Let’s face it, a large number of potential business users of Cloud services are still just that – potential – because they are still scared of it. But if companies they trust from their own marketplace, the big brand suppliers they normally turn to every day, were to be the source of those services they might feel a good deal more assured about making the move.
The trouble is, of course, that most of those big brands have earned their reputation by doing just about anything else than running big datacentres offering hosted managed services. So to muscle in on this new market – aggregating together the applications and services that meet the needs of one or more vertical market sectors, or perhaps a clearly defined slice of a larger horizontal market, and delivering them as branded package – they are going to require a good deal of technical expertise or assistance. Till now neither has really been there for them, which is why the majority of vendors pitching at the service aggregation market have come from the technology side of the fence, and mainly targeted at technology-oriented needs.
This is where the latest to come from Progress Software, Progress Arcade, has the scent of something different about it. This could be the tool that allows these non-tech-savvy brand masters to build aggregated services and have them run on a wide range of hosted platforms. In practice this is not the initial market seen for Arcade by Colleen Smith, VP of SaaS at Progress. That is the provision of an integration and business process management environment for the company’s vast array of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) within a portal that simplifies deploying applications and services in the Cloud.
The development of Arcade has sprung out of the work Smith has been putting in over the last three or four years in pushing the Progress partner channel – mainly ISVs that build applications on top of the core Progress system – to move into the Cloud using SaaS as a delivery vehicle. She observed that as this has grown the partners have started asking more serious questions about how and where they host their services.
Some have chosen to host services themselves and others have gone for third party hosting businesses. Even this basic choice has then raised questions about resource planning, performance, storage requirements and a host of other factors. It has not been helped by service providers having their own interpretations of some terminology, often leaving the ISVs not at all sure they were comparing eggs with eggs when assessing the choices.
The first infrastructure targeted is Amazon, but Smith is well aware that this will not be every company’s choice. There are a lot of approaches the partners really need to address, including private, hybrid and full public, so Progress had to be in a position to handle a broad cross section of different potential infrastructures.
To get round this problem, and its attendant need to build separate portals for each infrastructure choice - and the possible need for ISVs to rewrite code to fit if they targeted more than one infrastructure - Progress has create a Cloud abstraction layer. This is built this to a series of server templates, which are Cloud agnostic.
So users can choose a Cloud infrastructure that suits their purpose and use Arcade to interface with it. The advantage is, particularly as this is primarily designed for ISVs, that they now write their applications and services once, to Arcade.
This means that the ISVs’ customers are the ones that get to choose the environment, ranging from totally private to fully public, and the ISVs get the capability to deploy in accordance with those requirements. This means the ISVs also get significant amounts of flexibility, as Smith observed.
Perhaps one of the most important capabilities Progress has built into Arcade is agnosticism as to the parentage of applications that can be put into the Cloud. It can therefore be used as a Cloud integration tool for just about any application, according to Smith. This allows ISVs – and others – to build collaborative services in the Cloud. In addition, it also works with the company’s Business Process Management system, Savvion.
It is this capability that can take Arcade beyond its initial market of the ISVs and into the market for service integrators – businesses that grow into the brand masters for information and data services in their chosen vertical markets. At the same time, it also provides the platform which will allow some of those ISVs the opportunity to expand into that very role of brand master.
The importance of service delivery from brand masters associated with a marketplace rather than a technology, as currently happens with most on-premise infrastructures and applications, is that the Cloud will inevitably diminish the importance and influence of the technologies used to provide the services. It will be the services themselves which become not just important but the only real point worthy of discussion. For example, many people will discuss the relative merits of low cost supermarket petrol and higher priced, additive-enriched `name’ brand petrol.
But I don’t think I have ever heard the archetypal `person on a Clapham Omnibus’ discussing whether the raw oil came from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Azerbaijan. But many of the potential brand masters – businesses that know what applications and services are required by a vertical market and can even identify many specific products – are likely to be hindered by a lack of detailed knowledge of the tricks and potholes of configuring applications to work with a specified infrastructure.
Getting one application to integrate with other applications and services on that infrastructure, and collaborate within the framework of a BPM environment, could easily be the pain-point beyond which they will not, cannot, travel.
Yet it is precisely the knowledge of the marketplace and the business requirements of the vertical sectors which will be their true point of value. And it is no good the current technology-driven vendors then jumping up and down saying `please sir, we can do it’ the short answer is `no you can’t’.
They will be able to manage the technology of integration, but the chances of them understanding the needs of a vertical marketplace are probably lower than mine of understanding the intricacies of brain surgery……nurse, pass me the road drill……
