“Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.” Page said Google struggles “with people like Microsoft,” he said. As for Oracle, which is suing Google over Android’s use of Java, Google has “a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court … Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

In comments emailed to CIO.com, Microsoft responded:

“It’s ironic that Larry is lending his voice to the discussion of interoperability considering his company’s decision — today — to file a cease and desist order to remove the YouTube app from Windows Phone, let alone the recent decision to make it more difficult for our customers to connect their Gmail accounts to their Windows experience.”

Page’s words came a few days after Microsoft announced interoperability between its Outlook.com email service and Gmail and just after word came out that Google demanded that Microsoft rip its home-built YouTube app from the Windows store (and remove the app off the Windows Phones that were already running it.) So, who’s the winner in this melee? Neither vendor comes out looking good. For Microsoft to complain about Google’s business practices is laughable given its own track record. But for Google to claim it’s not evil while restricting consumer choice is also awful. Consumers might just say a pox on both their houses.

IBM spreads Watson around …

Watson, the natural-language-understanding software that played (and won) at Jeopardy, will be made more broadly available to third-party software makers, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said last week. Thus Watson technology could be used perhaps even by IBM competitors, to build self-teaching computer systems, according to Bloomberg News. IBM has made the most possible PR use of Watson capabilities, working to embed that intelligence in medical and other applications. Last week, IBM took its show on the road to Washington D.C. last week to show Congress the progress Watson has made in healthcare applications.

… as SAP doubles down on HANA

German enterprise software giant SAP, in a move you could see coming miles away, said this week that HANA, it’s in-memory analytical database, will be the brains of its ERP software going forward, according to InformationWeek and other  outlets. Running do-or-die ERP and CRM applications on HANA is a big step up from data warehouses because ERP and CRM cannot go down for hours or a day without severe blowback. And yet at the annual SAPPHIRE conference last week SAP announced general availability of its core Business Suite applications on HANA. Or, as CRN put it, it “bet the farm” on HANA.

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Lumira Cloud supposedly gives SAP an answer to the recent explosion in the cloud-based, self-service data visualization offerings. The HTML5-built BI service comes with a “monthly” subscription fee (albeit one that can only be ordered in annual chunks) and lets its users publish and share data visualizations with one another for viewing or editing on desktop or mobile devices.

SAP Lumira Cloud appears to be more an Dropbox-ish add-on for the desktop version of Lumira than a cloud-based replacement, but it does also allow the creation of datasets from Excel documents. The service, which integrates with on-premise data and naturally supports HANA, can also be used to share SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio files and SAP Crystal Reports documents.

This release appears to be the culmination of what SAP has been previously referring to as “project Photon” – supposedly the company’s “true departmental self-service BI offering.” The issue here, of course, is the monumental and somewhat confusing nature of the company’s portfolio. After all, doesn’t SAP already do this SME-courting, departmental analytics stuff through its BusinessObjects BI OnDemand product?

Try visiting at least one of the BI OnDemand product pages and you’ll be taken through to the Lumira page. Look at the Lumira Cloud FAQs and you’ll be told that BI OnDemand will continue to run “in parallel” to Lumira Cloud, but also that OnDemand customers can contact their account representative “to discuss the best timing and strategy” for migrating to the new service.

Perhaps this less-than-clear situation presages a simplification of SAP’s portfolio – no doubt more will be revealed at the company’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week. If it doesn’t, customers in search of next-generation data visualization tools have many far more straightforward options to check out.

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There weren’t a ton of details on pricing and dates which could come at the company’s annual SAPPHIRE conference, next week, but according to the release, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will be delivered by SAP and its partners:

 ”SAP intends to adapt this open ecosystem strategy with its managed service providers to offer the capabilities of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud from their data centers, as well as from multiple SAP data centers worldwide.”

In a research note, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund wrote:

“SAP indicates it will price its elastic cloud-computing service based size, scale of data, and application usage. The advantages are faster time to market and time to value, with lower total cost of ownership. Offering a service that delivers quick value and easy implementation should be a nice complement to the real-time capabilities users seek from HANA for a wide variety of new, real-time business processes, in addition to the Business Suite.”

SAP will continue to offer HANA via AWS, a spokesman said. But it’s clear that more contention is arising between legacy enterprise IT players and Amazon which is starting to compete with them by offering more higher-end services that compete with their products.  AWS has made no secret about its ambitions here —  it all but called out IBM, HP, Teradata, and Oracle by name when it announced its RedShift data warehousing service last November.

Meanwhile, SAP — along with these other legacy enterprise IT giants — has rushed to embrace cloud. Better to cannibalize your own on-premises business than to let Amazon do it after all. But, SAP got a rocky start in cloud. It launched Business ByDesign as a SaaS product four years ago to underwhelming response. But it vowed to do better and started buying up cloud expertise, with its $3.4 billion  acquisition of SuccessFactors, a SaaS provider of human resources management, two years later. But HANA, the hot in-memory database and analytics product  has become the company’s focal point in  cloud and big data efforts.

What would really be surprising is if SAP didn’t offer HANA from its own cloud.

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The service is for companies that want to quickly roll out a ride-sharing scheme for their employees – as is generally the case with such schemes, the advantages range from greater environment-friendliness to lower petrol costs and the need for fewer parking places. As Peter Graf, SAP’s sustainability chief, put it in a statement:

“We’ve combined our mobile and cloud technologies into a carpooling solution to help provide immediate economic, environmental and social benefits to companies and their employees. As such, we expect TwoGo to not only help people and businesses save money and greenhouse gas emissions, but to also connect people more closely with each other and with the company they work for.”

TwoGo works on the web and on mobile devices. Employees can enter their travel preferences, after which Nokia’s Here platform kicks in to display likely matches. Here is (in this writer’s opinion) Nokia’s big hedge against a post-hardware future, and this deal is significant for taking the location-based services platform into the enterprise. “We believe that location will be the new frontier of technology across industries,” Nokia mapping chief Christof Hellmis said in the statement.

Although it is particularly well-suited to large enterprises — the travel giant Thomas Cook is the first announced customer, having taken part in the beta program – SAP is also pitching TwoGo at smaller companies, as employees of neighbouring businesses can share rides too.

Handily, TwoGo also works with the likes of Microsoft Outlook and Google Apps (anything iCal-compatible will do) so that ride schedules can be integrated with corporate calendars. SAP has been using TwoGo internally for almost two years, and claims to have “generated more than $5 million in value for the company” through fuel and maintenance savings, lower travel expense reimbursements, cutting down on emissions and, of course, getting more employees talking to one another as they travel to work and back.

According to a separate blog post from Nokia, TwoGo is currently available for licensing by companies in the U.S. and Germany, with other countries coming online soon.

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OpenStack Summit 2013

It’s earlier than you think

IThere was tons of energy and more than 2,000 attendees at last week’s OpenStack Summit but most of those were vendors that have signed on to the effort and hope to make money off it. The proof of the pudding will come when actual end-user organizations that are not necessarily tech companies start adopting.

451 Group analyst Carl Brooks estimates there are now a few hundred OpenStack projects in production now, 60 to 80 of which are in production. Of those 40 to 50 are run by service providers of which maybe 3 or 4 make money.

SAP seeks cloud cred

We all know that tons of startups and a growing number of bigger companies tap Amazon Web Services for storage and perhaps some compute loads, the vast bulk of corporate computing remains on-premises. We’re entering an interesting era in which the legacy powers — Oracle, IBM, SAP, are rushing to embrace cloud and reap fiscal benefits. SAP CEO Bill McDermott last week told the AP that the ERP giant “accelerated into the cloud in a big way about a year ago and already we’re making money on it.”

Not to get all Clintonian here, but much here depends course a lot depends on how you define “cloud.” SAP is most certainly lumping in any and all revenue coming in via Software-as-a-Service implementations where the company gets paid via subscription vs. big lump fund payments for software licenses. SAP said cloud computing contributed nearly $37 million to its first quarter earnings.

SAP’s favored child product, the HANA in-memory database, saw its year over year revenue triple to €86 million (or about $112 million) for its first quarter.

Muddying the waters

When the industry started down this path, AWS was the big, scalable public cloud — with an ever-growing number of services that startups used to write, test and then deploy shiny new applications. VMware plugged vCloud Director as the way for existing VMware customers (most big companies) to move their legacy applications to a VMware compatible cloud.

Cutting to the chase, and vastly oversimplifying the case, it was one cloud for new apps vs. another for

old applications.But things have gotten a lot more, um, nuanced, since then.  AWS has added more services to accommodate those older but still-mission-critical applications while VMware announced plans for its own public cloud (which it calls hybrid.) And VMware/EMC spinoff the Pivotal Initiative on Wednesday will talk more about its take on cloud computing.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ahockley

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That’s the back story to Friday’s SAP Startup Forum held at the hack/reduce facility in Cambridge, Mass.’s Kendall Square neighborhood. There SAP talked up HANA, the company’s analytics database as a development platform data (or big data) applications to more than a dozen startups including Hadapt, Entagen, Diffeo, Objective Logistics, InsightSquared, Luminoso, Sqrrl, and Veracode. Those startups, in turn, were able to tout their business plans and demonstrate their products to an audience of reporters, VCs and others.

Wanted: (big) data startups

“We’re pitching to the startups and they’re pitching to us,” Scott Jones, SAP’s senior director for startup training and enablement told about 100 attendees. HANA, which debuted three years ago, has given SAP traction in an audience beyond its usual big-company ERP customer base and SAP fully intends to press that advantage.  SAP Ventures, the company’s VC arm, is increasingly active in finding and funding data startups. And it would very much like them to build their technology atop HANA.

The SAP execs repeatedly talked up HANA ONE, which runs on Amazon Web Services, as if to say “this isn’t the traditional, big iron, expensive SAP” of another era. It costs $3.49 per hour to run HANA ONE on an AWS EC2 8-core cluster.

As for the startups, many were clearly intrigued by HANA’s capabilities although none of those I talked to had actually run it. The consensus was this type of event and the promised perks — Jones offered free “no strings attached”  licenses and training — are what cash-strapped startups need. Indeed, that may be only way for a large commercial software vendor like SAP to hook small companies born-and-bred in a world dominated by free or nearly-free open-source software and rentable AWS infrastructure.

Plea to local startups: Stay put

A gaggle of area VCs were also on hand to sweet talk entrepreneurs into staying local rather than decamping to Silicon Valley after graduating from Harvard or MIT — as has been standard practice. Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica Systems, who has helped nurture a big data startup community in and around Boston, was on hand to talk up that effort.

And, Dr. Sam Madden, of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) was there to help out. “Boston is an awesome place for startups — there’s a spectacular pool of outstanding, hungry young talent [here].” It helps that the VCs that used to live way out on the Route 128 corridor have relocated in closer into The Hub.

In the past two years, Kendall Square has seen a huge building boom with growing presence from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others. It’s a hip area to work for young techies — many of whom don’t own cars and like how mass transit and bike-friendly the area is.

Still, not every attendee was buying either pitch completely. Cyrille Vincey, CEO and founder of qunb, a data analytics and visualization startup that does use HANA, extolled its features and performance, but had one suggestion: “HANA is simple and fast. It feels like open source. Why don’t you open source it?”

And Timothy Jones, CEO and founder of Buzzient said his company, which has been based both Cambridge and Boston but is now virtual, may relocate to the San Francisco area. “We can get office space cheaper there than in Kendall Square,” he noted.

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Dr. Sam Madden of MIT’s CSAIL lab.

CryptDB, a project out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, (CSAIL) may be a solution for this problem. In theory, it would let you glean insights from your data without letting even your own personnel “see” that data at all, said Dr. Sam Madden, CSAIL director, on Friday.

“The goal is to run SQL on encrypted data, you don’t even allow your admin to decrypt any of that data and that’s important in cloud storage, Madden said at an SAP-sponsored event at Hack/reduce in Cambridge, Mass.

He described the technology in broad strokes but it involves an unmodified MySQL or Postgres app on the front end that talks to a CryptDB query rewriter in the middle which in turn talks to a MySQL instance at the back end.

According to CryptDB’s web page:

“It works by executing SQL queries over encrypted data using a collection of efficient SQL-aware encryption schemes. CryptDB can also chain encryption keys to user passwords, so that a data item can be decrypted only by using the password of one of the users with access to that data. As a result, a database administrator never gets access to decrypted data, and even if all servers are compromised, an adversary cannot decrypt the data of any user who is not logged in.”

The technology is being built by a team including Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich and Hari Balarkishan.

CryptDB  could also run in a private cloud but there are still some big implementation questions. Asked how CryptDB would negotiate data transmission through firewalls, for example, Madden punted. “That’s not something we’re focusing on. The great thing about being an academic is we can ignore some problems,” he said.

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OK, so your NCAA tournament bracket has officially been busted. Don’t feel so bad. ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas, stat-geek superstar Nate Silver and even SAP’s vaunted predictive analytics software all missed the upsets, too. So did President Obama.

Three of the four correctly picked 11 of the Sweet 16 teams, while Bilas correctly chose 10. But despite the similariy in results between men and models, I’d follow Silver’s model-based forecast every time. Not only is it accurate, but it stands to make people a lot of money.

Just to be clear, though, Silver doesn’t actually pick winners and losers (at least not publicly, as far as I can tell). Rather, he uses a model that takes into account a number of variables — including a handful of popular computer rankings — and produces the probability of each team advancing through each round of the tournament. That’s what makes his forecast so effective if you’re a betting man: It’s easy enough to pick the winner and most of the final four by just choosing the top seeds (I’m looking at you, POTUS), but the way to accel past everyone else in points is to spot the Cinderellas.

If I were ESPN, I’d pay Silver a boatload of money to come on TV once a year and present his forecast to a March-Madness-obsessed nation. I’m fairly certain the network could extend the broadcast out to about three hours and charge Super-Bowl-like advertising rates. Here’s why.

It’s the probabilities, stupid

As I was saying, anyone, including Silver, can spot the best teams in the tournament by watching enough basketball, settling on some important data points to analyze or just following the NCAA’s seeding. Here are the seeds my experts, data analysts and the leader of the free world chose for the Sweet 16:

• Bilas: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5
• Obama: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5
• SAP: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8
• Silver: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5

Here are the actual seeds that advanced to the Sweet 16: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 15.

SAP’s mid-seed-heavy bracket

The smart money is always on the higher seeds from a pure probability standpoint (although I have no idea how SAP built its model to get so many 5-8 seeds in the Sweet 16). But strange things can, and often do, happen in the NCAA tournament. This year, those strange things are called Wichita State (9-seed), Oregon (12-seed), LaSalle (13-seed) and Florida Gulf Coast University (15-seed).

So why am I so high on Silver if his Sweet 16 probabilities were just as off-base as the two non model-based human brackets and SAP’s model-based picks? Because if I were looking for a few upsets, he might have helped me spot them. Here some of his notable projections for lower-seeded teams most likely to advance:

• Arizona (6-seed): 38.1 percent of reaching the Sweet 16 — they made it (SAP picked this correctly)
• Florida Gulf Coast (15-seed): 3.3 percent chance of making the Sweet 16 — they made it
• Oregon (12-seed): 17.5 percent chance of making the Sweet 16 — they made it
• Minnesota (11-seed): 61.9 percent chance of winning its first game — it won (Bilas, SAP and Obama picked this, too)
• California (12-seed): 32.8 percent chance of winning its first game — it won (SAP picked this correctly)

And in my neck of the woods — Las Vegas — being smarter than the sportsbooks means big money. No. 12 Oregon and No. 13 LaSalle didn’t really sneak up on the oddsmakers (60-1 and 100-1 odds to make the Final Four, respectively), but No. 15 Florida Gulf Coast is paying out 1,000-1 should it reach the Final Four.

I wouldn’t count on that happening, though. Silver now gives those teams a 1 percent, 5.1 percent and 0.8 percent chance, respectively, of making the Final Four. Louisville, Florida and Indiana look like locks to make it, and one of them should win the tournament.

Men vs. models: Let’s call it a draw

If you’re looking at these selections as some sort of man-versus-machine competition, I don’t think you’ll find a clear winner. Although Silver comes out looking the best of the four brackets I analyzed, his projections aren’t that much different than Bilas’s picks. And although SAP’s picks fall apart in the end — two of its Final Four selections (including its national champion pick) are out — it did correctly pick a couple upsets. President Obama, well, he pretty much picked chalk. The jury is still out on SAP’s model, which has three Final Four picks alive but made what seems like a risky choice by choosing Michigan State over Louisville.

The better way to look at these results is probably as further evidence that man and machine need to work together more closely, something we highlighted heavily at our Structure: Data conference last week. Men create models, but men probably don’t crunch the numbers. And when there’s pride or money on the line, knowing which No. 15 seed has the best chances of making a run is probably what matters most.

Your chances of picking every upset without a little help: not good at all.

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The company started out as PHPfog, which GigaOM’s Derrick Harris characterized two years ago as a sort of Heroku for PHP developers, but changed focus to support multiple languages and multiple public clouds.

The developers using PHPFog probably already know it’s not  easy to migrate from one software version to another and when the software in question is actually the platform which runs your applications, things get really hairy. One AppFog user acknowledged that the company provided notice and guidance about migrating applications but said any such migration is fraught. “Infrastructure moves are incredibly difficult and risky and the upside is usually fairly slim,” he said via email.

We'd love to keep in touch… so please follow @AppFog as we wind down here…. It's been freaking awesome.—
PHP Fog (@phpfog) January 23, 2013

The problem of a defunct PaaS may be rare — Coghead disappeared in 2009, although SAP ended up buying the intellectual property. But given that PaaSes act as platforms for real applications, customers need to go into deployment with their eyes wide open.

Gartner distinguished analyst Yefim Natiz, who studies this topic, recommends that PaaS customers negotiate terms to mitigate risk. “You should put something in your provisions that if the company is acquired or goes away, you can get some money back — even if a company goes bankrupt there are assets left over. The best thing is to get your code in escrow so if the PaaS goes away you can run it on premises if you need to,” he said.

And of course, all companies should always back up their underlying data all the time.

Carlson, who provided the tweetstream below to show how some customers “evolved” their thinking about the transition, said the benefits of moving to AppFog outweigh the headaches of the move itself.

“They get much better service, a choice of infrastructure, new languages, five new database services and can choose whatever version control system they want to manage their code instead of being forced into Git,” he said in an interview.

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The point of ‘SAP Business Suite powered by SAP Hana’ (currently available to existing customers) is to marry online transaction processing with analytics, with the primary benefit being speed. Indeed, SAP chairman Hasso Plattner said at the launch on Thursday that the goal for transactional query response times was three seconds. Now SAP’s purchase last year of enterprise mobile tech company Syclo starts to make more sense.

“Why is speed so important? One reason: mobile,” Plattner said. “When we use mobile devices… we do not want to wait more than three seconds.

“We will build a new world of front-end and we will do this together with our customers… We have to be on every device.”

Analysts at Ovum reckon processing speed is “the least of Hana’s potential benefits”, though. In a note on Friday, Ovum pointed out that there were clear efficiency benefits to embedding analytics with transaction processing. It also suggested that the ability to generate data views on-the-fly should trim database footprint requirements and, over time, simplify the design of applications running on top of Business Suite.

For SAP, though, this is largely a bid for relevance. Customers are used to running its ERP applications on other companies’ databases – Oracle, IBM’s DB2, Microsoft’s SQL Server – and this is a way of bringing them onto SAP’s own platform.

And Hana is clearly core to SAP’s future. The platform went into the cloud last October – perhaps finally giving SAP a lasting foothold in that arena – and Plattner noted on Thursday that all new SAP applications will be developed for Hana. That said, those rival databases will still be supported, although their vendors may need to do some optimization.

“Customers have the choice,” Plattner said. “There are some features missing in the other databases [but] we will tell the other database manufacturers what those features are and, if they can develop them, we will also support them.”

Will the Hana-fied Business Suite tempt enterprise customers? SAP is touting a ‘comprehensive’ set of migration and rapid deployment services for those who want to make the leap, but Ovum’s cautious, partly because it thinks SAP may have a messaging problem on its hands. After all, Hana was a database then an analytics platform, and now it’s just a platform — and it’s only a couple of years old.

“SAP Business Suite on HANA has the potential to be a game changer by making SAP much more relevant to its customers. But in the near term, SAP Business Suite on HANA should be seen as opportunistic upgrade for existing customers or greenfield opportunity for new ones,” the analyst house said.

“Few if any enterprises currently rank replacement of enterprise systems as top priority. Convincing customers that the ‘transformative’ benefits of Suite on HANA will be non-disruptive technically is the challenge SAP faces with an entrenched Business Suite customer base. Companies don’t swap out their database and ERP investments overnight.”

One thing that could help convince existing Business Suite customers to jump to Hana is the pricing model, which SAP set after consultation with its German user group, DSAG. Essentially, customers will only have to upgrade licenses that access the Hana database, rather than having to upgrade the whole license agreement.

“As far as licensing costs are concerned, the database for the Business Suite on Hana will now cost existing SAP customers exactly the same as the conventional databases,” DSG board member Andreas Oczko said in a statement. “This will give each individual customer the chance to use in-memory technology at a reasonable price.”

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