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What? The cloud IS Oracle, IBM, SAP, and HP's future revenue model. They are going to build the cloud, build the enterprise cloud services, and bill out consult

by ansy 15y ago

What? The cloud IS Oracle, IBM, SAP, and HP's future revenue model. They are going to build the cloud, build the enterprise cloud services, and bill out consultants specializing in the cloud. HP's future is nothing but the cloud moving forward. HP makes the servers that are the cloud. HP's business software will sit on its servers instead of yours. HP's consultants will charge you $$$ to tell you which services work for you, provision everything, configure it, do the integration, and host it for you in the cloud for a recurring monthly fee per user. WebOS has nothing to do with capitalizing on the cloud. It's just one of many clients to the cloud.

justincormack 15y ago
That is what they think. MySpace bought HP servers, but Facebook doesnt. That market will commoditise too, as cloud that uses software not hardware redundancy doesnt need the high margin features. And the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox and so on. The landscape will change drastically. While there is innovation in clients, owning a platform is still part of a viable strategy. There is still an opening for a business friendly platform, as Microsoft can still lose and RIM is weak.
- wheels 15y ago
  > the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox What color is the sky on your planet? Enterprise software -- the largest software market by a long-shot -- is not scared of ... Dropbox. That's like saying that cars will be wiped out by lawnmowers. The statement doesn't make any sense. Nor does using Facebook and MySpace as examples of enterprise infrastructures. They're medium sized companies with disproportionately large infrastructure needs. What happens at Facebook says virtually nothing about what happens at Mercedes. And nobody in the enterprise trusts Google since enterprise software is all about managing worst case scenarios, and Google's "here, talk to a robot" isn't even in the same galaxy as an acceptable partner program for the enterprise. Salesforce is the only one of those companies that even should be mentioned in the same breath and they're mostly a pain in the ass for Oracle and SAP because they've been chipping away at the low end of the market (very successfully). It is plausible that they'll continue to push upward and conquer increasingly larger markets, but that's something that will take a decade or two to unfold.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I mostly agree, but Google Apps for Business is slowly chipping away at some of the market that 5 years ago might've bought an enterprise "email solution", especially at the lower end of the market, like universities, state governments, and medium-sized businesses. Less success among very large businesses, but a few have adopted it.
    - justincormack 15y ago
      Chipping away from the bottom takes time. But it will happen. Do you see the big enterprise software companies doing serious innovation in their products? The stuff that they built was often fairly cutting edge when they built it, but that was years ago, and those companies are sales driven not innovation driven, like Oracle. Of course they buy in newer more innovative technology, but then try to merge it with the legacy.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  Respectfully, I don't think you appreciate the scale of huge companies and the requirements for the software and suppliers that help to manage them. If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the problem until it was solved. They might not even bother to market the result publicly, to avoid diluting their brand, but if they chose to do so, then the unfortunate small company concerned would probably be gone in a few months (assuming the large company didn't just litigate it out of existence because it was easier, if you're in a jurisdiction like the US). Put another way, companies like Dropbox don't do well because they have a magic recipe that the big boys don't, they do well because they've chosen a niche where they're too small for the big boys to care about and where there are plenty of smaller businesses who will value and pay for that kind of offering because they don't have the same kind of resources in-house to do it themselves. Edit... I should also mention Google, who aren't likely to be competing in the "enterprise" arena any time soon for a very different reason: they aren't set up to support that scale of customer. If you want to sell software to an engineering giant or a global services firm with an employee count in six figures, you don't show up with a few web pages and an e-mail address, you send a CxO or two on a plane to their head office to schmooze them, and then you appoint an SVP whose only role is to lead a large team of sales and support staff dedicated to jumping when that customer says jump.
  - prayag 15y ago
    >If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the >problem until it was solved. And if there is one thing we've learned from Microsoft etc. is that throwing unlimited funding at a problem fixes it.
    - cube13 15y ago
      >And if there is one thing we've learned from Microsoft etc. is that throwing unlimited funding at a problem fixes it. The main problem for Dropbox is simply scale. You, as a service provider, need to keep up with the storage and bandwidth requirements. The only way to deal with that is through buying more hardware/Cloud CPU time and bandwidth. If you're Dropbox, that means that you might need to get more funding. If you're IBM or HP, and they've made it a priority, it's much easier to get what you need. Dropbox isn't really all that special from a technical perspective at this point. Any of the large tech firms can solve it easily, and Apple, Amazon and Google have all come out with services that do basically the same thing as Dropbox.
- ansy 15y ago
  Enterprise software is a hell of a lot more than racks of web servers and managing licenses for Microsoft Office. Any publicly traded company, even one that is not a software company, has tons of business processes that are specific to its way of doing business and its industry. That requires various specialized if not custom software and lots and lots of glue to put it all together. On top of that, businesses want to see into all that activity so all the data from that software needs to be extracted, collected, combined, and reported on properly which requires technical and business expertise specific to that company's business practices and technology choices. The addition of more cloud services increases this burden while decreasing other burdens. HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external. And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.

by ansy 15y ago

justincormack 15y ago

That is what they think. MySpace bought HP servers, but Facebook doesnt. That market will commoditise too, as cloud that uses software not hardware redundancy doesnt need the high margin features. And the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox and so on. The landscape will change drastically. While there is innovation in clients, owning a platform is still part of a viable strategy. There is still an opening for a business friendly platform, as Microsoft can still lose and RIM is weak.

wheels 15y ago
> the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox What color is the sky on your planet? Enterprise software -- the largest software market by a long-shot -- is not scared of ... Dropbox. That's like saying that cars will be wiped out by lawnmowers. The statement doesn't make any sense. Nor does using Facebook and MySpace as examples of enterprise infrastructures. They're medium sized companies with disproportionately large infrastructure needs. What happens at Facebook says virtually nothing about what happens at Mercedes. And nobody in the enterprise trusts Google since enterprise software is all about managing worst case scenarios, and Google's "here, talk to a robot" isn't even in the same galaxy as an acceptable partner program for the enterprise. Salesforce is the only one of those companies that even should be mentioned in the same breath and they're mostly a pain in the ass for Oracle and SAP because they've been chipping away at the low end of the market (very successfully). It is plausible that they'll continue to push upward and conquer increasingly larger markets, but that's something that will take a decade or two to unfold.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I mostly agree, but Google Apps for Business is slowly chipping away at some of the market that 5 years ago might've bought an enterprise "email solution", especially at the lower end of the market, like universities, state governments, and medium-sized businesses. Less success among very large businesses, but a few have adopted it.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    Chipping away from the bottom takes time. But it will happen. Do you see the big enterprise software companies doing serious innovation in their products? The stuff that they built was often fairly cutting edge when they built it, but that was years ago, and those companies are sales driven not innovation driven, like Oracle. Of course they buy in newer more innovative technology, but then try to merge it with the legacy.
Silhouette 15y ago
Respectfully, I don't think you appreciate the scale of huge companies and the requirements for the software and suppliers that help to manage them. If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the problem until it was solved. They might not even bother to market the result publicly, to avoid diluting their brand, but if they chose to do so, then the unfortunate small company concerned would probably be gone in a few months (assuming the large company didn't just litigate it out of existence because it was easier, if you're in a jurisdiction like the US). Put another way, companies like Dropbox don't do well because they have a magic recipe that the big boys don't, they do well because they've chosen a niche where they're too small for the big boys to care about and where there are plenty of smaller businesses who will value and pay for that kind of offering because they don't have the same kind of resources in-house to do it themselves. Edit... I should also mention Google, who aren't likely to be competing in the "enterprise" arena any time soon for a very different reason: they aren't set up to support that scale of customer. If you want to sell software to an engineering giant or a global services firm with an employee count in six figures, you don't show up with a few web pages and an e-mail address, you send a CxO or two on a plane to their head office to schmooze them, and then you appoint an SVP whose only role is to lead a large team of sales and support staff dedicated to jumping when that customer says jump.
- prayag 15y ago
  >If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the >problem until it was solved. And if there is one thing we've learned from Microsoft etc. is that throwing unlimited funding at a problem fixes it.
  - cube13 15y ago
    >And if there is one thing we've learned from Microsoft etc. is that throwing unlimited funding at a problem fixes it. The main problem for Dropbox is simply scale. You, as a service provider, need to keep up with the storage and bandwidth requirements. The only way to deal with that is through buying more hardware/Cloud CPU time and bandwidth. If you're Dropbox, that means that you might need to get more funding. If you're IBM or HP, and they've made it a priority, it's much easier to get what you need. Dropbox isn't really all that special from a technical perspective at this point. Any of the large tech firms can solve it easily, and Apple, Amazon and Google have all come out with services that do basically the same thing as Dropbox.
ansy 15y ago
Enterprise software is a hell of a lot more than racks of web servers and managing licenses for Microsoft Office. Any publicly traded company, even one that is not a software company, has tons of business processes that are specific to its way of doing business and its industry. That requires various specialized if not custom software and lots and lots of glue to put it all together. On top of that, businesses want to see into all that activity so all the data from that software needs to be extracted, collected, combined, and reported on properly which requires technical and business expertise specific to that company's business practices and technology choices. The addition of more cloud services increases this burden while decreasing other burdens. HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external. And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.