Cash Registers in the Cloud

 

According to the rules of the New Austerity, companies get points these days just for raising financing. And like double coupons, they get double points for persuading chic hard-nosed investors to part with their money.

Aria Systems just came home with the chicest VC there is – Venrock, the Rockefeller concern that pretty much invented venture capital and funded Intel, Apple and the Google-acquired DoubleClick when they were start-ups.

In the name-dropping contest, the biggest name that Aria rival Zuora can drop is Salesforce.com founder and ex-Oracle lieutenant Marc Benioff, who was in short pants when Venrock started writing checks.

Benioff anted up some seed capital for Zuora.

What Aria and Zuora do is on-demand billing.

Aria also does customer lifecycle management and it just got a $10 million B round from Venrock.

It says it valuation this time through was double its A round last year.

It initial investors included Hummer Winblad and Dave Labuda, the Half Moon Bay restaurateur who used to be Oracle's CFO then went and started Portal Software and sold it to Oracle for $220 million two years ago. Founded in the days when the Internet was new, Portal focused on billing when nobody knew how to do it on the web.

Anyway, Aria wanted the Venrock money to accelerate the development of its A+ Billing Platform, an enterprise-class billing platform offered as a flexible Software-as-a Service (SaaS).

Aria, which says it was almost profitable before its first round, has managed over a million accounts (figure going on two billion transactions) over the past five years.

It converts complex legacy billing systems to subscription management for large enterprises while overseeing subscriptions and reporting for smaller companies. Aria does a lot of the fulfillment for its accounts.

CEO Ed Sullivan says the company takes a holistic approach to managing subscription-based billing – recognizing that the customer experience begins before and continues after payment collection and really embraces the whole lifecycle of a customer's experience with a company.

For instance, Aria defines billing as customer acquisition, service acquisition, usage tracking, invoicing (calculation, presentment, collection, remittance and reconciliation), customer management and reporting.

In September, it announced a record third quarter that saw sales bookings double sequentially and quadruple from the first quarter. It claims an "enormous uptick" since September.

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/773476

The Key to Cloud Computing: Componentization

Simon Wardley's Blog

If you think that "cloud" is simply about more efficient and lower cost provision of IT then prepare yourself for a rude awakening. The computing stack, from the applications we write, to the platforms we build upon, to the operating systems we use are now moving from a product to a service based economy. The shift towards services will also lead to standardisation of lower orders of the computing stack to internet provided components. A consequence of this will be an acceleration in the speed at which new IT systems can be built and modified. The world of IT and business on the web is about to get a whole lot faster.

The importance of "cloud" computing to business is far beyond simple cost savings, allocation of resources, capex to opex conversion and economies of scale. These are the obvious reasons for considering the cloud and they are little more than a follow my leader game caused by the commoditisation of IT. As more competitors adopt the cloud it will create cost competitive pressures for others to follow. Consumers of IT will need simply to adapt to this change in order to retain their relative competitive positions (this is known as the red queen effect).

It's a very old merry-go-round caused by the usual transition of the once novel and new field of IT infrastucture to more of a commodity. It will have all the trappings of past transitions from the cries of users for second sourcing options, the battles over standards and portability, the usual formation of exchanges, brokerages, marketplaces and the confusion created by vendors as they attempt to prevent their industry being commoditised.

However buried in all this is one truly interesting aspect known as componentisation. From the work of Herbert Simon's and his theory of hierarchy, we know that the speed of evolution of any system is directly related to the organisation of its subsystems. Take a moment to consider how fast it is to build an application today using a database and a development platform and then compare this to how slow it would be to build the same application if you had to first start designing the cpu, I/O and memory.

Componentisation can make an incredible difference and the more organised the subsystems are, the faster it is to build new and adapt old systems.

The computing stack, from the applications we write, to the platforms we build upon, to the operating systems we use are now moving from a product to a service based economy. This change can be clearly seen from a quick scan of what is hot today. Software as a Service, Web Services, Mashing up Data Services, Hardware as a Service, Service oriented architecture ... it's all the same thing.

The shift towards services will also lead to standardisation of lower orders of the computing stack to internet provided components. A consequence of this will be an acceleration in the speed at which new IT systems can be built and modified. The world of IT and business on the web is about to get a whole lot faster.

It should be remembered that the battle for survival of any company revolves around the non-trivial task of balancing the needs of adaptation (changes to the market, the red queen effect) and innovation (creative destruction). However, it is these two effects of adaptation (through maintaining cost competitiveness and matching increased competitor agility to adapt to changes) and innovation (an ability to bring new ideas to market more quickly) which will force any business to choose cloud.

You don't have a choice, you never did. The cat is well and truly out of the bag and the old way is in decline. If you think that "cloud" is simply about more efficient and lower cost provision of IT then prepare yourself for a rude awakening.

You might think that cloud computing won't effect you, but it will if you use any form of IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, at different layers of the computing stack, various companies are preparing a gilded cage for you to walk into.

You should already be thinking about the cloud and your first words to any vendor should be:-

• "Show me the alternative providers running a similar service not owned by you and how easy is it to switch between your service, their service and one I want to run myself?"
  
• "Am I dependent upon any particularly vendor with these services?"