Software as a service (SaaS) is all the hype these days as tough economic times demand leaner and meaner software solutions within the enterprise. Gartner research has predicted that revenues from SaaS will reach $8 billion is 2009, a 21.9% increase from revenues in 2008. However, despite the promising implications of SaaS in the enterprise, AllenPort feels that the all web-based approach is not always best. Rather, AllenPort proposes what it characterizes as a “hybrid” SaaS, in which applications and files can be accessed both locally and remotely in the cloud. With AllenPort’s “virtual file cabinet,” businesses can host files, applications, and user settings such that they are accessible from any Internet-connected computer. Furthermore, this information is also stored locally, allowing one access to their work in the absence of WiFi or during the inevitable disruption of connectivity. A particularly useful feature of the service is integration with Microsoft Office. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Allenport offers full-fledged versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Exchange, and Access from any device with Allenport installed. Users can download Office applications wherever they may be working, and can continue with work in the absence of Internet connection. AllenPort is one of several companies that feel on-premise applications are an imperative addition to storage in the cloud. Under the hybrid approach businesses are able to enjoy the advantages of the SaaS paradigm without a critical dependence on Web access. Egnyte, Ctera, and Digi-Data , to name a few, all offer variations of services offering both local and cloud storage. AllenPort seeks to take the idea a step further by mirroring data from the client to the cloud, functioning as a full IT infrastructure and, in many cases, replacing the LAN. It will be interesting to see how recent announcements from Microsoft and Google will affect companies offering hosted versions of the proprietary software. If Web-based offerings come to offer a level of functionality that appeals to small businesses rather than just individual consumers, the playing field may be drastically altered. → Read More
The best news in years for Microsoft just hit the wires. Remember way back when Microsoft was under the threat of a breakup in the anti-trust days? Bill Gates famously pointed out Microsoft had no such thing as a monopoly, because (this was pre-Google) some company could come along at any moment and change the dynamics of the environment. Soon he was proven exactly correct, as Google emerged with a browser-based Ajax-fueled broadband-harnessed realtime platform. Once this platform produced advertising network effects, the upstart company had all the ingredients to mount an attack on the inevitability of Microsoft. But what most saw as a direct attack on Microsoft actually produced more pain for other players. While Microsoft used the time to advance strongly in the enterprise server market, Sun lost control of its hardware leverage as Google built its realtime monetization engine on top of Linux. Apple used the same window to move from its niche hardware and OS platforms to Intel and OS/10, grabbing the leadership in the mobile market and transferring its application base to a browser plus services approach. Did this harm Microsoft? Not really — it gave Redmond an OS target to compete against rather than against itself, and the time to migrate to a Web-based OS strategy that will show its current evolution this Friday with the release of Silverlight 3. So now comes Chrome OS and what makes you think this puts any real hurt on Microsoft’s business. Mind share, media perception, even some developer erosion (although I doubt it.) Sure, the atmospherics are strong. After all, Google is in the advertising business. And although Chrome hasn’t produced real market share yet, it will start accelerating once the Mac version ships and all of us technocrats start loving on it full time. No, all of this is good news for Google. But bad news for Microsoft? Don’t think so. WHere does it impact revenue anytime soon? Nowhere except in the enterprise, where it will increase IT’s need to sell into a strong Windows channel. Google will continue to garner occasional wins for Apps, which will largely serve to promote collaboration features coming in Office 2010. And oh yes SIlverlight, with its realtime streaming architecture, integrated adserver metrics, and oh maybe, a Silverlight based social center of the new desktop, which as Marc Benioff tells me is really the new center of the network. Chrome → Read More
Earlier last month web hosting provider SoftLayer announced the availability of cloud services on an hourly basis. The offering includes flat hourly rates for cloud instances, while cloud storage is accessible on a pay-as-you-go basis. While most traditional cloud services (IBM, Savvis, AT&T, Terremark, etc) require multi-year commitments, the hosting industry has seemed to embrace commitments on a monthly basis. However, as cloud services have matured and the Web 2.0 audience has grown, the need for more flexible service offerings has become apparent. SoftLayer claims that demand from services over the Web has matched the demand and revenue generated from IT customers, and with the growing Web customer base comes a growing demand for flexibility. Web customers must be able to account for dwindling budgets and sudden surges in traffic, and often need the freedom to build out a service as the user base grows. SoftLayer looks to cater to these specific needs with its most recent offering, but is only partaking in a rising tide of interest towards more flexible cloud service offerings. Amazon pioneered the idea of hourly billing earlier this year, and RackSpace currently offers a similar deal. Other players, like GoGrid, offer a “tolltag” model in which users are required to prepay a specified amount, and then hourly billings are deducted from the total on a monthly basis. Larger players like AT&T and Savvis advertise hourly service packages, but usually leave mention of monthly commitments and minimum billing floors to the fine print. In short, as cloud services have matured, companies have begun seeking a competitive advantage in the flexibility of their service offerings. As the trend continues, it will become more and more possible for IT departments to scale at fixed cost. CrunchBase Information SoftLayer Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good. Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new facts obviate old ones and alliances switch to account for new alignments. In Twitter’s case, the early instability and the high stakes involved made for a great deal of passion and attendant posturing. We all took it personally (well, I did) when Twitter removed key features that favored serendipity and discovery. Until then, we felt the new space Twitter opened up was like the Old West, expanding outward without sense of limit or control. It wasn’t that Track was the most useful part of the service. It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries. Taking it away hardened the service into its fundamental structure, the familiar limits of space and time, the tenuous constructs of “friend” and “follow” rather than the surprise of the unfamiliar appearing suddenly with fresh ideas and humor. Before Track went away, we never knew what would happen next; afterward, we knew enough to not anticipate. In a similar way, 140 characters felt less like a limitation and more like an invitation to be surprised at how much you could squeeze into the frame. Like perspective in a painting, or echo in a recording, the creative use of limitations helped us overcome gravity and imagine more than we could “see.” Supporting the limits became a creative validation of the surprise that Twitter has always been. How many events and ideas must we share before we get over that surprise, that once again Twitter has exceeded expectations? 140 characters brought us url shorteners, the key to this new self-compressing and auto-expanding universe. Our software is now compensating for the microURL opacity, unpacking these links and harvesting the metadata they carry to aid indexing of the gestures they contain. Once again, the apparent limitations of the shorteners (gas station on every corner, lurking potential runaway code, mom and pop businesses closing down and orphaning links) are creating investment opportunities and entrepreneurial enclaves. It’s a little like the present wrapped in a series of enclosed boxes, where the → Read More
With the Gillmor Gang shut down, I’ve been shifting my attention to the Realtime Stream CrunchUp Eric Schonfeld and I are hosting July 10 at the Fox Theater in Redwood City. Growing interest from startups, bigcos, open standards developers, and investors augurs for a valuable event. I hope you’ll join us. Some of the areas we expect to see explored include, obviously, Twitter, its ecosystem of third party developers and products, and the reactions of and interactions with other social media platforms. Facebook’s namespace rollout of the past few days is just one of the ripple effects of Twitter’s surge. Others include FriendFeed’s realtime services, live video streaming and low cost digital production, Google’s Wave project, smartphone platform strategies, Robert Scoble’s Building 43 community, and the battle for control of the center of the Web OS desktop. Stringing these technologies and brands together highlights both how early and how late we are in this cycle of renewed innovation. Just a few short months ago, we were debating if Twitter would survive, whether Facebook would open up, why Google and Microsoft would see realtime as anything more than a distraction, and the eternal where’s the money. Today, the answers to those questions are clear: Yes, As quickly as possible, Because they have no other real competition than each other, and Right where it’s always been — the enterprise. With Oracle swallowing Sun, the enterprise dynamics have swung hard to right, past cloud computing, and directly into the mobile identity landrush. It’s easy to pigeonhole smart phones as the latest version of Studio 54 society politics, but in fact our identities are being consolidated around the SIM chip, with our social graph around the Follow/Track architecture of Twitter and its subsidiaries. Today the switching costs from device to device are substantial, but Apple’s aggressive deployment of the iPhone and AppStore application divide are doing to the carriers what widgets did to Yahoo. The razor blades are winning, gaining ground, and inexorably blacktopping the differences between service plans, mobile browsing, location-based services, and social graph (affinity) marketing. It’s a language the carriers understand: revenue per user divided by cost of customer acquisition. Feature comparisons between devices are not the defining metric for where the market will flow. Neither are broadband buildout, developer lock-in, or any other measure of value — except realtime elasticity. If you look at realtime access as the most valuable → Read More
There has been some doubt lurking in the trenches about whether Google has a solid, organized enterprise strategy. But there have been some recent developments that indicate that Google might have a viable game plan to become a player in the enterprise space. Yesterday, Google rolled out Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that will let businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino. Google says it’s using technology from Postini, security and compliance company Google acquired in 2007, to import information from users’ LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) systems, which includes mailing lists, groups, and user aliases, to a user’s Google Apps account. This utility will help many businesses, schools etc. who are currently using Google Apps save a lot of time and energy when it comes to importing information to their Google Apps system. → Read More
IBM is advancing its aggressive cloud computing strategy with a string of announcements this week. The most recent was IBM’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to allow access of its software to solution providers using Amazon’s cloud computing applications. The partnerships offers pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products through Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. The partnership makes sense because Amazon has been an early leader in the cloud computing sphere, and IBM is making strides towards becoming the master of cloud computing. Microsoft is readying its own cloud-computing software service, Windows Azure, that will allow developers to create services and applications that are supported by Microsoft’s data centers. IBM is also providing free Amazon Machine Images of its software applications for development and test purposes, in an effort to enable software developers to quickly build applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. IBM also said that its Tivoli service management software will be used on Amazon EC2 to help clients control the infrastructures in the cloud computing sphere. Amazon expanded on the reasoning behind this deal on its Web Services blog: “Existing IBM customers can use the licenses they’ve already bought while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of AWS to handle spikes and peaks. These licenses retain their value and can be used to handle steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times. This clean and innovative new model should clear up some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing. “ So the implication here is that IBM is using Amazon as supplier to play in the cloud computing sphere and is also pricing the transition so that it is easy for existing customers to switch to cloud computing. IBM has been making aggressive moves towards making its mark in the cloud computing sphere, including its recent partnership with Juniper Networks to offer cloud computing services to IBM clients, which we reported on earlier this week. For more information on cloud computing, please join TechCrunch and TechCrunchIT for a round table discussion and meeting on cloud computing on February 27, 2009. CrunchBase Information IBM Amazon Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Encoding.com has relaunched to address the new cost, quality, and scalability encoding issues that have emerged with the explosion of internet and mobile video applications. As a company that formerly hand coded and archived source video content, Encoding.com believes they can bring Internet and mobile video applications to the next level by providing a cost efficient, robust, and scalable encoding service that allows companies to focus on creating quality video content rather than investing heavily in encoding infrastructure. The end result is a dynamic encoding cloud made available as an on demand web service in an XML API. Customers send in their source content in any popular format, and receive encoded media at a location of their choice, in the format of their choice. The company hopes this technology will facilitate the development of higher quality video content on the web. Encoding.com is part of a growing number of web services offering cloud computing options that promise to help businesses cut back on hardware infrastructure costs. Other services that offer cloud computing are Amazon’s EC2 and Parascale, who recently secured a large sum in first round funding. These services, however, are not dedicated to video conversion. CrunchBase Information Encoding.com Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Microsoft has announced it plans to acquire MobiComp, a Portuguese software company. MobiComp’s software allows users to back-up, share and discover content on mobile phones. The company sells their software to mobile phone operators including Vodafone, TMN and Cellcom. Founded in 2000, MobiComp has been privately funded and according to its website has been profitable since its first year in business. Microsoft plans for the company to contribute to the Microsoft Mobile Communications Business in addition to serving its existing customers. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. CrunchBase Information MobiComp Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Steve Gillmor and I are here at the Sun Campus in Menlo Park, CA for a conference on Open Source Business Intelligence. Zack Urlocker is the VP of the Database group at Sun, he came to the company via MySQL. 12:40 – Zack came to Sun through MySQL. MySQL were planning to IPO, but they were interesting in what Sun were doing. Says that Sun has come a long way in the past 5 or 6 years as being a strong supporter of open source and a very strong advocate – which is what MySQL found attractive. Zack says that 5 years ago it was difficult to imagine Sun open sourcing Java or Solaris, but those moves sent a strong message that Sun were very serious about open source. 12:43 – The Sun acquisition of MySQL extends suns reach into the LAMP stack, better positions Sun as a web platform and Sun’s resources assists MySQL’s capacity to delivery solutions and support. 12:45 – Zack spent a lot of time recently tlaking to large enterprises, and has noticed that the trend towards open source within the Fortune 100 has shifted dramatically recently. MySQL refer to the trends as Enterprise 2.0, and it is a very real trend and it has driven a big increase in revenue at MySQL. Main stats: 12 years old 400+ employees 750 partners 70,000 downloads per day Customers across every major OS, hardware vendor, geography, industry and app type. MySql were at $100M revenue when they were acquired by Sun 12:47 – MySQL were optimized as a web application database. They never set out to comepte head to head with Oracle or the large RDBMS providers. MySQL set out to be a disruptor, and they found their niche in the web area, just as web applications and the open source web stack was being formed and usage was accelerating. 12:49 – MySQL marketing has a very strong emphasis on case studies and references. A very strong tip for similar companies looking to sell their solutions into the enterprise. Rather than the fat Oracle approach of RFP’s and large-scale sales teams, have solid real-world and public examples, and easy entry point (Eg. the free download) and the product, if good, will sell itself. Deployment stats: Average deployment is 2-3TB Largest deployment is 10,000 servers (its not Google) The largest deployments employ sharding 35% of users of Oracle users → Read More
In addition to the re-org at Yahoo, the company is also creating a new division to focus on building and implementing a cloud computing platform. Google and Microsoft have each released or announced parts of their cloud platform plans, while Yahoo had previously kept a tight lip. From Yahoo’s press release… In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan. In addition, it is putting new leadership in place behind Yahoo!’s search group, naming Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong as the interim leader of the search product team. We are trying to get more details about this news, and as we find out new info we will be updating here. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Synchronization, backup, and sharing solution Syncplicity today announced the launch of a new open platform that they hope will enable the next generation of Cloud Computing applications. The new platform allows developers to extend their web-based applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. The service is built on open standards to enable synchronization of files not just across computers and devices, but also on the web. Desktop files can now be accessed instantaneously in either online or local applications, giving web apps equal versatility on the desktop. Furthermore, files can be edited in any application, whether online or on the PC, and automatically backed-up and saved directly to the user’s hard drive. This spares users the trouble of locating recently saved files, and allows them to choose the most desirable application without worrying about where their data may be stored. Syncplicity also has announced a new pricing plan with free and premium accounts, as well as three partnerships with leading web-based services for documents and photos: Sribd, Zoho, and Picnik. CrunchBase Information Syncplicity Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Cloud computing management system provider RightScale has today announced at the Structure 08 conference that they have released a new utility to allow customers to deploy and manage MySQL instances on the Amazon Web Services platform. Using the new MySQL tools, customers can automate the configuration and deployment process, and manage multiple MySQL instances. RightScale allows users to scale out their MySQL database requirements and instances, with advanced monitoring and logging. RightScale will provide access to the MySQL manager feature in all accounts except the developer accounts. Pricing for RightScale starts at $500 per month, after an initial fee of $2,500. With RightScale users are able to deploy and administer large numbers of Amazon EC2 deployments, with website management, logging and more features. CrunchBase Information RightScale Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
BridgeWave was founded almost 10 years ago, but has only recently become known for their high-end high-speed WiFi equipment and solutions. Today they announced that they have closed a Series D round of $10M lead by existing investor Intel Capital and co-lead by new investor Core Capital amongst other participants. BridgeWave raised the new round to assist them in further establishing themselves as a Gigabit WiFi and 4G WiMax provider. The company currently provides a number of point to point wireless products, with speeds ranging from 100Mbit to a Gigabit and ranges beyond 6 kilometers, on both the 60Mhz and 80Mhz spectrums. CrunchBase Information BridgeWave Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Mosso today launched a new control panel for their application hosting platform. The new panel allows users to easily manage files and assets, upload new files and content, extract new packages and more. They have built a whole new interface using the Google Web Toolkit, and their plan is to incrementaly extend the features of the control panel to features that were previously managed manually by either Mosso personnel or users. The Mosso platform can host PHP, RubyOnRails, .NET and CGI apps in Python or Perl. It takes the user only minutes to setup a new instance, from where they can point their DNS record to complete setup. Once on Mosso, computational and bandwidth resources are allocated automatically on an as-needed basis, with websites and applications being able to scale from the very low end such as small blog hosting through to large-scale and bandwidth intensive web applications. The Mosso platform is based on an open source LAMP stack, with custom developed software to provide app virtualization, hosting and scaling. For database servers, both MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server are now available, and to get started users pay a $100 fee. Pricing thereafter is based on CPU cycles and bandwidth used, with 50 cents per additional Gigabyte of storage, 25 cents per Gibabyte of bandwidth and 1 cent per single CPU cycle ‘unit’. CrunchBase Information Mosso Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Opera Software is building a team of “web evangelists” whose job it is to find sites that do not display correctly in Opera and are not standards-compliant, and then email the site owners. They are sending emails with specific tips on how to fix HTML, CSS or other issues that don’t make sites compliant. Opera has always been a strong advocate for web standards, and this initiative is good for not only Opera but standards support on the web in general. On the Opera jobs website, there are job listings for multiple web evangelist positions. They are hiring in Norway, China, South Korea, the Czech Republic and the USA – so it is a multi-lingual global effort. Here is an example of an email sent to one site owner from an evangelist at Opera, with specific details on fixing a CSS bug: Hello from Opera Software, We have recently come to know that [retracted] is not displaying properly in Opera. It stems from an Opera bug which we plan have resolved and should be out with the next release. However, till that time, it would be nice if you could tweak the site on your end to make it work with Opera. Just add “overflow-y:visible;” to the “Body” of the web page in the CSS file. Or you can just put Body{ overflow-y:visible; } In the <style> section of the pages, and it should make the pages display with Opera perfectly. If you have any more questions, please feel free to contact us. CrunchBase Information Opera Software Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Marc Benioff took the stage at the first of a global Tour de Force to get out in front of the scramble for software as a service bragging rights. On the surface, the event features a continuation of the alliance between Salesforce and Google’s Apps services. Behind the scenes, this is an old fashioned land grab for developers, trying to pry them off Visual Studio and .Net and into the benefits of collaborative on demand services. Sales, marketing, call center, innovation and idea management – these are the applications Salesforce has been building out for the past decade. Today’s new message is the platform, or development as a service in community speak. Benioff has always used the language of the technorati as a way of bootstrapping what started as a no-software mantra. Web services, mashups, social media – all of these memes float through the evolution of the company as it tries (and mostly succeeds) in staying ahead of its growth with reliable service. Meanwhile, Google has used the same tactics in building out first Gmail and then the rest of the Apps. The recent launch of Gmail Labs attempts to leverage users as testers for features, with the implication that the strategy will spread out via Gchat, Google Reader, Docs/Spreadsheet/etc. and into the granular infrastructure underlying these tools, namely AppEngine and the Google APIs that reach into storage, social graph, and feeds. When Benioff says you can leave your infrastructure worries behind and focus on the applications, he’s counting on you trusting the multi-tenant pod architecture, security certifications, and transparent reporting of availability. The Salesforce (or Force) platform abstracts into database, workflow, and code as services, running VisualForce UI code over the wire built in the Eclipse IDE hosted like the rest of it on Force data servers. To the extent that Salesforce can capture business processes inside this on demand development cloud, they can profit from association with Google and their Data APIs, which allow connecting the Salesforce and Google clouds with extensions to the underlying Google Apps. To the extent that Google can undermine developer confidence in Microsoft pivoting to slow the dev drain from Office tools, the marriage of the two companies will continue to bear fruit. But before we bury Microsoft or Apple or perhaps an alliance of independent cloud vendors, pause to consider Salesforce’s Adam Gross when he demos integration of financial services vendor → Read More
At the O’Reilly Velocity conference today, Hyperic will announce and launch their new cloud service monitoring and logging service CloudStatus.com. CloudStatus is a free and publicly available website that allows developers and users of cloud services such as Amazon S3 and EC2 to monitor the performance and uptime (or downtime) of services. Initially five services from Amazon will be monitored, such as the S3 storage service, the EC2 computing service, SimpleDB and payments. Hyperic are well known and established as developers and providers of an enterprise server monitoring solution used by companies such as CNet, Mosso, Hi5, Microsoft and others. Their monitoring systems are used in co-location centers to monitor, manage and report on performance issues. Hyperic have used the same technology foundation to develop the monitoring that powers CloudStatus.com. Hyperic plan to support numerous web services in the future, such as Salesforce.com, the Google App Engine and Mosso. Currently those services usually publish simple feedback to users, such as a simple available/unavailable status signal or a simple report (such as the Amazon status page). CloudStatus digs a lot deeper and measures detailed performance metrics such as throughput performance, response times and overall availability for periods of up to a few months. For application developers or designers looking to use one of these web services, CloudStatus would be an invaluable tool as part of any evaluation in selecting the right cloud platform to use. We have previously reported on Techcrunch many occasions where CloudServices such as S3 or App Engine have been unavailable, as the repurcussions for developers and applications using the services can often be severe. CrunchBase Information Hyperic Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Cloud storage provider Parascale has closed an $11.37 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Charles River Ventures. The company, which was founded in 2004, primarily targets media and entertainment markets, but also offers platform support to clients in a number of other fields. Parascale intends to use the funds on product development and to help market the upcoming launch of “Parascale Cloud Storage”, which it describes as “an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.” Cloud storage is becoming increasingly popular as corporations forgo building their own traditional server farms in favor of managed solutions like Parascale. Other players in this space include Amazon S3, GoGrid, and Nirvanix. CrunchBase Information Parascale Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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