Bits And Buzz, by @JeremyChone

One of the biggest fears of any IT manager about cloud computing is the lack of openness. In other words, they ask, “How easy is it to get in and out? Or they might ask, “How portable is a cloud application?”

Ideally, enterprises should be able to take applications and data in or out of a cloud as business requires without having to rewrite the application or transform the data.

As discussed in the article “Don’t Get Stuck in a Cloud ,” cloud portability tends to be a factor related to the type of cloud one uses.

Here is a quick portability analysis of the three big Clouds on the market:

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Now that we have established that cloud computing is a real phenomenon that provides real technological and business value, the next question is how does it apply to the enterprise market?

To fully analyze this market opportunity, we need to realize that there are two related but different types of enterprise customers for cloud computing.

The first type is internal information technology (IT) organizations within the enterprise that are looking for more agile and cost-effective ways to manage their Internet application and services. The second type is the enterprise SaaS providers who want to leverage proven, highly-scalable architectures and integrate them into some cloud applications to increase functionality and maximize distribution.

IT and SaaS cloud customers have similar requirements but different priorities.

Here is a high-level view of some of the differences.

Jon Davis posted an interesting article discussing whether the Microsoft stack is really more expensive than open source alternatives.

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open source you get the full-powered editions. For example, Linux (e.g., CentOs), Xen (for virtualization), PostgreSQL/MySQL, Apache, Java, Tomcat, AspectJ, Lucene, Hibernate, and Eclipse are all robust, full-featured, and powerful technologies available for free to developers. The variety and the quality of product available from the open source community are just astonishing.

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While many see Microsoft Silverlight as an Adobe Flash killer, I actually think Adobe should rejoice that Microsoft is competing with Adobe on its own turf (i.e., media plug-ins) rather than putting all its energy, as it once did, into Web standards and innovation (IE 5.0 was the most robust and compliant Web browser of its time).

If Microsoft were to take a similar approach to the one it embraced in 1995, when it actually took the lead in Web technologies and provided the best Open Web browser implementation, new media functionalities such as video and 2D/3D would become an intrinsic part of the Web, making media plug-ins irrelevant to its future. In other word, if Microsoft were to go full Open Web (with SVG, Canvas, Smil, HTML 5, Video, and CSS3) Adobe Flash would be history in couple of years. However, Microsoft decided to follow Adobe’s plug-in strategy by forking visually rich capabilities into the plug-in world and throwing itself into a completely new market.

Why? Why follow when you can lead?

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If you are lucky, and curious enough, Oracle can be the best place to learn the enterprise software market. I have worked at Oracle for about seven years and, in my entire career, it is where I have learned the most about enterprise software. When Oracle announced it was buying Sun, I was actually not that surprised, and I thought it was to be expected after the IBM escape. Oracle is in a self-fulfilling prophecy to consolidate the enterprise software market and, after IBM turned down what could have been a great match for open source and Java, Oracle had to jump in. Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are great market strategists, and Sun should have been on their radar for a long time. Larry has also been good friends with Scott McNealy, and this topic must have come up many times over the years.

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Although there is evidence that the two styles will converge in the future, enterprise and consumer Web architecture and technology are quite different today. If one talks to an enterprise application architect, he or she will probably say that while consumer Web applications are cute, simple, and sometimes useful, their architectures and technologies are merely a bunch of scripts and hacks put together. If one talks to a consumer Web architect, she or he will probably say that enterprise software is overly complex, often unusable, and based on over-priced and under-performing technologies (i.e., JSF or Portal). (See the previous post about Web Developer Spectrum.)

Having lived in both worlds, I can see some truth in both arguments; however, I think that most of the divergence comes from a different set of requirements that leads to separate technical routes.  

I see six main differences between consumer and enterprise Web Applications:

1) Scale (Users vs Applications)

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The two premises of this article are as follows:

1. Social Networking is the method of connecting and communicating with the purpose of increasing knowledge (of people and of domain).
2. Collaboration is the method of organizing knowledge and expertise to efficiently accomplish a particular task.

So, Social Networking is about sharing and discovering, and collaboration is about organizing and creating. Although informal, the point of these definitions is to demonstrate the similar but inherently distinctive meanings of collaboration and social networking.

The latest challenge for an enterprise is that social networking has undergone significant innovation cycles, mostly on the consumer side, and collaboration has not kept pace. As a consequence, an enterprise is often tempted to substitute collaboration by social networking, which could lead to an oversized enterprise social network with very little productivity gain, or even a loss, due to the over-communication side effect.

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For a commercial entity, building an effective open source strategy can be a relatively daunting task. Open Source strategy discussions tend to revolve around licensing. Typical questions are, ”Should we use dual licensing?,” “Should we use GPL or BSD?,” “What are the risks of GPL?,” “Can the licensing help us drive users to our commercial assets?,” or “What are the competitive risk associated with each type of license?“

Well, while the licensing questions are pertinent and will need to be answered at some point, the real questions are “What? Why? And How much [open]?”

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In the last few years, the technology industry has been particularly focused on Web developers, and the last couple of weeks have been a relatively good example of such attention. First, Adobe released its Adobe AIR and their Flex 3 products; Microsoft did a massive SilverLight push at its now famous MIX event (see Read/Write post); Google announced Google Gears for mobile devices and, finally, Steve Jobs splashed the market with his “Flash not good enough for iPhone” comment (which, in my opinion, is more of a strategic move than a technical reality). Meanwhile, “non-corporate-backed” Web frameworks, such as Spring, Ruby/Rail, and many AJAX frameworks, also continue to attract more and more Web developers. Consequently, Web developers have now, more than ever, a wide variety of technologies at their disposal.

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In the last couple of weeks Microsoft has been pretty loud around the "new Internet wave." First, with the announcement of Windows live and Office live, and then, with the very insightful Ozzie and Gates "leaked" memos.

It is very interesting to watch Microsoft waking up, loud and determined as in 1995. The fact they chose Windows and Office brand for their "Live" offerings is significant.

A few interesting points from the Ozzie memo:

• Microsoft did openly recognize having missed some opportunities (e.g., Google, Skype, AJAX).
• They are puzzled about Google’s strategy:
  "[Google's] myriad initiatives … drive scale for their advertising business … or … grow to substantively challenge our offerings"
  (BTW, good job from Google. In less than a decade, they puzzled Microsoft)
• Ozzie did a good assessment regarding today’s Web hurdles:
  "User identity and cross-service interoperability mechanisms are still needlessly fragmented".
  (I hope this means Microsoft will work on standards and interoperability, instead of creating another proprietary Identity Management "a la MS-Passport"!)
• Regarding my previous point about this new advertisement revenue potential, Ozzie did confirm that "… no one yet knows how much of the world’s online advertising revenues should or will flow."
• Ozzie does point out the value of the Internet adoption model and seamless application integration.

Microsoft is certainly doing the right thing by embracing these changes. During the last couple of years, a lot of "underground" work has been done to come to this point. It will be interesting to see Microsoft catching up. Undoubtedly, they can catch-up on the technology side. Their real challenge will be adapting to these new business models.

Some missing points from Ozzie’s memo (just for speculation sake):

• No mention of Open Source. Ozzie could have said that Open Source is part of this new ecosystem. He probably wants to tackle this topic offline.
• Ozzie did explicitly mention the term AJAX couple of times, but not Web 2.0. Arguably, Web 2.0 encompasses AJAX. Free speculation: Microsoft might be starting branding MS Live "against" Web 2.0.

Related links:

• Dave Winer publishes Gates and Ozzie memos.
• On Slashdot -
  Why Microsoft and Google are Cleaning Up With AJAX
• Marc Benioff’s retort