Clouds

Go here….http://gigaom.com/2009/06/17/how-clouds-can-complement-consolidation/

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Google – The Data Center as Computer

This is worth reading. It comes via Vinnie Marchandi.

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GigaOm Interviews IBM on Clouds

GigaOm has an interesting interview today…

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IBM and Clouds

The headline reads more like a press release from IBM than something from the New York Times : “I.B.M. to Help Clients Fight Cost and Complexity”. Regardless, it is worth consideration…

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Peer1 and Guarantees

Peer1 in the UK is offering prospects a guaranteed 30% cost savings to switch to Peer1 UK’s hosting service.  I believe cost savings are a good thing – good for the customer and certainly good for the provider assuming  it is not significantly diluting its margins.  This is a win: win situation (do these ever truly occur??).

That said, I also think that using price as the hammer to encourage adoption is not a great idea unless you firmly believe you are engaged in selling a commodity and have little other value to add. It does not position Peer1 particularly well in the market – surely being price competitive, while focusing on superior customer service or disaster recovery or something else would be a better place to play? Unless you are Walmart, being known as  a price provider is not necessarily a good thing.

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Savvis and SaaS

I thought this was an interesting release from Savvis. Savvis has joined the Microsoft Software + Services Incubation Center Program. The stated goal is ‘to help guide independent software vendors (ISVs) and ensure their business model and applications are ready for service-based delivery’. According to the release, ‘the Microsoft Software + Services Incubation Center Program is designed to ease the commercial, financial, and technical challenges ISVs and enterprises encounter as they build and deploy software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models.’

Like I said, this is interesting. The transition from ISV to SaaS provider is not a simple or straightforward process and it represents significant change within the organization – the entire business model needs to change, starting with company culture, moving to sales and marketing and finishing with service delivery and on-going support. While Savvis can deliver many of the technical components necessary for succesful service delivery, it cannot deliver the other components of the puzzle which are equally, if not more, important. The partnership with Microsoft enables Savvis to deliver the other components. The challenge is that customer success will be driven only if all of the components of the transition are successfully managed. Missing the mark on one puts the entire transition at significant risk – the components are too integrated to be considered on a stand alone basis. Clearly Savvis is dependent upon Microsoft for a significant component of the program and it will be incumbent upon them to manage the relationship as tightly as possible. If all the pieces are properly tied together the value add is compelling.

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Badda Bing?

Microsoft officially launched its Google-killer, Bing, today.

I have spent some time poking around the site today and I confess that I have not found Bing to be the ground breaking, earth shaking revelation that was promised. It seems like just another search engine at first blush. I will keep at it over the next few days to satisfy my curiosity. I tend to be a monogamist when it comes to this sort of stuff, and I wonder if most consumers are the same. How many chances Bing will get before people simply fall back to Google or whatever they use today?

Microsoft really needs to get it marketing department sorted out though. The name is dreadful. Bing? Like the cherry, the guy from Friends or Stanley Bing (please follow this link…well worth the read) from the pages of Fortune magazine? Ugh. Someone suggested that Bing stood for ‘Bing is not Google’. Brutal. I am not sure if this is worse than Zune (does that stand for something?), but it is close. Good thing they have $100 million to spend on the launch.

I will let you know what I think in a few days…

Meanwhile, I will get back to regular programming.

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