Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Last night, cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,”...
KnowledgeTree offers Comfort Blanket; helps customers pull data from Cloud
Image by Anua22a via Flickr 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...
Repositories in the Cloud? Why on earth not?!
To be honest, I’ve never fully understood Higher Education’s penchant for building ‘institutional repositories.’ These frequently under-populated aggregations of academic papers produced by ‘research active’ employees of a particular university appear aligned almost exclusively to vaguely expressed institutional imperatives, and seem largely unrelated to either the selfish aspirations of the contributing authors or the tangible...
Keep your Executive Assistant happy if moving to the Cloud
Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS)...
LongJump embraces private Clouds with new licensing model for Business Application Platform
Sunnyvale, CA, Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider LongJump today demonstrated their belief in the value of so-called ‘private Clouds’ by licensing their existing Business Application Platform both for local installation inside the enterprise and for re-branding by third party hosting providers. I spoke with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya ahead of their announcement. The company...
Understanding SaaS business models in conversation with Adam Gross of Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com [CRM] is often held up as proof that the Software as a Service (SaaS) model works. Ten years old, and with over $1Bn in revenue last year, Marc Benioff‘s company certainly shows that SaaS isn’t just a passing fad. More recently the company has begun to diversify from its heritage as the provider of...
Looking back at Powered by Cloud conference
Clouds of a rather different sort complicated things at the start of the Powered by Cloud conference in London last week. As you may have heard, ‘unprecedented’ (but repeatedly forecast) snowfall brought the UK’s capital grinding to an ignominious halt. Despite the absence of a handful of the speakers, the only person who knew how...
Is Open Source inevitable in the Enterprise?
Image via Wikipedia Driving home last night, listening to podcasts from the BBC, The Guardian and John Willis, I began to wonder about the ‘inevitability’ of Open Source in the Enterprise. I shared the initial idea on Twitter and had some useful responses overnight; “Thought; Open & Closed Source coexist well in enterprise. BUT once...
A short chat with Duane Jackson of KashFlow about building SaaS applications
I spent some time yesterday afteroon talking with Duane Jackson, CEO of UK accountancy software firm KashFlow. Our conversation was recorded as a podcast, and published as part of the Talis series that I’ll keep contributing to over the coming months. Those podcasts have tended to focus specifically on the Semantic Web, but we’re keen...
Sinclair Shuller attempts to clean up the language of the Cloud
Yesterday’s blog post by Apprenda CEO Sinclair Shuller is an interesting attempt to clarify the hodge-podge of terms that tend to be thrown around almost interchangeably; Cloud, SaaS, PaaS and more. 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...
Financial Times returns to the Cloud
Last month I wrote about the interest of the Financial Times‘ Digital Business supplement in exploring Cloud Computing, noting that there would be more in an upcoming edition of the supplement. Peter Whitehead’s ‘Editors’ Note‘ went online this afternoon, ahead of its appearance in print tomorrow. No great surprises there although Jim Hietala’s piece, Don’t...
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