Enterprise Ireland – Best Connected -

On Wednesday, the IIEA (The Insititute of International and European Affairs) hosted a key event in Dublin about the ongoing implications of Policy for the Cloud. Speaking were Peter Fleischer of Google  (Link to Blog) and Billy Hawkins, Data Protection Commissioner.

Click Video to play. Copyright and original video from the IIEA.

What I found heartening was  the praise that Peter and Google had for Ireland, the commissioners depth of knowledge and positivity about security in the cloud, and the extent of the crossover (although with healthy differences) between the views of the commercial and governmental speakers. My notes on Peter’s talk are below – my most important point to takeaway being that the Cloud, done right, can actually enhance privacy and transparency for users, compared to the status quo.

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In the middle of our doom and gloom a bit of good news is always welcome.   Intel last night reported its best ever quarter results in its 42 year history.  Year-on-year revenue up 34% and a net income of €2.9bn.  Why is this good news for us?   Well, Paul Otellini, chief executive, said that Intel was running ahead of a global economic recovery because of a fundamental shift towards working on the internet.   Sales of server chip were up 170% on a year earlier due to a move to hosting applications and services in the cloud.   ”As internet traffic continues to boom, the cloud build-out is accelerating in order to keep pace,” he said.

So the move to the cloud continues unabated and confirms what many of Enterprise Ireland’s software clients believe – that SaaS and the cloud are here to stay.

We should also not forget the 4,000 people who work directly for Intel in Leixlip and the many hundreds of others whose jobs depend on Intel Ireland.   This is great news for them.

For those of us of a certain generation it is hard to imagine that the Leixlip plant was originally established to produce the i486 microprocessor.   A breakthrough in technology, it had a 50MHz chip set with 8k of on-chip SRAM!!!

This is a guest post from Dave Feenan, Vice-Chair at EuroCloud Ireland and Business Development Director at ASPeon, an Enterprise Ireland Client.

I’m pleased to announce that EuroCloud Ireland and The Irish Computer Society are organising a seminar on “Cloud Computing – Climate Change for Legal Contracts?” in the Clarion IFSC on Thursday July 1st at 7.45am with a repeat seminar at 10.30am the same morning. This event is being run in association with  Microsoft Ireland and Irish Software Innovation Network.

Philip Nolan, a partner and head of Mason Hayes+Curran’s Commercial Department, as well as being a board member of EuroCloud Ireland examines the legal implications of Cloud Computing for your business. He looks at its likely impact on your existing legal responsibilities and relationships. Philip will focus on how to address contractual matters such as service provider liability, data protection and retention as well as capacity/availability issues and their impact. Hugh Jones, an ICS Data Protection tutor and Michael Martin of the Irish Software Innovation Network will be joining Philip on the panel to participate in the Q&A.

To register for this free to attend event please go to http://www.eurocloud.ie/ICSandEuroCloud-Ireland-Seminar.

Aspeon (who I work for) allows me to work on Eurocloud as part of an initiative that helps the broader community, while also spreading the word about Aspeon’s technology. As our CEO ( Luke Conroy ,formerly the CEO at both Sun Microsystems and Changing Worlds) puts it, our primary focus  is ;

To deliver best of breed software solutions to their clients over the Internet utilising the SaaS model. For further information on their dashboard, project accounting, time and attendance modules plus their other solutions see www.aspeon.com

Our thanks go out to our presenters who travelled from near and far to deliver a highly engaging session on this topic on Wednesday.

We were delighted with the strong interest in the day and what it genuinely showed us was that this is an unstoppable train which is going to take us to some pretty interesting places !

Some key messages from the day:

• Cloud is moving closer to pay for use ; flexibiliy is the no 1 benefit amongst CIOs ; significant efficiencies can be found by responsibly exploring key partnerships
• End-users are no longer fearful of using SaaS though the applications may be on the periphery – may need a next generation ITIL for hosting external services
• While Cloud still resonates with cost efficiency strategies, there are dark clouds that are simply “me-too” – however there are still interesting opportunities in storage management, compute management and integration software.
• Economies of the cloud difficult to define but certification has potential to differentiate – governance is a key concern amongst CIOs
• Consider the importance of partnerships in the cloud – technology, infrastructure, and sales channels
• The CIO still considers Cloud a risky option for operational reasons as much as technical – consider these issues in developing the opportunties

• Bank of America Presentation
• PFH Cloud Presentation
• PA Consulting
• Sysco Cloud Challenge and Opportunity Presentation
• Cloud Strategy Group
• C-Infinity Presentation

Want your chance to meet the US based speakers from Enterprise Ireland’s Partnerships in the cloud event? The evening of Wednesday the 16th June starting at 8pm Dublin Time our guests travelling from the U.S. will be at Searsons to network with anyone that would like to come and chat.

(click image for more info)

Patrick Harr and Edgard Capdevielle are the Co-Founders and Managing Directors of the Cloud Strategy Group that provides planning and consulting services for start-ups formulating or refining their cloud computing strategies. Geoff Tudor is the Co-Founder & Senior Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at Nirvanix, Inc. Geoff is visiting Ireland looking for partnering opportunities with Irish hosting, managed services, ISV companies.

Event details

• Wed, Jun 16th, 8pm, Dublin
• Searsons of Baggot Street (Google Map) , Snug Area
• See the Original LinkedIn Event Invite for the Partnerships in the Cloud-Networking Event

If you’ve been following this blog a while, you’ll know that many EI Software clients use Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft is a key part of the route to market for those companies. You’ll also know that EI, EI Client Companies and Microsoft have been working together for some time to make this happen more effectively.

Following on from the Dublin BizSparkCamp in March, the Europe wide series of Microsoft events is reaching it’s finale in Paris tomorrow.  We’re waiting to find out which, if any, of the Irish companies that pitched at the Dublin event back in March have made it to the final shortlist.

Gearoid Mooney from Enterprise Ireland will be one of the speakers on the Panels during the day.

Update: This event is now sold out, but you can follow the announcements and the keynotes (including Kawasaki talking about Startup Trends, how to innovate, and the panel discussion on ‘Investing in the cloud’) here.

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I’d firstly like to thank the Ash Cloud for kindly moving out of the way so Charles Cameron could travel from London and give his presentation yesterday!

I’d also like extend my thanks to our speakers Jennifer, John, Philip, Gerry, and Charles, to my Enterprise Ireland colleagues and their fine organisational skills, and to everyone who took time out of their busy diaries to come along yesterday morning.

Some of the key points that were made include:

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“Managed Services & Solutions – partnerships in the Cloud”

Venue: Crowne Plaza Hotel, Northwood Park, Santry, Dublin 9

Time: 8:30am to 2 pm, Wednesday 16^th June 2010

Enterprise Ireland and the Enterprise Europe Network Ireland are co-hosting a seminar on the 16th June 2010 as part of the Enterprise Europe Network Technology Roadmap series and in conjunction with Best Connected  at www.bestconnected.ie.

This event is the second in a series, complementing May’s event The Commercial Realities of Software as a Service

Topic:

The aim is to provide managed services vendors and independent software/internet application vendors (ISVs) with the view from an IT manager (buyers) and potential partner’s perspective.  This is intended to help companies plan their future offering and partnering strategies as the IT world increasingly moves to virtualization and cloud services models.

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Best Connected Software Event – The Commercial Realities of SaaS

Venue: Enterprise Ireland, The Plaza, East Point Business Park

Time: 8.30 am to 12.00 pm, Wednesday, 19 May 2010

Software as a Service is here to stay. SaaS has continued to gain commercial acceptance by users and buyers across all industry sectors. The Software as a Service market is expected to triple by 2012 when it will be worth $17 billion.

This event complements June’s Managed Services & Solutions Cloud event also hosted by Enterprise Ireland.

Growing a company to scale on a SaaS business model requires a range of skills that extends beyond the purely technical. There are equal, if not greater, challenges in Financial Modelling, Sales & Marketing, and Organisational Development.

Enterprise Ireland invites you to participate in a seminar in Dublin on Wednesday the 19^th May from 8.30 am to 12.00 pm to understand more about the challenges in the SaaS business model.

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The current issue of The Market is now live on the web. Here are some of the Highlights.

Making the move from product to service (pdf Link)

The drivers behind Software as a Service (SaaS) are now well understood. But what about the transition itself? For this month’s issue of The Market magazine, Adam Maguire spoke to two Irish software companies now making the move.

Not patently obvious (pdf link)

Also in this month’s issue of The Market, Gordon Smith looks at the tricky and controversial area of software patenting.

Missed our Previous Software as a Service (Saas) and Cloud events? Fergus Gloster will examine how the software industry has changed dramatically over the past few years, including the emergence of new business models such as Software-as-a-Service.  This has implications for development teams, funding and sales & marketing resources.

Speaker Fergus Gloster (LinkedIn Profile) is the Founding director of salesforce.com in EMEA, SVP Corporate Sales for salesforce.com. With over Twenty fives years experience in the IT industry, Fergus is  Founder of Thomond Technology, a consultancy specializing in SaaS go to market strategies.

Fergus is also available on Twitter on @fgloster (click for more information)

Date: Tuesday  27th April  2010 ,  12.00—13.00pm
Venue: GA Conference Rooms 1&2 Enterprise Ireland East Point
Chair: Jim Cuddy   Manager  Finance And Enterprise Software

Please contact Dermot(dot)Murphy(at)Enterprise(hyphen)Ireland(dot)com to book your place.

Enterprise Ireland hosted SaaS workshop on Friday, 26th March 2010 in Eastpoint Business Park, for 20 clients of the HPSU Financial & Enterprise Software department. Fergus Gloster, a founding Director of salesforce.com in Europe and a key executive in the creation of salesforce.com’s success in Europe, delivered the content and provided his insight into building a successful SaaS busines. The topics covered in the first half of the seminar included SaaS Business Principles & Challenges, Financial Planning for SaaS, Marketing and Sales, Alliances, Attrition & Renewals.

After lunch, three of the seminar participants presented case studies of their company’s approach to the SaaS model, including the challenges they are facing as small Irish start-ups in the SaaS world. Many thanks to the 3 willing participants – Paul Birkett, Billfaster.com; Edward Grant, MX Sweep; and Ger Hartnett, Goshido!

Overall there was some very positive feedback from the participants about the value of the event for their businesses. Given the seminar’s success, it may be held again should demand call for it.

We have recently completed a programme around Managed IT Services for a bunch of our clients (EI) and we gathered some useful insights in to the whole area of delivering remotely managed IT Services. Late last year we identified the need for a greater focus on this area and felt there was a sufficient context around which to build something, in particular:

• Growing need from their customer base to reduce implementation costs and maintenance costs
• Growing acceptance of new service delivery models (such as SaaS and cloud computing).
• Reliable and ubiquitous broadband access, successful take-up of software delivery models and significant investment in next generation IT architecture is accelerating enterprise adoption of the IT as a service paradigm

As the SaaS model matures, fewer enterprises require the middleware – the onus of providing vital application integration is shifting to service providers  – Applications, processors, databases are becoming utilities and charged dynamically.

Our research identified that Financial services, public sector and manufacturing have heaviest spend in IT services and already 18% – 25% of companies using some form of managed IT service, with a further 37% – 48% either planning such a move or considering (source Datamonitor)

Early in the programme we had a discussion with each of the clients, most of whom had a strong desire to “get on” the cloud. Here is some of the thoughts that came back:

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Some of my colleagues in Enterprise Ireland were debating the other day an ongoing SaaS issue – whether it is an all or nothing business model or can you run your old on-premise business hand-in-hand with your new SaaS business, i.e. a ‘Hybrid Model’.   Salesforce.com and other SaaS zealots go for the purity of SaaS only and see the hybrid model as a bastardisation that will ruin both businesses.   The issue I think is more fundamental than alternative ways of applying technology, it is about leveraging your company’s strategic strengths through the key generic strategies of cost leadership or differentiation.

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As I have mentioned previously Enterprise Ireland is running a programme to transition ten on-premise software companies into a SaaS business model.   At the start of the programme we thought the biggest issue to be tackled would be the technology of delivering a SaaS solution.   And by we I include the CEO’s of the ten companies.   While the technology element is obviously a key issue, what has emerged from the programme is that the biggest challenge facing the companies is the development of a new business model.  The type of questions the CEOs are now asking themselves are: What is the new business message?   What is the new marketing pitch?   What is the marketing vehicle?   What is the revenue model?

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Meet and engage with Innovate!100 finalists in Dublin March 8th

Produced by Guidewire Group, the Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam in Dublin will feature 10 to 15 Innovate!100 finalists selected from the local region who will give rapid-fire pitches about their startup.

Each startup will receive invaluable feedback from a panel of expert judges, and everyone in the audience will get a chance to select their favorite Pitch Slam presenter. Sign up today to meet and mingle with entrepreneurs, investors, press and other members of the innovation ecosystem at this special networking event!

The Innovate!2010 Program is being supported by a prestigious group of market-leading companies like Best Buy, HP, Motorola, O2 Litmus, RIM, SAP, Sun, SWIFT and Verizon, dozens of early-stage investors, and marquee media partners. Learn more about sponsorship and partnership opportunities, or how to serve as a Pitch Slam judge.

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As you are aware – or you should be aware if you have been reading this blog – we are currently running a programme aimed at transitioning ten of our clients from an on-premise to a SaaS business model.   The company workshops, very ably run by Saaspoint, have been highly interesting and very educational.   The most recent workshop that I attended covered PR in the cloud environment.

Many people perceive public relations as something less than respectable – as clever guys trying to convince the public that what’s wrong is right.  Some see public relations professionals as manipulators of the public mind, rather than conveyors of truth.   From what I gleaned over the last week PR professionals are coming back into their own.   The rules of the game, however, have changed radically over the last ten years.   If you are informing Joe Public about a web based product or service then naturally you have to use the web to do it.   Using the printed word just won’t hack it.

Media coverage in the web is new and offers great possibilities to Irish software companies.   If done correctly, media coverage, can generate direct enquires and web hits.   More importantly by using tools such a Google Analytics you can get a reasonably direct correlation between your PR effort and new traffic to your web site.

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On Thursday 28th January Microsoft Ireland held – in their words – “an informal, celebratory evening marking the commercial launch of Windows Azure”.

Last week a number of EI Clients had the opportunity to visit Microsoft in Sandyford and hear from Cormac Keogh what exactly is Azure and more importantly what it can do for SMEs who are interested in utilising the Cloud to undertake business.At a high level, Windows Azure is simple to understand: it’s a platform for running Windows applications and storing the associated data in the Cloud. It has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As with any Cloud, Azure runs on a large number of machines, all located in Microsoft data centres and accessible via the internet. The Irish interest is that the latest of these Data Centres is based in Dublin. A common Windows Azure fabric knits this plethora of processing power into a unified whole and Windows Azure compute and storage services are built on top of this fabric.

On Windows Azure, an application typically has multiple instances (i.e. each occurrence of an object where objects are: hard disks, memory, processor, etc.). Each instance runs a copy of all or part of the application’s code and each of these instances runs in its own virtual machine (VM). These VMs run 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and they’re provided by a hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.

Azure lets a developer create applications using either Web role instances and/or Worker role instances. A Web role instance accepts incoming HTTP (or HTTPS) requests. A Worker role instance, by contrast, does not accept requests directly from the outside world as it does not have any incoming network connections. Instead, it typically gets its input via a queue in Windows Azure storage. The messages in this queue might come from a Web role instance, an on-premises application, or something else. Wherever its input comes from, a Worker role instance can send output to another queue or to outgoing network connections. Unlike a Web role instance, which is created to handle incoming HTTP requests, a Worker role instance carries out its work as a batch job.

Both Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service, however, the data store is not Microsoft SQL Server, and therefore it is not a relational system, and its query language is not SQL. According to Microsoft it provides simple, more scalable kind of storage and does so in three formats:

• Blobs: These allow the storage of binary large objects; provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure applications, and offers a form of tables with a simple query language. Blobs can be up to 50 Gigabytes each
• Tables: A single table can be quite large, utilising terabytes of data, and Azure storage can partition it across many servers if necessary to improve performance.
• Queues: These have a quite different purpose. The primary role of a queue is to provide a way for Web role instances to communicate with Worker role instances. For example, a user might submit a request to perform a task via a Web page implemented by a Windows Azure Web role. The Web role instance that receives this request can write a message into a queue describing the work to be done. A Worker role instance that’s waiting on this queue then read the message and carries out the task it specifies. Any results can be returned via another queue or handled in some other way.

As the names suggest, Compute provides computation environment with Web Role and Worker Role while Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue) for large scale needs.

The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called the Fabric Controller. This pools individual systems into a network that automatically manages resources, load balancing, geo-replication and application lifecycle without requiring the hosted apps to explicitly deal with those requirements.

With Azure, as against some of the competition, you can pick your data centre. This, in theory should reduce bandwidth costs. Which brings us to real question – how much does it cost?

There are two basic types of offers to choose from when purchasing a Windows Azure platform subscription. The first type requires no commitment – you pay only for what you use. The second type of offer is a commitment offer that provides a significantly discounted level of service in return for a six month commitment to pay a monthly base fee. Any usage in excess of this amount is charged at a standard consumption rate. In essence, therefore, it’s similar to purchasing a mobile phone. However, its not quite straight forward. There are charges for: compute instances, storage, data transfer in and out, access control transactions, service bus connections, etc, etc. The easiest way to get a handle on the Total Cost of Operation is to use Microsoft’s own calculator, which can be found at – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/tco/ . Interestingly, the only way to pay for Azure at the moment is by credit card. So who in your company is going to blow their credit limit?

The bottom line is that its getting very ‘Cloudy’ out there and there is no easy way to compare the offerings. While there were 100 providers this time last year, by October ‘09 Cloud Computing Journal listed 150 providers.

Like most new technologies you will just have to suck it and see. Microsoft is allowing you to trial Azure for free; however, this offer is only to the end of January. IBM is also offering a free trial and this can be accessed at www.ibm.com/cloud/developer.

As part of ongoing SAAS (Software as a service) transition programme,  Enterprise Ireland held it’s third workshop on SAAS Business models  in Bewleys hotels Ballsbridge, Dublin on Friday 15th January. This programme is being provided to 10 Enterprise Ireland clients through SaasPoint.

My notes  (part 4 ) from the session are below – Finance and Marketing. This post is one of four from the event covering Finance and Marketing, SaaS challenges and technology, Saas specific sales models and general SAAS Business principals.

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As part of ongoing SAAS (Software as a service) transition programme,  Enterprise Ireland held it’s third workshop on SAAS Business models  in Bewleys hotels Ballsbridge, Dublin on Friday 15th January. This programme is being provided to 10 Enterprise Ireland clients through SaasPoint.

My notes  (part 3 ) from the session are below – Technology and other challenges. This post is one of four from the event covering Finance and Marketing, SaaS challenges and technology, Saas specific sales models and general SAAS Business principals.

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