The news came out Friday as part of a flurry of SAP announcements. Another of those also relates to a departure – that of human resources chief Luisa Delgado, whose responsibilities will be taken on by CFO Werner Brandt – but the big non-quitting-related news is that SAP is consolidating its business to better reflect its newfound cloudiness.

SAP’s cloud “go-to-market” strategy will now all be under the purview of Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (alongside SuccessFactors, one of SAP’s major cloud buys of the last two years). And development will all be under the control of technology chief Vishal Sikka.

SAP is pitching this new structure as an innovation accelerator, but does it finally signal a streamlining of the company’s sprawling and often confusing portfolio (a condition I like to call IBMitis)? Yes! And no.

As Sikka said on a conference call today:

“We see an opportunity to not only consolidate and streamline the portfolio, but bring incredible efforts… to transform that in the power of the cloud. We will get into areas that are truly unprecedented – applications for new industries that weren’t possible before [such as] healthcare, banking, oil and energy.”

Which is nice, but – as co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe chipped in – SAP has “a lot of commitments” to its existing customers too, and “we’re a company that stands by our commitments.” This may mean we should expect some redundancy within the portfolio to continue for a while yet, in order to keep those with more old-school SAP systems in place happy.

As for SAP’s ongoing cloud strategy, co-CEO Bill McDermott promised that Dalgaard’s exit would lead to “zero business disruption”:

“Our cloud DNA is now embedded across 65,000 minds and hearts and it’s become the soul of SAP. While it’s nice to have one evangelist for the cloud, it’s even better to have 65,000.

“Lars took us from $20 million in terms of revenue to a $1 billion run rate in the cloud. Now it’s about scale because everything is cloud. No other company has gone through this transition so fast – it literally happened in 12-15 months under his leadership.”

McDermott added that Dalgaard had been having “open conversations” with him and Hagemann Snabe for some time about his plans to downgrade his role to that of advisor. “This is the nicest balance he could find in his personal life and we were happy to accommodate him because we think the world of the guy,” he said.

Speaking of SAP’s thorough cloudiness, the company also announced on Thursday that it would deliver its products – including, of course, those on the in-memory HANA platform — on VMware’s newly-re-announced vCloud Hybrid Service IaaS platform, as well as vCloud Suite. This will allow for fully managed services on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid deployments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Cloud computing 2012: a pessimist’s guide
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

As can be expected with that sort of customer base, France Telecom’s business services arm is highlighting global business continuity support as the main reason for choosing its IaaS over the likes of Amazon or Rackspace. As the company’s international cloud chief, Chris McKay, told me, configurability is also a selling point.

“There are no small, medium or large instances. You pay for what you use, but you don’t have to pay for steps in instances,” McKay said.

Regarding competition from other telcos, particularly others from Europe such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, he stressed the “industrialized” nature of Orange’s offering – “we provide a catalog for the customer which has granularity of managed services which the customer can choose, from the OS to middleware to applications” – and the fact that Orange manages its own cloud data centers around the world rather than turning to outsourcing in certain locations.

Orange already has around 500 customers for Flexible Computing, which allows both self-managed and fully managed usage. The platform is based on in-house technology, but McKay said Orange was also looking at “other avenues”.

“Right now we’re carrying out studies,” he said. “[We will try] possibly OpenStack and a few others for an internal cloud solution at France Telecom in the next four months, where we’re going to evaluate what the right direction is for the future.”

According to an Orange Business Services statement on the North American and Asian expansion, the company is on track to rake in €500 million ($644 million) in cloud revenues in 2015. It managed €113 million in 2012, which was a third up on the year before.

The big European telcos are certainly pushing hard when it comes to the cloud, and this will no doubt be a topic for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

For instance, application design principles changed dramatically when the PC, x86 architecture, and client/server paradigm were born in the ’80s. And  it happened again with the advent of the web and open-source technology in the mid ’90s. Whenever such abrupt changes arise, application developers are forced to rethink how they build and deploy their software.

Today, we’re seeing a huge leap in infrastructure capability, this time pioneered by Amazon Web Services. It’s clear that to take full advantage of the new cloud infrastructure, applications that run successfully on AWS must be inherently different than applications that were built to run successfully on a corporate server – even a virtualized one. But there are a number of other particular ways in which today’s (and tomorrow’s) cloud applications will need to be designed differently than in the past. Here are the most crucial ones, and how the ways of the old world have been changed in the new one :

Scaling 

In the old world, scaling was accomplished by scaling up – to accommodate more users or data, you simply bought a bigger server.

In the new world, scaling is typically done by scaling out. You don’t add a bigger machine, you add multiple machines of the same sort. In the cloud world, those machines are virtual machines, and their instantiations in the cloud are instances.

Resilience 

Before, software was seen as unreliable, and resilience was built into the hardware layer.

Today, the underlying infrastructure – the hardware – is seen as the weak link, and it is up to applications to accommodate for this. There is no guarantee that a virtual machine instance will always function. It can disappear at any moment and the application must be prepared for this.

By way of example, Netflix, arguably the most advanced user of the cloud today, has gone the farthest in adopting this new paradigm. They have a process called ChaosMonkey that randomly kills virtual machine instances from underneath the application workloads. Why on earth do they do this on purpose? Because they are ensuring uptime and resilience: By exposing their applications to random loss of instances, they force application developers to build more resilient apps. Brilliant.

Bursting

In the old world – think accounting and payroll applications – the application workload was reasonably stable and predictable. It was known how many users a system had, and how many records they were likely to process at any given moment.

In the new world, we see variable and unpredictable workloads. Today’s software systems have to reach farther out in the world, to consumers and devices that demand services at unpredictable moments and unpredictable loads. To accommodate such unforeseen fluctuations in individual application workloads required a new software architecture. We now have it in the cloud, but clearly it is still in its infancy.

Software variety

In the past we didn’t have much software variety. Each application was written in one language and used one database. Companies standardized on a single, or at least very few operating systems. The software stack was boringly simple and uniform (at least now in retrospect).

In the new world of cloud, the opposite is happening. Within a single application, many different languages can be used, many different libraries and toolkits can be employed, and many different database products can be used. And because in a cloud you can create and spin up your own image, tailored to your and your application’s specific needs, applications within one company must be able to operate under a spectrum of configurations.

From VM to cloud 

Even between the relatively new technology of hypervisors and the modern cloud thinking, there are differences. VMware, the pioneer and leader in virtualization, built its hypervisors to essentially behave the way physical machines did before.

But in the cloud world, the virtual machine is not a representation of a physical server; it’s a representation of units of compute. (Steve Bradshaw wrote about this topic in depth.)

User patience

In the old world, users were taught to be patient. The system may have needed a long time to respond to simple retrieval or update requests, and new features were added slowly to the application (if at all).

In the new cloud world, users have no patience. They hardly tolerate latency or wait times, and they look for improvements in the service every week, if not every day. Evidence of this can be found in self-service IT. Rather than file a ticket with IT and wait for a response several days later, users of IT can self-provision the resources they need.

Do these observations rhyme with what you are experiencing and taking action on in your organization? I look forward to comments and debate on this topic.

Marten Mickos is the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. He previously served as CEO of MySQL AB, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He is a member of the board of directors of Nokia.

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Photo courtesy of Mike Flippo/Shutterstock.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Well, a month ago the creator, Berg London, pivoted from its original incarnation as a design house to become a product-focused firm, looking to develop devices to run on its Berg Cloud platform and inviting other developers to do the same. And now the company has stepped up that latter ambition by teaming up with the Benetton Group’s Fabrica communication research center to launch Sandbox, a new R&D facility for developing connected products and services.

Not many R&D facilities run out of a 17th-century Italian villa, but Sandbox will. According to a statement, the facilities in Treviso will be used to prototype “connected objects, spaces and experiences” – just the sort of language you’d expect to hear from such design-centric companies.

Here’s how Fabrica CEO Dan Hill described the Sandbox mission:

“Sandbox is a unique opportunity for Fabrica’s researchers to imagine and prototype how these new connected objects and spaces will begin to radically change the way we live, work, play, organise and communicate. Going beyond the hype around ‘smart cities’ and Internet of Things, we are layering these technologies over our wonderful building to create a unique, open demonstrator – to help both us and our clients understand what it truly means to live and work with these exciting possibilities.”

I’m not sure centuries-old villas restored and expanded by star architects (Tadao Ando, since you ask) are the best representations of normal people’s living or working environments, but it sure does look like a nice place to do R&D:

Berg and Benetton are just the founding partners: more will be added in the summer, they say. Everything that comes out of this luxurious collaboration space will use Berg Cloud, however.

There are quite a few of these platforms gearing up at the moment, all of which aim to make it easier for people to create new types of connected, everyday devices. One of the biggest looks to be LogMeIn’s Xively platform, which counts the muscular ARM as a partner as of earlier this week, but there are other smaller efforts also underway, such as those from Carriots and Electric Imp. This is a very new field, though, so there’s every chance that different internet-of-things platforms will attract different types of developers.

I think it’s fair to say the more design-minded among those developers now know where to look as they prepare to invent the connected future. If you’re interested in design and the connected future, make sure to check out our RoadMap event in San Francisco in November. Tickets will go on sale this Summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to get access to those here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Here’s a video explaining how ComodIT’s direct install button works:

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Day 3:

• The GigaOM Show: Google I/O themes and takeways that affect you
• The future, according to Google
• Some of the best articles you need to read about Google I/O
• A sneak peek at YouTube’s future as it rolls out new channel design for everyone
• Redbox Instant is coming to Google TV soon, Roku up next

Day 2:

• So Google Compute Engine is out, your move Amazon
• Google, NASA quantum computing project could bring stronger machine learning to the masses
• SMS integration coming to Google Hangouts. Will Google Voice follow?
• Google CEO Larry Page: Do as I say, not as I do
• How Google Music wants to take on Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody
• Google jumpstarts Glass development with apps form Twitter, Facebook and Evernote
• What do good shoes, Google+ and Facebook have in common?
• How Google cleverly improved Android without releasing Android 4.3 at Google I/O
• The road less traveled: How Google does Streetview for the world’s oceans
• Why Google thinks the GPU is the engine for the web of the future

Day 1:

• Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
• Google I/O statshot: 900 million Android devices activated
• Google Apps set for a communication upgrade with deeper Google+ integration
• Google officially launches its music subscription service at Google I/O
• Google turns up location data usage on Android apps
• What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+
• Prepaid gives Google a huge Android boost (and Apple has noticed)
• Eight years later, Google reinvents its Maps for a data rich web
• Coming to a school near you: Google launches Android app store for education
• How Google is setting the new search standard with voice and knowledge graph
• Google TV will receive Android 4.2.2 update as well as latest version of Chrome
• And, bam! Here’s Google Compute Engine
• Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
• Here’s the real theme of Google I/O: Service unification between Chrome and Android
• Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass
• Google gains appeal for cloud services, but there’s this company called Amazon

Pre-show expectations:

• Why the time has come for Android @Home to finally make a splash
• Google I/O: Arming for the battle of the public cloud stars
• What to expect for Chrome and Android at Google I/O 2013
• Where to watch Google I/O 2013 live online
• Reports: Google will launch music subscription service at I/O

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

A petition posted on Change.org Monday after Adobe announced a shift to all-cloud delivery of new Creative Suite features and versions has 3,000 4,000 signatures as of Thursday. Creative Suite — a bundle of software tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc. — is a popular among artists, designers, publishers and others. But the current Creative Suite Version 6 will be frozen with no more updates and users wanting new features will have to shift to Creative Cloud. That requires a subscription costing  $20 to $50 per user per month. If the user stops paying, the software stops working.

According to a petition posted by Derek Schoffstall, the issue is this:

” … all of Adobe’s consumers will not be able to make such a large payment every month on the CC subscription model. In the short term, the subscription model looks to be okay, but over time the only entity that is benefiting from this is Adobe. The (no longer) current model: paying a one time fee for infinite access is a much better business model and is better for the consumer.”

Some comments on the petition echoed what GigaOM readers had said earlier. Namely that freelance artists and designers — a key Adobe constituency — don’t want to rent the tools of their craft. Some threatened to stick with their existing Creative Suite product as long as possible and then seek alternatives like Corel.

One Change.org commenter, Lee Whitman, wrote:

“Due to the nature of the ‘upgrade at gun point’ nature of the change, and the forced ‘renting’ of software at prices that could be jacked up at anytime, I will not continue with the Adobe brand. It’s suicide for a small business model.”

Three thousand people isn’t a huge number out of an estimated installed base of 12.4 million Creative Suite users, but this is certainly not the kind of PR Adobe must have hoped for. The company has not responded to request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Change.org has been used to push tech vendors for change. Other petitions ask Verizon to cancel its wireless contracts and for LinkedIn to protect its users from stalkers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

(Download this episode)

GigaOM Podcasts RSS feed

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

SHOW NOTES:
Hosts: Chris Albrecht, Tom Krazit
Guests: Erica Ogg, Barb Darrow, Eliza Kern

Design changes for iOS 7

Say what? Microsoft Azure’s a $1 billion dollar business?

Path doesn’t have a registered user problem, it has a trust problem

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.

The engineers, who will be hired over the next year, will also develop machine learning technologies to be used across Amazon’s business.

“Locating the development of key parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud in Germany speaks to the broad set of talent here and the investment we are making in the country,” the managing co-directors of the new Amazon Development Center Germany, Ralf Herbrich and Chris Schlaeger, said in a statement.

Amazon’s big European data center is located in Dublin, Ireland, although it also has a couple of edge locations in Germany (Frankfurt, to be precise) for content delivery purposes. The company also already has teams of AWS sales and business personnel in Germany.

UPDATE: Someone who would know says:

@superglaze they've already been hard at hiring machine learning folks the last 2 months.—
Mikio L. Braun (@mikiobraun) May 03, 2013

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

M-Files does away with traditional folder structures, relying entirely on metadata to help people find documents (think iPhone rather than Windows), and it works across cloud, on-premise and hybrid installations. The service has been around for a good 8 years and has picked up some very serious customers indeed, ranging from AstraZeneca and Pandora to Northrop Grumman and the UN Environment Program.

“Everyone says that metadata is important, but quite often it’s something users have to add when they are storing documents,” CEO Miika Mäkitalo told me on Tuesday.

“Our M-Files system is a metadata architecture, which gives excellent benefits for end users … You can [organize] documents by customer name, project, proposal date and so on, and if you choose to find a document you will always find the latest version – they might be different paths but they all lead to the same document.”

The fresh cash infusion will be used to push M-Files further into the U.S. in particular, Mäkitalo said: “We want to continue growing aggressively. We want our channel sales function to skyrocket in the coming years.” He added that, although the U.S. and Finland account for most of M-Files’s existing customers (of which there are thousands), there are many elsewhere in Europe and in Asia, too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook