World around me

Force.com market share

2009-06-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the Equity research paper on Salesforce.com from William Bliar & Company the has some research on the market size for Force.com

"........The application development market that salesforce is targeting with Force.com is $129 billion in size, much larger than the $16 billion CRM space. One way to look at the platform is that it theoretically allows every employee at every company to become a salesforce ......."

Here is the source document.

--Divakar

Cloud Computing on NPR

2008-08-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

There is a segment about cloud computing on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93841182

It is clear that the reliance on cloud is increasing on a daily basis. The interesting thing to watch is how government regulation will shape up for cloud services.

“We're all kind of used to the idea that if you don't pay your telephone bill, you know they're not going to shut off your phone while you're off on vacation ... But [for] your cloud storage service, there's no rules.”Harry Lewis, professor of computer science

Ready for Linuix on Desktop / Laptop?

2008-06-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Like most of the folks, I am a Windows Desktop user. At the same time I am a big fan and always tried to use Linux / Unix for server platforms.

After reading a lot about Ubuntu, I finally though I will give it a spin. I got hold of a old Dell laptop and thought I should try installing on it first for the test drive.

Install Experience: It looks like Ubuntu still has some glitches, when it comes to installing on my laptop. After spending a few hours and reading around on message forums, I finally got the install working. Overall, I would say Ubuntu folks did a great job!!! I am very impressed.

User Experience: I used it for almost a day, and overall , I am extremely happy with the user experience. First of all, it does not have all the million list of processes always running, like my windows laptop. It is lot faster to boot. Even though this is a old Latitude laptop, seems to be running faster than my state of the art work laptop. The user interface is very clean and it took me just a few minutes to get used to.

Native applications: Still there are quite a few windows applications I am used to, that are not available on Ubuntu by default. One example, I use google talk, and did not find gtalk support for Ubuntu. OpenOffice looks good and it is installed by default with Ubuntu, but need to get used to it to see if I like it.

Best: I like the synaptic package manager. I can search, deploy and manage almost all my applications from one single location.

Software Pricing

2008-06-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

These three thought provoking and informative articles about Software pricing on Sandhill.com are a great read.

Think twice before you re-price

The gaint crunching sound

Its the PITs (Pricing information technologies

Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry

2008-05-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

Peter Laird, Managing Architect at BEA and Kent Dickson, VP of Product Management at BEA did a great job of putting together a visual map of the cloud computing, SaaS Platforms and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) markets. Following is the link to the blog post:

Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry

Following is the visual representation that is on their blog post.

SaaS Economics 2008

2008-05-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

I presented some of my thoughts on SaaS Monetization in the SaaSEconomics Summit / SLAM 2008 conference. You can order proceedings of the SaaS Economics Summit from their website, http://www.infowebcom.com/conf_cdorder2008.php

Following is a brief description of my talk.

The SaaS model of software delivery causes a host of operational and revenue generation challenges for businesses. This talk will illustrate the different scaling issues SaaS vendors face, and the monetary impacts of these issues. It will elaborate on the recurring revenue subscription model, and how it forces SaaS vendors to be mindful of ensuring client success for contract renewals. The talk will then explain the telecom industry approach to selling subscription services in large volumes, and the similarities of this in the SaaS industry. This will include an architectural overview of the various Telecom OSS/BSS (Operational Support Systems/Business Support Systems) components needed to efficiently deliver the services. The presentation will then elaborate how and why SaaS vendors should be thinking about a similar model for servicing their customers. It will describe the key components of the architecture that SaaS vendors must build, which will include the service catalog, order fulfillment, and billing like the telecom industry has done for several years.

McKinsey 2008 Enterprise Software Survey

2008-04-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

McKinsey released a new Enterprise Software Survey. You can get this survey from : McKinsey Survey. This has great info about trends in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Webinar : Introducing Visualforce - Create Any User Interface as a Service

2007-10-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

Today I attended the force.com, visual force webinar. The speaker was Adam Gross, VP of Platform Marketing @ Salesforce.com. To give a brief backgroud, Sales force is working on a new On Demand platform called Force.com. This On Demand platform is supposed to address all aspects of application creation and delivery like secure infrastructure, Database as a Service, Integration as a Service, Logic as a Service, User Interface as a Service and Application Exchange as a Service. The On Demand user interface aspect of this platform is called Visual force.

The presentation was pretty nifty. They went through a hello world scenario on how to use the new UI capabilities and create an application on the platform that could break away from the UI looks of traditional Salesforce.com. Overall the technology is pretty good.

Scalability and dependability of the platform needs to be seen when multiple types of applications get hosted on this platform. A few questions I had that Salesforce.com has not answered yet:

How are non-Salesforce.com users going to access these third party applications that providers would like to host on the Force.com platform?
How is this Force.com platform going to be priced? This will be an interesting challenge.

Force.com timelines :

Now -> Available for Developers to start creating applications
Q1 2008 -> First customer pilot with a select list
Some time in 2008 -> General availability

IT Changes discussed in Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007

2007-10-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

Gartner believes that there are five major discontinuities that will force IT organizations to change dramatically. The five discontinuities include:

Software as a Service (SaaS)
Web 2.0
Global-class computing
Consumerization of IT
Open-source software.

"The five major discontinuities have the potential to completely disrupt vendor business models, user deployment models, whole market segments and key user and vendor brand assumptions," said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "These emerging discontinuities reinforce each other, and their combined effect will prove far stronger than each individual trend. IT managers who oversee applications must incorporate these trends into their long-term planning."

SunRocket and VOIP and eVapt office fun!

2007-07-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

I have always been a fan of Voice Over IP (VOIP) because of all the features it brings to the table. I used Sunrocket for my home as well as work phone services. (eVapt phone number). As most of you already know Sunrocket went belly-up. They pretty much shutdown their operations one day without any notice to customers. I am in the process of moving my telephone to a new provider but in the mean time my bankrupt Sunrocket phone is very unreliable.

Chris, who works with me at eVapt, is not a big fan of VOIP. Following is a sample conversation between me and Chris.

New eVapt Blog

2007-07-16T20:01:00.001-07:00

eVapt's corporate blog.

http://evapt.blogspot.com

New eVapt website

2007-06-27T12:16:00.002-07:00

Finally we spent sometime to redo our website.

New evapt website:
http://www.evapt.com

Opsource closes $15M funding

2007-06-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Opsource closes $15M funding. Great news for Opsource and its partners.

http://sanjose.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=122460&type_news=latest

SaaS Capital

2007-05-28T18:41:00.001-07:00

Finally I got time to catch up on all the blog posts. I saw this interesting post from Phil Wainewright on SaaS Capital :
http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=336

SaaS enables the new pay-as-yo-go business model. But this is not always a great news for software vendors. It takes the new software projects a longer time to break-even and puts higher cash requirements on folks raising capital.

There is this new VC company called http://www.saas-capital.com/ that give debt financing to companys based on their on-demand software contracts. Great Idea.

IDC SaaS Conference

2007-04-02T11:13:00.001-07:00

IDC is having a SaaS conference in April and early indications show that a lot of companies are going to participate in this conference. I am also attending the conference representing eVapt Inc.

Following is the link to the conference:
http://www.saascon.com/live/48/

News on the conference talking about the increased registrations:

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070329005640&newsLang=en

IBM I-WANT-CONTROL Advertisements

2007-03-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Did you all get to see the new IBM advertisements with the theme 'I Want Control"? Some of the advertisements are pretty funny.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/iwantcontrol/

Their main message is around how IBM can help IT departments regain control of IT Operations. IBM traditionally is a big player in IT outsourcing, where they manage end-to-end IT for big corporations. With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) becoming a popular model even for big enterprises, it will be interesting to see how their IT outsourcing strategy will evolve.

On another note on how IT departments can make or break a marketing message; go through the following links:
Go to:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/iwantcontrol/
Click on "Read all the Comments". This is below the "CTRL+ALT+DEL" message at the center of their page.
Click on any "i" to go to a comment.
You will find comments like "Our network admin informed me....."
At the bottom of the comment you will find a link to "Reply to or read all posts"
Click on that.........
Unfortunately this leads to a "page not found error!"

Is this a IT issue that could be detected before deployment?

Yahoo : Is unlimited good?

2007-03-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Yahoo announced today that they will be providing unlimited storage for email. This is a great news for consumers like me. I am not sure if the limits per email size will still exist. One of the biggest pains I had is not the size of my mail box but the size of each email, if I have to send attachments.

Is unlimited really good? I will be cautious to check how this will affect the performance of email service.

http://www.playfuls.com/news_06761_Yahoo_Mail_Offers_Infinite_Storage_for_10_year_Anniversary.html

New Venture

2007-03-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

As most of you already know, I am now working for a small software startup eVapt Inc. in Austin TX. We are working on developing Operational Support Systems (OSS) / Business Support Systems (BSS) for the Software-as-a-Service provider market. For more info, look at http://www.evapt.com

Moved from bloglines

2007-03-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

After staying for many years on Bloglines, finally making the switch. It was hard for folks to write comments on post at bloglines. Stay tuned on "World around me" here.