By now, everyone will have heard of Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for Yahoo, and of Yahoo’s board rebuffing the offer. What people may not be thinking about would be how a “Microhoo!” would affect IT application performance planning.
While it’s clear that Microsoft, having been unsuccessful in promoting its own software-as-a-service offerings, is now trying to buy their way into this market simply by buying out the market leader, it shows how seriously Microsoft takes the SAAS space.
Yes, it’s Yahoo, and not Google, that is the leader on online SAAS solutions – at least as far as consumers are concerned. Google gets more searches and does better with online advertising, but Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo Del.icio.us, Yahoo Voice, Yahoo Upcoming.org and all of the other services that are owned by Yahoo more than make up for Yahoo’s second banana status in search – to the point that Yahoo has more users and page views. Typing the word “mail” into Google returns Yahoo! Mail as the top search result – over Gmail. Seriously. Try it.
It’s not a sure thing of course, that Microsoft will build SAAS applications after a Yahoo acquisition, or that those applications will become commercially successful. It seems like a paradox that Microsoft has not been able to do well in SAAS development when SAAS applications discourage open-source solutions. Sure, there are open source SAAS applications but the overhead and cost of hosting and maintaining SAAS infrastructure favors larger, established proprietary software vendors, with more money to sink into the project.
This also provides enough reason for those who predict that Microsoft would somehow “ruin” Yahoo’s online-app offerings to pause and consider what would happen Microsoft’s business strategy combined with Yahoo’s online development and marketing.
As we’ve mentioned on Network Performance Daily before, you don’t stop thinking about application performance once applications move out from the data center to the Internet.
The conversion of Microsoft applications – which are still in a strong position in the enterprise – to SAAS applications would mean big changes to IT planning. When you move an app from the Data Center to the cloud, you’re giving up control of the infrastructure, and submitting it to the vagaries of the Internet. As we’ve seen recently with the undersea cables, it’s not always that great an idea to rely on consistent Internet performance for business applications.
Additionally, it’s disconcerting when you realize data, in SAAS solutions, is typically stored online. This makes SAAS solutions convenient, but it also makes SAAS solutions particularly prone to vendor lock-in. Salesforce is a wonderful app, but I wouldn’t want to switch to another CRM manager, online or offline, if all my data was already in Salesforce.
So with this sort of lock-in, IT managers have absolutely no back-up plan if things start to go wrong with their application performance – whether it’s in the SAAS application’s data center end or the Internet links in-between the SAAS data center and the enterprise data center. There’s even less margin for error.
In addition to making sure that each of the offices on the WAN has the connectivity and performance it needs (after all, even in the hypothetical situation where all the applications a company uses are online, someone still has to make sure the Internet gets to every computer) network engineers in the future may be evaluating solutions by running hypothetical scenarios of what would happen if particular Internet links or nodes went down for a period of time, and recommending particular SAAS services based on “worst case scenario” disaster prevention and recovery capability.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about that – prognostication is fun, but invariably you look ridiculous with the passage of time. But if there’s one thing is certain: Whether or not Microsoft is ultimately successful in its bid, the bid itself is a herald of new challenges for IT.
No comments yet.