Answer My Query

At this point in my career as my role as a manager matures and I prepare for a role in senior management, when my own perspective and roles have very tangibly changed recently, it's interesting to reflect back on how...

Jigsaw, which thought about Wall Street, has taken the way more sensible route and has sold out to salesforce.com for $142 million in cash plus a 10% earn-out. Almost all of its 140 people will be offered jobs including its CEO Jim Fowler, universally known simply as Fowler, and Jigsaw run as a free-standing subsidiary with its brand intact. Jigsaw, the so-called data-as-a-service company that’s shown what you can do with just the lead-generating information on a business card – making it an obvious mate for salesforce – expects to do $25 million-$30 million this year. It’s been cash flow positive for years and got there on three rounds totaling only $18 million.

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First, I want to stake a claim here that CloudFucius (TM) is mine and I have started the copyright process. :-) I googled and did a copyright search for ‘Cloudfucius’ and absolutely nothing gets returned, which actually surprised me. ‘Cloud-fucius’ returns a bunch of ‘fucius’ stuff so I figured it’s good to take. If you do have any rights, speak up now. While I am well versed with the security stories, I can admit I’m no cloud super-expert; knowledgeable but certainly not to the level of MacVittie, Ness and the rest. While weaving in what I do know, I was thinking of investigating a bunch of cloud topics that I’m not an expert on, learn along the way and report on it. Education for all and playing off the fact that Confucius=wisdom. Hopefully CloudFucius will teach us something along the way. He’ll start next week with some easy doctrines like, CloudFucius Says: AAA Important to Cloud and in later weeks move into other areas like, CloudFucius Says: Secure Cloud is Possible.

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But Lori, what about SaaS (Software as a Service)? That’s cloud computing. Business users tap into that, don’t they? No, no they don’t. They tap into the software – that’s why it’s called Software as a Service and not Cloud Computing as a Service. The SaaS model also requires, necessarily, that the business processes and functions of the software being offered are highly commoditized across a wide variety of industries or at a minimum can be easily configured to support varying workflow processes. CRM. SFA. E-mail. Document management. HR. Payroll. These types of applications are sufficiently consistent in data schemas, workflows, and terminology across industries to make them a viable SaaS solution. Other applications? Likely not simply because they require much more customization and integration; work that isn’t going to be accomplished by business users – not at the implementation level, at least.

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So we talked about some of the challenges – and hence opportunities – faced by Cloud Providers. Last time we talked about Trust, and how important Trust is for business relationships. Trust is already difficult in pretty straightforward environments, but in the context of Clouds, it can become very fuzzy… Read on.

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