Dell launches portfolio of SaaS applications- Saw this one a few minutes ago from the Bangkok Times (it looks like it has been automatically translated into English):

Dell has announced the new SaaS applications across three IT infrastructure management areas including Client Device Management, Remote Infrastructure Monitoring and Continuity and Compliance Management. The applications and services include asset management, patch management, software distribution, anti-virus management, laptop data encryption, online backup and restore, software inventory and usage management, email continuity, crisis management and email security.

I can only find the announcement in the Bangkok Times, so I’ll add more info as it is made available online.

Citrix Enters SaaS-Based IT Management with GoToManage- This one was on MarketWatch and is much easier to understand. Citrix picked up Paglo, the SaaS IT Search company from Menlo Park California and changed its name to GoToManage. From the MarketWatch article:

GoToManage is based on the industry-leading service offering from Paglo Labs Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif., provider of Software as a Service (SaaS)-based IT search and management services acquired by Citrix Systems early in 2010. GoToManage is an integrated web-based platform for monitoring, controlling and supporting attended or unattended IT infrastructure anywhere. It achieves this by creating an IT ’system of record’ — providing businesses with the ability to discover and identify all network devices; monitor critical servers and applications in real-time; manage network usage and track configuration changes. GoToManage is simple to deploy, can be accessed from anywhere, and requires no costly server infrastructure.

And

The launch of the new GoToManage service enables Citrix Online to meet accelerating demand from the large emerging SaaS-based IT management market, estimated by leading analyst firm Forrester Research to reach $4 billion in 2013 (How Big Is SaaS In IT Management Software?, November 2008). GoToManage will provide small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) and managed service providers (MSPs) an affordable alternative to costly and complex premise-based software.

I like two things about this. First, I like that there’s some external validation for the “SaaS-based IT Management Market” (notice the title of this blog). Second, I like that Citrix is aiming GoToManage at the MSP industry. It’s really an interesting angle, as I was surprised Citrix has repositioned Paglo from something IT departments can use to monitor and discover network resources to an MSP play.

Over on ZDNet, Phil Wainewright has an article on “The Four Pillars of the Transition To SaaS” which talks about four challenges SaaS companies face before gaining mainstream adoption:

• Partner strategy
• Pricing, packaging and selling
• As-a-service infrastructure
• Customer relationships

Another company called LiveTime put out a press release in corporatespeak that announced:

new SaaS based cloud deployment options, including Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. This new level of cloud support will allow Managed Service Providers to extend their offerings to include the Enterprise Service Desk.

The moral: Lots of SaaS IT Management companies are targeting MSPs.

Finally, (another nod to Phile Wainewright) RightNow made an excellent PR play with their Cloud Services Agreement, which says:

RightNow’s Cloud Services Agreement makes several key commitments, such as forward price visibility, being able to adjust numbers of seats in line with usage, the right to walk if the vendor doesn’t meet commitments and — most strikingly — cash refunds for breaches of the SLA. I suspect a lot of people’s first reaction is going to be, surely I get that already from a SaaS vendor? Amazingly, this kind of proposition is a novelty in the SaaS industry. I should add, though, that this is in large part the fault of customers, who are so used to buying conventional licensed software with no guarantees, huge shelfware components and long-term contract terms that they blindly walk into the same arrangements with SaaS vendors without even realizing there might be a better way.

That’s it for now.

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Phil Wainewright has an article entitled “Why freemium is bad for business” that brings up some interesting problems with using free SaaS services in businesses:

It means vendors don’t invest in proper access controls. Most low-end free services target individuals (’consumers’) and so they’re built around giving access to a single user. If you’re a business, you’ll probably want more than one user to have access to the same account, but that sort of access control infrastructure is expensive to set up and manage, so free services won’t support it. That’s fine if you can start off free and then migrate to a paid version when you need more access control, but many freemium vendors don’t offer that option.

and

It means vendors don’t invest in instrumentation. If there’s no fee, there’s little incentive to monitor usage patterns and service levels. Again, the infrastructure for this kind of capability is expensive, and if a vendor is focused on the kind of mass market that a free product has to appeal to, it’s unlikely to want to spend money on features such as SLA monitoring, uptime dashboards, real-time user support or detailed usage pattern analysis. This limits its ability to offer differentiated services that performance-sensitive business customers will pay good money for, forcing it to focus even more on volume rather than quality.

Over at 16 Ventures, author Lincoln Murphy spends 23 pages railing on freemium in SaaS. The guy really doesn’t like freemium.

Another one from Phil Wainewright- he’s got an interview with Jeff Kaplan about “some of the ways enterprises will deal with hybrid environments that mix on-premise and cloud assets.” It’s done as a podcast or a blog transcript.

Daniel Druker has a post giving a “2010 Forecast: Cloudy With Lots Of Sun:”

This has been quite the week for financial results and predictions for the cloud computing and software market.

1. Gartner Group predicts 17% growth for cloud computing and SaaS firms vs. 4.8% for on-premises software for 2010.
2. Forrester Research says “The technology downturn of 2008 and 2009 is unofficially over” and points to growth in cloud computing in 2010.
3. Bruce Richardson of AMR says “If you had listened to me and invested in SaaS stocks in December 2008, your portfolio would be up 300% to 400% by now.
4. And closest to home, Intacct announces 80% growth and the second best quarter in the company’s history - and that’s quarter over quarter increased growth for an already fast-growing company.

Shameless Self-Promotion

First, on the Aprigo front:

I put together a quick 30 second commercial that will be shown on G4TV this weekend.

Also, we presented at MassInnovationNights:

It’s about time to have a look around the SaaS/IT Management blogosphere to highlight what’s going on.

Shameless Self Promotion

Wasn’t sure whether to do this first or last, but I might as well get it out of the way. Here’s a quick roundup of Aprigo news since the last roundup:

• Seven Tips to Help Manage Data Storage Growth – Computer Technology Review- An article we wrote for the Computer Technology Review
• Do storage managers have a “pack rat” mentality?- A blog post on the Aprigo blog defending storage managers from Symantec’s assertion that they are pack rats
• Aprigo On KillerStartups.com - Aprigo was featured on KillerStartups.com, a site that lets readers vote whether the startup will “be a killer.”
• Aprigo NINJA in PCMag.com’s @Work Blog- Aprigo NINJA was featured in PCMag.com’s @Work blog by Errol Pierre-Louis.

We’ve got more news coming, but I don’t want to bore you with that. Moving right along……

Storage News

• Scott Lowe has resurrected his Storage Short Take series, and it’s well worth the wait. In this, #5 in the series, Scott gives the Reader’s Digest version of what’s going on in the storage world.
• On the StorageBod blog, Martin Glassborow has a post entitled “Date Night“, in which he anthropomorphisizes the relationship betweek storage customer and vendor.
• W. Curtis Preston has a wrapup of data protection and data backup trends in 2009

IT Management News

• Chris Evans at GestaltIT gives a wrapup of the first annual GestaltIT Tech Field Day, where both vendors and journalists converged for discussions and evaluations of the hottest tech products. Judging from the coverage, it was an excellent event, and they’re already planning the second annual event.
• Looks like IT spending is up according to Bob Evans, as he reports “Accenture Stock Target Soars As CEO Sees IT Recovery“. From the post: “A Credit Suisse analyst has boosted his target price for Accenture shares from $42 to $55 on the expectation that enterprise IT spending is beginning to loosen up and that Accenture will be a prime beneficiary of CIOs’ more-expansive spending habits and their increasing acceptance of outsourcing.”
• Mozy has a great video highlighting the importance of data backup by asking people on the street how much they’d sell their laptop for right this minute.

SaaS News

• The Security Risks with Sharing Documents and How to Prevent Them- Adi Ruppin has an article in IT Business Edge talking about the new access control opportunities and threats brought about by introducing SaaS in IT Management.
• Enterprise SaaS Working Group: Identity Management in the Cloud- Ryan Nichols has a post summarizing the Enterprise SaaS Working Groups activity around identity management in the cloud.

All right, that’s it for now. I’ll keep trying to do this weekly.

10 ways to evaluate your IT management software- Saar Bitner from SysAid Technologies has a great list to help evaluate your IT Management Software.

The True Cost of On-Premise ITAM tools- The guys at SAManage outline the real costs associated with on-premise tools.

Remote Data Backup Pitfalls and Solutions- A good look at remote data backup issues on the Data Recovery Blog.

Overheard: Cloud Computing - Learn It Or Lose- On the IT Management and Cloud Blog, John Willis is interviewed by Jim Ericson.

SaaS Silos Create New IT Management Challenges- Phil Wainewright has an interview with th Scott Bils of Conformity on the management challenges organizations are facing as they increase the number of SaaS applications they take on, and learn why SaaS and cloud require a new approach to identity and systems management.

Business case for SaaS- Dennis Howlett gives his take on the business case for SaaS, by David Terrar.

…and a couple of shameless plugs from the Aprigo blog:

A 5 Step Guide To Reclaim Disk Space And Save $$

A Guide To Year-end Data Storage Planning & Budgeting

1. Sign up for a free Aprigo NINJA Account on the right of this page.
2. When your account is activated, download NINJA and run a scan of 100 GB or more
3. Tell us about your experience with Aprigo NINJA

Let us know how you’d use Aprigo NINJA in your environment or your suggestions or ideas for feature enhancements. You can let us know on twitter, the feedback button in Aprigo NINJA, on GetSatisfaction, or by leaving a comment on our blog.

If you decide you’d like to tell-a-friend after you’ve run a scan, we’ll give you an additional $5 credit for each friend that signs up, runs a scan, and tells us about it.

The Aprigo Scan and Tell Giveaway from aprigo on Vimeo.

To get started, sign up for your free account here.

On-Premise Energy Consumption:

We’ll use the example of a typical physician practice, since electronic medical records (EMR) software is a market we know well. The “On Premises” side of the graphic below illustrates a four-physician medical practice, running EMR software on their own in-house server.

The HP ProLiant DL server, one of the most commercially popular servers on the market today, will consume 7,008 KW of server energy per year. That’s running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

In addition, each user is using a Dell desktop 546, Dell’s most popular starter desktop. A single 546 Dell desktop will consume 600 KW of energy a year, running 8 hours a day for 250 days a year (an average work year).

A four-physician practice will consume 9,408 KW of power each year just to run EMR software on-premise. Each user will personally consume 2,352 KW of power each year.

Now, the SaaS model:

Now let’s see how the energy consumption of SaaS software stacks up.  Rackspace, one of the largest providers of cloud computing hosting services, lists the Dell PowerEdge 2950 III as one of it’s most popular server choices. And since a data center would have a redundant server in addition to the PowerEdge, our SaaS applications are powered by two of these servers.

Running 24 hours a day for 365 days a year, the total energy consumption for these two Dell servers running SaaS applications would be approximately 6,570 KW/yr each, or 13,140 KW/yr total.

Running this server in a SaaS data center allows the SaaS EMR vendor to tens or hundreds of customers on one server. When a new customer goes line with the application, the incremental computing requires – an power consumption – increase only marginally.

How does this affect energy consumption by our physicians?

Now our physicians are only using 131.4 KW (1/100th) of the Dell PowerEdge server energy each year because of the multi-tenant architecture. Also, because SaaS applications require less computing power on the client, the physicians are able to switch to more efficient Dell netbooks, which only consume 120 KW of power each per year.

Using SaaS, our four physician practice now only consumes 1091.4 KW per year running their EMR software. That’s 272.85 KW per year, per physician.

That’s a 88% reduction in overall energy consumption for a four physician practice using SaaS EMR software over on-premise software!

So the lesson here is that even in a small, four physician practice, switching to a SaaS infrastructure can reduce energy consumption dramatically. And when you scale up the numbers, the incremental computing resources and power consumption only increase marginally.

Chris also points out that there are other “green” benefits to SaaS, inlcuding:

• Remote IT support. Whether or not your IT support is in-house, they’re going to consume energy traveling to and from an office to perform maintenance and fix problems. Since there really isn’t much of anything to maintain at the office, SaaS vendors are able to provide remote IT support, reducing travel and CO2 emissions.
• Less frequent replacement of PCs. Given that SaaS applications just require a web browser on the client machine, you really don’t need a very powerful PC. SaaS customers can keep their old machines in place or get a longer life from any new machines they buy. This compares to on-premises software, where customer will often upgrade hardware to support the computing resource requirements of new client software.
• Telecommuting. Accessing on-premise software remotely is typically slower and more technologically complex than a SaaS application. With SaaS applications accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, employees can work remotely, saving fuel and energy costs in the process.

I really enjoyed the post by Chris, and love the fact that he used actual data to make his points. And like every good post, it brings up some questions:

1. At what point do the cost savings on power consumption alone make moving to a SaaS model the smart option?
2. How do these numbers compare in an enterprise infrastructure with thousands of end-users and multiple apps?
3. Is there a good way to associate cost with reduction of power, reduced travel and the cost of upgrading hardware and replacing end-user machines? It seems like the SaaS model has multiple environmental benefits (which are excellent), but showing cost savings are critical in getting business stakeholders to make the jump to SaaS. Are there standard metrics out there to help show the cost savings?

Again, excellent article from Chris. Can’t wait to hear what you think.

Last Thursday we announced the release of Aprigo NINJA . One of the cool built-in features  is automatic updates.

When we thought about rolling out automatic updates, our motivation was streamlining user experience: We’re delivering a SaaS IT management product which needs to have a small presence in the customer’s environment. Now, when you develop a pure SaaS offering, with zero on-premise presence, all you have to do is update the back-end and the customer immediately enjoys the benefits of the new version (at least, the next time they log-in).

When developing a SaaS IT Management solution, we wanted to provide a similar experience even though our customers have a small (SaaS) client on-site (needed because after all you want to manage YOUR environment).

It’s a dilemma, but we’ve figured out a solution. So here’s what we’ve done:

• Back-end updates are transparent to customers (we’re running on AWS and there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening there: Servers, App servers, DBs, clustering, replication, snapshots etc.) This is one of the benefits of a SaaS IT Management offering - we remove the complexity out of the customer’s environment and updates happen without interference.
• We have an ‘update-aware’ SaaS client - when an update is available, the next time a customer logs-in to our AIR client (why we chose AIR is probably worthwhile a post on its own), they will see a message saying “a new version is available”. They then simply click a button to upgrade and that’s it.

The automatic upgrade.

Again, we were thinking about streamlining the customer’s experience, but after reading a post on Everything Sysadmin that talked about automatic updates, I started to understand that automatic updates are also a key security issue (see the following ACM article by the Google Chrome authors on the security issues around automatic updates).

Wow. That struck my curiosity, so I started googling around, and landed on google’s blog post describing their automatic updater with lots of statistics that show the benefits of having an automatic update capability. Some examples:

• Increased security thanks to timely deployment of security vulnerability fixes
• Better software stability thanks to timely bug fixes
• New features that make software more powerful

At the same time, getting all users to work with the latest software release is advantageous for the vendor:

• Happier users due to more stable, more secure applications with additional features
• Less support required: only unfixed bugs in the latest version get reported by users
• Less testing: engineers don’t have to keep testing older versions on newer platforms and with new third party software or drivers

Even though the research is from the perspective of a web browser I feel it’s equally applicable on a wider scale; even when it comes to on-premise components.

So armed with this knowledge of the additional benefits, we’ll continue working on our next release and will work hard on delivering the next wave of SaaS IT Management solutions. In the meantime, if you want to work with us as a design partner, let us know. We’re always looking to work with people that are smarter than us!

But before I go celebrating and trying to get the world to try it out, I do have to mention one important caveat: this is a private beta. This is most definitely a “soft launch”, as we’re only approving a handful of accounts at a time. We want to make sure that the people using it have the best possible experience, and want to get as much early feedback as possible.

How we’re accepting users:

There’s a registration form on nearly every page at www.aprigo.com, and when a user signs up there, we get notified that they’ve applied for an account. However, after filling out the first form, they’re redirected to a second form, asking them some more questions. The more information they give us, the better the chance we’ll approve them. It’s basically a way to jump to the head of the line.

Why do we want more information on our users? Now that’s a good question, and I promise: there’s nothing insidious about what we’re doing. We mainly want to know how the product will be used, in what kind of environment, etc. We will never share personal information with any outside party.

So, if you want to get in on the private beta for Aprigo NINJA, head on over to this page and sign up.

For a 60-second look at Aprigo NINJA, check out this video:

Just two days ago we learned of a holiday that is in dire need of more recognition: Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and we want to celebrate. From the Sysadmin Day web site:

Friday, July 31, 2009, is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication. (All day Friday, 24 hours, your local timezone). Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgment. It’s the least you could do.

We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we’re announcing the Aprigo Sysadmin Appreciation Day Giveaway. From now until the morning of July 31st, sysadmins and IT Managers are encouraged to sign up here. The first 100 who sign up will receive a $10 iTunes gift card via email on 7/31. A little bit about Aprigo (for those of you who are here for the first time): We’re a Waltham, MA based startup building a suite of SaaS IT Applications that help IT Pros in mid-size companies better manage massive file growth both on-site and in the cloud. We’ll be launching the free version of our product next month, and if you sign up for the giveaway we’ll let you know as soon as our free product is ready. Here’s how the giveaway works: If you’re currently a sysadmin or IT manager at a company, just fill in the form here. On July 31st, we’ll send you an email with a code that you can redeem at iTunes. There are only 3 rules:

1. You have to be a sysadmin or IT Manager at a company (ideally at a company with 100 or more employees)- We’d love to give these away to everyone, but hey, we’re a startup, so please enter only if you’re really a sysadmin at a company.
2. Only one entry per person
3. You have to use a valid work email address. We can’t accept entries from gmail addresses, hotmail, etc., as it’s incredibly easy to create a bunch of bogus email addresses to get repeat entries

And a little bit of radical transparency here: This is most certainly a marketing campaign. Since we’re about to launch a free version of a product that can help sysadmins and IT pros balance shrinking budgets with massive file growth, we want to be able to let them know when it’s ready for them to check out. So if you sign up for this giveaway, we’ll send you an email when we launch (and of course, you can always unsubscribe at any time….we’re not spammers here). That’s it. We’ve only got 100 of these, so as soon as we have 100 entries, the giveaway will end. Sign up today!

In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Rackspace Hosting, which provides servers that run untold numbers of websites, experienced a power outage Tuesday in its Dallas data center for as long as 45 minutes. Once power was restored, though, it took some sites several hours to come back fully. It was the second such power outage for the company’s Dallas data center in just over a week, though it’s not particularly common; as TechCrunch noted, the last time the company had a major outage was in November 2007. However, the recent incidents illustrate the problem—there are still risks associated with using the cloud.

and

Many of the IT pros who are evaluating cloud services name reliability as a major concern with cloud services, and have been doing so in the Ars forums and in closed-door sessions for over a year now. Many of these folks are at large companies and are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, "black box"-style cloud services makes them uneasy.

Many of the vendors that we hear from either downplay the reliability concerns or offer some version of "it hurts to be on the cutting edge." And with this last response, they do have a point. Often1, the decision to use cloud services instead of in-house systems is a decision that’s made for reasons of either cost and flexibility (in the case of SaaS) or development speed (in the case of actual cloud infrastructure).

All excellent points, and points that are valid in any instance when a business outsources mission-critical processes to a third-party. When it comes to selecting cloud or SaaS services, IT professionals will, like the article says "have to carefully balance the downtime risks with the cost and agility benefits of using the different tiers of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS).