SaaS – Hype vs reality

With any new idea there is need to establish an identity separate to the existing market and to do this we maximise the separation between established and new.  The hype around this new idea is  focussed on this separation, upon the clear differences.  This is normal and understandable practice, however the reality is that once …

WPF Twitter Clients

I have been using TweetDeck for a while and have nothing against AIR per se, however it is another piece of software that is relatively immature and could bloat my machine.  So on the basis that “like it or lump it I have WPF on my machine already as part of .NET” it would be …

Paris with Microsoft EMEA Communications Team

Interesting few days in Paris this week.  Microsoft’s EMEA Comms team have pulled together a group of specialists in the area of Software plus Services who can provide support to Microsoft Hosting partners in the transition to the wider S+S/SaaS/Cloud/etc agenda.  This is innovatively called the “Business Partner Support Group” 🙂 but mustn’t mock as …

More people have read this Shirt than my Blog

An experiment to see what attracts people to blogs – and maybe while you are here you may actually find some of the articles interesting 🙂

The 2009 Software plus Services challenge for Microsoft

Where we begin: Microsoft have been pushing the hybrid story of on-premise software combined with hosted services for some time now.  Some of this is simply to establish clear space between the Software as a Service “SaaS” and other stories, however to be fair it is probably the right architectural story as witnessed by the …

Discussing S+S with Darren Bibby of IDC

Over the past few months I have been involved with a piece of work that IDC have been delivering to Microsoft around partner evolution in the emerging S+S world.  The output from this is a tool that is available either via the global partner web site (Products and Solutions tab, S+S section) or directly at …

Five point Summary for Microsoft Partner Conference, Houston 2008…..

1. Houston was nowhere near as humid as I had been led to believe, I was walking 10+ blocks in the middle of the day all week and whilst the aircon upon entering the hotel was heaven, I didn’t need to rush to my room and change 2. Having spent 2 years working with Microsoft …

How did it end being July already?

Last time I looked it was May 21st and I was packing my bags to head off to New York for the Software plus Services PAC.  Fast forward and we are mid July with the PAC, lots of hard work (and fun) plus Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference all been and gone.  Looks like it’s going …

Software plus Services Partner Advisory Council

Microsoft PACs (see previous blog for some background) are normally twice a year events (spring and fall), however since the S+S PAC started (originally Live PAC – which shows how things have moved on) there has been an additional S+SPAC slipped in during the run up to Worldwide Partner Conference to help shape and validate …

In the S+S world does the notion of major software releases go out of the window

One of the great challenges with the traditional on-premise software model (whether it be the OS or the applications that run on top) is the development/test/deployment cycle with it’s big bang approach to releases.  The periodic nature of the releases and the scale of change involved means that there are many undesirable side effects: Revenue …