SaaS Economics Archives

Nov 12

Hadoop Predicted To Be More Disruptive than Linux

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Abhishek Mehta is Managing Director for Big Data and Analytics for Bank of America, and serves as Executive in Residence at MIT Media Lab. SiliconAngle.tv founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder David Vellante interviewed him at Hadoop World last month. Abhishek sees Hadoop as being more disruptive than Linux, and leading to the formation of data factories. He also sees Hadoop giving programmers greater freedom to concentrate on creating algorithms that solve much larger, more complex problems than is possible today.

Here is a quote from the interview:
“So these data factories are going to emerge as the new drivers of innovation of a massive revolution that will change fundamentally how business models extract value, because data is going to be, is the core asset in a multitude of industries.”

At just under 30 minutes, this is a fascinating look into the future of Hadoop.

Transcript of the interview by Bert Latamore

Source attribution: SiliconAngle.tv video

Nov 6

Taking A Quick Tour of Apache Hadoop and HBase

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Cloudera’s Todd Lipcon has put together an excellent overview of Hadoop and HBase and it is provided below. Apache Hadoop is a scalable software framework capable of supporting highly data intensive applications.

The last twelve months has seen a steady increase in interest in Hadoop and HBase due to its implications for all variations of cloud-based applications, services, and testing. Google Trends shows the following results on Hadoop for example. Please click on the Trends graphic to see a larger image.

The Google File System (GFS) and Google MapReduce concepts serve as the theoretical foundation of Hadoop and HBase. Doug Cutting created Hadoop while working at Yahoo. The 45 slides in the following presentation provide an excellent overview of Hadoop and HBase and show its implications on cloud application development and services.

Nov 1

Cloud Computing in Businesses – Insights from Financial Times Report

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Despite much of the hype around cloud computing and its promised ability to transform businesses, an article in Financial Times, Cloud computing in businesses shows how these technologies are redefining tax services’ business models. The report published today provides insights into how ADP Tax Services Division can now profitably sell tax services to medium-sized companies for the first time.

Accessing New Markets With a Standardized Business Model

Standardizing their tax services and delivering them over cloud-based architectures has allowed ADP to entire markets that were not accessible before. Previously, ADP relied on a professional services model based on billable hours. While very profitable in larger businesses, the billable hours model could never scale into the medium business market ADP sees as critical to their growth.

The report also discusses how IBM is revamping its cloud strategy and includes analysis of cloud adoption by Frank Gens of International Data Corporation (IDC).

Bottom line: What’s insightful about this report is that it concentrates on which business processes can be streamlined first and made more effective using cloud technologies.

Link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c87b9e88-e53c-11df-8e0d-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss

flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/1741532398/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Oct 19

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Netflix in the Cloud – Lessons Learned Deploying AWS

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Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix recently published a summary slide deck of a presentation he will be giving on November 3rd at QConSF. It is a fascinating look into how Netflix chose AWS and the lessons learned. Adrian discusses the presentation on his blog here.

It is going to be very interesting to see the entire slide deck after QConSF, which is when Adrian plans to upload it per a note on his blog.

Oct 16

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Test Driving An Amazon EC2 Micro Instance

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Last month Amazon Web Services launched Micro Instances for EC2, the lowest-cost instance type they have offered to date. A Micro instance includes 613MB of memory and can support 32- and 64-bit platforms on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

The pricing begins at $0.02 per hour for Linux and $0.03 per hour for Windows. In addition, a Micro instance supports Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for defining applications, data structures and databases in addition to configurations. Amazon is also including a templated image to get up and running quickly with a Micro instance as well.

Greg Wilson, who is a Sr. Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, produced one of the best tutorials and test drives available, which is shown below. He has also written a blog entry regarding lessons learned which can be found at My dive into the world of Amazon EC2 and the new crazy cheap Micro instance.

Bottom line: Micro instances are going to shift cloud-based development away from compute- and data-intensive application development to smaller applications and web services. Given the price point, the use of Micro instances could lead to a proliferation of new low-end, utilitarian-like applications as well.

Oct 2

SaaS UK Accounting Market: Opportunities and Challenges

Dennis Howlett, a noted enterprise software blogger for ZDNet and a founding member of the influential online community Enterprise Irregulars, created the presentation below. Dennis is well- known for his expertise in accounting, IT, finance, and taxation among many other areas as well. He is a former technology and tax partner in a British firm of Chartered Accountants, serving in that role for 10 years.

Sep 28

Executing on Innovation

Today Harvard Business Publishing released the following video interview where Vijay discusses his latest book, The Other Side of Innovation - Solving the Execution Challenge. You can download a sample chapter here for free. At just over 14 minutes, the video is worth watching and time well spent.

Aug 24

1 Comment

Ingram Micro Seeing Traction with Cloud Conduit Initiative

Bottom line: Reselling cloud computing services shows much potential as a market for technology platform and application providers. The challenge is the ability to tailor the services mix efficiently and accurately enough to capitalize on scalability and selective demand of mid-tier and small business end users.

Jul 19

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Sizing the Cloud Computing Market

The pace of cloud computing market forecasts produced and announced is quickening, with several new projections announced this month. In every one of these forecasts, the benefits of operating expense (OPEX) versus capital expense (CAPEX) financing play a role, as does the emerging trust in cloud computing as a viable platform.

Jun 13

Analyzing the Cloud Computing Landscape in India

This is a noteworthy study due to several insights gained from their research including the rapid adoption of SaaS-based platforms in small and medium businesses (SMB) and the prioritization SaaS is getting from CIOs in larger enterprises. There is also an assessment of the drivers and constraints of SaaS adoption in the Indian market. At 15 slides, this is a summary of their larger report, yet for the price (free) it’s an excellent glimpse into the Indian cloud computing landscape in 2010.