Is that regular or large infrastructure to go? Sunday, April 29, 2007

At lunch last week, I was chatting with a "techie" about whether one should spend money upfront on building an infrastructure that scales or whether it should simply be designed to be capable of scaling.

It's a debate of keen interest to an investor. The latter should be cheaper and hence offers the appeal of keeping the bet size down until the venture is demonstrating success, at which point, no one will refuse money to scale up. You also get the impression that hardware should be capable of being added easily (famous last words).

However, who can predict when the infrastructure will be required i.e. foretelling the timing of success with sufficient certainty that the infrastructure upgrade will begin in time. The big fear, of course, is missing the "wave" of popularity and actually generating negative sentiment when "customers" find the service isn't working because it's overstretched.

Artificial peaks are the worst though - an example of which is the "Techcrunch bounce", that Mike Arrington acknowledges. In this situation, there is a sudden surge of interest in the site following a blog post or launch piece, which then fades away before a "normal" level of traffic is established. The challenge is whether to build an infrastructure capable of dealing with this only for it to be redundant for some time thereafter.

Many argue you should invest upfront. After all, disk spaces and servers are relatively cheap these days. Yet does that include full resilience from the outset such that the likelihood data loss or service outages is minimised/eliminated. After all, depending on the website offering, losing your customer's data or being temporarily unavailable may wipe out your business on reputation grounds alone eg calendar service, online document storage.

I'm not sure there is a right answer but I know that good design is essential. Peter Van Dijck's has a useful post linking to 10 presentations from some of the large websites on their scaling efforts which offer some fascinating insights. Essential reading for all sites builders.

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The Users that know more than IT Wednesday, February 28, 2007

It was never meant to be this way. IT was way too complicated for the users and that was the way IT departments liked it. "You pay us and we'll sort out this difficult stuff, just hand over the money and watch us do our magic."

Well, a combination of increasing number of IT literate users and available online services are starting to challenge this arrangement. When the guy paying the bill knows as much as the person providing the service, or at least enough to ask the right questions, the balance of power shifts back towards the user. When the user can declare UDI when either service satisfaction is not forthcoming from IT or is not delivered at a reasonable cost or in appropriate timeframes, then the power has truly moved.

This post from Ed Sim nails the story.

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Teqlo - a mashup platform for the masses? Monday, February 19, 2007

Dennis Howlett has blogged on several occasion about Teqlo but its' only recently that they have opened the beta to the general public. I confess that in the absence of trying the service it was hard to understand what the fuss was about, particularly since the site home page gave almost no info away.

So having finally been able to sign up, I confess that I can see why Dennis was getting excited, albeit there is clearly some way for the service to go.



Their intro video is here, which follows the style of the increasingly infamous web2.0 video.



Teqlo provides a platform within which non-programmers can join "widgets" together to create personalised applications. Whilst this initially appears daunting, Teqlo has provided a couple of pre-configured apps to start you off. One is a simple "lead & call" app which allows you to record to-do's that are automatically added into your google calendar; the second returns results from a search of your LinkedIn account with a google map of the contacts that you select from those results.

It took some "fiddling" to get the hang of modifying the examples, but it was quickly evident how immensely powerful this environment is, far more so than the current incarnation of Yahoo Pipes. I'm intending to continue to play with Teqlo because I've hardly scratched the service of what seems possible. As ever, it's always easier to develop an application if you have a real need rather than just dabbling with no purpose. Also the environment is presently constrained by the range of widgets that may be usefully "mashed-up" - some of the google widgets are clearly designed to simply be viewed and no "do'ed". But this inventory will continue grow and I can see Teqlo being an important pioneer in "crossing the chasm" to the mainstream.

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Saas firms will simply love Firefox 3 for its offline feature Monday, February 12, 2007

I wrote the other day about Adobe's Apollo which will enable online applications to run offline. Read/Write web have a report that emerged from FooCamp New Zealand that Firefox v3 will deliver support for offline applications.

If they weren't doing so already, this will galvanise Saas providers into pushing Firefox as the browser of choice, since it will hugely advance their cause by tackling one of the issues surrounding Saas apps, namely loss of connection to the service. Whilst some may be concerned about offending Microsoft, the benefits to the customer that it promises surely outweigh the upside of neutrality.

Given that both Adobe and Mozilla are addressing this issue, I imagine some resources are being marshalled over at Microsoft HQ to figure out how to do the same.

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SAP on the slide or is this a turning point? Friday, January 26, 2007

SAP, the world's largest business software company, is getting battered on the stock market. Its' shares are down 15% already this year as worries mount about its' ability to continuing growing given the saturation in the large corporate market.

Back in 2000 it did begin attempts to enlarge its market focus to include SMEs but most people consider its' software far too complex for this space.

However, SAP is clearly renewing its focus on this SME market and has announced that it is to introduce a SaaS offering from the end of March. It will be subscription based and mark a departure from SAPs usual licencing model.

SAP claim they will be the first company to offer a business suite of products on demand, rather than niche CRM or accounting components.

Is this a desperate attempt to revive their fortunes by hooking up to what SAP may perceive as a fad/fashion or a genuine refocussing of the company to eventually operate alongside pure-SaaS players like Salesforce?

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Software as a service - ups and downs Monday, January 15, 2007

I'm a Saas fan. If you are too, you'll have no doubt met lots of doubters about it who've raised objections concerns etc. I've even listed some of those concerns in past posts and in this slidedeck.

One concern cited is the reliability/availability of the service. No matter that you rely on the phone company or electricity company to enable you to do your business, which is rarely raised by folks (unless they live in California where power outages have been known or some third world states), it just feels different, especially if you feel the service could be hosted internally.

So, in case the doubters are struggling to provide examples to make their case, and in the spirit of honesty and openness, they should be aware that posterboy of the Saas world, Salesforce was reportedly offline the other day.

Thanks to Dennis Howlett for the tipoff. Pleased that Dennis likes Koral too. He's correct whe he points out, I did forget to mention that Koral handles document version control too, which is a hugely important feature when talking about a collaboration app.

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Koral - an excellent content & collaboration management solution Sunday, January 14, 2007

I'm really impressed with Koral which is an online (SaaS) enterprise content management solution, which launched on 26 Sept 2006.


Koral helps you put an end to wasted hours trying to find your most recent and relevant content by synchronizing it in a central place and making searching for it very intuitive. Say goodbye to a mess of folders: Koral doesn't require them. Koral then helps you use your business information to collaborate within your company and with partners, suppliers and customers.

With this online service you can
Koral is offered soley as a Software-as-a-Service solution (like salesforce.com). A business user can create a workspace to collaborate, then invite others (similar to how linkedin works). The sweet-spot of companies using Koral at the moment is department and team-level collaboration. This is smart - I've always believed that the best way for these apps to succeed is to sneak in under the corporate procurement and IT radar, and then spread between users who entice their colleagues in because of the network externalities benefits.

To make it easy for business teams to adopt, Koral has focused on (i) usability (ii) self-service administration (iii) ease of adding co-workers. The UI is very slick and intuitive, as is the navigation.

I always approach Enterprise 2.0 applications with some apprehension, because the developers often forget that corporate users rarely have the option to install plugs Java Applets or ActiveX as it's highly likely these will be blocked in a corporate environment. So in demanding that users have the latest browser, Java RTE etc they lock out most users. With Koral, they've not fallen into this trap and so are more likely to achieve viral success.

There is an optional desktop application which extends the value you can get from Koral, but it's not mandatory. If, in comparison, you look at something like Microsoft Groove, the fact that it requires a 30Mb+ install of a windows app to do *anything* makes you realise why it didn't spread virally amongst corporates.

Another smart move by Koral is offering this service via the Salesforce AppExchange, which plugs them into a large distribution opportunity.

Check the introductory video out which provides a good insight into its capabilities. There's also a pretty good video of Tim Baker (a Brit involved in a great web app still living in Britain!) doing a demo to Robert Scoble here. However, one cautionary note is that without the optional desktop piece shown on the demo video you can't simply drop documents into an icon on your desktop for them to upload nor do you get the IM alert/notification that you are using an out dated version when opening it on the desktop. Oddly, as you'll see in both videos, this a pitched as a major benefit of the app without mentioning either the install requirement or that this ordinarily won't be available to many corporate users.

The service is free for basic usage with fees kicking in as it is more widely adopted within a business in similar fashion to Salesforce.

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