• Repackaging workloads into VMs faster than an Amazon.com shipping manager.
• Standardizing like McDonalds – everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

In the interim, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO has dismissed the cloud as vaporware and says it’s nothing new.

When the IT industry is like this it is important to not to ignore the hard-earned lessons acquired over the past twenty years. Particularly:

• Standardization and commoditization drives prices down, reduces switching cost, increases choice and benefits consumers
• Proprietary, market domination controls prices, keeping them high, increases switching cost and benefits the dominant vendor

Just look at the drop in prices of PC’s over the last 20 years compared to the software that runs on them. Amazon, for example, is already continually reducing the price of its cloud services both in response to competition but primarily as a result of achieving certain economies of scale. The question you have to ask yourself is will a proprietary cloud vendor, that has tied you in, reduce prices in a similar way to Amazon?

As a result of extensive partners and customer interviews Alfresco has consistently and loudly heard that:

• Customers want to choose software without having to worry and predict where they will deploy it
• Customers want to de able to choose where to deploy software later and have the flexibility to change their deployment options
• Customers do not want to be penalized for choosing on-premise or cloud deployments

Given this, it is critical to look at your corporate architecture – both behind the firewall and in the cloud as a set services that can be deployed to the environment best suited to accomplish the desired business and technical objectives. This brings forth the concept of a “Cloud Service Architecture

The Cloud Service Architecture

There are distinct architectural layers and services within a Cloud Service Architecture (CSA) and the terminology sometimes varies, but in essence they all have the following functionality. Forrester in “Future View: The New Tech Ecosystems of Cloud Services, And Cloud Computing” define the services as follows (in bold)

• Cloud Computing Applications – Software-as-a-Service
• Cloud Computing Component Services – App-Components-as-a-Service
• Cloud Computing Platform Services – Software-Platform-as-a-Service
• Cloud Computing Virtual Infrastructure Services – Virtual-Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• Cloud Physical Infrastructure – Physical-Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Cloud computing applications are packaged applications that run in the cloud. Historically, SaaS applications are typically multi-tenant and can run on traditional hosted hardware (pre-cloud as we know it) or in a cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Evangelist, Jeff Barr discusses the emerging Cloud Service Architecture as follows in:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/06/the-forthcoming.html

“The existing state of the art in cloud-based architectures takes the shape of an application running in the cloud, calling upon services running within and provided by the operator of the cloud… I am starting to see something which goes beyond this in a subtle yet important way. Developers are now building services in the cloud for other developers, with the understanding that important (and perhaps primary) consumers of the service will also be resident within the same cloud. I’m going to call this the CSA, or Cloud Service Architecture.”

Legacy applications may run in the cloud but modern cloud computing applications are built on cloud computing component and platform services. . As Barr continues to say:

“Applications communicating with each other inside of the Amazon cloud enjoy some important benefits. They get high-bandwidth, low-latency communication, at little or no cost. They inherit all of the other attributes of cloud-based applications such as on-demand scalability, fault tolerance, cloud-wide network security, and cost efficiency.”

Cloud Computing Platform Services

Platform services are often referred to as Platform-as-a-Service – PaaS. Typical core platform services are:

• Database-as-a-Service – DaaS
• Message Queue
• Blob or Object Stores
• File Sharing

As an example, Amazon now offer MySQL as a service for example. This is the level where Content Services fits in to the Cloud Service Architecture.

Open Cloud Service Architecture

The “Above the Clouds: A Berkley View of Cloud Computing, February 2009” report points out that “Software stacks have improved interoperability among platforms, but the APIs for Cloud Computing itself are still essentially proprietary, or at least have not been the subject of active standardization. Thus, customers cannot easily extract their data and programs from one site to run on another.”

Examples from the most open to the most closed are:

• Amazon EC2 - At one end of the spectrum where users can control nearly the entire software stack of operating system, database, application server and language
• Google’s AppEngine – Targeted at traditional request-reply web applications with a proprietary, operating system, database (MegaStore based on BigTable data storage) and the open Python language
• Microsoft Azure – General purpose computing. Applications written using .NET libraries and compiled to a Common Language Runtime.
• Salesforce.com’s Force.com - At the other end of the proprietary spectrum Force.com is designed to support business applications that run against the salesforce.com database, and nothing else.

It is important not to forget the lessons learned over the last 20 years regarding standards and openness when you have your head in the clouds. The recent prices rises of Oracle and SAP and the lock-in experience by SharePoint usershave been a firm reminder of the importance of choice and the danger of tie-in.

• Content Services in an Open Cloud Architecture

Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) or Content Services neatly fits as a service at the platform services level next the database services. For this to be open and enable customers to easily extract their content from one cloud to another – internal or external it is essential that content management standards that are service oriented and cloud friendly are used.

CMIS, which stands for Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a draft specification submitted by leading ECM vendors to OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and is well underway to being ratified as the ECM industry standard. One of the key words here is “Services”. We are moving from a world of locked content into a world of Content Services where content is easily and consistently accessible and can be mashed up in a wide variety of ways thereby enabling a whole new breed of content-centric applications and sites.

In short, CMIS will be to content what SQL is to data.

CMIS defines a domain model which consists of a:

• Data Model - To consistently model content and properties
• Services - To access the Content in a consistent way
• Bindings - SOAP and REST/ATOM bindings

These are designed to be a layer on top of existing content management repositories offering a generic, universal set of capabilities applicable both within the enterprise and outside the firewall in the realm of Web 2.0

Using Alfresco and CMIS in the Cloud

Content Management has always been an application and a server, often provided by the same vendor. Now these two are breaking apart as Content Services accessed through Content Applications, often provided by other vendors. This is similar to the database application ecosystem spawned in the 1990’s by SQL where Oracle served data to Siebel, Peoplesoft, SAP etc.Content Services can be either local, in a private cloud or public cloud.

A recent example is Alfresco offering Content Services to the Lotus social collaboration products including Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal.

Alfresco is also making the Alfresco Enterprise Content Repository available in a wide variety of forms to cater for the following categories of usage:

• Developers – Community AMI’s
• Small Deployments - Single Image AMI
• Large Scale deployments - Complex multi-image clustered templates

For CMIS developers there is the CMIS resources site:

• Cmisdev.org

An Amazon image (AMI) is also freely available. Details of how to access this are available at:

• wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/EC2

For users investigating the cloud an AMI is available with pre-populated content and training at:

• www.alfresco.com/products/trials/cloud/

For complex multi AMI architectures Alfresco work with RightScale. Details of this are available at:

• http://bit.ly/4OmMOC

Lotus users can find details and see a video about Alfresco Content Services for IBM Lotus at:

• http://www.alfresco.com/lotus

We are entering the dawn of a new era of content applications driven by content services. New killer apps will come that will revolutionize the market as much as Siebel, Peoplesoft and SAP but this time on content. The Cloud is just accelerating this and CMIS is not only the standard for Content Services but also for content in the cloud.

This post can be downloaded as a PDF, printer-friendly, whitepaper at:

• http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers

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Many years ago, I remember talking to a senior banker at Lehman Brothers and a small thing he said made a lasting impression on me – “The best Return On Investments (ROI’s) I have ever seen I have been able to write on the back of a postage stamp!” The point he was making was that when people make great (career making) decisions, the ROI is often so obvious it is a no-brainer. The ROI behind open source should be  a no-brainer. The pricing and packaging should be simple, open and based on value innovation (See Strategy Rule 2).

Using publicly available, publicly verifiable information is key here. The information can be simply and independently verified with a simple web search. A good source is the US Government GSA Advantage site:
https://www.gsaadvantage.gov

What is as important is a simple pricing model that can be applied to this public information.

This compares with traditional ECM pricing models that are often as complex as the product offering, with literally thousands of options for customers to consider when pricing a product configuration.  Customers are not clear on what extras are required to deliver a working system. These complex pricing methods can be based on user, type of usage, intranet, extranet, website or compliance requirements. These models need Enterprise sales people to explain them (and try to justify them with value based pricing, strategic selling … ) This, in the words of Trout and Ries is where you attack the weakness (pricing and complexity) in the enterprise software vendors strength ( a large direct, enterprise salesforce). Consumerize the sales process and consumerize the pricing model and price on fair usage as opposed to hidden extras pricing models.

A good rule of thumb regarding cost is a tenth of that of an Enterprise vendor. They typically charge maintenance as 20% of a license. Licenses may get discounted but maintenance rarely does. Therefore at 10% you offer no license cost and are half of the annual maintenance cost. If you have, not just cost advantages, but also value innovation you are better and half of the cost per year of the existing enterprise-wide contract.

Using the US Government GSA Advantage site for comparison Alfresco enables an Enterprise to reduce their ECM cost by between 89% and 96% when compared to Documentum, OpenText and SharePoint:

That is a simple no-brainer. More detail can be found at:

http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers/

Other open source vendors have equivalents that can be compared through this same process.

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Messaging should complement and reinforce the differentiation and positioning (tag line) but also be more campaign oriented, fun and controversial. Messaging should intuitively feel like what the customer already thinks and believes - no salesman required to give a complex explanation. To re-enforce and support this it should be simply verifiable with a call to action. Transparency is key. Facts should be in the open in a similar way to code being open.  You are up-against the deep wallets and a large sales-force whispering into the customer’s ear. If the message is not what the customer intuitively believes and can simply support  the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) volume dial will be turned up by the enterprise sales force and become deafening.

Good open source campaigns typically revolve around undeniable facts focusing on:

• Dramatic Cost Savings
• Consumerization - Innovation through Simplicity for all Users
• Choice - No Tie-in to a Proprietary System

Some Dramatic Cost Saving examples are:

Do More with Less - Use Alfresco and save 89% to 96% compared to Documentum, OpenText, Vignette and SharePoint

For an analysis of publicly verifiable US Government GSA figures go to:

http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers/

Just received your multi-million dollar ECM renewal?

Say No and get a Modern ECM System for 96% Less

Click here for an analysis of publicly verifiable US Government GSA figure

Some Consumerization - Innovation through Simplicity for all Users examples are :

Does your ECM system feel like this?

Alfresco - As Simple as a Shared Drive and Facebook

Click here to try it immediately

Some Choice - No Tie-in to a Proprietary System examples are:

Don’t get Tied in by Proprietary ECM Stacks

and be held to ransom with enterprise software price rises

Total Cost of Ownership just got Green - Reuse your existing software, hardware and skills to reduce costs in areas such as:

• Linux, Unix or Windows
• Oracle, DB2, MySQL or SQL Server
• J2EE – JBoss, BEA Web Logic (Oracle), Web Sphere (IBM)
• Existing High Availability (HA) and scale-out architectures
• PHP, Java, JavaScript, Ruby
• Dreamweaver
• Microsoft Office or Open Office
• AJAX. Adobe Flex, YUI
• Firefox, Safari or IE

Be Fun. Be Controversial and be Transparent

These three things when combined with open source are louder than enterprise sales FUD

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On a more serious note the last decade has shown us that when ECM companies expand their suite, new products either take a long time to get integrated or never do. Overlapping products become orphan children starved of resource and left to wither.

When companies pay large amounts for an acquisition they need to get a return on their investment and it is the customer (existing or new) that pays. The customers typically suffers either through:

• Higher license prices
• Higher maintenance costs
• Higher integration costs
• Lower customer service as key people leave
• or paying for support and maintenance on a product that is on life support with little investment

This is in contrast to an ECM industry that is going through:

• Commoditization - Driven primarily by Open Source in the ECM space
• Standardization - Driven by new standards such as CMIS
• Consumerization - Driven by simple mass market social computing interfaces
• Dramatic Cost Reduction - Publicly verifiable figures show this to be in the range of 89% to 96%

As I have previously written,  the open source model operates at a dramatically lower cost and thrives in blue oceans where vendors such as Interwoven have been too complex and expensive. Websites don’t live forever. Many of our customers are existing Interwoven and Vignette customers who have chosen to build new sites on Alfresco and gradually move away from the legacy proprietary vendor. The new world is a heterogeneous one where users choose what is most appropriate for each project.

In acquisition situations such as this customers are taking a big risk staying with an ECM Camel. What products will exist in 6 to 12 months time. Which will be on life-support. Which ones will be in the process of being integrated. Even those that are being integrated come at a cost. A focus in integration means a long wait and a new version with no new functionality that is often less stable than the old version.

Interwoven was a good product in its day and to keep using the analogy a racehorse. Customers need to think about if they want a camel or to move to a modern racehorse that is very different to the one of the 1990’s.

Autonomy adding Interwoven for Governance and Risk Compliance makes sense when adding the WorkSite product which is strong in the legal sector. But what about the Digital Asset Management and Web Content Management humps? Also, what about the two humps of WorkSite and Meridio.

The Credit Crunch and acquisitions such as this make people stand back and think as opposed to just doing business as usual.

The blue ocean just got bigger and the flood gates are opening.

Welcome to a world of:

• Choice
• No Tie-In
• Standards
• Simplicity
• Dramatically Lower Cost

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“A SharePoint initiative is like bamboo: the challenge isn’t getting it to flourish; it’s keeping it from taking over your IT garden”

“many I&KM professionals would say I’ve worked with ECMs, and I know ECMs. SharePoint, you’re no ECM”

Pandas may like bamboo but it not so good for managing content when the compliance and productivity of your company depend on it.

The limitations are discussed

• Lack of repository scalability
• Lack of structured workflow support
• Limited support for non MS-Office file types
• Limited lifecycle management

Some key lessons are discussed:

• Higher value content such as contracts or engineering assets are often stored in non-SharePoint systems
• Large files such as schematics can bring the system to its knees
• Often SharePoint is used as a work-in-progress repository and are then published into an authoritative library

This brings me to my point. Companies are having to:

• Manage more content not less
• Manage content for more users not less
• Offer greater compliance and productivity

ECM for the masses should offer a very low-cost set of simple content services for all users and all content that scales across the enterprise using standards so that all applications and all users are equal citizens. This is not SharePoint.

Forrester point out that the attraction of SharePoint is that “in conjunction with Office 2007 it offers a comfortable, if not intuitive, working environment for business users.” What is really required is a simple SharePoint front end such as MS-Office or another simple web-based consumer client accessing the enterprise content services. As Forrester point out Web parts to mimic the SharePoint user experience fall short. “to date, only Alfresco has implemented support for the SharePoint protocol to match SharePoint’s integration with Office desktop applications.”

Alfresco 3 addresses  these issues:

• Native SharePoint protocol support
• CMIS standards support through REST and Web Services bindings
• Share - a simple consumer web application for collaboration on content with a flex document previewer enabling office 2007 and non-Office 2007 users to share documents
• Email In support for document storage and discussions
• Support for all content types, Microsoft and non-Microsoft, large and small files, high-value and low-value content
• Scalability beyond the dozens of of SharePoint recommended restrictions - 100GB databases (often users restrict to 30GB for acceptable performance), 50 million documents per server
• A content services platform for Alfresco and non-Alfresco applications - MS-Office, Joomla!, Open Office, mediawiki

Alfresco can be downloaded at:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Labs

I would encourage you to read the Forrester report at:

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47368,00.html

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Larry points out that US buyers want “better, cheaper software and a better relationship with vendors;” all of which Open Source helps create for them. He also points out that “The European community sees those benefits, but in addition recognizes that the Open Source nature of the code is the driving factor behind those benefits.”

As I have written about in previous posts:

• Open Source with commercial Service Level Agreements in a typical enterprise configuration saves between 89% to 96% for Enterprise Content Management. - Lower cost
• To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also be able to choose the lowest cost software stack to run it. Avoiding vendor lock-in is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow.  Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost

Commercial open source has been the driver to enable:

• Reusing existing software, hardware and skills - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost
• New fair usage pricing models that can be driven out of op ex as opposed to cap ex - Lowering the cost of money

So lowering vendor cost and avoiding lock-in go hand-in-hand with the same goal. A common phrase about the US and the UK is two countries separated by a common language. Maybe “Reduced Cost” and “Avoiding Vendor Lock-in”  is the same thing - but in a different language.

The next day Scrooge catches his clerk arriving late and pretends to be his old miserly self, before revealing his new person to an astonished Cratchit. He assists Bob and his family, becomes an adopted uncle to Tiny Tim, and gains a reputation as a kind and generous man who embodies the spirit of Christmas in his life.

I believe that this time next year when we look back at 2009 we will see it as a positive year. Times like this turn us all into what my friend Nancy Garrity calls “Econnoisseurs”. The Urban Dictionary defines econnoisseur as “One who insists on the highest quality at the lowest price.”

After the tech bubble burst every company needed to find a way to do more with less. Lee Thompson of E*Trade discussed in Business Week how by using open source software, running on less expensive hardware, he saved $13m per year going from 2002 to 2003. Open Source with commercial Service Level Agreements in a typical enterprise configuration saves between 89% to 96% for Enterprise Content Management.

In times of recession companies can’t just do business as usual. They need to look at what they do, look at what is really necessary, innovate, simplify and cut out un-necessary costs. This creates great software companies and enterprises that are great users of software. Out of the bubble came great companies such as Google, Amazon and eBay that benefit people every day of the week. Out of this recession Open Source and Cloud-Based Web 2.0 companies will emerge as similar powerhouses that benefit people every day of the week.

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With every new year comes a look back at last year. The current monetary crisis will reignite regulation, governance and compliance concerns. What this crisis has taught us is that markets are global and local regulations cannot protect global markets. New global regulations will come into place and need to be enforced globally. From a content management perspective this means:

• Audit everything and everybody in everything they do in every region
• Audit not just documents but also email, instant messages and also social networking when it relates to business
• Audit not just additions or changes but also access
• Enable rapid searching and eDiscovery across not one but all repositories of all types that a person may have accessed
• Make it simple to show the process and rules you have been using and the change control in your systems including your websites

This will require open standards and architectures to support these new requirements and avoid costly highly damaging eDiscovery requests. This “mass” compliance will require systems that are:

• Low cost
• Simple for all users to use
• Simple to rollout on a large scale
• Based on open standards for integration

Then you can address the question in a rational way:

“Can I afford not to be compliant and also how can I afford to be compliant

Prediction for 2009: 2009 will see a resurgence of compliance and an audit everything approach from a content management perspective. This will further drive open standards adoption to enable cross repository access and analysis offering commoditization driving down the cost of content compliance.

The Year of the Consumerization of Buying Enterprise Software – Discover, Try, Buy - with the Wisdom of Crowds

In the 1990’s there was a lack of freely available product information and the only way to access and try an enterprise product was through the sales division of that company. The world has changed and the internet has made:

• Information on a product freely available
• A product download freely available
• Advice on that product freely available
• The opinions of masses of users freely available

The credit crunch is forcing companies to look for value – not just in the cost of software but in the way they evaluate software. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get opinion and information you rely on the wisdom of crowds. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends show in real-time market trends. Masses of blogs offer up-to-date information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica.

Prediction for 2009: Enterprise software acquisition will be consumerized. Companies will “Search” the web, trusted blogs and forums, “Try” the software via download or in the cloud, and ‘Buy” if they like it, typically through a subscription model.

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Enterprise software has often been very successful “shelf-ware”, being expensive, difficult to rollout, expensive to scale and difficult for users to learn and want to use. The consumer market and Web 2.0 has shown the way in a number of areas including:

• Simple and intuitive to learn with no training course
• A system that users want to use as opposed to being forced to use
• Low-cost, massive scalability

A study for CIO magazine entitled “Nine out of 10 users said they could work better if they could bring their home computer into work,” points to users finding the web and web 2.0 applications easier to use and more productive than legacy enterprise applications. The iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Google, WordPress, delicious, Slideshare and Friendfeed will influence enterprise software and expectations as much as they have the internet. Enterprise software will become consumerized, changing the trend of enterprise software funding the consumer market irreversibly. In the 1980s and 1990s enterprises and the military set the pace for technology innovation. Consumer technologies are now increasingly driving technology innovation and IT adoption.

The Consumerization of Enterprise Software

Prediction for 2009: ECM software will become consumerized and as much at home in the home office as the head office. Just like you don’t say software is object-oriented you won’t say software is Web 2.0. It will just be there, inside and outside the enterprise. Interfaces will move to Rich Internet Interfaces such as AJAX, Flex and standards such as RSS, REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON, OpenSearch will become as taken for granted as http and HTML.

8. The Year of the Lean Software – The Development Diet

Every new year has “New Year’s Resolutions” and a diet is often on the list. This year the diet will be in software development. The 1990’s was to software, what junk food is to a weight-loss plan. Bloatware and obesity went hand-in-hand. This century has seen core technology such as Java remain at the server level but lightweight scripting and rapid development become the norm for application development and the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications. Lightweight development focuses on:

• Simplicity and rapid development
• Lightweight scripting using such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl and Python vs. J2EE and .NET
• REST vs. SOAP
• Web scalable vs. Enterprise scalable
• Mashing up internal and external content vs. content from one system

Prediction for 2009: Loosely-coupled scale-out, REST architectures will form the foundation of new systems with web applications developed in lightweight scripting languages delivering mashed-up content into a RIA will be the way forwards in 2009.

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“Choice” has always been a nice word. The headline grabbing price rises of Oracle and SAP and the new lock-in of SharePoint have made customers realize they don’t want to put themselves in a situation where they have no choice in the future. Choice is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow. Geoffrey Moore, a great visionary, a number of years ago predicted the “Stack Wars”. Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also choice of the lowest cost software stack to run it. This allows you to in the future, if your vendor increases its prices, to switch another vendor. You could for example go from BEA to JBoss, Oracle to MySQL, Windows to Linux or vice versa.

Prediction for 2009: Support for an open stack at the operating system, database and application server levels will be demanded. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) will become the SQL for the content management industry and the catalyst for choice, developing applications once that run on any compliant system with painless switching.

6. The Year of New Enterprise Software Pricing Models

Traditionally enterprise software has been bought with a large upfront payment, followed by a large, typically 20%, annual maintenance renewal. This was driven as a capital expense (cap ex). Discounts for enterprise deals have tempted companies into buying more than they need, creating shelf-ware and rich software companies. This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models. Customers are now demanding:

• No large upfront fee
• A subscription model
• The ability to budget out of operating expense (Op ex) as opposed to capital expense
• This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models

Customers are also demanding fair pricing for fair usage highlighting the flaws of traditional pricing:

• Per user pricing – often called Client Access Licenses (CALs)
• No difference in pricing for someone who uses the software for 1 hour a year and someone who uses it 24 hours per day
• A single user paying multiple times to use different software just to access or edit different content formats e.g. Word and CAD files

Prediction for 2009: A move to a subscription model driven out of operating expenditure and a move to fair usage based pricing not CALs.

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