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| White Papers & Presentations |
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Cloudy Skies Ahead: Threats, Opportunities, Hope & Hype
The Internet, combined with powerful commodity processing power, virtualization advances, improved systems automation and management, and a requirement for wide-scale financial de-leveraging, is driving the next seismic shift in software known as “Cloud Computing”.
We think of Cloud Computing as an environment offering variable computing capacity and storage resources with dynamic provisioning and billing to support such real-time demands – a highly elastic response to demand changes along with a seemingly infinite pool of available resources. Software specifically written for Cloud Computing is often built around a service model using low-cost commodity hardware and sophisticated provisioning and virtualization software.
The transition to Cloud Computing, not unlike the shift from mainframe to distributed computing, will take decades to become the most significant economic factor in the industry. And ultimately it will be driven by economics, with Cloud Computing providing further efficiencies and lower costs than current models. Cloud-based computing will account for the lion’s share of growth in new IT spending at the expense of traditional solutions. |
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The Great Debate: Arma Partners event report with full transcript
Arma Partners and the Churchill Club co-hosted a debate on April 3rd 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA between Marc Benioff, Founder, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, the world’s leading independent Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, and Hasso Plattner, co-Founder, ex-CEO and Chairman of SAP AG, the world’s largest business software company
The debate focused on the future of the Enterprise Software industry and the disruption created by the SaaS model. Marc and Hasso discussed the excitement, hype and reality surrounding the SaaS market today and explored the cultural, structural, technological and economic issues of around the model against the background of ongoing consolidation in the Enterprise Software market. Click here read more about The Great Debate>> |
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Arma Partners Whitepaper: SaaS Addendum
Since we last published our strategy work on the SaaS market (Software As A Service: Ride it While it’s Hot, 28 November 2007), the industry has continued to evolve
We think that SaaS remains a secular growth opportunity over the next 10 years. Moreover, we think the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) concept can drive the opportunity through a long 25+ year replacement cycle not unlike the transition from mainframe to client/server. Valuations and expectations have a tendency to run in front of reality in early-stage secular growth markets and the SaaS market is no exception. The market can move from irrational exuberance to the trough of disillusionment very rapidly. We continue to believe we are in an extraordinary time for the SaaS market and well-prepared companies should be developing their strategic plans for liquidity. |
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Software as a Service: Ride it while it’s hot!
The SaaS market is hot: companies are lining up with S-1 filings for public offerings. Wall Street, as usual with early stage markets, has decided to bet across the board that each SaaS company is a winner deserving a high multiple. As it’s too early to sort through the winners and losers, that task will be put off for some time. We are in the early days of the development of the SaaS market. Much like other markets we have seen evolve, we first see companies try to apply existing applications to a new technology/distribution model and achieve efficiencies, first-to-market position, better valuations and hopefully some end-user benefits. In the early days of the Internet, we took existing models such as Yellow Pages (Portals/Yahoo), Retailing (Amazon, Expedia), Auctions (eBay) and made them web-enabled. It wasn’t until a decade later that highly progressive models around social media, social networking, MMORG, virtual worlds and other collaborative/highly interactive applications began to appear.
Applications will emerge that would be near impossible to run as a single enterprise, because behind them is embedded and concentrated expertise, collaborative communications, data accumulation and raw computing power that would be on a scale uneconomical for a single enterprise to amass. The seeds of such applications are being sown today. These types of applications will not only be threatening to the premise-based software industry, but also to the professional services industry.
This paper tries to take a balanced look at the excitement, hype and reality around the SaaS market today. It looks at the cultural, structural, technological and economic issues around the model and considers those against the background of ongoing disruptions occurring in the enterprise software market. |
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“Convergence: Beyond the Talk, How IMS and SIP factor in”
Standards, by themselves, do little. But when we witness broad, large-scale adoption of these standards by carriers, equipment providers and software companies for the next-generation communication applications, as is the case for IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), we take careful note. The uptake of new applications and services is seminal to the survival and prosperity of the value-chain of the telecommunications industry. Simply stated, in order for consumers and businesses to spend more, they need to be able to do more. There therefore needs to be compelling applications beyond plain person-to-person voice. Faced with the unprecedented commoditization of the standard voice application, traditional PTT/wire line carriers are embracing IMS and SIP into their infrastructure and reshaping their competitive position with FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) and VoIP applications. On the wireless side, Japan led by NTT DoCoMo, is the poster child and science experiment for IMS/SIP deployment with its new Push-to-Talk (PoC) application running on top of its 3G network and compatible handsets. Newly emerging MVNOs are also offering innovative services.
This whitepaper looks at the implications that the adoption of IMS as a platform and standard, combined with SIP will likely mean for carriers, equipment providers, handset providers, software companies – both application and infrastructure, content providers, consumers and enterprises. |
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Web 2.0: Hype or Reality...and how will it play out?
The Internet is currently in a “Back to the future” phase. Today, Internet companies are cropping up again by the thousands; numerous companies are being bought out by high-flyers and bricks-and-mortar companies. Despite the renewed confidence and interest in the sector, there is a growing divergence between the Internet world of the past and the dynamically evolving “Web 2.0” world, with changing usage patterns, expectations and functionality.
This paper addresses how a new generation of entrepreneurs is responding to rapid local and global evolution in Internet usage and the opportunities thrown up by these changes. |
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Enterprise Mobility: are we there yet?
Enterprise mobility is the hope and dream of technology vendors, telecommunication providers, corporate CIOs and investment bankers. Devices continue to get smaller, cheaper and smarter. But beyond email, Blackberries, and corporate laptops, on the surface it appears as if the notion of enterprise mobility is just a notion and not reality for our highly visible and white-collar workers.
This white paper looks at the current state of the enterprise mobility, the pieces in place today, the likely developments over the next several years, the challenges that beset the industry participants and the areas that are likely to emerge over the next 5 years. |
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Creating value amongst the forces of creative destruction
Violent, turbulent and profound changes are impacting virtually every industry as they have for centuries, but perhaps today at an accelerated rate. Joseph Schumpeter, the noted economist referred to this as the "gales of creative destruction". Forces of change are constant, and the software industry is now confronting new, large-scale challenges, the likes of which the sector has not seen for over 20 years, driven by innovations in business models, labour inputs, distribution models and deployment strategies. At stake is an industry worth over $500 billion, the largest single segment in technology.
This white paper analyses the challenges and strategies for confronting these forces of creative destruction. |
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