Cloud Computing is topic that has been on our minds at Hummer Winblad for a few years now. It represents a very interesting shift in the data center that we are all used to working with.
You can see a recent cloud computing session I moderated here. This event was organized by the good team over at DealMakerMedia who also recently published the cloud computing ecosystem map. This map covers a large and growing (thanks to some creative rebranding of many companies around cloud computing) list of companies in the space. We were pleased to see several of our companies there including Elastra - the enterprise cloud company, VKernel - Systems management and chargeback for private clouds (virtualization), Birst - cloud BI and Aria Systems - cloud billing infrastructure.
Cloud computing is following some interesting adoption patterns. Amazon.com has lead the way by providing a public cloud offering and they are rapidly adding enterprise features and partners such as IBM. The adoption of cloud computing is rapid in the start-up space - almost every company we meet now has some leverage on the back end from cloud infrastructure. From our discussions with larger companies, CIO's and enterprise developers cloud is also starting to get traction there as well. This is one of those trends where if the corporate IT department cannot offer cloud solutions that are blessed, the developers will put their credit card in and start using Amazon Web Services. It just takes too long to get resources inside an organization compared to firing up an instance on EC2 in 5 minutes to beta test an idea.
In our informal survey the adoption of cloud is progressing in the following categories:
- financial services
- technology (including startups)
- Medical
- education
- government
The initial use cases are usually non-core applications and batch processes. It is being followed by more sustaining use cases over time. This wave is happening...and corporate good corporate IT departments are trying to get ahead. We believe the future of cloud computing will include public clouds like Amazon, private clouds run in corporate datacenters, semi-private clouds managed and run by the likes of IBM on behalf of corporate clients - and a common language/infrastructure to move between these infrastructures.
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday, June 13, 2008
SaaS Platform Wars
Chris Keene (CEO of our portfolio company WaveMaker) pointed me to a recent McKinsey report on the SaaS Platform Wars.
The reference, and link to the McKinsey report are on Chris' blog entry called SaaS Platforms For ISVs - Who Wins? from May 21st.
It was very thought provoking and gave our firm a basis for examining our work in SaaS. We have been very active SaaS investors with about 15 companies including Omniture, Employease and Aria Systems. The latter is a great example of the common services layer being delivered as a SaaS infrastructure layer as described as one of the core areas of the stack.
I think the internationalization piece related to SaaS is another core asset that platforms can provide worth noting. For instance Aria provides other SaaS companies with the ability to do business in many countries and currencies with one integration - to date they have done a billion transactions in over 150 countries. Without good SaaS platform components each vendor would have this complicated mess to untangle for each area that they want to do business - and it slows down the adoption.
The battlefront that I see as the one developing the most quickly in SaaS platforms is the one around cloud computing. We are seeing different approaches and different levels of the stack exposed by all the vendors…Amazon is a utility model (but proprietary queuing and other bits), Google forces Python and the persistent storage, Opsource wants to build lock-in through application peering, etc. We still don’t know where Microsoft, IBM and others will enter…it will be a dynamic market for a bit yet. We are investors in Elastra that provides a third party layer for working with cloud computing environments.
The reference, and link to the McKinsey report are on Chris' blog entry called SaaS Platforms For ISVs - Who Wins? from May 21st.
It was very thought provoking and gave our firm a basis for examining our work in SaaS. We have been very active SaaS investors with about 15 companies including Omniture, Employease and Aria Systems. The latter is a great example of the common services layer being delivered as a SaaS infrastructure layer as described as one of the core areas of the stack.
I think the internationalization piece related to SaaS is another core asset that platforms can provide worth noting. For instance Aria provides other SaaS companies with the ability to do business in many countries and currencies with one integration - to date they have done a billion transactions in over 150 countries. Without good SaaS platform components each vendor would have this complicated mess to untangle for each area that they want to do business - and it slows down the adoption.
The battlefront that I see as the one developing the most quickly in SaaS platforms is the one around cloud computing. We are seeing different approaches and different levels of the stack exposed by all the vendors…Amazon is a utility model (but proprietary queuing and other bits), Google forces Python and the persistent storage, Opsource wants to build lock-in through application peering, etc. We still don’t know where Microsoft, IBM and others will enter…it will be a dynamic market for a bit yet. We are investors in Elastra that provides a third party layer for working with cloud computing environments.
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