Is Generation SaaS Here?

Treb Ryan at Sandhill.com posts the argument that this recession may be just the nudge required to push Software as a service (SaaS) over the tipping point of user adoption, possibly leaving installed software packages as a footnote in the history of the Internet.

I easily fit into most of the boxes that Mr. Ryan argues will spell the decline of the old school complex, application architecture.

….expensive, difficult to use, challenging to integrate and complex to install

Check, check, check, and check again!

I know I may sound like a broken record if you have been reading this blog for a while, but for those of us the SME space, there are still a few land mines that we have to beware of.

1) A SaaS provider of ours recently unilaterally changed the terms of our agreement. Will that have an effect on you if it occurs to you?

2) A lot of the providers in the SaaS space, and a lot of the reams of digital ink written about it are still very US-centric. What are the liabilities and jurisdictional risks we need to consider? As an example, if I, as a Canadian business, do business with Cuba – am I liable for a visit by the US Patriot Act police if my data is hosted on a SaaS vendor’s servers in California?

The SMB Takeaway

I am not saying that these are necessarily deal breakers, but a full evaluation of the risks, as well as the benefits are required to calculate if it is the best option for you.

You can get updates to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Where Is Your Planning Horizon? (Part 2)

In part 1 of this post, I outlined how ‘C’ level executives and managers in the small to medium enterprise need to ensure that their senior IT leaders (internal or outsourced) are considering long and medium term planning horizons, not just short term planning, which is the specific, immediate actions required for particular results.

Often longer term planning can be difficult, because it will always be a moving target. (I have changed my own long term planning goals twice in the last 18 months or so) Despite being a moving target, get away from the what if.. or you will never get any planning goals off the ground.

Your IT planning has to balance the long term of where you want to be vs. the day by day steps that get you to that goal.

One Without The Other?

Does not work!

With no long term planning, short and medium term planning has no goal. No end game. No target that you are trying to aim for. And with only long term planning, you get stuck vague ideals about a perfect future – but with no immediate deliverables to begin setting you on that road. (like the old saying; if you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there)

And yes! your long term plans will probably change, be aware of it, and adjust as necessary.

In part 1 I promised to give a real world example, so here it is!

After joining my organization n the fall of 2007, I realized that our IT cost structure was way out of whack.

So easily enough my long term plan was to reduce our IT cost by at least 50%

The short term and medium term plans to get to that goal included multiple tasks, some of these were relatively easy to implement, and others that were more difficult. Examples include;

* Improving purchase approvals,processes and supplier agreements

* Improving IT costing

* Consolidating four database servers down to one

* Consolidating five application servers down to three

* Improving budget and trend analysis

You get the idea!

Some of these tasks took a lot of planning and time (eg, you can’t just pick up and move a database from one server to another – trust me on that – applications will break, software code needs to modified, etc etc)

In the interest of full disclosure, I cannot take credit for all cost reductions we achieved as our B2B customer base started feeling the pain of our current economic meltdown long before the press started talking about the recession word. When they closed their wallets, many growth and spending plans had to be shelved.

The Long Term Planning Change

OK, so my first long term plan was cutting IT costs. By middle to late 2008, the market that we call SaaS, (Software as a service)and  PaaS (platform as a service) had begun to mature.

For me? maintaining database servers and application servers are not our core competency.So my long term planning has evolved into identifying if we can successfully leverage those technologies.

The SMB Takeaway

Yes, the future is unknown, and unknowable. But that is not excuse to avoid planning for where you believe you need to be. You may modify, you may tweak, you may adjust.

In fact you may rip out and replace the whole plan.

Do it anyway!

You can get updates to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Photo credit coincoyote via flickr

Cloud Considerations

For SMB’s thinking of dipping their toes into the waters of SaaS (Software As A Service) Karl Palachuk has some great due diligence questions to think about on his Small Biz Thoughts blog.

You can get updates to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

SaaS – When Policies Change, Are You In Or Out?

A Change In Policy

We use a hosted, online Software as a Service tool. It is not a huge or complex one, but use it for a key internal function.

As the possibility of the vendor going out of business, shutting down, or being aquired always exists, we negotiated at the outset that we wanted periodic copies of our data.

In this case, the vendor was simply supplying a raw backup of the database. In the event they did shut down, our development team could at least extract the data for import into any other tool that we wished to use.

A few weeks ago I stopped getting that data backup.

An email with their tech support was responded to with this;

Hi Elliot,

I am with XXXXX support. I tried to contact you few minutes back to discuss this issue and reached your voicemail. I left a voicemessage for you. Currently there are some changes in our company policies because of which database backups are not provided

The SMB Takeaway

Using software applications ‘out in the cloud’ has some benefits. But there are risks.

In this case our data backup strategy for our corporate data had the rug pulled out from underneath it.

You can get updates to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Photo Credit JM3 via flickr

Utility Computing: And What’s In A Word?

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I believe that computing will become more utility oriented. That there will be less reliance on what we currently look at as internal technology infrastructure.

My belief in this came about in the mid 80’s when I read that every automobile manufactured in North America had more computing power built into it than the NASA moon shots.

If you have read Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter you will notice one key difference, I never saw it as the world of software that we currently have, the way I saw it back then was along the lines of intelligent hardware devices. Similar to the “smart” thermostats in most new homes.

This type of Utility IT has often been compared to electricity – just plug it in, and pay by the sip. I have used that analogy myself.

But there is an excellent warning by Andrew McAfee, formerly at Harvard, now MIT. He argues that we should not try to simplify this concept down to the simplicity of an analogy like electricity.

His argument is that even in a more utility environment, IT is not as simple as 110 or 220 volts (North America) coming out of a socket. There is no decision to made there, no decisions or management is required around an electrical socket.

So using terms like electricity may overly simplify, or “dumb down” our thinking of IT.

And that is dangerous.

When was the last time you talked about electricity at a management meeting?

Exactly!

And even if get your IT through a wall jack (eg Salesforce.com)  There are still management decisions that must be made. We use technology to create or consume information. To do that there are work flows, business processes and certain business metrics and capabilities.

All of these will still demand management attention, demand decisions, and need to be top of mind for all businesses.

So, you can consider me a convert!

Will more and more of our IT resources continue to come from outside our walls? Yes,

But will you be able to plug in a cable and by magic have exactly the information, processes and work flows just appear? No!

It will still need management attention – lots of it.

You can get updates to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Non US Risks in The Clouds

Dana Gardner has a good piece on some of the risks and expectations with Cloud Computing on the briefingsdirect blog.

I suspect that the majority of survey was American organizations.

For those of you outside the United States, an issue that is not mentioned is the law.

As a Canadian company, if that cloud data is in California – what legal jurisdiction is it under – Canadian, or California?

Same issue if you are under European ‘Safe Harbour’ legislation.

This issue becomes even more complicated if you consider trade laws.

For example, Canada has relations with Cuba, the US still does not.

If one of our customers is in Cuba – but that Customer data is in a cloud in the US………..

You can subscribe to this blog by clicking the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Photo Credit zerega via flickr

The Beginners Guide to the New IT

Vinnie Mirchandani at the New Florence. New Renaissance. blog pointed me to this Economist special report titled; ‘A special report on corporate IT’ .

It is a great non – technical look at the trends shaping the IT world, from ‘Cloud’ Computing, through the mobile future.

And like Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesnt’ Matter, it describes how we have migrated from the individual craftsman (Administrators) to the standardized, commoditized building blocks that enable this next wave.

Virtualization – What SME’s Want

Courtesy of the Ottawa Network and Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP I had the opportunity to attend a casual panel on the concept of virtualization.

The technology aspects of the discussion ranged from abstracting hardware right up through the application layer and the current buzzword of cloud computing.

But for the my audience in the SMB / SME space.  Outside of the panelists, there were two questions that I found say it all,

He Says; IT Doesn’t Matter

Just Plug It In

One gentleman, (A small business owner) whose name I was not able to get, asked when he would just plug in a display type of device into a wall and have his computing environment.

(If I was able to, I would have given him copies of Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter and the Big Switch )

She Says; She Can’t Give it Away

The second interesting point was from Fay Khazai, President of a SMB that supplies a software suite for some SMB verticals.

These business are reluctant to use her hosted offering – for one reason. They cannot rely on their internet connections.

These SMB’s rely on lower end offerings connectivity from their providers such as DSL and cable for their internet connections. No connection – no business.

There you have the SMB dichotomy. Can I give you an answer for this?

No, sorry I cannot.

Panelists:

Mike Kemp: CTO Liquid Computing

Jean-Marc Seguin: Chief Architect, Embotics

Miro Adamy: Founder, Thinknostic

Socket Image Credit

Internet Image Credit

ITyrannousauras Rex

As I quoted here, Nicholas Carr stated that he would be surprised if ;

“..if …20 years from now there are still IT departments in corporations”

And Vaughan Merlyn pointed me to this “Tech Pros: The Next Dinosaurs?” article by Ben Worthen

IT Evolution is Coming Here

In house IT staff as plugging a PC or server into a wall jack will be gone.

That is not to say that this low level IT work will disappear completely, but it will be a service provider. Somewhere in the phone book between Electrician and Plumber.

IT staff in our businesses will have to be Business IT – part negotiator, relationship manager, and with deep understanding of the interdependencies among data, processes, and the individuals using them.

Susan Scrupski writes that nGenera is already there. 100% Software as a Service. (Saas)

Wanting to or not, we have caught the wave – Now we need to either ride it, or, well, like old T-Rex, be for the archaeologists to look for.

Are you evolving?

Photo Credit: only_point_five

Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton

SaaS, Outages, and the SMB

There have been dozens of articles in print and online in recent weeks, including this one by Nicholas Hoover at Information Week regarding high profile SaaS outages with big name SaaS vendors.

In fact Mr. Hoovers article is titled;

Outages Force Cloud Computing Users To Rethink Tactics

In the SMB / SME Space? Well lets keep it real Yo!

Yes outages are a concern, yes outages are a risk.

But before someone throws the concept out of the window because they heard about an outage somewhere. Ask;

Well – Can We Do Better?

In the SMB / SME space – I bet not.

I know that I can’t.

I am located in a region with frequent power outages, and the building does not have an emergency generator.

The backup batteries on the servers and other devices hold everything for a while, but not long enough.

So as part of your evaluation and due diligence – be aware of the risks – but ask yourself if realistically you can do better.