Adobe Acrobat 9 Now Available

Adobe announced today the launch of Acrobat 9 which includes native support for Flash and new collaboration capabilities. Users can now include Flash Player compatible video and application files into PDF documents.

Acrobat 9 also includes the ability to unify a wide range of content into a single document with the new concept of PDF Portfolios. PDF Portfolios enable users to assemble multiple media types into one, compressed PDF file that can be customized with several professional layouts and specific branding.

In addition, Acrobat 9 provides access to capabilities for collaborating live within a PDF document, enabled by working with Acrobat.com, a suite of hosted services available as public beta. This new capability can enable users to drive a group’s navigation through a PDF document in real-time, helping ensure everyone is literally, and figuratively, on the same page.

Acrobat 9 expected to launch up to twice as fast as earlier versions.

Are You Hip Enough for Cloud, Grid, and Utility Computing?

Keeping up with the lingo alone has become a challenge as changes in the global computing infrastructure bring an entirely new approach to managing both enterprise and personal computing.

Writing over at SOA World, Michael Sheehan has a great piece comparing the differences and similarities of Grid, Cloud, and Utility Computing - terms that are often used interchangeably and in different ways.

There seems to be a lot of debate as to what Grid computing really is. In fact, the blogosphere seems to be throwing around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. And rather than clarifying things, I feel that the waters are just getting muddier.

Surprisingly, he suggests that the term "cloud computing" is on it's way out because it is too ambiguous where I'd suggest this concept is appealing partly becuase it is vague, and more importantly has enough catchy buzz that the term "cloud computing" will actually come to replace all the others, with distinctions made after vendors have offered a "cloud computing model" to customers.

SaaS Comes To Online Advertising

SaaS has become the new buzz word at least on the web operations side of things. So much so that there is now a SaaS product for online advertising reports Marketing Vox. The service developed by Theorem Analytics enables media planners or account managers to upload various data and filter it through customized templates and formulas. Reports can be converted to HTML, Excel or other formats. Interested in learning or sharing your thoughts and on SaaS, you can do so in the SaaS group.

Acrobat.com Launched - SaaS Solution For Taking PDFs Online

Adobe has announced the beta launch of Acrobat.com, a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that allows you to create documents together and share them. It's a software as a service (SaaS) solution intended to increase productivity and collaboration. The idea is that people can create documents faster without email attachments or version control issues.

They are starting with three apps:
1. Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
2. Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
3. The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.

The document collaboration services are currently free but the intent is to provide businesses with premium subscription services such as workgroup capabilities, administrative controls, more advanced document workflows and additional capacity.

You can access Acrobat.com while online from almost any browser using the Flash Player or from your desktop via Acrobat.com on AIR. They are also planning to roll out a version where you can access your work via the AIR version of Acrobat.com while off-line.

Acrobat.com is really a new solution to an old problem. Adobe's products are desktop based including the dreaded Acrobat PDF documents. Moving to web based solutions is a step in the right direction and answering the call for ubiquitous access via cloud computing. PDFs are still inherently desktop based documents which Acrobat.com provides an online mechanism to manage. The chat and meeting features has some similarities to Webex and Live Meeting capabilities. It's also akin to web office suites like Google Docs and Zoho but not quite since these offer a full suite of more office solutions like spreadsheets, presentations, etc.

NetSuite Buys SaaS Provider OpenAir

NetSuite is acquiring OpenAir, a SaaS provider for project automation and management for $26 million in cash. OpenAirs provides web based project billing, timesheets, expense reporting and project management to organizations. Cloud computing business applications are a rapidly emerging market and the acquisition enables NetSuite to accelerate its vertical strategy. For those of you interested learning or sharing your thoughts and ideas about SaaS, you can do so in the SaaS group.

Why Open Source Will Win The SaaS Fight

McKinsey & Company published a report predicting the market size for Software as a Service (SaaS) will exceed $37B market over the next 5 years. In particular, the report described the need for Independent Software Vendors to SaaS-enable their products using special-purpose SaaS development tools. Matt Asay also wrote recently that the growth of the top 60 software companies is driven by SaaS.

McKinsey claims that traditional J2EE and .NET platforms are poorly suited to building SaaS applications. According to McKinsey, this opens up a $3B market for Platform as a Service (PaaS) products from new entrants like WaveMaker, Coghead and SalesForce. From the article:

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this marekt has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it’s with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you’ve got Apex!?).

Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

Development Problems for SaaS

SaaS is highly disruptive for existing hardware and software providers. SaaS platforms are different from traditional computing platforms like J2EE and .NET in three ways:

• SaaS platforms contain new core components, such as web services APIs to integrate to other applications and usage-based billing capabilities. This disrupts existing platform providers like BEA and Microsoft.


• SaaS platforms are designed for multi-tenancy, including global and tenant-specific data schemas, multi-layer administration and virtualization for scalability. This disrupts traditional ISVs like Oracle and SAP.


• SaaS platform are delivered on-demand, not on premises. This threatens the business of traditional hardware providers like IBM and HP.


• SaaS products need on-demand customization tools. As SalesForce has demonstrated, a complete SaaS application needs its own customization tools if it is to compete with enterprise solutions like Siebel and SAP.


• SaaS products need on-demand integration capabilities. This includes ability to integrate with on-premises data (a notorious weakness of pure-cloud solutions like Force.com) as well as with on-premise and on-demand web services.

SaaS Architecture Requirements

McKinsey identified three elements of a SaaS architectures:

1. Development environment: an on-demand development platform for creating SaaS applications. This platform should be able to ship along with the application itself to allow customers to customize their application.


2. Run-time environment: an on-demand infrastructufre to deliver applications. This can be a proprietary hosting environment like SalesForce, or an open hosting environment like Amazon EC2. Ideally, the customer should be able to deploy applications on-demand or on premises depending on their security, data integration and other requirements.


3. Ecosystem for adding new capabilities to applications (e.g., SalesForce AppExchange). This ecosystem should also be able to access enterprise data and services located inside the enterprise firewall.

SaaS Is Make or Break for ISVs

According to McKinsey, SaaS has greatest impact on ISVs, delivering a 50-70% improvement in the level of features that can be delivered for a given investment in development and infrastructure.

For ISVs, SaaS platforms offer low upfront cost, rapid time to market (productive tools + pre-built components like billing) and high quality service delivery. In short, existing ISVs have a limited window to migrate their offerings to the SaaS platform or risk being obliterated by newcomers who get there first.

The lesson of SalesForce versus Siebel Systems is clear: existing ISVs should migrate their presentation layer to SaaS quickly while preserving their existing back end servers. Preserving existing back end logic requires a SaaS platform that supports traditional languages like Java.

Which Platform Will Win the ISV Business?

A battlefield is emerging between established mega-vendors and pure play SaaS vendors. The following factors will separate the winners from the losers in this market:

• Build a robust offering: cutting edge technology, reliable, high quality.
• Enable extensive customization: provide additional components that address SaaS-specific needs (e.g., authorization, billing, monitoring & management).
• Monetize effectively: McKinsey identifies this as the most important success factor. The winning platform vendor will be the one which most effectively creates economic value for its ecosystems!
• Drive ecosystem growth: enable partners to make money within the platform vendor’s community through collaboration, sharing of tools and best practices.

Although many of the early SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages and tools, Gartner predicts that 90% of SaaS software will be based on open source within 2 years.

Evaluating SaaS Platforms For ISVs

Here are important criteria for ISVs to consider in evaluating SaaS platforms (sometimes called Platform as a Service, or PaaS):

• Open hosting: can I move applications I build to another SaaS hosting providers? Many SaaS platforms lock the ISV into a proprietary hosting provider (e.g., SalesForce). ZDNet says that ISVs need to offer their SaaS software both on demand and on premises.
  
• Full platform: does the SaaS platform offer a complete development solution with presentation layer, business logic, security, database and web services? Some SaaS platforms only offer part of the development stack (e.g., DabbleDB, Tibco GI)
  
• Standard language: does the SaaS platform support development using a standard language such as Java? Many SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages (e.g., Apex, the proprietary language for SalesForce).

Table: A Comparison of PaaS Vendors

* Proprietary language

Peter Laird also has a good SaaS platform review and Phil Wainwright’s has a good comparison of PaaS providers.

SaaS Platform Product Review - WaveMaker

WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. The WaveMaker studio can be installed on a developer workstsation or delivered on-demand. WaveMaker creates standard Java applications based on Spring, Hibernate and Dojo that can be deployed in a SaaS or on premise architecture.

For ISVs, WaveMaker offers several compelling benefits:

1. WaveMaker's visual studio provides a faster and more natural way to build rich internet applications than traditional hand-coding using Java and struts
   
2. WaveMaker is completely open, making it portable across hosting providers and even enabling applications to be deployed on premise
3. WaveMaker includes a complete development platform based on open source standards such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo
4. WaveMaker is based on the Java language, making it an ideal choice for ISVs who already develop in Java and don't want to migrate their existing server code.
   

WaveMaker can be downloaded here.

Summary - What ISVs Need From SaaS

Every ten years there is a dramatic shift in the development tools world: in the 80’s to client/server, in the ‘90s to three tier and now in the 00’s to SaaS. In each of these shifts, the dominant development tools providers have been supplanted by a new generation. This time around, the seismic shift is being driven by the on-demand architecture and the ISVs have the most urgent need to rebuild their solutions to remain competitive.

Over the next five years, we will see the 500 pound gorillas of the development world like Microsoft’s ASP.NET and Sun’s J2EE unseated. In their place will be new software platforms based on traditional languages that are specially designed to enable development of SaaS applications.

SAP's "Business By Design" Rollout Delayed

SAP's "Business ByDesign" product was to be a major new SaaS release for this year, but the company announced last week that Business by Design would be delayed by over a year, with a new release date expected in 2010.

As Phil Wainewright notes at ZDnet this is very bad news for SAP and very good news for their key competitors who have similar offerings ready to roll, especially US market leader Netsuite along with European companies including UK's CODA which is a Salesforce platform and
Twinfield, an on-demand financial application from the Netherlands.

SAP's endorsement and promotion of the concept of this type of SaaS suite combined with an offering delayed far into the future may even help Netsuite's sagging stock which was off after reported earnings that were under investor expectations.

SaaS - More Than An Acronym

Software as a service - SaaS for short, is clearly a major development in how enterprise computing will evolve in the coming years.

OpSource, a solutions provider, has an excellent set of white papers and a resource center featuring issues relating to SAAS deployments and advantages. For the disadvantages with SaaS you'll want to turn elsewhere since Opsource is presumably a strong advocate for SaaS solutions given their business model.

Over the coming weeks we'll be exploring several issues relating to SaaS and the enterprise including the advantages of flexibility, scalability, and rapid deployment using services like Amazon's E3 but also the challenges of integrating SaaS solutions with existing legacy systems.

IT managers of existing installations may benefit from the huge number of potential SaaS solutions but they also must contend with highly complex integrations and unexpected complications that arise with any major deployment.