Gianpaolo's blog

Unless you have been abducted by aliens a few months ago and just returned to earth I am pretty sure you have heard of Software + Services or S+S (if you have been abducted and just returned, hence not heard about S+S, I suppose you have bigger issues...

From the left: eugenio , fred , me. Not sure why I am the fat one and by the way, Fred is way too tall :) Thanks Wu Hao for the picture. [update: I was just made aware that the motto used for the title of this post is often used by the Hell's Angels....

A few days ago, Fred and I hosted a BoF at the OpSource Saas Summit . It was a great discussion. Most of the 15 people who came to the BoF were startups exec. the few others were architects / director of dev. at larger companies. The discussion...

In the last few weeks I have read quite a few articles (and blog entries) glorifying multi-tenancy, how it will solve world hunger and bring peace to the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am a BIG FAN of multi-tenancy and fully comprehend the value of architecting...

It took us a bit more than expected, but a few minutes ago, we released Litware HR: our SaaS sample application. The sample is a fictitious HR application, but what matters is not what it does, but how it does it. Architected as a single instance...

Sometime watching a show that has nothing to do with software architecture could help you understand architectural concepts. It recently happened to me. I usually come home early enough to have dinner with my kids, read them a story and put them to...

In the last few months, I have been talking to a lot of different companies about SaaS. Initially, my discussions were primarily with ISVs , as many are considering (if not already in the process of) re-architecting their solutions for SaaS delivery;...

Several weeks ago, we wrote a introductory article on service delivery platforms published in the Architect Journal . If we don't count blog entries, this is our first published article looking into "running" software delivered as a service. Over the...

Wow… I have not blogged for a while, but I need to get out my blog silence to share my experience about the IE8 $10K prize competition, which by now, half of the Internet and 80% of Twitter community has commented on. (well OK, maybe not :) Let’s start...

Yesterday, we released ( here ) on the MSDN Architecture center a section dedicated to Software + Services (S+S). We realized that depending on whether you are a large enterprise, an ISV, a hosting company or trying to establish yourself as a trusted...

Below is an diagram I have been using for a while in my presentations on software + services (more about s+s here ); so due to popular demand :) here is an explanation of it in my blog. The image is meant to represent the new (or evolving) relationships...

In my recent discussion about SaaS, I get often asked what multi tenancy means. Here is my "current" take: In a pure multi-tenant architecture a single instance of the hosted application is capable of servicing all customers (tenants). Unlike...

In a few weeks, I will be packing all my goods in Redmond and board a big Qantas Airbus A380 to Sydney Australia !! My 4 and 1/2 years in Redmond have been a blast, I'm looking forward to more of those down under. (for those interested) here is more info...

As indicated in various press articles and blog entries in the recent weeks, PDC will be Microsoft's 'coming out' party for its cloud services platform. These additional platform assets will create a vast array of new possibilities, but at the same...

The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant teaches a great lesson: although the six blind men in the story were partially right, they were all in the wrong. They were wrong because they assumed that the partial view they had of the elephant was the...

It's been more than a month since my last post... this was due to some well deserved vacation :) and a business trip to Asia. But also due to the writing of our first SaaS architecture guidance whitepaper So, if you are interested in an introductory...

After a couple of whitepapers and a few blog entries on how to successfully deliver SaaS (or as Fred would put it , taming the three-headed monster (scalability, configurability and multi-tenant efficiency) that haunts every SaaS ISVs.) We are in the...

As part of the enterprise paper we are working on, I have been thinking about (and discussing) the impact of SaaS on IT Governance. Clearly, the way software gets evaluated has to change, Phil has a good list on what to look for when selecting a SaaS...

Yesterday I was talking to a couple of enterprise customers, one of them happen to be from Jamaica. He was telling me that one of the big barrier of SaaS adoption there is trust or more precisely lack thereof. Many enterprises are not ready to trust a...

It took us a bit longer than expected, but our latest white paper is finally here! This white paper goes through the sometime quirky relationships that exist between ISVs wanting to deliver their software as a service and Hosters. Here is an excerpt from...

Nephology (from the Greek word nephos for 'cloud') is the study of clouds and cloud formation. It seems to me that everybody in the IT industry wants to be an expert in cloud these days; cloud computing that is. Jokes apart, one thing I learned from the...

As I mentioned previously , the study of clouds (cloud computing of course) is becoming a very popular topic in the software industry. In the last couple of weeks alone, I read tens of articles on the subject. I found many of them proposing various type...

If I was given a penny for every time I was asked whether it is better to use 1 database per customer (isolated data layer) or 1 database for all the customers (multi tenant data layer) I could retire in a tropical island without worrying about money...

For those interested, here is the link to our SaaSCon Understanding SaaS Archtiecture presentation. As usual feedback welcome.

In his fantastic paper, Jim Gray describes the Distributed Computing Economics (it was published in 2003, if you have not read it, it is a MUST READ). The basic premise is simple (from the paper): A computation task has four characteristic demands: •...