The War for Mind Share In the Skies

The recent announcement of IBM’s Cloud Computing initiatives
represents the latest front in the marketing and delivery battle for
customers, partners, and ISV’s.  IBM has pulled together a mix of
existing technologies and new developments into a four pronged attack
that focuses on:

  • Cloud service delivery to end customers –
    leveraging existing Lotus Collaboration technologies (e.g. Sametime
    Unyte) and the newly announced Bluehouse, a web-delivered social
    networking and collaboration cloud service.
  • Customer integration of cloud services –
    delivering system integrator led practices around salesforce.com and
    Success Factors through IBM’s Global Business Services (GBS).
  • ISV enablement of cloud services – providing ISV’s with tools to design, build, deliver, and market cloud services.
  • Customer enablement of cloud services – helping customers deploy their own clouds through a suite of enabling technologies known as “Blue Cloud”.

Pricing Model Favorable to Broader ISV Adoption

With vendors looking to attract the greatest number of ISV’s into
their cloud, OEM pricing often becomes an issue for PaaS adoption by
ISV’s.  Typical barriers to entry stem from a disconnect on how
middleware is paid for and how SaaS models generate revenue,
prohibitive upfront costs, and the lack of scaled pricing.  IBM’s SaaS
pricing pilot launched in July makes a point to address key barriers with
low up front cost, fixed predictable annual costs, and a one year
cancellation option.

What it means.

SaaS platform wars continue to intensify. Oracle’s announcement
last week at Oracle Open World and this week’s announcement by IBM
stresses the importance of this emerging battleground.  As the
enterprise vendors join Amazon, AppNexus, GoGrid, and Google, expect the convergence of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to hasten.

Your turn.

So now your turn.  Do you think the enterprise vendors will
transition to the new world or will today’s cloud vendors become
tomorrow’s enterprise veterans.  Post a comment or drop me a line at
rwang@forrester.com

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved. Reposted from http://blog.softwareinsider.org