Peter Christy

May the Force be with you!

It was a big month for users' conferences, analyst meetings and reunions. On one side of Moscone was Intel's Developer Forum and on the other SalesForce's DreamForce. IDF was a geek fest, DreamForce something entirely different. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff made good on his promise for a two hour keynote (still nothing like Fidel's 8 hour rants) and delivered a lot of interesting news. SF has renamed their SaaS platform Force.com for one. The platform has in fact become significantly more platformish with the addition of a revisable UI for an application ("Visual Force" not unexpectedly) and the ability to store unstructured (non database) content. Kevin Kettler, Dell CTO, spoke about Dell IdeaStorm, a customer facing website that Dell developed with SalesForce which enables the creation and "promotion" (voting on) of ideas for Dell. Kettler said that IdeaStorm had already (the site has only been up since Febuary) transformed how Dell thinks about product development and greatly accelerated the product conception and planning process. All of this suggests to me that SaaS is going around a very important corner in terms of being mainstream. That impression was reinforced by a couple of non-profit applications that were demonstrated. The first was from the Bronx Lab school and was an application for coordinating teacher/teacher, teacher/parent and teacher/student communications. It's an ideal SF application because it centers on people and relationships. The application is both simple and useful, didn't take long to get going and simple to revise and add to. Palo Alto has a home grown (inferior) server equivalent (InClass). The comparison makes it clear that applications like that should be SaaS implemented from today onward. The second application was called Homeless Connect and had been developed with the City of San Francisco. It provided coordination between all the agencies providing homeless services. Apparently each had their own data system dedicated to providing reports to their funder proving they were doing the right job, but doing nothing for the client. Now all agencies can understand (a) the overall objectives for each client and (b) what each agency is doing for that client. Again the application is simple, useful and readily evolved, and the same conclusion: there are large categories of local government software that should always be built as SaaS going forward. I'm struggling for the right analogy; maybe it's the Excel spreadsheet of today. Over the years amazing and valuable tools have been built on top of Excel, much more rapidly than conventional applications could be built. Maybe we should think of SalesForce as the network analog, now scalable with worldwide access enabled.

Hafnium Rocks Your World!

The latest Intel Developer Forum demonstrated clearly that progress in the world of microprocessors hasn't slowed down. The keynotes are available on the Web, including a great discussion with Gordon Moore who has to be one of the nicest and most thoughtful technology barons the world has ever seen. Over the last couple of years Intel has retrenched back to a company that really focuses on the core computer offerings and that roadmap has lots of life in it that includes continuing architectural improvements to support bigger picture topics like virtualization, the continuing evolution to multi-core architectures as the means of increasing computer power while saving on electric power, the pending integration of high-performance graphics onto the CPU as well as the integration of a lot of standard radio technology. Moore's Law progress won't cease in the next five years for sure. BTW, Hafnium [Hf] is an element that is at the core of Intel's approach to continue to make transistors smaller and smaller.

Cavorting on Biscayne Bay

While everyone else was holding user and analyst fetes at Moscone in San Francisco, Citrix hauled us back to the Key Biscayne Ritz-Carlton near their Florida Mother Ship. We've gotten to know the Citrix team reasonably well since they acquired our NetScaler friends. President and CEO Mark Templeton seems to be one of those guys in the same category as John Chambers -- nice person, people like to work with him while at the same time being a relentless driver for evolution and change. XenSource is the latest Citrix acquisition and the XS team was around to talk about that even though the deal hadn't officially closed. Our earlier analysis of the acquisition hasn't really changed much -- there are no shortage of challenges after you spend $500M of your stockholders' hard-earned money on a company without any real revenues (as e-Bay's Meg Whitman seems to be painfully learning with Skype on an even bigger scale). The XenSource acquisition certainly could make good sense for Citrix and in many ways represents business challenges they can't evade. There aren't a lot of details at the blocking and tackling level yet, but the story line holds our attention.

The Red, White and Black

Our friend Oliver Friedrichs from the Symantec Security response team pointed us at his blog and that in turn pointed at a recent meeting at CMU and an interesting paper he's authored all on the chilling topic about how our various email and Web vulnerabilities can be brought to bear to distort US elections. Given the attention that has been paid to the real but still somewhat obscure notion of tampering with voting machine, this unnerving analysis moves up the food chain and talks about spying on the participants and manipulating the perception of the voter by employing tools like Phishing and Spyware that are unquestionably real. Reading about this stuff makes one think about disconnecting the network and retreating to the woods. Oliver is knowledgeable and hardly an alarmist -- it's worth reading

Poke me!

If you don't know what that means it's because you don't use Facebook. Facebook is interesting because (a) a rumored Microsoft investment would set the market value at over $10B, (b) the user population seems to have broken out of the college and high-school set and (c) Facebook capabilities have exploded because of the ability in integrate external applications. Unlike SalesForce where the core model is adding application modules that run on the Force.com platform, Facebook is very much more Web 2.0 in the sense that most applications run on other Web connected systems. Again, the conclusion seems to be that SaaS is about to take off big time with both SalesForce and Facebook as evidence for the argument. Poke me if you disagree.