I run a seminar in Finland at Microsoft Finland office 23rd of November for Microsoft ISVs about the transition to the cloud and what it means for software vendors overall. One of the key things in my messaging for ISVs is that they have to look at the cloud together with mobility going forward. This morning I run into an article in Information Management web-site where IDC predicts that mobility and cloud will surge in 2012.

It is easy to agree to this based on what we have seen in our work and research specifically in the US continent. IDC predictions are based on 1000 IDC analysts and according to this study, cloud spending will top $36 billion next year which is four-times the overall IT industry rate of growth.

Another interesting statement from IDC chief analyst Frank Gens is that there will be a “generational shift in the tech platform adoption and innovation” which could according to him lead to a worldwide IT spending of $5 trillion by 2020 and all of this based on mobile tech and the cloud.

Based on hundreds of discussions with independent software vendors (ISVs) around the world we have seen a clear shift in the urgency of many ISVs to ensure that they are on the right bandwagon concerning the cloud. My colleague, Juha Harkonen has been analyzing the trends for quite a while and the observations that he has made are very interesting. You might want to check some of his observations from his excellent blog.

Now it is in the open. According to a recent article from Gigaom.com and research from Martin Wolf M&A Advisors, SaaS companies are getting much higher valuation when compared with legacy software vendors. The chart from Wolf M&A Advisors tells it all:

I knew we would get to this sooner or later as the move is definitely towards the cloud and ISVs that are resisting this move, will eventually run into issues if they do not re-architect their legacy solution as clients will require a true SaaS solution and not a solution that is “running in the cloud” but without really taking advantage of things such as scalability etc.

The Gigacom.com article concludes that it is not a surprise that enterprise vendors acquire smaller SaaS players such as the acquisition of RightNow Technologies by Oracle (1.5 billion). I work with ISVs around the world and I have seen many different types of organizations, some of them being start-ups and some making the transition from legacy business to SaaS business. One very popular way for traditional ISVs to make inroads to SaaS game is to build some type of an extension to the legacy solution to get experience what it is to build for the cloud and this also gives a more evolutionary way of creating something that can be sold to existing customers as add-on service.

I think each and every software executive should contemplate on the message from Gigaom and Martin Wolf especially if the company is in the game of getting sold in the future. The times of high license revenue with maintenance and support is gone and will be sooner or later replaced by monthly/quarterly recurring revenue where the software vendor has to create a solution that is not only used but loved by its users. Gone are the times where a software was sold that was both unfriendly to use but as the software vendor got its money, there was no incentive (other than getting the annual maintenance and support fee paid after first year) to ensure that the software was something that the buyer really liked. In the old-fashioned model, the company paid a large lump sum for the software and this was almost always a lock-in from the software vendor as the end user organization is always fully invested in the solution and is almost forced to pay the maintenance fee in the end. I do remember vividly when I was CEO for a business intelligence company when I was always worried whether our largest clients would pay the support/maintenance fee in the beginning of each year.

]]> http://www.drsalonen.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=766 0 http://www.drsalonen.com/blog/?p=763&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=book-review-social-engineering-can-expose-your-company-secrets-case-kevin-d-mitnick http://www.drsalonen.com/blog/?p=763#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:59:08 +0000 DrSalonen http://www.drsalonen.com/blog/?p=763

I love books and one of the books that I remember reading years ago was the book by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff “Takedown: The  Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw-by the Man Who Did It”. This book came out in mid-90’s and as I was already then in software business, I was interested in to learn more about the mindset of hackers and Kevin D. Mitnick was at the time the most known.  At the time, I do not remember learning anything about Social Engineering but having read the latest book “Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker” by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon, it became obvious to me how vulnerable humans are in revealing secrets to strangers without really thinking too much about it.

This book brings an intriguing perspective to what went on in Mitnick’s life and what makes it even more interesting is to see the other side of the coin and the comments that Mitnick makes about both Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff. According to Mitnick, many of the claims that Markoff’s book brings to light are false and it is obvious that Markoff is not one of Mitnick’s favorite friends. Whatever the case, this book brings the dark side of being a fugitive, not being able to spend time with family and having to move continuously from one place to another based on how close the authorities were able to get to him. He describes how bad he felt when he let down his mother and grandmother and the grief he cause to them by continuing on this illegal activity.

The book has lots of detailed examples of the hackings that he did to companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Sun Microsystems etc. The examples of Nokia were especially interesting when he explains how he called Salo product development in Finland and asked a person to send source code by using social engineering tactics. This is something that people do not think about and especially in large organizations where people assume that the request is coming from within the company and not from a hacker that pretends to be something else that he/she really is. The book explains the different tactics that Mitnick used and I think this book should be a required reading for any information system student or person that works within the technology field. It explains that the biggest threats in security might not be coming from weak security systems, but from the weakness of humans working in organizations. Mitnick knew the lingo and used this as a way to convince the other side on the telephone to do what he wanted. This is what social engineering is all about.

When reading the book, Mitnick claims that he was never after money or wanting to cause damage to any organization. He did hacking because of the challenge and I guess boredom. What was also obvious is that his friends that he was hacking with turned out to be not his friends as they became informers to get Mitnick prosecuted. I am not sure why Mitnick decided to spend a big part of this life having to worry about being arrested, but I guess many things in people and our lives can’t be explained. Mitnick also includes other famous hackers in his book such as Kevin Poulsen that spent time in prison and also wrote a book “Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground”

If you want to read about Mitnick’s side of the story, I think this is a good book to get started.

It is sad to read about Research in Motion (RIM) attempt to become hip again. I have been a client for RIM for the past few years for one reason: AT&T provides me with an unlimited data plan (worldwide) and that is hard to beat. I have not been able to switch to any other phones as I really need my phone when globetrotting and I am reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars each month for roaming.

As a Blackberry user, I would have appreciated RIM to focus on getting a real phone on the market that is competitive and I can still keep my unlimited data plan but I guess nothing lasts forever and I need to move on and change to a new operating system and vendor and deal with the roaming. I can’t be left behind in innovation and usability and when you look at the current smart phone market, it is growing and advancing with huge steps every month. My current phone (BlackBerry Torch) has a lackluster touch screen that does not react to my fingers the way one would expect. I have also had to rebuild the phone at least 10 times from scratch due to applications that have broken the phone. One would think that cannot be possible, but it is and I have seen it many times. I even had to buy a software tool to “self-manage” the rebuilding as AT&T refuses to rebuild the phone and forces you to buy the phone again if the warranty is over. Not something I enjoy doing. Once returning from Europe I put my phone on and it went dead and by discussing with AT&T service they said to buy it again.

The latest attempt from RIM was to publish BBM Music store that enables BlackBerry users to stream 50 songs using BlackBerry Messenger. Why on earth would I want to do that and wasn’t this something that Nokia already failed in and decided to kill? If I were RIM, I would focus purely on getting new phones on the market and focusing on the youth as they are the ones that either make the platform or break it. Another group are the developers that now are at crossroads as they have to decide what to do to a dying operating system as RIM is moving to the new QNX operating system that they acquired by RIM.

My personal opinion is that RIM needs to focus on having applications that support music services such as Spotify, Rhapsody etc. and forget about things that are outside their own core competence areas. This tale is also something that the software/IT industry keeps seeing all over again: once you are the top dog, you will eventually come down due to many reasons. We have seen this happen with IBM, Nokia and many other players. We need to remember to reinvent ourselves on regular basis and keep working in a humble way. Becoming arrogant and believing in something that is not true anymore can be lethal in the long run. When somebody becomes market leader, it always causes people/employees to think that this stays status quo even in the future. This never happens.

Where does this leave me as a smart phone user? In my mind there are only three players left in the smart phone field: Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft, Android from Google and iPhone from Apple. With these three choices the follow-up decision is to select the hardware manufacturer and that is where the race is going on with Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Dell etc. on the WP7 field and obviously the same thing with Google Android devices but with iPhone with only one manufacturer being Apple.

I can’t believe how many announcements we are getting from the large IT players: First Google buying Motorola, then HP deciding to kill its HP TouchPad.  I just read news from Wall Street Journal that he is resigning as CEO of Apple and taking the role of Chairman of the Board if the board accepts that. I am sure that will happen. According to CNN, Steve Jobs sent a letter of resignation to the Apple’s board with following statement:

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come,” wrote Jobs, who has been on medical leave since January. Cook has been filling in as the company’s leader.

The question that everyone will now have is what Apple will be when Steve Jobs no longer runs the day-to-day business. Some might say that nothing and Tim Cook that will take the CEO role will be doing what he was doing before. However, there is no question in my mind that Steve Jobs is and has been the visionary for the company and there will be a change at least in the long term.

When I look back at very successful software/hardware companies, there has always been a strong leader with almost ruthless and dedicated desire to win the game. Look at Apple and what happened to the company when Steve left long time ago: it was almost bankrupted. There are several books that tell this story such as “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” by Alan Deutschman.

I am listening to CNBC when writing this blog entry and according to the analysts; Steve Jobs was never the one that has executed on operational level that has been Tim Cook.  The question that I have is whether Apple will be coming with new things as they have with Apple iPhone, iPad etc. According to the CNBC, the stock has lost 5% of its value afterhours.

Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs and the other way around. The question that the CNBC is asking whether Tim Cook is the right guy to lead: he came from an IBM operational role to help Apple to run operations smoothly. Only time will tell how Apple will continue on its path and the market is in shock as this could be the end where Steve Jobs and his presentations are over.

What is this going to do for the mobility and tablet market? The questions that the market will have is whether Apple will be able to continue on its iPhone and iPad success or will the market become suspicious whether the ecosystem and the devices will be able to compete. I do not like to speculate specifically as this has probably to do with Jobs illness, but this could be a major break for the competitors to gain some momentum at least on the long term. The market will be in disarray for a while even if CNBC says that Steve Jobs has mapped the devices/software and strategy for years to come. However, when you look at the current mobility and tablet market, it is in flux and any player can take over in matter of months. Just look at Android and how it is taking market share from Apple iPhone and others.

I expect there to be more announcements in the mobility/tablet market during the fall. No question about it.

I have written several times in my blogs about ecosystems and the role that ecosystems play. I recently run into an interesting article in the Redmond ChannelPartner with the header “Intuit Extends Cloud Pact with Microsoft”. As I am working with Microsoft ecosystem every single working day, I became interested what the article was all about. Intuit has been building a Partner Platform (IPP) that was reported by Mary-Jo Foley already back in January 2010. I am a longtime QuickBooks Online user so I have a pretty good picture of Intuit’s SaaS delivery model at least from 2003. I believe Intuit was one of the first software companies to introduce a full-blown accounting solution for the SMB market and my company still uses it every single day.

In January 2010 Jeffrey Schwartz reported  that Microsoft and Intuit stroke a cloud pact for small business where Windows Azure would be the preferred PaaS platform for Intuit and Intuit App Center.  This value proposition is obviously good for ISVs that can build solutions to the waste QuickBooks ecosystem with integration not only to QuickBooks data but also between QuickBook applications.

The idea behind this Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is to help developers to build and deploy SaaS applications that are integrated with QuickBooks data and also to give huge exposure for the ISV on the marketplace that Intuit provides for its partners. This marketplace (Intuit App Center) has thousands of applications that can be used with QuickBooks and other QuickBooks third-party solutions.

Let’s look closer to why Intuit and Microsoft need each other. I read an interesting blog entry from Phil Wainewright that includes very interesting remarks about software platform that happens to be the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation (Evaluation of a Product Platform Strategy for Analytical Application Software). The blog entry from Wainewright includes following picture:

You can read more about this topic and download Wainewright’s report “Redefining Software Platforms – How PaaS changes the game for ISVs) for Intuit” and this can be found by following this link.

When you review the picture above in more detail, you will find interesting and relevant information how Windows Azure and Intuit IPP platform play together. According to Wainewright, the conventional software platform capabilities are all about functional scope of the development platform whereby cloud platforms add three additional distinct elements according to Wainewright: Multi-tenancy, Cloud Reach and Service delivery capabilities.  The service delivery capabilities have to do with provisioning, pay-as-you-go pricing and billing, service monitoring etc. The multi-tenancy is typically not something that the PaaS platform provides automatically without the application developer building the multi-tenancy logic to the application. I still hear people saying that a legacy application that is migrated to the PaaS platform will automatically become multi-tenant. This is not true as each application has to be re-architected to take advantage of things such as scalability (application increases compute instances based on load).

The idea behind Intuit IPP platform according to Wainewrite is that Intuit has built service delivery capabilities that can be abstracted from the functional platform that is on the left hand side of the picture. The idea that Intuit had initially was to be able to provide support for any PaaS platform to be integrated to the IPP platform which I think is a good idea by not practical considering how fast the PaaS platforms are evolving and the amount of investments that are put into them.

One thing to remember is that all cloud platforms such as Windows Azure has already moved on the horizontal axis whereby the situation and clear cut separation between functional platform and service delivery capabilities is no longer that obvious. This also means that any Microsoft ISV that builds additional infrastructure elements to Windows Azure has to be carefully aligned with Microsoft product teams as there might be a danger to be irrelevant as some third-party functionality will be covered with the functional platform itself (PaaS platform) like Windows Azure. I have seen the same situation with some ISVs working with BizTalk extensions that suddenly have become part of BizTalk itself. Microsoft is very clear with its ISV partners that they should focus on vertical functionality or features that are unlikely to be part of the Microsoft platform in the short-term.

A new post from Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11^th, 2011 explains how Intuit IPP and Microsoft Azure will be even more integrated as Intuit will drop its native development stack and instead “focus on the top of the stack to make data and services for developers a top priority” according to Schwartz. In reality this means that Intuit will invest heavily in Windows Azure SDK for IPP and make developing an app on Azure and integrating it to QuickBooks data and IPP’s go-to-market services easy and effective. Microsoft released some more information about this partnership in the Windows Azure blog. The two companies have launched a program for this called “Front Runner for Intuit Partner Program” that explains what the developers get by participating in the program. The site portrays three steps: Develop, Test and Market and there is a video that explains what it means.

So what should we learn from this blog entry? First of all, every development platform (PaaS etc.) will evolve and my recommendation for the ISV is to focus and invest on one that you think is here in the long run. I think this example from Intuit is a great example of a company that was initially in the race of competing in the PaaS space to some extent to conclude that the investments to keep the competition going is just too huge and this led to the conclusion to select Microsoft Azure as the foundation for IPP. Intuit will be much better off by focusing on building logic on-top of Windows Azure by participating in SDK development an ensuring that any solution specific development can be easily integrated into Windows Azure platform. Intuit will therefore focus on providing data and services for developers to use with Windows Azure PaaS platform.

Microsoft has been in the development tools and platform development since its foundation so they are much better off to do those kinds of massive investments. I think this is very smart from Intuit and this enables Intuit to have a scalable solution that developers can rely on even if the decision was not easy according to Liz Ngo from Microsoft. Alex Chriss (Director, Intuit Partner Platform) from Intuit explains this in his blog why Windows Azure is a good foundation for Intuit development. Also, Intuit provides a tremendous opportunity for ISVs like CoreConnext and Propelware report based on the blog from Liz Ngo.

Software ecosystem will continue to evolve and EVERY ISV has to figure out how its solutions will meld to be part of different sub-ecosystems. This will also require efficient and well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (API) from all parties to be able to create an integrated solution based on service oriented architecture (SOA).

Let me known if you know other good examples where software ecosystems mesh nicely with each other. 

Many of us is still pondering on the Google Motorola Mobility deal and today we (WSJ.com) heard that HP it’s quitting its PC business by a spinoff. At the same time, HP is shutting down its tablets and smartphone business so we can now say goodbye to HP TouchPad for good.

Yesterday we could read that Best Buy management wants to return 200k units back to H-P as they have not been able to sell more than 25k of TouchPads.  That is tough for HP. I remember blogging and commenting on H-P acquiring WebOS and Ari Jaaksi to become Senior Vice President for WebOS. Ari used to work in the Nokia Meego project previously and his blog can be found here where he has been commenting on the WebOS development.

What is intriguing in this overall news is that the tablet or hardware business has become a commodity low-margin business and IBM realized this a few years ago when selling its PC business to Lenovo. HP wants to do the same thing, focus on software and services and leave the low margin business to others. A sign of this HP has offered to acquire U.K. enterprise software firm Autonomy Corp for $10.25 billion. I just listened to CNBC and some analyst was skeptical about this decision specifically now with the change of strategy to exist the PC business. Also, the analysts conclude that an European software executive Leo Apotheker is buying another European which might make it easier. Only time will tell.

What should be concerning to HP and its upcoming earnings is that by announcing the fact that they are getting out of PC business might have an impact in their sales in similar fashion what Stephen Elop has experienced with Nokia smartphone sales that are based on Symbian. He became famous with his statements of a burning platform.

The similarities between Elop’s and Nokia’s departure from Symbian can be seen similar to that of HPs decision to leave PC business. The market will view things from viability perspective and acquire and purchase things that have a life. Symbian is on life support, WebOS has a dire future as HP is abandoning it so as far as I am concerned we are left with three players in the mobility/tablet space. I do NOT believe in other platforms such as Bada from Samsung. They are just too late with something new that the development community would be excited about. There is just a limit of how many platforms ISVs can support and Bada won’t be one of them.

That is why I really think that the mobility space will now be between Apple iPhone/iPad, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 8 with a tablet.

The question will be how this news will impact Dell, Acer and other similar companies? Will this have a positive impact on these vendors from market share perspective or are we in a down-spiral in respect to PCs as the market and market analysts are claiming? There is no question that Apple iPad has become a major player with more than 25 million delivered and some analysis (not IDC) are already counting iPad in the same category with a PC/laptop and with this calculation, Apple has become a major player.

I do not think the news today about HP will be the last one we will hear about the turmoil this fall. I expect that there will be further consolidation in the mobility market as well as PC markets. Time will tell what it is.

Do you agree with my conclusions?

Here we go again. The mobility world is changing with Motorola Mobility being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion. This was widely reported this morning when I woke up. Doug Barney from Redmondmag.com concludes that this move from Google might anger device manufacturers. My personal belief (that many other analysts support) is that Google woke up to realize that it might be good to make money on the phone business and not have it “free” as it is now.  The fallacy of open source might have finally caught up even with Google….. It could be that Google executives also realized that the winning formula is about ecosystems and  not only about the operating system as Galen Gruman conclude in his blog entry today.

I have stated in many of my writings that I do not believe in the open source model for an ISV and there are many reasons for it. One reason is obvious: the more success you get, you will have patent trolls suing your ass with our without reason. I have seen it so many times and it is frightening. Yes, large companies do the same thing to each other, but I guess the reasons are little different. Large companies can afford lawsuits but for the small ones this can be a death sentence.

Another reason has to do with valuation of the company in case you want to sell it in the future. There is no question that a company with real IP has more value that the one that assembles things from pure open source. In some cases this might be OK, but if you want to build something that has real value, some pieces have to be closed from competition to view it. I have been part of software organizations that have been sold (both as CEO and as Chairman of the Board) and there is no question in my mind that the buyer is interested in where the code (and algorithms) came from. I am sure there is a place for open source as well… If I had to start a company today, it would not be based on open source.

The announcement from Google to acquire Motorola is has caused a stir in the marketplace with speculation of whether Microsoft is now going to buy Nokia to have the same situation with Google. One blog entry suggested that even RIM might be a target now, but based on CNBC analyst interview this morning, RIM does not bring any additional value to the table so the market does not expect them to be bought up. This is going to be a race between Apple iPhone, Microsoft Phone and Android.

How should we now read the market and the intentions from these three players? Nokia’s share shot up 10 percent today: maybe Nokia will also be bought and or Android will be loosing attractiveness to players such as HTC and Samsung that are now going to compete directly with Google in hardware design and manufacturing. Interestingly, I read today from the news that Apple has ordered 95 million iPhones for the fall and Samsung is going to be one of the largest manufacturers, which makes this game very interesting. Samsung and Apple are fighting for the same markets and are in fact even in a lawsuit on patent infringement but still doing business together. Go and figure out……

The Business Insider blog entry today concludes that the deal between Google and Motorola might end in a disaster mainly because of Google stabbing HTC and Samsung in the back by now competing against them. At the same time, Microsoft now became the only big player that does NOT manufacture its own handsets and this could potentially be really good for Microsoft and Microsoft Phone future. It could be that Microsoft ends up also acquiring Nokia going forward, but this is purely my own speculation. Some bloggers from ZDNet think this would be the most logical option for Microsoft. It seems that the embedded software/hardware design ala xBox Kinect could work well where Microsoft would design the best handset to be optimized with Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. This is probably what the Nokia-Microsoft partnership is trying to do.

Another interesting perspective that Galen Gruman provides is to claim that Android really isn’t open source and now with the Motorola deal we are most probably going to see more closed sub-systems within Android that Google will not disclose from algorithm perspective. Gruman also concludes that the Android open source system development does not have an iron fist to make decision like it has in the Linux development environment with Linus Torvalds in the helm. Failed attempts such as Moblin, Maemo and MeeGo are examples of open source mobile platforms that never really got the traction that the platform needed.

What today’s acquisition confirmed to me was that the future of smartphones really does not have anything to do with just to operating system, but it is about software ecosystem and how software developers, handset manufacturers can manage the user experience. Nobody besides Apple is making really serious money on smartphones today as the entire market has matured and margins have come down.

IT IS ALL ABOUT ECOSYSTEMS AND FIGURING OUT WHERE EVERYBODY WILL PROVIDE VALUE.

I explained in my previous blog post that the cloud era is here to stay and with this new era, there are also quite a few technologies that the ISV has to select to build a solution. One key thing is to select the cloud platform but an increasingly important technology that the ISV has to evaluate is what development environment to use to support hundreds of different mobility devices, both smart phones as well as tablets.

When I look back not more than five years, the requirements for applications were much different that today when it comes to consuming information. Today, the end user expects to be able to use a smart phone and tablet to view/update information using a solution that typically is built on cloud technology. Flash used to be the main technology to build applications for the Internet browser, but with the decision that Steve Jobs and Apple did on Flash of not supporting Flash on Apple iPad, the success of Flash is doubtful in the future. Consumers do not care about technology, they care about having the ability to consume information and this is something that the technology industry forgets every now and then. If somebody has any doubts about this, just look at what is happening on the US markets and what has happened for example for RIM and BlackBerry market share on smartphones. It is brutal.

Back in 2010, there were quite a few articles of whether HTML5 will kill Flash. There are millions of Flash web sites whereby I do not think Flash will go away anytime soon, but the real question is whether the ISV should believe that Flash is going to survive going forward. My personal opinion is that I would not invest time and money to Flash anymore as we all know it is not going to support all of the relevant mobility interfaces and I do not think that for example RIMs approach by marketing its BlackBerry PlayBook to support Flash makes a difference in the large scheme of things. The question that each ISV needs to evaluate is what technology it expects to support from a long-term application development perspective.

We already know by now, that Flash will not survive in the long run and has already become a major limitation for many ISVs. When you really think about it, users have already won the battle by ignoring the Flash and showing this by buying iPads even if they know it won’t support Flash. Can you afford building sites and ignore the millions information consumers? I do not think so. Many entrepreneurs (me included) have made the decision not to allow any Flash technology  to be used on the web-site as most smart phones and tablets do not support Flash and Flash not optimized either from SEO and SEM perspective. Check your web site analytics/statistics and you will find out that smart phones and tablets are becoming more relevant in information consumption.

I believe that the next wave of innovation will be coming from software vendors that are able to combine the cloud and mobility in a way that helps end user organizations to become more effective and productive in whatever the application area happens to be. I read an interesting article “Building An Enterprise Software Company That Doesn’t Suck” where the author described how large enterprise software packages are losing the appeal from both end user organizations as well as users. People are sick and tired of complicated and hard-to-use software solutions that do not bring any value add to a user’s daily life. Organizations have forced users to use software to fulfill some type of compliance rule but I my bet is that with the new generation of users, this will change whether organizations want it or not. The new generation entering the marketplace is fluent mobility users, they use social networks as we used to use the regular phone and they would not care less about the corporate compliance stuff and based on research, they won’t even apply to organizations that are old-fashioned way of viewing the world.

Technology selections for an ISV business is always tricky and I have had to do this many time during my career and I have also had a few misses such as selecting an application development tool from Synon (acquired by CA) called Obsydian that never really took off in the marketplace and my developers were never really able to use it effectively. The same applies to the selection today in respect to mobility development. Can you afford making a mistake, spend money in development and then suddenly realize that something else should have been used. I do not think so.

I recently read an interesting article “Seven Reasons HTML5 is Killing Flash” with some interesting points of why HTML 5 could potentially kill flash. According to the article, there are more than 109 million mobile users with HTML-5 ready browsers, but by 2016 the estimate according to ABI Research is that there will be more than 2.1 billion mobile users with compatible browsers. According to ABI Research, there will be 25 key features that will make HTML 5 competitive and the seven that was picked in the article are as follows:

1)      Video Play: HTML5 includes a tag for videos that allows it to play with the start, stop, pause etc.

2)      Video Record: This will become even more important going forward as mobile phones have video recording and HTML5 will support this

3)      Audio Play/Record: Today, the user needs, Flash, QuickTime or Java to play or record audio, but with HTML5 it is just another tag.

4)      Apps: HTML5 allows Web pages to access the same routines that make browsers work and enables them to become like any application. I think this is one of the key things when you think about mobile application development using HTML5

5)      Rich 2D Graphics: All types of sophisticated two-dimensional graphics will be built into HTML5

6)      IM: Instant messaging will be built into HTML5 by virtue of Web sockets

7)      Real-time Streams: Web sockets will also allow any Web-page designer to easily add real-time data streams to the application.

HTML5 could become the best friend for the ISVs going forward as it will provide the broadest support from a device/browser perspective and when smart phones will get HTML5 compliant Internet browsers. HTML provides a better way to support multiple devices as is explained in the article “Enterprise App Stores Harness HTML5” by Colin Johnson.

Software developers love to challenge themselves with things that make them feel good and the trickier the problem, the merrier it is to find the solution. In some cases, this could obviously be the killer innovation that nobody else has ever done, but if it is something that already exists and can be purchased from a third-party organization, it is waste of time and money to rebuild something that is already available. Do you remember the saying “ it can’t be good as it was not invented by us?”. I do remember vividly and have been the witness multiple time during my career.

Ten years ago software developers had to work on basic infrastructure before getting the solution built, but today, the focus should be mostly on innovating and assembling solutions that bring something new to the marketplace. I still see SaaS ISVs to claim that they need to build a billing solution as part of the solution, but there is plenty of other solutions already on the marketplace that do that well an can be integrated to the overall solution scenario.

I happened to view Microsoft Windows Azure homepage today to see if there was something new and was very happy to see the homepage to include the same statement that I am bringing here: “Focus on your application. Not the infrastructure”.  A good place to start looking at other SaaS components/solutions is to visit Windows Azure marketplace that includes listings of different solutions that the ISV can use as part of their solution delivery. If you are a system integrator, you should also spend time understanding what the software ecosystem has to offer so you can become a trusted advisor to your clients.

I do recognize that in some cases there is a need to build “glue” components that can be regarded as infrastructure components, but at the same time, the ISV needs to realize that those components will be replaced by commodity software whereby the original solution needs to be reengineered in some way or the other. In the past, as a leader of a software development team, we had to spend lots of time creating infrastructure for our solution to even work. I used to be the lead for several business intelligence solutions and at that time, there just weren’t enough components or infrastructure that would take care of the basic functionality. I still remember vividly our fight in going from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit technology and we had to support APPC communication between the mini computer and the Windows desktops.  The bad news was that IBM decided to redo most of the router software with a pace that we as an ISV had really hard time to follow and we run into pressure from our clients to upgrade our 16-bit technology.  You typically do not want to be the first one on the planet to test new technology, but in this case we did not have a choice. We spent multiple months “running against the time” when trying to get our solution to work with the latest Windows router technology and it was not fun and it was very expensive.

I mentioned that SaaS ISVs should look at other SaaS solution to bring functionality as billing and organizations such as Zuora, Inc is an example of an organization that brings subscription billing and commerce platform that can be used by other SaaS vendors.

My message to cloud ISVs is simple: learn your cloud ecosystem, learn what there is that you can consume as part of your solution and focus on innovation on the solution and not on the infrastructure.