When I first heard about this idea almost a year ago my first reaction was – “Why in the world would you want to do that?”
Realizing that this phrase is the closest thing in business to “get off my lawn” I decided to put more thought into it and think about the business rather than focusing on the declining value of my docbasic expertise. EMC Public SaaS solutions were introduced at EMC World in May but at Momentum Devcon Wednesday David Lestrat gave more detail on the strategy and timeline. A few key things for the community to keep in mind
- This is more about how people want to buy than how we want to code – Talk to almost and technology leader and two things they want will come up. 1) they want a consumption or at least a subscription based pricing model and 2) they don’t want to maintain it. Neither of these necessarily demand a particular technology, language or product but the SaaS platform must address these two ideas. The second is an obvious point – it will be a public cloud deployment on a multi-tenant architecture but the first is a more complicated problem to figure out – especially for companies with existing business that needs to transform and adapt to consumption pricing. To be clear there was no talk of pricing today – it is just a fact of the market.
- This is a SaaS model that is relevant to EMC – The success of Syncplicity on-premise storage options proved what we believed. Customers want and need the option to maintain their data in their own data center even when the application managing it lives elsewhere. This means customers will need storage and that is what we (EMC) do better than anyone else.
- Solutions will make or break it – Today’s enterprise customers do not simply buy capacity – they buy capability. While the SaaS platform is a great story for IT, with out a business problem to solve it isn’t good for much. That means solutions, built for this channel by EMC & our partners.
- Your investment in learning xCP today pays off in this platform tomorrow – Solutions delivered on this platform will be constructed with xCP2.x. The goal is that what you develop locally can be deployed in the cloud. No matter what, the techniques and principles for creating xCP applications we are learning now are the foundation for everything to be built in the platform.
Especially if you are a partner, it is worth your while to start spending cycles preparing your best ideas for the public solutions platform.