We at Devunity enjoy researching new technologies, on one of my recent small researches i’ve been digging into the Cloud services. There has been alot of buzz going around the Cloud like services (PaaS) , platform as a service you might call it. Very interesting concept that actually works.

Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US, said: “The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away but there is a transition taking place.”

Chandra laid out his case for why Google stands to gain more business customers in the coming years. Foremost is Google’s strength in the consumer market, which he said will eventually translate into a stronghold in business computing.

He said: “The cloud has arrived. It’s not a question of when but how fast it will arrive. Google runs itself off of Google apps.” Is it true? did all of the hosting companies are starting to loose grip of their customers? Why host your software on a static none agile server with limitations, Pay a monthly fee for something you are not actually using.

The concept of your software being served alive when a user needs it is a very interesting concept.

Alot of Facebook applications for example because of the low cost of building one and the users you can have for your application, alot of developers host their facebook applications on the amazon cloud inorder to offer a response to 5 - 5million users that will want to use your application. The fact that you cannot predict the popularity of your application comes in conjunction with buying a server? its like buying a plane togo to the office just in case you will need to fly to the office in some cases. The pay as you go model is proving more and more as the next business model for Internet companies in this day and age.

Another trend, he said, is the rise of the “power collaborator” within companies. “In the enterprise, things are still built for the power user. Software is built by experts for experts. Increasingly, people work in teams. We believe that you need to do a complete rethink to accommodate this new generation of employees. It shouldn’t matter what OS people use, or in what geography they’re located. Software is based on open standards. This is the vision of cloud computing and why we think this is the vision for the next generation of enterprise computing.”

Do enterprises use open source software? from my experience not a whole lot even like using mysql. CTO’s tend to want parents for a certain piece of software and a 1800 number to call to when something fails. That’s one of the major problems with open source. Not to mention using online services to manage and collaborate online. The whole privacy issue emerges there. what sane company will want to publish their bug tracking information online? Probably none, just because of ignorance. In a study i’ve made for a sister product we had called betabug.com, More then 95% of all bugs published on internal bug tracking software are formulated from 5 lines describing the bug and 0 patent infringement secrets and company confidential information.

According to the Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, “by 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms”.

The report also predicts a “stealth” impact for the technology in embedded form: “Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.” IT managers who simply want to cut costs will look to SaaS rather than open source, says the Gartner report. “More technically adventurous IT projects will often prefer the direct use of open source and on-premises software development, but the mainstream IT organisation looking to reduce the IT cost burden will tend to choose SaaS where it is available.”

If we go into the hard facts, Salesforce CEO got it right, in the recent year salesforce.com grew more then 60% in income thanks to their force.com platform.
“Our fourth quarter and full-year results show that businesses are selecting the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service and cloud computing over failed client-server alternatives,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.

“There’s only one way to describe both the consolidation of the industry and the growing number of companies choosing innovation, not infrastructure: The End of Software.”Revenue: Total Q4 revenue was $216.9 million, an increase of 50% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-over-quarterbasis. Subscription and support revenues were $196.5 million, an increase of 49% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 11% on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Professional services and other revenues were $20.4 million, an increase of 68% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 24% on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

Marc Benioff claims that software is dead. I think so too. Whats the point in installing a piece of software that sits static on your drive, acts as the same as online service but lacks in agility?

http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024647,39244956,00.htm?r=1

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/4904