Have you been reading 2010 IT predictions lately? Have you seen one that does not mention "Cloud"?
Do you remember when Al Stewart released the Year of the Cat?
No doubt about it, 2010 is the Year of the Cloud. In fact it is likely that the term "Cloud" will cover an ever bigger spectrum and that related terms such as SaaS and the XaaS suite of acronyms will fall under "Le Nuage" as wider, non techie, audiences get more familiar with the concept.
App to SaaS to PaaS to App!
I got intrigued by the recent post of Phil Wainewright titled "Is SaaS the same as cloud?". One particular comment on the post drew my attention:"the cloud needs vendor neutral, non-intrusive and inexpensive integrations in order to allow customers pick, choose, combine and build solutions".
What we are seeing with current PaaS initiatives from big vendors, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, SAP, Intuit and Zoho, is an attempt to increase application wallet share through an ecosystem of partners. The message is clear: start with our core app (emails for Google, CRM for Salesforce or Zoho, accounting for Intuit, ERP for SAP...) and add certified modules from our partners. It is not a new idea but it is legitimate on three fronts: 1) large vendors drive additional revenues to justify their enormous infrastructure/development costs 2) smaller app providers expand their reach thanks to the brand power of the big vendors 3) end users benefit from much required apps integration.
The Cloud will give more freedom for users to pick and choose freely the most suitable applications (mostly SaaS) in terms of features, cost and integration needs. There will be one challenge though. How to find organized, independent and neutral information about all integration points available?
One to watch: Integration - the future for SaaS and Cloud Apps?
The key to effectively leveraging a SaaS investment is delivering real-time integration between SaaS applications and other enterprise applications and data behind the corporate IT firewall. It's important that the integration delivered is flexible and scalable - with reusable components and as little custom code as possible.
Today Small businesses use a myriad of online applications. These don't always fully integrate, or give a complete picture of what is happening. This matter is becoming a growing concern for all enterprises and integration is often coined the number one issue prior to buying a new app.
I believe that there will be a model developing in parallel: "vendor neutral, non-intrusive and inexpensive integrations". Through open APIs smaller vendors will allow other app providers to integrate 1:1 overcoming larger platforms constraints and cost.
What is likely to develop is an hybrid model where a user, prior to choosing a new application, will look at vertical one to many platform integrations and horizontal one to one integrations. An example: I want to make sure that my email marketing app is integrated with my CRM and also with my newsletter template generator while the latter does not need to be integrated with my CRM.
There are two kinds of integrations: Bottom up or one to many, where you integrate your app with a platform provider, usually a publisher of a core business app such as CRM (Salesforce.com) or email (Google).
One to many, which usually involves an API that's present in each other's products.
In any case, clearly companies who embrace cloud computing and SaaS will be extremely well equipped to outperform less forward-thinking rivals in the future.
Looking for SAP business one cloud, contact Alenu IT Now! at (65) 6884 5030
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