Getting it all together

Martin Luther wasn’t the first priest to have concerns about the behaviour of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the sale of indulgences and the way the church was using money from the poor to build ostentatious houses of worship. But it just so happened that as well as nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, he sent it by mail to a handful of people.

Now that is where it all should have stopped and Luther would have been remembered in history as another slightly potty minor heretic. The difference between Luther and his predecessors was that a handful of the people to whom he sent his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences had access to a printing press with movable type, which had been invented half a century earlier by Johannes Guttenberg.

The letter was reprinted and reprints of the reprints were made and soon it was circulating throughout Europe, leading to Luther’s ex-communication and formation of the Lutheran church and other Protestant denominations, splitting the Christian church irrevocably.

Things move faster in the 21st century than they did in the 1500s but the underlying principle of the confluence of ideas with the technology needed to disseminate them is the same.

It has been 12 years since a bunch of former Oracle software engineers got together to create web-based software company salesforce.com. And the idea wasn’t original. At the time there were a number of software providers and technology integrators calling themselves application service providers (or ASPs in keeping with the tech obsession of reducing everything to a three letter acronym).

But for most ASPs, the timing was wrong. The broadband internet connections needed to make it easy and fast to access software via the internet were not widely available and the software vendors were not sure how to charge for software as a service, having grown accustom to the licensing and support fee model.

The difference for Marc Benioff and his mates at salesforce.com was that 12 months earlier another California-based company by the name of VMWare had come up with a way to partition the operating systems of large computers called servers, making it possible to run multiple applications on a single computer. Ultimately this same technology would make it possible to run thousands of software applications across thousands of servers, massively reducing the cost of running software.

At the same time, fibre-based broadband connections were being rolled out across the central business districts of major cities. In short, the technology required to make it possible to distribute software services online was finally being made available and salesforce.com was willing to provide its software on a pay per use basis, while it’s competitors were still expecting customers to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to buy and run servers.

Cloud computing succeeded where ASPs had failed because the means and the mechanism came together to make software available as a service over the internet and since the year 2000 it has grown along with broadband services and virtualised data centres.

Initially the attraction was cost and flexibility but more recently cloud computing has become sufficiently sophisticated to hide the technology side of the delivery and make it possible to simply use “the cloud” to offer services such as call centres and newsletters, as shown in the following case studies.

BRW

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