Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2009

Amazon Customers Can Now Get A Placebo Cloud

That would be the new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by Amazon . I am a big proponent of the public cloud but I am a bigger proponent of giving what the customers really want. Amazon had resisted offering a private cloud but they finally gave in and offered a private cloud or at least this is what they want the customers to believe. The bloggers are already questioning whether VPC is a true private cloud . Regardless of the arguments whether the VPC is really a “virtual” private cloud or a “virtually" private cloud , I believe, this placebo cloud is likely to help the customers overcome the cloud computing adoption barriers: Security: The placebo cloud would alleviate the perceived risk of adopting the cloud computing. The perceived risk is based on the customers’ past experiences. The customers believe that anything that they can connect using VPN must be safe even if they are tunneling into a set of shared resources. The customers will get an environment what they believ

SOAP may finally REST

Lately I have observed significant movement in two transformational trends - adoption of REST over SOAP and proliferation of non-relational persistence options. These two trends complement each other and they are likely to cause disruption sooner than later. The enterprise software that required complex transactions, monitoring, and orchestration capabilities relied on the SOAP-based architecture and standards to realize their SOA efforts. The consumer web on the other side raced towards embracing RESTful interfaces since they were simple to set up and consume. There are arguments on both the sides. However, lately the market forces have taken the side of REST even if REST has significant drawbacks in the areas such as security and transactions. This once again proves that a simple and good enough approach that conforms to loose contracts outweighs a complex solution that complies to stricter standards even if it means compromising certain critical features. The web is essentially an u

SaaS 2.0 Will Be All About Reducing The Cost Of Sales

A clever choice of the right architecture on right infrastructure has helped the SaaS vendors better manage their operational infrastructure cost but the SaaS vendors are still struggling to curtail the cost of sales. As majority of the SaaS vendors achieve feature and infrastructure cost parity, reducing the cost of sales is going to be the next biggest differentiation for the SaaS vendors to stay competitive in the marketplace. Direct sales model is highly ineffective and cost-prohibitive for the SaaS vendors as it does not scale with the volume business model that has relatively smaller average deal size. The role of the direct sales organization will essentially get redefined to focus on the relationship with the customers to ensure service excellence and high contract renewal rates in addition to working on long sales cycles for large accounts. How can a SaaS vendor reduce the overall cost of sales to maintain healthy margins and growth? This is a difficult nut to crack. There are