Cisco strengthens collaboration portfolio
Cisco today announced its acquisition (which is expected to close by the end of October) of email and calendaring startup, PostPath, for the princely sum of approximately $215 million. The PostPath offering is Linux-based, and has been designed to drop into a Microsoft network as an alternative to Exchange, with the company
claiming to offer an easier migration path from Exchange 5.5 to PostPath than from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007.
This acquisition is a logical step for Cisco, which acquired conferencing vendor WebEx in May 2007, followed by policy management vendor Securent in November. Cisco wants to be a major competitor in the collaboration software market, leveraging its communications background to move up the business software stack. With the exception of its small business email offering WebEx Mail, email and personal calendaring has been a noticeable weak spot in the Cisco portfolio, and by building the PostPath technology into the SaaS-delivered WebEx Connect product (which is gradually becoming the platform for all things collaboration at Cisco), the acquisition means it can offer an alternative to customers, and further fleshes out the Cisco collaboration stack.
The previously stagnant email market has seen a flush of activity recently, with hosted email services such as Google's Gmail introducing increasingly viable alternatives to the costs of maintaining an in-house Exchange environment. While it is unlikely that players such as Google and Cisco will making a major dent Microsoft's Exchange market share in the short term, the competition can only be healthy, and at least prompt Microsoft to address the challenges posed.
I have yet to speak to Cisco directly about the acquisition, so I remain quite speculative about how significant a role the company sees this technology playing in the overall collaboration portfolio. $215 million is a considerable purchase price, although it pales into insignificance next to the $3.2 billion the company paid for WebEx last year. Whether the value of the PostPath technology will justify that investment however, remains to be seen. Integration is a key factor in the WebEx Connect strategy, so it will be interesting to see how effectively Cisco can leverage the PostPath features across the breadth of the collaboration portfolio, rather than simply adding a check in the "email and calendaring" box. For organisations considering hosted collaboration offerings such as WebEx Connect, this acquisition could make Cisco a more interesting proposition, especially if Cisco can leverage the Exchange migration strategy touted by PostPath in combination with both PostPath's and WebEx's Outlook integration.
Labels: Cisco, collaboration, google, Microsoft, PostPath
More acquisition activity in the identity space
Hot on the heels of last week's acquisition of
Credentica by Microsoft, Ping Identity (who I covered
here in an On The Radar report)
announced yesterday that it has acquired the Sxip Access business unit from Sxip Identity.
Sxip was early to spot the potential opportunity in providing organisations with a simple, easy-to-deploy single sign-on (SSO) solution for software-as-a-service (SaaS). Sxip Access was its response to that opportunity, combining provisioning capabilities with some Sxip hosted services and an appliance. The company had also cultivated relationships with the likes of Salesforce.com and Google (for Google Apps).
The acquisition of Sxip Access is a smart move by Ping Identity. Although it can be used to provide SSO for SaaS, PingFederate (the company's flagship multi-protocol federated identity offering) lacks some of the rapid implementation and deployment capabilities of Sxip Access. Part of the SaaS proposition is that organisations can get up-to-speed much more rapidly. Authentication and authorisation shouldn't hold you back: something that Sxip Access should help to prevent.
Back in September Ping began to actively target the SaaS opportunity, allowing providers to sell PingFederate-based SSO to their customers and share the revenue with Ping. Yesterdays announcement should accelerate this.
(As an aside, I do wonder whether we might see Ping's
SignOn.com user-centric identity offering heading in the other direction, given that Sxip is now fairly-and-squarely focused there).
Ping and Sxip, whilst they are comparatively small, punch above their weight when it comes to identity mindshare. I wonder whether this announcement might shake the much larger incumbent identity management vendors, none of whom have really articulated a credible SaaS proposition, into action. It should. SaaS buying decisions often bypass the IT organisation and the business buyers aren't (and in fact shouldn't be) interested in identity management: they want access. If a Salesforce.com recommends that the customer just needs to get their IT department to deploy this box and hook it up to the existing identity management solution so be it. Job done. With SaaS increasing in popularity, particularly in the SME segment where they have struggled to gain a foothold, the incumbents need a strong proposition or lose out to the likes of Ping.
Labels: google, identity, Ping, SaaS, Salesforce, Sxip
Google launches Google Sites
Google is once again treading on Microsoft toes with the launch of its newest product, Google Sites. The new offering allows users to create and manage their own websites, and is based on the wiki technology the company acquired from JotSpot in October 2006. Google Sites is clearly targeted at the market currently dominated by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and the beta-version hosted derivative of SharePoint, Office Live Workspace (which I blogged about
here), while highlighting its own simplicity and low cost - Google Sites is available free to existing Google Apps customers.
Unusually for a new Google product it is not a beta version but a fully released product, no doubt thanks to its history under JotSpot. Most notable is the work that Google has already put into integrating the software with other Google applications - Google Calendar, Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa are all integrated to allow embedding of calendars, documents, videos, etc. into your site.
It is interesting that Google has squarely removed all reference to wikis in its description of Google Sites, at a time when many enterprise software vendors are clamouring to ensure their offerings at least reference Enterprise 2.0 terms such as "wikis" and "blogs". This is the right decision: the Google Sites offering, while far from being a sophisticated site design tool, is much broader than many wiki tools in the market. It will also help Google in its attempt to "cross over" into the enterprise market - despite the success of business-focused products like Google Search Appliance, Google is still very much an Internet brand. While wikis and blogs are very "now", they are far from established in the enterprise, and the terminology can alienate less tech-savvy business users. Google needs to create confidence and trust among the enterprise market, and this branding/marketing decision seems to reflect this.
Clearly Google Sites is not going to displace SharePoint in the short term. But Google continues to challenge the dominance of Microsoft in this space, and yet again it has chosen a services-based approach to achieve this. The debate around whether or not Google will displace Microsoft in office productivity will continue for a long time yet, but in the meantime, Google continues to show perceptive awareness of what it needs to do, as well as the investment capacity and determination to do it.
Labels: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, google, Microsoft
Google the new Microsoft? No comparison
...at least when it comes to discussion on the web.
Google announced its OpenSocial social networking API project just 5 days ago - and now the company's own search engine reports over 7,700,000 hits for "OpenSocial". And it's still
alpha code!
A day earlier, Microsoft announced Project Oslo. And despite the announcement being what
Gavin Clarke refers to as an experience of
buzzword bingo, "Microsoft Oslo" garners just 1,400,000 hits or so.
OK so it's not exactly scientific. But to me at least it shows just how far Google-fixation has become the psychosis
du jour of the technology industry.
Labels: google, Microsoft
Time to be honest about SaaS
I thought that those of you who aren't recipients of our monthly newsletter might be interested in this commentary (penned by the other Neil) dissecting some of the problems with the definition (or lack thereof) of software-as-a-service.
Over the past few days we’ve been having an interesting debate here at MWD, in conjunction with the analysts at our close partner
Freeform Dynamics. The question came from Dale Vile at Freeform: what's a good definition of software-as-a-service (SaaS)? The reason for asking the question was that SaaS is a hot topic, and it's something that's considered as a major growth opportunity for a lot of technology suppliers; but although there are a fair few forecasts of growth in demand, it's difficult to get a clear idea of what's actually included in these forecasts. Of course, if there isn't a consistent view of what does and doesn't actually constitute SaaS then that's not really helping anyone. The approach we took to try and provide that consistent view was to look at a long list of things (ranging from Google Search, Google Maps and hosted wikis to Skype's VOIP and messaging services, hosted voice PBXs, online travel agency services and remote backup services), and say whether we thought they "counted" as SaaS offerings.
What came to the fore very quickly was that there was no crisp set of attributes that we could agree characterised SaaS offerings. SaaS isn't defined (as some would tell you) by a particular type of distribution or access technology, a particular technology architecture, or a particular approach to charging for usage.
Yes, SaaS offerings do commonly exhibit particular choices in these areas (use of the web for distribution and access; a "multi-tenant" architecture to efficiently separate the data and customisations of each customer from those of others; and some kind of subscription license). But crucially, these choices aren't unique to what most people would call SaaS offerings. Google's services, and countless millions of other online dynamic websites, have made those same technology choices for distribution and access – and they're commonly lumped into that whole other can of slippery worms, "Web 2.0". Countless online portals (some hosted within organisations, others available to the public) allow users to personalise their experiences and use a multi-tenant architecture to store personalisation data efficiently and effectively. Lastly, all sorts of information- or IT-based capabilities are delivered on a subscription basis (not least, mainframe capacity, and analyst research ;-).
So what is it that marks something out as SaaS (or not)? The only answer that seems to tick all the boxes is that SaaS offerings are those which deliver online, hosted alternatives to things that we have historically experienced through the in-house purchase (or development) and deployment of software systems.
Let's take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as an example. Historically, CRM capabilities were provided by software that was installed on premise, was managed on premise, supported one organisation, and was paid for through a perpetual license. When Salesforce.com delivers those CRM capabilities from a remote installation, manages them on behalf of multiple organisations, and is paid to do so on the basis of a monthly subscription, it needs a different name: that's "Software-as-a-Service". Following that example, remote backup/restore services, online word processing applications like Google Docs, the Zoho suite and (now Adobe's) Buzzword, and SAP's BusinessByDesign (formerly A1S) all count as SaaS offerings. Google Search and Facebook don't, because they're not delivering capabilities that you would ever have associated with on-premise, perpetually licensed software.
This helps us clarify SaaS' place in the IT industry, but we think it's a problematic conclusion, for three reasons. Firstly, most people use the label without really understanding how context-dependent it is (what you think of as SaaS is primarily defined by your own experience); secondly, if we continue down this road, there can never really be a consistent definition of SaaS that will work for everyone; and thirdly, this is a very IT industry- and supplier-centric way of looking at the world that is only likely to alienate or confuse a very important community – "users" (the people who pay all our salaries).
Perhaps we need to call time on SaaS, and think of some clearer terms and definitions that can really help IT organisations and IT buyers work out how everything fits together. At the very least, as an industry we need to be honest about SaaS – and explain that it’s an industry-driven marketing and positioning term that's primarily about separating "funky new stuff" from "boring old stuff".
Labels: Adobe, Facebook, google, SaaS, Salesforce, SAP, Skype, Web 2.0, Zoho
