PaaS Marketing

I recently had the pleasure of talking to some folks very involved in IBM Bluemix and Pivotal Cloud Foundry field sales teams and although they are similar technologies there was a difference in how they were going to market. I first thought this was just two individuals with different styles but then I looked at the home pages and they do seen to be targeting different audiences. 

Check it out.....

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Pivotal seems to be speaking to operations staff and developers.

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IBM appears to be very developer focused.

I’m not saying either approach is good or bad it’s just interesting to see the different approaches to promoting the platforms. It will allow be fascinating to see how these next generation platforms will evolve over the next few years.

Salesforce Chatter (a business toy.)

After being forced to use Chatter as an email replacement for 9 months I find myself surprised to be happy to be using Lotus Notes again.  Notes is not perfect (far from it) but at least you can sort and search messages allowing it to function as a decent personal knowledge management system.

Chatter is terrible when trying to find old messages. Social networks and software that provide personal message feeds add value in flattening an organization and have a purpose but they are not a replacement for email, well at least Chatter isn't.

Much like the children's Fisher-Price Chatter Toy Phone you should not attempt to use Salesforce Chatter as a serious business communications tool.

Live Tiles, Dead on Arrival (Updated with Lumia 900 Info)

There were some big surprises in the most recent smart phone market share report from the NPD Group. As seen below Android market share dropped significantly but still held onto it's lead while Apple surged.

Many have already been commenting on Apple's bounce back with the iPhone 4S and RIM's race to ZERO market share but what I found most surprising is Microsoft's combined share of the smart phone market is still dropping. How can this be happening?

Windows Phone 7 with Live Tiles was hailed as an innovative entry in the smart phone market. Microsoft's follow-on release of Windows Phone 7.5 ("Mango") was a great step forward in functionality and the number of apps supporting the platform is growing and from what I can tell the quality of the apps is good.

The idea of Live Tiles,  a phone you can glance at and get a good view of your day is great and most that review the OS tend to rave about Live Tiles but it's going nowhere in the marketplace. If the launch of the Lumia phone is not a success I imagine Steve Ballmer is going to lose a gasket and heads will begin to roll in the mobile division of Microsoft.

I think there are two main reasons why Windows Phone is not catching on. The first is that it's very difficult to go anywhere when you are the fifth horse in a race and that is where Microsoft was when they started over with Windows Phone 7. WebOS was fourth at the time and we know how that ended.

So Microsoft is #4 now with RIM perhaps falling below Microsoft late this year when they to try and reboot their phone platform. Microsoft's only chance might be to try and win the battle for #3 just to stay in the game and hope to get some wind in their sails with the launch of Windows 8 and the Metro UI which has a design language very similar to Live Tiles.

Even though it's tough to come from behind the mobile space is one where the pecking order can change quickly because early adopters upgrade their phones ever 12-24 months. This is why I'm so surprised Microsoft's share is dropping, it seems like early adopters are not interested in purchasing Windows Phones. So why has the concept of Live Tiles not helped Microsoft Windows Phone grow market share?

I think it's as simple as this. Although Live Tiles is a feature that I think the average smart phone user would like if it suddenly appeared in their iPhones it is not something that anybody other then technical early adopters are really aware of at the moment.

These techies are already using Android and are happy with the Widget support provided by that platform. It's a bit tacked on compared to Live Tiles but it gets the job done and offer lots of configuration options. If Apple adds Widget support in iOS 6 it could be game over for Live Tiles which would be too bad because it really is a great concept and is very well implemented.

Update: I just learned that the Nokia Lumia 900 is going to have a 800x480 screen. That is just pathetic and I can't see how any early adopter will want to purchase a phone with such a large but low resolution screen.

Unlocking the Java Platform

At Oracle Open World 2011 last October Oracle's CEO to took a few shots at Heroku, (http://www.heroku.com) a fascinating cloud platform for deploying applications written in many development languages. Salesforce.com recently purchased Heroku and I have to say it is a very powerful and elegant platform. Although it supports many languages I will focus on Java for today.

Oracle was throwing FUD at Heroku and it made a few points that I feel were unfair, in particular one that stated that since Heroku is not based on J2EE standards that using Heroku would lock a customer in. Now let me make one thing clear, Oracle is correct on one point, Heroku is not based on J2EE. That's right, no J2EE support and that can be a *good* thing.

Heroku is in alignment with recent shifts in the Java community away from J2EE application servers toward frameworks that are based on Java the language and run-time platforms based on POJOs (plain old Java objects.) Oracle ignored this point and was talking like it was 1998, when the only way to scale Java was with an application server or framework that had an API that needed to be coded to.

Oracle was saying that because Heroku was not based on J2EE anybody that used it would be "locked-in." This makes absolutely no sense, Heroku was designed to make the transition from developer workstations to the production platform as seamless as possible. You don't need to buy a developer version of Heroku to work with because you are working with the Java Language and common open source libraries. This makes it much easier to move a Java app off Heroku then to move a J2EE app from Fusion to WebSphere or to remove the J2EE parts from a Fusion application if your organization wants to move away from J2EE.

The approach Heroku takes reduces lock-in by only requiring the developer to use Java, not the J2EE spec and the Fusion or WebSphere extensions that come with it.

That being said if you are using full J2EE and you want to use a container you can bring your embedded one with you to Heroku.  In this way your development platform matches your production Heroku environment. Heroku looks after scaling (Java) processes, be they web based (like a JSP/Servlet), worker based (like an EJB or POJO containing business logic), or time based (scheduled tasks).

The debate over the Heroku PaaS compared to a full J2EE application server would take more words then one blog post can contain but the point I wanted to clarify is that Heroku reduces vendor lock-in. If your development organization, like most, has already moved to Java based open source frameworks and uses a J2EE application server to simply scale Servlets, JSPs and POJOs Heroku is something you might want to take a serious look at.

Salesforce Overview

Many of my professional contacts have been asking me lately about what Salesforce all about. Here is a set of resources that show some of the key aspects of salesforce.com, I hope you find them useful if you are curious about the future of cloud computing.

Cloud Computing Overview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms

Social Enterprise Vision

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETRt7eDDpno

The Sales Cloud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-fDOigVuY

Social Success in the Contact Centre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVw0yFzyy2k

Social Monitoring with Radian6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH1dcFh_-I4

Overview of Heroku (a Multi-Language PaaS)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqAXmratgzE

Heroku and Java
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqLkjJvEMko

Heroku Platform Basics
http://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/platform-basics

Developerforce Workbooks
http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Force.com_workbook

Multitenant Security in the Cloud

I was confused by Oracle CEO Larry Elison's comments during the Oracle Public Cloud keynote at OpenWorld 2011 which refered to salesforce.com's multitenant cloud as old technology and then referred to virtualization technology as newer, strongly implying that it is more advanced and a better solution.

The salesforce.com platform has had multitenancy for years, but that is not a weakness. Many cloud platforms are still trying to add the capability to seamlessly host multiple applications securely. So good on Oracle to try and use salesforce.com's strength as a weakness, however it has to be pointed out that saying the sky is green does not make it true.

As to ranking technology by age and saying that the oldest concept loses, I'll just bring up virtualization on mainframes and leave it at that.

Oracle's implication that a platform with multitenancy built-in is inferior to a design based on multiple virtualized single tenant platforms is just not true. All modern systems have, or at least should have, security implemented at some level of the technology stack and there are pros and cons of having the security higher up in the application platform, near the middle in the OS or hypervisor or at the bottom near the sectors of the storage device. All these options can be made secure if security was considered when the design was created.

Security was the highest design priority for salesforce.com. It is implemented at multiple layers in its platform (from individual database records to fields in the user interface) because the platform was designed with multitenancy in mind from the start.

In contrast designs based on virtualized operating systems running single tenant platforms can certainly be made secure if you take care to ensure every tenant gets a virtualized copy of every layer of your stack but unless multitenant security is built into the application development platform, like it is with salesforce.com, I would consider it a less secure architecture.

To summarize I feel that having security build into an application platform is a key requirement for a cloud platform whether or not the platform is hosted on virtualized operating systems, storage and networks.

Cheers,

Mark

Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture Version 1.0

When I first saw a link to the "Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture Version 1.0" document from OASIS I must admit I thought to myself that this must be some kind of mistake and this was an old link coming back from the dead, however this is a recent release.

Although such a weighty document is tough to review on a smart phone I was impressed with the overall scope, quality and detail included.

For example taking the concept of Roles in Social Structures and tying that to service permissions and obligations (Section 3.1) was when the document started to hook me personally and I found it got more engaging as I continued reviewing it. I'm looking forward to getting on a PC and giving this a more thorough read.

If you are interested in Reference Architectures, SOA or otherwise, I suggest you take a a look.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/soa-ra/v1.0/csprd02/soa-ra-v1.0-csprd02.html