Upcoming Australia / NZ CloudCamps: Sydney, Wellington, Melbourne, Perth

NZ's own resident Cloud rainmaker @benkepes has been hard at work helping to get CloudCamps organised around the region this year.

• Mar 4 2010: CloudCamp Sydney http://www.cloudcamp.org/sydney/2010-03-04
  
• Mar 26 2010: CloudCamp Wellington http://www.cloudcamp.org/wellington/2010-03-26
• Apr 1 2010: CloudCamp Melbourne http://www.cloudcamp.org/melbourne/2010-04-01
• Apr 8 2010: CloudCamp Perth http://www.cloudcamp.org/perth/2010-04-08

Cloudcamp's mission statement:

"CloudCamp was formed to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing

Through a series of local CloudCamp events, attendees exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. As an informal, member-supported gathering, we rely entirely on volunteers to help with meeting content, speakers, meeting locations, equipment and membership recruitment. We also have corporate sponsors that provide financial assistance with venues, software, books, discounts, and other valuable donations. To become a member, simply register. Anyone may attend a meeting, there are no fees or dues."

Hope to see you there...

Gartner Prediction: By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Gartner's New Year predictions included a pretty impressive statistic that confirms the "IT Free Business" trend which Memia is working towards for our customers:

"By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points."

For the rest of Gartner's predictions see http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413

Cloud model software development team - Technology Architecture viewpoint

Over the last 6 months Memia has successfully operationalized and proved a new (for us!), scalable cost model for our software application development business, almost exclusively using cloud infrastructure and services throughout. I'm sure there are a lot of other folks out there who have done the same, but having worked in software for 15 years I wanted to share our experiences - and ask how can you do it for even less? The near-zero financial capital requirements of this model implies that the barrier to entry for software (...as-as-service) is now based almost entirely on how smart your team is rather than how much capital you have.

Business Principles

The business principles we've used to guide our Technology architecture are pretty simple:

• Minimize total cost of ownership
• Opex not Capex where possible - we're a startup!
• Ensure an acceptable level of data security (In particular protection of IP)
• Ensure an acceptable level of usability for staff
• Our priority is to deliver working, tested, software, monthly - we need our IT collaboration services to be available 99.9% of the time at least. However, we can survive the odd outage.
• Content over style: documentation associated with software development does not need rich desktop publishing features.
• Generally we find our team are more productive when they are colocated in the office for core hours every working day
  
• Trust our staff to uphold security policies and procedures
  

The first couple of financial principles strongly push towards buying our applications as a service, not as a capital expense. However, when we started out, we still weren't absolutely sure what "acceptable" meant for security or usability: but after trialling some services and reading through the SLAs we decided to see if using the common SaaS collaboration applications which are currently available (in particular Google Apps) would be "usable enough" (they are. With spades on) and "secure enough" (the jury's still out but looking good so far...)

Technology tactics

- Bring your own laptop and softphone (each staffmember / contractor gets a monthly allowance to provide and support their own equipment - this is the 21st century everyone has their own laptop, why double up?)
- Cloud for everything. No servers anywhere in our business
- HTTPS and, where necessary, certificate-based authentication for all internet-based communications
- Everything in a browser. (Where possible: most IDEs, application runtimes don't allow for this. There are some examples such as Heroku (Rails) and Force.com are getting there, although that's not so practical yet).
- Wireless internet only
- Work remotely outside core hours if you want (Note: this has implications for Business continuity = go home and work from there!)
- Think of the trees before you print anything - collaborate electronically and round a projector where possible
- Skype is "good enough" for non-sales conference calls
- All integration, system, performance, load and UAT testing is done on Cloud IaaS (either Amazon or GoGrid). Once the testing has finished we wind the virtual servers back down and stop leaking $$$

This means we've ended up with an infrastructure technology architecture that looks (simply!) like this:



...that is, the only capital expenditure on IT Equipment required was:

• Wireless routers (in our case these came free with our ADSL line but we upgraded to our own for better reliability)
• Wireless multifunction printers
• A projector for each meeting room
• PSTN phones (only used for free local calls - looking at getting rid of these as we never use them for business!)

Again: No servers, no datacentre. Everything else is opex.

Services Architecture

Abstracting up a level from the networking and infrastructure technology, we've developed a reference services architecture for an software development organisation, shown in the diagram below. This basically enumerates all of the input technology services (ie excluding sales, marketing, HR, real estate) which go into delivering a working increment of the software on a monthly iterative cycle, together with associated artefacts like project management reports and requirements documentation (the output services).



The input application services are divided into two main categories:

1. Collaboration and productivity applications

We have become solid users of Google Apps for collaboration as a team - Google Sites especially is a great way for the team to post content and documentation for the rest of the team to collaborate on together. We also use it for our requirements documentation and our BAs work directly with customers to get Use Case and UI screenshots right. It meets most of our requirements, and the real-time collaboration beats client-side productivity tools hands down. We also use Skype for conference calls and, for the most part, it's ok. (And we're at the end of a long thin pipe under the Pacific Ocean here in New Zealand!)

2. Software development applications

Depending upon what the target application technology is that's being developed, you can mix and match on the software dev apps. (For example for developing ASP.NET applications developers will generally use Microsoft's integrated Visual Studio and Team System toolset, installed on cloud IaaS, but for Ruby on Rails for example you could use Netbeans or Aptana for the IDE, GitHub for source control and then choose your own flavours of continuous integration and defect management).

What I'm still on the lookout for is the best SaaS requirements management tool - any suggestions?

Fundamentally, our experience is that this technology model *works*, and furthermore it *scales*. It cuts the technology costs of running a software development organisation to the bone, and provided that the business in question is satisfied with the security and reliability of using services in the Cloud provides easily the best value solution.

So this is how you design and operate IT for a software development business. How many other industries does this model apply to....?

Notes from Cloud Futures Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference

On my way back home to NZ now, time to collate some thoughts on the last couple of days here at the Cloud Futures SaaS migration conference.

There were some really great speakers here - including the first time in a long while when Amazon and Salesforce have spoken together in the same room. In particular, my main takeaways from the speakers were:

Keynote from Bill McNee, Saugatuck Technology: Valuable fact-based market research:

- Despite current economic crisis, purchasing for Cloud IaaS and SaaS remain strong through 2011
- However, financial benefits around cloud IaaS potentially illusory? (=> position around other business benefits than price).
- A new ecosystem is forming around Cloud Computing, will transform IT sector
- Sweet-spot: 100-499 employee count, then 500-1000. But there is significant demand from Enterprise.
- Highly interwoven: hybrid app architectures emerge
- Cloud dev via PaaS providers has begun to open up
- A new SaaS based business services delivery model is emerging
- While roughly 35% of ISVs have begun transition to SaaS, will be long and rocky road for most (expect around 70% eventually.) Totally new model for traditional ISVs - many not prepared financially or operationally for the changes needed.

Mark Trang from Salesforce:
- 7 secrets of SaaS success, a small set of moves from Benioff's playbook

Allan Leinwand from Panorama Capital giving the VC perspective:
- Enablers of Cloud Computing such as networking are continually getting cheaper: run CC on the "Taiwan Inc" model - eg Vyatta, a firm that Allan is invested in can provide networking equipment equivalent to an $6000 router for $10! The landscape changes. Expect costs to keep coming down.
- Cloud Services Market: Gartner : Cloud Services market triples from $56.87 -> $150.5 2009 -> 2013 (mainly SaaS)
- Obstacles: Security, Management,Performance,Economics
- VCs are looking for Cloud startups who understand how to measure performance / SLAs
- Q: What will drive exits for Cloud startups? A: Monetization of customer growth.
- Being "cloud" is sexy and doubles your valuation multiple. (Eg Rackspace cheap acquisition of Slicehost (<$10m?) made them a "Cloud" company overnight, their multiple went up to 4x compared to 1.2-2.7 for their competition.

Rick Nucci from Boomi
- "API is not optional" - all SaaS must come with API AS STANDARD. (There is NO DATABASE!)
- All SaaS-to-SaaS integration can now be done in the Cloud
- SaaS API Blueprint recommends Object.Operation naming convention

Sumatrar Sarkar from TechStrategyLabs: The Economics of Cloud Migration
- Demand side economics: NO MORE CAPEX
- Supply side economics split between Supplier and VAR
- Very impressive (if slightly incomprehensible!) TCO model which models optimum allocation of costs between Customer, Supplier and VAR.

Doug Harr, CIO of Ingres:
- Ingres decided to run with totally SaaS-based IT (except desktop productivity and directory services from Microsoft)
- Successful implementations, rapid agile delivery
- Have implemented SSO across their SaaS apps using MyOneLogin
- Leading frontrunner in "IT Free Business" model
- Enables the role of CIO to be more involved in enabling business strategy, not day to day operations.
- CIO is more involved in understanding risk model: auditors still learning how to audit control objectives for security and management when it's consumed via SaaS.

Erik Novikoff, Enki (previously director of software dev, Netsuite)

- Enki provide "people on demand" ;-)
- Enki have done 50-60 customer deployments from on-premise to the Cloud.
- Enki customers enjoy increased revenue, new opportunities,delight their customers. (He says).
- With SaaS, can calculate costs as fraction of total revenue
- Retrain some traditional sys admins to be cloud admins
- Charging for service:
Model - Enki charges based on "cost plus"
Pricing
- Start with equal 2-year NPV (ie equal to boxed software) and upsell

- Gotchas / one time costs/tasks:
-Moving to Cloud
- Web presentation platform
- Single to multitenant conversion
- Redesign for scaling
- Adding API / mashup
- Monitoring (SLA) - internal and external
- Billing system
- Upgrading support offering (24x7)
- Financing your move: Covering delayed time-to-value
- Marketing: whole new world with different competitors/comms channels

Ramon Chen, Rainstor
Rainstor is a vendor of Cloud-based archiving solution. Useful for the following use cases:
- Storage of archived data for compliance purposes
- Escrow of data held in 3rd party SaaS services
- Log and security event data retention

Interesting product (service!), launched in US today.

Richard Reiner @ Enomaly
Richard woke up the room with more specialized detail on the security question than I've seen to date. Cloud IaaS is potentially compromisable because software is the *only* security control - a compromised virtualization layer therefore means that your data and applications are not secure. He characterizes all current cloud IaaS vendors as saying "Trust me" based on their quality people and processes. (The "Trust Me" cloud). Enomaly is (about to?) launch a product which provides the "Verified" cloud, and provides a direct channel from a browser plugin to the underlying hardware layer to verify that the software installed (eg virtualization / hypervisor layer) has not been tampered with. Good communication of the issues, but does the cost outweigh the risk?

Nolan M. Goldberg, Proskauer: Legal Issues of Cloud Computing- Case law is behind the technology
- Make sure legal issues are covered off in service agreement (which is a contract!). In particular, make sure that responsibility for paying costs to comply with legal requests is assigned.
- Went through the standard legal risks of privacy, data security, geographical location / jurisdiction

Gowri Subranium, Aspire Systems:
- Aspire are a Chennai-based SI / development partner specialising in building SaaS. (Bit like us!)
- Gowri introduced three main strategies to build SaaS:
1. Ground up build
2. Build on top of PaaS
3. "Solution Accelerator" - effectively a set of code libraries which enable delivery of the platform out of the box.


You can see the Twitter stream for the conference at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23cfsj09 (mostly me, natch...)

From my side, the conference was worth it in that it:
- Validated my thinking that the industry is at the same early stages of development across the globe, and ISVs / IT Services Vendors are still unclear as to which business models will work and which ones won't. "How do you make money out of SaaS / Cloud?" - there's only one data point so far and that's Salesforce. The costs and risks for traditional ISVs to make the move are substantial, and maybe better strategy is to "enhance" an existing on-premise offering with SaaS rather than "migrate". (Begs the question what do you do when a SaaS competitor for your core offering takes your customers a couple of years down the road....)
- Enabled networking with a (surprisingly small) number of key players in the industry in the US (particularly enjoyed catching up with @MichaelDunham of Scio - who are an agile outsourced SaaS vendor much as ourselves - and trading war stories, and the other guys from outside the border Luc and Stephan from C3Wave from Belgium).
- Overall, the trip has provided some solid new insights into the risks, opportunities, strategies and challenges with moving from on-premise to SaaS and Cloud. Useful, all in all.

In San Jose for Cloud Futures SaaS Migration conference

Arrived in San Jose after 11 hour flight to SFO from Auckland and then what seemed like almost as long to get from the airport in a shared minibus. Good to go all around the Valley though - drove a really roundabout route past the silicon valley headquarters of Oracle, Ebay, Microsoft, Adobe and hundreds more. Great to be back in an economy where software truly "belongs" rather than one dominated by agriculture... ;-/

Anyway, I'm here for the Cloud Futures Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference '09 which starts tomorrow - see http://www.cloudfutures.com/usa/index.shtml. This is one of Memia's "sweet spots" and we really enjoy working with software businesses to make the move (both technology and operations) from the on-premise model to SaaS (see http://www.memia.com/isvservices.html) for more details. I'm looking forward to meeting others who are doing the same thing in this particular part of the industry, and learning about what's going on this side of the Pacific and how our skills and experience stack up back in APJ.

Memia is hiring: XHTML, CSS, ASP.NET Developers

Are you an experienced web developer with strong Web 2.0 and Enterprise Application development knowledge, an understanding of how the best SaaS applications should work, and (even better) experience of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes?

If so, we would like to hear from you.

You will need the following experience and skills:

* Over 3 years of professional experience as a Software Developer
* XHTML - with knowledge of upcoming v.5 features
* CSS (2.x min - ideally 3.x) - for typography, positioning/layout, image manipulation/sprites and experience in cross-browser compatibility issues
* JavaScript with a working knowledge of the JQuery library.

In addition any additional knowledge and experience in the following would be a strong advantage:

* ASP.NET 2.0 and/or ASP.NET MVC
* IIS (6.0 minimum, 7.0 preferred)
* A deep understanding of web-based applications and SaaS delivery models
* Ideally experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and processes
* Ability to work closely with customers, software testers and business analysts in an Agile software development environment
* Strong written documentation skills
* Rigorous attention to detail
* Ability to bring creativity and new ideas to the job, and to be willing to put in the extra effort to help the team meet deadlines
* Above all, we are looking for you to be a self-starter who delivers results from day one.

What we can offer:

* Market-competitive remuneration
* Work from our great City Centre offices on Cashel Mall
* Relaxed flexible working environment
* Get to be part of a world class team using the latest Cloud-based technology
* Be part of the next great global SaaS success story born right here in Canterbury

If this role describes you and fits in with *your* career ambitions, please send your CV in confidence to Smina Vanlerberghe, Director: smina@memia.com

Note: You have to be able to work in New Zealand to apply for this job.
There's visa information at New Zealand Immigration Service.

CloudCamp Christchurch - Fri October 30th

Cloud Camp Christchurch Unconference

October 12, 2009 - "CanterburyCloud", an emerging idea for a network amongst SaaS/Cloud Computing businesses in Christchurch, today announces the first Cloud Camp Christchurchunconference (agenda free event where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supportive environment) to discuss what such a network could achieve for its participants, the region and the world.

In Christchurch and Canterbury we have a surprising number of players in this field - all doing interesting things with internet technologies but, at least to a certain extent, isolated from the good advice, talent, resources and plain support of their peers.

We believe we can change this, thus the idea of developing CanterburyCloud. So what is CanterburyCloud? It is a network where start-ups can access and leverage the communal wisdom of their peers. It is potentially a co-working space where growing companies can work and bounce ideas off like-minded businesses. It is potentially a marketing platform - a network of businesses that can, to an extent, share key messages about our value proposition, resources and evangelise each other's services within New Zealand and internationally. It will become what we want it to be but ultimately, it has to be unique - shine for its excellence from a healthy dose of agility, smart business and web savvy people.

We would like to explore this opportunity with you and we are therefore inviting you to join an unconference - but beware! It is not going to be a tech event, rather it is going to look at developing this idea of CanterburyCloud further- vision, goals, forming, participants, sponsorship, venues, business models, strengths and weaknesses and the general appetite for working together.

We will be holding this event at 1pm-5pm on Friday 30 October at CDC, 193 Cashel Street, Training Room T1, Level 2, followed by free drinks and nibbles at Memia, 107-109 Cashel Street, Level 1. Please RSVP by 28 October to smina@memia.com

We would like to thank CDC and Telecom for their generous contribution in supporting us with organizing this event.

See also Ben Kepes' blog post at diversity.net.nz for a bit more background.