Posted on April 27, 2013, by Goran Čandrlić | 5 minute read
Joel York, a cloud blogger at CloudAve, once again ponders upon Software as a Service (SaaS) model, or online software, hosted remotely and rented if and when needed. "Don't ask what is SaaS," he is persistent, "ask why SaaS! Understanding “What is SaaS?” may help you explain your business to the analysts, but understanding “Why SaaS?” will ensure you leverage the SaaS business model for all its worth, today and tomorrow."
York sees using SaaS as essential for businesses to sustain competitive advantage, and using both visuals and some statistics, he revisits the SaaS business model basics.
He inspects the model in terms of:
"The cloud, social and mobile have not displaced SaaS. The cloud has expanded the opportunity for SaaS competitive advantage through economies-of-scale. Cloud computing enables entirely new technical architectures that deliver as much or more savings as multi-tenant databases. In turn, social and mobile have expanded the opportunity for SaaS competitive advantage through network effects by creating that many more opportunities for customers to interact with other customers," York claims.
Read the whole article and find the visuals at Cloud Ave.
A survey was conducted by Rightscale in the first quarter of 2013, and it included 625 respondents from development, IT and business roles across a wide range of company sizes and industries, including financial services, media and publishing, education, digital agencies, and software companies, while it categorized respondents into 4 different cloud maturity levels:
The remaining 8% of respondents were not planning to use the cloud.
Here are some of the survey results: "30% of Cloud Beginners reported that they were gaining faster access to infrastructure, while 87% of Cloud Focused respondents realized that same benefit. In addition, respondents reported that challenges such as security, governance, and compliance declined as cloud maturity increased. For example, security is reported as a significant challenge by 38% of Cloud Beginners, but only by 18% of the experienced, Cloud Focused, respondents."
Image 1 - Enterprises want multi-cloud/hybrid cloud, Image Source: Rightscale
"In addition," the report goes on, "larger organizations are choosing multi-cloud (77%) with the majority of those (47%) choosing hybrid cloud strategies. Enterprises with hybrid cloud strategies are making progress toward their goals, with 61% of those organizations already running apps in public cloud, 38% in private cloud and 29% in hybrid cloud environment."
Find the full report from Rightscale here.
Rightscale is a cloud management company that supports 15 public and private clouds, which include AWS, Rackspace Open Cloud, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, HP, SoftLayer, Logicworks, IDCF and Datapipe as well as private clouds based on OpenStack and CloudStack.
"It has become clear that, as Linux once did, OpenStack now stands at the center of development activity for infrastructure software," says Eric Knorr at InfoWorld, and adds, "last week the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, was the place to be in tech. The idea of creating a baseline open source platform for both public and private clouds has gathered huge momentum, attracting all manner of vendors, customers, developers, and hangers-on."
Knorr sums up some main speeches held at the summit, he mentions Jonathan Bryce, OS executive director, Jim Curry, OS co-founder and senior vice-president at Rackspace, Angel Diaz, IBM's vice president of software standards, and more. "Many of the Summit's sessions were devoted to SDN, a key component of cloud infrastructure that will take years to mature," he explains.
Moreover, some major announcements included the launch of RDO (Red Hat Distribution OpenStack), HP's integration of OpenStack into its private cloud solution, Project Savanna, a deployment platform for Hadoop, the latest Grizzly version of OpenStack…
Read the full report from InfoWorld.
Also here is more about SDN, software-defined networking from InfoWorld.
David Linthicum, one of the top 10 enterprise technologists in the world, a thought leader in the world of cloud computing, an SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, curator for cloud and mobile at GigaOm Pro, author of over 13 books on computing, and a cloud blogger at Info World, will hold a webinar on Thursday, May 2, bringing an overview of hybrid cloud computing.
According to the official announcement, the webinar will explore 4 emerging approaches to Hybrid Cloud Computing:
"Most enterprises are just getting started with cloud computing and building a hybrid cloud is fairly complex and sophisticated work," the organizers of the webinar explain. David Linthicum will thus inspect best practices and hybrid cloud architectures that are enterprise proven.
Drew Hendricks, tech writer at the Huffington Post, presents 5 reasons why cloud computing is booming, or how it is experiencing serious growth.
In a nutshell, Hendricks claims;
"However, some people are a little concerned about giving up hard copies and going completely virtual. Big change is always difficult to deal with. However, getting on this bandwagon is a great idea that can save money and time (assuming the cloud server chosen has a solid reputation)," Hendricks concludes.
Read the full article here.
