Microsoft Pickets Salesforce.com at Cloudforce

It made me think!   Why is Microsoft picketing salesforce.com.  Could it be that they don’t like what the cloud is doing to their business?  Could it be that cloud computing will demolish IT as we know it?   Could it be that Microsoft has figured out that they are a dinosaur?   Hmmm…

Today millions of people and an entire ecosystem of companies selling billions of dollars worth of goods are involved in an activity that history will paint as the rough equivalent to “sticking a needle in your eye.”  

 Picture this:

• You allocate a significant percentage of your people and dollars and have them work on things that are out of your core competency
• Once you have done that, start buying parts that you have to put together, operate, and be totally responsible for
• And for the cherry on the top – you will have to pay the companies that sold you the bag of parts just to pick up the phone when you call

Sound like a good deal?

No way! Yet, I would say that is a fair description of the global IT market as it is today – and it’s painful!      

Benefit can be derived, but high costs, risks, and distractions to your core business are CRAZY OUT OF CONTROL!

The way I look at it, IT in its current incarnation is going the way of the dodo bird.   The global pervasive network called the Internet allows us to consume our IT in a better way – hosted and operated in the cloud by companies who make it their business to do it well.  And the best part, if you don’t like it, you change.   No bag of parts, no big capital expenditures to hold on to, no regrets.  You can even call them without having to pay something extra.   It’s all good.

Over the next 10 years – the “old” tech companies will either completely reinvent themselves or perish!   This is their buggy whip-to-automobile moment.   Cloud is it – it’s cheaper, better, and easier.   

So to Microsoft – I am sorry – we will not go back to the old ways.   We have seen the light – and its name is CLOUD!

Let's put it on the table - disconnected products are lame! THEY ARE A PAIN!

They require me to do the heavy lifting. I have to understand their every need, to learn arcane ways to interact with them, and heaven forbid if they have a flaw - I will have to live with it until the end of time.  A prime example: my high-end HD TV that chooses to lose its noodle every time the game get's close! How does it know?

Disconnected products are all little islands - they barely interact with me and hardly ever with each other. I want to corral them, to organize them, to turn them into an army that works with relentless efficiency, doing the things that I want them to do - when I want them to do them...I WANT MY PRODUCTS TO BE CONNECTED!

To be fair, today's products do amazing things, but the avalanche of complexity has caused a great disconnect between the user and the maker of the product. Users want a better product experience. Makers want to differentiate themselves from their competition and sell more product. So, where do we meet?

We meet in the cloud! I want to utilize the infinite possibilities of the cloud to teach my products new tricks! To teach them my likes and dislikes... to get them to play well with others... to evolve...

Instead of putting more complexity into my product - into a platform that can't handle and organize it - utilize connectivity to leverage capability in the cloud and give me the reigns! And here is the amazing thing: I, the consumer, will actually pay for you to give me the reigns! If it creates value, makes my product better, makes it more useful, solves problems for me, I will gladly pay. The iPhone is a perfect example of this. Today, this platform has more than 200,000 applications and has sold more than 1 billion devices. It has changed the game.

Your product, too, can become a cloud-based platform. Medical devices? Yes. Industrial machines? Yes. Consumer products? Definitely yes.  Join me on my crusade. Let's rid the world of lame disconnected products! Connect them today! http://developer.axeda.com.

Dale

A common request we hear is the need for vertical market M2M applications. The thought is, what if there were applications for healthcare, energy, transportation, industrial etc? That would make rolling out M2M applications much faster. The problem is, due to the wide range of application requirements and lack of standards, this is not practical today. Take healthcare for example, what's the commonality between an application for home glucose monitoring and hospital respirators? Or for transportation, can you create a single application for school bus monitoring and a pay as you drive insurance program?

Although you can't create vertical applications for these markets, you can build applications much faster by starting with a platform that takes care of the issues that are common such as managing connectivity, modeling assets, location based services, business rules, and business system integration. Emily Green from Yankee wrote a great blog post about this titled "Opportunities and risks in M2M's maturation"

Connected Products are inherently unique, companies want to create specific applications to differentiate themselves in the market. Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook are both e-book readers, but the applications are unique based on the hardware and the services that each company offers. There are areas were a general purpose application can work across multiple products such as Axeda ServiceLink which is a remote service solution for wired assets, and fleet management applications for some types of vehicles. But in general, the world of M2M applications is very diverse, and is better served by an M2M platform vs. lightweight vertical applications that don't really solve a problem.

 

 

Since telecommunication providers have already connected most of the people in the world, to continue growing they now need to connect products or "things." This new market, also called M2M, will eventually have many more connections than there are people in the world, so the opportunity is huge. Sprint recognizes this, and we announced an alliance with them recently to make it easy for our customers to quickly build and deploy connected products.

By connected products, we mean things like e-readers, utility meters, cars, TV's, appliances, health monitors, you name it. As Eric Schmidt CEO of Google said recently, "A device that is not connected is not interesting; it is literally lonely. An application that does not leverage the cloud isn't going to wow anybody." With Axeda, devices never need to be lonely.

There's a new Forrester report out about the next cycle of innovation, which Forrester dubs "Smart Computing". In the abstract of the report, I keyed in on an interesting statement:
 
the problems faced by business have very strong vertical industry dimensions, leading to much greater demand for highly verticalized IT solutions... Horizontal technologies -- which today represent about 95% of all technology purchases -- will continue to dominate the technology market... but vertical technology solutions will expand their market share to 25% or so by 2016.

Platform pedantry aside, it follows from the above statement that "smart computing" (which is probably best interpreted as a superset of M2M, ubiquitous computing, sentient computing, and next-generation Enterprise Integration), will need a horizontally applicable set of foundational technology that can be used to build vertical applications that are crafted to solve a domain problem.

We can expect to see an avalanche of generic and mediocre (generically mediocre?) track-and-trace and asset management apps to try to fill this expanding space. They will be horizontal, meaning that the vendors will try to sell it to you whether you are monitoring wind turbine output or your rental car customers. This is fine if you just want to get the lowest common denominator, generic experience. If you are looking to build an innovative, game-changing solution in your industry, you need a platform that offers a technology stack that is flexible enough to let you focus on your solution's unique value, while launching your development progress forward past the details of connectivity, workflow processing, scalability and security.

The enterprise software community is waking up to the importance of realtime data access, APIs and Web-Oriented Architectures.

2010 should be an exciting year for Axeda.

As I posted earlier this month, we are creating a series of videos on the Axeda Platform.  See the latest editions below:

Integrating Axeda Platform with Oracle & SAP

Axeda Platform - Axeda Wireless Technologies

Axeda Platform - Connecting to Existing Wireless Assets with Custom Codecs

Do you like videos as a way to learn about products, or do you prefer written materials? Let us know!

 

What is Axeda Connexion 2010? It's the place where you can connect with the community of people using Axeda products to create smart service programs and build new M2M applications. It's also an opportunity to share your success stories with your peers, and learn about how the latest features in Axeda products can make you even more successful. The conference is open to all: customers, partners, press, analysts and people interested in becoming customers.

This year the conference will be in Miami, April 12-14, which will be especially welcoming to those of us coming from northern latitudes. Yesterday was the first day of winter, so I can't wait! Look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

It's been written about before, but it bears repeating: it seems that suddenly every computing product calls itself a platform. In the early days of computing we made programs (when was the last time you met someone that called themselves a programmer?), then at some point that didn't sound good enough, so they became systems, but that started to imply green-screen terminals, so the new object oriented kidz started calling stuff frameworks. More recently, the SOA crowd got us calling stuff services. Now platform has become the term du jour, with everyone from chip makers to graphics designers jumping on the bandwagon.

That's the way it goes, I suppose. It's really hard to summarize in a sound-byte definition, but I'll make a stab:

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is an offering that provides solution developers the necessary services to implement solid applications, where the application execution environment, development and testing tools, administration and configuration, and runtime monitoring are provisioned in the cloud.

Here are some corollaries to that definition:

A PaaS should:

• enable rapid time-to-market for solutions
• massively scale
• provide high availability and fault tolerance
• provide a standard security model
• abstract the physical infrastructure completely from the application
• provide standard services that are tailored to the general domain (i.e. a PaaS for remote asset intelligence should provide strong support for Assets and Communications as first-class concepts)
• provide an integrated model for the application lifecycle: develop, test, deploy, maintain, end-of-life
• have a comprehensive and open API that is consumable by the widest possible set of technologies

That's a really, really high bar. To me, calling something a platform implies an absolute commitment to addressing the above list. That's what it takes to walk the walk.

 

Great article today in the Wall Street Journal on how AT&T is looking to the M2M market for growth. The executive leading the initiative (Glenn Lurie) was the guy who got the iPhone deal, so this is a high priority for AT&T. In the article, it says that some analysts think that the market for carrier services might be only $16B a year by 2013, another analysts puts the opportunity at $90B a year by 2013. Either way, the market for connecting "things" is going to be huge, just not sure how huge.

We have posted a new video on the Axeda Platform, this one is about building applications. Check it out. Instead of a whiteboard, this time we used a screencast to show screens from the demo application and the rules builder. We will be putting out a steady stream of videos covering all aspects of the platform. Bookmark http://www.axeda.com/videos to follow our progress!