It’s not so often than I get to poke fun at anyone (yeah, right), but in this day and age where it seems that the only way to get noticed is to have funny cartoons, I figured I would enlist the help of my super secret artisan resource, and poke some fun at our competition.

As I spend more and more time with our partner community discussing all things related to SaaS and PaaS, one topic comes up over and over again.  Having a proper Service Level Agreement (SLA) provided by any potential cloud provider is the most important item on the list of their required items.  The failures of the Amazon cloud (portal and web services) and Google properties (Apps, and App Engine) are well documented, and it has given pause to many of the potential developers in the IT Pro and ISV space.  Their main concern is what is going to happen if they deploy a service or application against that infrastructure?  Who’s neck do they get to choke?

Google App Engine has no mention of an SLA in their terms of service, and they know it.  The GMail guys have one, but like the Amazon S3 SLA (the only one of their web services to have an SLA), it’s 3 9s.  A good start, but not what the enterprise customers are going to need to instill confidence to move to the cloud.  The loss of control associated with moving to the cloud is a powerful disincentive for these developers, and without a higher degree of certainty over the uptime of the services consumed, moving mission critical, line of business applications and services to the cloud becomes a much harder discussion with the business decision makers.

The notable exception here is Joyent, who goes out on a limb to claim 100% uptime in their SLA.  The big issue here, unfortunately, is that as a provider on top of the Amazon services, they are at the mercy of Amazon and their ability to keep their servers up.  The pecuniary consideration Joyent is willing to pay out is not really well within their control, which is unfortunate, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.  However, I definitely give them credit for putting that SLA out there.  The problem with writing late at night is you get your companies mixed up.  Joyent does provide SLA, but they don’t run on Amazon.  Big thanks to Rod at Joyent for keeping me honest on this one.  Joyent is running their own datacenters and have made significant investments across their 4 DCs.  That said, they have had some downtime, which is not unexpected.  It would be very interesting to know the economic impact of their January outage, but something tells me that Rod won’t be so forthcoming with that correction for me. <g>

The company I was thinking about that had tied themselves to the Amazon ship is RightScale.  They have a FAQ tied to their pass through SLAs with Amazon.  The challenge I have with their solution is that if you have access issues, you are advised to log in and launch more instances.  This doesn’t help you if datacenters fall over, power goes down, large scale DDoS attacks, etc.  This only helps for domain / app specific scaling issues, and even then, it doesn’t always solve your problem.

There’s a lot of work to be done in the cloud space, especially if the many business ISVs out there are going to think about porting some or all of their offerings to a platform provider.  The feedback from partners is very clear, and the online conversation backs up this assertion – SLAs are the first stop to winning the hearts and minds of the business ISVs and IT Pro developers.

Every once in a while, you get two see two artisans at work.  Perfection is required in the oft dangerous world of professional motorcycle racing at the highest levels.  Occassionally, the mark of a true champion is their ability to improvise, to make do with the inadequacies of their tools, persevere through impossible odds, and insert the most worrisome of emotions into their competitors – doubt.  Casey Stoner is surely doubting himself after watching this pass (believe me, the picture really doesn’t do it justice), and then taking his own stroll through the dirt, and dropping his bike.  Never mind that Rossi was not reared on dirt bikes like young master Stoner.  To see a low speed crash in dirt from a dirt tracker like Stoner can mean only one thing.  The acid of doubt is eroding his confidence.

Rossi has taken aggression to his rivals to play mental games with them, often forcing them into retirement.  Exhibit A – Max Biaggi.  Exhibit B – Sete Gibernau.  With Sete, Rossi was so bold as to let the Catalan know that he would never win again.  This coming on the heels of a particulary nasty pass Sete placed on The Doctor.  Sete never did taste the top step again.

Until now, Rossi has been somewhat deferential to the young Australian, despite his theft of a crown Rossi considered his.  Stoner has been smart, and withdrawn from opportunities to pull that tiger by its tail.  The tiger is angry, and the psychological games are coming.  Stoner is angry, and he’s going to play right into Rossi’s hands.  This should make for a very entertaining rest of the year.  The only wildcard being that Laguna is a notoriously difficult place to pass, allowing Rossi to neuter any advantage of the Ducati.  I’m not so sure that strategy is going to work at the remaining tracks.

I just don’t understand the mind-set of some of the pro peloton riders.  Getting caught for doping in this years’ Tour is insane.  How could they think that they would get away with it?  So far, we have had three riders thrown out of the tour, and one team completely retire.

Saunier-Duval walked away from the Tour on the heels of the revelation that their rider, Ricardo Ricco, tested positive for a new form of EPO.  Did they walk away because of shame, or fear that more of their riders would test positive?  Seeing as Ricco had two stage wins, not to mention a runner up slot at the Giro d’Italia, and Saunier had riders finish 1-2 on stage 10, one can only wonder if the new form of EPO Ricco was caught using was also flowing through the bodies of the rest of that team.

Here’s what I don’t get.  If the police come to a bar and tell the patrons that not only are there going to be sobriety check points on the road that night, but that there would be check points at all possible points of egress from that bar, and that if you test positive you are going to jail for life, would anyone leave the bar drunk and try to drive?  Seriously.  Dumbfucks.  The lot of them.  I just can’t comprehend the level of conceit and disrespect for a sport where you continue to cheat, especially knowing full well that you will get caught and be publicly shamed and humiliated.

I don’t care if the cheaters are gone.  They haven’t tarnished what has been great racing so far.  The Tour execs have handled each of these doping situations swiftly, strongly, and appropriately.  Good on them.  Here come the Alps…let’s keep riding.

I’ve been thinking about business models quite a bit lately.  Mostly because of the work I am doing on cloud services.  In fact, many of the conversations I have been having at our Worldwide Partner Conference over the last few days have specifically focused on cloud compute business models.  I am going to put this out there, and let the VCs be damned.  There’s a reason that “free” and “fail” both start with “f” and have four letters.  “Free” is my new four letter word.  A business model that is based on free is frail and bound to fail.

At some point, the tyranny of the free has to go away.  Mashable had a similar article just the other day.  37Signals hammers on this point constantly.  It’s real simple, as far as I am concerned.  Make something, sell it, make more, and then sell more.  It’s a nice virtuous cycle.  I have lost count of the number of partners with whom I have met this week who have multiple millions of dollars in revenue attached to coding (ISVs or custom application development).  Selling ads against your app requires scale.  Scale comes to a very small number of apps.  There’s a ton of software left to be written that will never be used by enough people to be ad supported.

I want to offer the following: The free movement is completely wrong minded.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  The company I just sold has software+services that are completely free.  In just 14 months, we signed up 150K users, but the app didn’t have an engagement model that supported high numbers of page views.  We listened to one very loud board member who insisted that we be free and never charged for the product.  In the end, we sold the company (for a good result), but we were on fumes.  Developers need to be paid, and they don’t accept page views.  Had we started charging from the outset, I suspect we would not have sold so soon.

In the next few weeks, I plan to have some posts on the business models that are out there and what probably makes sense around cloud compute, but we, as an industry, have to refocus on solving real problems, and charging money for those things.  The penny-gap is getting harder and harder to cross with so much downward pressure on pricing from people who are willing to give stuff away for free.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter.  During all of the sessions here, any pre-made video has close captioning.  During the major keynotes, they had real time close captioning.  Looking around, I can see international partners using headsets to get real time translation.  I have seen real time sign language once or twice at a keynote for other conferences, but certainly nothing of this scale.

First things first.  I have been silent on the wire as things have settled down a bit.  The wife and I finished up the vacation and needed to figure a few things out.  First, where were we going to live?  We looked at a few places, but ultimately we decided to return to the city where we met.  In April we found a place in Redmond, WA, and are settling back into the Pacific NW.

Second, what was I going to do for work.  Having been in startup land for so long, I wanted to remove myself from the constant fire drill of day to day startup life.  This decision was made a little bit easier from the fairly strong recruiting tactics used by my old boss who heard I might be returning to the PacNW.

As of May 12, I have joined the Cloud Services team at Microsoft, working on Ecosystem development.  This is going to be one of the most challenging roles I have had in my professional career.  Microsoft is definitely late to the maket when compared to Google, Amazon and even Salesforce.  True as this may be, I am very excited about the development effort happening on our cloud services, and what it will mean for our partners.

Speaking of partners, I am at my very first Worldwide Partner Conference.  It’s pretty overwhelming, but there are a few things that have jumped out at me in just the few short hours I have been here:

1) We have a ton of partners.  I guess I always knew this, but sitting inside of the Houston Toyota Center, and seeing it packed with people is amazing.  And we’re not here to watch the Rockets stink up the joint.  The entire lower level and floor are completely packed.  Partners from all over the world.

2) Microsoft’s ecosystem is very strong.  I learned a new factoid today.  For every $1 in sales of Microsoft products, there are $7 more of sales/services tied to a Microsoft partner, and 96% of all revenues at Microsoft comes through a partner.  Those numbers simply blew me away, and we really need to do a better job of telling that story.  Our ecosystem is probably our must unheralded weapon in our toolbox.

3) Silent majority versus the tyranny of the minority – it’s interesting to see so many people who have positive things to say about Microsoft.  If you spend too much time in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, you are indoctrinated with the incontrevertible fact that Microsoft products suck.  I have never believed this, but certainly over the last few years, having lived in the LAMP stack, it was pretty deafening.  However, talking with these partners, about their businesses and about their customers, it’s astonishing to me to hear so many positive stories.  You can tell a lot about what matters to people when the economy is tight, and I was expecting to hear a lot of bitching about Microsoft products.  I am happy to say that was not the case.  There’s a very vocal group of haters out there, and the new blog / twitter communication channels makes it very easy to hear them.

4) I have a lot of work to do to get immersed in the pro-MSFT blog community.  Most of the A-list bloggers are very pro-LAMP.  I need to find the strong voices in the Windows camp.  In fact, it’s my job to become one of the A-listers.  Microsoft has done a great job of using social aspects of the web to connect with customers and users, and I look forward to continuing on that in my new role.

5) Billion Dollar Baby – here’s a pop quiz: can you name all of the billion dollar businesses within Microsoft?  I’ll bet that you will be surprised to hear that there are more than 2.  In fact, there are more than 6.  The number is under 10, but stop and think about that for a minute.  A billion dollars.  That’s a lot of opportnuity for Microsoft and people who work there, but also for partners who build their businesses on top of our software.

So that’s it.  Lot’s going on, and not a ton of time for updates until now.  It’s time to get serious about the blogging again.