KnowledgeTree, a provider of cloud-based document management solutions based in Raleigh, North Carolina, today announced that customers on their enterprise payment plan will be able to download copies of documents, workflows and associated metadata for local backup.

As Krish noted over on CloudAve when the company recently announced their single sign-on capability, these are hardly groundbreaking advances. They are, however, important incremental enhancements and an indication of growing product maturity. To move beyond early adopters and niche use cases, ‘basic’ features such as integration with enterprise identity management processes and effective – tangible, almost – backup procedures are simply essential.

According to the release,

“With this feature, customer content is available for immediate download via secure HTTP, FTP and rsync connections, ensuring a quick and efficient backup. Downloads are encrypted and password-protected. Documents, while still available anytime and anywhere via the cloud, can now have backup versions housed on an organization’s own servers.”

This new backup capability goes further than the product’s existing ability to offer ZIP downloads of customer documents, as it preserves workflow, audit trails, and associated metadata.

I spoke with CEO Daniel Chalef ahead of the announcement, to learn a little more about the company’s direction. He was, of course, keen to stress that provision of this download capability should in no way be seen as a reflection on the robustness of either the Cloud or KnowledgeTree’s own (Amazon S3-powered) infrastructure. Rather, Chalef pointed to the continuing (mis-?) perception that auditory and compliance requirements may more easily be met by companies that are able to lay their hands upon local copies of key data.

With a focus upon customers in legal, financial and HR-type roles, KnowledgeTree has transitioned from providing on-premise solutions toward a mixed economy in which the product is available as either Software as a Service (SaaS), or as an on-premise installation typically addressed toward larger customers. The SaaS offering is updated on a 3-4 week release cycle, with the traditional on-premise version updated more slowly. A new version is due early in 2011, which will bring feature parity with the current SaaS release. Chalef argued that the company continues to grow both branches of the product, but I can’t help wondering how long it will truly remain cost-effective to offer – and maintain – both?

Chalef suggests that the company’s focus upon providing turn-key solutions designed to address the needs of its defined customer groups differentiates it from the competition. These, he argues, are primarily SugarCRM and Microsoft Sharepoint, both of which tend to present rather more of a blank canvas upon which customers (or VARs) are expected to build. A turn-key solution, especially deployed from the Cloud, should enable customers to realise value from their investment relatively quickly. The more significant investment in on-premise installations, bespoke development and VAR engagement may result in eventual cost savings or better alignment with business requirements, but it’s a long-term – and risky – bet. Press Releases over the past few months suggest that KnowledgeTree continues to innovate, fleshing out the feature set on a product that shows no sign of slowing.

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Formed as a partnership between Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade focuses upon delivering IT solutions based upon Microsoft’s suite of technologies and products, including Cloud offerings such as Azure and the company’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).

I discussed Azure in a podcast with Microsoft’s Amitabh Srivastava last year, and in this latest conversation Scott and Bob share some of the experiences Avanade has gained in rolling out over 1.3 million BPOS seats to a wide range of enterprise clients.

This podcast was recorded on Wednesday 28 July, 2010.

During our conversation, we referred to the following resources;

• Accenture
• Amazon
• App Fabric
• Avanade
• Avanade Cloud Computing
• Azure
• BPOS
• Hotmail
• Java
• Lotus Notes
• Microsoft
• Microsoft Live@Edu
• PHP
• Werner Vogels

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Cutting through the Hype: Clouds in Context set out to question some of the preconceptions that many people seem to hold about Cloud Computing, and I suggest that the majority are less black and white than they initially seem.

Although neither a panacea nor universally offered, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a routinely applied tactic that is seen to increase customer confidence, to drive internal targets, and to offer some (usually small) recompense in the event that it is invoked. Notable hold-outs are, of course, most of Google‘s services, Salesforce.com, and several other significant players in the Cloud Computing space. Even companies such as Amazon, which do offer SLAs, have done so only relatively recently (currently targeting 99.95% uptime for EC2 and 99.9% for S3). There are various reasons why the notion of a generic Service Level may not always apply at Internet scale.

3Tera yesterday announced a new SLA for their AppLogic Virtual Private Datacentre (VPDC), which will take effect from April for US-based customers. The SLA sets an ambitious target of 99.999% availability (it does not, of course, promise 99.999% availability, but nor could it), and is unusual in that it should apply credits for downtime automatically rather than requiring customers to document and claim for any outage. 0.001% downtime translates — loosely — into AppLogic being unavailable to any given customer for less than one hour per year.

Any loss of mission-critical infrastructure, even if only for a few minutes, can be hugely damaging in certain sectors. The relatively trivial recompense offered by most Cloud SLAs is actually not worth very much, and will rarely come anywhere near covering the potential loss of revenue and credibility to those relying upon the infrastructure of 3Tera and its competitors in this increasingly competitive market. In many ways, though, the subscription credits offered by the SLA are not the point. Rather, the SLA is part of the process that a company such as 3Tera must be seen to go through in demonstrating their faith in their own core infrastructure, and their contingency planning for the inevitable occasions on which things break.

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Jeff is VP of Business Operations for the company, and gave a presentation (PDF) at PubCon towards the end of last year in which he dissected some of the marketing noise around major providers of Cloud-based hosting.

As we discuss during our conversation, SmarterTools ended up deciding to host their customers themselves, rather than relying upon a third party hosting provider. Have a listen to hear Jeff’s rationale, and let us know whether you agree…

Almost tangential to the main thrust of Warfield’s post, he writes;

“There are two ways the SaaS world tackles [the problem of making enterprise software applications flexible]–for some problems metadata is the answer, and for other problems end user-approachable self-service customization works.  Let me give some examples of each.

Metadata is literally ‘data about data‘.  As such, it is a beautiful thing.  Let’s consider the database.  It is very common for different organizations to want to be able to customize the database to their own purposes.  Let’s say you have a record that keeps information about your customers.  A lot of this information will be common, and could be standardized.  We all want the customer’s name, their address, phone number, and perhaps a few other things.  But then there will also be a lot of things that differ from one organization to the next.  Perhaps one wants to assign a specific sales person to each customer.  Another wants to record that customer’s birthday (obviously this is a much smaller organization than the first!).  And so on.  Without metadata, each database has to be customized and changed.  With metadata, rather than changing each database, you build the idea of custom fields in, and then you can just tell the database what the custom fields will be in each case but the structure needn’t change.  Metadata is not unique to SaaS, but it is an important part of the ‘multitenant’ concept.  It makes it possible for all those tenants to live in the same database, but still get to have all their custom fields.

Metadata can also make it possible to enable that second method for flexibility.  Customizing a database without metadata is going to require someone to get into the database, modify the schema, make sure reports are modified to deal with the new schema, make sure the schema changes don’t break the product, and on and on.  Such work is definitely the province of expensive and highly technical experts.  However, once we have metadata, we can create a simple user interface that lets almost anyone add new fields, and that handles all the rest of it automatically.  Suddenly we have made what had been a difficult and expensive technical task approachable in a self-service way by non-technical customers.  Not only that, but they can make these changes quickly and easily, and they can even iterate on them until they get it just right.”

‘Metadata’, eh? I remember the times I spent, back in the Nineties, travelling a world that seemed in thrall to massively over-complicated taxonomies, cataloguing rules and data structures, evangelising the benefits of a more light-weight approach to the description of resources. The assertion that metadata was ‘data about data’ appeared in just about every presentation, closely followed (when talking to librarians, at least) by ‘it is sort of like cataloguing.’

Enter Grigorovici, and his discussion of an old post by Glenn McDonald. As Dan notes, Glenn doesn’t seem particularly keen on ‘metadata;’

“There is no such thing as ‘metadata’. Everything is relative. Everything is data. Every bit of data is meta to everything else, and thus to nothing. It doesn’t matter whether the map ‘is’ the terrain, it just matters that you know you’re talking about maps when you’re talking about maps. (And it usually doesn’t matter if the computer knows the difference, regardless…)”

So, two views of metadata that are apparently contradictory. Yet I pretty much agree with both of them, actually.

Returning to the Nineties, and the rather ridiculous pinnacle of my Gold status with a plethora of the world’s airlines, the “metadata is ‘data about data’” truism was often closely followed by “one person’s data is another person’s metadata” (or vice versa, of course).

Here, as elsewhere, there can be a depressing tendency to seek polarisation; to make things simple by declaring everything either black or white. Grey is anathema, and to be hunted down for exposure to ridicule almost as biting as that directed at proponents of the pole opposite to your own. The reality is, of course, that grey is frequently the norm. The world is a complex place, and one in which a spectrum of views and ‘truths’ is necessary in helping us to make sense of the confusion that bombards all of our senses throughout every waking moment.

An overly dogmatic attempt to categorise some things as always being metadata and others as always data is pointless. Whilst Glenn forcefully argues that there is therefore no such thing as metadata, I would push back just as forcefully to say that any data can be considered metadata; in the right context.

That detailed and structured description of the new car after which you lust is a perfectly valid set of data. In a different context, and perhaps as a surrogate for the car itself, it can more usefully by characterised as metadata.

A database of flight codes, routes, times and aircraft is rich with data just begging to be used in a plethora of ways, whilst ‘BA283′ is equally comfortable as a piece of metadata describing one airline’s afternoon flight from London to Los Angeles.

The concept of metadata can be an extremely useful one; so long as we avoid becoming too dogmatic in defining its boundaries or fervid in upholding spurious conceptual purity.

Hillmann’s Real Metadata © Jeffrey Beall 2007, and shared on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Have a read, and see what you think.

I spoke to Sinclair recently, ahead of today’s announcement of their SaaSGrid offering, and there’s plenty more to share from that conversation when I get to it in my task list!

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Sage is a titan of the UK software scene but has struggled recently, both with expansion beyond Europe and (like others) with shifting their business toward a hosted capability.

According to Duane Jackson of competitor KashFlow (also picked up by Dennis Howlett and Ben Kepes at CloudAve), Sage are only weeks away from rolling out SageLive;

“On a laptop tucked away in a quite corner I spied a program running in a web browser with the title “SageLive Beta”. I got chatting to the guy demonstrating it (without saying who I am). He confirmed it’s their newest product, in development for 18 months and due for release in January. Until now they’ve tried to keep it under wraps. I commented that it seemed to be a new approach for Sage to develop a product from scratch rather than acquire an existing company. They were obviously very proud of what they’d achieved and rightly so.”

This is interesting, but I’m intrigued to understand more about why Sage were showing this ‘in a quiet corner’ at a big trade show? Is the product still ‘under wraps’? If it is, why on earth was it there for the competition to oggle? And if it’s not, why aren’t they talking about it? Maybe Duncan Hawes, Development Manager for the product, would like to set the record straight?

Duane suggests that SageLive is ‘posting to a Sage 50 database in the backend,’ which (if I understand correctly) means they’re limiting the reach of the new offering to just the UK because of the data structures used in that particular product line. If true, this would seem something of a missed opportunity for alignment of the company’s confused product mish-mash.

It would also be interesting to have a lot more information about the target audience for this product; small businesses, medium businesses, big corporations? And is it an alternative for existing customers, part of a drive to acquire competitors’ customers, or an attempt to address pockets of non-consumption?

Come on Duncan; tell us what you’re building up there in Newcastle. I drove past your building on Sunday, too. If only I’d known this then, I could have popped in for a chat!

Update 3/12/2008 – The Financial Times reports on Sage’s results…

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Tarry Singh draws my attention to National Cloud Computing Day, which comes to the UK on Friday 12 December.

The creation of UK-based KashFlow, National Cloud Computing Day

“is being organised… to encourage UK small businesses to evaluate online applications and speed up the migration from traditional word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, email and contact management systems installed on computers to their web-based counterparts.”

KashFlow managing director Duane Jackson is quoted as saying,

“Throughout the world businesses are discovering web-based software and it’s important that UK small businesses don’t get left behind.  They are already enjoying the benefits of a wide range of online services which are virtually indistinguishable – and often superior – from there [sic] installed counterparts.

The Cloud Computing Day challenge is simple – for small businesses to exclusively use online software in their day to day business on December 12th. This is a fun challenge with a serious message.  And we hope National Cloud Computing Day will help to raise awareness of a more efficient, economic and flexible way of working.”

This is in large part, of course, an attempt by KashFlow to gain free publicity for themselves and their award winning online accounting software. As they’re not attempting to disingenuously disguise their involvement, I have no problem with that, as it may well attract some attention to the wider issues around moving applications and data to the Cloud. The Financial Times, for one, has a tradition of seeing how technology might change business on the ground, and the paper is clearly looking closely at the Cloud.

I do wonder, though, if the emphasis on ‘online applications’ is misguided? Looking at my own behaviour, the biggest shift has actually been to move my data to the Cloud rather than the UI through which I choose to interact with it most of the time.

A quick skim of the applications currently running on my machine shows that every single one of them is tightly enmeshed with the Cloud, and every single one of them has (more or less) a Web-based interface that I am consciously choosing not to use whilst sat at my desk watching snow fall across East Yorkshire.

NetNewsWire, Twhirl, Mail, ecto, iCal, Adium, Skype, OmniFocus. And Firefox of course, but that’s different. All are running locally on this Mac, but all are working with data that I can access at will from my iPhone, and all (except OmniFocus?) are also available to me by various means on any net-connected computer with a half-decent browser.

There are plenty of sound business reasons to move toward Cloud-based software, SaaS and the rest. For the end user, though, the biggest challenge must surely be demonstrating the value, security and flexibility of moving data to the Cloud. Leave the decision about whether they actually read their Gmail via google.com or download it into Mail to the individual; they have reasons for their decision, and those reasons work for them.

Right, back to watching the snow. I look forward to seeing whether Duane’s initiative gets any traction next Friday.

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The notions of core and context are, of course, most often associated with Geoffrey Moore, and one of his sites defines them, thus;

Core

“Any activity which creates sustainable differentiation in the target market resulting in premium prices or increased volume. Core management seeks to dramatically outperform all competitors within the domain of core. (Note this use of the term is unrelated to either core competence, which describes differentiated capability, or core business, which describes categories accounting for a high percentage of overall revenues.)”

Context

“Any activity which does not differentiate the company from the customers’ viewpoint in the target market. Context management seeks to meet (but not exceed) appropriate accepted standards in as productive a manner as possible.”

Writing in last weekend’s Financial Times, Gerrit Wiesmann tells us that;

“We’ve been waiting for trains since 1840, the year a British parliamentary committee invented mass transportation by ruling that rail traffic should be exclusively in the hands of the companies that owned the track. It’s an odd notion now, but in the years before that decision, a debate raged about how to use rails. In the 1820s, the British railway visionary Thomas Gray called for a national network for use by private vehicles. He reckoned traffic in and out of London could be handled by 12 parallel ‘rail-ways’.”

Here, as elsewhere, ideas given serious consideration at the birth of an industry are superseded as that industry matures and sustainable business models begin to emerge.

There will always be areas in which technology companies invest their own human capital rather than buying in services and products from third parties. The traditional view, largely captured in Moore’s terminology, holds that companies gain most by focussing their own efforts upon the differentiating aspects of their business whilst making use of supporting services from third parties to enable concentration upon those differentiators. It will tend to be cheaper and ‘easier’, so the argument goes, to pay for commodity services from a third party rather than develop everything in-house from scratch.

In the early stages of any technological wave, there is an understandable tendency to develop and control far more of the stack within a single organisation. Various players enter a nascent market, and attempt to shape it to their needs at the same time as laying the foundations for what they hope will be a successful product or service. Without agreement on standards and specifications, there is very little interoperability. With an emphasis upon attracting and growing a customer base, there is little incentive to make it easy for users to compare offerings with – or move to – the competition. With a fluid understanding of the final product and its differentiating features, there is little clear understanding of that which will be ‘core’ as opposed to that which will merely be ‘context.’ Internal and external pressures encourage, and almost require, an approach that is closed and all-encompassing.

The problem, it seems, is in making that move from a nascent market toward the point at which certain aspects of the technology stack are fit for commodification; the point at which a healthy and competitive ecosystem can begin to emerge that increases customer choice whilst lowering development and running costs. Looking at aspects of the Cloud Computing and SaaS arenas, we must surely be reaching the point at which numerous homegrown technology stacks become increasingly counterproductive? In the Semantic Web space, too, that early burst of innovation is becoming unnecessarily expensive to maintain as one company after another continues to concern themselves with segments of the problem space that might easily be made a commodity.

Look, for example, at the number of Semantic Technology companies continuing to pour effort into building, scaling and maintaining a basic ontology. The ontology is rarely the point of the company. It is simply something they need to have in order to get on with the business at hand. How many of them are ‘wasting’ time recording the fact that Gordon Brown is the UK Prime Minister, or that Beverley is in East Yorkshire, which is in England, which is in the United Kingdom, which is in Europe?

A recent conversation with Hapax CEO Mark Redgrave confirmed the extent to which they are having to focus upon ontology construction with Amplify. Refreshingly, though, he was extremely open to the notion of gaining value from a more open and generic ontology upon which Hapax and others could build, add value, and compete. In the SaaS space, too, Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller has some interesting ideas with regard to enabling others to build their own Software as a Service offerings on top of a common platform that begins to look increasingly like a commodity. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the reality of his company’s SaaSGrid is able to match that vision.

I have spent (too much!) time in the formal standards making process, and would be the last to even consider suggesting that freeform innovation and commercial creativity be snuffed out in favour of protracted and painful rounds of negotiation, specification and never-ending compromise.

However, it seems apparent that early innovators in a given market (Amazon with EC2, Salesforce, etc) often see little incentive to open up and behave less proprietarily. It is in their interests for every competitor to have to reinvent all the wheels that those early entrants first conceptualised. The shift needs to be driven by their competitors, some of whom will be sufficiently successful that they disrupt the market conditions in which incumbents dominate to such an extent that customers are incentivised to consider switching.

A little reinvention is a good thing. It encourages creative thinking, and probably leads to refinement, iteration, and further innovation. Perpetuated at the expense of opening up a nascent market, it becomes a tool of monopoly and ultimately counter-productive for all concerned.

Perhaps it is only at this point that those at the top of a market segment are able to realise the benefits of letting go a little, and of relegating much of what they do to the status of mere context.

Image of a bicycle with square wheels © Michael Vroegop 2007, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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