I have a reputation for calling things as I see them. For example, by now, many of you know I’m firmly in the Android camp. There really is no technical comparison (like, who remembers 2012 anymore?).
I find it no surprise that one by one our clients are turning to virtualization and private cloud infrastructure. As far as I am concerned, Amazon’s AWS platform is the definitive winner here. Let me illustrate with a real life example. Sorry, this may get a bit technical.
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We saw one of those signs while out shopping this weekend: “We’ll beat the competitor’s price or its FREE!”. So we enjoyed a good chuckle, because who is going to give anything away for free? But they got to use the word “FREE”, and I guess that’s all that matters. Along the same vein, today’s spam included one with the subject “Harness the Speed and Security of the Cloud”. Another chuckle for me…but I don’t think that was the goal of the sender.
The Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing admits that the popularity of the term “can be attributed to its use in marketing”. We recognize that emphasizing being a “cloud solution” can be marketing hype and so we don’t talk about “the cloud” as often as we talk about our features.
At Spitfire we are all about the functionality of our Spitfire Project Management System. A very significant portion of that functionality was created as a direct result of listening to our users. We are proud of both that functionality and the technological foundation that has allowed us to build an amazing feature set in our software. So, we talk about our features. A lot.
We don’t want to stop focusing on those features–and we promise we never will–but that same technological foundation that supports all those features was also designed to scale really, really well. Therefore, I’m taking a moment today to emphasize that, yes, of course, the Spitfire Project Management System runs “in the cloud”, and that is equally true whether you think that means Software as a Service (SaaS) or software that scales incredibly well and runs on redundant virtual servers not tied to any local footprint. Continue reading
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It seems that in many cases, the issue of “Cloud” based software solutions versus traditional self-hosted solutions has become the primary decision point for companies procuring project management/accounting software. Unfortunately, this sometimes happens at the expense of what should be the single most important consideration: functionality.
Functionality is the hard part. It is the hardest for the software company to deliver; the hardest to implement; the hardest for users to understand; and the hardest for purchasers to evaluate. Getting from functional evaluation through to completed functional implementation means “rolling up one’s sleeves” and doing some very detailed work. Unfortunately, all too often, the specter of doing this due diligence is more than people want to embark on. Furthermore, because of all the industry-wide buzz and hype regarding “the Cloud,” people become easily distracted, and end up focusing all of their attention on the Cloud issue.
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