SaaS vs Cloud Applications
What is exactly the difference between software-as-a-service (SaaS) and a cloud application? If you aren’t confronted with both topics frequently, this question is likely to be confusing and you may be tempted to simply answer that there is no difference. In fact, the difference is subtle and is based on the fact that SaaS is a subsystem of cloud computing that represents the application layer of the cloud. Down the road, this differentiation may not matter anymore as SaaS has matured over the past few years and SaaS services could be considered as cloud services in the not too distant future, at least if we believe Gartner’s projections.
Gartner estimates that 75% of the current SaaS delivery revenue could be considered as a cloud service, and that could exceed 90% by 2014 as the SaaS model matures and converges with cloud services models. However, SaaS is on a dramatic growth pace that is estimated to climb past $8.5 billion in sales in the global enterprise application software market this year. That would represent a 14.1% growth rate over $7.5 billion in 2009. SaaS currently holds a 10% share of the total enterprise software market and is believed to increase that number to 16% by 2014, although it may be generally described as cloud service by then. Gartner expects the “adoption of SaaS to far outpace market growth through 2014.”
Security is without doubt the greatest concern of businesses when they consider a move to the SaaS and the cloud, but it appears that more knowledge about these technologies is impacting their perception in a positive way. “The popularity of SaaS has increased significantly within the past five years and initial concerns about security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread,” Gartner said.
However, the adoption of SaaS is different in different markets. The company said that the project and portfolio management (PPM) SaaS market is rapidly growing in percentage of sales. The communications and collaboration (CCC) market continues to show the widest disparity of SaaS revenue generation, with SaaS representing 4% of enterprise content management (ECM) and approximately 82% of Web conferencing in 2009. SaaS is currently responsible for 24% of total CRM market revenue in 2009.
IBM vs Amazon Cloud Services
IBM is now officially providing cloud computing infrastructure services and will wraps up the beta phase on June 30.
The IBM Cloud is essentially a self-service portal that allows subscribers to access virtual machines and configure storage operating systems, middleware and other software resources as needed. OS options include the IBM software catalog, Linux flavors Red Hat and Suse as well as Windows. Like other infrastructure providers, IBM Cloud also provides the ability to save customized images. The advantage of such a service is a way to reduce development and test cycle times on the one hand and to accelerate time-to-market for critical applications.
According to IBM, new testing environments can be set up in a matter of minutes. Using itself as a test bed, IBM said that the usage of cloud applications enabled the company to achieve up to 50% operational cost savings. That number, however, referred to a user base of greater than 100,000.
It is natural to compare IBM’s Cloud service to Amazon’s Web Services, but it is too eraly to draw a conclusion. As its instances are transient, an IBM “EBS” type persistent storage service doesn’t exist yet, so those who are used to the full service suite of tools that other cloud vendors have, they’re going to have to wait. In regard to the more technical details, Babak Hosseinzadeh wrote up a great analysis of the different layers involved in IBM’s cloud stack.
IBM’s service is really just out of beta now and its maturity for business critical applications is, of course, still in question. But the beta ran smoothly from what we could tell and the service is shaping up well. But IBM has a good shot at becoming one of the big players in the market and has a clear advantage over its arch rival HP at this time. Over time, I would not be too surprised if IBM became one of the top 3 cloud infrastructure providers in the U.S.
Market researchers have made no secret that cloud infrastructure services will flourish as the demand of cloud applications increases. IDC just released new market estimates that put the cloud IT services spending at $16 billion globally for 2009 and forecast that number to grow to $55.5 billion by 2014. That volume will represent about 12% of the size of traditional IT product spending, IDC predicts.
Rackspace OpenStack – Is it Worth It?
One of the leading IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers, Rackspace, today said that it is open sourcing its cloud platform. OpenStack represents the full software stack behind the company’s cloud servers as well as cloud files offerings. OpenStack will be licensed under Apache 2, and can be used by enterprises and governments as well as Rackspace’s rivals.
Rackspace said that it is envisioning OpenStack to be driving cloud system just like Linux has driven innovation on the web. “Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere,” the company wrote on its blog. “A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers. In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it.”
The bottom line of OpenStack is that cloud computing could become much more accessible than it is today. Virtually anyone can run the software anywhere and create a cloud system. A rather prestigious project that is already based on OpenStack is NASA’s Nebula cloud computing service that is based at Ames Research Center.
According to Rackspace, OpenStack will be extended over time. One of the next components will be a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. In combination, organizations can turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code that Rackspace currently uses on its own projects. Analysts have already weighed in and consider OpenStack a boost for the credibility of cloud computing.
“Hard to beat the credibility of this platform being run by a top five IaaS provider,” wrote Forrester’s James Staten. “The appeal is obvious if you are a hosting company because there are strong similarities between your business and Rackspace and thus the solution should be relatively applicable.”
We do see new cloud platforms emerge virtually every week. However, most of them are relatively new and have no track record. OpenStack has an element of maturity right from the start, even if some may suspect that Rackspace will be holding back technology to keep its advantage over competing infrastructure providers.
And the Best Cloud Host Is…
Amazon
We have been proponents of Amazon’s EC2 service from the very beginning and – warning: shameless self-promotion – have built some pretty impressive applications on top of it. Check out the Sweety High social networking site, for example. Now you can take high-performance computing to the cloud. Amazon has added a relatively cheap HPC service to its EC2.
For $1.60 an hour, one EC2 cluster compute instance provide 23 GB of memory, 33.5 EC2 compute units, which consist of two Intel Nehalem quad-core processors each, 1690 GB of storage, 10 Gb Ethernet access. If that is not enough horsepower, Amazon allows its customers to group up to eight (or more on special request) cluster compute instances into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Depending on usage patterns, applications can see up to 10 times the network throughput of the largest current Amazon EC2 instance types, the company said.
There isn’t much you can’t do on Amazon’s EC2 service and even those who traditionally have run supercomputers may be doing the math already. Rob Gillen, a researcher and developer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, said colleagues have already figured out that his department could replace its cluster with an AWS cluster for $208 per hour.” In comparison to the cost a supercomputer, that sounds like a good deal to me.