The market for hosted e-mail mailboxes is poised for rapid growth due
to the economics of cloud computing and the entry of new vendors…. the move to a hosted-delivery model will change the face of IT architectures over the next decade and that e-mail will be at the forefront of this change.

Sonian’s premise from the very beginning is based on this trend: IT will begin to selectively use SaaS services tactically to solve specific pain points like archiving, and over time, move more functions into the cloud. IT has to get comfortable with the idea of hosted versus on-premise, and that comfort and trust will mature over time. The next few years will be very interesting in the SaaS sector. Sonian is doing its part to create an affordable, reliable, secure SaaS experience.

We already know Microsoft has a service called Microsoft Online which offers managed PC desktops and will soon add hosted Exchange and Sharepoint to the menu. For quite a while now, Microsoft has been managing the desktops as a service provider for Energizer Holdings and XL Capital. Now smaller companies will be able to subscribe to these offerings.

It is still unclear where the channel partner fits in this new “direct to customer” world. Microsoft Online doesn’t mean there is no role for its channel partners, but clearly something will have to change in this new SaaS-y world.

Customers contemplating hosted archiving might think: “The price is right (certainly less expensive then doing it ourselves), the features are just what we need, but can we trust a vendor with our data?”

Trust, in the form of reliability and security, doesn’t come for granted. And hosted archive vendors have to earn the customer’s trust. This is especially true since the customer is putting a lot of faith in their archive vendor to protect the contents entrusted to the vendors care.

One way to build trust is to adopt a policy of “Total Transparency.” This means talking openly about how the mechanics work behind the scenes. This is especially important when it comes to how data is encrypted, stored and managed. Customers will want to know what encryption algorithms are in place, how the data is stored, what happens when a data center experiences an outage – basically all the things they would know if the archive were maintained “in-house.”

Sonian, with our use of Amazon Web Services, has our entire data center infrastructure under scrutiny by hundreds of thousands daily users. If a hiccup happens, everyone will know, just like when the electricity goes out. This is total transparency at its best.

http://trust.soniannetworks.com

According to Pi’s web site, the software Pi is working on is designed to let people control, share, and publish information that is online or locally stored.

Pi has ambitious goals, and the fact they are building this super-personal information manager (S-PiM) shows there is a growing desire among modern knowledge managers (i.e. any of us who use email, digital files for photos, music and record keeping) to have more flexibility in the way we manage and access our digital content. Cloud compute combined with a lightweight rich Internet application is a great way to accomplish this goal.

Apparently EMC agrees, since they have purchased Pi Corp. in an all cash deal.

“We’re saying that success in this new space will require a very different technology base–and a business model–very unlike other parts of the traditional IT landscape,” wrote Chuck Hollis, EMC’s global marketing chief technology officer, in his blog.

The IT landscape is changing rapidly. It’s exciting times to be at the forefront of the next wave of great innovation.

For Sonian specifically, our customers were not affected by the outage. But this fact is more luck than anything. Our “portion” of the cloud remained running while other parts did not. If Sonian was interrupted by the outage, here is what would have happened:

• Data collection would be put on pause – which means we would not accept any new items. The data will queue up on the customer side and then collection automatically resumes when the all systems are go, and the light above changes to “green.”
• Searching could be affected. No data is ever lost, but access to the data could be interrupted for a brief period of time.
• Exports will be put on pause. Access to file downloads will be paused until we are running again.
• Sonian has a self-healing mode (external to the cloud) to monitor it’s own health in the cloud. This feature will kick into action and restart processes automatically.

Failures like this can happen in every system, and anyone that promises otherwise is foolish or lying (or both). Amazon does not promise that their systems won’t fail, but I can assure you that when something does go wrong, I trust that when a team of Amazon engineers springs into action the issues will be resolved quickly….. probably more quickly than if your own server crashed in the middle of the night or if you were hosted at another vendors co-location facility.

Sonian the company, and Sonian Archive the service, were created to address the growing need for affordable enterprise SaaS solutions to help organizations spend less on IT and get greater value. And by the way, SaaS is also better for the environment. Less electricity is used compared to in-house server usage patterns.

• By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license. With software as service (SaaS), the user organisation pays for software services in proportion to use. The SaaS model of deployment and distribution of software services will enjoy steady growth in mainstream use during the next five years.

• By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service. Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure at other sites and still receive the same response times. Enterprises believe that as service oriented architecture (SOA) becomes common “cloud computing” will take off, thus untying applications from specific infrastructure. This trend to accepting commodity infrastructure could end the traditional “lock-in” with a single supplier and lower the costs of switching suppliers.

• By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods. Initially, the motivation will come from the wish to contain costs. Enterprise data centres are struggling to keep pace with the increasing power requirements of their infrastructures. And there is substantial potential to improve the environmental footprint, throughout the life cycle, of all IT products and services without any significant trade-offs in price or performance. In future, IT organisations will shift their focus from the power efficiency of products to asking service providers about their measures to improve energy efficiency.

More than a year in development and leading edge in so many ways, we thank our investors and advisors for their support and guidance. Everything is coming together nicely as we “on board” new customers into their hosted archiving experience.

At the heart of Sonian’s mission is the core belief that archiving for both compliance and storage management should be affordable and accessible to all companies and organizations, no matter their size or IT budget wealth. And affordable does not mean sacrificing security and reliability. On the contrary, we think Sonian, from our customer’s point of view, is the most secure and reliable of any hosted archive service. We knew security and reliability were two critical concerns our customers would have when thinking of using a hosted service to archive their data. Cost is the third concern. Sonian is the right combination of technology and business model to meet all three concerns.

It’s clear SaaS will play an ever larger role in IT deployments. And it’s also crystal clear that cloud-compute infrastructure is the best way to deploy a SaaS system. Sonian is leading the way to the future in how SaaS should be created and managed.