in. Today, customers are often locked into a particular cloud provider just as surely as they are locked into their in-house data center. Moving forward, you should have the ability to change clouds providers as easily as you change cell phone providers.

Labels: cloud computing, saas

Larry Ellison recently unleashed a tub-thumping tirade against cloud computing covered by Ben Worthen (with further comments from Daya Baran, Giva Perry and Dan Farber) . Here is a quote from Larry:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing... The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

Now as usual with big whoppers told by people in fear of their checkbooks, Larry's rant has an element of truth. There is much cloud lipstick being sloshed on many a barnyard animal these days. But behind all the buzzwords, a basic shift is occuring - the wholesale outsourcing of core business applications.

Yes, this is a return to timesharing, but this ain't your grandfather's timesharing. It is interesting that Larry was a huge supporter of thin client computing when it threatened his enemy Microsoft but is now a detractor of the son of thin client when it threatens his own rice bowl.

Forrester research has a simple chart that illustrates Larry's dilemma - he paid $30B for a collection of low growth businesses, making Oracle is the Computer Associates of the new millennium (and we know where this strategy got CA).



















Larry's rant is an extraordinary example of whistling past the graveyard. Oracle's huge transformation over the last 10 years has been from an infrastructure company (databases & middleware) to an applications company (ERP, CRM, SFA ect). Now, just as this transformation is completed, along comes an infrastructure that will obsolete all the applications Oracle just got done rolling up.

No wonder he sounds ticked - you would be too if you just spent more than $30B (see Oracle acquisitions chart below) on a bunch of wasting assets that are going to be shafted by the Cloud/SaaS shift just as Siebel's market share was eviscerated by SalesForce.



The dead giveaway is that Larry's rant focuses on the metric most important to him - profitability - while ignoring the metric most important to customers - value. Larry knows that customers are deserting him in droves, what really angers him is that he can't make as much money in the SaaS world.

Labels: Oracle, saas

McKinsey & Company published a report predicting the market size for Software as a Service (SaaS) will exceed $37B market over the next 5 years. In particular, the report described the need for Independent Software Vendors to SaaS-enable their products using special-purpose SaaS development tools. Matt Asay also wrote recently that the growth of the top 60 software companies is driven by SaaS.

McKinsey claims that traditional J2EE and .NET platforms are poorly suited to building SaaS applications. According to McKinsey, this opens up a $3B market for Platform as a Service (PaaS) products from new entrants like WaveMaker, Coghead and SalesForce. From the article:

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it’s with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you’ve got Apex!?).

Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

Development Problems for SaaS

SaaS is highly disruptive for existing hardware and software providers. SaaS platforms are different from traditional computing platforms like J2EE and .NET in three ways:

• SaaS platforms contain new core components, such as web services APIs to integrate to other applications and usage-based billing capabilities. This disrupts existing platform providers like BEA and Microsoft.


• SaaS platforms are designed for multi-tenancy, including global and tenant-specific data schemas, multi-layer administration and virtualization for scalability. This disrupts traditional ISVs like Oracle and SAP.


• SaaS platform are delivered on-demand, not on premises. This threatens the business of traditional hardware providers like IBM and HP.


• SaaS products need on-demand customization tools. As SalesForce has demonstrated, a complete SaaS application needs its own customization tools if it is to compete with enterprise solutions like Siebel and SAP.


• SaaS products need on-demand integration capabilities. This includes ability to integrate with on-premises data (a notorious weakness of pure-cloud solutions like Force.com) as well as with on-premise and on-demand web services.

SaaS Architecture Requirements

McKinsey identified three elements of a SaaS architectures:

1. Development environment: an on-demand development platform for creating SaaS applications. This platform should be able to ship along with the application itself to allow customers to customize their application.


2. Run-time environment: an on-demand infrastructufre to deliver applications. This can be a proprietary hosting environment like SalesForce, or an open hosting environment like Amazon EC2. Ideally, the customer should be able to deploy applications on-demand or on premises depending on their security, data integration and other requirements.


3. Ecosystem for adding new capabilities to applications (e.g., SalesForce AppExchange). This ecosystem should also be able to access enterprise data and services located inside the enterprise firewall.

SaaS Is Make or Break for ISVs

According to McKinsey, SaaS has greatest impact on ISVs, delivering a 50-70% improvement in the level of features that can be delivered for a given investment in development and infrastructure.

For ISVs, SaaS platforms offer low upfront cost, rapid time to market (productive tools + pre-built components like billing) and high quality service delivery. In short, existing ISVs have a limited window to migrate their offerings to the SaaS platform or risk being obliterated by newcomers who get there first.

The lesson of SalesForce versus Siebel Systems is clear: existing ISVs should migrate their presentation layer to SaaS quickly while preserving their existing back end servers. Preserving existing back end logic requires a SaaS platform that supports traditional languages like Java.

Which Platform Will Win the ISV Business?

A battlefield is emerging between established mega-vendors and pure play SaaS vendors. The following factors will separate the winners from the losers in this market:

• Build a robust offering: cutting edge technology, reliable, high quality.
• Enable extensive customization: provide additional components that address SaaS-specific needs (e.g., authorization, billing, monitoring & management).
• Monetize effectively: McKinsey identifies this as the most important success factor. The winning platform vendor will be the one which most effectively creates economic value for its ecosystems!
• Drive ecosystem growth: enable partners to make money within the platform vendor’s community through collaboration, sharing of tools and best practices.

Although many of the early SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages and tools, Gartner predicts that 90% of SaaS software will be based on open source within 2 years.

Evaluating SaaS Platforms For ISVs

Here are important criteria for ISVs to consider in evaluating SaaS platforms (sometimes called Platform as a Service, or PaaS):

• Open hosting: can I move applications I build to another SaaS hosting providers? Many SaaS platforms lock the ISV into a proprietary hosting provider (e.g., SalesForce). ZDNet says that ISVs need to offer their SaaS software both on demand and on premises.
  
• Full platform: does the SaaS platform offer a complete development solution with presentation layer, business logic, security, database and web services? Some SaaS platforms only offer part of the development stack (e.g., DabbleDB, Tibco GI)
  
• Standard language: does the SaaS platform support development using a standard language such as Java? Many SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages (e.g., Apex, the proprietary language for SalesForce).

Table: A Comparison of PaaS Vendors

* Proprietary language

Peter Laird also has a good SaaS platform review and Phil Wainwright’s has a good comparison of PaaS providers.

SaaS Platform Product Review - WaveMaker

WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. The WaveMaker studio can be installed on a developer workstsation or delivered on-demand. WaveMaker creates standard Java applications based on Spring, Hibernate and Dojo that can be deployed in a SaaS or on premise architecture.

For ISVs, WaveMaker offers several compelling benefits:

1. WaveMaker's visual studio provides a faster and more natural way to build rich internet applications than traditional hand-coding using Java and struts
   
2. WaveMaker is completely open, making it portable across hosting providers and even enabling applications to be deployed on premise
3. WaveMaker includes a complete development platform based on open source standards such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo
4. WaveMaker is based on the Java language, making it an ideal choice for ISVs who already develop in Java and don't want to migrate their existing server code.
   

WaveMaker can be downloaded here.

Summary - What ISVs Need From SaaS

Every ten years there is a dramatic shift in the development tools world: in the 80’s to client/server, in the ‘90s to three tier and now in the 00’s to SaaS. In each of these shifts, the dominant development tools providers have been supplanted by a new generation. This time around, the seismic shift is being driven by the on-demand architecture and the ISVs have the most urgent need to rebuild their solutions to remain competitive.

Over the next five years, we will see the 500 pound gorillas of the development world like Microsoft’s ASP.NET and Sun’s J2EE unseated. In their place will be new software platforms based on traditional languages that are specially designed to enable development of SaaS applications.

Labels: paas, platform as a service, saas, salesforce, software as a service, WaveMaker

Recently there have been a slew of announcements in a category that could be called Platform as a Service. SalesForce launched their new Force.com platform last week, and companies like Coghead and Teqlo have entries in this arena as well.

The details differ, but each Platform as a Service vendor provides roughly the following:

• Web based development tools: graphical environment for building business productivity apps and deploying them immediately to an on-demand server.


• Proprietary server technology: the applications and data are locked into a unique SaaS environment. Goodbye any hope of managing IT standards consistently!

Haven't we seen this movie before and doesn't in end in tears? For example, how many people still think SAP's ABAP is a good idea? In return for short-term pleasure (easy to build apps, don't have to worry about deployment), I let myself in for a long-term world of pain (including security, data quality and integration challenges).

Why would any enterprise want another company to have semi-exclusive control of their business logic and data?

To be sure, the SalesForce platform may well be an excellent way to extend existing SalesForce applications, as ZDnet points out here. It does not make sense, however as a stand-alone platform, particularly in comparison to more accepted platforms like J2EE and .NET.

At ActiveGrid, we believe that the whole distinction between on-site and on-demand deployment is an artifact of poor tool design. The next generation of web development tools will make it transparent whether you are deploying to your desktop, to the data center or to a SaaS hosting environment like Amazon's Electric Compute Cloud. Programmable web has a nice summary of EC2 applications here.

The next generation of virtualization will occur when enterprise developers can make on-the-fly decisions about whether to host applications on-site or on-demand. Put succinctly, SaaS manageability goodness is not enough to overcome proprietary badness.

Labels: abap, force.com, saas