Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Saas’

Novell Gets Ready To Release Pulse and Federation with Google Wave

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave. This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts.

Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.

Sponsor

The service resembles platforms that we see emerging. It has a real-time activity stream. People may create their own groups within an activity stream. Groups may also be created with external communities such as partners or customers. Pulse will be available as a SaaS or on-premise.

The service includes a co-editing feature, much like you see in Google Wave.

Novell Pulse looks like a viable alternative for the companies and government organizations that want a platform they can modify without concern about proprietary constraints. Still, it is clear that Pulse is in its infancy with a host of features needing integration.

We question how many people may use the service simultaneously. Google Wave has received criticism for its inability to handle large numbers of simultaneous users. Novell says it will see how many people the platform can handle. Of note is that the beta is so limited. It will essentially only be open to a very limited subset of the market. Perhaps it will spread through invites. We’ll see.

Its open-source roots make Pulse most compelling. The approach fits with the company’s roots. Novell sees an opportunity to federate with Google. The larger question will come down to how well the integration works with Google Wave.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Magento Scores $22.5 Million For Open Source E-commerce Platform Play

According to a regulatory filing, LA-based Magento Commerce, which develops an open source e-commerce software suite, has recently received a $22.5 million capital injection in an equity funding round.

Magento was originally a product developed and marketed by Varien, a 9-year old company that also delivers e-commerce business consulting and other services, but has now effectively been incorporated as a stand-alone venture. It’s unclear whether the financing of Magento comes from Varien, or if the latter company’s existing and / or other investors have stepped in to provide funding. Either way, the company says it concerns ‘fresh’ cash.

If I were to venture a guess, I would say PayPal plays a part in this story – from what I can gather the least you can say is that the digital payment company has a deep partnership with Magento that spans both co-marketing of their respective services as well as a collaboration on a product development level.

I had a brief chat with Tim Schulz, the former MySpace product manager who recently became Magento’s Senior Product Manager, who told me they’re positioning the Magento Commerce solution right in the center of various growth areas in electronic commerce and that its goal is to become the provider of the single largest e-commerce platform in the world. Bonus points for showcasing some ambition.

Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.

Here’s a video of Varien / Magento CEO Roy Rubin outlining his vision on open source e-commerce:

Read the whole story…

Drupal Founder Critical of SaaS and its Proprietary Nature

Drupal’s founder is calling for open source in the enterprise and in the cloud. This should be no surprise, coming from someone like Dries Buytaert. But it is still interesting, considering the source and the point he makes about the actual lack of open source in cloud computing.

Drupal is one of the most popular, open source content management systems. Buytaert created it initially as a messaging board. It went open-source in 2001.

Sponsor

Dries, who is now the co-founder of Acquia, says the SaaS model need to be updated, modeled on open source values. He points out that SaaS companies for the most part are built on proprietary software.

Dries:

“….they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don’t allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.”

It’s in Dries view that this model can be disrupted by open source. For example, he says, the Drupal Gardens community improves the overall platform by contributing to it. The goal, as Dries says, is for people to export their Drupal Garden site in their entirety ” the code, the theme and data — and move the platform to any Drupal hosting environment.”

His example points to a huge issue with cloud computing. It’s not easy to export data from cloud computing services. Third-party services offer methods for exporting the data but for the most part, cloud computing services are proprietary. No open standards exist for passing data.

As Vint Cerf said in January to the Commonwealth Club: It’s like 1973 for moving data around in the cloud. IBM, Google and Amazon have no way to interoperate. There are no cloud standards.

Open-source communities are faring well in the enterprise space. Matt Asay of the Open Road posted a story last week that illustrates the success of oepn-source enterprise efforts.

In particular, he referred to some of the most successful companies: Alfresco Software, Sugar CRM, Jaspersoft and Zimbra. Here are the numbers he presented:

Open-source communities thrive in all sorts of places, even the enterprise space. The next step is to bring this same community drive into the cloud community. Our bet is it will happen sooner than we think.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Mobclix Acquires iPhone App Sales Analytics Software Heartbeat

Mobile ad network Mobclix has made its first acquisition. The startup is buying up Heartbeat, a cloud-based SaaS that helps iPhone app developers manage and access sales data, crash reporting, ongoing hourly usage stats, reviews and rankings. The acquisition price was not disclosed.

Mobclix bought Heartbeat from app developer Enormego, which launched the software in January 2009. So far Heartbeat has tracked $25 million in paid application downloads with over 3,500 applications using the platform (55 percent of which are paid apps). Heartbeat’s offerings will be folded into Mobclix’s platform to offer Heartbeat’s software to both Android and iPhone app developers. Heartbeat’s sales analytics will be integrated with Mobclix ad revenue data to allows developers to have a visualization of all aspects of an application’s revenue including ad monetization, in-app purchase and paid models. While Heartbeat’s current service only caters to the iPhone app market, its technology will be adapted to serve Android apps as well.

The acquisition makes sense for Mobclix to boost its exchange’s offerings. Mobclix allows app developers to sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. It also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. The startup recently announced a deal to offer Nielsen’s ad targeting data into its ad exchange to enhance ad targeting.

With the acquisitions of AdMob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple , ad exchanges and networks like Mobclix, Greystripe and others are working hard to boost the appeal and strength of their products. But according to Gartner, the mobile advertising market will generate $13 billion in revenues by 2013, leaving plenty of possible revenue to go around.

Read the whole story…

Is Oracle Really Killing the Sun Open Cloud?

Larry Ellison may be remembered as the one who steered clear of the “folly” that is cloud computing. Or he may be remembered for ignoring the real and considerable impacts that the cloud brings.

Or he may also be remembered for staying true to what Oracle does best. And that’s providing the underlying infrastructure for any platform, be it in the cloud or on-premise.

Or it may be that Ellison is simply bluffing. Oracle is really not killing the Sun Open Cloud. In its marathon event last week to discuss its plans for Sun, Ellison apparently hooted and howled about the cloud. He asked if anyone could explain it to him at all. He heard little if no response. He said Oracle is discontinuing the Sun Open Cloud, that they don’t want to be like Amazon Web Services, that they are not a public cloud service, and that Oracle is not in the business of renting by the minute.

Sponsor

We’re not so sure.

Look closer and it’s clear Oracle has many of the pieces for a cloud strategy. The SmoothSpan blog has a good vision for how an Oracle cloud strategy might unfold.

For example, the post points out how systems integrators are clamoring for a SasS environment from Oracle.

“….In that world, the System Integrators are the gatekeepers for the market. They’re very powerful, and the interesting discovery Tony [Hemelka, Helpstream's CEO] made is that they absolutely love Force.com. It’s not hard to see why. The SaaS model squeezes the SI ecosystem. The normal meat and potatoes business around just getting on-premises software installed is greatly reduced. The business of just keeping the lights on is almost non-existant for SaaS. Yet SI’s have a lot to bring to the table. A good SI often understands the Domain, its Best Practices, and the key Business Processes better even than the software vendor. Having access to a SaaS platform makes it possible for the SI to turn that valuable knowledge into product which can then be sold. That’s why having a platform on which to do that is so important to them.”

A Theory About the Open Web

But even if Oracle does have all the pieces, is its culture right for developing a cloud-based approach to the enterprise?

Earlier this week, we touched on the relationship between the social Web and cloud computing. Oracle is not considered a superstar of the social Web. Sure, the company uses the social Web, but it is not experimenting to the degree that you see with a company like IBM, perhaps Oracle’s biggest competitor.

IBM is developing a cloud-based collaboration platform. It is developing its own cloud computing service. It is diving deep into the world of the cloud and how the open Web fits with enterprise collaboration environments. In our view, these go hand in hand. It makes a lot of sense that if you want to be a cloud services provider, you need to understand the different ways Web oriented architectures function within the enterprise. A Web oriented architecture requires an online network. With that understanding comes the knowledge how to serve clients that depend on cloud-based infrastructures for their IT services.

Oracle does not want to be like Amazon, providing a public cloud infrastructure.

Instead, the Sun Open Cloud infrastructure will be configured for providers that want to provide their own public clouds and enterprises that seek to create private clouds.

You see? Oracle provides infrastructure – a complete IT services platform. Right now, all Oracle cares about is being the underpinning for all the systems in the enterprise IT environment.

As Dana Gardner points out:

“In doing complete IT package gig, Oracle has signaled the end of the best-of-breed, heterogeneous, and perhaps open source components era of IT. In the new IT era, services are king. The way you actually serve or acquire them is far less of a concern. Enterprises focus on the business and the IT comes, well, like electricity.

This is why “cloud” makes no sense to Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison. He’d rather we take out the word “cloud” from cloud computing and replace it with “Oracle.” Now that makes sense!”

It sure does. Oracle sees the cloud through the vision of its own technology infrastructure. The Sun cloud fits into that vision even if for now it is getting mothballed.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

EchoSign Integrates With Twitter To Tweet Out “Signed Deals”

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has launched a nifty Twitter integration to let users “ring the bell” on Twitter the moment a deal is signed and closed. EchoSign will auto-tweet the moment a deal is signed, and will Tweet how quickly a deal was closed.

The startup is also launching a contest to incentivize the use of Twitter when signing deals via EchoSign and will reward the top closer and quickest closer each month with gift cards and prizes. Echosign is used for a variety of transactions, including those in real estate deals, sales contracts and in human resources activities. Of course, its important to note that users may not want to Tweet out their deals to the public for privacy reasons.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 1.2 million users and has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections. EchoSign has gained traction as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…

Why Do Small Business Services Sometimes Lack Sophistication?

Collaboration services targeted for the small business market often seem more like software suites than web-based services with deep linking capabilities and tag-based environments.

For example, the new offering from HyperOffice focuses on features that are fundamental to small business operations but lacks the advanced capabilities that we see from a number of Enterprise 2.0 services.

Is this a good thing? Is this due to the domination of document-based systems that have traditionally been such a part of the small business world?

Sponsor

We are torn on this one. We see a number of companies offering services such as real-time collaboration environments. Still, the portal mindset seems to have such a hold on the small business market.

HyperOffice looks like it is providing a service that has value for the small business. But like others we have seen, HyperOffice feels monolithic. It provides the capability to create personal and group environments but extensions to the web are limited. In some respects this may be just the right approach. HyperOffice users may not want the capability to build data mashups and tie into services like Twitter.

The company points out that the market is flooded with Web 2.0 style point tools. The HyperOffice platform is a one-stop shop. This may be smart as the company is targeting Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes users. A SaaS like HyperOffice may be enticing, perhaps even more because it has similar functionality to the offerings from the big players in the market.

The HyperOffice UI resembles a Microsoft Office environment. The main page includes icons such as desktop, mail and calendar.

The features are basic but provide a clear functionality for the user. HyperOffice has personal and group settings. Groups may share calendar items, collaborate on documents and other tasks. Additional features include tasks, notes, a wiki and the ability to search Google and Yahoo! from within the application.

Here’s an overview of the service:

Google Apps and Zoho provide a deeper web experience than HyperOffice. But there is definite value here for the company looking for an affordable, CRM service.

Pricing starts at $7 per user, per month.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Google Executive Says Companies Can Get Rid of Microsoft Office…Next Year

The Google executive in charge of Google Enterprise is talking smack about Microsoft Office, saying that firms will be able to get rid of the software suite in one year’s time.

Man, those are some fighting words. The remarks came from Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division, in an interview with ZDNet Asia.

Sponsor

In context, what Girouard says does make sense. Open formats are the rule these days and proprietary formats like those from Microsoft will have less of an appeal. But it may not be just Google that rules the enterprise. Microsoft SaaS offerings will become more robust and a number of new players are making headway.

Girouard, one of four presidents at Google, said that in a year’s time, Google Docs will have a “point of capacity,” that will be enough for people to make the switch from Microsoft Office.

He admitted that at this point, Google Docs is much less mature but efforts are underway to add 30 to 50 new features and performance upgrades that will put it in a position to work for the “vast majority” of users.

He added that Microsoft Office will never go away but as it stands it is overkill for most users. In his words, Office will be more for specialty users.

Hubris? Perhaps. Microsoft still has a huge lead and its Sharepoint product is really the future for Microsoft’s place in the enterprise.

But open formats are what’s hot. Young people are used to the way the Internet works. They have access to so much information that it is critical for them to port it to where they want it to be. Girouard says this movement will spread into the enterprise.

Discuss

Read the whole story…