Software strategies and more…

I have been very engaged lately with analysts and vendors about the rapidly evolving cloud ecosystem and am working on a research framework/discussion document that I hope use to test theories and advance some of the factors driving different stakeholders of cloud-enable business processes.

This picture illustrates my initial thinking as to what each of the four major market segment/players are grappling with on a regular basis. These factors influence the development of their strategy, products and ecosystems.

From the 12 o’clock position we deal with a lot of the purveyors of the cloud platform – the platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a services (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). These players work in conjunction to address the needs for web ‘plumbing’ and include hosting co.s, carriers, and private solutions that invest to provide maximum services to a maximum number of people for little to no margin.

My ‘vendors’ segment represents those folks looking to sell goods and services via a traditional, web and hybrid models. This creates a shift (in many cases) in their business model(s), value propositions and go-to-market methods. This is an incredible complex segment because it contains everyone from 21st century cloud based firms to 19th century media and energy giants. All of these vendors are now faced with not only evolving their services, community and ecosystem – but they (in many cases) are doing them for themselves as well as for their customers.

Partners in my model are under significant duress. Those who’s services are now under the shadow of the cloud must move from a product+margin+services model to an increasingly services based model. Rather then adding value in a tangible (here’s X product) “touch it, see it, use it” manner, partners have to understand how they can help develop solutions and deliver services based on the time to value perceptions of both vendors and customers. They must also rethink what services they are delivering – from custom code to platform (PaaS, IaaS and SaaS) integration and management.

Finally, the customer who sees the shift, understands that their workforce is changing, and is looking to make IT matter less and less and what the business does matter more and more. This segment wants to keep IT costs low (ideally <5% of revenue), manage risk and enable people with solutions and devices tailored to their job. SaaS is of primary interest here to the end user, but from an IT perspective (and from a Financial perspective) these solutions much adhere to governance, privacy and management principles that protect stakeholder value.

The intersection of all of these is what each and every one are doing to create business value. That being the creation and/or evolution of cloud-enabled business process. Talking with Jive Software a month ago I was really impressed with their approach to socializing business process by creating a framework for engaging the right people based on their roles, profiles, etc. This is further enabled by Jive’s partner who are looking to the cloud to facilitate information exchange that is in greater context than email. Greater context in a shorter format that automates information flow across people, devices and applications. By building across business process applications, collaboration suites, and delivering via the web [my understanding of] their argument is that people want information that is easily consumed and in the context of their current activity.

In many ways that last part almost seems to call out the end to multitasking and rather lays a foundation for hypertasking – many short bursts of effort in context of priority and in conjunction with an organization or communities broader goals, both immediate and long-term. (Something to further explore now that I think about it…)

I am working on research to further flush these points out, but I am very interested in where devices come into play across all of these sectors. Its seems that topics like ‘curated’ models (whether these are Salesforce.com AppExchange or Apple or Google’s app stores) are playing a growing role at the edge and where IT and business are working together to push IT to the edge of the organization and off loading systems where they can to third parties or back to the vendors themselves.

Your thoughts?

I am not sure.

After hobbling thru the choppy live webcast yesterday and trying to piece together all the PR fluff, blogger commentary and random 140 character posts on Twitter I am still not sure how VMforce will be a monetize-able joint venture between VMware and SFDC.

On the surface it seems to be a great new sandbox for developers to play in to develop future cloud and on-premise applications for their organization and/or for the market at large. Folks that already utilize SFDC’s appexchange and chatterexchange to develop add-ons for SFDC user communities now have access to an even more robust and dynamics infrastructure – but what is VMware’s cut in this?

My gut says VMware is trying to position themselves as a leader in cloud based infrastructure as a service. Potentially even helping companies not only shed business software, but also the hardware needed to support these and other client/server apps. It a bold gambit that vaults them into competing on higher footing with the likes of Amazon’s AWS and both Cisco’s Smart Grid and HP’s Cloud Assure IaaS plans.

Of course the interesting play here is how both of these companies through VMForce are looking to attract the Java developer communities and enable them to create connection across both application and infrastructure software realms. This should further bolster interest in FinancialForce.com, making it easier to build out its core accounting and financial solutions to include industry and role-based users and business processes. Finally this also may allow for BI as a Service to also take off by utilizing virtual machines to power processor hungry analytics, reporting and planning tools.

Personally, I think this makes them a very interesting M&A target for SAP or a merger with SFDC themselves – both to compete more effectively with Oracle. Time will tell as more information and customer adoption of VMforce.com comes to light.

Late in 2009 both SalesForce.com and SAP began beta testing social applications that proposed businesses could use social tools within their walls to address a variety of needs from financial management and sales tracking to impromptu group collaboration. Since then both of these solutions have gone live and are beginning to garner much interest in the Enterprise 2.0 communities.

The applications are Chatter and StreamWork, respectively. I blogged about StreamWork before as it occurred how in the business environment we use word processing tools less and less and depend more and more on our email to communicate ideas across departments, teams and amongst individuals.

I have also touched on the incorporation of business intelligence and search (here) and how these could automate the presentation of information in the context of what an individual, team or department is doing at any given time. I talked in my blog about how I saw the trifecta of business intelligence, search and collaboration tools adding previously untapped insight, thus value, to employees in a highly tailored, yet automated way.

Now I am seeing the productization of this in both Chatter (and Chatterbox by Financial Force.com) and StreamWork. Salesforce’s Chatter, “…which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social.”  adds another dimension to the companies AppExchange so much that the company created ChatterExchange a one stop shop for business grade collaborative tools that can plug-in to the many services and products that businesses are subscribing to from Salesforce.com.

SAP has positioned its self as a thought leader here by doing something completely un-SAP like. By first introducing StreamWork (nee 12Sprints) as a tool to aid in cross organization discussions, decision making and delivery toolkit for organization it took the emerging trends in social collaboration being tackled by the likes of Google Wave and Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and packaged them in context of a business application with integration into business processes.

While there are differences between the products, SAP stays closer to a collaboration tool that connects to popular email, content management and unified communications solutions while Saleforce.com’s Chatter leverages what it has learned from relationships with social media tools like Facebook and twitter. Both address the needs for robust, business grade solutions for collaboration, messaging and workflows. They both advance the enterprise from treating communications as transactional and promote relationships that unleash a community’s ability to work together in real time on topics of interest to bring business and customer value.

The exciting part is both of these tools are open to others to develop on top of and thus create a social network of their own for improvement in a very dynamic fashion. While is is not necessarily new of Salesforce.com, it certainly is not the business norm for SAP.

The potential value for using these applications may be tremendous for their customers who can now stay on top of internal and external events, opportunities and tipping points so that they can participate in conversations that previously they may have not even known were happening. Further by offering social tools in the context of the business they have potentially set their customers up to take advantage of that next big leap in productivity making them more competitive and more agile than other organizations.