Matt Deacon's digestive blog : SaaS

The Cloud, the architect, IT and the great disruption

matt deacon — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:54:00 GMT

Here's the deck I presented to Accenture technical consultants. Bit of fun and got a chance to give my view on what's happening to IT. Here's what I was asked to cover ...

What’s cloud computing?
What’s the industry trend, projections, opportunity and client value?
What does this mean for organisations and how are we expecting them to change?
What’s Microsoft doing to define, capture or ride this trend?
What’s Microsoft and Accenture doing together to capture this market?
What’s the next big Disruptive technology?

On the last point - I said that we're in it, but the only problem is with disruptive technologies is that you can't normally see them until they disrupt:)! On the whole Cloud in all its forms is an example of radical innovation but in certain cases it will disrupt. Here's some candidates for disruption IMHO:

Traditional OUtsourcers, that don't see the opportunity to innovate as organisations multi-source
System Integrators/Consultants that don't seak to generate IP and business partnerships with their customers
Organisations that don't service enable their IT & don't differentiate their assets against critical and non-critical functions
Organisations that don't invest in architecture and integration at a strategic level within IT (and the business)

Implications Of The Cloud

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Thoughts welcomed ....:)

What ISVs should know about hosting/building on cloud/PaaS

matt deacon — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:29:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of talking at an IBM hosted SIIA event yesterday and thought it worth sharing some thoughts. It was hosted by Phil Waineright (http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/) a well known commentator on SaaS and comprised of a series of 5 minute "lightening talks" (as popularised by Cloudcamp) from various invited guests. Other than myself, these included IBM, BT, CohesiveFT, CODA (hosted on Force.com), Accounts IQ (OpSource) and Cast Iron. There were around 60 or so people in attendance with a healthy cross-section of SIs, Hosters and ISVs plus the obligatory IBM and of course Google too.

The presentations and format I find really appealing - if you can't get your words out fast enough then the buzzer goes and it's on the the next presenter! Some of the presenters fell foul of the time limit but using the importal words "I've started so I'll finish" I managed to get my final point out there before Phil reclaimed the stage:)! I spent some time preparing for this over the past day or so and although time is limited it really forces you to focus on what you want to share. What is the one thing you want to get across? We often get an hour or more to talk to an audience and to my mind I think this can make you lazy about getting your point across.

Cast Iron are an interesting company offering "Integration as a Service" a key barrier for SaaS adoption that I would recommend taking a look at. Alexis Richardson from CohesiveFT (who hosts Cloudcamp) was great, I'm a big fan of AMQP plus their work on crossing clouds is great - plus we got to chat about Azure too which was great!

I took most notes from the guy from AccountsIQ - I thought he gave a great insight into being a SaaS provider and here's a map I drew up from it.

Click on image to set larger version

Plus here's the deck I used. I ended up with what I jokingly called a "maturity model" for which I got some positive comments. I've also added the mind map I put together while preparing for the session in the hope that I get points for showing my working out:)!

View more presentations from MattDeacon. (tags: cloud isv)

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SaaS as a Disruptive Technology?

matt deacon — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:23:00 GMT

At long last I've finally got the report I produced with Dr Steve Moxey of Manchester Business School published on MSDN.

In short the report concludes that SaaS as a general concept is being seen as a "radical incremental technology" more than being "disruptive" which makes sense given that SaaS as an architectural pattern builds on existing architectural patterns such as SOA. That said, although the approach is itself "incremental" it will still depend on the individual scenario as to whether that will be disruptive or not.

The framework below describes the approach we took in workshops with software vendors that's proved a useful tool in understanding one's own particular market.