One of these big areas of opportunity is in single sign on. As organizations, and the workers within those organizations move to using a wider variety of applications, they are looking for solutions that ease the pain they feel around authentication and provisioning. IT is also searching for solutions that reduce the tedium and low value work involved in rolling out solutions to users.

One vendor working hard on building significance in this identity and access management space is OneLogin – I’ve written about them a bunch in the past. I took the opportunity recently to spend some time talking with company founder Thomas Pederson for an update into the business.

Pedersen was quick to boast about the success that OneLogin is having in the marketplace – they’re seeing a number of customer sign on with 10k plus users. While the sweet spot that Pederson sees for identity vendors is in the over 150 user bracket – OneLogin is actively moving up the food chain somewhat – they’ve recently won deals for Steelcase, a furniture maker with over 35000 users, as well as a variety of customers in the tens of thousands of users category.

OneLogin has also recently open sources a SAML toolkit and they’re seeing significant take up of this from new SaaS startups that are enjoying being able to offer backwards integration into directory services. Of course the win for OneLogin is that if a startup uses their SAML toolkit, they are well poised to easily integrate with OneLogin itself – and one important aspect of the opportunity for identity vendors is that the larger the number of applications they integrate with, the easier it is to convert customers.

OneLogin has also introduced a free plan that gives companies the ability to use the product free across three different apps. I put it to Pedersen that the three app limit is fairly tight and that most prospects would use a far higher number of apps than this – however he rightly pointed out that many of those customers will use Google Apps and at a later date will add other SaaS applications. It’s also the case that Google Apps users can leverage the Google Apps Marketplace and the SSO offering it has so in a round about way the three application limit on the free plan makes sense..

OneLogin has recently introduced modules for a number of additional applications, including Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and Jira/Confluence from Atlassian – again the integration with these applications just increases the proposition for the product. Alongside this a new reporting engine is proving popular with customers to give visibility into the use of different applications and the like.

The cloud SSO space is an interesting one to watch – I predict there will be significant consolidation in the space over the next year or two as large traditional vendors acquire startups to build out their own portfolios. OneLogin is well placed in all of this and I’m looking forward to seeing them grow in the months and years ahead.

Given this background, it’s interesting to hear of Zuora’s announced partnership with FinancialForce, Intacct and Sage – seeing it now embedded in all the major mid-sized accounting products. It’s an interesting move and one which sees Zuora take a subtle shift to more of a best-of-breed rather than a suite approach.

Previously Zuora had announced a partnership with NetSuite – since that time NetSuite has started talking about its own offerings in the subscription and billing space. It is no coincidence then that these announcements are all coming on the day before NetSuite’s global conference, SuiteWorld. No coincidence also that Zuora is not sponsoring SuiteWorld – if you sense a subtle parting of the ways there you’re probably not far from the truth. This marks a conscious shift for Zuora who is now talking about a best of breed approach and moving away from the “one suite to rule them all” message that NetSuite prefers. If there was any doubt about the significance of both the timing and the messaging of this news, Zuora clarified that by including a covering note from CEO Tien Tzuo in which he writes “…finance departments and CFOs look to retool their companies for the subscription economy, they want best of breed” – fighting words indeed.

With this move, Zuora is integrated into FinancialForce, Intacct, Sage, Workday and NetSuite – their aim is to help CFOs, no matter what financial software they use, navigate the growing importance of the subscription economy. Zuora’s net position is that financial systems cannot cope with the complexity of modern commerce, specifically the dynamic nature of;

• Pricing offering customers multiple price plans, bundles with one-time, recurring and usage fees, and pay-as-you-go pricing;
• Relationship commerce for the ongoing subscription lifecycle which includes the initial order, change orders, add-ons and renewals;
• Automated subscription billing and payments high volume for B2C businesses or more complex B2B businesses; and
• Forward-looking subscription metrics to forecast future revenues and growth.

If the messaging from Zuora itself wasn’t strong enough, the CEO of Intacct, Robert Reid, came out with the announcement with both guns blazing in NetSuite’s direction saying;

Our alliance and this new framework enable joint customers to realize  the true value of Zuora and Intacct together. This is a perfect example of how cloud
computing makes it easier for companies to select integrated best-of-breed systems like Intacct and Zuora, instead of being forced into a suite of average products from one
vendor

While there is much that goes on this space that can be simply put down to positioning and maketing, the fact that with this announcement Zuora is integrated into all the financial systems that matter is another indication that they are becoming the vendor of choice. While it is true that everyone in this space has a different focus (Vindicia for example is well ingrained in gaming), Zuora is rapidly becoming the de facto standard – a position that sets them up well for strategic moves (either an IPO or trade sale) in the short to medium term.

Today’s news sees users of these development platforms able to utilize a low-touch, high availability and scalability database service alongside their application. The integration sees a one-click implementation to add the database onto their applications and this creates a MySQL compatible database that can readily be connected to their app. The integration is the next logical step for Xeround who are already integrated with Heroku and EngineYard as well as with infrastructure services from AWS, Rackspace and HP.

Xeround’s add-on on AppHarbor is available in Xeround’s FREE, BASIC and PRO plans as an end-to-end solution for developing MySQL applications in the cloud. PHP Fog users will initially only be offered in the FREE version, soon to expand to additional plans to enable automatic scaling and more robust features.

MyPOV

Database as a service is a logical step for those building and deploying applications in the cloud but it’s fair to say that DBaaS has been a late bloomer, possibly because database is a more complex and specific functional area. Recent moves from AWS to provide DBaaS services via their Relational Database Service (RDS), and the general move from Azure in this space validate the proposition. Xeround was an early entrant into the DBaaS space and their aggressive strategy in terms of broad integrations stands them in good stead as more developers look to leverage DBaaS.

Interestingly enough, AWS last week announced support for Microsoft SQL surver for RDS, joining the MySQL and Oracle databases they already supported.

While many developers, particularly those using AWS and Azure, will chose to use native DBaaS from those vendors, customers of other vendors will look to use the deep integrations from third party DBaaS providers.

in the increasing move towards marketplaces for add-on services, Xeround’s strategy of integrating broadly and being a neutral party should prove a smart one. While there is much consolidation to come, and potentially these small providers could be gobbled up by larger platform vendors, Xeround has potential continuing along its current strategy.

MuleSoft provides a number of integration products that tie together both SaaS and on-premise applications. MuleSoft is delivered as a packaged integration experience and they boast of production usage by Walmart, MasterCard, Nokia, Nestlé and Honeywell, and integrations with SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Workday, Intuit and Zuora.  Their on-premise product has 3200 customers and possibly more interestingly they have over 100000 developers as part of their integration community – trying to help join the dots between on-premise and the cloud.

In terms of what this new SaaS edition of the product actually does, features include;

• Graphical data mapping and transformation capabilities – enables SaaS vendors and SIs to build and deploy integration apps without writing custom code by using the Mule Studio drag-and-drop interface
• Connector DevKit – makes it easy to create new cloud connectors in Mule Studio for any public or private Web API
• SaaS Operations Center – provides complete visibility into end user environments with a multi-tenant portal to monitor, manage and maintain integration apps, including:
  • Operational dashboards: deliver better customer support with live integration status and performance metrics
  • Real-time notifications: meet availability requirements and improve service level agreements (SLAs) with immediate notifications for events or performance issues as they occur
  • Proactive alerts: reduce support calls by proactively monitoring and addressing issues before they impact customers

All of which makes sense but the real test is in enabling these integrations to occur as painlessly as possible, this is where I was interested to look at the packaged applications and connectors that MuleSoft is launching along with this release. It’s focus is to enable a variety of integration needs including;

• Data integration and data loading – move batch data and flat files between systems, ensuring correct data formats and field mappings
• API enablement – create and host open REST APIs as composites of legacy APIs (e.g., SOAP) and other data sources
• Process orchestration – integrate and automate business processes that span multiple applications, in the cloud or on-premise
• Composite and mobile applications – create new end-user applications from multiple underlying applications and data sources

Integration apps are prepackaged integrations that MuleSoft provides to automate multi-step processes and data transfers across systems. Integration apps are a way to provide repeatable integration between third party systems. The idea is that by simply switching out the third party application or endpoint and performing some minor configuration and data mapping, SaaS providers using MuleSoft are able to provide prepackaged integration to their customers as part of their product feature set or a simple add-on component. It’s a chance for a vendor to create broad connections to other applications in one fell swoop.

The integration space is reasonably busy with CastIron, Boomi, NextAxiom and SnapLogic all trying to “crack the code” on the integration problem – integration is one of my “big areas” of opportunity and I’m interested to who the winners will be in the space.

When I was last in Texas, I spent an hour or so with the crew from SoftwareAdvice.com who wanted to host a roundtable looking at cloud adoption and some issues around the broader cloud ecosystem. I didn’t realize that the roundtables were actually going to be videoed and so, in my inimitable Kiwi fashion, I turned up to the recording in shorts and a tee shirt – and even forgot to wear a cowboy hat! Anyway, despite the sartorial misadventure it was an interesting session with a good cross section of participants. I was joined by Matt Brace, Senior Engineer at Invodo and Don Fornes, CEO of Software Advice.

In the first video I’m going to write about, we covered common mistakes companies make when considering a move to the cloud and the barriers that still exist to deeper adoption. The video is worth watching but some bullet points of what we covered included;

• Cloud doesn’t mean that organizations can forget about management and control, in fact a move to the cloud makes advance planning all the more important

• There are bandwidth issues for many users that make some cloud tools non-viable

• There are costs that people need to think of beyond the simple cost of service – connectivity, internal networking equipment etc all have their part to play in the economics

• Cloud is about agility more than cost savings – so quit purely focusing on price!

Coming out of the session I was reminded of a few metaphors I often used when talking about cloud adoption. They may be a little clichéd but they’re a great starting point for organization planning their move to the cloud;

• Think of cloud adoption as being like an onion – peel it one layer at a time, don’t try and hit everything in one hit

• Cloud is a sliding wedge – over time adoption will grow higher as more organizations realize the benefits that cloud can bring

• Cloud may not be for everything, but it’s likely for everyone

It was an interesting session and gives some good advice to people beginning, or continuing their journey into the cloud.

FlashPanel is an enhanced management overlay for Google Apps domain administrators designed to give a higher level of granular control and visibility. FlashPanel includes;

• Domain management from one dashboard: access to domain vitals including users, groups and organizational units, as well as Google Docs quota usage and a chart profiling active, suspended and unused seats

• Granular management and shared contacts: Domain administrators can use FlashPanel for tasks like adding users to new groups or OUs, group creation, and shared contact sync with mobile devices
• End-user tools: Email signature standardization and ‘Apps Butler,’ which users enable via Google Chat, retrieves company directory contact information on-demand

• Reporting, surveillance and user on-boarding: Scheduled and on-demand scans for domain stats and email inbox monitoring
• BetterCloud Gets $2.2M to Make Google Apps Safer, Easier to Manage

BetterCloud founder David Politis wrote a recent article for Mashable in which he described the generation of young people who have, in his words, “Grown up Google”. He extrapolated this fact further to suggest that it marks the end of legacy messaging systems and called out some statistics that show a less than stellar desire for organizations and especially users to move to Office365.

While it is true that Google has the early lead in cloud office productivity, it’s too early to say that lead is insurmountable. That said, BetterCloud is firmly positioning itself as a company with a series of products that are all features of Google Apps – over time we’ll see Google themselves and other Google channel partners like CloudSherpas and Appirio, but these sorts of companies to roll the functionality into some of their own offerings.

This week’s contribution comes from Zyrion, a Cloud and IT monitoring vendor who has released their predictive analytics capabilities for the monitoring of distributed clouds and infrastructure. The core premise is sound – more and more organizations are moving to a broad heterogeneous IT infrastructure setup – in doing so they want to get monitoring visibility across all of their kit. Add to that the promise that these solutions will use machine learning to identify patterns and you have a proposition that promises the holy grail – continuous improvement and ever increasing fine identification of performance degradation. The premise goes that IT infrastructure, once fairly static in nature, is now becoming ever-more dynamic – monitoring platforms need to keep up with this shift.

This launch follows last year’s launch of the Zyrion ‘Data Capture and Processing’ module for seamless monitoring of Cloud technologies,and the 2011 release of the ‘Automation’ module. This third phase of Zyrion’s self-titled “platform evolution” aims to deliver features aimed at reducing false alarms using predictive analytics in IT environments.

Specific features in Zyrion’s predictive analytics module includes:

• Behavioral Pattern Analysis: Automatically determine the behavior of any and all IT components by analyzing the performance metrics for time of day and day of week behavior over any given period of time
• Flexible Baselining based on Behavioral Pattern: Administrators have the flexibility to adjust the calculated baseline behavior using any statistical calculations of mean, peak or 95th percentiles
• Composite Thresholds: Allows creating composite Service Metrics for any IT service and modeling the behavior of this Composite Service Container metric

The proposition is sound – especially when one looks beyond the buzzwords! Heterogeneous IT monitoring is one of the big overarching themes I see coming to prominence over the next few years – while there’s a lot of players in the space, and some will obviously fall by the wayside, those who knuckle down and deliver on the promise look set to capture a big opportunity.

I promised a look back to last year’s event so here goes. Broadly speaking the highlights for me were;

• The announcement of a partnership with Yammer to embed social into NetSuite
• The demoing of an impressive manufacturing offering built on top of NetSuite
• A maturing ecosystem growing up around the company
• Lots of customer success stories, the ultimate proof points

So, on to SuiteWorld 2012. Here’s what I want to see;

More Social Success Stories

White SuiteSocial was announced last year, I’m yet to hear the really compelling customer success stories about how it’s enabling better business. AT Salesforce’s DreamForce conference last year we all heard the CEO of Burberry was poetic about what Social Enterprise generally, and Chatter in particular, are doing for her business. Attendees at SuiteWorld need to hear a similarly compelling customer story for NetSuite’s social initiative if they’re not to lose mindshare to other vendors. Not only salesforce with Chatter but also Workday and Infor going social and more recently SAP, after acquiring the HCM provider, offering its Jam social collaboration platform to SuccessFactors customers.

More Platform

PaaS is the future of the cloud and in my view it comes in two flavors. Developer PaaS, typified by Heroku, that is aimed at enabling developers to deploy apps more easily and Business PaaS, typified by force.com which is more about giving business users the ability to highly customize point applications. Again it’s probably fair to say that salesforce has stolen a march on NetSuite, force.com is the most mature business-centric platform and again I’d be looking to see some announcements from NetSuite that show it’s strongly pushing its own platform as the place for business users to build their applications and tie them in to their NetSuite financial and customer data.

More Financial Roll Ups Stories

NetSuite has long been talking a two tier ERP notion with NetSuite taking the role of ERP for divisions or business units and more traditional players doing the corporate roll-ups. While that makes sense as a market entry message, in the past twelve months we started to hear more about NetSuite being used across the entire organization. I’m expecting to hear more about this and perhaps even some product launches that meet the needs of the largest corporate finance divisions, thus enabling NetSuite to hammer another nail into SAP.

A Compelling Mid-Sized Business Story

Last year I made specific mention of NetSuite moving up the food chain saying that;

While some might bemoan the shift in focus (NetSuite calls it a broadening of focus but I’m not convinced) away from SMBs and up the food chain, we can see that into the void comes innovative companies building offerings on top of the core NetSuite engine. Witness JCurve in Australia building a product that very much targets micro and small businesses – if NetSuite can replicate this sort of partnership elsewhere in the world, they look set to truly deliver on the promise of a consistent solution from the smallest, right up to some of the largest businesses.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see NetSuite broaden the JCurve initiative elsewhere, they could acquire JCurve and roll it out globally as an independent business unit or simply strong-arm and support JCurve to branch out themselves. Either way it makes perfect sense for NetSuite to own not only it’s current but also its future customers, a product aimed at mid-sized customers will do that.

A Complete Outlier

I’ve been saying for years that Larry Ellison should simply formalize the fact and acquire NetSuite outright – eh already has a significant shareholding and now that he’s no longer pouring scorn on all things cloud it makes even more sense. While it’d be a surprise to see it announced at SuiteWorld, I still think that at some point in the next couple of years we’ll see Oracle acquire the company outright.

Bring It On

SuiteWorld is always a fun event, characterized by some great conversations, some awesome wine and food and me wearing a suit for an unheard of three days running. It will be interesting to see how this year’s event differs from previous incarnations.

Disclosure – NetSuite comped my travel and expenses to attend SuiteWorld

News today of yet another partnership for SaaS subscription and billing provider Zuora – this time they’re signing up Citrix as a customer with Zuora powering the subscription and billing parts of Citrix’ CloudPortal Services Manager. The deal is essentially a simple one, Citrix wants to provide cloud tools to service providers who can then on-sell them to end users. An important part of the package that services providers need is the ability to meter and bill customers in different ways – some service providers might be bundling cloud with other products or services and they’ll all have different ideas about a pricing and subscription strategy that works for them.

This integration is touted as providing a tightly coupled and hence low friction way for service providers to tie their service provision tools to their revenue management tools

MyPOV

Hardly a day goes by without Zuora announcing some kind of partnership. I’ve reflected on this fact in the past.While more cynical souls would claim that it’s yet another example of PR by partnership, beyond that it does speak to a deeper need and market opportunity. Make no mistake – there is an increasing trend towards companies wanting to offer their products and services in different ways. The old style of license fee + maintenance no longer works, rather we’re in a space of usage, monthly, value added, incremental, add on products and a million and one other billing models.

I’m less excited by the announcement as a partnership per se, than by the fact that it indicates, yet again that vendors are realizing that new ways of doing business are a non-negotiable requirement. That’s a massive validation for what Zuora and its competitors (a rapidly growing list) are offering – Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo has long waxed poetic about the coming “subscription economy” – deals like this one validate that viewpoint.

2Degrees is a mobile carrier in New Zealand that is trying to break the back of the two well entrenched incumbents – Vodafone and Telecom. Their approach is to be agile, to rapidly iterate products and services and in doing so to be able to closely respond to the needs and demand of the market.

Snapper is a great company that is on a mission to power the cashless society. By way of their now ubiquitous (at least in New Zealand) cards, they’re allowing people to pay for small purchases – public transport, coffees, movies tickets – without using cash. Quick and easy – that’s Snapper’s story. It also helps when stories surface like the one about the bus driver in New Zealand who recently died after being robbed of his cashbox – the director of the bus company went so far as to admit that a move to a completely cashless paradigm for these sorts of small purchases would help to avoid these tragic occurrences.

Last week these two companies got together top launch Touch2Pay, a neat implementation of existing technologies. Touch2Pay combines the Snapper offering in a mobile application running on a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled mobile. Want to buy a coffee? Just wave your phone at the Café’s cash register. Want to get a bus? Do similarly to the Bus sensor. Want to know your balance, top up your account or buy a bus pass? Do it all from the mobile application on your device.

The video below is a typically understated Kiwi example of what this can do – like I said, nothing technologically revolutionary here, but what it does is take the exciting stuff that the cognoscenti have been talking about for years, and delivers it out to everyday folks – that’s thought leadership for sure!