Darren Wesemann Blog

A number of cloud offerings are appearing, and some mixed with SaaS messages, in particular some clouds are going to market with other clouds.  IBM’s offering coupled with Amazon’s EC2 is one example, see this article, or this one, (also here, here and here).

Cloud offerings will continue to appear.  These services provide generic computing that are purchased in a pay-as-you-go model, where units of raw computing are purchased as they are consumed.  These are important initiatives for the technology industry at large because they enable the consumption of computing in much the same way we pay for electricity in our homes today (i.e. individual home owners don’t pay directly for electrical hardware such as transformers, switches and cable, we instead pay for a simple electrical service that flows through our homes as we consume it, monthly).   The delivery of raw computing is moving to this paradigm, which is changing the way companies fundamentally consume technology.  Also, software delivery (the stuff on top of raw computing) is likewise following the same paradigm, and is also changing the way software applications are delivered and consumed.  SunGard is embracing this paradigm with our Infinity SaaS initiatives I’ve blogged about in previous posts. 

Although IBM and others focus on computing infrastructure (such as CPU cycles, application servers, databases, etc) SunGard’s focus is on business applications and components that make up composite applications.  Environments like Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure are complementary offerings because they provide raw computing environments (void of solution content) that are billed as the environments are consumed (available for applications to be written for them and run there).  Some cloud offerings include robust application server infrastructure (such as IBM).  Still, in order to use the cloud computing service, one needs to load some software there (not provided by the cloud service).

SunGard, on the other hand, remains agnostic to the location and format of the cloud environment.  Infinity provides an abstraction to the runtime environment such that any cloud service can be leveraged.  The value for SunGard is in the application content and the ability to deliver solutions using that content to customers meeting business needs in an on-demand model, (shortening the distance between the identification of a business need and the delivery of a solution meeting that need).  The runtime cloud can be within SunGard’s cloud environment, on a third-party cloud or within a customer’s own computing environment.  The first “S” in SaaS stands for Software, which emphasizes the key point in where SunGard focuses the on-demand model, our content meaning the solutions that our customers consume, irrespective of where it’s running.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Software, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.