The Technology Life

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff

, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com

. In it, he explains why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.

That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn’t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud

and can’t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it’s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.

In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service’s status as a “killer app.” Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It’s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part.

What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn’t meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven’t kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a “newsfeed” was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed.

Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter

takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation—making it all easier than ever before.

We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers. Luckily, this time, I don’t have to leave my job to find out what they are.

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CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Website:	facebook.com
Location:	Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded:	February 1, 2004
Funding:	$836M

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by… Learn More

Salesforce

Website:	salesforce.com
Location:	San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:	April 13, 1999
IPO:	June 23, 2004

Salesforce is an on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor. According to their website, more companies use Salesforce than any other on-demand CRM.

Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle… Learn More

Marc Benioff

Companies:

Salesforce

Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

The market is evolving at increasing rates and it's all about the user experience!

Micro Focus' SilkPerformer CloudBurst Service lets businesses to load-test Internet-facing web applications for performance and scalability.

By --> Daniel P. Dern
InformationWeek
July 9, 2010 11:25 AM

" /> For companies looking to load-test their Internet-facing applications, Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization, testing and management solutions, recently announced their SilkPerformer CloudBurst service.

Based on Micro Focus' Enterprise Cloud Services, SilkPerformer CloudBurst lets testers create and emulate Internet-based virtual users and do peak-load performance testing, without needing to buy, rent or otherwise provision and manage a complicated infrastructure of test machines.

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• Maximizing Revenue and Retention: Using Customer Insight to Drive Real-Time Execution
• Enterprise Risk Management for Financial Services

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According to Steven Dykstra, product marketing director for Micro Focus, "We already offer a load testing product, SilkPerformer, which you usually use on-premise. SilkPerformer CloudBurst extends this to provide a load testing service from the cloud. Few companies are likely to have the hardware inventory and geographical reach to do this kind of testing on their own, especially hardware they may only use sporadically."

"We can emulate users from any browsers, since the various browsers do behave differently, and other web clients," says Dykstra. However, Dykstra points out, SilkPerformer CloudBurst is not providing usability testing. "To validate whether the application works, you'd use Micro Focus' SilkCentral Test Manager, our functional testing software."

Understand the threats posed by the Web, email and IM applications Ensure 360-Degree Border Security

Enterprise-class uses for SilkPerformer Cloudburst might include government agencies with big web sites, retailers with period surges of online shoppers, SaaS-based tax return processors.

SilkPerformer CloudBurst is also relevant for small-to-midsized businesses, Dykstra notes, e.g., testing for tens of thousands of users, or even a thousand. "The service is very granular, and our Virtual User Protection means you only pay just for what you use." For example, according to Dykstra, if a company is prepared to test for up to 10,000 virtual users, but the test is halted at, say, 3,000 users because the application fails or starts getting errors, "You only pay for those you have used."

The goals of the load testing, says Dykstra, are to see response versus load, whether there are problems as the number of users scales, and where these problems are. Unlike end-user-only load testers, Micro Focus also monitors and analyzes activity on the other end. "You need to understand what effect the load is having on the application and on the hardware," says Dykstra. "We monitor the servers -- CPU, whether processing queues are becoming a bottleneck, and we also monitor the application, the executing code, and provide you insight into the slow points and bottlenecks in the code's processing. So if you see that the transactions are slow, you can drill down and see where. For example, if you had a load-balanced four-server farm for the application, you want to make sure that when you put the application under load, the farm will handle it. You could add hardware, or tune the application to be more efficient."

For working with Web 2.0 applications, Micro Focus SilkPerformer CloudBurst also includes Browser Driven Load Testing, which, according to the company, "cuts scripting and script maintenance time in half and more accurately emulates end user loads on Web 2.0 applications."

Available now, SilkPerformer CloudBurst is priced is based on a pay-as-you-go, consumption-based pricing model. SilkPerformer CloudBurst can also be used with the on-premise SilkPerformer, for testing internally as well as externally.

Once your agency has completed the business case for deploying a private cloud, how do you actually move ahead with your data center transformation? In this InformationWeek Government Webcast, we'll explore steps to get you there. It happens Aug. 11. Register now.

So how will that application behave when served up int he cloud?

Salesforce.com and VMware have teamed up to offer an enterprise Java cloud called VMforce. The offering, which ties the existing Salesforce.com infrastructure to VMware’s SpringSource-based Java platform is an indication of a larger trend for infrastructure and platform as a service providers to sell not just a platform, but to sell the app. It’s the difference between selling the services of a general contractor or selling someone a house.

As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote in a GigaOM Pro article this weekend (sub req’d):

The combination of cloud services designed for and hosted on cloud platforms seems like a surefire strategy to secure PaaS (or even IaaS) adoption. … By creating targeted applications designed specifically for use on their platforms, cloud providers can increase the likelihood of bringing customers into the fold (and can increase their profit margins, as well) by letting applications help sell the platform instead of relying on the platform itself. According to some surveys, at least, businesses presently find SaaS significantly more palatable than straight-up cloud computing.

It also is a highly anticipated move ever since VMware purchased Spring Source last summer and said it would create platform as a service for enterprises. Essentially, what this announcement means is that enterprise customers can use their existing Java experts to build application on the Salesforce.com infrastructure and link it to Force.com and Salesforce.com databases and services.

Under the hood, Salesforce.com is running VMware’s software in its own data centers for the VMforce cloud. It’s the first platform as a service offering for VMware, which is continuing its march up the cloud stack, and also shows how influential Salesforce.com can be when it comes to influencing enterprise custoemrs. When asked if VMware would host its Java cloud with any other provider, Mitch Ferguson, senior director Alliances at VMware said the company was currently focused on this product.

The VMforce offering will be available in developer preview at some undisclosed time this year, and pricing will be announced at that time. Maybe VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz will announce it when he speaks at our Structure 10 conference in June.

Cloud Bliss: VMware and Salesforce

For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.

First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.

Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.

The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.

More on The Cloud

• Who Exactly Owns Your Data in the Cloud? Tech Insider
• Elastra Makes Its Cloud Even Greener Tech Insider
• Google Docs Ratchets Up Flexibility With Files Tech Insider
• Leave Virginia Alone: On Open-source and Proprietary Threats Tech Insider

HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.

Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”

Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.

Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.

The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.

The investigation should raise some concerns with the enterprise community. Such an investigation could cover aspects of Internet communications that have been in use for years.

How would the FTC distinguish between the rights of the consumer and businesses that also use cloud computing services? What regulations would drift into the enterprise sector?

Any service provider could be viewed as part of the investigation under such a broad umbrella. The obvious parties would include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace and the other large cloud computing services.

SaaS is a form of cloud computing. That could mean a company like NetSuite, Zoho or Salesforce.com would have a stake in the outcome of such an investigation.

According toThe Hill, the investigation surfaced in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In the filing, The FTC recognizes the cost savings of cloud computing but has concerns about information being stored remotely:

"However, the storage of data on remote computers may also raise privacy and security concerns for consumers," wrote David Vladeck, who helms the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau.

This statement is puzzling. People have been storing their data remotely since the early 1990s on services that predate the social networks.

The intent of the inquiry is to protect consumers privacy. But the repercussions of such a broad investigation will also have reverberations throughout the enterprise community if the inquiry is not narrowed.

According to The Hill, the FTC is holding a roundtable Jan. 28 to focus on privacy protections. It will include specific discussions about cloud computing, identity management, mobile computing and social networking.

Image courtesy of TechFlash Todd on Flickr.

« Inside Looking Out: An Executive View on Enterprise Mobility with Jim Hemmer | Main | Inside Looking Out: An Executive View on Enterprise Mobility with Willie Jow »

16 July 2009

Is The Cloud The Ultimate Platform for Enterprise Mobility?

Now back from my brief trip to the West Coast, I am done digging myself out of what was an impressive (depressing?) amount of things that piled up on me in just two days.

As you know, Twitter has become an impressive tool for real-time knowledge (or almost anything else for that matter)sharing.  I saw a tweet today from the people at InformationWeek that caught my eye: Web May Be Ultimate Mobile Platform.  Needless to say, it made me think about the potential impact on enterprise mobility.  I'm talking Mobile Cloud Computing.

Now, this is not of course the first time I think about the cloud and its impact on enterprise mobility.  In the past, I've spoken about how I think the cloud makes enterprise mobility compelling.  Now, there's a conference called MobileBeat 2009 taking place today in San Francisco.  Many industry heavyweights are there, including Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, and Google (among others) and they are all talking about the impact of The Web and HTML 5 on mobile platforms.

Back in February, I penned a little article that asked if one should care about the mobile platform.  I think that the major players are coming to see how The Cloud does in many respects level the playing field.  In fact, even from an enterprise perspective, it becomes less a question of which device you prefer, but instead which BROWSER works best for you.  Heck, even today, RIM announced that its new browser would support tabbed browsing (it's about time if you ask me).

So this has, in my opinion, some pretty big implications on device and application management.  While there will always be a need for baseline device management (especially if you use direct access email), but what if (almost) no data is on the device because all the applications you are using are in The Cloud?   Application Management becomes all but moot.  You won't need to worry about pushing applications out to employees and making sure they get all the latest updates.  You won't need either to (necessarily) create applications that work on a specific smartphone platform...instead, you'll need to make sure it works best with the popular browsers.  Hmm, sounds like the Browser Wars of yore.

What does increase in complexity is device SECURITY.  Why?  It's all about where the data that you will be accessing will reside.  With HTML 5, you'll be able to cache data temporarily on the device should you lose coverage.  That's great, except for the fact that it creates a real threat in terms of data breaches.  Device encryption becomes critical.  So does authorization and authentication in terms of being able to access the data.  Depending on the setup, VPNs may be necessary. And last, but certainly not least, you need remote wipe capabilities.  Otherwise, can you imagine what would happen?  I don't even want to begin to think about it...it would be like TJX all over again.

So maybe the enterprise's mobile security needs - especially remote wipe and lock - make device management all the more critical.  It becomes critical not in terms of the ever increasing heterogeneous device environments found in enterprises, but rather for what a device management solution can do from a security perspective.

Hmmm....

You might also like:

• What Apple Could Do To Make The iPhone Enterprise Mobility Ready
• My Five Predictions for Enterprise Mobility in 2009
• Do You Care About The OS On Your Device?
• How Cloud Computing Makes Enterprise Mobility Compelling

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Comments

Andrew Borg said...

I totally agree that Web delivery is the right model for enterprise mobility; however, I don't agree that the browser will be the delivery vehicle. Web scraping into a targeted 'app' for UI and interaction, and subsequently synchronization back to the cloud may be more likely... we can discuss over coffee next time ;-)

Reply 16 July 2009 at 18:41

Philippe said...

Good point Andrew....except for the fact that HTML 5 will completely blur the line between having a UI via a browser or from a rich application. Yes, something else for us to debate over coffee ;-)

Reply 17 July 2009 at 08:30

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Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.

The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains, and many others.

This is another black eye for the company, though they are generally responsive with other issues we’ve had throughout our time with them. But until they can prove to be more reliable, we’ve decided to get a backup version of TechCrunch up and running at another datacenter, for when someone inevitably trips over a power cord at the Dallas Rackspace center again.

Here’s a few updates

from the company:

As of 3:45 PM CST, we are currently experiencing an issue within our Dallas / Fort Worth data center.  We are investigating the issue and will post an update momentarily.

UPDATE: As of 3:55 PM CST, to clarify: This is a networking issue affecting Cloud Sites in our DFW data center.

UPDATE: As of 4:05 PM CST, networking engineers are quickly working to address this issue.  We should have a resolution shortly.

UPDATE: As of 4:14 PM CST, another point of clarification: This is not a power issue in DFW, all power is confirmed up and has not been down.  This is a networking issue.

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CrunchBase Information

Rackspace

Website:	rackspace.com
Location:	San Antonio, Texas, United States
Founded:	1998
IPO:	August 7, 2008

Rackspace is a global web host known for their high end managed hosting and dedicated services. The company delivers enterprise-level managed services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world, serving more… Learn More

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When the 'cloud' goes down, all customers go with it. Ouch! Not good for those skittish on this new model already.

Amazon has taken a page from fellow Web juggernaut eBay.

 

The Internet retailer, which recently got into the cloud computing space with Amzon EC2, has announced a new service that will allow customers to bid on unused server and storage capacity. Amazon's EC2 "Spot Instances" service effectively takes eBay's auction/bidding model and applies it to cloud computing. But how exactly will the bidding work? And is this service too risky for customers?

 

With Amazon's EC2 "Spot Instances," customers can use the capacity as long as their bid "exceeds the current Spot Price." According to Amazon, "[t]he Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain aceess to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another option for obtaining compute capacity. If you have flexibility in when your applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower your Amazon EC2 costs. Additionally, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for applications with urgent needs."

 

Okay, it looks a little murky. Amazon tries to clear it up. Basically, if you're a small or medium-sized Web site that's launching a new feature that will bring in more traffic, you can bid on the virtual hardware needed to keep your site running at peak times without having to commit to those cloud computing services for longer periods of time than you need. The bidding process sounds complicated, but Amazon explains it on the Spot Instances home page:

 

"Let’s assume you decide to place a Spot request for one Standard Small (m1.small) instance in the US East – Northern Virginia Region. You can see from the Spot Price history in the AWS Management Console or by using the Amazon EC2 API that the Spot Price has recently fluctuated about every 1-2 hours between $0.030/hr and $0.060/hour, and is currently $0.050/hr. You decide you want to bid a maximum price of $0.045/hr. You create your request by using the AWS Management Console or making a request through the Amazon EC2 API. Because your maximum price is less than the current Spot Price, no instance is launched and your request remains in a pending state.

 

"Two hours later, the Spot Price drops to $0.045/hr. At this point, your request may or may not start running. This is because your maximum price exactly equals the current Spot price and there may be more requests at this price than can be fulfilled. Let’s assume your instance does not start. Thirty minutes later, the Spot price drops to $0.039/hr. Because this is below your maximum price, a Spot Instance will soon be launched and you will expect to pay $0.039/hr for the instance’s first complete hour."

 

Amazon's Spot Instances is certainly a bold move, considering cloud computing is still in its infancy and Amazon itself has had some high profile issues with EC2. Just recently, a password-stealing botnet was discovered in Amazon's cloud (it inflitrated EC2 through a poorly protected cloud customer). Around the same time, Amazon suffered a major data center outage that crippled EC2 -- and sadly, the culprit was nothing more than the failures of just two power supplies in Amazon's mammoth data center in Northern Virginia.

 

But on its face, Spot Instances could have appeal to customers seeking flexibility and quick fixes for their computing needs. So let the bidding begin....