http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/office-365-and-the-future-of-cloud/7244?tag=nl.e101
Office 365 and the future of Cloud
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By Patrick Gray
January 23, 2012, 11:26 AM PST
Takeaway: Patrick Gray talks about how hosted infrastructure is now within reach of even the smallest companies, and how it will evolve.
My company is in the final stages of a migration to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud computing offering. At first brush, Office 365 is essentially hosted email and online versions of Microsoft’s Office software. However, when you delve a bit deeper into the offering, one can also purchase a subscription that includes desktop versions of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office software, at a price that amounts to less than the cost of individual licenses.
I’ve always suggested that cloud should be about more than saving a few bucks, and for us, Office 365 promises a significant “hassle” savings as it will eventually replace our on-premise server that runs Windows Small Business Server. SBS was generally worry free, save for the bimonthly “ghost in the machine” that would require a couple of days of troubleshooting, time that could have been better spent elsewhere.
I will miss a few features of having a locally administered server. File and print services are now commodities available in big box store NAS units, but SBS offered centralized user administration and access management that’s not easily replaced. This concern brings me to what most interested me from a larger industry perspective as we migrated our network: how hosted infrastructure is now within reach of even the smallest companies, and how it will evolve.
The dawn of the black box
Tools like Office 365 will serve most of basic infrastructure needs for small and medium companies; however, there are still instances when a local server proves beneficial. Network backup, centralized user and computer management, file and printer sharing spring to mind-services that can’t easily be replaced by a cloud equivalent. What would be an interesting replacement would be local hardware that’s remotely administered by a cloud provider.
A reasonable analogy is the cable box provided by your cable or satellite company. It’s essentially a “black box” from a technical perspective: you’re unconcerned about (and prohibited from) managing or maintaining the hardware, and interact with the device through a simplified interface or, in many cases, through an online portal that communicates with the box. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Microsoft, Google, or Apple shipping a “black box” that a small business plugs into their network, then configures via a simplified web portal. The box could handle file and print services, centralized user management, and even cache OS patches and virus updates, all without the care and feeding one would associate with a standard server.
Microsoft’s Small Business Server seems to have been striving toward a “network in a box” concept, but at the end of the day still requires a full-scale server and the associated maintenance. The box I’m envisioning would likely be about the size of your current cable box, and perhaps be based on solid-state drives and fanless hardware. Rather than a howling rackmount unit, it might sit quietly in a 20-person office, updating its configuration automatically based on changes to the associated cloud account. Microsoft is already making moves in this direction, although it’s still not the computing equivalent of the cable box.
Could this work for the “big boys”?
When one begins scaling to thousands of users, cloud services look less attractive from a financial perspective due to migration costs and the economies of scale that can be accommodated with thousands of users. A remotely-configured “black box” might seem like heresy to the CIO of a large company, but it’s less of a stretch than one might imagine. All manner of single-purpose devices from routers and firewalls to anti-spam “appliances” are migrating toward this model. Most separate the underlying OS and associated configuration from a vendor-provided portal that configures the device. Virtual appliances fit the same mold, and it’s not too big a stretch to envision basic network services following a similar route.
If nothing else, local devices that are centrally managed and configured from the cloud offer a level of flexibility and redundancy that would be appreciated. New branch office? Set them up on your vendor’s cloud portal, have that vendor ship them a “black box,” and moments after they plug it in their local network is up and running.
While cloud computing seems to be the latest and greatest, like most technologies it is not a tool for every problem. For many computing services, local resources still offer benefits, especially when a cloud-based management and configuration philosophy is applied. While we still may be a year or two away from a true “network in a box” product, the major players seem to be making the right moves to get us there.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Ops readiness for Cloud for enterprise
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/cloud-enterprise-applications-12-principles-of-operational-readiness/5265?tag=nl.e101
The Enterprise Cloud
Cloud enterprise applications: 12 principles of operational readiness
2
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By Nick Hardiman
January 23, 2012, 6:00 AM PST
Takeaway: Nick Hardiman lists his 12 principles of operational readiness for an enterprise application built on the public cloud.
I installed an enterprise application on my public cloud-based virtual machine. Can I hand the application over to my enterprise colleagues for operational use? If so, I can tick this job off my list, grab a coffee and move on. But how do I know if it is ready for enterprise operation? How do I measure operational readiness?
Installing an enterprise application is not like installing a desktop application. Both types of application are handy shrink-wrapped knowledge, providing a popular set of functions to help people work. The difference is an enterprise application requires a lot of non-functional work — I need to make the application work in an enterprise environment.
Here is the list of enterprise service operational principles that works for me. I measure my new enterprise application against my list, work with colleagues to fix the failures, and test again. When my application follows all the principles, it is operationally ready.
Enterprise service operational principles
These dozen statements describe how an enterprise service should be. If all these statements apply to my new enterprise service, I can happily stamp my operational approval on it.
I have provided a few examples to make these statements a little clearer, but I have not described the actions required to get there. As you can imagine, putting these principles into practice for enterprise services is complicated. It’s almost impossible to get everything right.
Many cloud innovators provide services in one or two of these areas, to ease an organization’s workload. You can pay Green Hat to provide cloud-based performance testing tools, Core Cloud Inspect to check security, and Cloudkick to monitor infrastructure. A few big players like EMC and Novell have enough tools to take all the responsibility. The bigger your wallet, the more responsibility you can avoid.
My enterprise service:
has been functionally tested. If a new business application has not yet been signed off by the guy paying the bills, I will waste my time carrying out operational tests.
has capacity. Sysadmins may want to scale up the disk space for a storage service and the bandwidth for a video chat service. They may scale down to a pocket calculator for a monitoring service.
is resilient. This is the world of High Availability: double up on single points of failure, improve code quality, and even if something does fail, make sure the service handles it gracefully.
is recoverable. If the student deletes half the files or the computer room catches fire, service can be restored.
is reliable. Customers use Internet services 24 hours a day, but an intranet may only be needed during office hours. An intranet that is down every night may still be perfectly reliable.
is scalable. What if the new service has traffic spikes or gets really popular? I may need to scale out by adding more servers. Wading through treacle is not attractive.
is monitored. The operational support people must be alerted immediately if someone breaks into the computer room, if upstream services disappear, and if a process goes berserk.
is supportable. If an architect designs an Internet bank that only runs on one server, how pleased will customers be when an operator turns off the bank to upgrade the memory?
is secure. Vulnerabilities get patched, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) watches the network, and the security team have signed on the dotted line.
has been pushed to the limit. The whole system has been thrashed, bottlenecks fixed and the system thrashed again and again. The service owner then knows how much performance can be squeezed out of her service.
has integrity. The customer support people won’t be plagued by calls from customers whose data is inconsistent, whose files have disappeared, or whose transactions were duplicated.
will operate within the SLA. The people sponsoring this service deserve to know how their investment is doing. The service builders automate the measurement and reports of the service level. Stakeholders can then help a failing service to succeed.
Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.
The Enterprise Cloud
Cloud enterprise applications: 12 principles of operational readiness
2
Comments
more +
By Nick Hardiman
January 23, 2012, 6:00 AM PST
Takeaway: Nick Hardiman lists his 12 principles of operational readiness for an enterprise application built on the public cloud.
I installed an enterprise application on my public cloud-based virtual machine. Can I hand the application over to my enterprise colleagues for operational use? If so, I can tick this job off my list, grab a coffee and move on. But how do I know if it is ready for enterprise operation? How do I measure operational readiness?
Installing an enterprise application is not like installing a desktop application. Both types of application are handy shrink-wrapped knowledge, providing a popular set of functions to help people work. The difference is an enterprise application requires a lot of non-functional work — I need to make the application work in an enterprise environment.
Here is the list of enterprise service operational principles that works for me. I measure my new enterprise application against my list, work with colleagues to fix the failures, and test again. When my application follows all the principles, it is operationally ready.
Enterprise service operational principles
These dozen statements describe how an enterprise service should be. If all these statements apply to my new enterprise service, I can happily stamp my operational approval on it.
I have provided a few examples to make these statements a little clearer, but I have not described the actions required to get there. As you can imagine, putting these principles into practice for enterprise services is complicated. It’s almost impossible to get everything right.
Many cloud innovators provide services in one or two of these areas, to ease an organization’s workload. You can pay Green Hat to provide cloud-based performance testing tools, Core Cloud Inspect to check security, and Cloudkick to monitor infrastructure. A few big players like EMC and Novell have enough tools to take all the responsibility. The bigger your wallet, the more responsibility you can avoid.
My enterprise service:
has been functionally tested. If a new business application has not yet been signed off by the guy paying the bills, I will waste my time carrying out operational tests.
has capacity. Sysadmins may want to scale up the disk space for a storage service and the bandwidth for a video chat service. They may scale down to a pocket calculator for a monitoring service.
is resilient. This is the world of High Availability: double up on single points of failure, improve code quality, and even if something does fail, make sure the service handles it gracefully.
is recoverable. If the student deletes half the files or the computer room catches fire, service can be restored.
is reliable. Customers use Internet services 24 hours a day, but an intranet may only be needed during office hours. An intranet that is down every night may still be perfectly reliable.
is scalable. What if the new service has traffic spikes or gets really popular? I may need to scale out by adding more servers. Wading through treacle is not attractive.
is monitored. The operational support people must be alerted immediately if someone breaks into the computer room, if upstream services disappear, and if a process goes berserk.
is supportable. If an architect designs an Internet bank that only runs on one server, how pleased will customers be when an operator turns off the bank to upgrade the memory?
is secure. Vulnerabilities get patched, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) watches the network, and the security team have signed on the dotted line.
has been pushed to the limit. The whole system has been thrashed, bottlenecks fixed and the system thrashed again and again. The service owner then knows how much performance can be squeezed out of her service.
has integrity. The customer support people won’t be plagued by calls from customers whose data is inconsistent, whose files have disappeared, or whose transactions were duplicated.
will operate within the SLA. The people sponsoring this service deserve to know how their investment is doing. The service builders automate the measurement and reports of the service level. Stakeholders can then help a failing service to succeed.
Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Share of platforms
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing/
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El impresionante crecimiento de iOS y Android
01/17/2012 05:29 PM
[...] quizás la tendencia se hace más chocante si la vemos en un gráfico como el que generaron en Asymco ...
Will Android be the death of PCs? | androidless.net
01/17/2012 11:35 PM
[...] and consulting services for companies interested in deploying mobile applications,” published a blog post today that might make some people’s ...
Will Android be the death of PCs? | Hi Android
01/18/2012 03:18 AM
[...] and consulting services for companies interested in deploying mobile applications,” published a blog post today that might make some people’s ...
Jasonmcdermott » The rise and fall of personal computing
01/18/2012 08:15 AM
[...] Horace brings the goods, yet again. Here he is, documenting what he calls the rise and fall of personal ...
The conditions for survival and prosperity | asymco
01/18/2012 02:43 PM
[...] Yesterday’s post described the history of personal computing platforms over the past 37 years. It showed a distinct shifting ...
Apple’s Education Event | Ken Kinard
01/18/2012 05:09 PM
[...] will leverage its disruption in the PC market to disrupt the textbook market. In partnership with a few major ...
The rise and rise of … | Koer.sk
01/18/2012 06:05 PM
[...] gegroeid sinds computers in onze woonkamers passen. Meer plaatjes en achtergronden en zo (saai) zijn er [...]
Pub Options & Tools | Butcher, Baker
01/18/2012 06:18 PM
[...] both print and all (most?) eBook formats will be supported. That said, a recent piece on “the rise and ...
Is the iPad a Personal Computer? | My Distribution Law
01/18/2012 06:35 PM
[...] entitled “The rise and fall of personal computing.” You can read the whole thing here. Here are some of ...
Android Devices Projected To Surpass PC Sales Next Year | WebProNews
01/18/2012 07:33 PM
[...] analysis from Asymco suggests that, as soon as next year, the amount of Android-supported devices shipped will exceed [...]
Extreme Analysis: Android, iOS Will Kill the PC | Lose Your Fear
01/18/2012 08:48 PM
[...] interested in deploying mobile applications, threw a whole bunch of numbers and graphs into a blog post and came ...
10 Mid-Week PM Reads | The Big Picture
01/18/2012 09:33 PM
[...] The rise and fall of personal computing Source: Asymco PERMALINK Category: Financial [...]
Extreme Analysis: Android, iOS Will Kill the PC | Technology Magazine
01/18/2012 10:51 PM
[...] in deploying mobile applications, threw a total garland of numbers as well as graphs in to a blog post ...
Android and iOS said to contribute to the fall of personal computing | EMKWAN - GEEK LIFESTYLE REVIEWS AND VIEWS - EMKWAN PROJECT™
01/18/2012 11:26 PM
[...] Read [...]
The Complete History Of Computer And Gadget Sales In One Elegant Chart (AAPL, RIMM, MSFT, GOOG) – Finding Out About
01/19/2012 06:26 AM
[...] lovers and tech geeks, observe in awe. Courtesy of Horace Dediu of Asymco (h/t The Big Picture). This is ...
تاریخچه کامل کامپیوتر و گجت های محبوب در یک عکس « عصر IT – موبایل،تبلت،�
01/19/2012 06:58 AM
[...] است بدانید که ایده اولیه این چارت از سایت آسیمکو بوده و بعدا [...]
The Complete History Of Computer And Gadget Sales In One Elegant Chart (AAPL, RIMM, MSFT, GOOG) | Athens Report - Top Stories
01/19/2012 08:01 AM
[...] lovers and tech geeks, observe in awe. Courtesy of Horace Dediu of Asymco (h/t The Big Picture). This is ...
تاریخچه کامل کامپیوتر و گجت های محبوب در یک عکس
01/20/2012 06:38 AM
[...] است بدانید که ایده اولیه این چارت از سایت آسیمکو بوده و بعدا [...]
The rise and fall of personal computing | benjamin junior
01/20/2012 11:51 AM
[...] [Updated] The rise and fall of personal computing | asymco. ← Previous post ...
| The first 37 Years of Personal Computing | Expect So Much |
01/21/2012 03:52 AM
[...] (via) « Previous [...]
Assorted links — Marginal Revolution
01/21/2012 07:16 PM
[...] 1. The rise and fall of personal computing. [...]
EXPERIENCE ASYMCO, LIVE
SPONSOR ASYMCO
EXPLORE DATA
Global Mobile Market
Smartphones: Platform Shares
Vendors: Market data
Apple: Product Line Financials
Apple: Analyst Performance
Computers: Historic Shipment Data
26717 comments
2632 pingbacks
SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL
Your email:
inShare
247
@ASYMCO
Any successful business that is sufficiently explainable is on the cusp of becoming unsuccessful.
6 hrs ago
iPod unit sales estimates for Q1 range from 9 to 18 million - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech
http://t.co/nolC1hUx
8 hrs ago
With SOPA Hollywood awoke a great giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
17 hrs ago
You cannot separate the MPAA from the value networks underpinning Hollywood. If you have one you must have the other.
1 day ago
Follow @
asymconf
for Asymconf related news and updates
1 day ago
Windows and Windows Live generated $4.3 billion in Q4 sales five years ago. The same business generated $4.7 billion last quarter.
1 day ago
Windows slowly shrinking as a percent of total Microsoft revenues. Now at 23%. Five year time frame:
http://t.co/Qkxypehv
1 day ago
Google's Page: There are now about 250 million Android devices
1 day ago
More updates...
©2012 Horace Dediu. All rights reserved. RSS fee
6 Next →
M Subscribe by email S RSS
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Post as …
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El impresionante crecimiento de iOS y Android
01/17/2012 05:29 PM
[...] quizás la tendencia se hace más chocante si la vemos en un gráfico como el que generaron en Asymco ...
Will Android be the death of PCs? | androidless.net
01/17/2012 11:35 PM
[...] and consulting services for companies interested in deploying mobile applications,” published a blog post today that might make some people’s ...
Will Android be the death of PCs? | Hi Android
01/18/2012 03:18 AM
[...] and consulting services for companies interested in deploying mobile applications,” published a blog post today that might make some people’s ...
Jasonmcdermott » The rise and fall of personal computing
01/18/2012 08:15 AM
[...] Horace brings the goods, yet again. Here he is, documenting what he calls the rise and fall of personal ...
The conditions for survival and prosperity | asymco
01/18/2012 02:43 PM
[...] Yesterday’s post described the history of personal computing platforms over the past 37 years. It showed a distinct shifting ...
Apple’s Education Event | Ken Kinard
01/18/2012 05:09 PM
[...] will leverage its disruption in the PC market to disrupt the textbook market. In partnership with a few major ...
The rise and rise of … | Koer.sk
01/18/2012 06:05 PM
[...] gegroeid sinds computers in onze woonkamers passen. Meer plaatjes en achtergronden en zo (saai) zijn er [...]
Pub Options & Tools | Butcher, Baker
01/18/2012 06:18 PM
[...] both print and all (most?) eBook formats will be supported. That said, a recent piece on “the rise and ...
Is the iPad a Personal Computer? | My Distribution Law
01/18/2012 06:35 PM
[...] entitled “The rise and fall of personal computing.” You can read the whole thing here. Here are some of ...
Android Devices Projected To Surpass PC Sales Next Year | WebProNews
01/18/2012 07:33 PM
[...] analysis from Asymco suggests that, as soon as next year, the amount of Android-supported devices shipped will exceed [...]
Extreme Analysis: Android, iOS Will Kill the PC | Lose Your Fear
01/18/2012 08:48 PM
[...] interested in deploying mobile applications, threw a whole bunch of numbers and graphs into a blog post and came ...
10 Mid-Week PM Reads | The Big Picture
01/18/2012 09:33 PM
[...] The rise and fall of personal computing Source: Asymco PERMALINK Category: Financial [...]
Extreme Analysis: Android, iOS Will Kill the PC | Technology Magazine
01/18/2012 10:51 PM
[...] in deploying mobile applications, threw a total garland of numbers as well as graphs in to a blog post ...
Android and iOS said to contribute to the fall of personal computing | EMKWAN - GEEK LIFESTYLE REVIEWS AND VIEWS - EMKWAN PROJECT™
01/18/2012 11:26 PM
[...] Read [...]
The Complete History Of Computer And Gadget Sales In One Elegant Chart (AAPL, RIMM, MSFT, GOOG) – Finding Out About
01/19/2012 06:26 AM
[...] lovers and tech geeks, observe in awe. Courtesy of Horace Dediu of Asymco (h/t The Big Picture). This is ...
تاریخچه کامل کامپیوتر و گجت های محبوب در یک عکس « عصر IT – موبایل،تبلت،�
01/19/2012 06:58 AM
[...] است بدانید که ایده اولیه این چارت از سایت آسیمکو بوده و بعدا [...]
The Complete History Of Computer And Gadget Sales In One Elegant Chart (AAPL, RIMM, MSFT, GOOG) | Athens Report - Top Stories
01/19/2012 08:01 AM
[...] lovers and tech geeks, observe in awe. Courtesy of Horace Dediu of Asymco (h/t The Big Picture). This is ...
تاریخچه کامل کامپیوتر و گجت های محبوب در یک عکس
01/20/2012 06:38 AM
[...] است بدانید که ایده اولیه این چارت از سایت آسیمکو بوده و بعدا [...]
The rise and fall of personal computing | benjamin junior
01/20/2012 11:51 AM
[...] [Updated] The rise and fall of personal computing | asymco. ← Previous post ...
| The first 37 Years of Personal Computing | Expect So Much |
01/21/2012 03:52 AM
[...] (via) « Previous [...]
Assorted links — Marginal Revolution
01/21/2012 07:16 PM
[...] 1. The rise and fall of personal computing. [...]
EXPERIENCE ASYMCO, LIVE
SPONSOR ASYMCO
EXPLORE DATA
Global Mobile Market
Smartphones: Platform Shares
Vendors: Market data
Apple: Product Line Financials
Apple: Analyst Performance
Computers: Historic Shipment Data
26717 comments
2632 pingbacks
SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL
Your email:
inShare
247
@ASYMCO
Any successful business that is sufficiently explainable is on the cusp of becoming unsuccessful.
6 hrs ago
iPod unit sales estimates for Q1 range from 9 to 18 million - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech
http://t.co/nolC1hUx
8 hrs ago
With SOPA Hollywood awoke a great giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
17 hrs ago
You cannot separate the MPAA from the value networks underpinning Hollywood. If you have one you must have the other.
1 day ago
Follow @
asymconf
for Asymconf related news and updates
1 day ago
Windows and Windows Live generated $4.3 billion in Q4 sales five years ago. The same business generated $4.7 billion last quarter.
1 day ago
Windows slowly shrinking as a percent of total Microsoft revenues. Now at 23%. Five year time frame:
http://t.co/Qkxypehv
1 day ago
Google's Page: There are now about 250 million Android devices
1 day ago
More updates...
©2012 Horace Dediu. All rights reserved. RSS fee
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
eBook on getting into the Cloud
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VNVMWW/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=thepartim-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B004VNVMWW&adid=0F3S31Q6PHGNJ3KPAEDV&
Amazon.com: Google Apps Express: The Fast Way To Start Working in the Cloud eBook: James Beswick: Kindle Store
Amazon.com: Google Apps Express: The Fast Way To Start Working in the Cloud eBook: James Beswick: Kindle Store
Sunday, November 20, 2011
predicts cloud growth
http://www.businessinsider.com/from-the-ashes-of-a-hostile-takeover-by-oracle-workday-rises-to-fight-back-2011-10
From The Ashes Of Oracle's Hostile Takeover Of PeopleSoft, Workday Rose To Fight Back
Matt Rosoff | Oct. 6, 2011, 3:04 PM | 25,222 | 5
A A A
inShare
438
Image: Workday (via Bloomberg West clip)
ORCLNov 18 11:00 PM
30.60
Change
-0.22
% Change
-0.71%
See Also:
This Former Salesforce Hotshot Just Closed A $36 Million Round
Here's How Box.net Wants To Be More Like Facebook
What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, And SAP Don't Tell Customers
Aneel Bhusri was a top executive and board member at PeopleSoft in 2004 when Larry Ellison's Oracle made its hostile takeover bid.
After they lost a bruising 18-month battle, he and cofounder Dave Duffield quietly left the company and nursed their wounds.
A few months later, they teamed up to start a competitor: Workday.
Like PeopleSoft, the company started by focusing on human resources, although it's also moving into financial management.
But unlike Oracle, which has been slow to get into cloud-based services, Workday has been based entirely in the cloud from day one.
The company now has more than 250 large enterprise customers — including companies with as many as 200,000 employees — and is on track to double its bookings this year to $300 million. An IPO is possible late next year, Bhusri recently told Bloomberg.
Last week, on the eve of Oracle's big OpenWorld conference, we caught up with Bhusri, who is also a partner at big VC firm Greylock.
Here's some of what we talked about:
The big vendors are vulnerable because they require big expensive upgrades. Workday doesn't go into startups — it's selling to big companies that have HR and financial software in place. But companies have to update this software periodically, and the traditional vendors like Oracle and SAP make it hard and expensive to upgrade. That's when startups like Workday jump in.
Oracle will survive the cloud transition, but will have to acquire some companies. He thinks NetSuite, which is already majority-owned by Larry Ellison, is a logical candidate.
SAP is toast. "I think SAP doesn't really have a play."
Don't underestimate Microsoft. He thinks the company really gets the cloud, and that Windows 8 will easily become the second-biggest category of tablets — simply because they will run Office, while the iPad never will. "If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away." He also thinks that Microsoft's army of .NET developers will move to Azure, the company's cloud platform.
Google will make a bigger enterprise play eventually. Bhusri called enterprise Google's "secret weapon" and noted that he sees a lot of companies considering a switch to Gmail at the same time as they switch to Workday.
Full Q&A is below:
Business Insider: Tell me how you founded Workday.
Aneel Bhusri: We started the company in March of 05. Dave and I are very close friends. Dave had been the founder CEO of PeopleSoft, I had been the head of products and vice chairman at PeopleSoft. We had both actually stepped out of day to day operations until the hostile takeover with Oracle. We came back and had so much fun working together for 5 of 6 months.
During that time, I had spent a little time with (Salesforce CEO) Marc Benioff, and I came to the conclusion that what he was doing was going to have an impact on our space as well. So we started the company, we convinced ourselves we were at the cusp of yet another technology shift.
BI: Tell me about the Oracle takeover. What was that like?
AB: It was an 18-month hostile takeover. At the end of it, the Oracle team didn't really want Dave or I, so we didn't stay for the transition. So we both took a couple months off, then got back together in Tahoe in February, said "we had a lot of fun so should we start another one?"
BI: We were hearing a lot about the cloud early this decade, and now it seems like in the last year or two a lot of enterprise cloud companies are getting momentum.
AB: The last 18 months, the cloud has really become mainstream. When I look back, the first few years we were in business we were just building out the first version of the product. Candidly, when you go back to 07 or 08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses) but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.
So for the last 18 months, it's really exploded. We've been growing. 2009 we grew (bookings) 50%. 2010 we grew 75%. 2011 we're going to grow 100%. Our growth's actually accelerating....Right now we have more demand than we actually know what to do with.
That's booking. Revenue growth would be faster.
BI: How much are you booking?
AB: Last year we booked $150 million. This year we should double it.
BI: One thing I've noticed looking at the books of public cloud companies like Salesforce and NetSuite is that the revenue growth looks good, but the bottom line growth doesn't match. It seems like there's a really long ramp-up before you get to profitability.
AB: It's purely the accounting model. With a license-based model, you get to account for all the revenue up front because you get all the cash up front. You sell a perpetual license which means the customer has it for ever. With a subscription model you get maybe a three-year subscription, and you don't get to recognize it all up front, you have to recognize it ratably. You don't get all the cash up front, you get some portion of the three-year deal up front and then the customer generally pays over time.
If you converted us to a license model or you converted Salesforce to a license model we'd be wildly profitable. It really is just idiosyncrasies of accounting.
BI: What about churn? How low does churn have to be before you make that turnaround happen.
AB: We have almost no churn. One reason for that is we're selling to large companies. Small companies tend to go out of business, large ones don't. The second reason is we're not selling a point solution like talent management or recruiting or expenses, we're selling HR and accounting systems that customers might change out every 7 to 10 years when technology is out of date. So to date, although we're young, we've had almost no churn. We ask for three year contracts, our average contract is four years because our customer is pushing us to long-term contracts. So we're very different from any other cloud player out there.
BI: What's your average customer look like?
AB: For all time, our average customer has about 8,000 employees. If you look at the last 9 months, it's 15,000 to 50,000. Just with the letter "T" in the last few months, Thomson Reuters, Time Warner, and Toys R Us. Those are full scale human capital management replacements for Thomson Reuters and Time Warner.
BI: When you go in to a big account like that, who are you displacing?
AB: It's Oracle-PeopleSoft and SAP. Right now, we have about 250 large enterprise customers on human capital management. We're ramping up on financials, and we're just beginning to do those replacements too.
BI: What's driving this accelerated move to the cloud over the last 18 months? Is it economic? A big technological shift?
AB: I think it's three things. By the model itself, the cloud is cheaper. In 2009 we grew 50%, and you'd be hard pressed to find another company that grew 50%. Sony Pictures is a good example — they chose us because they couldn't afford to implement SAP. They thought we might be too early, but when they looked at what we had they said "no, they're not too early." Now they're a very happy customer and will tell anybody that will listen it's half the cost and half the time.
Since then, one things people haven't paid attention to with the cloud is the pace of innovation. We don't have four or five versions we're worrying about. You look at PeopleSoft or SAP customer base, they might be on one of four or five versions going all the way back to the year 2000. With the cloud model, everybody's on the same instance. When a new version comes out, they all go on the same version. We just keep moving customers forward instead of keeping them on old releases. So the development model looks much more like Google or Facebook than it does like SAP or Oracle.
And in the last 18 months, systems like Workday or Salesforce, which looked like exciting new technologies that were less functional than those systems, now have more functionality. We're innovating so rapidly we're blowing by the legacy systems.
So the combination of lower costs, higher rate of innovation, and now the functionality where you can actually turn off those old systems, the combination of those three things is really driving it.
BI: But how do you get customers to throw out these old systems they've invested so much in? These aren't green-field sales to startups.
AB: You have to catch them at the point of an upgrade. They can't stay on an old version forever, especially with HR and accounting which are driven by statutory rules. So you can't have a system that's outdated or HR rules that are outdated, you'll get in trouble. So they might get a proposal for an upgrade that's very expensive [seven figures plus]. At that point they look outside. We come in and say we're half the cost — typically over five years we're half the cost — we're a modern look and feel, modern functionality, and we take care of upgrades for you, they're no longer your problem.
Almost all of the large accounts are facing a big upgrade process.
BI: How do you think consumerization is affecting the move?
AB: We started out with a browser-based solution, and we made a big leap forward around the ease of use — we hired a bunch of consumer Internet developers to really build our UI technologies. The newest big leap is around the iPad. We see a lot of executives carrying around iPads. Generally they don't get on these enterprise systems, but if you can give them a system that is really built for them — analytics, search, directory, simple transactions — they will use it.
We rolled out our iPad offering just a couple months ago and it's met with an unbelievable reception. So much so that I think in the next couple years, executives, managers, employees, all of whom use HR systems, they will predominantly use the iPad and systems like that to get to Workday. The power users, accounting and HR people will still use a laptop or desktop, but 90% of the people who are not in the HR or accounting department, they will use tablets.
BI: When you look at all the enterprise vendors with cloud based solutions, everybody is expanding into each other's turf. You're adding financials, Salesforce is adding modules all the time. Do you see a shakeout at some point?
AB: We're still in the early days of the cloud, so there's still plenty of runway for all of us. A few weeks ago at Dreamforice we announced a big partnership with Salesforce, we embraced Chatter, we embraced Force.com as an extensibility platform. Marc and I are good friends, we have a very good partnership. He owns CRM, and he's quickly owning the development platform as well.
From day one, we set out to be an ERP replacement, so HR and accounting. Financials is not a new idea, it's just a new application. For us, that's a $30 or $40 billion market. That's enough to keep us busy for a very very long time.
Right now I see no reason why we should compete with each other.
BI: So who's going to win in this battle?
AB: The people that are trying to replace the core systems that were on premise before. Trying to replaceSiebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, rather than trying to coexist. The people are successful in displacing those systems rather than coexisting are going to be very big companies. That's what Salesforce is doing, that's what we're doing. NetSuite's trying to do that in the SMB market — we never see them — if we compete with NetSuite, one of us is in the wrong place.
Unless — which I've been predicting — Oracle tries to buy NetSuite. Because Fusion is not a true cloud application, Larry already owns 2/3ds of NetSuite, so at some point I think he'll just buy it.
I think Box is a great company in the collaboration area, I like their CEO a lot.
There's an identity management company called Okta — full disclosure, I'm on the board of that company. This whole area of identity is really important. If you've got five or six cloud apps do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.
I mentioned Zuora, they're a very interesting billing company.
BI: It seems like Oracle is still at the center of a lot of these companies — they have connections to Salesforce and NetSuite. Do you think they're going to survive this transition?
AB: It's hard to bet against Oracle. I'd say Fusion is not the answer. They want Fusion to be on premise, in the cloud, and hybrid but there's no such thing. You're either all in the cloud or not. If you're all in the cloud, you build your systems to be grid-aware, you build them to be based on that scalable cloud model, multitenant, all these things. You can't have it both ways. If you want to have multiple choices, it's just the old-school hosting model.
Oracle's going to continue to do very well supplying the cloud providers. There's a long-tail on these applications. Workday now has 250 large enterprises. There are probably 40,000 enterprises around the globe that are running Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft.
My guess is that Oracle will have to make an acquisition.
I think SAP doesn't really have a play. They are in a much more difficult position.
BI: What about HP? What's their next move?
AB: You'd have a better idea than I would. To me, what they should be doing is buying the software infrastructure layers around automation, monitoring, and configuration management that drive server sales. So if people want to replicate the Amazon Web Services, then HP provides all the servers and all the software around replicating it. Autonomy doesn't fit that strategy, but I'm not setting strategy for HP.
BI: What about Microsoft? They seem to be doing both the application layer with Office 365 and Dynamics CRM and ERP, and then Azure is their attempt to do the infrastructure layer.
AB: On the ERP side, we don't think of them as a competitor. I think of Great Plains as more of an SMB mid-market competitor.
I think people underestimate Microsoft. I think Microsoft is going to come back with a vengeance around Windows Mobile 8 and Windows 8, they're going to become the number-two player in tablets because of Office integration. I love my iPad. I think Apple rocks. But I still need Office, and that's the one thing I can't get on the iPad. If I could get Office on a tablet I'd throw my laptop away.
Some of the Office 365 is pretty slick, and they don't get the credit for it. I think people will start paying attention to them sooner or later. It's funny call them a dark horse, but I think Microsoft gets the cloud way better than people give them credit for.
The development platforms are really interesting. There are a whole bunch of .NET developers out there. Where are they going to go? They're going to go to Azure. The Java developers are going to go to Force or Heroku or Google App Engine. But the .NET guys are not going to jump on to Java platforms.
BI: What's going on with Google — why aren't they making a bigger play for enterprise cloud computing?
AB: At the core, they're a consumer company. They're very focused, as you see with Google+, more focused on being relevant in social and consumer. I think enterprise is their hidden weapon, though,
it's growing very rapidly, we're getting to know the Google Enterprise folks, the products are excellent. Google Docs has to come further to truly be an Office replacement, but Gmail is terrific.
What I'm seeing in sales cycles, as people are going from PeopleSoft or SAP to Workday, they are asking us about Gmail.
I think for them, it's much more about a sales and marketing push than it is about the technology. Google and Microsoft can build anything they want, they both have amazing engineering organizations. But enterprise people are not good at doing consumer technologies, consumer technologies need to learn how to sell to enterprises. Google's learning that — they actually hired a couple of the guys out of SAP.
From our perspective, I'd love to have Microsoft and Google both as partners.
In the early days of the cloud, people paid a lot of attention to architecture — multitenancy versus hosted — and yeah it's got a consumer look and feel versus old enterprise systems. But as the technology evolves with social, with mobile, with open Web services, these new generation of systems look so different from the old generation that the cloud is just the starting point, and the gap is just widening between these legacy systems.
It's not just about the cloud versus on premise, it's that the cloud vendors are taking all the consumer internet technologies and bringing them to the enterprise world, and the old guys are not. So I can do an iPad demo for you now that looks just like a native iPad app. It doesn't look like an enterprise app. It's an iPad app.
The same technologies you use to build a cloud service — HTML5, open Web services — they happen to be the same technologies you use to build mobile. So for a cloud vendor, getting to mobile is pretty easy. For a legacy vendor like SAP, they spent $5 billion on Sybase, and a year later they still have nothing to show for it. Workday had 5 22-year-old developers building our iPad client.
We both had 5. Five billion, five developers.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/from-the-ashes-of-a-hostile-takeover-by-oracle-workday-rises-to-fight-back-2011-10#ixzz1eFz8aVbB
From The Ashes Of Oracle's Hostile Takeover Of PeopleSoft, Workday Rose To Fight Back
Matt Rosoff | Oct. 6, 2011, 3:04 PM | 25,222 | 5
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See Also:
This Former Salesforce Hotshot Just Closed A $36 Million Round
Here's How Box.net Wants To Be More Like Facebook
What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, And SAP Don't Tell Customers
Aneel Bhusri was a top executive and board member at PeopleSoft in 2004 when Larry Ellison's Oracle made its hostile takeover bid.
After they lost a bruising 18-month battle, he and cofounder Dave Duffield quietly left the company and nursed their wounds.
A few months later, they teamed up to start a competitor: Workday.
Like PeopleSoft, the company started by focusing on human resources, although it's also moving into financial management.
But unlike Oracle, which has been slow to get into cloud-based services, Workday has been based entirely in the cloud from day one.
The company now has more than 250 large enterprise customers — including companies with as many as 200,000 employees — and is on track to double its bookings this year to $300 million. An IPO is possible late next year, Bhusri recently told Bloomberg.
Last week, on the eve of Oracle's big OpenWorld conference, we caught up with Bhusri, who is also a partner at big VC firm Greylock.
Here's some of what we talked about:
The big vendors are vulnerable because they require big expensive upgrades. Workday doesn't go into startups — it's selling to big companies that have HR and financial software in place. But companies have to update this software periodically, and the traditional vendors like Oracle and SAP make it hard and expensive to upgrade. That's when startups like Workday jump in.
Oracle will survive the cloud transition, but will have to acquire some companies. He thinks NetSuite, which is already majority-owned by Larry Ellison, is a logical candidate.
SAP is toast. "I think SAP doesn't really have a play."
Don't underestimate Microsoft. He thinks the company really gets the cloud, and that Windows 8 will easily become the second-biggest category of tablets — simply because they will run Office, while the iPad never will. "If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away." He also thinks that Microsoft's army of .NET developers will move to Azure, the company's cloud platform.
Google will make a bigger enterprise play eventually. Bhusri called enterprise Google's "secret weapon" and noted that he sees a lot of companies considering a switch to Gmail at the same time as they switch to Workday.
Full Q&A is below:
Business Insider: Tell me how you founded Workday.
Aneel Bhusri: We started the company in March of 05. Dave and I are very close friends. Dave had been the founder CEO of PeopleSoft, I had been the head of products and vice chairman at PeopleSoft. We had both actually stepped out of day to day operations until the hostile takeover with Oracle. We came back and had so much fun working together for 5 of 6 months.
During that time, I had spent a little time with (Salesforce CEO) Marc Benioff, and I came to the conclusion that what he was doing was going to have an impact on our space as well. So we started the company, we convinced ourselves we were at the cusp of yet another technology shift.
BI: Tell me about the Oracle takeover. What was that like?
AB: It was an 18-month hostile takeover. At the end of it, the Oracle team didn't really want Dave or I, so we didn't stay for the transition. So we both took a couple months off, then got back together in Tahoe in February, said "we had a lot of fun so should we start another one?"
BI: We were hearing a lot about the cloud early this decade, and now it seems like in the last year or two a lot of enterprise cloud companies are getting momentum.
AB: The last 18 months, the cloud has really become mainstream. When I look back, the first few years we were in business we were just building out the first version of the product. Candidly, when you go back to 07 or 08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses) but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.
So for the last 18 months, it's really exploded. We've been growing. 2009 we grew (bookings) 50%. 2010 we grew 75%. 2011 we're going to grow 100%. Our growth's actually accelerating....Right now we have more demand than we actually know what to do with.
That's booking. Revenue growth would be faster.
BI: How much are you booking?
AB: Last year we booked $150 million. This year we should double it.
BI: One thing I've noticed looking at the books of public cloud companies like Salesforce and NetSuite is that the revenue growth looks good, but the bottom line growth doesn't match. It seems like there's a really long ramp-up before you get to profitability.
AB: It's purely the accounting model. With a license-based model, you get to account for all the revenue up front because you get all the cash up front. You sell a perpetual license which means the customer has it for ever. With a subscription model you get maybe a three-year subscription, and you don't get to recognize it all up front, you have to recognize it ratably. You don't get all the cash up front, you get some portion of the three-year deal up front and then the customer generally pays over time.
If you converted us to a license model or you converted Salesforce to a license model we'd be wildly profitable. It really is just idiosyncrasies of accounting.
BI: What about churn? How low does churn have to be before you make that turnaround happen.
AB: We have almost no churn. One reason for that is we're selling to large companies. Small companies tend to go out of business, large ones don't. The second reason is we're not selling a point solution like talent management or recruiting or expenses, we're selling HR and accounting systems that customers might change out every 7 to 10 years when technology is out of date. So to date, although we're young, we've had almost no churn. We ask for three year contracts, our average contract is four years because our customer is pushing us to long-term contracts. So we're very different from any other cloud player out there.
BI: What's your average customer look like?
AB: For all time, our average customer has about 8,000 employees. If you look at the last 9 months, it's 15,000 to 50,000. Just with the letter "T" in the last few months, Thomson Reuters, Time Warner, and Toys R Us. Those are full scale human capital management replacements for Thomson Reuters and Time Warner.
BI: When you go in to a big account like that, who are you displacing?
AB: It's Oracle-PeopleSoft and SAP. Right now, we have about 250 large enterprise customers on human capital management. We're ramping up on financials, and we're just beginning to do those replacements too.
BI: What's driving this accelerated move to the cloud over the last 18 months? Is it economic? A big technological shift?
AB: I think it's three things. By the model itself, the cloud is cheaper. In 2009 we grew 50%, and you'd be hard pressed to find another company that grew 50%. Sony Pictures is a good example — they chose us because they couldn't afford to implement SAP. They thought we might be too early, but when they looked at what we had they said "no, they're not too early." Now they're a very happy customer and will tell anybody that will listen it's half the cost and half the time.
Since then, one things people haven't paid attention to with the cloud is the pace of innovation. We don't have four or five versions we're worrying about. You look at PeopleSoft or SAP customer base, they might be on one of four or five versions going all the way back to the year 2000. With the cloud model, everybody's on the same instance. When a new version comes out, they all go on the same version. We just keep moving customers forward instead of keeping them on old releases. So the development model looks much more like Google or Facebook than it does like SAP or Oracle.
And in the last 18 months, systems like Workday or Salesforce, which looked like exciting new technologies that were less functional than those systems, now have more functionality. We're innovating so rapidly we're blowing by the legacy systems.
So the combination of lower costs, higher rate of innovation, and now the functionality where you can actually turn off those old systems, the combination of those three things is really driving it.
BI: But how do you get customers to throw out these old systems they've invested so much in? These aren't green-field sales to startups.
AB: You have to catch them at the point of an upgrade. They can't stay on an old version forever, especially with HR and accounting which are driven by statutory rules. So you can't have a system that's outdated or HR rules that are outdated, you'll get in trouble. So they might get a proposal for an upgrade that's very expensive [seven figures plus]. At that point they look outside. We come in and say we're half the cost — typically over five years we're half the cost — we're a modern look and feel, modern functionality, and we take care of upgrades for you, they're no longer your problem.
Almost all of the large accounts are facing a big upgrade process.
BI: How do you think consumerization is affecting the move?
AB: We started out with a browser-based solution, and we made a big leap forward around the ease of use — we hired a bunch of consumer Internet developers to really build our UI technologies. The newest big leap is around the iPad. We see a lot of executives carrying around iPads. Generally they don't get on these enterprise systems, but if you can give them a system that is really built for them — analytics, search, directory, simple transactions — they will use it.
We rolled out our iPad offering just a couple months ago and it's met with an unbelievable reception. So much so that I think in the next couple years, executives, managers, employees, all of whom use HR systems, they will predominantly use the iPad and systems like that to get to Workday. The power users, accounting and HR people will still use a laptop or desktop, but 90% of the people who are not in the HR or accounting department, they will use tablets.
BI: When you look at all the enterprise vendors with cloud based solutions, everybody is expanding into each other's turf. You're adding financials, Salesforce is adding modules all the time. Do you see a shakeout at some point?
AB: We're still in the early days of the cloud, so there's still plenty of runway for all of us. A few weeks ago at Dreamforice we announced a big partnership with Salesforce, we embraced Chatter, we embraced Force.com as an extensibility platform. Marc and I are good friends, we have a very good partnership. He owns CRM, and he's quickly owning the development platform as well.
From day one, we set out to be an ERP replacement, so HR and accounting. Financials is not a new idea, it's just a new application. For us, that's a $30 or $40 billion market. That's enough to keep us busy for a very very long time.
Right now I see no reason why we should compete with each other.
BI: So who's going to win in this battle?
AB: The people that are trying to replace the core systems that were on premise before. Trying to replaceSiebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, rather than trying to coexist. The people are successful in displacing those systems rather than coexisting are going to be very big companies. That's what Salesforce is doing, that's what we're doing. NetSuite's trying to do that in the SMB market — we never see them — if we compete with NetSuite, one of us is in the wrong place.
Unless — which I've been predicting — Oracle tries to buy NetSuite. Because Fusion is not a true cloud application, Larry already owns 2/3ds of NetSuite, so at some point I think he'll just buy it.
I think Box is a great company in the collaboration area, I like their CEO a lot.
There's an identity management company called Okta — full disclosure, I'm on the board of that company. This whole area of identity is really important. If you've got five or six cloud apps do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.
I mentioned Zuora, they're a very interesting billing company.
BI: It seems like Oracle is still at the center of a lot of these companies — they have connections to Salesforce and NetSuite. Do you think they're going to survive this transition?
AB: It's hard to bet against Oracle. I'd say Fusion is not the answer. They want Fusion to be on premise, in the cloud, and hybrid but there's no such thing. You're either all in the cloud or not. If you're all in the cloud, you build your systems to be grid-aware, you build them to be based on that scalable cloud model, multitenant, all these things. You can't have it both ways. If you want to have multiple choices, it's just the old-school hosting model.
Oracle's going to continue to do very well supplying the cloud providers. There's a long-tail on these applications. Workday now has 250 large enterprises. There are probably 40,000 enterprises around the globe that are running Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft.
My guess is that Oracle will have to make an acquisition.
I think SAP doesn't really have a play. They are in a much more difficult position.
BI: What about HP? What's their next move?
AB: You'd have a better idea than I would. To me, what they should be doing is buying the software infrastructure layers around automation, monitoring, and configuration management that drive server sales. So if people want to replicate the Amazon Web Services, then HP provides all the servers and all the software around replicating it. Autonomy doesn't fit that strategy, but I'm not setting strategy for HP.
BI: What about Microsoft? They seem to be doing both the application layer with Office 365 and Dynamics CRM and ERP, and then Azure is their attempt to do the infrastructure layer.
AB: On the ERP side, we don't think of them as a competitor. I think of Great Plains as more of an SMB mid-market competitor.
I think people underestimate Microsoft. I think Microsoft is going to come back with a vengeance around Windows Mobile 8 and Windows 8, they're going to become the number-two player in tablets because of Office integration. I love my iPad. I think Apple rocks. But I still need Office, and that's the one thing I can't get on the iPad. If I could get Office on a tablet I'd throw my laptop away.
Some of the Office 365 is pretty slick, and they don't get the credit for it. I think people will start paying attention to them sooner or later. It's funny call them a dark horse, but I think Microsoft gets the cloud way better than people give them credit for.
The development platforms are really interesting. There are a whole bunch of .NET developers out there. Where are they going to go? They're going to go to Azure. The Java developers are going to go to Force or Heroku or Google App Engine. But the .NET guys are not going to jump on to Java platforms.
BI: What's going on with Google — why aren't they making a bigger play for enterprise cloud computing?
AB: At the core, they're a consumer company. They're very focused, as you see with Google+, more focused on being relevant in social and consumer. I think enterprise is their hidden weapon, though,
it's growing very rapidly, we're getting to know the Google Enterprise folks, the products are excellent. Google Docs has to come further to truly be an Office replacement, but Gmail is terrific.
What I'm seeing in sales cycles, as people are going from PeopleSoft or SAP to Workday, they are asking us about Gmail.
I think for them, it's much more about a sales and marketing push than it is about the technology. Google and Microsoft can build anything they want, they both have amazing engineering organizations. But enterprise people are not good at doing consumer technologies, consumer technologies need to learn how to sell to enterprises. Google's learning that — they actually hired a couple of the guys out of SAP.
From our perspective, I'd love to have Microsoft and Google both as partners.
In the early days of the cloud, people paid a lot of attention to architecture — multitenancy versus hosted — and yeah it's got a consumer look and feel versus old enterprise systems. But as the technology evolves with social, with mobile, with open Web services, these new generation of systems look so different from the old generation that the cloud is just the starting point, and the gap is just widening between these legacy systems.
It's not just about the cloud versus on premise, it's that the cloud vendors are taking all the consumer internet technologies and bringing them to the enterprise world, and the old guys are not. So I can do an iPad demo for you now that looks just like a native iPad app. It doesn't look like an enterprise app. It's an iPad app.
The same technologies you use to build a cloud service — HTML5, open Web services — they happen to be the same technologies you use to build mobile. So for a cloud vendor, getting to mobile is pretty easy. For a legacy vendor like SAP, they spent $5 billion on Sybase, and a year later they still have nothing to show for it. Workday had 5 22-year-old developers building our iPad client.
We both had 5. Five billion, five developers.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/from-the-ashes-of-a-hostile-takeover-by-oracle-workday-rises-to-fight-back-2011-10#ixzz1eFz8aVbB
Friday, October 28, 2011
Apple iCloud
A Look at Apple’s iCloud
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/a-look-at-icloud/
7:13 p.m. | Updated to note user reports of e-mail problems today.
This week in The New York Times, I reviewed Apple’s new iPhone 4S. But the new phone is only one of the big Apple news items this week. On Wednesday, iCloud went live.
This new service is the latest incarnation of what has been called iTools, then .Mac, then MobileMe.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
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There are three bits of good news about iCloud.
First, it’s free. (MobileMe was $100 a year.)
Second, it does more than MobileMe.
Third, it’s solid. Like a rock. It would be understandable if you wanted to steer clear; plenty of people remember the data loss and foul-ups of the early MobileMe — but this time, it looks as if Apple nailed it.
So what is iCloud?
• A synchronizing service. It keeps your calendar, address book, documents updated and identical on all your gadgets: Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches. In other words, pretty much what MobileMe was.
This is a huge convenience. Change, add or delete an appointment or address-book entry on one device, and the change is instantly, wirelessly, automatically reflected on all the others.
iCloud also includes a free e-mail account, ending in @me.com. Same deal here: Delete a message on one gadget, and you’ll find it in the Deleted Mail folder on another. Send a message from your iPad, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder on your Mac. And so on.
Some programs are available for more than one machine — including Apple’s own iWork suite (Numbers, Pages, Keynote). Those programs are available for Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad. In that situation, you can create or edit a document on one kind of machine, and marvel as iCloud automatically syncs it with all your other devices. (Well, sort of. Create or edit a document on an iPhone/iPad/Touch, and it appears on the iCloud.com site for manual downloading by your Mac; the transfer isn’t automatic. Similarly, you have to manually upload these files to iCloud.com before they are transmitted to your iGadgets.)
• An online locker. Anything you buy from Apple — music, TV shows, e-books, and apps — is stored online, for easy access at any time. For example, whenever you buy a song or a TV show from the online iTunes store, it can appear automatically on all your i-gadgets and computers. Or you can re-download it manually at any time, no charge.
• Photo Stream. Every time a new photo enters your life — when you take a picture with an iPhone/iPad/Touch, for example, or import one from a camera onto your computer — it is added to a special folder called Photo Stream. In other words, it appears automatically on all your other iCloud machines: iPhone, iPad, Touch, Mac, PC, Apple TV.
Now, your iGadget doesn’t have nearly as much storage available as your Mac or PC; you can’t yet buy an iPad with 750 gigabytes of storage. That’s why, on your iGadget, your Photo Stream consists of just the last 1,000 photos.
(There’s another limitation, too: the iCloud servers store your photos for 30 days. As long as your gadgets go online at least once a month, they’ll remain current with the Photo Stream. And it doesn’t sync over the cellular airwaves. It sends photos around only when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot or connected to a wired network.)
You don’t have to worry about that 30-day, 1,000-photo business on your Mac or PC. Once they appear here, they’re here until you delete them.
On an iGadget, once a photo arrives, you can copy it to your Camera Roll, where it’s permanently saved.
This, in its way, is one of the best features in all of iCloudland, because it means you don’t have to sync your iPhone over a USB cable to get your photos onto your computer. It all happens automatically, wirelessly over WiFi.
It’s also a great way to send photos the other direction — from your Mac or PC. You can drag photos into the Photo Stream folder there, and marvel as they show up on your iGadget.
The one weirdness is that, to preserve its simplicity, Apple designed Photo Stream to be literal and rigid. Every photo that enters your photographic bloodstream becomes part of the Photo Stream. You can’t choose which ones. And more alarmingly, you can’t delete one. All your terrible shots, all your muffed shots, all your scandalous shots become part of the stream, and therefore get propagated across all of your iCloud devices. This is not great news for politicians.
(If something unfortunate enters your own stream, you can visit iCloud.com and use the Reset Photo Stream function. Just be sure to turn Photo Stream off and on again on each of your devices, too, to make them “notice” the newly empty Photo Stream.)
• Back to My Mac. This option lets you access the files on one Mac from another one across the Internet. It isn’t new, but it survives in iCloud.
• Find My iPhone — and Mac. Find My iPhone, the one free former MobileMe feature, pinpoints the current location of your iPhone or iPad on a map. It’s great for helping you find your iGadget if it’s been stolen or lost.
You can also make your lost gadget start making a loud pinging sound for a couple of minutes by remote control — even if it was set to Vibrate mode. That’s brilliantly effective when your phone has slipped under the couch cushions. In dire situations, you can even erase the phone by remote control, preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
In iCloud, this feature can find your Mac, too. That might seem like a silly idea; how often do you misplace your iMac? But remember that 75 percent of all computers Apple sells are laptops.
• Automatic backup. iCloud automatically backs up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Completely, automatically and wirelessly (over WiFi, not over cellular connections). It’s a quick backup, since iCloud backs up only whatever data has changed since the last backup.
But in some ways, iCloud is MobileMe Minus; some MobileMe features didn’t survive the cut. For example:
• iWeb. The beauty of this easy-to-use Web-site design program was that, with one click, you could publish your work on the actual Web — the MobileMe site “hosted” your pages. (As a replacement, you might consider the free www.weebly.com service, which makes it super-simple to design a Web site.)
• The iDisk. This “virtual hard drive in the sky” was a great way to transfer big files between computers. (As a replacement, consider DropBox or SugarSync; they let you create desktop folders that behave exactly like the iDisk. You can make them appear — and synchronize them — on any computer, or the iPhone or iPad. Free for up to 2two gigabytes (DropBox) or five gigs (SugarSync).
• Photo Gallery. Apple’s online galleries were a beautiful, uncluttered and ad-free way to present your digital slide shows to your adoring fans. And now they’re gone (the galleries, not the fans). (Replacements include www.picasa.com and www.flickr.com. And, of course, there’s Facebook.)
• Data sync. Some of the things MobileMe could sync no longer sync in iCloud: Dashboard widgets, Dock items, Keychains and all the trappings of your e-mail accounts, like settings, signatures, rules and preferences.
Apple will keep MobileMe around until June 30, 2012. At that point, it goes away forever.
A free iCloud account gives you five gigabytes of online storage. Fortunately, anything you buy from Apple — like music, apps, books and TV shows — doesn’t count against that five-gigabyte amount. Neither do the photos in your Photo Stream. (You can expand your storage if you find five gigs constricting — for $2 a gigabyte a year. So you’ll pay $20, $40 or $100 a year for an extra 10, 20, or 50 gigs. You can upgrade your storage right from your iGadget or computer.)
This must sound like a lot of stuff and a lot of complexity. And it is. (Of course, you choose which features you want to use, or you can ignore all of it and just not sign up.)
Still, that’s nothing compared to the complexity that must have been involved in engineering all of this to work smoothly from Day 1. Imagine the strain on Apple’s servers when its 300 million iGadget and Mac customers descended simultaneously on iCloud on Wednesday. (Update: Actually, some people are having iCloud e-mail problems today.)
But the bottom line is that there is real gold in them thar clouds. The syncing of address book and calendar is essential. Photo Stream is fantastic — you never have to curse the fact that some great photo is stuck on another machine (although I wish there were a way to delete individual photos).
And all of this is free?
What can I say? It’s a banner week for Apple.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/a-look-at-icloud/
7:13 p.m. | Updated to note user reports of e-mail problems today.
This week in The New York Times, I reviewed Apple’s new iPhone 4S. But the new phone is only one of the big Apple news items this week. On Wednesday, iCloud went live.
This new service is the latest incarnation of what has been called iTools, then .Mac, then MobileMe.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
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There are three bits of good news about iCloud.
First, it’s free. (MobileMe was $100 a year.)
Second, it does more than MobileMe.
Third, it’s solid. Like a rock. It would be understandable if you wanted to steer clear; plenty of people remember the data loss and foul-ups of the early MobileMe — but this time, it looks as if Apple nailed it.
So what is iCloud?
• A synchronizing service. It keeps your calendar, address book, documents updated and identical on all your gadgets: Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches. In other words, pretty much what MobileMe was.
This is a huge convenience. Change, add or delete an appointment or address-book entry on one device, and the change is instantly, wirelessly, automatically reflected on all the others.
iCloud also includes a free e-mail account, ending in @me.com. Same deal here: Delete a message on one gadget, and you’ll find it in the Deleted Mail folder on another. Send a message from your iPad, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder on your Mac. And so on.
Some programs are available for more than one machine — including Apple’s own iWork suite (Numbers, Pages, Keynote). Those programs are available for Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad. In that situation, you can create or edit a document on one kind of machine, and marvel as iCloud automatically syncs it with all your other devices. (Well, sort of. Create or edit a document on an iPhone/iPad/Touch, and it appears on the iCloud.com site for manual downloading by your Mac; the transfer isn’t automatic. Similarly, you have to manually upload these files to iCloud.com before they are transmitted to your iGadgets.)
• An online locker. Anything you buy from Apple — music, TV shows, e-books, and apps — is stored online, for easy access at any time. For example, whenever you buy a song or a TV show from the online iTunes store, it can appear automatically on all your i-gadgets and computers. Or you can re-download it manually at any time, no charge.
• Photo Stream. Every time a new photo enters your life — when you take a picture with an iPhone/iPad/Touch, for example, or import one from a camera onto your computer — it is added to a special folder called Photo Stream. In other words, it appears automatically on all your other iCloud machines: iPhone, iPad, Touch, Mac, PC, Apple TV.
Now, your iGadget doesn’t have nearly as much storage available as your Mac or PC; you can’t yet buy an iPad with 750 gigabytes of storage. That’s why, on your iGadget, your Photo Stream consists of just the last 1,000 photos.
(There’s another limitation, too: the iCloud servers store your photos for 30 days. As long as your gadgets go online at least once a month, they’ll remain current with the Photo Stream. And it doesn’t sync over the cellular airwaves. It sends photos around only when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot or connected to a wired network.)
You don’t have to worry about that 30-day, 1,000-photo business on your Mac or PC. Once they appear here, they’re here until you delete them.
On an iGadget, once a photo arrives, you can copy it to your Camera Roll, where it’s permanently saved.
This, in its way, is one of the best features in all of iCloudland, because it means you don’t have to sync your iPhone over a USB cable to get your photos onto your computer. It all happens automatically, wirelessly over WiFi.
It’s also a great way to send photos the other direction — from your Mac or PC. You can drag photos into the Photo Stream folder there, and marvel as they show up on your iGadget.
The one weirdness is that, to preserve its simplicity, Apple designed Photo Stream to be literal and rigid. Every photo that enters your photographic bloodstream becomes part of the Photo Stream. You can’t choose which ones. And more alarmingly, you can’t delete one. All your terrible shots, all your muffed shots, all your scandalous shots become part of the stream, and therefore get propagated across all of your iCloud devices. This is not great news for politicians.
(If something unfortunate enters your own stream, you can visit iCloud.com and use the Reset Photo Stream function. Just be sure to turn Photo Stream off and on again on each of your devices, too, to make them “notice” the newly empty Photo Stream.)
• Back to My Mac. This option lets you access the files on one Mac from another one across the Internet. It isn’t new, but it survives in iCloud.
• Find My iPhone — and Mac. Find My iPhone, the one free former MobileMe feature, pinpoints the current location of your iPhone or iPad on a map. It’s great for helping you find your iGadget if it’s been stolen or lost.
You can also make your lost gadget start making a loud pinging sound for a couple of minutes by remote control — even if it was set to Vibrate mode. That’s brilliantly effective when your phone has slipped under the couch cushions. In dire situations, you can even erase the phone by remote control, preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
In iCloud, this feature can find your Mac, too. That might seem like a silly idea; how often do you misplace your iMac? But remember that 75 percent of all computers Apple sells are laptops.
• Automatic backup. iCloud automatically backs up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Completely, automatically and wirelessly (over WiFi, not over cellular connections). It’s a quick backup, since iCloud backs up only whatever data has changed since the last backup.
But in some ways, iCloud is MobileMe Minus; some MobileMe features didn’t survive the cut. For example:
• iWeb. The beauty of this easy-to-use Web-site design program was that, with one click, you could publish your work on the actual Web — the MobileMe site “hosted” your pages. (As a replacement, you might consider the free www.weebly.com service, which makes it super-simple to design a Web site.)
• The iDisk. This “virtual hard drive in the sky” was a great way to transfer big files between computers. (As a replacement, consider DropBox or SugarSync; they let you create desktop folders that behave exactly like the iDisk. You can make them appear — and synchronize them — on any computer, or the iPhone or iPad. Free for up to 2two gigabytes (DropBox) or five gigs (SugarSync).
• Photo Gallery. Apple’s online galleries were a beautiful, uncluttered and ad-free way to present your digital slide shows to your adoring fans. And now they’re gone (the galleries, not the fans). (Replacements include www.picasa.com and www.flickr.com. And, of course, there’s Facebook.)
• Data sync. Some of the things MobileMe could sync no longer sync in iCloud: Dashboard widgets, Dock items, Keychains and all the trappings of your e-mail accounts, like settings, signatures, rules and preferences.
Apple will keep MobileMe around until June 30, 2012. At that point, it goes away forever.
A free iCloud account gives you five gigabytes of online storage. Fortunately, anything you buy from Apple — like music, apps, books and TV shows — doesn’t count against that five-gigabyte amount. Neither do the photos in your Photo Stream. (You can expand your storage if you find five gigs constricting — for $2 a gigabyte a year. So you’ll pay $20, $40 or $100 a year for an extra 10, 20, or 50 gigs. You can upgrade your storage right from your iGadget or computer.)
This must sound like a lot of stuff and a lot of complexity. And it is. (Of course, you choose which features you want to use, or you can ignore all of it and just not sign up.)
Still, that’s nothing compared to the complexity that must have been involved in engineering all of this to work smoothly from Day 1. Imagine the strain on Apple’s servers when its 300 million iGadget and Mac customers descended simultaneously on iCloud on Wednesday. (Update: Actually, some people are having iCloud e-mail problems today.)
But the bottom line is that there is real gold in them thar clouds. The syncing of address book and calendar is essential. Photo Stream is fantastic — you never have to curse the fact that some great photo is stuck on another machine (although I wish there were a way to delete individual photos).
And all of this is free?
What can I say? It’s a banner week for Apple.
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