THINK IT Services

Friday’s Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s (MassTLC) UnConference on “The Future of Software and the Internet” was a tremendous success because it brought together over 250 area executives and entrepreneurs for a free-wheeling set of discussions about a wide array of industry trends and opportunities.

Some of the sessions were open debates about the meaning of current trends, such as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Others were open-ended explorations about how companies and individuals can capitalize on these trends to create new business opportunities, such as “cloud-solving”. Still other sessions turned out to be useful tutorials about the realities of the marketplace, such as one I attended about the inefficiencies in today’s capital markets that are discouraging tech IPOs and reshaping the way start-ups evolve.

Dealing with the unstructured nature of an unconference can be unsettling for folks like me initially. And some sessions can border on anarchy at times. But, Friday’s event proved that the unconference format can also generate plenty of ideas, provide refreshing new perspectives from peers rather than ‘expert’ speakers, and encourage a new set of relationships.

As someone who is always looking for ways to encourage the growth and vitality of the Boston area technology industry, I was especially pleased to see Friday’s event attract a great cross-section of people and produce lots of exciting ideas.

Yesterday, Verizon Business introduced an on-demand, “cloud-based” Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution that will be an important indicator of whether telcos can succeed in the cloud.

Anyone who has followed my writings knows that my roots are in the telecom industry, having helped to launch IDC’s Communications Industry Research program in 1983 at the time of the AT&T divestiture.

I’ve watched the telecommunications giants make many failed efforts to penetrate the data center. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they tried their hand at systems integration and IT outsourcing.  In the late 1990s, they aggressively provisioned fiber optic cables and built out showcase network operations centers (NOCs) to exploit the Internet explosion and capitalize on the over-hyped demand for managed services which never fully materialized.

After the telecom industry shakeout at the beginning of this decade, the telcos bought their way into the Application Service Provider (ASP) market. Verizon acquired Digex and Totality via MCI, and AT&T picked up USinternetworking. These acquisitions have produced limited success because the telcos still couldn’t convince their prospective customers that they fully understood their data center and application support needs.

Now, the telcos are trying to redirect their assets and energies to capitalize on growing customer interest in cloud computing. AT&T announced its cloud computing capabilities, called AT&T Synaptic Hosting, in August 2008. At the time, AT&T described Synatic Hosting as a “next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses.” Last month, AT&T rolled out a Storage-as-a-Service ‘cloud’ solution.

Verizon Business’ CaaS announcement is noteworthy because the company has pulled together a number of its corporate assets to address prospective customers’ varying cloud computing preferences. In addition to its data center and application management resources from the Digex/Totality units, Verizon Business has also included its professional services teams who will provide front-end consulting and project management skills during the CaaS deployment process. It has also added the Cybertrust Security Management Program to alleviate customer concerns about security and privacy.

In addition, Verizon Business has spent more than two years architecting and implementing a ‘next-generation’ data center to support its CaaS offering powered by an assortment of leading technology providers including HP, VMware and Red Hat.

The net result is that Verizon Business has built a cloud computing engine which isn’t aimed at dislodging Amazon EC2 as a low-cost alternative. Instead, it is a more holistic set of services aimed at addressing the varying needs of a wide array of enterprise and mid-sized organizations who would prefer to rely on a service provider they know and trust.

Verizon Business must now deliver on its promises in a cost-effective fashion and hope there is a sufficient number of enterprise and mid-sized organizations who are comfortable turning to a telco to meet their cloud computing needs.

THINKstrategies announced today that Concerro has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Concerro is a provider of web-based workforce management software and services which reduces labor costs, protects revenue, and improves staff and patient satisfaction in hospitals across the U.S.

Click here to read about the business benefits Concerro’s clients have gained by utilizing its SaaS solutions.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Award program and how companies can apply for an award.

Phil Wainewright provided a very interesting analysis of Intalio’s new ‘hybrid’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing offering which echos the approach I suggested last Fall.

My original blog was inspired by the belief that technology is advancing at a fast enough rate to make it possible to offer a fully contained SaaS ‘appliance’ deployable behind the firewall to alleviate customer concerns regarding data security, service availability and/or performance.

While some of my friends at Salesforce.com said my idea was crazy, my blog post prompted many SaaS and cloud computing vendors to comment that they were already offering flexible deployment options to satisfy various customer preferences.

Of course, the key to this go-to-market strategy is the ability to lock-down the code base so that the SaaS vendor is only supporting one version of the its solution, no matter where it is is deployed.

By putting their SaaS solution into a ‘lockbox’ that can be deployed wherever the customer prefers, vendors can now substantially expand their addressable market for their ‘on-demand’ solutions.

Intalio is also offering a managed service option in which the company will administer the customer’s behind-the-firewall deployment of its solution. I published a profile of BMC’s attempts to offer these three options in 2006. BMC was unable to make this approach work because its solution was not truly multitenant and its corporate culture wasn’t properly aligned to support this go-to-market strategy.

In my view, SaaS vendors will not be alone  in offering location-independent solutions. You should expect to see the rapidly growing array of ‘cloud computing’ vendors also heading in this direction. While many users will prefer to take advantage of the online, offsite aspects of these services, a significant number of organizations–large and small–will be comforted to know that they can also deploy them on-premise to meet their specific needs or satisfy their individual preferences.

The bottomline is that offering customers various deployment choices may become a key to gaining long-term success in the SaaS and cloud computing market.