Model for selling cloud-aware applications?

[Pradeep Tapadiya]

Folks,

 

In future, how would businesses purchase cloud-aware applications?

 

Model 1: Cloud-aware application would be sold shrink-wrapped. The customer would buy the product and simply install it on her favorite cloud host.

 

Model 2: Customer's don't buy the application. They just buy into some kind of usage/subscription model.

 

Model 2 is probably what many of the businesses are looking at today. The responsibility of ensuring the application and the infrastructure uptime is on the software vendor. The software vendor in turn negotiates with the cloud computing platform provider.

 

Do you foresee adoption of model 1 at some point? This would require a standard virtualization technique (unlike what Amazon EC2 requires).

 

Regards,

Pradeep

[EUng...@gmail.com]

Pradeep,

You have outlined the 2 models well, I think there are inherent issues
with both that are far from being worked out. In model one, software
vendors would appreciate the fact that they can maintain their sales
models. There are very complex questions on how you move from a
selling a product and services to a subscription. The typical sales
force, with pre sales support tries to move several million dollars
per rep at a very high margin. Some of this you might comment on as
needless overhead, but it does bring up the question of who would do
(afford to do) the pre an post sales support.

Regarding the second model, if all we are talking about is classic
shrink wrap like Office or email, then I could see cloud being a
hosted environment. I know IBM has announced something like this
recently (that is not I plug, I do not work for that division). I
think the real issue comes when we move into more complex applications
like SAP, where version issues and customization are part of the norm.
Any application that touches these core business apps might also end
up not being easily moved to the cloud.

So in answer to your question, I do see quick movement on the part of
vendors to deliver some cloud applications. I think in many they will
be subscription based and follow the lines of model 2. In the case of
model 1, I think to many vendors will wrap a cloud computing wrapper
over what is basically outsourcing.

Ed Ungemach
Americas SOA Sales
IBM

On Dec 17, 8:13 pm, "Pradeep Tapadiya" <pradeeptapad...@gmail.com>
wrote: