Cloud computing and beyond

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the SDForum cloud computing and beyond summit. I joined Trae Chancellor from Force.com, Rajan Sheth from Google Apps, Sanjog Gad from SAP Labs and Praful Shah of RingCentral on a panel moderated by Chris Primesberger of eWeek, talking about the future of cloud computing.

We had a lively discussion, with the most drama coming when an audience member directed a very pointed question to Google and Salesforce about lock-in - the gist of the question was that the ideal behind cloud computing is interoperable standards-based resources available on the Internet, but the Google and Salesforce have come up with proprietary and incompatible development platforms, so if you are a software developer you have to choose one or the other and once you make this decision you are locked in.

My sense is that this is a "missing the forest for the trees" discussion. What Google and Force.com offer are basically highly productive development toolsets that are combined with an operating platform. Like every other development toolset that has ever been created, these have unique features and capabilities that once you use, you are wedded to. I don't see any way to get around this, although I understand what makes developers uncomfortable is that in the cloud world these development tools are also tightly coupled with an operating platform - so you can't yet run Force.com Apex applications on Amazon's cloud infrastructure.

My response to this at the forum was that as a cloud developer you simply have a business decision to make. When you look at the risk and return do you come out ahead by adopting these Platform as a Service offerings and building a relationship with these companies or not? I encouraged the audience to think not just about the technical platform as a service offering but also with the business relationships that come along with it.

At Intacct we have greatly benefited from our relationship with Salesforce and the work we have done on Force.com - but here is where stepping back to look at the whole forest comes in - from our customer's perspective Intacct and the Intacct ecosystem are running in the cloud - and we work very hard to make which underlying platform we are using transparent and irrelevant to our clients. We have worked very hard to combine Salesforce and Intacct so our customers can deploy seamless business processes that span CRM and Financials - regardless of the places in the cloud that our customers, Intacct and Salesforce live in.

This insight - that from the client's perspective the platform for cloud computing has to be the Internet, and not any single development or operating environment - is key. Already, many of our customers are using not just Intacct; they’re using it together with on average four other best-of-breed on-demand applications and cloud services – like Adaptive Planning, ADP, Avalara, Boomi, CompuPay, Google, IBM, LucidEra, Pervasive, QuickArrow, Salesforce and Zuora.

Making this even easier and more transparent is where the next innovations in the cloud have to happen. This idea of the Internet as the platform made up of many connected clouds offers a compelling vision for bringing together the benefits of the suite (vendor responsibility for integration, maintenance and support) and the benefits of best-of-breed (great applications that really work) without exposing customers to the risk, expense and lock-in of a single-vendor solution.

My predition as we ended the panel is that over the next five years we see a world where many companies are deploying 100 percent cloud -based applications to run their businesses.