Why Amazon and Salesforce are pulling away from the cloud pack

  In 2011, I predicted Microsoft and Google were poised to own the cloud computing market in the next decade. Eighteen months later, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com seem like the ones that really have what it takes to dominate over the long haul.

photo: Shutterstock / Neale Cousland

In early 2011, I wrote a blog post about who I thought would be dominant cloud computing players 10 years from then. In that post, I argued that the breadth of offerings from Microsoft and Google put them in position to own large parts of future IT markets. But much has changed since then. I think two cloud providers — Amazon Web Services and Salesofrce.com — have begun to pull away from the pack, and I’m ready to admit I didn’t give these two companies their due.
To understand why are they beginning to lap the field, it is important to understand what has been successful in cloud computing to date, and what hasn’t been successful (or at least not yet).

Market dynamics create the opportunity

Despite several years of basic cloud services being available, and a small explosion of different services and business models, success in the cloud has been somewhat limited to a few areas. Software as a service has been surprisingly (to some) successful, but mostly for task-specific consumer applications, or for contextual (i.e., non-differentiated) business applications.
The other successful service market, infrastructure as a service, only has two application classes that are really successful: large-scale web applications and data analysis/processing. The mass migration of legacy transactional applications to IaaS has yet to really take hold, if it ever will. For the most part, the economic advantages for IaaS really still belong to apps that have dynamic natures — either fixed execution timeframes (e.g., data processing) or variable load (e.g., web apps).
Platform as a service, while showing real promise, is not being used at nearly the scale of these other two categories. I would contend, as well, that the most successful platforms will either run the types of applications that are already successful on IaaS, or be “attached” to SaaS applications in order to extend, enhance and integrate those offerings.
Thus, when it comes to PaaS, I think the biggest beneficiaries of its eventual success — which is likely, but not guaranteed — are the same two companies I believe are pulling away today.

Why Amazon Web Services?

I almost feel silly calling out Amazon today, as today its dominance seems so obvious. But 18 months ago, while it was definitely the visionary among the IaaS offerings (as I noted in a follow-up post), it hadn’t really stepped into the era of offering services that competitors couldn’t match within 12 to 18 months (assuming those competitors had the vision to do so).
What is so disappointing, however, is that none of Amazon’s competitors really took the challenge. While many focused on EC2 (compute), some on S3 (object storage) and a few on RDS (relational database) or SimpleDB (key/value storage), none understood the total package that Amazon was providing. What sets Amazon apart are things like reserved instances, a spot market for unused capacity, an integrated management console, and an overall focus on what customers need today to build and run the applications that make cloud valuable.
Yes, I believe Microsoft has some competitive capability, but it is, for now, focused on  features and services it can sell to developers piecemeal. Amazon started this way, but I believe James Hamilton and others helped Amazon determine early on that the real financial market in cloud happens in operations, not development. Amazon’s spot and reserved instance markets are examples. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have grasped it … yet.
Google, too, has the scale to compete with Amazon, but I don’t see it scrambling to address operational needs. Where is the unified console for operating and monitoring all the Google services an IT team is using? How about additional services around application deployment, configuration and monitoring? Google has promise, but it also has a way to go.
All in all, nobody has put the package together that Amazon has for the new computer utility market (as my friend Simon Wardley would call it).

Why Salesforce.com?

The thesis of my earlier post was the idea that the eventual cloud winners would offer emerging businesses completely integrated, but “mixable,” sets of IT capability on demand from a single service interface. While I expected Microsoft and Google to be the leaders in that space (and they still could be in eight years), the current leader appears to be Salesforce.com.
Sadagopan Singam has a great post outlining his thoughts about the recent Dreamforce conference put on by the SaaS leader. He calls the company an “enterprise nerve center” that can let all parts of an organization work in tandem to respond to business needs.
What Salesforce is doing so well is combining the core functions of business and the social interactions with customers, partners, and within the organization itself. So, as work gets created, moves through the company, and results in deliverables and/or revenue, Salesforce can automate key elements, coordinate the human aspects, and measure and analyze it all.
This is disruptive stuff. Most existing enterprise software companies drive business by moving documents around and relying on humans to handle their own communications around those documents. This is slowly changing (and is not, frankly, my area of expertise), but you can see a distinct difference in the language used by Salesforce, and that of Microsoft or Google.
Microsoft can certainly give Salesforce a run for its money here, assuming Redmond can overcome the internal inertia and politics involved in realigning products in such a fundamental way. The same is true of Oracle. Google is largely a no-show in this respect, in my opinion, as anything other than productivity apps seems outside its comfort zone.
But Salesforce still has a long way to go in subverting the existing relationships, technologies, processes and cultures that legacy vendors have established. It’s not just that its software has to be better, it also has the challenge of convincing more IT organizations that SaaS is the way to go when upgrading or replacing legacy applications. However, Salesforce has met that challenge often in the last decade.

Is it game over in the cloud?

I am unwilling to say these companies have locked down the future of cloud computing, but both have engaged in what economist Brian Arthur once called “The Law of Increasing Returns.” Now that they’ve established some advantage, they are going to start attracting more and more of the IT ecosystem in a positive feedback loop that drives more market share back to them.
As to companies that can disrupt (or at least blunt) their bright futures, keep an eye on Microsoft. If it can complete the work it’s doing on changing its internal mindset and stop thinking as a product company first and a service company second, Microsoft will begin to make great strides in integrating its formidable portfolio.
The rest of the cloud computing market lines up in one category or another, but no company has yet to show signs of significant disruption except in niche areas. There are also myriad disruptive startups in the cloud computing space, although the pace of that disruption will continue to be slow and steady. Many established IT companies are only now realizing the time and effort it to address this opportunity before it’s too late.
In the meantime, I want to leave you with one last scary thought about Amazon. In the last few weeks, it has announced its Glacier archiving service and a marketplace for selling unused reserved instances. It also has its first major conference coming up in November. If it announced those two important services now, I wonder what Amazon is waiting to announce at the conference …

• By James Urquhart
• courtesy:http://gigaom.com 

Top 3 Successful College Drop-outs

 

Henry Ford is the first successful college dropout with a net worth of $188 billion. At the age of 16 he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist. Ford always had a passion for mechanical devices. One of his first jobs was being a watch repair man, which he self-taught himself. Ford’s engineering career didn’t begin until he was 28 when he became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. Within three years he was promoted to Chief Engineer which gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. Within another three years of his experiments Ford completed his first self-propelled vehicle, the Quadricycle. After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The company only produced a few cars a day, but in 1908 Ford introduced the Model T, which initiated a new era in personal transportation. What Ford did next revolutionized automobile production and made him the face of American automobiles. In 1913 Ford invented the continuous moving assembly line. The concept of manufacturing cars on an assembly line made Henry Ford one of the most successful Americans of all time.

Bill Gates is the second successful college dropout with a net worth of $59 billion. Gates first fell in love with computers and computer programming at the age of 13 when he was first introduced to the ASR-33 teletype terminal General Electric computer. At the age of 13 Gates also wrote his first computer program, which was a tic-tac-toe implementation that allowed users to play games against the computer. Later Gates was introduced to the system, PDP-10 belonging to the company Computer Center Corporation (CCC), who ended up banning Gates and three other students from their system because of them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time. At the end of the four year ban, CCC hired the four students to help find bugs in their software in exchange for computer time. While Gates spent his time at CCC he studied source code for various programs, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. Eventually CCC went out of business and Gates moved on to another company where he wrote one of his first large programs. As an employee at Information Sciences Inc. Gates wrote a program to schedule students’ classes for his high school, which first started to demonstrate his ability as a computer programmer. At age 17, Gates formed a venture with one of his friends Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In 1973 Gates graduated from Lakeside School with an SAT score of 1590. He then enrolled into Harvard with no definite study plan. In 1974 he dropped out of Harvard to pursue his computer software company, by 1975 him and Allen formed Microsoft. The rest is history.

Larry Ellison is the third successful college drop out with a net worth of $27 billion. Ellison had a rough childhood; he was born to an unwed mother, who gave him to Ellison’s aunt and uncle to raise. At nine months old, Ellison was officially adopted by his aunt and uncle. He did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48 years old and still to this day he does not know the identity of his father. In 1959, Ellison and his family moved to South Shore, Chicago, where he finished up his high school education. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he eventually dropped out after his second semester because of his mother’s death. The next year he attended the University of Chicago for one term where he was introduced to computer design. At the age of 20 he moved to northern California and eventually started to work for Ampex Corporation, where his first project was a database for the CIA, which he named “Oracle”. Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems. In 1977 Ellison founded Oracle, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratoires. In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc. and then finally renamed to its present name Oracle.

The above three men all defied the cliché of attending college to become a successful individual. Ford falling in love with mechanics at the age of 16, Gates falling in love with programming at the of 13, and Ellison falling in love with computer design and database relationships at the age of 20, they all found their passion at a different age, yet they all were determined to make their passions a success story, without a college education. Although college is a vital step in individuals’ development towards success and is supported with data, there are some special cases where talent and determination takes precedents in success

PREMALATHA PANNEERSELVAM,A LADY TO FOLLOW

Bringing out the best in every child 

 

She retains her smile amidst the cacophonic crowd of students falling all over her in order to get into the frame. She retains her motherly care when more than a dozen students do not go home during Deepavali and Pongal holidays but stay back in her house and she pampers them with new dresses, sweets and gifts.

She retains her cool confidence in plain cotton saris at glittering wedding functions and formal official high-profile meetings with equal ease. She retains her simplicity despite being at the helm of the Mahatma chain of schools, started by her a quarter Century ago.

Premalatha Panneerselvam is no unfamiliar name in thousands of homes in Madurai. And over the years, this Senior Principal, Secretary and Correspondent of Mahatma Schools has gained the trust of parents in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada and the Gulf who have placed their ward’s future in her hands.

“Blame it on destiny,” she quips with a gentle smile.

Mahatma Gandhi’s photos adorn the walls of her large officious room. A big red bindi on her forehead is the only make-up she wears. “At 17 also I was like this, how can I change at 57 now,” declares the winner of multiple “Best Teacher” Awards.

After completing her B.A from Sarah Tucker College, Palayamkottai, she came to Temple town Madurai 35 years ago, seeking admission in Fatima College.

“I wanted to study further and this institution on Bypass Road was a tad closer to my native village near Sivakasi than any other college in the city. But fate took me to Thiagarajar Arts College for a Post-Graduate course in Economics as per the University allotment,” she still holds back the ‘secret’ and then suddenly catches me unawares by blurting out: “Actually that is where I met Panneerselvam.”

The two obviously vibed well and by the time she finished her course, she also stepped into an inter-caste marriage.

“God charted out my life at every turn. Though ancestrally ours is a Tuticorin-based agri family, it also has many professionals including teachers, politicians, bureaucrats and freedom fighters. From childhood, this gave me an exposure to the outside world and the confidence to do whatever I wanted to.”

And what did she dream of doing? “I wanted to become a bureaucrat after my maternal uncle and work towards uplift of society in general. I was always driven by the urge to do something different.”

Post-marriage, her husband, a voracious reader of philosophy and religion initiated her into Gandhism while on the insistence of her father-in-law E.Rm.E.Rengasamy, Rotarian, social worker and the founder of the Yadava College, she agreed to straightaway join as Headmistress of Rotary Laharry School in 1974 sans experience.

“I owe a lot to Mrs.Vasantha Jawahar, the school Correspondent. If she had not trusted my ability, nobody would have known me in the field of education today.”

In 1979 Mrs.Premalatha moved on to S.D.H Jain Vidyalaya as its Principal for two years before joining the Arulmigu Meenakshi Sundareswarar Girls HSS as a P.G.Assistant for the next four years.

It was during these years, her friend and educationist Mrs.Lalit Malhotra coaxed her into Montessori programme and sowed the seeds of starting her own school.

“I was already motivated by Mahatma Gandhi who valued children and was deeply concerned about their education in the early formative years. He strongly decried stuffing their minds and instead propagated that basis of education should ensure the cultivation of the hearts of the young and stimulate and develop them,” Mrs.Premalatha narrates.

With her Montessori training matching this idea and an ever-supportive husband backing her dream project, Premalatha started the Mahatma Montessori School from rented premises at Anna Nagar with 32 students and six staff members in 1983.

Today, the school functions from K.K.Nagar with 3,000 plus children and 250 staffers. But it is the first batch of 32 that she holds dear to her heart. “The parents placed their faith in me and the students did not let me down. This is my biggest achievement,” she asserts.

“The purpose of education is to bring out the best in every child. Like Gandhiji said, my aim is to develop in the child his hands, brain and soul and invigorate the creative spirit and make it productive materially and aesthetically.”

“Looking back I realize when I used to walk six kms up and down for my High School in Poovanathapuram, how effective was the old style teaching. My village teacher started geography with the neighbourhood fields which I used to cross daily, arithmetic with counting all our little possessions in the school bags, history round our local place and religious thoughts through the lives of local saints. This simple technique gave us the real experience because children relate best to things that are close and familiar. Dry and abstract lessons only make a farce of teaching process.”

It had taken fraction of a second for Premalatha to decide the name of her first school. “Mahatma Montessori was a perfect amalgamation of the East and the West, where we aim to elevate every soul (atma) into a great soul (mahatma) through education in which knowledge, action and feelings are evenly balanced.” With such a philosophy deeply embedded in her heart and sheer hard work, “growth” was the only reward that effortlessly came Premalatha’s way. Today, she mothers nearly 8,500 students and 800 teachers.

“My schools have a broad spectrum of entrants. You will find an autowallah’s child to a bureaucrat’s. I never enquire about a child’s caste or religion,” she says, elaborating on the “wholesome education” comprising academics, sports values, nature and culture, offered in her schools.

It is not only the infrastructure or the curricula but also Premalatha’s guts to try the unconventional with the parents’ confidence in her intact that set her apart. For instance, she introduced ‘Paramapadam and Pallanguzhi’ to teach simple mathematics to complex concepts like fractions, integers, and even probability to children between the first and the eighth grade. She has done away with exams till Middle School and does not permit writing till a child turns five.

She chooses to experiment regularly and with much success. She is the constant driving force behind conducting varied, innovative and regular workshops and training programmes for students, children and parents alike for the betterment of all.

A good storyteller and an avid reader of books on managerial skills and success stories of great people, Premalatha’s desire is to take the Montessori education to the masses.

A believer in Fine Arts, a learner and lover of Carnatic music, a staunch devotee of Puttaparthi Sai Baba, she says her journey in life continues to be the same as it was when she started off. Even today she works equally hard from 5.30 a.m. to midnight, visiting each of her school daily, taking classes, attending meetings, entertaining visitors, meeting happy and aggrieved parents.

Inside her fit and small framework, she is an astounding bundle of energy, who loves to walk, sing bhajans, play with her grandchildren, cook for her family and friends…If at all she has any complaint, it is against time.

FACTFILE

Started a residential school in sprawling 45 acres in Alagar Koil with 260 students and 24 teachers in 1992. Today, the school has 815 students on roll and 112 staffers.

Started her third school in Gopalakrishnan Nagar in 2005 with 1482 students. Today, its strength has risen to 3,160.

Last summer started Mahatma CBSE School with 1,168 students.

Received Jeycees Outstanding Young Person Award 1992

Vocational Excellence Award 1996-97, Rotary Club of North-West Madurai

Dr.Radhakrishnan Award for the Best Teacher, Tamil Nadu Government 2001

Best Teacher Award, from Lions and Rotary Club Madurai 2001

For the Sake of Honour Award, Rotary Club Madurai Metro 2003

Best Administrator Award, 2007-08, STRI, a social organisation

Mahatma group of schools has also received the Best School of Award several times from different organisations.

The British Council International School Award — for introducing and developing the idea of internationalism in school curriculum — has been accredited to Mahatma School, K.K.Nagar, from June 2008 to March 2011 and to Mahatma Baba Building from June 2009 to March 2012.

The Alagar Koil residential school is working for the same award for the next academic year.

Former President Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam presided over the school’s silver jubilee celebrations last October and the day is described as a historic and memorable day by all those associated with the school.

For 18 consecutive years including 2009, Mahatma School has won the shield for best overall performance in art and craft competitions conducted by Asian Paints every 15th August 

COURTESY: HINDU