EnjoyTech

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...

I do recognize the thrust behind the NoSQL movement. While some are announcing an end of era for MySQL and memcached others are questioning the arguments behind Cassandra’s OLTP claims and scalability and universal applicability of NoSQL . It is great to see innovative data persistence and access solutions that challenges the long lasting legacy of RDBMS.  Competition between HBase and Cassandra is heating up. Amazon now supports a variety of consistency models on EC2 . However none of the NoSQL solutions solve a fundamental underlying problem – a developer upfront has to pick persistence, consistency, and access options for an application. I would argue that RDBMS has been popular for the last 30 years because of ubiquitous SQL. Whenever the developers wanted to design an application they put an RDBMS underneath and used SQL from all possible layers. Over a period of time the RDBMS grew in functions and features such as binary storage, faster access, clusters etc. and the ...

Today Google announced  Google Buzz . Watch the video: The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it  Google Wave does not help solve a "weekend-sized problem" . Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct adoption barriers with Google Wave and Google Buzz has capability to overcome those: Inseparable container, content, and collaboration: Changing people's behavior is much more difficult than inventing or innovating a killer technology. Most of the people still prefer to keep the collaboration persisted separately from the content or not persisted at all. Single task systems such as email, Wiki, and instant messaging are very effective because they do one and only thing really well without any confusion. Google Wave is a strong container on which Google or others can build collaboration capability but not giving an o...

In a much anticipated mystic event Apple announced a tablet today called an iPad . Steve Job's hypnotizing presentation convinced people that iPad is a magic. I was not there in person to see Jobs unveiling an iPad and somehow escaped the magic. That gave me time to think about the implications of a trend that an iPad endorses - mass customization. Firefox's success in part can be attributed to its approach to allow the developers to write and publish extensions. There is a Firefox plug-in for pretty much anything. Then came the iPhone and we had an app for pretty much anything. Now we have an iPad and the trend continues. Mass customization trend is about micro-chunking the software that we run on our devices ranging from cell phones to laptops. The emergent architecture and delivery model have empowered the consumers to buy only the chunks of software that they actually need. The cloud computing and SaaS have further enabled the consumers not to run any software other than a ...

It was a routine trip back home from work one of these days. As soon as I boarded the bus the driver asked me: "So, what do you think about Google's announcement regarding China? Will Yahoo follow the suit?". The same bus driver had asked me about my views on NexusOne on the day it was announced. He even has a strong point of view on net neutrality. The other day the librarian showed me a Firefox plug-in that hides your identity from Google. Everyday it's a constant reminder of the demographics that we live in the Silicon Valley. It's an innovation dagger. One edge keeps people to stay on top of cutting edge technology and the other keeps them away from the vast majority of the users that don't live in the valley. I cannot overemphasize the importance of being surrounded by the smartest of the smart people in the valley. However for entrepreneurs it is equally important to stay grounded in the reality. As cool as iPod was and iPhone is and iPad/iSlate will be ...

One of the biggest revelations to me from my trip to CES is that the ubiquitous computing, once an academic concept, has finally arrived. The data, voice, device, and display convergence is evident from the products that I saw. There has been wide coverage of CES by many bloggers who track consumer technology. However, as a strategist and an enterprise software blogger, I have keen interest in assessing the impact of this ubiquitous convergence in consumer technology on enterprise software. I believe that the consumers will soon start expecting the ubiquitous experience in everything that they touch and interact with ranging from their coffee cups to the cars and everything in between. This effect is going to be even more pronounced amongst millennial who grew up digitally and are entering into the workforce with an expectation of instant gratification. The mobile phone revolution was consumer-driven at large and Apple made the Smartphone category popular and appealing to non-enterpris...

The second most populous country with the fourth largest spending power, India, saw a surprising 7.9% YOY GDP growth well above the expectations of 6.3%. The Indian stock market recovered much quicker since the US financial meltdown. In fact one of my friends who oversees sales of a European earthmoving equipments company in India complained that the European manufacturers have not increased their production to meet the increased demand in India due to the faster economic recovery, especially in the infrastructure sector. When I switch on a news channel in India I hear all about incentivizing manufacturing companies to increase indigenous production that will fuel the growth of the industrial sector. I also see commercials ranging from baked potato chips to a service to transfer money using virtual currency on a mobile phone targeted to the fast growing middleclass. The marketers have no problem understanding the rich and the middle-class of India and designing the products for them. ...