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Putting his money where his mouth is, Minor has recently launched a $50 million
venture capital fund with his own money to fuel on-demand startups.
Marc
Benioff - CEO of Salesforce.com Inc., which originated the "no software"
marketing campaign - offers a similar view. "Enterprise software is dying
out," he said. "Look at companies like IBM...and Oracle saying things
should be delivered on demand. Even Siebel, who for years and years said it would
never happen, is now saying it has to happen."
Bold talk. And when
taken to its logical extreme, it could prove more than a little alarming for enterprise
IT. One premise underlying the death-of-software argument upheld by Minor, Benioff,
and others is that enterprise IT is drowning in complexity. The business side
is tired of big licensing and hardware investments, endless software deployment
cycles, random outages and regulatory-compliance horrors. Rather than keep suffering
all that, enterprises will pull the rip cord and opt for the hosted, on-demand
model instead - or so the argument goes.
But if companies commit to that
strategy wholesale, won't enterprise IT be subject to massive layoffs? Will those
poor souls be sending their resumes to the likes of Minor and Benioff ?
On-demand
proponents are quick to mute such overtones. "Those IT folks and those resources
are going to be reallocated to the stuff that adds value to the organization,"
said Jason Maynard, senior North America software analyst at Merrill Lynch &
Co. Inc., which last April launched an on-demand index that tracks both pure-plays
such as Salesforce.com and software-by-subscription from traditional software
houses such as Microsoft Corp.
Or as John Girard, CEO of hosted content
management provider Clickability Inc., puts it: "Insource the core and outsource
the rest." But why should IT trust on-demand providers to handle "the
rest," when just three years ago so many failed so spectacularly under another
name, ASPs?
The answer is that, although the on-demand model is still evolving,
many of the problems that scuttled the first round of ASPs have been or are being
solved. Web services have helped make customization and integration easier. Identity
management is bridging user provisioning between provider and enterprise. And
various technologies - much of them developed by a handful of ASP survivors -
are making hosted provider platforms more reliable, scalable and secure.
Such
advances lead many to identify on-demand software as the next big thing, although
the number of current deployments is tiny compared with the software market as
a whole. "In spite of all the hype around it, software as a service is the
biggest thing to happen in software in 25 years," Girard said. "It's
an enormous paradigm shift."
this year's model
Even
Michael Conlon, a University of Florida technology strategist whose large IT operation
has made a point of doing everything itself, is thinking about making the shift
in certain areas. E-mail, application monitoring and HR functions could all be
candidates. "You identify things that are commodity, not core, to the business,
and (that are) well-defined. If they can be executed off campus, that's fine."
One
explanation for the sudden openness to the on-demand model has to do with licensing.
Customers are tired of the "Costco" style of software purchasing, as
Merrill Lynch's Maynard terms it. "I can't eat that many cheese nips in my
lifetime. A four-gallon drum of licorice; that's how we buy enterprise software,"
he said. Paying for what you consume rather than paying up front for a lifetime
of usage fits better with today's downsized IT budgets.
According to Grand
Central's Minor, botched deployments provide even greater motivation to make the
on-demand switch. He points to Avis, which recently sunk US$100 million in an
ERP system that never saw the light of day. "The pay-and-pray model of enterprise
software is over," Minor said. "Instead, it's going to be delivered
as utility, where you'll pay for successful delivery like you pay for your phone
calls." Rather than the "big bang" theory of utility computing
promoted by IBM, where enterprise datacenters suddenly become self-healing and
self-managing, the on-demand model is more like utility computing, one enterprise
application at a time.
Poor visibility is another factor for moving to
an on-demand model, suggests Todd Johnson, president of Jamcracker, which began
as an aggregator of hosted IT services such as VPN and currently provides platform
technology for companies in the on-demand business. Today, enterprises are lucky
if they can see beyond the next quarter, he said. The risks of an 18-month global
Siebel rollout are enormous compared with a Salesforce.com deployment, which,
even if sophisticated, should take no more than 90 days - and with zero investment
in software licensing or hardware.
Mercury Interactive Corp., which has
been offering a hosted version of its application-monitoring solution for years,
is in a unique position to observe customer reaction to the on-demand model. "We're
not as religious as some. We offer a choice," said Christopher Lochhead,
Mercury's chief marketing officer. During the sell cycle, he notes, customers
like the idea that they can switch from hosted to internal deployment. But in
fact, very few do. Today, Mercury delivers application management as a hosted
service to between 3,000 and 4,000 customers, approximately half the installed
base for that solution. "When the customer looks us in the eye and says,
'Hey, what's the best way to deploy your technology?,' we lead with the hosted
offering."
objections and opportunities
Not everyone
is biting, of course. Topping the list of doubts is whether hosted offerings can
be properly integrated with internal enterprise apps, and skepticism over the
efficacy of adapting on-demand solutions to unique business processes. And some
IT managers bristle at relying on an outside host's ability to run its datacenter
impeccably, not to mention maintain a solvent business. Total dependence on a
browser-based UI is another sticking point.
Ask any on-demand partisan
about the integration issue and you'll hear two words: Web services. As SOA (service-oriented
architecture) and Web services spread across enterprises and as on-demand providers
outfit their offerings with Web services interfaces, data-level integration gets
easier inside and outside the enterprise. But in most cases, Web services' share
of the integration pie remains small, which is one of the ideas behind Grand Central:
Provide a complete services bus, which supports not only Web services but also
legacy messaging protocols.
Grand Central, however, has more up its sleeve
than helping on-demand providers and their customers to integrate. The company's
approach not only facilitates customization, it focuses on integrating hosted
services before they touch the customer's enterprise. "No one is going to
buy a bunch of services and then buy a bunch of software to try to integrate them,"
Minor said. For example, he adds, Grand Central routinely integrates Salesforce.com
with ADP payroll processing so that a customer can cut commission checks without
leaving the Salesforce.com environment.
As hosted integration gets more
sophisticated, customers can also begin developing process-based applications
on the host's platform, an idea touted by Grand Central and by Salesforce.com
with its sforce integration and application development platform. In fact, most
on-demand providers - including Amazon and eBay, notes Salesforce.com's Benioff
- seem headed in this direction. Customers get a development environment in which
they can create unique functionality that, unlike conventional enterprise apps,
won't break when a new version arrives.
Although the host's API limits
the functionality of such applications, the potential for hosted application development
doesn't stop with a handful of providers. As Eric Newcomer, CTO of enterprise
integration company Iona, reminds us, one of the original ideas behind Web services
was that applications could be built from components published as services across
the Internet.
"I think we're seeing an increase in interest in getting
the components instead of the whole package," Newcomer said. He also believes
the reverse is true: Companies are trying to leverage their existing assets by
service-enabling them and selling them on a subscription or pay-per-use plan.
For
outside-the-firewall integration of multiple services on behalf of a single customer,
federated identity management is a must. But Todd Johnson of Jamcracker, cautions
that properly integrating identity and security infrastructures among customers
and hosted services is a tough problem - one that defeated many first-wave ASPs.
always
on?
In the end, the fear that an on-demand provider could fail remains
the biggest single obstacle to large-scale enterprise adoption of software as
a service. One can argue, as Grand Central's Minor does, that on-demand providers
can afford to invest in redundancy and uptime at levels individual enterprises
can only dream of achieving. Maybe so, but customers must be confident that the
provider is doing everything right with its architecture, core technologies, security,
and choice of partners.
IT has a natural resistance to losing control -
and to losing personnel. "I think that there's some fear, but I'm not sure
whether or not it's a rational fear," said Eric Peterson, site technology
and operations analyst at JupiterResearch. "Out of one side of its mouth,
IT says, 'We're too busy; we don't' have enough people to get X and Y and Z done.'
But it (also) says, 'We don't want to give up any of the software that we already
own because it reduces the size of our kingdom.'"
As usual, enterprise
customers who see the merits of this paradigm shift will benefit most. Internet
infrastructure has already taken over the heart of the enterprise, causing the
line between inside and outside the enterprise to blur. Meanwhile, a good application
is a good application. If an enterprise can get most of the functionality of a
great shrink-wrapped solution through the browser with a magnitude less hassle
and expense, IT can finally tuck into that backlog of important projects.
And
that may be the best job security of all.
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