This Week along with other colleagues from NaviSite, I attended the SIIA (Software and Industry Association) OnDemand SaaS and All About the Cloud (sponsored by OpSource) event in San Francisco.
Many of the leading SaaS (Software as a Service) experts, thought leaders and companies were in attendance and happy to share updates on the state of SaaS. Also in attendance were some of the great new vendors and established companies that have products and services targeted specifically to ISVs, SaaS companies and Cloud Services providers.
There were several sessions and keynotes delivered by the great software platforms and stack companies, among them were IBM’s WebSphere, Microsoft’s .NET, Silverlight and SharePoint platforms, Oracle and others. Summarizing those presentations with one blog post is a bit of a disservice – but it’s safe to say that the hundreds of thousands of applications that are deployed on these platforms on-premise are candidates to move to the cloud. This transition puts both the application and the foundation that it’s built on under a microscope – and IBM, Microsoft and Oracle all want to ensure that hosting providers enable their customers to have a safe and reliable place for the application to land. According to surveys shared at the event approximately 50% of new enterprise applications built on these stacks will be on the cloud in within the next two years.
There were also several great panels that created a lively interchange of ideas. Among them was the Public Clouds panel moderated by Jeff Kaplan form THINKstrategies. Some of the key takeaways from this panel included a key message hosting providers should emphasize when discussing security concerns: “As third parties, we have far less interest in the content of the data stored on our infrastructure than an on-premise IT team may have. Add this to the fact that hosting providers have layers of security and expertise and experience gained from threats and mitigation is by now, widely known and accepted. The panel also repeatedly brought up the fact that on-premise private clouds do not scale and cannot take advantage of the economies of scale that enterprise-class hosting providers are able to achieve.
In another panel on Private Clouds, moderated by Phil Wainewrigt of Procullux Ventures, the consensus seemed to be that in 5 years time the words private and public will be like Internet and intranet. The phrase intranet is no longer a common term and we are more likely to see the phrase hybrid clouds – a combination of cloud and on-premise deployments.
The event – a marriage of “the Cloud” and “SaaS” highlights in my mind what the cloud transition is all about: “application services in the cloud”. Coming from the hosting perspective – the infrastructure side of things – this may seem like a de-emphasis of the foundational services we provide as IaaS. However in the end, it’s really all about the applications. This is why our customers come to us - we host and manage their applications and infrastructure. Without the applications it’s just compute and storage.
To learn more about the event search Twitter for the hashtag #AATC
About William Toll
William Toll, VP, Marketing at Yottaa, Inc., has held Marketing and Product Management positions in the Web hosting and Internet infrastructure industry since the late 1990s. Currently William is driving the marketing strategy and implementation for Yottaa, Inc. Yottaa, The Web Performance Company, provides innovative cloud services enabling its customers to assess, benchmark, monitor and optimize their websites and Web applications for a better user experience and improved ROI. Most recently William was at the leading managed hosting and cloud services provider, NaviSite. At NaviSite, William was responsible for developing and marketing the company's hosted product lines, including managed cloud services, managed hosting, managed business applications and shared and dedicated hosting for SMBs. In past positions at companies such as Affinity Internet, Inc., Intermedia.NET, and NTT/VERIO, William was the driving force in launching and enhancing successful SMB focused services including: Shared Hosting services, Microsoft Exchange and hosting add-on services like Online Marketing and Web Design. William received a BA in Marketing from New England College. William Toll can be found on Twitter: @utollwi
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