Salesforce says developers using its tools can build apps that tap into troves of legacy data from existing CRM customers.

Given these developments, and rumblings that public cloud king Amazon Web Services is gearing up its mobile development push, it looks like legacy cloud giants are crowding into a space pioneered by smaller, more focused providers of mobile back-end services. (GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV has a good take on choosing an MBaaS here — subscription required.)

Who needs an MBaaS?

Salesforce.com’s pitch is that, while there are tons of useful consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps to date are still lacking.  ”It’s hard to build mobile apps that don’t just look nice but are engaging and that comes down to data. They need to be connected into your work data,” said Adam Seligman, VP of developer relations at Salesforce.com. “You have to make it easy to build the apps, the client side stuff, but you also need those hooks into corporate data.”

The new mobile packs, which support three lightweight mobile frameworks — jQuery Mobile, Backbone.js and AngularJS — should help on the ease-of-development front.

Salesforce, which backs both Force.com and Heroku Platforms as a Service (PaaS), subscribes to the school of thought that a specialized Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) — from Parse, Kinvey, Kii or Stackmob — isn’t necessary. Those smaller competitors would no doubt argue that developers need to build applications that connect to myriad applications from many sources — not just those from one company.

Rackspace wraps up mobile stack in an easily deployable package

Rackspace already hosts “tons of mobile apps” but it wants to make it easier for developers and companies to deploy and run them, CTO John Engates said. So the San Antonio, Texas-based company wrapped up a mobile-focused technology stack as a sort of prepackaged cloud for that type of user.

“We want to streamline things. We put together a stack — including Linux, MySQL, PHP, Memcached, Varnish cache in a sort of blueprint that we can deploy consistently and quickly,” he said.

This backend runs in Rackspace’s public cloud infrastructure, but on cloud servers that are dedicated to that customer. “We’re basically running a single tenant infrastructure on a multi-tenant cloud,” Engates said. “Heroku is a multi-tenant platform that lives on Amazon, a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud. We’re trying to build a single-tenant platform atop a public cloud so you can build your own deployment and spec and scale it for what you need.”

Rackspace CTO John Engates

The entire stack is open source and developers can use their SDKs of choice to develop for any mobile device. Rackspace has also signed up some partners to work with its stack: FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob and Trigger.io.

“The idea there is you use our infrastructure but then SOASTA can test your application from many perspectives — not just Rackspace — and throw a load up there to make sure it scales before you deploy it,” Engates said.

Bring on the consolidation

As more of these bigger, broader “cloud” companies add mobile development and hosting capabilities, it may be time for consolidation in the MBaaS business to kick off for real.

Forrester senior analyst Michael Facemire said consolidation in the MBaaS space, which started to happen last year with Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish, will likely heat up now that these bigger players finally see how important mobile developers are to the future of their overall businesses.

And, it will be extremely interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve vis-a-vis Google App Engine (GAE). Oracle, a power among enterprise applications, will be another company to watch.

This story was updated at 7:50 a.m. PST with analyst comment

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VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

This “VMware vCloud Hybrid Service,” to be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware, is slated to come online later this year. VMware pitches it as a way for the company’s 480,000 customers “to reap the benefits of the public cloud without changing their existing applications while using a common management, orchestration, networking and security model.”

But VMware faces a raft of challenges.

Too little too late?

First of all, many of those VMware customers have already tested out other cloud offerings — Amazon Web Services, or a third party service provider, MSP or hosting company, they’re already in the cloud in some way. AWS, for better or worse, has set the bar high when it comes to pay-as-you-go services for developers and higher-level managed services for other constituencies in the enterprise. Even solid VMware shops are testing out alternatives for different use cases, as we learned in last week’s big PayPal does/doesn’t dump VMware for OpenStack kerfuffle.

Fractious partner relationships

Second, VMware’s existing cloud partners — including big service providers and telcos offer VMware’s vCloud Director as an option but several of those partners, speaking privately, aren’t wild about it. They say it’s under-featured and expensive. And, nearly all of them offer other — less costly — options to vCloud Director including OpenStack.

The fact that VMware will pick certain service providers over others to host this cloud means it will tick off others.

“Nearly all of the service providers were already hedging on vCloud Director because of cost issues and now all those that weren’t already hedging are aggressively moving in that direction,” said an exec with one vCloud Director partner who requested anonymity for obvious reasons.

Forrester cloud analyst James Staten agreed that VMware stepped on “xSP” partner toes, but said it had no choice.  ”None of its partners — not even the vCloud Data Center partners —  were really offering the full vCloud Director cloud experience as VMware views it. And it felt it needed to do this to really help educate buyers on the full capabilities of vCloud Director,” he said via email.

Playing catchup is hard, especially for a leader

The bigger problem, is that VMware is behind the curve when it comes to full pay-as-you-go cloud capabilities. And the claim that customers running vSphere internally and vCloud Director in the cloud get fully interoperable elastic cloud services across sites,  is, untrue, said Carl Brooks,  internet infrastructure services analyst at The 451 Group.

“If you run vSphere in house and vCloud outside, you can get very basic capabilities — virtual storage and virtual servers– but that’s very little compared to what you get from any other hoster these days,” Brooks said. With vCloud director, “it’s like VMware is giving you a 1978 Pinto and saying it’s a Formula 1 car.”

VMware would argue that the level and type of services that a third party service provider offers depends on the service provider itself, not on VMware, which supplies the software stack and tools. That’s one big reason that VMware will manage and run this new hybrid cloud, but proof will be in the pudding.

And VMware’s biggest problem — the perception that its software is a proprietary and expensive — remains unchanged.

Banking on the brand

But, VMware has its advantages. For one thing, there are all those customers. If it can stem defections to OpenStack or other cloud technologies and convince enterprise customers that its cloud is a more secure but also cost competitive alternative to AWS, it has a shot. VMware also spun off a bunch of projects to the Pivotal Initiative so it can better focus on its priorities — although Pivotal is also focusing on cloud initiatives. It’s not clear — at least to me — how Pivotal’s work will or will not complement what VMware itself is doing with its hew hybrid public cloud.

The problem there is AWS has a 7-year head start and rolls out new services (and price cuts) practically every week. And it’s getting more enterprise savvy and is showing more interest in co-existence with private clouds preferred by regulation-constrained industries.

OpenStack remains a wild card. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was careful to talk about the company’s commitment to heterogeneous environments when he outlined the new strategy. And, after all, VMware is a member of OpenStack now, a development that caused a lot of head scratching.  One big reason for OpenStack momentum is that VMware’s rivals and enterprise customers alike have vested interest in preventing VMware from parlaying its on-site virtualization dominance into the cloud.

Staten maintains that VMware’s hybrid-public cloud is trying to be bold without being too bold. ”Any way you look at this, it seems like a half-hearted effort which means its likelihood of success is low,” Staten said.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user fontplaydotcom

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What company that does not have sensitive information — source code, customer lists, blueprints, M&A plans — that it doesn’t want walking out the door on someone’s USB drive? Those fears are exacerbated by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) tidal wave, in which employees use personal smartphones and consumer cloud services like Dropbox to store work documents — even when forbidden to do so.

In theory, DLP should keep bad guys from stealing stuff in the first place but is often more likely to help catch them faster, minimizing damage, and to provide a detailed audit trail of who took what and how. That is important. The problem is that most DLP solutions to date are on-premises solutions that are complicated, time consuming and expensive to deploy.

Now, Verdasys, a Waltham, Mass.-based company that helped pioneer a cloud deployment model for DLP is offering less expensive DLP managed services for smaller companies that can’t afford the traditional DLP. This week it’s opened up that service globally by bringing non U.S.-based cloud suppliers online. Competitors include BEW Global, a systems integrator that deploys and manages DLP clouds using Symantec McAfee, RSA or other technologies.

By making DLP technologies available as managed services or via a software-as-a-service model, vendors make sure customers are working with latest technologies to meet fast-changing threats, according to Edward Ferrara, principal research analyst for security and risk professionals for Forrester Research.

And, the availability of cloud-based DLP also makes it more affordable both to the huge enterprises — big aerospace companies and car makers — that are typical DLP customers, as well as to smaller organizations. Many smaller suppliers in the aerospace business, for example,  cannot subcontract with the big vendors unless they deploy approved DLP. Last year, Gartner estimated that a typical DLP rollout costs $350,000 to $700,000 but can go much higher.

Getting DLP from an off-premises cloud (Verdasys uses private Rackspace clouds for most geographies) can cut time and cost of DLP deployment down to $100,000 per year and perhaps less, depending on company size compared to traditional on-premises DLP approaches, Verdasys said.

While trusting an outside cloud for internal security seems illogical, Bill Munroe, VP of marketing for Verdasys, says it makes sense. Verdasys does not collect the actual data itself. Rather, it aggregates the metadata about the files and documents and watches for patterns of activity. Sensors placed on every piece of the network watch the data move around, collects that metadata, encrypts it and sends it up to the cloud.

“It may see a Word document with credit card numbers on it or a CAD file — it looks at it but it doesn’t send the actual file up — just the data about the file,” Munroe said. The patterns collected are not just about the data but the user, the machine used, the file type and the application in use.

Verdasys customers include CDI Corp., a Tempe, Ariz. aerospace company that works with GE Aerospace.

DLP is just one of several new application areas starting to move to the cloud — via a managed service or SaaS model. And that means that many more businesses — with security concerns of their own — will be able to take advantage of the technology at an affordable price.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Todd Ehlers

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Red Hat’s decision to buy ManageIQ, announced Thursday, gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story. ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, works with Red Hat’s CloudForms and Red Hat’s KVM-centric enterprise virtualization software but also with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

As InformationWeek reported when the deal was announced on Thursday:

“The acquisition is aimed at making Red Hat a stronger player in the creation of multi-hypervisor, on-premises clouds capable of working with various public cloud services. ManageIQ workloads can be configured to run via Amazon Web Services EC2 or Microsoft Azure.”

Planned support for the Xen-based Rackspace Cloud gives ManageIQ total hypervisor coverage.

This sort of multi-vendor kumbaya message is getting more important as customers evaluating cloud deployment want to be assured they won’t be locked into a single-vendor, single-technology-stack solution.

VMware also touted that rationale of heterogeneous support when it acquired DynamicOps last summer.

No surprise: AWS reigns supreme for developers

The vast majority (more than 70 percent) of developers surveyed by Forrester Research use Amazon EC2 for custom app development.  Microsoft Windows Azure came in a distant second at 25 percent; with Google and Force.com following close behind that.  This according to 106 developers participating in Forrester’s Global Cloud Developer Online survey.

And, of those EC2 users,  about 19 percent said they expected their usage would hang steady over the next 12 months, roughly 12 percent said it would shrink and 43 percent expect it to grow. (See chart below.) Among those using Azure about 5 percent said their usage of that platform would shrink — about the same percentage thought it would stay the same, and about 19 percent expect their Azure use to grow.

Amazon rolls out fat new instance type, Data Pipeline

Amazon had a busy pre-Christmas week. On Friday, it launched its promised Data Pipeline service. And to keep those aforementioned EC2-mad developers happy it also came out with a big new EC2 instance type for data intensive applications. The new High Storage Eight Extra Large instances suit applications requiring high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance.

Such applications include data warehousing and log processing. For those with short memories, Amazon announced its Redshift data warehousing service at AWS: Reinvent in November. taken together, the Data Pipeline and Redshift could be a potent combination in Amazon’s quest to provide a platform for enterprise-class data warehouse applications –taking on such legacy giants as Oracle, Teradata, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

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According to new research from Forrester, the unintended, but entirely predictable, consequence is that many of those frustrated employees just turn to new, unsanctioned devices instead.

After surveying 5,102 business users for its “Five Steps to a Successful BYOC Program” (Forrester prefers the term “computer” to “device”), here’s what Forrester has to say:

Today’s workers often need more than the locked-down corporate PC’s and are spending an average of $1,253 annually of their own money on computers to do their jobs. … Yet the same survey reveals that only 12% of firms encourage those who do so, with the rest actively discouraging it – and some even penalizing employees. The mismatch between employee needs and IT’s position is obvious, but few organizations are adequately prepared to change course.

The examples of this tactic are piling up. IBM, for example, disables Siri in employees’ iPhones and forbids the use of Dropbox, the wildly popular cloud-based file storage, sync and sharing service. That raises interesting questions in the cloud computing era, where users can tap consumer-oriented services from their personal phones and laptops that may be verboten in the corporate context. It’s the very definition of shadow IT.

Shadow IT: not necessarily a bad thing

Often, workers have much better technology at home than they do at work. For example, Forrester found that more than half of the businesses surveyed still run 11-year old Windows XP on their PCs. The question then is: Which would you use, that moldy PC or your shiny new iPhone? I rest my case.

And even if you have a modern PC at work but it can’t access your Dropbox account, would you stop using Dropbox? Not likely.

Forrester analyst David Johnson, blogged about the topic here, and reinforces what most of us already intuit:

When the tools a person depends on for their job belong to them, we often can observe 3 things: 1) They will buy tools that align best with their own strengths and help them do the best work they can, 2) They will generally select good quality tools given the choice, because they don’t have time to waste dealing with cheap ones that break, and 3) They buy them from companies who stand behind them and will pay more to get better service. In their world, as in ours, time is money.

As another data point: a survey of 4,000 business users by cloud-based storage and file sharing company SkyDox, found that nearly two-thirds (60 percent) of respondents use free file-sharing apps and of those more than half (55 percent) do so without informing IT.

So what to do? Forrester recommends that IT staffs be encouraged to stop fighting the rank-and-file and really learn about the tools they want to use and, where possible, facilitate rather than fight that use.

And, where security and compliance are a concern, IT should investigate the use of virtual desktop technologies and other options to provide a standard Windows environment without requiring a corporate PC.  That would give users access to secure corporate applications that are easily managed, patched and updated, while also allowing them to use their device of choice for both work and personal tasks.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user DieZBW.

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“Rapidly converging technlogies accelerate the benefits of consumer delivery,” McQuivey said, and that benefit is digital content and entertainment. “It’s all about the software,” he said, because software services make the content easy to access across a wide number of devices, such as the 35 million e-readers also owned by consumers. “The big thing happening is a platform promise between device makers,  service providers and consumers.” That’s why the iPad is a hit: It’s a solid blend of hardware, software and ecosystem support.

This “platform promise” is bringing unprecedented use of devices for content, particularly with the iPad. Consumers are looking for a full package; not just a nice piece of hardware. And until others can offer that full, “everything” package, Apple will continue to lead. But don’t count out Microsoft, McQuivey said, given the 70 million Xbox 360 devices connected to televisions.

“The platform is the new throne where content reigns and content is king,” he notes. “And the platform promise can make or unmake a king at any time.” The iPad might be sitting on the throne now, but as competitors build up the promise of their platform, the game of thrones rages on.

Tablets: Not Just an iPad World

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

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If you’re a SaaS provider and you want to wring the richest rewards out of an already lucrative gig, you should verticalize your services, according to a new Forrester Research report.

Liz Herbert, a principal analyst at Forrester, writes that the already sky-high valuations of SaaS businesses could get higher if vendors start tweaking their services to suit the automotive, government, life sciences or insert-your-favorite industry here. Her findings reinforce other research that shows the valuations of SaaS companies far outstripping those of legacy software companies.

Software delivered as a service,  a trail blazed by Salesforce.com and NetSuite, was the public face of cloud computing to many businesses that had never considered offloading workloads to an Amazon Web Services–style Infrastructure-as-a-Service or a full-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

So SaaS may be a mature segment of cloud computing, but Herbert still sees growth on the horizon for this subset of SaaS providers according to the report, “Five trends that will change SaaS sourcing.”

Here are three takeaways.

Vertical apps: big and getting bigger

Customers clamor for applications that suit their specific needs and will pay a premium for them, Herbert said. Among the hottest verticals is the government arena, where the Obama administration’s Apps.gov marketplace of GSA-blessed cloud applications and “Cloud First” initiative have had an impact.

Salesforce.com, which started out offering generic customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) functionality, has since added more vertical functions on its own and encouraged developers to offer their vertical offerings on AppExchange as well. Oracle offers life sciences, automotive and other industry-specific versions of Siebel CRM On Demand.

Systems integrators like Accenture are also building and deploying templates: They have “productized” some of their best practices for specific businesses and are making them available via SaaS.

Analytics boost appeal

SaaS players were early to the analytics party and continue to innovate. Workday, Dave Duffield’s human resources SaaS play, for example, serves up related information to users based on their activity.

As Herbert writes:

Workday’s latest release already allows users to click open windows of related information (such as compensation or performance data) to inform decisions. Similarly, SuccessFactors includes built-in workforce analytics to drive key decisions about succession planning and talent management.

Users balk at SaaS for mission-critical apps

As popular as SaaS is for many tasks, many companies still won’t put their lifeblood applications on someone else’s infrastructure.

“We still see reservations about putting mission-critical apps in the cloud,” Herbert said. The No. 1 concern is security, but there is also a question of cost, since many of these applications have run for a while and have significant customizations that make them poor candidates for SaaS.

Mission-critical apps include things like supply chain management applications. “Most companies define mission-critical as anything that can afford no downtime,” she said.

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By next year, more businesses will  know a good bit about the notion of cloud computing — even if they themselves haven’t put corporate applications or data onto public or private cloud infrastructure. C-level executives and their operational troops have at least read up on the subject and faced enough sales pitches that they can differentiate the real from the bogus. And I would bet they all have a passing knowledge of the potential benefits (moving budget from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, the pay-as-you go model, etc.) from the pitfalls (IT cedes control of infrastructure to an outsider) of cloud computing.

In his top 10 cloud predictions for 2012, Forrester Research analyst James Staten said the upcoming year marks the beginning of cloud computing’s “awkward teenage years.” That means there will be some real maturation — and some embarrassing slip ups.

On the plus side, he agrees cloud-savvy customers will mean an end to annoying “cloud washing.” That’s the practice in which a marketer cloaks his or her company in the mantle of cloud computing whether it’s applicable or not.

Also good news is that cloud IT posers will be discovered and shunted aside as more people get trained and gain real experience on cloud deployments. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EMC and others are all stepping up here. There are more openings for cloud experts than cloud experts to fill them, but new training and certification will address that imbalance: all good things.

Not so good is the prospect of cloud failures. The message here is: Things break; get used to it. “Your company will survive a major cloud outage,” Staten states.  ”The sooner you learn to deal with [that] the better off you will be.”

Also scary: There are some ugly regulatory issues on the horizon. Much as parents try to rein in unruly teenagers, governments will try to control the spread of cloud computing. Just as the U.S. Patriot Act gave international companies pause before deploying cloud assets in the U.S., other attempts to regulate, ban or spy on cloud computing assets will constrain growth.  A few months ago, for example, a Deutsche Telekom exec proposed a German cloud that would be safe from U.S. snooping. This attempted imposition of national or other borders on cloud computing could kill off this adolescent before it’s old enough to vote. Bottom line, says Staten: “The Internet knows no bounds and neither should the cloud.”

And as often happens even with well-intentioned “good” teenagers, some executive in the cloud universe will overstep the rules, trying to test compliance regulations in the cloud and will end up in court (or worse) or at least unemployed.

Finally, a topic close to my heart, Staten reiterates the mantra that IT channel players – the companies that sell software, hardware and services to business customers — that haven’t evolved to embrace the cloud better do so now. Or else.  It’ s not a new message, but it still rings true: “For the channel to survive it must add value around cloud services and there’s plenty of opportunity to go around.”

Just as human beings are made stronger by the trials and tribulations they faced as pimply-faced teens, the hope here is that cloud computing will face and survive these challenges, and come out on the other side stronger and more capable.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user GorupKa

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To find out, Forrester Research recently polled 4,985 U.S. information workers about their use of enterprise social for The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011, which was released last week. The results: 28 percent of workers use social software at least monthly.

That’s not a terribly low figure for a relatively new technology, but Forrester further profiled that 28 percent and found they belong to a very narrow subset of the workforce.

• They’re earlier adopters. “They have positive attitudes about the role of technology in their lives — more than two-thirds are technology optimists,” says the Forrester report.
• They’re well paid. More than half make $60,000 a year or more.
• They’re highly educated. “23 percent hold advanced degrees, and 49 percent are in management,” reports Forrester.
• They’re pressed for time. “Software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”
• They’re not all Gen Y. While a slightly more than a quarter (26 percent) are supposedly social-mad Gen Y, a larger percentage (35 percent) of users are from Gen X.

While there’s nothing shocking in this profile of the average enterprise social software user (in fact it sounds a lot like the average telecommuter), this stereotypical portrait of the connected, elite professional reveals that these technologies have a long way to go before they’re accepted more broadly in the workplace. This confirms earlier Forrester research showing just one in six Gen Yers use social tools.

The numbers also show that while the high-powered and over-scheduled really like their enterprise social tools, they don’t view them as essential. “Just 22 percent of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs,” according to Forrester, who says these tools “remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.”

Will enterprise social tools ever be an everyday component of work for a wide swath of the workforce?

Image courtesy of Flickr user luca.sartoni.

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So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iain Farrell

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