Krishwords

As cloud computing grows and matures, there are many vendors who venture into Software as a Service model (SaaS) targeting small and medium businesses. Recently, I was talking to a CEO of a small firm from across the world and he asked me the difference between SaaS and ASP (Application Service Providers) of the previous decade. I thought I will write a post here explaining the difference in case if others have similar questions as well. For those of you who came here with an expectation to see posts related to Open Web, I would like to point out that Cloud Computing is also part of the open web and this post highlights the importance of SaaS models built on the cloud. Since cloud computing and the business based on clouds is of interest to me, I will post some posts on these topics too.

SaaS and ASP have a somewhat similar philosophy but there are many differences that makes SaaS more competent in the marketplace than the ASP in the previous era. Lemme, explain the differences in this post.

• ASP was single tenancy whereas SaaS has multi tenancy. This offers SaaS the much needed ability to scale. ASP was limited to single organization and hence high cost of implementation. Since SaaS is shared by multiple organizations, without compromising on the reliability, security and privacy, the cost for businesses is very minimal compared to the implementation of ASP.
• In many cases, the underlying cloud is built upon open source software. The application stack also uses open source software overwhelmingly. This reduces the cost of infrastructure by several fold, thereby, bringing down the cost of implementation to a much smaller level. Today, a small business having three employees can have CRM fro free and a company with 5 employees can have it for as low as $24 per month. I am not sure about Zoho’s infrastructure but many SaaS vendors rely heavily on open source software and the associated cost savings (plus the cost savings due to multi tenancy) is passed on to the customers.
• Some SaaS vendors offer the source code under one of the open source licenses. This helps organizations some reliability in the case of SaaS vendor going out of business. As I have explained in some of the previous posts, businesses can take the source code and their data and host it anywhere in the cloud. Since the cost of cloud infrastructure is almost close to zero, this option saves a huge amount of money for businesses compared to the ASP approach.
• Unlike the ASP approach, SaaS vendors can release a particular version and it shows up for all the customers. This reduces the time and cost involved in support and security implementation. Unlike ASP, all the SaaS customers will be using the same version of the app.

There are various other advantages of SaaS over ASP. I am just pointing out to some of the advantages that are important according to many industry analysts (including me :-)).

PS: The basic structure of this article is based on one of the old articles on the topic by Julie Craig in one of the Internet.com reports. I added my ideas about cloud computing and open source to that structure.

Wired has an article in which they report about Bill Gates’ comments on Opensource.

One thing Gates won’t be leaving behind in retirement is his distaste for open source software. After one scientist asked if Gates would consider open source uses in health research, the man who built his $280 billion company on the power of intellectual property bristled.

"There’s free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

The funny part about the whole episode, aside from his ignorance on the matter, is that he is saying to scientists that their approach in academia, which was responsible for propelling the world to the current advanced state, is nonsense. It is time for him to realize that opensource itself was inspired by the scientists in academia. Bill Gates joins Jaron Lanier in his ignorance about science.

Craig Balding raises the following issues related to security cloud computing. Since some of the issues concern to the theme of this blog, opensource, open standards and open web, I thought I will link the concerns here. Some of the issues highlight the need to have a cloud computing infrastructure without any proprietary software infrastructure.

Multiple cloud storage providers for a single app, raises some issues.

* Is ISV obligated to tell you they are migrating to a cheaper cloud storage provider? (think cross border data transfer issues).
* What security ‘certification’ will take place of the new provider and what visibility will you have of that?
* How much notification do you get before the switchover?
* If you don’t want to go with the new provider, but that is the only supported option, what happens to all your data? Even if we *assume* an export function is provided you still need to find an alternate ISV that has coded a compatibility layer to access your existing data. If you can’t, where do you export the data too? Will we have ‘frozen clouds‘?
* What integrity checks take place to ensure data was properly migrated over?
* When the migration happens, what clean-up happens at the source? (can anyone say forensic wiping?). What about any backup tapes or off-line copies? Who is responsible for making sure those are wiped/destroyed?

Opensource Economics is still new for many people. Here, Law professor Yochai Benkler explains what it is and how it is shaping the human society.

Reuven Lerner makes an excellent case against OOXML at OStatic

Unfortunately, yesterday’s adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard fails on all three counts. To begin with, it seems that the OOXML standard was poorly defined, leaving a huge number of ambiguities and undefined terms. That’s not surprising, given the fact that it is 6,000 — yes, six thousand — pages long, a size which makes it nearly impossible to ensure internal consistency. The large size also ensures that it will be difficult to create alternative implementations; would you like to be the programmer charged with checking that a particular program adheres to all 6,000 pages of the standard?

Moreover, parts of the standard require a programmer to deviate from many other, correct standards. For example, 1900 was not a leap year, as is the case with three out of every four “00″ years. (Thus, 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was.) Microsoft got this point wrong when they first implemented Excel, and as a result, the OOXML standard requires that implementers make this same error, for the sake of consistency.

There are also serious questions regarding some Microsoft patents that any implementer will need to use. Microsoft has promised that it will not sue OOXML implementers for patent infringement, but the Groklaw site points out that this statement might be meaningless.

I wrote this post at a time when Readburner was crucified and before its current resurrection. In that post, I had suggested that companies entering deadpool should consider releasing their code under one of the opensource licenses. I made this argument to emphasize that it will build trust among the customers in this era of apps residing on the web rather than on the user’s computers. It was my argument that if the web app is also released as open source (as the in case of apps like wordpress and some wikis we have talked about in the previous posts), users will not be left in the lurch (in the event of a company shutting its doors).

Today Marshall posted about the AJAX based photo sharing site Zoto releasing its source code under an opensource license. There is no information about the company entering the deadpool. But, if it ever enters the deadpool, it won’t have any effect on their customers because they can simply take the source code and get it installed in their own servers. This is the kinda approach that will get people to trust the startups offering web apps. I just hope that the other startups follow Zoto in releasing their code under an opensource license. This ensures that the web app will live forever, irrespective of whether the company behind the app is part of the history or not.

and the winner is Linux. Check it out here. My question is: Why do you need a contest to know this?

Adobe today released AIR framework for Linux. It is still in Alpha version and you can download it here. You can find the release notes here. Also, read the writeup by Josh Catone and Ryan Stewart.

Adobe AIR is not an open source software. However, it excites me because it is the only framework (right now) that offers the same kinda experience on all three operating systems, Linux, Mac and Windows. The apps developed on AIR framework works flawlessly on these operating systems. This is a very important for the following reasons.

• Both data and apps are moving to the cloud, thereby, making desktops redundant. With this shift, we are more worried about the open standards used in the storage of our data in the cloud and data portability than the open source nature of the underlying software. In a way, open source, as we know it from the previous era, is losing steam to other ideas like open standards, data portability, open publishing, etc.. However, open source doesn’t become irrelevant in the SaaS world, as people like Tim O’ Reilly would like you to believe. Open source is the precursor for the Web 2.0 movements like Data Portability and others. Also, the idea of open source code is very important even in the case of web apps as we have seen with wordpress and wikis. Having said that, we have to accept the fact that the desktop, as we knew it from the past, is slowly getting redundant. The future desktops may not need high computing capacity. We could have a reasonably powerful desktop/laptop and derive the necessary computing power from the cloud. This has resulted in a wave of “cloud PCs and Laptops” running Linux. Adobe AIR on Linux is very important for these Linux based cloud PCs to gain traction. The user experience offered by AIR apps will help propel Linux based cloud machines into the mainstream, eventually resulting in more Linux adoption.
• With the buggy releases of Vista and Leopard and the prominence gained by Ubuntu, there is an opening for Linux in the desktop market, even though the market is dead in the Cloud Computing era. People are not inclined to spend money on desktop operating systems when the computing power lies in the web. Ubuntu is slowly gaining traction among the ordinary desktop users. If this trend has to consolidate, it is important that users are offered an experience similar to what they get in Windows and Mac. Right now, Adobe’s AIR is the only platform that could offer such an experience.

In my opinion, Adobe has released AIR for Linux at an opportune time both for Linux evangelists/companies and for Adobe itself. Linux evangelists and companies can project the user experience on Adobe AIR to gain traction for Linux desktops among ordinary users. Adobe can benefit by gaining a monopoly kinda advantage because they have now embraced a big segment of desktop users who had to live at the mercy of ‘volunteer’ developers in the past. Do you agree with this take or do you think that I have compromised my idea of ‘open world’ by embracing a proprietary software like Adobe AIR?

Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them.

In recent times, I was playing around with many hosted Wiki sites like Wikidot, Wik.is, Pbwiki and Wikispaces. All of them have features that will help you get your Wiki running without any problems. Compared to MediaWiki, these hosted Wiki platforms are much more “user friendly”, making it a cake walk even for newbies. In fact, you can do a comparison of various Wiki platforms in the Wikimatrix website. Frequently, I come across questions about the best hosted wiki platform from my company’s clients, my friends and my social networking contacts. I often refer them to sites like Wikidot.com or Wik.is. In fact, I use Wikidot.com for a couple of projects and Wik.is for the third project. Both these Wiki platforms are extremely good and they are very user friendly, with good “mashup support”. Deki Wiki, the wiki that powers Wik.is, is very well integrated with the web services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. Both Wikidot.com and Wik.is can solve your Wiki needs without any difficulty for the users. My support for these two Wiki platforms doesn’t mean that Pbwiki and Wikispaces are a bad choice.

I will explain why I selected Wikidot.com and Wik.is over Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com here. When I consider the options for a hosted wiki, whether it is for personal purposes or business purposes, I have to take into account the long term stability of the platform. Some of the hosted Wiki sites have very good financial backing and these companies might be there for a long haul. However, this is not the case with every company that offers Wiki as the hosted platform. Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the stability of a company on which we are going to trust our personal or business data. There is always the danger of the hosted Wiki company shutting its doors and vanishing in thin air. How can we foolproof our personal wiki or business wiki against such eventualities? There are two ways in which we can achieve this stability. One approach is to ensure that your Wiki company offers you a way to export all your data in open formats. Now a days, many Wiki companies allow this export of data. We can then take the data to another hosted wiki company and get it imported. The second approach is to find a hosted wiki company that also offers the Wiki platform in one of the open source licenses. Suppose if the wiki company goes out of business, you will still have the application available to install in your own servers or in the computing cloud. You are completely safe even if the company that hosted your wiki is out of business. Since the wiki is released under open source license, there will still be developers working on the Wiki development. This offers you continuity with your wiki platform and your investment, both financial and time, is completely protected.

I prefer the second approach over the first and this forms the basis for my recommendation of Wikidot.com and Wik.is. You get a long term stability with your wiki platform irrespective of what happens to the company behind the wiki. I consider this to be very crucial in everyone’s wiki strategy.

Do you have a favorite hosted Wiki platform? Do you have an underlying reason to choose the platform. Feel free to share your experience here.

I posted this comment in one of the ReadWriteWeb posts. Since the topic fits well into the theme of this blog, the concept of open web, I thought I will also post it in my blog.

The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can we rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time?

These questions bring to forefront two of the important ideas in the technology world, Open source and Data Portability. All the web services should offer a way to take your data with us using open standards. This will ensure that we will have our data in the event of a web service shutting its shop. The second important point is that these web services should consider releasing their code in one of the open source licenses. Right now, some of the web services release their code under open source licenses. For example, if wordpress.com or wikidot.com or wik.is is going to shut the shop tomorrow, nothing will happen to me except a few hours of downtime. I can take my data from these web services in an open format, use their released source code to install the software on one of my servers or somewhere in the cloud and, more importantly, my life will not get affected. How cool is that? I hope that all the mom and pop web services startups take the option of data portability seriously and consider releasing their source code to public, at least, when they shut their shop.

Technorati Tags: Dataportability, Data Portability, Opensource, Open Source, Open Standards, Readburner, Web 2.0