Of all the conversations and discussions held at Salesforce’s customer day in Egham this week, one in particular struck a chord with me. Cloudapps, an ISV and partner of Salesforce, spoke briefly about the challenges of capturing, storing and analysing Big Data, in particular telecom mast sensor data, on the Force.com platform.  Although there wasn’t time to drill into detail about Force.com’s Big Data support – it got me thinking generally about the wider options for exploiting vast amounts of digital data within the cloud.

As a lot of the Big Data that people are interested in analysing – such as sensor data, social media data or weblog file data – already lives in the cloud, it makes sense to also use it as a platform for hosting and analysing this data too. Rather than the often more inefficient method of pushing it to an on-premise enterprise data warehouse for example.  At the same time one set of technologies in particular – Hadoop – is also becoming synonymous as a lower cost approach for storing and processing these large-scale datasets in the cloud.

Given the proliferation of digital data and the desire to harness it for better business effect, it’s not surprising that Big Data and the Cloud are on a natural collision course. With its elastic processing capacity, lower cost and lower risk approach, the cloud provides a powerful platform for storing, processing and crunching this data – whether using Hadoop or not. Similarly the emergence of cloud based offerings that mix analytics and Big Data in the public cloud are also helping to circumnavigate some of the skills shortage issues relating to advanced analytics techniques and Big Data technologies.

However that’s not to say that the cloud should be seen as the answer to all your Big Data needs. On-premise data warehouses that employ technologies such as MPP analytic databases, in-memory computing, columnar databases or packaged appliances provide equally valid alternatives. In fact in many cases these Big Data approaches should be seen as complementary to each other, as each brings different strengths to the table.  The challenge however for organisations that haven’t put their eggs in any one particular Big Data basket, is how to mesh these approaches together and equally how to do this across the on-premise and cloud divide.  The benefits of  integrating data to support a more consolidated, complete and accurate view of your business are well known after all.

As we outlined in our recent report on Analytics in the Cloud, a hybrid cloud is one plausible approach to using both public clouds and private or on-premise IT to deliver a more integrated Big Data analytic system. This can provide a more pragmatic and blended approach for balancing the strengths and pitfalls of both cloud and on-premise implementations but it also comes with its own set of challenges. Apart from managing the environment there are also factors relating to the immaturity of certain Big Data technologies, lack of best practice and interoperability across platforms.  For example, of those looking at Big Data Hadoop projects a significant proportion are still in experimentation (rather than production) mode, testing out the concepts, design and technology -although we do expect this to change over the next 12-18 months as the market evolves.

Given the great many opportunities for leveraging Big Data in the cloud, it’s surprising to see that aside from its social media monitoring platform Radian6, Salesforce doesn’t have a stronger message or story about its Big Data hosting capabilities. It appears from the conversations at the customer event the company still has something to prove when it comes to supporting and helping ISVs and developers work with Big Data especially on the Force.com platform. But as a company used to pioneering cloud based offerings we don’t expect this to be the situation for very long.

Yesterday I was briefed by Salesforce.com on their latest SaaS-based product in the collaboration space, Do.com. A result of their acquisition of Manymoon back in February, Do.com is a social project collaboration tool for small groups of up to 15 people, providing features such as task management, notes and discussions. Do.com is still currently in private beta, with public beta coming in a couple of weeks, but once it is fully released, Salesforce.com intends to provide it through a “freemium” model – i.e. a free version will include the core features of the tool, with the option to upgrade to a paid version to access (for example) advanced features, premium support, or perhaps to support larger groups of users.

The product itself, while showing plenty of scope for enhancement, is slick and intuitive, employing a simple task-oriented UI to enable individuals to create and allocate tasks for themselves or others. The task list allows you to categorise tasks in a way that suits you, grouping them into personalisable “sections” which may or may not correspond to the projects to which they belong. The social element is provided in a couple of ways; each task has a comments thread associated with it which captures users’ discussions around the task, as well as tracking edits to the task such as, for example, changes to the assignee or notifications that the task has been completed. Each project has its own activity feed which tracks both comments threads and changes or additions to the tasks associated with that project, and project members can comment inline against particular activities or notifications within the feed.

An interesting aspect to the application is that it has been developed as a “mobile first” app, i.e. the UI has been designed to work well on tablets first  and desktops/laptops second – the experience is the same on both. Notifications about your tasks and projects are delivered to your various devices as applicable – for example as emails, or as native pop-up notifications to your iPad or iPhone (note that iPad is the only tablet supported at present). The notes feature is interesting, providing a wiki-like platform for recording or tracking information; a line of text can be selected within an individual note, and a task created from it with a single button click. Documents can be attached to tasks, and you can create tasks and notes by emailing directly into Do.com.

Despite its immaturity, the product is already integrated with fellow SaaS services Google Apps and Dropbox, as well as (of course) the wider Salesforce.com offerings. The Google Apps integration is particularly noteworthy, leveraging the Gmail gadget framework to enable Do.com tasks to be created from an email, for example. There is also single sign on with Salesforce.com, Facebook and Google Apps.

While the app itself is very promising, what strikes me as most significant is the market that Salesforce.com is targeting with this product. Unlike its Sales Cloud or Service Cloud – or even Chatter – which are designed to serve large enterprises, Do.com is very clearly targeting the “prosumer” and small business markets. Not only is this an area where Salesforce.com is not experienced, but this is the second product this year from a major vendor to target small businesses – Microsoft, too, showed its interest in the SMB market during its launch of Office 365 back in June. However, with Do.com, Salesforce is focusing even farther down the scale, seeing it being not only a business tool, but something individuals will use in their personal lives as well, combining the two contexts within a single environment. This is interesting because it is explicitly blurring the boundaries between business and personal tools – something which is characterised by many of the social tools that have achieved massive growth over the last five years, and yet something that many organisations have considerable concerns about, whether for security or for governance reasons. For this reason, it makes sense that Salesforce is positioning Do.com as a small business tool, especially as this type of organisation tends to be more open to SaaS services.

But I wonder if and how Salesforce will eventually link these two strategies – the large enterprise against the small business – and what it intends to achieve with Do.com. Chatter was a logical extension to the Sales and Service Clouds, enabling Salesforce to broaden its applicability within its existing client base, i.e. beyond the sales and marketing and customer support departments. Do.com on the other hand is ignoring this existing customer base altogether. At the moment, that doesn’t make sense to me. I just hope there’s some clearer direction there that isn’t visible yet.

What’s your take on this? Is this a good or a bad move for Salesforce.com?

Yesterday, Salesforce.com announced that it had completed its acquisition of web conferencing vendor DimDim for $31 million in cash (net of cash acquired). The company intends to build DimDim’s feature set into its Chatter product (prioritising presence, instant messaging/chat and screensharing, it would seem), helping to build out its collaboration software credentials and, in Salesforce.com CFO Graham Smith’s words, “create more reasons for customers to live inside of Salesforce.com”.

As a relative new entrant to the enterprise collaboration market (Chatter was first announced in November 2009), Salesforce has made reasonable progress within its own customer base, but as yet has not quite managed to gain acceptance in the broader market, either from a market profile perspective or from a new customers perspective – but it is still early days. To do this it needs more than a microblogging platform, and this is what the DimDim acquisition is intended to achieve. Of course, the other thing it is missing is experience of the collaboration market, and that can only come with time. While it is acquiring good engineers with DimDim (DimDim has around 75 people in total, based in India and Massachusetts), the startup has not had a great deal of experience of enterprise collaboration on any kind of scale, so is unlikely to bring much value from this perspective.

Not surprisingly, given its platform approach to applications, Salesforce.com is not continuing to sell DimDim as a standalone service, and so DimDim’s existing 6 million users will need to look elsewhere. The service will operate until 15th March, after which it will be switched off – including access to audio recordings, so customers are advised to download any materials before that time. There is also a question as to what this means for DimDim’s recent partnership with Novell – Novell’s latest version of its Conferencing product (which was only released in May 2010) replaced its previous core with an OEM’d version of DimDim Pro. It is possible that Salesforce.com will continue to honour this partnership in the short term, but in the long term Novell will need to come up with an alternative partnership, or rebuild its own technology using what it’s learnt from DimDim. Either way, I can’t help but think that Novell should have just bought DimDim in the first place instead of partnering – although given its own acquisition predicament, presumably this wasn’t an option.

Overall, the acquisition makes sense for Salesforce.com in the context of its longterm strategy for collaboration and Chatter, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it make other small acquisitions in the collaboration space over the next 12 months or so to further flesh out the platform. Yes it was late to market with Chatter, but you can’t question that the company has the resources to catch up fast.

Collaboration advisory service customers can read our Vendor Insight report Salesforce.com spreads its wings with Chatter here.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

Yesterday Salesforce.com’s customer, partner and media event, Cloudforce 2010, took place in London, drawing an impressive 3,000 or so attendees – all the more impressive given that the company changed the date only a week in advance in order to avoid clashing with Tuesday’s London Tube strike.

The event itself was the first since the company released its Twitter-like collaboration service, Salesforce Chatter, in June, and not surprisingly Chatter played a central role in CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote, as well as other press and analyst sessions during the day. I have already written about the capabilities and positioning of Chatter as well as the opportunities it offers to customers and partners (see my Vendor Insight report – Salesforce.com spreads its wings with Chatter), but what I found particularly interesting during the event was the way that Chatter has now wound itself around all aspects of Salesforce.com’s marketing and positioning, with customer stories all referencing their take on (and use of) Chatter.

One of Chatter’s major differentiators over other collaboration software competitors is its combining of people’s own status updates and comment threads with notifications from Salesforce.com applications and other apps hosted on the Force.com platform. And this seems to be where most of the company’s partners see the opportunity with Chatter – leveraging Chatter as an interactive notification system, enabling collaboration to take place in the context of an application activity or event.

Another effective message which is being presented is the embedding of the Chatter capabilities as part of an existing process – for example the process of escalating an opportunity risk which automatically adds managers to the Chatter group focused on that opportunity so that they are notified and can provide input. The advantage of such examples is that it helps organisations to understand how the technology can be of value in a practical sense – something which is often lacking in social software marketing propositions.

With the product only released two months ago, I had few expectations of hearing about new capabilities or the product roadmap, however today’s event was accompanied by the announcement of new mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms. There were also a few tasters about the next version of Chatter, which is due for release in October, and which will include some new analytics capabilities as well as more practical support for customers about how to go about supporting the roll out of the Chatter technology.

It is of course still early days for Chatter, with Salesforce’s communication placing heavy emphasis on selling the strengths of the new offering, while customers are still learning about how best to use it. But even taking that into account, it is clear that Salesforce.com sees Chatter as more than a new product – it represents a new direction for the company, and brings a whole host of opportunities going forward.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

This is the third in our Software Delivery InFocus series of podcast episodes, starring Bola Rotibi – the Principal Analyst of MWD’s Software Delivery competency area. In this episode, she discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with using cloud-based software development services. Bola’s guest is Debbie Ashton, Product Director for CODA – a provider of both on-premise and SaaS-hosted financial management applications.

Although there is a lot of hype surrounding the concept of "cloud computing", there also appears to be real value to be gained in some usage scenarios. The obvious financial benefit of renting software service (being able to remove up-front capital expenditure and instead account for software as an operating expense) is coupled with the scalability that’s possible (you can pay as you go, and pay as you grow) and together it looks like cloud-based offerings will be especially attractive in the tougher economic climate that nearly all of us look likely to be experiencing for quite a while. Many organisations today are tempted to think only of the quick advantages of Cloud – partly as a result of the hype coming from the vendor community. However, whilst the potential and advantages are well documented and clear for people to see, the disadvantages or the challenges of use are not. In this podcast we look specifically at the challenges of developing applications for delivery from cloud-based software platforms. What practices if any should organisations take on board in developing applications and solutions using cloud-based development services? What processes and methods should organisations be putting into practice to get the most out of cloud development services?

CODA developed its SaaS-based offering, CODA2go, on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform – and in this podcast episode we hear what Debbie and her team learned about developing in the cloud along the way. Thanks to Debbie for some great insights. You can download the audio here or alternatively you can subscribe to the podcast feed to make sure you catch this and all future podcasts!

As with all the episodes in this podcast series, we’ve also published a companion report which summarises the discussion and "key takeaways". You can find it here, and it’s free to download for all MWD’s Guest Pass research subscribers (joining is free).

I thought that those of you who aren’t recipients of our monthly newsletter might be interested in this commentary (penned by the other Neil) dissecting some of the problems with the definition (or lack thereof) of software-as-a-service.

Over the past few days we’ve been having an interesting debate here at MWD, in conjunction with the analysts at our close partner Freeform Dynamics. The question came from Dale Vile at Freeform: what’s a good definition of software-as-a-service (SaaS)? The reason for asking the question was that SaaS is a hot topic, and it’s something that’s considered as a major growth opportunity for a lot of technology suppliers; but although there are a fair few forecasts of growth in demand, it’s difficult to get a clear idea of what’s actually included in these forecasts. Of course, if there isn’t a consistent view of what does and doesn’t actually constitute SaaS then that’s not really helping anyone. The approach we took to try and provide that consistent view was to look at a long list of things (ranging from Google Search, Google Maps and hosted wikis to Skype’s VOIP and messaging services, hosted voice PBXs, online travel agency services and remote backup services), and say whether we thought they “counted” as SaaS offerings.

What came to the fore very quickly was that there was no crisp set of attributes that we could agree characterised SaaS offerings. SaaS isn’t defined (as some would tell you) by a particular type of distribution or access technology, a particular technology architecture, or a particular approach to charging for usage.

Yes, SaaS offerings do commonly exhibit particular choices in these areas (use of the web for distribution and access; a “multi-tenant” architecture to efficiently separate the data and customisations of each customer from those of others; and some kind of subscription license). But crucially, these choices aren’t unique to what most people would call SaaS offerings. Google’s services, and countless millions of other online dynamic websites, have made those same technology choices for distribution and access – and they’re commonly lumped into that whole other can of slippery worms, “Web 2.0″. Countless online portals (some hosted within organisations, others available to the public) allow users to personalise their experiences and use a multi-tenant architecture to store personalisation data efficiently and effectively. Lastly, all sorts of information- or IT-based capabilities are delivered on a subscription basis (not least, mainframe capacity, and analyst research ;-).

So what is it that marks something out as SaaS (or not)? The only answer that seems to tick all the boxes is that SaaS offerings are those which deliver online, hosted alternatives to things that we have historically experienced through the in-house purchase (or development) and deployment of software systems.

Let’s take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as an example. Historically, CRM capabilities were provided by software that was installed on premise, was managed on premise, supported one organisation, and was paid for through a perpetual license. When Salesforce.com delivers those CRM capabilities from a remote installation, manages them on behalf of multiple organisations, and is paid to do so on the basis of a monthly subscription, it needs a different name: that’s “Software-as-a-Service”. Following that example, remote backup/restore services, online word processing applications like Google Docs, the Zoho suite and (now Adobe’s) Buzzword, and SAP’s BusinessByDesign (formerly A1S) all count as SaaS offerings. Google Search and Facebook don’t, because they’re not delivering capabilities that you would ever have associated with on-premise, perpetually licensed software.

This helps us clarify SaaS’ place in the IT industry, but we think it’s a problematic conclusion, for three reasons. Firstly, most people use the label without really understanding how context-dependent it is (what you think of as SaaS is primarily defined by your own experience); secondly, if we continue down this road, there can never really be a consistent definition of SaaS that will work for everyone; and thirdly, this is a very IT industry- and supplier-centric way of looking at the world that is only likely to alienate or confuse a very important community – “users” (the people who pay all our salaries).

Perhaps we need to call time on SaaS, and think of some clearer terms and definitions that can really help IT organisations and IT buyers work out how everything fits together. At the very least, as an industry we need to be honest about SaaS – and explain that it’s an industry-driven marketing and positioning term that’s primarily about separating “funky new stuff” from “boring old stuff”.

Back at the beginning of March I asked “has Microsoft got BPM?“. At that time I hadn’t had the opportunity to get a briefing from Microsoft on its recent BPM moves, but now I have.

So – has Microsoft got BPM? Yes and no.

Microsoft is not about to become a fully-fledged BPM solution provider. Rather, Microsoft is attempting to do to BPM what it attempts to do in all the areas of enterprise software it’s played in (think DBMSs, development tools, middleware, portals, etc etc) – commoditise the core technology and make it part of an integrated software platform that’s digestible by mainstream medium-to-large enterprises. Sun wasn’t the first company to realise that “volume drives value” – it’s taken a leaf out of Microsoft’s book.

So a big part of the focus is on providing the technology foundation for BPM. Here Microsoft has a couple of formidable weapons:

1. Office. Office is the defacto productivity suite in enterprises – and with Office 2007, is becoming the front end infrastructure for BPM scenarios in Microsoft’s world, as well as a suite of apps. It’s an environment very familiar to business people, so if those people are looking to get a BPM initiative started, Microsoft’s proposition could look pretty attractive. [If you don't believe us about Office, see this research from our partner Freeform Dynamics.]
2. Workflow Foundation. This is a core component of .NET 3.0 (the native programming model for Longhorn Server and Vista). It provides embeddable workflow execution services for both highly structured business process automation scenarios and less structured, collaborative scenarios. It’s becoming the foundation of both BizTalk Server 2006 (which will drive structured process automation scenarios) and Sharepoint 2007 (which is more suited to unstructured, collaboration-focused processess). Workflow Foundation really is neat.

The big caveat, of course, is that all these weapons only really come into play if and when organisations buy into the current tranche of product releases – Office 2007, BizTalk 2006, Visual Studio “Orcas” and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and .NET 3.0.

Although all these pieces are either released or coming very soon, where customers have a significant investment in Microsoft in these kinds of areas, it’s far from certain that they will upgrade or migrate quickly. Microsoft’s success in engineering an integrated platform of software infrastructure is also a weakness, in other words – people who buy into it tend to have a lot of capabilities riding on it. That drives caution and risk aversion.

Microsoft’s BPM foundation is mainly focused on the development and deployment of processes, and although BizTalk 2006 has some BAM capabilities (through integration with SQLServer OLAP and BI functionality) Microsoft isn’t focusing primarily on providing tools for modelling and simulating, analysing or optimising processes. It’s developed a coterie of “Business Process Alliance” partners to fill in the gaps, and also to help it accelerate demand for the new versions of its key BPM foundation components. When it comes to Workflow Foundation in particular, the huge Microsoft-focused packaged application vendor (ISV) community which so effectively drove adoption of SQLServer will also be a key element of Microsoft’s strategy.

So on paper Microsoft has a good BPM story – if you’re prepared to put a lot of skin in Microsoft’s game and if you’re prepared to upgrade to the latest Microsoft infrastructure. The company isn’t yet pushing the base technologies aggressively and directly to customers, but it is priming its partners and channels and these will drive uptake.

Another interesting angle to the technology piece of this story is the recently announced BizTalk Services offering – a set of integration capabilities “in the cloud” which offer a hosted complement to on-premise BizTalk integration implementations. These services are designed to, in theory (it’s early days), make the creation of highly federated, distributed service and process networks much more simple to develop and operate. It’s a fascinating development that has some parallels with what Salesforce has been doing with the Salesforce Platform Edition, and (a little less so) with what BT is attempting to do with BT Integrate.

One last small thing though. If it’s serious about BPM, at some point Microsoft’s going to have to sort out the difference between this BPM and this BPM…