Monetizing Social Networks Will Change Everything, Says Bill Coleman

February 20, 2009

Learning to monetize the social web will change commerce, as we know it.

Call it the pull economy, says Bill Coleman

Call it the "pull" economy, says Bill Coleman

But we might not figure out how for a decade or more.

This according to Bill Coleman, CEO of cloud-computing company Cassatt and founder of BEA Systems, which Oracle purchased last year.

Computing is becoming a utility, Coleman said this week at the Churchill Club. Computers and software will sit in the cloud, and organizations will pay for what they need like they do other commodities.

It may take 20 years to reach this point, Coleman said.

On top of the computing platform will sit the social network, a person’s dashboard to the world, he added.  Making money from these social networks will occur when people figure out how to let people invite companies into their conversations.

Call it the “pull” economy, Coleman said. And prepare for it to take decades to evolve.

But when it does, it will change everything, he said.

1 Comment | computers, news, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

Downturn Accelerating Move To Cloud Computing

February 12, 2009

The global slowdown is turning businesses to cloud computing at an accelerating pace.

“We thought the uptake of cloud by enterprises was going to be slow,” said Savvis managing director Bill Fathers of last year’s outlook for the market. “I think we were wrong.”

Companies desperate to save money are turning to outsourcing, says Bill Fathers

Companies desperate to save money are turning to outsourcing, says Bill Fathers

Fathers, who is also a senior vice president of the outsourcing firm, says there is pent up demand for both cloud computing and outsourcing in general from businesses desperate to save money. That is because hosting a server or a company application at an outside data center can often be cheaper.

Renting space on a server in someone’s hosted “cloud-computing” data center can cost between $30 and $50 a month, he said. That’s a significant reduction from even hosting a company-owned server in that same data center – an outsourcing procedure called co-location. Co-location can cost $1,000 a month, which is still often less expensive than keeping the same server in house.

That’s because the cost of the data center is shared among a group of customers. And with a cloud-based server, the server itself is shared among customers, spreading its costs out as well.

The downturn has shifted the market place, Fathers said. Companies are abandoning in-house information-technology projects to push ahead on outsourcing.

Fathers said he expects cloud services to make up about 15 percent of the outsourcing market by the end of this year compared with 5 percent at the end of 2008.

1 Comment | computers, news, software | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

Cloud Computing Startup RightScale Raises $13 In VC Money

December 8, 2008

RightScale, Inc. said Monday it has secured $13 million in second round funding from venture capitalists Index Ventures and current investor Benchmark Capital.

The Santa Barbara company also announced that Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer joined the company’s board.

The money will go toward advancing the development of RightScale’s cloud-computing management product and allow it to expand into new markets.

The company uses “server templates” to let customers manage and scale multi-cloud applications.

6 Comments | news, software, startups, venture capital | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

2009, The Year of the Cloud: When Enterprise IT Becomes A Cloud-Based Service

November 20, 2008

Jake Sorofman is vice president marketing at cloud computing start-up rPath

Jake Sorofman is vice president marketing at cloud computing start-up rPath

Jake Sorofman, the vice president of marketing at cloud computing company rPath, shared with us his predictions related to the worlds of virtualization and cloud computing for 200.

Offered in no particular order:

  1. The Hypervisor goes vertical, mainstream
  2. The management of enterprise application virtualization emerges
  3. Virtual machine sprawl is the new Hell
  4. Rogue “enterprise” applications leak to “public” clouds like Amazon EC2
  5. The CIO gets a Cloud mandate

The full explanation behind Sorofman’s predictions after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Adobe Pushes Into Cloud Computing With First Product; Sees Revenue Opportunites For New Cocomo Next Year

November 17, 2008
Adobe has balanced approach to cloud computing and services, says Kevin Lynch

Adobe has balanced approach to cloud computing and services, says Kevin Lynch

Adobe Systems launched an early version of its first cloud computing software, called Cocomo, on Monday and said additional development teams were working on more services-based offerings.

At the Adobe Max conference, the company said it saw a major shift underway in the software industry to online services and cloud computing. The Silicon Valley company expects to benefit with new revenue streams and products.

Cocomo, which was released for beta testing, is a tool developers use to create online collaboration services using communications technologies such as online chat and digital video. Adobe has started hosting collaborative conferencing services using Cocomo that are linked to sites such as Acrobat.com.

Adobe sees important business opportunities from online services and cloud computing, said CEO Shantanu Narayen. The company should be able to find new revenue in services and provide server software for companies that want cloud-style applications on campus separated from the Internet by security firewall, he said

With respect to Cocomo, a variety of revenue streams from subscriptions should appear in 2009, the company said.

“The landscape is shifting in software,” agreed Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch. With the shift still in its early days, “Adobe is taking a balanced approach” between applications in the cloud and on the client, or desktop, Lynch said at the San Francisco event. “We think that is the best architecture for applications on the Internet.”

He said there are a lot of development teams working on services inside the company and for now the teams are being set free to innovate without having them look for a common umbrella to link the services together.

Leave a Comment » | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

Is Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-service with Lipstick?

October 15, 2008
MR Rangaswami, host,

MR Rangaswami, host, Cloud Summit Executive conference

No doubt, cloud computing is the latest buzz word in Silicon Valley.

It’s been so over-hyped to a point that anything that is on-line is now beeing called a cloud computing service.

Flickr, Google, Youtube… are cloud services for the consumer. EC2 is Amazon’s cloud used essentially by startups and small and medium businesses. EMC, HP, Microsoft, Sun… are all building their own clouds!

So what is cloud computing? Is it real?

“At this event we asked ourselves, is cloud computing, software as a service (Saas) with lipstick? I think cloud and Saas have fundamental differences. For example, with cloud computing you can virtually buy compute power and storage. Saas is application-driven. Cloud is much broader than that. And I think in these tough economic times, even though cloud computing is a new buzz word, it has to deliver value not hype. And companies are going to buy into cloud computing architecture and solutions if there’s a specific business reason and value”, explained Rangaswami, the host of the Cloud Summit Executive conference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Startups: Use Tough Economy Excuse To Layoff “B” Staff; Tighten Belt and Raise Cash… If You Can!

October 15, 2008
Prashant Shah, the managing director, Hummer Windblad Ventures

Prashant Shah, managing director at Hummer Windblad Ventures

Souring tech economy, layoffs, startups closing…Deja vu, circa 2001?

Well, not exactly, according to Prashant Shah, the managing director at venture capital firm, Hummer Windblad Ventures speaking yesterday at the Cloud Summit Executive conference in Mountain View, Calif.

“It’s not as bad for Silicon Valley as 2001 in a sense that we’re not ground zero for what’s happening. That’s a fundamental difference. So what that really means, is that a lot of the advices that venture firms are giving to their portfolio companies is more predicated on the basis that the effects that what’s happening now in Wall Street will reach out here in many different ways. But we expect to reach out at some point”, said Shah.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | news, software | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Trend Micro Bets Company Future on Cloud Computing Offering

October 14, 2008

John Maddison, vice president of core technology solutions, Trend Micro

Speaking at the Cloud Summit Executive conference in Mountain View, Calif., John Maddison, vice president of core technology solutions for Trend Micro, was so bullish about the prospect of cloud computing that he’s willing to bet the future of the anti-virus company on it!

“Our vision is that most of the processing and analysis of computer threats will happen in the cloud and that endpoint clients [be it PCs, mobile...] will ping the service to check on potential malware or threats”, explained Maddison.

Trend’s cloud offering dubbed the “Smart Protection Network” is currently in beta testing and requires to download on a computer a very light weight software client that will then in turn call the company’s on-line service every time there’s a change on the computer.

“This client is one-tenth the size of a traditional antivirus software. Both the antivirus engine and the signatures are on-line versus running locally on the computer”, adds the Trend Micro executive.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

[SDForum] Cloud Computing Trumpets Customer Choice, But Customers Might Disagree

October 1, 2008
Heads In The Clouds Over Lock-in

Heads In The Clouds Over Lock-in

So is it true? Do cloud-computing vendors create customer lock-in, making it hard to trade one for another?

Software on-demand companies are quick to say no. But with customers holding their feet to the fire Thursday at the SDForum Cloud Computing and Beyond, they sang a different tune.

The vendors were asked if proprietary software keep customers from freely changing companies. If a client creates an application in one software environment (Salesforce.com’s, for instance) it isn’t easy to rework the program for another’s (like Google’s).

“We definitely have work to do from an open-source perspective,” said an uneasy Trae Chancellor, vice president at Salesforce.com. One question managers debate inside Salesforce is “how do we make this less proprietary. We don’t want to lock people in.”

Google says it too is trying to figure out how to lessen lock-in. “We need to figure out what the next generation of standards will be” and adopt them, said Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager.

Vendors typically like to say traditional software developers with large software suites are the ones with real lock-in. Once a customer invests millions to install software in house, it is expensive to change.

Leave a Comment » | software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

[SDForum] Cloud Computing Vendors Fight Back Against Bad Rap, See Revolutionary Best Of Breed And Hybrid Environments

October 1, 2008
SDForum Cloud Computing And Beyond conference

SDForum Cloud Computing And Beyond conference

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took aim at cloud computing last week, calling it a fashion sure to go out of style. Just weeks earlier, Lawson Software predicted the young business would collapse in two years.

Of course, both are traditional software vendors, so you might expect the digs. But that didn’t stop software-as-a-service vendors from going on the defensive Thursday at the SDForum Cloud Computing and Beyond conference.

There is a lot of value in the cloud and the notion of delivering software as a service over the Net, said Rajen Sheth, senior product manager at Google. “There is a point in the future we might get to where everything is in the cloud.”

“Cloud computing is like a battleship,” echoed Sanjog Gad, senior vice president at SAP. “You ignore it at your peril.”

The vendors argued cloud computing is still relatively new, but is maturing and changing rapidly. At SAP, also a traditional software vendor, Gad said the company is looking at a hybrid model that “decouples the software from the hardware” and permits customers to mix hosted and on-premise applications. The company is looking at software architecture from the ground up, he said.

New models also allow customers to prospect of picking best of breed components from among vendors, said Daniel Druker, senior vice president at Intacct.

That should give traditional software vendors (with big integrated applications suites) some pause.

Leave a Comment » | software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers