Early tablet computers used a laptop design with a swivel hinge. The problem with such a design is that it is quite cumbersome. It’s heavy, has too many moving parts, and ends up being quite fragile. One could add multi-touch capabilities to a regular laptop’s screen, but as Steve Jobs pointed out, a vertical touch screen isn’t very effective. After a while, your hands simply get tired. Clearly, the multi-touch trackpad is a much better user interface.

But what if we put a screen on both sides of the laptop’s lid? When closed, it would look and behave like an iPad. When open, it would look and behave like a MacBook Air. In a nutshell, two LCD screens would sandwich a shared LED backlight. Structural integrity could be a challenge, but not anything Jonathan Ive couldn’t figure out…

Today’s MacBook Air 11” weighs 2.3 pounds. Let’s assume that adding a front screen would add half a pound (glass is heavy). At 2.8 pounds, it would still be one pound lighter than the 3.8 pounds MacBook Air + iPad combo.

A MacBook Air 11” with 64GB of storage retails for $999. An iPad with the same amount of storage retails for $699. If we assume that adding a second screen would increase the cost of the MacBook Air 11” by about $200, the combo device could retail for something like $1,199, which is $500 less than buying the MacBook Air and the iPad separately. Well, technically it’s $499 less, but you get my point…

From a software standpoint, the laptop mode would use the regular Mac OS X operating system, while the tablet mode would use iOS hosted by Mac OS X. In essence, you would get the best of both worlds. And all of that is being built today for Lion anyway.

Why would such a device offer a better user experience than using the iPad and MacBook Air separately? Because it would allow one to consume and produce content from the same device. The tablet is a great form factor for consuming content, but it’s a lousy one for producing it. Nothing can really match the convenience of a keyboard and multi-touch trackpad for writing an email, editing a spreadsheet, or drawing a diagram. Combining the two form factors into one also means:

Thinking about it, I must believe that Steve and his team already thought about such a design. In fact, they might have patended it a long time ago. If they did, more power to them. But if they did not, here is a gift from me to them. And you.

Now let me tell you why all this matters to me, beside the fact that I love computers:

Apple is re-inventing the computing experience on the client-side, with better devices and better ways to consume applications and content with them (iTunes App Store). While I’m having fun dreaming about the new devices they might come up with in the future (like I did for the iPad with the Redux Model 1), what gets me really excited is to re-invent the computing experience on the server side. That’s what Intalio, the company I work for, is all about.

How do we make it easier to build applications for the Cloud? How do we make them available to the broadest audience possible, for all the computing devices that are available today, from desktops to laptops, tablets, and smartphones? How do we go beyond systems of records and help organizations build systems of actions, or systems of engagement? How do we leverage BPM and CRM technologies into a unified computing experience that blends documents, objects, and processes in a seamless way? And how do we keep it simple? How do we make it social? How do we make it look good? These are the questions that we’re working hard to answer at Intalio, and Intalio|Cloud is our best answer so far.

Intalio|Cloud combines most of the features and functions offered by Salesforce.com, Google App Engine, and Amazon Web Services, into an integrated software stack that can be deployed anywhere, on-premises or on-demand. It runs on any hypervisor (Hyper-V, KVM, VirtualBox, VMware, Xen). You can start small (free for up to five users), or grow very large (it’s powered by OpenStack). You can use only a few of its components (I love the new Project Management application), or you can use them all. You can develop your applications with our graphical tools, or you can use your programming language of choice (we support Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). And you can run it from anywhere, on your local server, in your data-center, on Amazon, or on Mars if you find a way to get your software there (some did). In other words, the very best of what the Cloud has to offer, with none of the limits that sometimes come with it. No Limits!

The single-tenant version is coming out in November, so stay tuned…

My primary phone is an iPhone 4, with a regular AT&T account enabled for international roaming. This gives me worldwide access to email from the handset device, but no ability to tether my laptop of iPad (since I want to keep my unlimited data plan). As a result, it’s an incomplete solution, and a very expensive one if I start using Safari for reading blogs or making product demonstrations (Intalio’s product is bandwidth-hungry).

In order to get Internet access from my laptop, I initially used 3G USB modems. They’re cheap, easy to find, but a pain to configure, especially when using a MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop computer. I bought one in Japan, managed to make it work with one of my laptops, then failed to re-install its driver after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6. This lead me to consider using a mobile Wi-Fi access point as an alternative. My first such device was Novatel’s MiFi 2200 Mobile Hotspot, which I introduced in this past article and used in the US. I immediately fell in love with the concept, and later on acquired similar devices for Japan, then Singapore.

This worked fairly well as long as I was traveling regularly to two countries only, but when business called in Western Europe, things started to get a bit more complicated. Today, I am finishing a trip that took me to Ireland, the UK, France, and Germany. I bought similar devices in the UK and France, then realized that my approach would not scale, not to mention the fact that it was an utter waste of hardware. Also, trying to get connectivity in France made me reconsider the form factor altogether.

The problem with my approach is that I usually cannot get regular data plans, since I don’t have a permanent address (and their associated utility bills) in the countries I travel to on a regular basis. Instead, I have to rely on pay-as-you-go plans that require customers to follow super funky procedures in order to add credits to their plans. For example Orange in France makes it borderline impossible for the user. First, when you buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card, it comes with 3 hours of free connectivity, but you can’t add more credits before 48 hours (because of batch processing in their billing system). Second, the only way you can add more credits is by calling a toll-free number that can only be called from a French phone. And if you want to add credits through their website, you need to create an account which password is sent to you over SMS, using the cellphone number attached to your SIM. But since you’re using a mobile hot-spot device that does not have any screen on it, the SMS is positively unreadable — unless you have some X-Men powers that let you scan through flash memory. I for one don’t.

After hours of trials and errors, I eventually gave up and decided to make some radical changes to my approach. First, I would use a device with a screen, also known as Android smartphone with Mobile AP (Mobile Access Point) enabled. Second, such a device would be unlocked, so that I would buy and carry a single device and only buy a SIM card for each country where I would spend more than 4 nights every year. This lead me to the positively fantabulous Samsung Galaxy S, which I bought unlocked from a tiny shop in Bonn, Germany.

Before I dive any deeper, let me get something straight: I am a patented Apple fanboy. I currently own four or five Apple laptops, I bought every single iPhone every released, and I still have a couple of shrink-wrapped iPhone 1G 8GB, which I hope will serve as a retirement plan sometime in the future… That being said, I must admit that Apple has some serious competition with Samsung’s 3GS look-alike device, especially when using the factory model free of any carrier-installed crapware. What I like about this smartphone is that it’s as light as any mobile hot-spot device I ever owned, but it comes with a (gorgeous) screen that tells me what’s going on in plain English, instead of relying on some cryptic color-coding, or seemingly obfuscated instructions. Also, because it’s a full-fledge phone, I can interact with local mobile operators through voice or SMS in order to activate newly-acquired SIM cards, or add credits to already-setup plans. In other words, it works.

To be honest, I am not planning to replace my iPhone with an Android device any time soon (unlike many of my trend-setter friends). The iPhone remains the best mobile device from an industrial design standpoint, and design matters a great deal to me. Also, its user interface has a level of polish that Android can only dream of, while its curated marketplace feels a lot safer than Android’s Wild Wide West. Nevertheless, Samsung’s top-of-the-line Android device is a perfect traveling companion, with its removable battery, regular-size SIM card, and support for Mobile AP. I know that Jonathan Ive will never go for the first one, which is fine with me. The second one is only a matter of time (until Micro SIM become the norm). But the third one is a no brainer as far as I’m concerned. If I pay for an unlimited data plan, I want it to apply to any devices I am using, be it an iPhone, an iPad, or a MacBook (Pro). So, if you don’t want to lose my business to Android over the long run, you Apple should really consider having a serious talk with your friends at AT&T.

Until then, I will proudly carry my Samsung Galaxy S around…

With a bunch of SIM cards for various local carriers…

Which brings me to the real point of this article: acquiring SIM cards for multiple countries is a real pain in the neck. And having to pay a premium for pay-as-you-go plans feels like a total rip off. In the long run, major carriers will figure this out, and will offer roaming plans that actually make sense. But this will take three to five years. In the interim, I must believe there is a significant business opportunity for what I would call Global Mobile Virtual Network Operators (GMVNO) to offer roaming data plans with a single SIM card that would work in most major economies, with unlimited data plans. If I where the Product Manager for it, I would price it at something like $25/month/country, with a minimum of four or five countries.

I can’t wait to be a beta-tester for one of these.

For all its presumed flaws, the new iPhone is an absolutely amazing experiment in industrial design and ecosystem reshaping. It’s bold, slick, gorgeous. It makes me wonder what the world would be like if all surrounding objects had been designed with the same level of attention.

The iPhone 4 is an acquired taste. At first touch, it feels angular. But as the relationship develops, a unique blend of round shapes and square corners emerges, making for a truly enthralling haptic experience.

It’s so square, you want to flip it in circular motions between your thumb and index. It feels heavy on the lift, so you want to flip it some more, upside down, left and right. You’re getting acquainted.

As you’re fooling around, an idée force emerges: you’re dealing with something quite exceptional. By now, you’re fully aware that the aluminum trimming is actually an antenna, and its asymmetric black interruptions serve a real purpose. But as you’re spinning the gizmo around, you stumble upon the screws surrounding the USB connector. Both are perfectly aligned!

For it to happen, Jonathan Ive must have asked one of his lieutenants to ensure that every Chinese worker responsible for the assembly of such an intricate piece of machinery would stop their screwdrivers at the precise point where the screw patterns would align with the user’s discovery process. What more could you ask for?

Steve, Jonathan, David, and their teams are relentlessly pushing the enveloppe, taking uncalculated risks to create a breathtaking user experience. In most areas, they succeed. In some they fail, yet quickly learn from the experience. Knowing what is at stake, their unwavering belief in such a creative process is truly remarkable. For it, we should be grateful.

Thank you guys!

First, as described earlier, I am planning to replace my MacBook Air with a Sony VAIO X complemented by an iPad. Same total weight, same total cost, three times the battery life, and a lot more fun…

Second, in order to reduce weight and bulk, I banned any electronic devices that could not be charged over USB. That way, I only have to carry my laptop charger, Apple’s ultracompact USB Power Adapter, Belkin’s USB 2.0 4-Port Ultra Mini Hub, and a few ReTrak cables to make it all look like a cute little octopus.

Third, I replaced all my cables with retractable ones. There are two reasons for that: one, they are lighter and take less space; two, they are quicker to pack, making it faster to check out of my hotel room. I usually carry the following cables:

Fourth, I ditched my 3G USB modems and replaced them with mobile WiFi routers. There are many reasons for that: first, many of these USB modems are difficult to configure, especially when using a MacBook laptop; second, they deplete your laptop’s battery very rapidly; third, they only provide mobile Internet access to one device at a time. In order to reduce roaming charges, I bought one device for each country that I travel to more than once every quarter. By the end of the month, I will cover the following geographies:

Fifth, I keep my local mobile WiFi router turned on all day long. That way, my smartphone (iPhone 3GS 32GB) is always using WiFi for Internet connectivity, therefore reducing my roaming charges and allowing me to use Skype. In order to power my router beyond its 3 hours of battery life, I carry a HyperMac External Battery 60Wh, which fits neatly into one of the two pockets of my Incase Nylon Sleeve. It’s perfectly sized for a small laptop, and the back pocket can neatly house my Kindle DX, soon to be replaced by a much more versatile iPad.

Once complete, the whole setup including Sony VAIO X, Apple iPad, Apple iPhone, HyperMac battery, mobile WiFi router, and carrying bag will weigh less than 4.5 pounds, which is what the Apple MacBook Pro 13” alone weighs. It will give me over 20 hours of battery life on the VAIO X plus 10 hours on the iPad, with 7.2Mbps instant Internet connectivity on all three devices.

I can’t wait…

In the meantime, I am adding the following components to the setup:

First, let me state that most of the applications I am using are in the cloud, hence the operating system I run does not really matter. In fact, the only offline application I allowed myself to use following my pure Office 2.0 experiment is Apple’s iWork, mainly for Keynote. That being said, I rarely modify my presentations on the road, and the occasional use could be supported by the iPad. And if I need the convenience of a keyboard, I could always log to my Mac mini Server using LogMeIn or VNC.

Second, since most of my applications are online, I do not need a very fast computer. While the Sony VAIO X’s Intel Atom Z550 is nowhere near as fast as the MacBook Air’s Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, it won’t make much of a difference when using a simple Web browser (Chrome or Safari for JavaScript performance) with Gmail or Intalio|Cloud.

Third, I would certainly miss iDisk, but Intalio|Cloud’s next release will include the Nuxeo Document Management System, which I will use to store all my files, including over 10TB of movies. A copy of Intalio|Cloud is currently running on the Mac Pro workstation I use at work and serves the instance of Intalio|CRM I recently migrated to from Salesforce.com. Nuxeo will allow me to map folders from the Windows 7 filesystem to my online Document Management System, giving me a supercharged alternative to iDisk, with a lot more storage, plus versioning capabilities.

Fourth, after (or before) weight comes battery life, and the combination of a VAIO X and Apple iPad would give me over 13.5 hours of battery life with the VAIO’s standard battery, and over 20 hours with the extended battery, compared to the MacBook Air meager 5 hours of advertised battery life (closer to 4 hours in reality).

Fifth, the VAIO X’s ports are something that I learned to miss with the MacBook Air, especially the standard VGA port (no need for a custom adapter), the second USB port (nice for recharging my phone and mobile WiFi router), and the SD Card port (extremely useful for moving movies between my Mac Pro workstation and my laptop).

Conclusion: I will buy a Sony VAIO X tomorrow and wait for my iPad…

Yesterday, on my way from Incheon to Seoul, the cab driver was listening to Queen’s I want it all. Here is what Freddie Mercury could have said about Apple’s Tablet: “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.”

As can be seen on the screenshot above, Intalio|Cloud’s user interface is closer to the one sported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM rather than Salesforce.com, and this choice was deliberate. Salesforce.com’s user interface did not evolve much since the application was first released ten years ago, and is starting to feel a bit Web 1.0. For Intalio|Cloud, we decided to take full advantage of now-mature AJAX technologies in order to make it a true Rich Internet Application.

The result speaks for itself: an accordion on the left-hand side gives you access to large collections of objects (many more than you could get with an horizontal tab bar), while horizontal tabs are used for showing different dashboards. And a simple drop down menu on the top right lets user quickly switch from User View to Administrator View and Developer View, as long as he or she has the right privileges to do so. Everything is just one or two mouse clicks away, organized in a very logical fashion, while only showing a rather limited number of buttons and options, so that new users do not get overwhelmed at first sight (a common feeling with Salesforce.com or SugarCRM).

But what makes this user interface extremely powerful is that it can be customized right from the home page. Tabs, Views, Reports, Charts, and Widgets can be added without having to go through configuration options hidden deep into some setup area, empowering users to create the dashboards they need to get things done as effectively as possible.

Now, where things get really exciting is that such a design philosophy has been applied beyond the home page, throughout the entire application, and it’s nowhere more evident than when looking at individual records. The following screenshot shows how an instance of the Account object (or any object for that matter) is displayed through a pop-up window. This user interface also makes extensive use of accordions and tabs, giving the user access to a tremendous amount of information without having to browse through very long HTML pages (as is the case with Salesforce.com unfortunately).

Furthermore, the application lets users open as many windows as they want at the same time, allowing records to be compared and data to be copied from one record to another very easily. To make a long story short, Intalio|Cloud provides a true multi-windowing environment, right in the web browser. When using a browser that supports fast execution of JavaScript code (Google’s Chrome or Apple’s Safari), the productivity gains resulting from such a user interface can be very significant.

This is what I love about Intalio|Cloud!

One of the most useful mashups I ever developed is my Free/Busy calendar, which is available at freebusy.ghalimi.name. I introduced this project on this previous article. Since its release a year and a half ago, this little gadget saved me countless hours trying to get meetings scheduled with people.

This mashup is pretty simple. All it does is looking up events from my Salesforce.com account, producing an ICAL feed from them, and subscribing a public Google calendar to this feed. Nevertheless, this simple mashup could not be developed directly from Salesforce.com, and required the writing of 150 lines of PHP code hosted on a separate server. It also created somewhat of a security breach by requiring the storage of my Salesforce.com login credentials on a PHP page served by a public web server. Clearly, there must be an easier way of building such a simple mashup.

Here comes Intalio|Mashup, which is a component of Intalio|Cloud, which itself powers the Intalio|CRM application. Intalio|Mashup gives you the ability to visually combine pre-built components into very powerful mashups that can be published as web pages, web services, ATOM/RSS feeds, etc. The mashup I now use to publish my Free/Busy calendar only took 8 components, as illustrated on the following screenshot.

This mashup tool is available form the Developer view of Intalio|Cloud, alongside the application builder. On the left hand side, an extensive collection of standard mashup components are available, while custom components can be developed graphically or by writing code. On the top part, the canvas contains the mashup scenario itself, while the bottom part displays results of the mashup, at any point throughout its execution, in either text, tree, or grid fashion (very useful for debugging purposes).

As can be seen on the screenshot above, I am using a development version, because the very first mashup component used on the canvas (on the left hand side) does not even have an icon (bug already filed). Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting components of the tool: it’s called XRM Reader, and it gives you access to the entire XML/Object-oriented database middleware (called XRM) that powers Intalio|Cloud and can be deployed on top of any relational database (like MySQL or Oracle). Using this mashup component, I can lookup my appointments and feed them to a For-Each component that parses them and retrieves just the information I need for creating a valid ICAL feed (start time and end time essentially).

One of the really nice things about this mashup tool is that it does not limit the developer to the set of standard mashup components offered out of the box. Instead, it lets the user build custom components whenever they are missing. For example, I needed a way to produce a text file instead of an XML document, and while Intalio|Mashup offers a few components for the manipulation of strings, it was originally designed to process XML fragments. That being said, using the Custom Operation component, I quickly built what I needed, writing nine lines of code that will look very familiar to anyone who has ever written XPath or XSLT code:

<xsp:text value="BEGIN:VCALENDAR"/>
<xsp:for-each select="$_Source">
<xsp:text value="BEGIN:VEVENT"/>
<?xpath t(concat('DTSTART:',replace(replace(start/@start-date,"-",""),":","")))?>
<?xpath t(concat('DTEND:',replace(replace(end/@end-date,"-",""),":","")))?>
<?xpath t('SUMMARY:Busy')?>
<xsp:text value="END:VEVENT"/>
</xsp:for-each>
<xsp:text value="END:VCALENDAR"/>


While I initially spent a few hours getting familiar with the tool, building this mashup from scratch should not take more than 30 minutes. In comparison, the original mashup written in PHP and using Salesforce.com’s relatively complex WSDL web services took a few days to write and debug. Furthermore, Intalio|Mashup is a tool that a less-technical user like myself can really be productive with, while I had to rely on professional software engineers to build the Salesforce.com mashup.

This is what I love about Intalio|Cloud!

Wikipedia defines cloud computing in the following fashion:

“Cloud computing is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.”

The definition we propose is borrowed form the writing of Neil Ward-Dutton, who works for MWD Advisors, a specialist European IT advisory firm which focuses exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment. In a post released in June 2009, Neil outlined The seven elements of Cloud computing’s value, which we reproduced here with the author’s permission and some minor editing, some suggested by Gartner’s Daryl Plummer:

In a nutshell, Cloud Computing can be defined as a set of computing and storage resources providing an application platform as a service. This platform is characterized by a unique set of economic, architectural, and strategic elements of value, which clearly distinguishes it from anything that has been available so far, even though it builds upon the legacy of more than 50 years of distributed computing.

Utility Pricing
Cloud Computing is first a foremost defined by its utility-based pricing model. Users of the platform consume computing and storage services on demand and pay for them as they go, using an Operating Expenses (OPEX) budget, instead of paying for infrastructure resources up-front using Capital Expenditures (CAPEX). For example, a Director of Sales can create CRM accounts for 10 of her sales people on Salesforce.com by using her corporate credit card, without having to ask the CFO for a budget, and without having the IT Department initiate a requisition process for a new server.

Elastic Resource Capacity
Cloud Computing differs from more traditional forms of distributed computing in the way it scales computing and storage resources up and down. Instead of tapping from a fixed set of resources, users can add or remove capacity at will, almost instantaneously, and only pay for what they actually use. While utility pricing let users pay as they go, elastic resource capacity let them pay as they grow (or shrink). Following our previous example, the Director of Sales can add 5 more accounts for the sales people that were recently added to her team following the merger with another company, without having to worry about adding new servers or buying more hard drives.

Virtualized Resources
Cloud Computing would not be possible without virtualization, not for arcane technical reasons, but for one obvious business requirement: the need for multi-tenancy. In order to benefit from economies of scale, cloud computing is predicated upon the sharing of a common infrastructure by multiple groups of users, often referred to as tenants. And multi-tenancy can only be achieved through some kind of virtualization, either at the database level (Salesforce.com), application server level (Google AppEngine), kernel level (Red Hat), or CPU level (Amazon EC2). Unlike grid computing, which often pooled and aggregated distributed computing resources for the purpose of handling very large computing jobs that could not fit or would take took long to complete on a single server, Cloud Computing creates virtual slices of resources from clusters of servers and storage devices, perfectly sized to fit the specific needs of multiple users. Such virtual resources can be small or large, and scale elastically as user needs evolve over time. In our previous example, virtualization means that the CRM application used by our sales team is served by an infrastructure also used by over 60,000 other tenants, all securely isolated from each other (hopefully).

Management Automation
Cloud Computing platforms differ from traditional corporate data-centers in one major way: standardization. While your typical data-center will usually host every versions of every operating systems and databases known to mankind, thereby creating massive management overhead, most Cloud Computing platforms usually standardize on a single kind of CPU (x86-based predominantly), a single hypervisor (VMware, Xen, etc.), a single operating system (some Linux distribution usually), and a single database (MySQL rules). This standardization has an obvious business benefit: dramatic reduction of operating costs through aggressive management automation. Following our previous example, the sales team’s CRM application is served by one of 16 instances, each made of a few dozens servers. Altogether, this infrastructure might require anywhere from 100 to 200 full-time resources to manage. As a point of comparison, if each of Salesforce.com’s 60,000 customers were to require a dedicated infrastructure, it would take several thousands full-time resources to manage it all.

Self-service Provisioning
Cloud Computing and Software as a Service is often compared to the Application Service Provider (ASP) model that became popular for a brief period of time ten years ago. One element makes them fundamentally different from each other though: self-service provisioning. With the ASP model, dedicated servers had to be provisioned for each customers, which meant that technical resources had to be involved every time a new customer would be signed. Hefty setup fees would be added to the bill, and the service would become operational within a few days at best. With Cloud Computing, business end users like our Director of Sales can provision applications and user accounts in a few mouse clicks, and these become available instantly.

Third-party Ownership
Cloud Computing is also a new form of outsourcing. Customers trying to focus the allocation of scarce capital resources to their core businesses soon realize the benefits of moving IT infrastructure off their balance sheet. Furthermore, as technology evolves and leading service providers roll-out ever larger data-centers, the acquisition and operation of state-of-the-art data-center facilities makes less and less sense from an economic standpoint for most organizations. Cloud Computing is all about the transfer of ownership for such resources to a third-party that specializes in their deployment. According to our previous example, the company using the CRM application provided by Salesforce.com does not own any infrastructure beyond a few laptop computers. Everything else, from data-centers to servers and storage systems is owned by Salesforce.com, Inc.

Managed Operations
Cloud Computing is finally about allocating human resources to tasks that will directly impact the business, rather than simply managing the infrastructure that supports it. As such, Cloud Computing advocates a model according to which the IT infrastructure is not only owned by a third-party, but managed by the third-party as well. Software upgrades, data backups, and the countless other tasks required to manage mission-critical business applications on a day to day basis become the responsibility of a third-party, according to well-defined Service Level Agreements. Following our example, the Director of Sales discovered this morning the snowman adorned logo for the Winter 2010 version of Salesforce.com, without having taken any part in the software upgrade process that took place over the week-end. In the cloud, ignorance is bliss.

Until now, the only way for customers to benefit from the seven elements of value outlined above was to use a public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Force.com. Today, private cloud offerings such as Intalio are bringing these benefits on premises, behind the firewall. To learn more about how private clouds can address each element of value, please review this presentation.

The need for private and virtual private clouds is driven by a combination of factors, many of which were clearly outlined by Gartner’s Bruce Robertson in his recent article titled Top Five Cloud-Computing Adoption Inhibitors (Gartner account required). Bruce felt compelled to add a sixth one (Vendor Viability), and we took the liberty to add a couple others, while slightly altering their designations.

Risk Management
When using the services of a public cloud provider, your options for risks assessment are rather limited. While compliance to industry standards such as SAS 70 or the publishing of auditable availability metrics in a trust.salesforce.com fashion can provide some level of comfort, they are not sufficient for proper risk management. Deploying a private cloud in your own data-center, or in the data-center of a trusted third-party (such as your local telecommunications service provider), will give you a more complete picture of the risks inherent to cloud computing.

Location
As the saying goes, real estate is about three things: Location, Location, Location. While this might be counter-intuitive for those of us confusing cloud computing with ethereal computing (a concept I just made up and which makes no sense at all), the location of clouds really does matter, be it when talking about meteorology or computing. The geographic location of the servers powering a cloud has direct implications on how it will perform, and whether it will comply to specific regulations or not. For example, desktop virtualization requires low latency, which itself requires geographic proximity. Similarly, most database-driven applications will work only if the application sits really close to the data. And if you’re a retail bank, the data you collect about a customer must remain in the customer’s home country, as stated by law in many jurisdictions around the World. While the largest public cloud providers will certainly deploy multiple Points of Presence (Salesforce.com now has servers in four regions: North America, EMEA, APAC, Japan), many local cloud providers will emerge in order to provide geographic proximity to customers in the World’s 195 countries (as of today).

Portability
An application developed with Force.com can only run on the Force.com public cloud. And while many public cloud providers like to talk about interoperability, their objectives are to lock customers up with a proprietary architecture, API, or programming language. The choice is clear: Bluepill, half a dozen public cloud reluctantly agreeing to half-baked interoperability standards. Redpill, millions of private and virtual private clouds built on top of a common infrastructure. With no hesitations, I take the redpill.

Resilience
As a I write this article, it is becoming clear that Microsoft/Danger lost all the data stored by customers on their Sidekick smartphone. Contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, and photos are gone, following a botched SAN upgrade undertaken without proper data backup. Data loss is a huge concern for consumers and corporate customers alike, and private clouds provide an answer to this. For consumers, the deployment of reverse backup solutions such as the Egnyte Local Cloud (Disclaimer: I sit on Egnyte’s Board and originated the idea for the ELC) provides a virtually failsafe solution, at a very low cost. For corporate customers, the use of a private cloud implementing proper data backup and disaster recovery policies will significantly reduce the risk of data loss.

Security
Many security experts claim that most corporations cannot afford the legions of systems administrators employed by the like of Amazon or Google to secure their public clouds, then conclude that public clouds are inherently more secure than private ones. This is either naive, dishonest, or plainly stupid. First, currently-available public clouds are utterly primitive when it comes to security. For example, VPN access is both a novelty there (Amazon just released the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud), and the very best they can offer (forget about two-factor authentication with devices like RSA SecurID). Second, the security of most public clouds currently available has been successfully breached over the past few years, usually through Denial-of-Service attacks or phishing methods, and the pace at which such events occur does not seem to be slowing down. Third, and maybe most importantly, a small number of homogeneous public clouds creates massive single points of failure. In essence, if a significant amount of the World’s computing and storage needs are addressed by half a dozen public clouds, any vulnerability in the security infrastructure of any of these clouds will expose over 15% of the World’s IT assets to unimaginable risks. This basic architecture simply makes no sense at all, and in a weird twist goes against the Internet’s distributed architecture, which enabled cloud computing at the first place. If we want secure cloud computing, we want millions of private clouds, not just 5 or 6 public ones.

Confidentiality
Data confidentiality is one of the most difficult things to guarantee in a cloud computing environment. There are several reasons for that: First, as public clouds grow, the number of people working for the cloud provider who actually have access to customer data (whether they are entitled to it or not) grows as well, thereby multiplying the number of potential sources for a confidentiality breach. Second, the needs for elasticity, performance, and fault-tolerance leads to massive data duplication and requires aggressive data caching, which in turn multiply the number of targets a data thief can go after. Third, end-to-end data encryption is not yet available. What this means is that while data can be encrypted when transiting between the end-user’s client and the cloud’s server, and can also be encrypted when stored on the cloud’s server, it must be decrypted on the cloud’s server when being processed for a query or a transaction, unless fully homomorphic encryption is used. But until such a technology becomes commonplace (which will take quite a few years), data confidentiality will be maximized by using a large number of private clouds managed by trusted parties.

Regulations
Local regulations will most certainly be the strongest driver for the deployment of private clouds. Many vertical industries such as financial services and healthcare, as well as the overall public sector (for both national and local governments) mandate that certain classes of data be stored and processed locally, in some cases by local service providers. While the deployment of local Points of Presence by private cloud operators will address such requirements in some cases (as it did for Salesforce.com when signing Japan Post as a customer in Japan), it will not be sufficient in countless others, and the deployment of local private clouds will be necessary.

Service Level Agreement
Another powerful driver for the deployment of private clouds will be the need for specific Service Level Agreements that public cloud operators cannot address, either because they’re not compatible with their business models, or because they cannot be supported by their technical architectures. For example, most public clouds today deliver three nines uptime today (99.9%, or downtime less than 8h45m57s per year), and four nines is a distant dream for all of them (52m36s). All the while, many customers require five nines availability (5m16s), which requires a technical architecture and a set of procedures significantly different from the ones deployed by most public cloud operators. Another area of concern is related to data ownership, as stated by user agreements. While some providers are pretty clear about it (Salesforce.com among them), others remain dangerously ambiguous (Google for example), making their clouds unsuitable for a broad range of applications.

Control
Last but not least, the need for overall control will be the one predicating the use of private clouds for most organizations. While this alternative form of cloud computing might not offer the same economics or the same level of elasticity as the ones delivered by their public counterparts, it will always provide the extra level of control that large organizations crave for, and large organizations are the ones that will drive the adoption of private cloud computing platforms in the years to come.

Postface: This post might leave you with the strange feeling that while you get a pretty good idea for what a public cloud might be (AWS, Force.com, Google AppEngine, etc.), the concept for a private cloud is a lot less obvious. If that is the case, please refer to this presentation, or read my next article, titled Defining Cloud Computing for Business Users?

Note: As promised, this post on Cloud Computing will be followed by many others…

Additional stops in the U.S. might be added soon.

In a nutshell, the hypervisor (VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc.) is the next operating system, and it brings elasticity to corporate IT from a technical infrastructure standpoint. Thanks to such elasticity, corporate customers can build private clouds on top of the virtualization infrastructure, leveraging hardware virtualization for multi-tenancy. The challenge in doing so is not so much a technical one, but a business one: licensing elasticity — or the lack of it. Let me further explain.

Most enterprise software at the platform layer (including the database) is licensed per CPU today, which makes it fundamentally inelastic. By that, I mean that customers have no way of knowing how much the cloud will cost to operate if they are using commercial software for their database or application server. While they’re comfortable paying for the underlying hardware (which is getting cheaper by the day) and for business applications on top (on a per user basis), they’re very concerned about the fact that deploying traditionally-licensed software like the Oracle database will lead to exploding bills. This is where Open Source has a critical role to play.

From a practical standpoint, virtualization software such as VMware vSphere and vCenter makes it relatively easy to build an elastic Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, taking advantage of live Virtual Machine (VM) replication for dynamically resizing VM sizes and properly balancing loads across a pool of commodity servers. But from a business or financial standpoint, this is scary as hell: if improperly configured, your IaaS layer might instantiate a handful of Oracle database servers that you have no licenses for, and before you know it you owe Larry’s company quite a bit of money that you have no budget for. This is precisely the kind of nightmarish scenario that has VMware customers concerned today when talking about Private Cloud Computing.

You can’t have elastic computing with inelastic licensing.

Essentially, the pricing of database and middleware software sold through perpetual licenses is fundamentally inelastic, which makes such software rather unsuited for Private Cloud Computing. Ideally, you want this software to be licensed as a component of the overarching business application (as is the case when using public cloud offerings such as Salesforce.com, which runs on top of the Oracle database), or to be licensed through a utility-based pricing model, by the drink. Unfortunately, changing pricing models is very challenging for software vendors, as history as shown repeatedly — remember what happened to CA’s former CEO? This is precisely where Open Source delivers a systemic competitive advantage. In most cases, commercial Open Source software is licensed through CPU-bound yearly subscriptions, which could easily be adapted to support a GHz-Hour or GB-Hour utlity-based pricing model.

Open Source software, and especially Linux, Apache, and MySQL, played a critical role during the Web revolution of the past fifteen years. Similarly, Open Source software should play a critical role in the Cloud revolution during the next fifteen.

And Intalio is at the forefront of this revolution…

If you know the answers to the following questions, or have some time available to look for them, please share your insight with us. Each answer backed-up by proper references will get you a $25 Apple Gift Card or our infinite gratitude (you pick one). Please send answers to Michael Morel, our new Vice President of Marketing.

Question #1: What do computing and storage cost?
When including hardware, software licenses, and workforce, how much money does a typical IT department spend on computing (per GHz of CPU) and storage (per TB).

Question #2: What is the power consumption of a legacy server?
In other words, how old is the average server used in a typical corporate IT environment, and what is the power consumption of such a server? Power consumption is measured in Watts per GHz of CPU, Watts per GB of memory, Watts per TB of storage, and Watts per Gbps of bandwidth. 3 datapoints out of 4 qualify for eligibility.

Question #3: What is the total maintenance cost of a legacy server?
Looking at the same average server, how much does it cost to keep it up and running? This cost should include hardware maintenance contracts and workforce costs. The later should be calculated by dividing the fully loaded cost of a typical systems administrator by the number of legacy servers this person can manage (Cf. Question #4).

Question #4: How many servers can a systems administrator manage?
How many physical servers can a single systems administrator manage?

Question #5: How many database servers can a database administrator manage?
How many database servers can a single database administrator manage?

Question #6: How does Google compare?
How many servers does Google use to run its search engine, and how many systems administrators does it employ on a full time basis? Since such data might be difficult to gather, estimates published by reputable sources would qualify for eligibility.

Question #7: What is the utilization rate of an average server?
Over an extended period of time (a month or more), what is the average utilization rate of a server found in a typical IT environment, as measured from a pure CPU utilization standpoint.

Question #8: How do alternative stacks compare form a pricing standpoint?
Looking at slide #15 in this presentation, how much would a comparable stack cost in terms of perpetual licenses acquisition if the individual components where to be provided by IBM (not including any discount)? How much would it cost if provided by Oracle? And which components would be missing, if any?

Question #9: How much would it cost to integrate such a stack?
If using the services of a top-tier systems integration firm, how much would it cost to integrate such a stack together from components provided by IBM or Oracle in order to provide the level of automation outlined in slide #16 and the self-service provisioning outlined in slide #17. How long would such a project take?

Question #10: How can we quantify the benefits of OPEX vs. CAPEX?
How would an accountant or a CFO quantify the financial benefits of an OPEX-based (Operating Expenses) pricing model over a CAPEX-based (Capital Expenditure) pricing model? What other benefits could be outlined, if any?

Ready, Set, Go!

These businesses are born out of the Internet. They have 50 employees or less, spread across 5 locations or more. They sell technologies and services to either businesses or consumers, over the Internet, or through indirect distribution channels. Even though they have very few employees, every single one counts, and keeping them happy is one of the CEO’s top priorities.

A good example for such a company would be Caucho Technology, developer of the Resin application server, which last month surpassed both JBoss and Tomcat according to Netcraft. Caucho has 7,500 corporate customers around the world, served by no more than 10 employees. The CEO lives in San Diego, CA, the CTO and a couple of engineers live in San Francisco, CA, and one of their senior developers currently lives in Tonton, ON, but is about to move to Vancouver, BC.

In order to get their job done, these guys need three things: a place to work outside of their homes so that they can focus, places to meet once a week for those who live in the same area, and very good communication tools to stay in sync. What they do not need is the hassle of setting all this up, especially if it means doing it across 4 or 5 locations, in 3 or 4 countries. Here comes Monolab|Workspace, the concept for which the Monolab|Incubator is a real-life experiment.

The idea for Monolab|Workspace is to develop a network of shared office spaces around the world. Unlike Regus and their 900 offices located in corporate areas, we’re looking at 25 to 50 locations only, strategically located in trendy neighborhoods. Think Embarcadero Center vs. Potrero Hill in San Francisco, CA, Shinjuku vs. Daikanyama in Tokyo, or La Défense vs. Le Maris in Paris.

Instead of private offices, we want open spaces, because our target users prefer email and IM to phone conversations. And when they really want to talk to someone, they either do it in person while sipping an espresso, or with the best videoconferencing system money can buy. And besides, nobody likes to sit in a box all day…

The main concept is to give very small businesses access to an infrastructure that only large companies can afford. For example, a good videoconferencing system costs north of $10,000, and a company of 10 people scattered across 5 locations just cannot justify spending the equivalent of a full year salary for it. But if you can spread the cost across 50 or 100 users, it all starts to make sense. The same is true for a nice meeting room that could sit a dozen people and could be used for sales presentations or training sessions. If you’re going to use it only once a week, how do you justify spending $5,000 to $10,000 on chairs alone? Sharing is the answer.

Then comes the question of locations. The audience we’re addressing with our concept is rather young, free spirited, and cosmopolitan. They could make a lot of money working for large corporations, but they would rather preserve their independence and develop their own ideas. As a result, they cherish smaller offices, smart architecture, green surroundings, and the proximity of good restaurants. They like mingling with creative types, visiting art galleries, or getting a drink with friends after a long day at work. For all these reasons, our workspaces will be located in historical downtown areas rather than corporate office complexes, and our spaces will look nothing like The Office.

There is also a notion of aesthetics, elegance, or style. This might be more a matter of personal taste rather than business rationality, but we like good design, quality materials, and smart user interfaces. At the risk of being dubbed as elitists, we’d rather spend more money on good equipment and furniture that make you feel good about your workplace, and less on staff whose job can be largely automated. As a result, you can expect our workspaces to be quite amazing, not in a luxurious way, but in the sense that no amount of efforts will be spared in our inhibited attempt to make them as effective and inspiring as possible.

Another aspect of the concept is locality and mobility. You can think of it in the context of the Global Village. Our users are bedouins who travel from place to place for a living, but do not want to lose the concept of Home, and want to engage with their destinations to the fullest. If this sounds a bit too abstract, just remember the feeling of loneliness you got the last time you traveled around the world for business, and found yourself in a normalized hotel room that looked exactly the same as the ones you stayed at in five other locations, down to the bar of soap in the bathroom. For a split second, you could not even remember where you were. Was it Sydney in Australia? Or maybe Austin, TX? And of all of sudden, you started questioning why you did all this traveling to begin with. We think life is too short for this.

Our belief is that business traveling should be leveraged as a way to discover the world and engage with local cultures. Unfortunately, time constraints make it extremely difficult, and the more we travel, the less we know how to engage. If you’re like me, you’ve discovered that shortening your trips help reduce jet lag. In fact, making your trips shorter than 3 days at a time can remove jet lag altogether. Earlier this week, I was in Tokyo for 3 days. A week before, I went to Australia for 19 hours. And next week, I will go to Singapore and Thailand (for business), for just a day and a half. Definitely extreme, yet highly effective.

If your traveling schedule is anything like mine, your main challenge is about optimization of time spent on the ground. Which is another reason why we want our workspaces to be located in culturally rich neighborhoods, in places where you will find a great restaurant serving local food, in areas where you will meet real people who look nothing like you, but might share your vision of the Global Village. Essentially, Home away from Home, for people who have a slightly expanded view of Home.

We’re doing two things to fulfill this vision: First, our buildings will be typical of the places where they are located. In San Francisco, CA, we will look for a converted warehouse. In Paris, an old atelier, or a vintage garage maybe. In Japan, a traditional house, or an old temple. Second, 20% of our real estate will be used for bedrooms. That’s right, bedrooms. The idea is to flip the concept of hotel business center. Instead of having a cramped business center located in a large hotel, we want a small yet comfortable hotel located in a spacious business center. In each location, we will build two or three bedrooms, using furniture found in places like Qbic Hotels or Yotel. These bedrooms will be reserved to members only, and will be priced at $99/night, just enough to amortize the furniture and pay for top-quality cleaning services.

With that in mind, our concept is taking a whole new dimension. For $1,500 a month, you essentially join a club that gives you access to a fantastic workplace, anywhere around the world, or at least in the top 25 to 50 destinations you might find yourself doing business in. You also get access to conveniently located hotel facilities that will reduce the time you spend in taxicabs. And because all the facilities will use the exact equipment, you won’t have to read the manual next time you’ll want to print, sign, and fax this all important contract from halfway across the globe.

Of course, with such a model, we’re faced with a pretty challenging catch 22 problem: the value of our network is directly proportional to the squared number of locations, and we’re starting with just one (Palo Alto, CA). Nevertheless, we strongly believe in the vision, and have faith that we will find like-minded people along the way who will help us turn it into reality. So if that sounds like fun, here are the first 12 locations we have selected. If you live there and think you could take advantage of a local workspace, or would like to help us out, just drop us a line.

And if you still don’t get it, read Monocle!

Beyond the polish of its user interface, what I like about Idea Exchange is the way it ranks popular ideas based not only on the number of promotions, but also on the recentness of those and the comments that usually come with them. I was also very impressed to see the list of features originally submitted to the Idea Exchange and added to the last Spring release when I received an email notification announcing its availability. This gave me a sense of immediate feedback loop that is highly satisfying.

I like to put my money (and time) where my mouth is, so I started submitting ideas to the Exchange yesterday. I posted seven so far, and I invite you to promote them if you have a Salesforce.com account. Moving forward, all ideas presented on this blog and related to Salesforce.com will also be recorded onto the Idea Exchange. I strongly encourage other vendors to build exchanges of their own. Dell did just that, using technology developed by… Salesforce.com.

With its strong document management capabilities, Koral will allow Salesforce.com to better manage unstructured data, but being able to store documents is not all that exciting if you cannot produce them from structured data, nor share them outside the boundaries of your organization. For such purposes, I would recommend that Salesforce.com takes a look at ThinkFree and EchoSign (covered here and there).

As written before, ThinkFree has one of the best office productivity suites currently available, and certainly the most feature rich. It is about to release its read/write API, which would allow direct integration with Apex Content. This in turn would allow any office document stored into ContentExchange to be directly edited from Salesforce.com. Granted, a more advanced API would be required in order to support merge with data stored into Salesforce.com, but I could not think of a better use case for ThinkFree to develop such an API. One scenario would be for a salesperson to draft a contract for an opportunity managed by the CRM system.

Following this scenario, the next step would be for the salesperson to send the contract to the customer for review and approval. Of course, this could be done as an email attachment or via fax, but a much better solution exists and is already integrated with Salesforce.com — EchoSign. Using this powerful yet extremely easy-to-use tool, the salesperson would be able to get the contract signed either electronically or via fax, without having to actually use a physical fax machine. And once the contract is signed, it could be stored directly into ContentExchange for archiving purposes.

I use all four applications — Salesforce.com, Koral, ThinkFree, and EchoSign — today in order to support this end-to-end workflow, but because the later two are not fully integrated with the former two, I still have to move files around manually. Contracts written using ThinkFree Write have to be manually edited with customer-specific data before being saved on my local computer, then uploaded into Salesforce.com as EchoSign agreements. Then, when contracts have been signed by customers, they have to be downloaded from Salesforce.com to my local computer, then uploaded into Salesforce.com again as Koral documents. A partnership with ThinkFree would solve the first problem, while EchoSign’s support for the upcoming ContentExchange would solve the second. Quite frankly, I cannot wait for this to happen.

In the meantime, congratulations to Mark Suster and his team!

So far, SAP’s foray into the SaaS market has been unimpressive at best. Over the past couple of years, SAP focused mainly on the NetWeaver middleware and the A1S platform. The later is available as a hosted solution, but is targetted at the mid-market. SAP calls it game-changing, but I do not believe that it has anywhere near the disruptive power of Salesforce.com and the AppExchange, for a couple of reasons: first, it’s out of reach for the smaller SMBs that represent the bulk of the potential market opportunity; second, it lacks a strong ecosystem of partner solutions. I believe that SAP needs a new solution, directly targeted at the SMB market, and only available as a service, for this is the only way to make it work.

As of today, SAP is maintaining three separate product lines: Business One, A1S, and mySAP. What I am advocating is the development of a fourth one, for the following reason: while Business One might be appropriate from a functionality standpoint — even though this is highly debatable — it does not have the right architecture. As our friend Marc Benioff so eloquently taught us, SaaS only works if you have multi-tenancy, and multi-tenancy is not something that you can fake. Also, to support the variety of needs found in smaller organization, the application needs both objects and processes to be configured or customized in a model-driven way. Business One is capable of doing this only for objects, and the way it does it is nowhere near as easy-to-use for non-technical people as Salesforce.com is. Like it or not, a new platform needs to be developed, most likely from scratch.

If it decides to do so, SAP should focus on three functional areas: Finance, CRM, and HCM (Human Capital Management). CRM is a no-brainer, and is what most SMBs need from the start. HCM, and especially an easy-to-use employee self-service portal, is where I would expect most CRM players to go next, mainly because it’s easier to implement than a financial package, and because it gives you the ability to sell many seats — theoretically one seat per employee. Finally, Finance is where SAP could truly leverage its global expertise, and leapfrog its most established SaaS competitors, Salesforce.com being first among them.

As of today, SMBs looking for a financial package have only a handful of options, and few of them are available online. Intuit’s QuickBooks is very strong in the U.S., but not much of a player elsewhere, and it only works with Internet Explorer — what a shame! Microsoft Dynamics is a good on-premise solution, but the on-demand version is at the stage of demoware right now. NetSuite and Salesboom both have decent financial offerings, but they are not fully localized yet, and are supported by limited marketing resources. Workday is an interesting player, but with only 10 customers as of today, it still has a long way to go.

If SAP were to release an on-demand solution including FI, CRM, and HCM sometime in the first half of 2008, it would most likely be one of the very first players to do so. And if it were to release it with something equivalent to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange from the get go, it would have a very decent shot at building one of the next-generation platforms that will be used to build the composite applications that will support most business activities in the future. If it were to inject a healthy dose of Office 2.0 magic as well, it might even have the most attractive platforms of all.

Granted, what I am proposing is no simple feat. For starters, SAP would have to adopt a brand new business model — renewable subscriptions as opposed to perpetual licenses — and get rid of its not-invented-here syndroma. For example, if it were to enforce the use of its own middleware to build such a thing, it would most likely fail. Instead, it should learn from the successful experiences of other players in the field — especially Google and Salesforce.com — and make extensive use of open-source technologies, for the database, the application server, and the web services stack. Also, it should rely on a network of third-party vendors for providing a rich set of Office 2.0 user interfaces that will drive end user adoption.

Such a program is virtually impossible to run internally, for it would face too much opposition, from too many stakeholders. Instead, it should be developed through a semi-independent entity. Of course, similar initiatives have been met with mixed results in the past, but it should not prevent SAP from giving it another shot. Quite frankly, there is not much to loose, and a lot to gain here. I write semi-independent, because one critical success factor would be to get access to functional IP, especially with respect to financial applications. Through the development of Business One, A1S, and mySAP, SAP AG has accumulated a unique expertise that would give an SAP-funded spin-off a truly unfair advantage on the market.

At the time of writing, SAP is going through a major transition, prompted by a series of unrelated events that have created both formidable challenges and fantastic opportunities. There is no way to tell which direction the company will go, but one thing is clear to me: the company has extraordinary assets that could be leveraged for developing a truly game-changing platform, and I find such a prospect quite exciting.

Salesforce.com’s marketing team is good at highlighting the large number of applications that have been deployed on the AppExchange (more than 500 to date), or some success stories about customers using them. What is missing from the picture though is the success that third-party developers are getting in signing new paying customers, using the AppExchange as a cost-effective sales channel.

If you are in the process of developing a business plan for your Office 2.0 startup, the Salesforce.com ecosystem might not be that impressive to you. With “only” 29,800 customers and 646,000 subscribers, it’s no match to the mind-boggling 450,000,000 users of Microsoft Office. But don’t get fooled: these 646,000 users are as close to a qualified prospect as you’ll ever be able to find without spending massive amounts of marketing dollars. The reasons for this are pretty simple: they already bought into the concept of Software as a Service, they are not afraid of putting their most mission critical business data in the hands of a third-party, and they are paying a meaningful amount of money for it. In other words, they are your low hanging fruits.

There is more than anecdotal evidence to prove that the model is working for a new breed of SaaS vendors, but some examples might help paint a clear picture. Two vendors that I am quite familiar with, EchoSign and Koral, each managed to sign tens of paying customers through the AppExchange in less than six month. Xcellery, which launched less than a year ago, signed their first customer last December, and got their first AppExchange customer this week. By any measure, this is fast.

So my advice to you is the following: if you’re developing an Office 2.0 application that could add value to the Salesforce.com platform, make sure to join the AppExchange sooner rather than later. This will encourage you to architect your application with open APIs in such a way that you can integrate it with third-party solutions, this will force you to focus on your core value proposition rather than developing yet another jack-of-all-trades that nobody really needs, and this might help you get your first couple of paying customers, before you bring any sales and marketing staff on board.

According to Salesforce.com, AppSpace is built on the Apex platform, supports powerful capabilities like embedded mash-ups, custom tabs and objects, and workflow, enabling any company to quickly tailor its own unique customer experience.

I like the concept very much, and could see myself using it for developing a fairly advanced conference management application that I could use for the next edition of the Office 2.0 Conference. Unfortunately, AppSpace is currently priced at $995 per month, with a limit of 200 public users. I expect between 500 and 750 participants for the conference, which means that I would have to pay something in the range of $2,000 per month in order to use AppSpace. Between this and the free Event Wax, which also support payment (AppSpace does not at this point), the choice is all to easy: I will have to go for Event Wax, and wait for them to develop an API that would allow me to integrate it with Salesforce.com.

To be fair, I might not be representative of the Salesforce.com user base. With 29,800 customers and 646,000 subscribers, the average Salesforce.com customer has 22 users, while I’m the sole user of my personal Salesforce.com instance. Nevertheless, if we assume that most customers are using the team edition priced at $65 per user and per month, their monthly bill is $1,430. Adding the AppSpace option means that their bill will go up 70%. I must believe that such a sticker shock will convince most potential users to look for alternatives, and that’s too bad.

As mentioned in this past article, Salesforce.com is trying to build a platform, and as such must lower any possible barrier to adoption, especially when trying to get developers on board. Apex and AppSpace are directly targeted at developers, yet the pricing defined for AppSpace makes it look like its actually targeted at the business user who selected Salesforce.com at first place — a Vice President of Sales usually. This might work for Salesforce.com’s larger customers, but for smaller users like myself, it just does not. Note to Marc: please revise your pricing.