Open Source Shifts to Software-as-a-Service

Tracking open source software in 2014, particularly around Big Data, showcased a shift towards Software-as-a-Service models. It makes sense. Since open source is free, there is a natural tendency for users to see how far that approach can go before spending money on software.
With SaaS, there is an immediate connection to a Service (it’s in the name of course), plus the natural connection that we usually pay for services.

Startups moving Open Source to SaaS

A number of startups have launched new offerings that point in the SaaS direction. Last year Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket which at the time provided MongoDB as a service, and has since expanded to add Redis as well.
Starting in the summer of 2014 Databricks launched their Spark-based Cloud Platform at the Spark Summit. Watch the video from the summit if you want more on the Databricks Cloud.
In August, MongoHQ (another MongoDB as a service provider) changed their name to Compose.io and added Elastic Search, built on top of Apache Lucene. Since then Compose.io had added support for RethinkDB and Redis, and offers deployments on AWS, Digital Ocean, SoftLayer, and GoGrid.
Not to be left out, Apache Cassandra as a service appeared in September 2014 when Instaclustr announced $2 million in funding including participation from DataStax, the dominant provider of Apache Cassandra solutions.
In October 2014, MongoDB announced enhancements to the MongoDB Management Service, a cloud service to manage MongoDB deployments. Press stories played on the explanation to declare MongoDB targeting a ‘massive’ revenue stream.

Mapping Software Categories

In the spirit of Peter Thiel, I drafted a 2x2 matrix to understand four categories of software:

• In-house Development
• Commercial Software
• Open Source
• SaaS

On the X axis I added Predilection to Pay Someone Else, which gets back to the introduction of this post that there is a not-so-natural disposition to pay for open source software, and there is a much more natural disposition to pay for services, including those that deliver software.
On the Y axis I added Ease of Adoption with the intent to loosely categorize the time, energy, and money spent up front to deploy software.
The trends among startups recently has been centered in the shift depicted by arrow 1. However, other migrations are in effect from the popularity of commercial SaaS offerings like Salesforce, Box, and Workday, along with the ongoing march of AWS cloud domination.

Finding the Center of Data

In the pre-cloud days, most folks could point to the data center which housed all the important company information. Today, that concept has vanished into multiple cloud computing providers and SaaS solutions.
The center is shifting outside the data center. Interconnecting software and applications has become more important than having them in a one place, and enabling flexibility, mobility, pay-as-you-go, and ease of adoption will only further the SaaS bandwagon.
Have favorite examples of the open source to SaaS shift? Add them in the comments or send to me on Twitter @garyorenstein.

Building Effective Roadmaps

In technology companies, and perhaps more broadly, roadmaps drive alignment across groups to explain product plans and company direction. By keeping roadmap versions connected across different audiences, companies can operate more seamlessly with a consistent message and purpose.

Here are a few audiences to keep in mind in building a multi-purpose roadmap.

External Audiences

Align externally facing roadmaps across customers, investors, media, and analysts. Each may need a slight twist, but ensure they tie to a common core. Respective versions should:

• Set the vision and industry direction
  Create a simple, well-defined roadmap to share the vision and set the playing field.

• Communicate thought leadership
  Share uncharted paths you will tackle with your products and technology, but also tie into widely understood trends.

• Provoke and Inspire
  Customers will need an impetus to change from what they are currently doing, or to take net new action. Use a roadmap to help show them a step-by-step approach.

• Showcase Innovation
  Be seen as a long term partner, and detail innovations you bring to the table.

Internal Audiences

Across company functions like engineering, product, marketing, and sales, clear and defined roadmaps maximize company unity and minimize contention. When executed well, product and technology roadmaps drive:

• Alignment
  Keep teams together in solving customer problems.

• Common Understanding
  Allow individuals and groups to see the balance of near term and long term product introductions and directions.

• Focus
  Be realistic about products and maturity levels so people can count on the integrity of the information.

• Priorities
  Enable decision making to filter down with a set of common priorities conveyed in a roadmap.

• Teamwork
  Foster roadmap buy-in and collective ownership, encouraging departments to achieve a common objective.

Specific Audiences

Within company departments, I have found roadmaps provide:

• The Executive Team
  Common talking points to convey the company message internally and externally.

• Engineering
  A detailed framework to set the foundational technologies and tie exciting paths to products.

• Sales
  An industry and company view of a problem and solution so they can become partners with their customers.
  A more detailed product release view that they can use to qualify opportunities and deals.

• Marketing
  A playbook from which to create thought leadership content, corporate communications, and campaigns.

• Finance and Operations
  The planning mechanisms to understand how to deliver products and services and how to get paid for them.

Use Audiences to Streamline Roadmap Creation

Piecing together the details of a product, technology, and company roadmap takes time and energy to drive consensus. But by keeping audiences in mind through the process, you can hopefully gain in solving broader alignment in the company.

Got ideas?

Have more ideas on roadmaps? Leave a comment or drop a line on Twitter @garyorenstein.

Collaboration Report Inning 2

Just shy of a month ago I put together a few thoughts on Rethinking Enterprise Collaboration including a take on companies such as Slack, Quip, and Box, among many others.

In just a few short weeks a whirlwind among these comapnies and others has ensued.

Does this phone still make calls?

Things got interesting when Talko launched on September 22nd. Founded by collaboration godfather Ray Ozzie, Talko has admirable ambitions to bring voice back to the smartphone era. I know that I personally cannot deal with voicemail but would gladly live talk more frequently when easily facilitated.

Integrations as Features

Quip hopped on the integration train September 25th, following a path popularized by Slack. They detailed the integrations with products such as Dropbox, Zendesk, JIRA and others in this blog post. A bigger Quip announcement was soon to follow.

Starting with Content Creation

Slack, on September 26th, acquired a small two person startup Spaces to create All-in-one documents for teams. This moves Slack in more direct competition with other startups like Quip and Box and industry heavyweights like Google Apps and Office365.

Battle Royale for the Office Suite

Quip upped the ante on the whole group by launching Quip Spreadsheets today on October 9th. While initially you might ask, “how different can a spreadsheet application be?” Quip has taken a holistic view for more seamless integration. Try it yourself:

• start at https://quip.com
• launch a spreadsheet and enter a few cells
• from settings choose document view
• flip back and forth to explore

This morning on Product Hunt Steven Sinofsky said,

Most interesting is how this is reflective of the very old Claris/Apple Works and is bringing back the notion that an integrated document type reimagined for a mobile/collaborative/cloud world can be very exciting.

Re-imagining content creation and publication for our mobile/collaborative/cloud world is a challenging endeavor, but one I whole heartedly support.

In a blog post announcing the acquisition of Spaces by Slack, the editors reminded us of that team’s accomplishments.

By letting go of the document’s print legacy — things like page ‘breaks’ and ‘tab stops’ — it was possible to create a new kind of document that’s much better suited to how we work today.

Steering to Content Disruption

Not to be outdone, Box today announced the acquisition of MedXT to modernize healthcare collaboration. It is the logical follow-on from the Box for Industries initiative announced at the recent BoxWorks conference. These directional moves make sense as the traditional Box world of cloud storage pricing races to zero, and Box moves from that to a world where content and worfklow matter more than raw dollars per gigabyte.

Go Forth and Collaborate

No doubt we live in a world of plentiful tools. As the race to help the world collaborate more effectively continues, expect this game to continue.

Rethinking Enterprise Collaboration

Computer habits die hard. Many early experiences with personal computers and documents centered on Microsoft Office. When transferring documents we put them on a floppy disk or printed them out. Later we emailed them. This manual flow of files and documents was as close as we got to effective collaboration.

Internet and mobile device ubiquity should cause an absolute rethink on creating and sharing information. But many of us still rely on decades-old, document-based approaches, forgoing many opportunities of our Internet existence.

Let’s take a look at four collaboration areas of Content Creation, Task and Workflow Management, Email, and Enterprise Messaging Platforms, and both the old and new players working to improve the experience.

Content Creation

It starts with content, and companies like Quip are reinventing how we create material collaboratively online. With integrated documents, messaging, and broad mobile device compatibility, Quip makes sense for generating words together in real-time.

Of course Google has long had Docs, now integrated into Google Drive, and recently rebranded “Google for Work.” Google Docs lies in between the simple style of Quip to the bloated online versions of Microsoft Word, now Office 365 Online. And while not quite as developed as any of the above, Box recently added Box Notes, a simplified collaborative online document, to its suite of offerings.

Task and Workflow Management

While some of us have memories of project management tools like Microsoft Project, this discipline has thankfully evolved too.

Basecamp, a classic online collaboration tool, provides all the simple features you need, and none that you do not. Basecamp has stayed remarkably true to its simplicity mission since the beginning.

New entrants like Asana promise “Teamwork without email” and enable a highly interactive approach to organizing teams, projects, milestones, and goals.

And in a further bid to establish value around online document collaboration and creation, Box recently announced Box Workflow as a manner to establish rules for document routing.

Email

At the core of our online communication, email has not changed much in the last 25 years. New entrants like Accompli aim to change that with a new take on how professionals use mobile email. Of course Google still hopes to topple Microsoft Outlook and recent headlines around its “Google for Work” rebrand included “dethroning” and “unseating” the corporate email champion.

Enterprise Messaging

The most vibrant sector of collaboration today is the emergence of enterprise messaging applications. The first wave of tools like Yammer provided a corporate feed to enable social interaction, and now a second wave of tools provide a richer feature set including integrations to other applications.

The important tack for these companies is recognizing that no single collaboration tool covers all things for enterprises. Rather than trying to own all of the collaboration features (document sharing, code repositories, customer service and more) these Enterprise Messaging companies simply focus on a unifying metadata layer to collect information from all of the services a business might use.

Slack is one of the newest and high profile entrants for real-time messaging, archiving and search. The simple approach to managing communications channels like chatrooms with links to other applications has been a hit. Other companies in this arena include Cotap which is differentiating with a heavy mobile focus, including groups that might have only phones and not laptops, such as retail service workers. Hipchat is another, though as part of the Atlassian suite of tools tends to favor software developers.

Make A Move

Of course, none of these new tools and services will prosper unless we move beyond our old ways and try something new. So pick your favorite tool or service and start a new take on enterprise collaboration!

Markdown Adventures

Fresh content is the new marketing currency and we need ways to produce content without recreating it every time. Legacy approaches have left room for new tools to create, publish, and maintain content, both online and offline. Enter Markdown.

Our changing content consumption habits

We used to read on laptops or monitors but now we read on tablets, mobile screens and everything in between. Simple, legible, attractive content fits these needs.

Print is not dead, but should serve and service online content

We will have print for a while but the core content should be the same as online. Layouts may need to differ, but if I publish a web page, an attractive printout should be a built-in option. Markdown helps make this happen.

Markdown Basics

Markdown was launched by John Gruber in 2004. In his words,

Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Using Markdown across content creation, presentation, and publication applications gets us closer to a write once, publish everywhere content system.

Markdown also has “just enough formatting” with simple heading styles, ordered lists, quote call outs, links, and pictures that it can be portable and flexible for re-use with existing web pages, publication styles, and layouts.

For the most basic Markdown syntax, see the bottom of this post.

Markdown Friendly Applications

Markdown Editors

There are almost as many Markdown editors are there are note taking applications. But there were plenty of those too until Evernote came along.

StackEdit.io

StackEdit is my go-to editor. Browser-based and able to sync with Dropbox, it does almost everything I need and nothing more.

StackEdit also has a long list of “Publish On…” options including Blogger, Dropbox, Github/Gist, Google Drive, Tumblr, and Wordpress.

However, there are a few cases where I’ve needed capabilities beyond StackEdit, hence the following additions to my list.

Mou

Mou bills itself as the web developers’ Markdown editor for Mac OS X.

When using multiple client-side Markdown applications, a desktop-based editor is helpful. As an example, the DeckSet presentation application can easily call the Mou desktop editor, but I have not found a way for it to call the online StackEdit editor.

iA Writer for Mac

For Markdown conversion, iA Writer for Mac filled a great spot for me in converting to Microsoft Word. iA Writer also has dedicated iPad and iPhone applications.

Collaborative Editors

Quip

Most of the focus for Quip is on collaborative editing and messaging for documents. However, they have always allowed a simple cut and paste of Markdown from the web view, and now specifically callout Markdown in the “Export To…” options.

Markdown Presentations

Deckset for Mac

Deckset is a Mac desktop application for Markdown presentations. The lightweight structure makes it super speedy. And while it is definitely a different experience than creating in PowerPoint, the flexibility is powerful.

Slides

While not necessarily Markdown specific, Slides is a fantastic online presentation tool that supports Markdown. I have only started exploring the possibilities here.

GO’s Take

Markdown has been around for 10 years yet is still unknown outside of technical and developer circles. However with content consumption patterns changing, and the need for fresh content rising, perhaps we’ll see a surge in Markdown’s adoption.

---

Markdown Examples

Markdown supports basics headings,

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

And emphasis like bold or italic or both.

• Bulleted Lists like this
• And this

• And this

  1. Numbered Lists like
  2. This, and
  3. This

And quotation call outs,

This is the most important thing ever said :)

Image insertion,

And much, much more.

If you are curious to see the Markdown behind the prior section, I can use the code insertion features of Markdown here

# Markdown Examples
Markdown supports basics headings,
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3

And emphasis like **BOLD** or *Italic* or ***Both***.

- Bulleted Lists like this
- And this
- And this

1. Numbered Lists like
2. This, and
3. This

And quotation call outs,
> This is the most important thing every said :)

Image insertion,

![Manresa](https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/go12a/manresa.jpg "Manresa")

And much, much more.

[end of post]

The Telling Future of Infrastructure Apps

Years ago with clouds materializing and mobile dominating, a set of companies emerged to tackle the infrastructure challenges behind this new application wave. Services such as communications, application performance management, notifications, and security became available to developers through application programming interfaces (APIs). Several options to integrate rich functionality without recreating basic infrastructure appeared in a Gigaom piece I wrote titled, The New World of Infrastructure Apps, including companies like Twilio, New Relic, Urban Airship, and Dasient.

Early Leaders in Infrastructure Apps

Twilio was an early infrastructure app and now powers the biggest communication and connectivity apps in the world including Uber and Airbnb. Collectively Uber and Airbnb have been privately valued at as much as $27 billion.

New Relic has forged ahead in cloud-based application performance management touting large media and web companies like Microsoft, Nike Digital, NBC, Walmart, AT&T, and Comcast as customers. New Relic’s ability to deliver developer visibility to build and faster applications also powers recently minted public companies like Tableau and Zendesk.

Urban Airship powers notifications for top companies focused on end customer engagement like Walgreens, Michaels, Nascar, ESPN.

Dasient, an early security-centric infrastructure app was acquired by Twitter in January 2012.

Infrastructure Outlook Stronger Than Ever

Cloud capabilities, mobile adoption, and new application development combine to fuel needs in software infrastructure across categories.

Application and Operations Management

This sector includes up and comers and more established players alike.

• Boundary focuses on unified monitoring for web scale IT.
• Big Panda helps administrators manage and respond to operations incidents faster.
• More established AppDynamics recently raised $120 million to continue to grow. AppDynamics added self-service SaaS and management approximately one year ago.

Databases as a Service

• Newly renamed Compose, formerly MongoHQ, just expanded from offering MongoDB as a service to adding Elastic Search, a fully-managed search engine..
• ObjectRocket started with MongoDB and was recently acquired by Rackspace. They have since added Reddis as a Service to their portfolio.
• Cloudant similarly addressed the database as a service segment with Apache CouchDB. Cloudant was acquired by IBM in early 2014.

Communications

Of course with success of companies like Twilio, new players are emerging in this space including Layer, founded by an executive from GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google and became Google Voice. Layer promotes a communications layer for the Internet and is in early access mode.

Infrastructure Apps Going Forward

There are dozens of additional Infrastructure App categories to consider such as delivery, payments, email, messaging, and storage to name a few.

With application development shifting to rapid assembly of services, expect the landscape to evolve quickly and foster new entrants. If you have a few favorite Infrastructure Apps of your own, let us know in the comments.