In brief Arnie’s government is going to replace the hundreds of current email systems in use across the State with one, centralised system which everyone will use. The rationale is simple of course, one system = less costs.

But Google aren’t too happy with the bidding process as they claim their platform has been excluded based on unfair selection criteria – criteria which they were unable to either meet or change. This, you might say, is fair enough surely? The criteria are there to make sure that the system chosen meets the requirements of the organisation(s) and the users, no?

Well apparently not. Google’s position is that the requireemnts are based on the current email functionality which happens to be Exchange/Outlook and that, as such, newer and different approaches are being unfairly shut out.

I’m torn over this one, I have to admit. Part of me hates the attitude of “That’s the ways it’s always been, so that’s the way it should stay” but there’s also a strong element of “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it”.  Google are taking a pounding at the moment for the delays in delivering their solution into the City of LA. The LAPD have some strict data proection requirements which are causing some ‘issues’. But there’s one thing for sure… they’ll learn from that and be better prepared next time around.

On a purely personal note, I don’t like the GMail web interface at all. Yes I’ve become accustomed to the “Outlook” way of doing things, but as a Mac user I’m also very happy with the Mail.app and use Entourage (gasp) on an daily basis too. Outlook, both locally and as a web application, is a compelling application. It’s certainly got some bloat and some features I never use but it does do email pretty well. GMail is quirky and while some love it, its quirkiness still presents a barrier to adoption.

There’s an overhead to running IT, even if you’re only a 5-man outfit. There are applications to be bought and updated, there’s an email system to be maintained, there’s file-servers to be backed up (!) along with all of the other minutia which comes with the IT world. That overhead is a time and money sink and small businesses are sesitive to both – the easiest option then is to make it someone elses problem. A “Cloud” provider.

Getting document management, applications, email, web-sites et-al without needing to actually ‘buy’ anything is pretty cool, especially as you can be fairly sure – if you use a ‘name’ as your service provider – that the service is going to be there whenever and wherever you need it.

Google are leading the march on this, I’m afraid that they’ve got a full package of services which many small businesses find hard to ignore, especially as they can get them for free as part of the Standard Edition. Oh sure, they don’t get some facilities or an SLA but to be honest it’s not many small businesses who’ll have a need for private video streaming and the SLA is simply words as part of the decision-making process.

Microsoft are pitching BPOS as their alternative to Google, primarily because they believe that the communications side of the equations is the key, that email, instant messaging and collaboration are the keystone upon which organisations will build their “Cloud” services consumption. And in part they’re right… those things ARE very important and WILL form the key decision points for many organisations but for a small business they’re not necessarily important enough to pay for over the free alternative.

But wait! Microsoft themselves have a free online service for Small Businesses up to 5 users! Ahhh you didn’t know about that did you!

No… neither did I. And I think that’s the point. Office Live for Small Business is one of the Live suite of services which seems to float around in a perpetual Beta state with no real direction, marketing or strategy in place. For those who have used the Office Live service (similar name, different service) you’ll know that this service is being ‘updated’ in  move to Live SkyDrive. For some this will mean the loss of some functionality – web sites and specific Workspaces being a couple – as Skydrive is basically a document repository. But SkyDrive has one key and critical feature, it has Office Web Applications for free. Yes, as a SkyDrive subscriber you can create Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and OneNote notebooks all on-line and all for free.

Office Web Apps - on Skydrive for free.

Now let’s review, we have Office Live for Small Business which allows the creation of a Website, basic or premium (at a price) email services, document management using SharePoint and  contact management – as well as other functionality – all available for free (up to the aforementioned 5 users) and we have SkyDrive for individuals with Office Web Applications and a bunch of storage space also for free. 2 solutions both accessible via 1 authentication method – the Live ID.

I can’t be the only one who see’s a trick being missed here can I? There must be someone in Microsoft looking at 2 tabs in their browser and saying  ”You know what, if those things worked together that’d be really cool!”.

I may be pre-empting a great announcement but Small Businesses are ready for a move to “Cloud” services, all we need if for those services to be ready for the Small Businesses.

One of the really interesting things is the positioning of Microsoft’s Office Web App suite. This suite brings versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote to the web for general consumption, for free, by anyone who signs up for a SkyDrive account. And it’s pretty good too! I use a lot of Live stuff, including SkyDrive, Sync, Messenger and the web versions of the products are perfectly adequate for the majority of the work most people will need to do. This then, should be the answer to the Google Apps surely? Microsoft have the Office brand to leverage and can pitch Web Apps as the perfect business answer along with BPOS for those wanting to move their investment away from on-site IT real estate and onto “Cloud” services.

The answer of course is no. Of course any individual can sign up to SkyDrive and get Office Web Apps for free, but which corporate IT manager is going to adopt that model. Use of Office Web Apps by a Business requires that the business has already licensed Office 2010 through a volume licensing agreement and then it’s only available as an installation into an internal SharePoint system.

So where does this leave businesses who’s IT spending does not warrant having a Volume Licence Agreement in place? Well simply it leaves them either buying Office 2010 for local installation, not upgrading, or moving to one of the other on-line services and there’s more than one. Google Apps is the nom-de-jour but another service worth a mention is ZOHO and this one is interesting in a couple of ways – it integrates with Google Apps and it supports links to SharePoint.

I like Microsoft Office, I really do, there are some applications in the suite which I simply can’t work properly without, but the idea that I HAVE to make a significant investment in local licensing of the suite the suite to get the benefits of the Webb Applications, only the have those then limited to being installed in-house, well I do wonder who’s being protected in all of this.

But with every issue, comes an opportunity. I wonder who will be the first hoster to market offering an Office Web App platform for Enterprise customers with Volume licensing in place.

Today’s Internet / Web landscape is very different though. There are far more services available than any one hoster – even if you’re a Google – can effectively deliver and the key to keeping your customer happy is not to give them everything, but to give them access to it. The difference is slight but the effect is major.

Don't limit your customers or they may not be!

I was flitting around doing some research this week and twice I came across web-applications which allowed me to authenticate using 3rd party sources. Now I’m using the term ‘sources’ here for two reasons, firstly because it grammatically correct but secondly – and more importantly – because there were indeed multiple options to choose from on each occasion. Now it’d be easy to dismiss this as simply coincidence following the premise that “if you look for something hard enough, you will eventually find it” but I was simply pinging across my network of sites and interests and bang! there they were, two totally different environments and both using some of the same external authentication sources.

Well 3rd party authentication isn’t new of course, Microsoft had a good go at it with the Passport (now Live ID) and it was picked up by quite a few externals, but it now seems to be predominantly an MS exclusive authenticator – I used to use Passport to log into Expedia for example, but they dropped it in favour of a local system. But it now seems that other platforms are becoming de-rigueur for user identification and authentication purposes and I think it’s obvious why.

Take a system like Facebook – one of the options on both of my ‘hits’ – there’s a platform with millions of registered and highly active users, each knowing their account and password and are happy. Why then clutter up their lives with yet another user-name and password? As  a supplier of a different service – let’s say one which allows you to organise all of your travel plans and manage them in one place – why would you not enable your customers to use the Facebook authentication service? Your customers only have the one user-name and password to remember and that makes them happy and a happy user is more likely to not only stay, but recommend the service to all of the ‘freinds’ on Facebook! Plus you can then leverage that account information to deliver your service directly INTO their Facebook account. It’s win-win!

Microsoft’s Passport came too soon and was face-backwards in it’s approach. They said “Create a single authentication account and sites may let you use it to access their services” a solution waiting for a problem, action with no immediate reward. Of course Live as a brand is now delivering some pretty good services and my Live ID(s) get a daily thumping for sure, but twice now I’ve used my Facebook account to authenticate me as a user of services. Sure there are going to be those who throw their hand up in horror and shout about commercial organisations, security, data-sales and all of that guff but if you’re careful about what you put out there, I can’t see any real harm.

The bottom line? If you are bringing a service to market, don’t place requirements on your users (or potential users) which may put them off. The option to use Facebook, Google, Google Apps (yes there are two.. I don’t know why), or Live ID for authentication purposes may be the single tipping point which turns a <click – next> into a sale.

Cloud Is More Secure

Denis Martin wrote a very good article about how it is possible, using layered techniques, to build an enviroment using Cloud technologies which is more secure that would be possible in-house. Here’s the summary:

Cloud Is More Secure
— Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides compelling cost and strategic benefits. These include scalability with reduced capital expenditure, more efficient use of IT resources, and the ability for an organization to focus on their enterprise’s core competency. Despite fears to the contrary, many well-established security technologies and procedures can be applied cloud computing and provide enterprise-class security. In many cases the cloud vendor may even provide better security in a virtualized environment than the individual enterprise can achieve in a purely physical architecture.[1]
The most effective security is a comprehensive, layered defense based on a framework. A cloud platform can leverage specialized tools to protect the integrity of virtual machines and Internet communications. Virtualization creates logical abstraction layers that allow for multi-tier security policies in order to provide true defense in depth. Enterprises with limited IT resources may not be able to afford the same security measures as a cloud provider and remain competitive. Deploying cloud-based IaaS represents an opportunity for the enterprise to build in security from the ground up.

Carbon Neutral On-line Service Provider

One of the ways I’ve been talking to hosters about how to position their On-live Services (“Cloud”) platforms is the reduction in energy costs to run a virtualised platform over physical ‘room heaters’ running at 5-10% capacity. Last week, CloudSigma announced that it was “Carbon neutral” as an organisation and was therefore offering the most environmentally friendly services available claiming that it’s “carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry.”

Of course running a datacenter isn’t the only aspect which consumed energy and leaves the dreaded ‘Carbon footprint’ but the independent organisation which evaluated CloudSigma, myclimate, have concluded that the organisations approach of “avoid, reduce and offset” has worked. OK, Switzerland does have one of the ‘greenest’ electricity supplies in the world available to it so they had a bit of a head-stert there, but it shows that this IS something to be taken seriously and it will become a factor in the decision =making processes of environmentally aware businesses and organisations.

With “Cloud” or online service consumption becoming more mainstream and business focused, this approach is now coming to be seen as a limitation to customer adoption. If someone needs a RAM heavy but CPU light environment, the chances are that the ‘bucket shops’ don’t offer such a beast, again in history this would have been a “bespoke build” and a premium charge would have been applied for the privilege.

But the times they are a changing and with Amazon’s EC2 utility model showing increasingly that flexibility in all things is key hosters are now embracing the magic of The Slider!

Power to the people!

By allocating costs, not at the end product level but, at the component level the customer can specify exactly what they think they need. The emphasis there isn’t just because I like random italics either. If a customer defines their own product based on what they believe their requirements are, they can never claim to have been mis- or over-sold. There is also an element of truth in the assumption that they’ll also try to ‘go cheap’ too, specing a little lower because they can shave a few sheckles off the monthly / yearly costs. When reality bites and they have to upgrade, they simply use the slider tool in their Control Panel to self provision… Lesson learned, up-sell complete, effort zero.

Give customers the right tools and they’ll work out what they need, provide the right service and they’ll happily slide up the value scale with little or no direct intervention from you

Sliders FTW!

I’m not expecting to see ad’s in the dating pages just yet, but there is a significant growth in developers looking to put their applications ‘out there’ for consumption at scale and as a Service. Now that Microsoft’s Azure has formally been launched we’re going to start seeing some real shift in how both application developer and web-service solution providers are offering their products. Google’s I/O is also starting to hit a significant mark with dev’s looking at size the potential audience for their work with glee!

But oranges are not the only fruit and there are devs out there who will be looking for a provider who is able to work with them on a more personal level, one who will understand their specific requirements and who may have a slightly different, but more accessible way of providing the right service. Hosters should now, more than ever, be looking at the developer community and really asking what services can be provided and how. The paradigm is also shifting in terms of the relationship too, no longer are hosters simply selling space and power for devs, with SaaS offerings there is a n opportunity for true partnership and for applications and services to be offered out as revenue share, referral or reseller.

The days of the “Web Hoster” are almost done. Get flexible, get dynamic and get “Service” oriented, then you’ll get the business.

This is a significant ‘win’ and shows that when the decisions are made it’s not only about pricing – Microsoft’s BPOS stack is typically around the $120 per user per year mark, compared to Google’s $50 – but also about integration, migration, security and risk mitigation. I’m sure that there was also a decent dollop of “I’d just feel better with Microsoft” in there too.

I’m involved with a couple of incipient projects which are also of the magnitude of the University and the decision processes are protracted as the risks of moving core services on-line are identified, discussed, addressed and re-addressed. The costs are very much secondary in these discussions as long as the mitigation is not overly significant.

The Microsoft announcement of the deal said “In addition to updating the university’s numerous and antiquated e-mail and calendaring programs to one centralized system, employees will get 10 GB mailboxes and new features such as instant messaging, presence and online meetings with the ability to share their desktop, audio or video with other users on or off campus,”. And this shows where the adoption of on-line services is really going to take root.

Many, many organisations – not just educational ones – have either old, legacy systems or a whole clutch of systems inherited though mergers and acquisition activity. The capital costs of replacing these systems in-house is usually significant and the benefits are often difficult to put a value on when building a business case. Moving the services on-line becomes THE viable solution in these circumstances as there’s little capital costs (the engagement of an SI for migration activity being the only significant, but potentially vital, one) and the ongoing costs are directly related to usage. The on-line services will usually provide a greater SLA than an in-house solution and will probably also deliver more storage and other functionality that would be implemented in-house too.

Microsoft, Google, or someone else. The decision soon will be not IF they move is to on-line, but WHO will be chosen to deliver the service.

The number of Service Providers offering ‘proper’ services is growing, by proper services I mean those which offer a valuable use for the technologies underneath without selling those technologies directly. I’m proud to have been, peripherally, part of the creation of Rise, the new B-2-B IaaS solution from Fasthosts which set’s it’s stall out very clearly in terms of the services it offers but makes little or no mention of the underlying technologies. Of course these can be gleaned by a visit to the main Fasthosts site where the DataCenter on Demand solution is pretty easy to find. The point is though that for Rise, it’s market simply aren’t interested in the “how” it works, simply in the that it works and provides what they need.

But Rise an DCoD aren’t the only solutions rolling in, look at nGenX. Their new GeoCoud offering takes the whole this a step further and abstracts away the datacenter itself, you pick the services you need and they’re delivered from ‘out there’ with geographical redundancy – obviously organisations with data-boundary limitations need not apply, but for the rest, it’s a nice way to be “global”.

The game continues to change. Service Providers with a quick eye are already part of that change, the slow-pokes may get left behind!

I had been invited to take part in a pre-event workshop for solutions architects which was slated to provide some more technical depth that the other presentations which would take place over the following 2 days. And some of what was shown was actually pretty good. The Orchard project shows that Microsoft are starting to understand the demands of the consumers of services and aims to deliver a content management system based on MS technologies. In particular the use of SQLite as the database store is interesting as this in-process data-store means no more mucking around with database creation and management (probably the only sticky bit of using WordPress for example). The ‘consumer’ focus is also backed up with an entry level site-creation toolset which I would describe as Visual Studio with all of the complicated bits stripped out. This sounds like it’d be a bad thing, but the demonstration I saw was both accessible and seemed very intuitive.

This latter aspect has been achieved by bringing through some of the new Intellisense features which have been brought into both this product and the new VS 2010 product suite. I’m no dev, but this seemed to make the drudge elements – constructing function structures etc – and automate them, allowing the dev to simply plug in the relevant pieces. The final  and most interesting piece – for service providers – is the MS-Deploy endpoint. This IIS extension allows for devs using VS (and the new lighter product) to publish packaged applications and databases up to the server environment. If you are pitching at web developers then this is something your systems MUST be providing.

Video was a big topic too. We are apparently seeing a huge growth in video delivery and consumption over the ‘net – 180% over the last two years with 80% of all ‘net users watching video – and  this is predicted to continue. Service providers should certainly consider video publishing as a potential product, Expression Encoder is free to download and links directly to IIS for simple publication. The guidance here is pretty clear, provide a publication service with a link to some free software for encoding and publishing and get on board sooner rather than later.

Storage has historically been a sticking point when it comes to video delivery but the new paradigms enabled by the XXX-as-a-Service solutions means that everyone – including Service Providers – can take advantage of on-line, “Cloud” storage. After all this is the perfect example of utilisation, if I need the storage I pay for it and it’s provision becomes a direct, measurable, scalable cost for the the extended service I’m providing out to my customers. It starts getting very easy to bring products to scale when you are simply using a massive platform in an on-demand basis.

The rest of the workshop was less engaging however. A technical dive into SharePoint 2010 revealed that installing and provisioning a multi-tenant environment is still not as slick and smooth as it should be and some of the really nice feature of SharePoint (file-system storage of large binaries for example) are dependent upon features available only in the Enterprise edition of SQL server – this is a significant cost per month on SPLA and isn’t something which a lot of SP’s will stump up. This position runs contrary to Microsoft’s general position which is that SharePoint is a solid platform for website creation – cost is ALWAYS an issue when we talk about web-sites.  The final session covered Windows Server Futures. This actually covered Windows Server Pasts and was principally all about what was done in Server 2008 / SP2. The NDA elements regarding Windows Next were so generic that they could have been applied to almost any product produced, ever. Sorry this was rubbish!

Overall it’d have been nice to get a little bit more architectural information throughout the day. We’re about building systems and solutions and there was nothing there to support any thought processes in that direction. I did mention this and there was an acknowledgment that this was a missing element in the day. WIN!

The Summit proper was principally a set of keynotes and, for me, fluff. Yes, we know that on-line services are a big thing, yes we know that Microsoft are “All in” with the Cloud. Of course Microsoft still see hosting partners as strategically important, as a revenue stream SPLA is pretty significant! What we are seeing now though is that, rather than cookie-cutter technical solutions the guidance is now around value differentiation. I’m very happy about this as it vindicates what I’ve been belting on about for a couple of years now, if not longer.

The bottom line?

Microsoft ARE committed to on-line delivery of services. See BPOS, see Office Live, see Azure. They are also committed to spreading the use of the Microsoft stack to deliver services through their hosting partners, what’s changed over the last 18 months though is the method through which this commitment is being delivered. Gone are the end-to-end hosting solutions of times past and in their place are products and services which are designed with ‘Net delivery in mind and open-sourced examples.

The result is that many of the smaller hosters who relied on the plug-and-go solutions are now faced with a significant choice, if they want to continue and advance their solutions they need to start investing in the development and differentiation of their services – otherwise they may well wither on the vine.