Emerging SaaS platform wars akin to on-premise middleware wars
With consolidation in the middleware market fairly under way, adoption of SaaS platforms (i.e. PaaS) by solution partners represents the next land grab in the enterprise software space. Current key players include industry leaders and specialists such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Magic Software (UniPaas). Today's announcement by Oracle indicates that:
SaaS platform wars will intensify as Oracle enters a parallell market where BEA, Microsoft VS.NET, and WebSphere traditionally played in the on-premise world. This move can be seen as Oracle's ambition to be the software deployment and development platform of choice for the cloud based computing world. In effect, Oracle now places itself in direct competition with SalesForce.com, NetSuite, and Google for mindshare and technology partnerships. ISV's looking for a PaaS partner now gain another option.
Your turn.
What are your thoughts on Oracle in the Cloud Computing space? Do you see Oracle as an effective provider of solutions for your ISV? Do you believe you can partner with Oracle? Does Oracle provide you with the right tools? Look forward to hearing from you! Feel free to post your comments here or send me a private email at rwang0@gmail.com.
With consolidation in the middleware market fairly under way, adoption of SaaS platforms (i.e. PaaS) by solution partners represents the next land grab in the enterprise software space. Current key players include industry leaders and specialists such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Magic Software (UniPaas). Today's announcement by Oracle indicates that:
- R&D investment in the on-premise stack is very applicable to the cloud. As Oracle continues to strengthen it's "Red Stack" initiatives, it's looking at how to effectively win in multiple deployment options from hosted, single tenancy, multi-instance, and multi-tenancy. The platform offering currently includes Oracle database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle VM along with security and other high availability support. The existing partnership with Amazon WebServices show cases this commitment to work with other cloud providers.
- Oracle seeks to become the PaaS vendor of choice. Oracle's foray into SaaS platforms and cloud computing gains momentum as 250 ISV's have chosen the Oracle SaaS platform for delivery and development. ISV's include Adaptive Planning, Ariba, Asknet Inc., Blackboard, Callidus Software, CashEdge, Click Commerce, Inc., Docupace Technologies, dthree inc., EnterConnect, eXpresso Corp., frevvo, InfoNow, Intacct Corp., MAXIMUS, Inc., OpSource, Perot Systems, Sabrix, SuccessFactors, Teranode Corp., Where 2 Get It, Wireless Matrix, Workstream Inc., Xactly Corp, Zogix. The list of ISV's is impressive given the size of the vendors, industries, and geographies.
SaaS platform wars will intensify as Oracle enters a parallell market where BEA, Microsoft VS.NET, and WebSphere traditionally played in the on-premise world. This move can be seen as Oracle's ambition to be the software deployment and development platform of choice for the cloud based computing world. In effect, Oracle now places itself in direct competition with SalesForce.com, NetSuite, and Google for mindshare and technology partnerships. ISV's looking for a PaaS partner now gain another option.
Your turn.
What are your thoughts on Oracle in the Cloud Computing space? Do you see Oracle as an effective provider of solutions for your ISV? Do you believe you can partner with Oracle? Does Oracle provide you with the right tools? Look forward to hearing from you! Feel free to post your comments here or send me a private email at rwang0@gmail.com.
(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved
4 comments:
I think Oracle will become (one of the) leader in providing SaaS providers with the correct tools. Even do Oracle will be doing the large accounts themselfs I think they will more and more open a big market for 'smaller' companies to provide Oracle products in a SaaS enviroment who can then provide those services to SMB market players. I now and then do a update on Oracle and SaaS on my weblog so this might be a place to look every now and then... http://johanlouwers.blogspot.com
Regards,
johan Louwers.
It is still unclear to me how much of this is new and how much is lipstick.
Overall, it is time that megavendors such as Oracle enter the arena. But when I tried to scratch the shiny surface, I did not find much information. I could not find concise information about the implementation of multi-tenancy throughout the platform, and I could not understand what it is that ISV’s have to do in order to render their existing Client-Server applications SaaS enabled and Multi-tenant. I also did not find information on the granularity of the resource consumption of the platform, which is critical when it comes to elastic infrastructure.
I believe that a key factor to success in this market is SaaS content. In other words, in order for a SaaS operator to succeed it needs SaaS enabled applications. I think of SaaS operators in similar terms as TV – the key to compete is broadcast content. This implies that platform vendors who provide accelerated migration paths from traditional existing applications to SaaS enabled applications (such as Magic Software’s uniPaaS) will have the advantage. Those who would require ISV’s to practically redevelop their applications on a new platform, would be at a disadvantage.
This being said, I am very encouraged by Oracle’s endorsement of metadata driven application engines and declarative development paradigms. It is also critical to ISV’s to be able to work with a single platform for both on-premise and SaaS deployment.
Bottom line – we start getting more color and variations in the SaaS Enabled Application Platform market, and that also means that there is effectively a growing market!
Avigdor Luttinger
Oracle's all hung up about multitenancy versus single tenancy. This is as crazy as SAP with "mega" tenancy. Do you really think these legacy vendors have anything for multi-tenant SaaS? Is Larry after Benioff?
Interestinng thoughts
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