Over at DiversityAnalysis we’ve just published a new report – right in time for the Cloud Connect event in San Jose next week. Krish and I wanted to write a very basic report tailored for mid to late adopters as a guide to the pitfalls and problems involved in a move to the cloud (especially cloud software) and the questions to ask prospective vendors to ensure all those risks are mitigated.

We were stoked that Intacct saw the value of what we were doing and decided to support us in the writing of the report – it was something we wanted to do anyway, Intacct support just made it all the easier.

Our report articulated a number of questions to ask when evaluating cloud applications – these questions fall into several distinct groupings:

• Business requirement questions
• The reliability questions
• The availability questions
• The upgrades, maintenance and outages questions
• The security questions
• The privacy questions
• The data ownership questions
• The integration questions
• The customization questions

We’re pretty pleased with the report – feel free to check it out here.

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Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence  will be entered into (perhaps).

Julie Tangen from the Appirio (more on them here) media agency dropped me an email and asked me if I’d like to look at some of the t shirts they had. A couple of weeks later a package turned up for me with a host of Appirio shirts in it – all in black. Look for more Appirio schwag in upcoming reviews.

Hot

• One of the benefits of the cloud being emblazoned on your chest
• Nice thick 100% cotton fabric

Not

• Made in Nicaragua – hmmmm
• I don’t dig black, sorry
• Man I have a lot of t shirts!

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During the recent CloudCamp in Sydney I had the chance to catch up with Marc Lehman, CEO at SaaS accounting provider Saasu (more on Saasu here). Marc and I talked about where Saasu is at, both from a business and from a product perspective. Much of what we discussed I’m not at liberty to write about, but one feature – soon to be released – Marc was happy for me to talk about.

Saasu has an interesting approach in that they give customers the ability to create and use multiple templates within the application and also create CSS/HTML designs to add apply to these templates. More than a lightweight user skin however, these templates give users the ability to customize the look and feel of many parts of the application.

Saasu are about to release a new statement engine that leverages this template functionality and delivers real benefits to their customers. The statement engine enables a whole host of automated features including:

• the automation of payment reminders
• the ability to automatically send monthly statements
• the ability to run subscription billing from the application
• the facilitation of debtors collection (otherwise known as dunning)

While I’d not entirely agree that the functionality Saasu has introduced would drive complete subscription and billing from within the application (subscription and billing is highly complex – see this whitepaper we recently published), the functionality that Saasu offers gives businesses with a simple recurring revenue model the ability to automate their processes.

More importantly it enables them to manage their cashflow and allows them to chase shoddy payers with almost no intervention required – a double win for all.

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How much will it cost?

Under $900m. We have received a VROM (very rough order of magnitude quote) but are waiting for further quotes which we believe will be for less. As the process goes forward the quotes get tighter, but more expensive to produce

Who is doing this?

Aside from the founders we are talking to other big investors and customers, but it is very early stages at the moment. I’m impressed at the interest we are receiving though. The way these work is that we need to sign up early customers before we can lock in money, which is tough as the biggest players have their own cables.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing but we know that the demand overall will be there to deliver and our early contacts are very promising. The key for customers is to sign up, regardless of what competitors counter-offer (and they will), so that we can guarantee a competitive market in the long run.

What return will it provide?

We will have equity and different types of debt – the yield on each varies as the risk profile varies. The more solid debt will be backed by customer orders and give high grade debt-like returns. The equity is much more at risk, and really dependent on the speed of the rising tide of demand. Our aim is to generate good returns for investors while achieving our mandate of high speed uncapped internet at affordable prices in Australasia.

As an aside this is an interesting move for those involved. For Drury it is a reasonably high-risk initiative. he’s obviously very ambitious and those ambitions extend well beyond Xero (witness his NZX directorship). If Pacific Fibre takes off it could be the launch pad that propels him to the next big thing.

For Morgan and Tindall it’s much more philanthropic, and they undoubtedly bring a discipline that balances Drury’s exuberance.

Rushworth brings telco experience and marketing nous to the organization, while Wiggs and Humphrey are there to do the work (as an aside I for one am going to watch Wiggs, more usually the high level adviser, get involved in nitty gritty – it’ll do you good to get your hands dirty lance )

More interesting to see will be which large organizations buy in to this (financially or otherwise). The telcos, central government and other large businesses that have the cash and wherewithal to get involved will position themselves in the weeks to come – watch this space.

Announced this morning is Pacific Fibre, an early stage international fibre venture founded by a group including Stephen Tindall, Morgan and Drury. Hell even the blogosphere gets a look-in with local boy Lance Wiggs having a role in all of this.

The group is looking to secure funding and build a 5.12 Terabits/sec capacity fibre cable to be ready in 2013 connecting Australia, New Zealand and the USA -  the initial proposal is a cable which will deliver five times the capacity of the existing Southern Cross system.

The current proposed cable configuration would be 13,000 km long, and have two fibre pairs with 64 wavelengths (lambdas) each at 40 Gigabits/sec per lambda. The maximum lit capacity initially would be 5.12 Terabits/sec, but would be upgradeable to over 12 Terabits/sec as the emerging 100 Gbit/sec per lambda technology becomes reality. The newer cable and repeater technology that Pacific Fibre proposes to use will be substantially more easily upgradeable than that of existing cables.

The company is still undergoing incorporation so no details about ownership and governance are available but involved parties are:

• Stephen Tindall – Founder of The Warehouse and K1W1
• Rod Drury – Founder of Xero
• Sam Morgan – Founder of TradeMe
• Mark Rushworth – former Vodafone Chief Marketing Officer, technology 
• John Humphrey – industry veteran and
• Lance Wiggs – strategy consultant and entrepreneur

More to come on this one – watch this space…

To quote Homer Simpson… Doh!

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Image via CrunchBase

Last evening Google unveiled Google Apps Marketplace, an one-stop shop for SaaS business applications that are tightly integrated with Google Apps. Zoli covered the launch from Google Event and Ben did some analysis from the SMB perspective. I am going to take a different approach and cover some of the launch partners from the cloud computing space. Before I talk about the companies that launched in the marketplace, let me slip in some of my thoughts on this announcement.

Long before rumors of Google Apps Marketplace even surfaced in the internet and almost a year after Zoli clamored for Google’s entry into the business applications market, I fantasized about Gmail as an enterprise dashboard. People might have called me crazy at that time but I loved the idea of using the Gmail as a dashboard for all my activities.

I also want to point out that it is now possible to add any Google gadgets, including those developed by third party vendors, to Gmail. Who needs expensive Exchange Server and Sharepoint Server when you can have similar capabilities within a browser for a fraction of its cost? Before people jump on me for this assertion, I want to highlight the fact that I am talking about what could happen in the future than the current state of Google SaaS products.

Yesterday’s announcement was more like my dream come true. Well, I wanted a much deeper integration but it is a good beginning. From what I hear from many of the SaaS vendors, a deeper integration is in the roadmap for all of them.

Even though Ben has spoken from the SMB angle, I feel that this move by Google increases the relevancy of SaaS in the enterprise segment in a big way. One of the biggest obstacles for the enterprise adoption of SaaS is the issue of identity management. With the release of Google OpenID Federated login API, Google Apps became the identity hub of SaaS. The next logical step is to deeply integrate Google Apps with different SaaS applications and wait for the customers to jump in. With the release of Apps Marketplace, Google took the necessary step for this transition.

Check out this video giving an overview on Google Apps Marketplace

Google launched the App Marketplace with 50 launch partners. It is not possible for me to cover all of them. I will select four of them from the briefings I got and talk about how their apps are integrated with Google Apps. There is a common theme to all the apps. They are

• Installing the app from the Google App Marketplace that shows up in Google Apps Admin Dashboard, much like other Google App services
• The installed apps show up in the Google universal navigation (the links available on the left top side on all of the Google applications)
• Integration of third party apps with Google apps and sharing of data

Zoho: Zoli has covered a bit about Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive sponsor of Cloud Ave) on this post yesterday. At this time, Zoho is integrating two of their business applications, Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, with Google Apps. They have done some tighter integrations like the ability to import users from Google Apps, import contacts from Google Apps to CRM, subscribe and view events in CRM and Projects, attach Google Docs inside CRM and Project, etc.. This helps Zoho reach out to Google Apps users by offering a solid portfolio of business applications including Zoho CRM and Zoho Project. With the availability of Opensocial gadgets for Zoho CRM and Project, the data in these apps can be accessed from inside of Gmail. I asked Zoho evangelist, Raju Vegesna, about how deeply their products are going to integrated with one another in the future. He told me that we can expect much deeper integration with features like automatic sync of Google Contacts and Zoho CRM contacts, etc.. As a power Google Apps user and a Zoho CRM user, I can’t wait to have this kind of deeper integration. Exciting times are ahead for SaaS interoperability and integration.

Check out this video about Zoho CRM integration with Google Apps.

Socialwok: Socialwok is another favorite app of mine. Socialwok adds a social layer on top of Google Apps and offers a deeper integration with Google Apps services like calendar and docs. Socialwok, the winner of the Techcrunch 2009 demopit award, also runs on the Google infrastructure. It is built on top of Google App Engine. Already, they had made available a Google gadget which integrates well into Gmail. Now, Socialwok is even more integrated with Gmail, vastly simplifying the workflow and enhancing the collaboration further. I strongly recommend this app for any business with a distributed team.

Atlassian: Atlassian, the company behind the famous products like Jira, Confluence, etc., is also part of the Google Apps marketplace. Jira Studio, the fastest growing Atlassian product that offers developers a hosted software development suite, is now tightly integrated with Google Apps and it is available in the Marketplace. This integration allows developers to attach Google docs to any issue, embed any Google doc or list of docs into their wiki, Jira studio activity bar which shows unread message from gmail, calendar notification, open issues, etc. is available at the bottom of any page in studio and it is integrated with Google talk as well.

Check out this video about Jira Studio integration with Google Apps.

Skytap: Of all the partners, I was surprised to find Skytap in the list of Google Apps Marketplace launch partners. Unlike the other three I have covered above, Skytap is a cloud infrastructure provider (see my previous coverage of Skytap here, here and here). By integrating with Google Apps, Skytap is allowing users to log into their UI with Google Apps login, solving one of the biggest identity related problems faced by enterprises. But the most interesting part is the ability to run any enterprise apps, including legacy apps, on the Skytap cloud and access it from inside of Gmail. In my opinion, this is a true game changer and boosts the value of Google Apps among the enterprises.

For example, by using Skytap and Google Apps together, a sales engineer can instantly toggle between an enterprise application demo running in the Skytap Cloud to a Google Calendar application that contains necessary information to complete a task.  Application developers and testers can move enterprise resource (ERP) applications to the Skytap Cloud without any code changes, migrate to a newer version, create application snapshots, maintain project milestones in Google Calendar(tm), and multi-task between Skytap and Google Docs(tm) to de-bug, track, take notes and collaborate with business analysts.  Training Managers can use Google Apps to create a learning portal and provide access to a Skytap Cloud training environment for enterprise applications, while shifting between applications like Google Calendar which can be used for scheduling.

Check out this video about how Skytap is integrated inside Google Apps

I think few years from now, when we look back in this space, we may even conclude that this is a pivotal moment that catapulted Google into a strong player in the enterprise market. This has a potential to not only lift the prospects of Google on the enterprise side, this move will also strengthen the future of SaaS in a big way.

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Last week I speculated to some impending announcements from Google about application stores specifically tailored to the small and medium business market. Well, readers didn’t have to wait long, Google has just launched what is essentially an SMB application marketplace – A place where (they hope) customers will discover, purchase and deploy integrated third party cloud applications.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a store front aimed at the 25 million individual users that Google apps has across two million businesses. It’s a standards looking web application space that leverages some core facets:

• Central management of application availability

• Universal navigation within and between apps

• Single sign on
• Secure data access via OAuth

In terms of the business details, later in the year Google will be releasing a flexible billing API for vendors to allow them to set their own pricing policies – either way Google extracts a 20% revenue share for applications purchased through the Marketplace.

I spoke with Bob Warfield, CEO of Helpstream who are part of the salesforce.com AppExchange (a similar, yet slightly different, app store). Helpstream acquires around 100 sales leads a month from their involvement with the store. I asked him what vendor and customer drivers there were around involvement on an app store. Not surprisingly, Warfield’s answer showed the bipolar nature of application store involvement:

For a vendor, app stores are all about how much traffic they bring you.  I suspect for buyers, they're all about how many choices they bring.

It seems to me that Google’s approach is a somewhat limited perspective on what app stores can achieve for SMBs. Platforms (notably the AppExchange and the Intuit Partner Platform (see disclosure) have a much broader set of touch points than does Google’s incarnation. Whereas the other two examples use a broad common data model, Google’s is limited to management at the back end and calendar/docs/mail at the user facing end.

I put this to Scott McMullan, enterprise lead at Google, who expressed the position that Google believes “the web is the platform, and where common data models are typically created” a seemingly more open approach, but one that arguably drives less benefits to end users than a more proprietary, but richer, approach. I spoke to Sunir Shah from freshBooks about this matter and he, unsurprisingly, supported the oepn web view saying:

The reason the Open Web is important is because closed platforms lock small businesses into solutions they may not want with services worse than why the free market provides. The lightweight data structures is how the Web works best: small pieces, loosely joined. Forcing third vendors to buy into a massive monolithic data structure locks them into a smaller market which limits how much they can grow and reinvest resources into innovation.   

Shah was also very positive about Google as a player in the marketplace saying:

I am a big fan of them. Not just for the obvious reasons of their size and market reach but because from the beginning they have put a huge emphasis on building a marketplace the right way. For years they have supported the Open Web movement and helped usher in protocols like  OpenID and OAuth. They have reached out to partners and competitors to involve them in a fair and meaningful way. Moreover working with them has been great. They have been extremely helpful and I just want to give them a public high five for that. 

McMullan’s view about open versus proprietary platforms was that:

We're [the more proprietary platforms and Google's more "open" approach] both promoting "integrated apps".  We just tend to bring different types of data to the party to integrate. Intuit has a lot of transaction/finance data, so they're extending the value of that into other contexts.  We have a lot of collaboration and messaging and user profile data, so we're looking to make that more useful to users.

This view is, unsurprisingly, borne out by Intuits Director of the Partner Platform, Alex Chriss, who told me recently that the IPP, with its common data model, will be more appealing for SMBs who want a “one stop shop” for their apps. “The simplicity of sign up and sign in and the ability to have data working seamlessly across applications is a very powerful thing” he said.

I also questioned McMullan about The Small Business Web and it’s goal of getting SaaS vendors to work together and publish open APIs. McMullan was positive about the initiative, saying that “I know this group and we like what they stand for.”

McMullan and I talked about app stores in general and for SMBs in particular. I asked McMullan whether there were synergies between what Google is doing and other SMB plays such as the AppExchange or Intuit’s Partner Platform. While not wanting to look too far forward, he was positive about Intuit’s approach saying that “We believe strongly in what they're doing w/App Center for sure and are fans. Synergies are mainly ahead of us, given we don't do much together, other than believe this is part of the future for small businesses acquiring software”

It should be noted that with the launch of the Marketplace, Intuit and Google are working together as Intuit has an Online Payroll application already listed.

So… as for the Google initiative. With 25 million users it almost guaranteed that developers will flock to the app store (at launch there are already around 50 applications available). The current APIs available to developers are well proven and hence integration with the store should be relatively straightforward. McMullan gave an example of Google apps appearing within Atlassian’s Jura application (see below) as a useful and efficient use case for users.

Coming up on the road map are what Google calls contextual gadgets – in the same way that Gmail is now automatically embedding YouTube videos with Gmail, so too could application developers chose to have contextual data from their apps embedded in an email – see the image below showing Appirio data within Gmail. This is from a real product “PS Connect” that Appirio are demo-ing at the Google CampFire right now.

All in all it’s an exciting move. The purist in me would have wished for a far higher granularity around data integration points and a richer common data model but notwithstanding that I’m fully confident that Google’s app store will gain significant traction in the marketplace.

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Let’s face it – despite significant hand-waving to the contrary, Microsoft Outlook is the default email client for the vast majority of the enterprise world. No matter how much people love to hate the fact, Outlook is both widely understood and the accepted norm. I’ve talked to a number of people involved in deploying Google apps into enterprise sites and often the case is that this is in fact an infrastructure play – the organization uses Google as an exchange replacement but maintains its existing desktop clients.

This situation is a huge barrier to Google apps proper gaining traction – users are unlikely to edit a Google apps document, only to have to jump through hoops in order to collaborate on that document with others - as vendor MainSoft asks, what happens when you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, and you’re interested in using Google Docs?  Is SharePoint + Google Docs:  An Oxymoron? Not anymore, and this is an announcement that even I, jaded as I am from product pitches, am getting excited about.

Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook.  Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly – so end users can be more productive. They’re also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate – full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint – tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.

The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar.  Users can

share, locate, and manage centralized documents directly from their e-mail client.

  A brief overview of the features that are available for Outlook and SharePoint users:

From within Outlook, people can:

• Publish and share document links:
• Drag documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDF files to the Harmony sidebar to upload them to Google Docs.

• Share documents automatically.  Drag Google document links to a new e-mail message, and Harmony will automatically share it with recipients listed in the user’s Outlook or Gmail address books. The email sender decides whether each email recipient gets read or editing rights to the online documents.  Recipients can view and edit the documents on Google Docs, using a free Google account.

• Replace attachments with links and send e-mail, in one step. When composing or forwarding an e-mail with attachments, Harmony prompts the user to publish the documents online and send a link instead.
• Find documents from the convenience of e-mail:
• Search the contents of users’ entire collection of Google Docs documents from the Harmony search bar.
• Locate documents users have permission to access using views, folders, sorting, and starred documents.
• Work on Google Docs documents:
• Organize documents in folders; star, share, rename, or hide them.
• Open and edit Google Docs documents in Outlook, including Microsoft Office, PDF, and Open Office formats.

Of course the question this raises is why on earth this is a free product. This would seem to solve such a pain point (at least for Google resellers and, I’d imagine, for Google also although they’re unlikely to admit it) that Mainsoft should have people more than willing to pay for the product. Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen told me that their strategy is a freemium one – the current product is free but future products that will include functionality that IT departments want (granular control, permissioning, central admin etc) will potentially be paid. I’m not sure if I’m convinced about this approach – Harmony provides significant value today (heck, the saving in traffic by not emailing attachments alone is significant for a large organization) that I believe they’d be able to monetize from day one.

Either way I’m really impressed by what Mainsoft have created with Harmony and I’m marking them as a company to watch.

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