Sun Solaris On Demand - Just Tell Me The Damn Price Already!
In the last few days, Sun Microsystems seems to have launched an on-demand utility computing offering that allows software companies to provide their software through a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. At least, I thought that’s what it was…
Sun calls it - “Solaris On Demand”. From the name, if sounds like it could be a scalable, utility computing offering. Something that would follow on from Amazon’s super high-profile computing services such as “Amazon S3″ and “Amazon EC2″; and, more recently, from Google’s App Engine offering. Sun’s business model for their offering seems rather different to Amazon’s and Google’s. Whereas both Amazon and Google use their own servers in their own data centers, Sun is partnering with other companies (AT&T USi, NaviSite, NTT Europe Online, and RagingWire) to deliver their offering.
So, I wondered to myself, how much does Solaris On Demand cost? I headed on over to the site. There wasn’t anywhere that pointed me at pricing info, so I checked out the FAQ section. Pretty quickly, this told me that you get to try out a “proof of concept” sandbox free for 90 days with no commitment. Seemed like a great start! But then things went rapidly downhill…
You see, before anyone is going to spend time signing up; and spending time deploying their systems, they’re going to want to know what it’s going to cost to host the system. That’s not going to happen with Solaris On Demand. Why? Because, it turns out price has to be individually negotiated with each of Sun’s different delivery partners, after what I presume will be superslow moving, and lengthy conversations between the software company and the delivery partner to agree what the requirements and service expectations are for each different use case; along with some attempts to upsell additional technical support and consulting services. That’s simply not the kind of model that’s going to revolutionize the provision of the kind of on-demand, scalable compute power that will enable early-stage SaaS offerings to grow. It’s far too hard for customers to understand, and the buying processes are far too slow and painful.
I really hope “Solaris On Demand” isn’t supposed to be Sun’s real entry into full-spectrum utility computing (after their first attempt with Network.com). If it is, I can’t see many companies signing up, when they can more easily head over to Amazon or Google instead. And, by the way, if you were thinking this is only going to be an issue for start-ups, and that large corporations don’t like offerings like Amazon S3, think again. At the end of last year, a transnational corporation worth more than $50B spoke to us about creating a SaaS offering they wanted to subscribe to; and that they wanted to be based on Amazon S3. When decision-makers at $50B companies want to use Enterprise SaaS systems that are based on standardised utility services like Amazon S3, you know this standardised-off-the-shelf way of working is starting to become mainstream.
Sun’s fantastic spectrum of software and hardware assets should mean that the company is supremely well-positioned to offer some truly amazing, pioneering and transparently priced utility computing services. People have high expectations for what they could offer… However, this latest offering doesn’t seem even close to meeting those expectations. Whatever “Solaris On Demand” is intended to be, I can’t see (at first glance) that it qualifies as either amazing or pioneering. To me, it looks like something that anyone could negotiate with any generic IT services company. Of course, I may well have missed something about Solaris on Demand - I stopped looking at it when I realised buying what should be simple IT services requires protracted negotiations with the provider. Or, to put it another way - Just Tell Me The Damn Price Already!
Nick wrote:
Solaris on Demand is not for consumer facing, web native applications running on a LAMP stack. It is for allowing highly specialized, industry specific business software (think health care, sales management, inventory management, manufacturing) that runs on-premises (local server) or on a desktop to be offered as SasS without having to rewrite it in something like php, rails, perl, or python. Google App Engine and Amazon EC2/S3 are not its competitors, neither is any other traditional web hosting company. It’s competitors are in what is known as the ISV (independent software developer) space. Solaris on Demand simply helps ISVs offer apps in a SaaS model instead of on-premises.
Posted 21 Oct 2008 at 12:43 am ¶
simon wrote:
I’m not seeing how the offering is really unique in the market. It may be, e.g. if Sun is really doing something clever with its software stack to bring down costs to the end-customer (savings which can be passed on to users). However, I suspect that might not be the case. Most likely, this offering is really about Sun trying to sell tin to the service providers they partner with; and trying to get them to buy the most expensive hardware they can. I could be wrong on that, it’s just a guess.
Also, there’s no technical reason why much of the kind of industry-specific business software you’re talking about couldn’t run on Amazon’s infrastructure; excepting some areas such as financial services that have complicated regulatory requirements; and excepting some technical limitations.
There are, however, major business issues. Specifically, cost. There are problems with pricing of current cloud computing offerings, which, for certain types of applications, make them very expensive compared to running dedicated servers yourself, hosted by a data center somewhere. That’s why I was interesting in seeing Sun’s pricing model for their offering. However, as I say, the way I suspect the service is being organized leads me to suspect it might not be particularly price competitive…
Posted 21 Oct 2008 at 12:02 pm ¶