LiveCycle in the Cloud: a pragmatic approach
Yesterday I had a briefing from Paul McNamara* and John Carione of Adobe regarding the recently-announced LiveCycle Managed Services offering.
LiveCycle Managed Services is powered by Adobe’s LiveCycle ES2 BPM suite, hosted on Amazon’s EC2 platform. The company had previously introduced LiveCycle Developer Express, also hosted on Amazon’s EC2 platform.This offering provided an online subscription service aimed at developers, helping them get started with LiveCycle quickly. What’s interesting here, though, is that Adobe is positioning LiveCycle Managed Services as a production-strength platform for customers which should be considered as fully equivalent to on-premise deployment.
Adobe has wrapped the basic Amazon hosting service with a set of management services – provisioning, support, maintenance, upgrades, backup and recovery. Support is provided 24×7 by a dedicated team of NOC staff (the staff are actually part of the team that supports the recently-acquired Omniture service). In delivering the service Adobe has traded off flexibility for security, based on what it says are customer requests: it reserves Amazon computing resources as single-tenant instances, dedicated to each customer – and additionally it encypts all data before it’s written to Amazon’s S3 or EBS storage resources.
This is not a “pure Cloud Computing” offering – with utility pricing and flexible subscription – and Adobe has wisely steered clear of trying to position it as such. It’s a set of managed hosting services that Adobe is delivering on top of Amazon’s Cloud Computing platform (and just because a Cloud Computing platform is used in some part of the supply of an end service, doesn’t make the end service also a Cloud Computing service).
The pricing model is in line with what you might expect from such an offering – the model is based on an annual subscription. Customers pay for the components they use; annual pricing is set at 85% of the cost of a perpetual on-premise license for the same components. Adobe can offer customers a staging environment as well as a production environment; staging resources are priced at 50% the cost of production resources.
Adobe is pitching this as a way for customers to get started with new LiveCycle projects quickly, proving the value internally before potentially investing in on-premise infrastructure and management services to support internal deployment. However it also believes that LiveCycle Managed Services will be attractive as a continuing alternative to on-premise deployment for prospects in industries like retail, construction, mining and utilities where the geographic distribution of users and/or the lack of appetite for investment in-house IT infrastructure makes on-premise deployment difficult to sell. It’s too early to tell how strongly this new model will be taken up by customers, so we’ll be watching Adobe’s progress with interest.
*As an aside Paul is titled “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Adobe, and is responsible for Adobe’s “enterprise Cloud” business. He’s ex-CEO of innovative application-development-in-the-cloud provider Coghead, which was absorbed into SAP at the start of 2009 when its venture funding commitments fell apart.
Tags: Industry news
Posted by Neil Ward-Dutton on February 17, 2010
