Posts Tagged ‘saas’

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Thursday, August 20th, 2009 by Sebastian Holst

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height” - Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

So “what’s love got to do with it?” (Private Dancer, Tina Turner) Hint: if people live for love, then businesses live for money

On July 14th, Microsoft announced Azure pricing and a “grace period” through PDC 2009. A primary rationale here is to enable development organizations to optimize deployment and monetization models to maximize Azure commercial opportunities.

So, whether you are a romantic (like Ms Browning above) or perhaps more hardened like Tina Turner’s Private Dancer (or Stanley Kubrick a la Full Metal Jacket), one thing is for sure - Microsoft wants Azure to “love you long time.” How deep, wide, high or long is the question.

Check out a this article in SD Times - PreEmptive’s Dotfuscator instruments Azure applications By David Worthington – where Dave Worthington makes many of the very same points.

Of course, we announced Runtime Intelligence Service (RIS) Azure support to help developers answer these very questions. While perhaps not as soaring as a sonnet – Runtime Intelligence allows for any .NET component deployed into Azure to be injected (post-build) with session, feature and method level monitoring. The runtime intelligence is streamed out of Azure for analysis. Other than writing a custom solution, this is perhaps the only means to measure adoption, usage patterns and performance inside Azure in near real-time.

Now, my posts are all intended to help you (blog followers) find more ways to make more money (we want to spread the love). So, you will note that I very specifically said the RIS helps to answer these questions. What the Azure development community really needs is an ROI calculator that will combine real usage data (from both legacy and piloted Azure applications) with Microsoft pricing and the offset IT expenses to come up with an Azure ROI calculator. I know there are lots of calculators being written – but how many of them can incorporate actual usage data before and after deployment to the cloud? That’s not our business – but could it be yours?

If yes, let me know and I will make sure you have what you need to call our RI Service via our RESTful API – making your calculator uniquely able to reliably predict cloud ROI.

As always, i have a more philosophical take on this issue on my personal blog at http://apps-are-people-too.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-ways.html

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Posted in Application Lifecycle Management, DashO, Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE, IT Operations Management, Microsoft, Opportunity (swOt), Runtime Intelligence, Software Development Lifecycle Management, Threat (swoT) | No Comments »

How do you get $5 from every .NET developer on the planet?

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 by Sebastian Holst

Here is an idea that I have been telling anyone who will listen, but as far as I can tell, no one is doing anything about it.

Back at PDC 08, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 would include “Application Feature Monitoring, Usage Expiry and Tamper Defense capabilities.” These capabilities will be delivered inside the next generation of Dotfuscator CE (now to be called Dotfuscator Software Services) and will be included in the box with Visual Studio (except the Express SKU) with no registration or any other steps required.

Specifically, the tamper detection functionality referenced here will enable any Visual Studio user to inject tamper detection logic POST-BUILD into any .NET executable (assuming it is not already signed). Once this step is complete, the application will (when tamper is detected) have the ability to:

a) halt execution AND

b) (here is the important bit) send a SOAP signal to an IP endpoint of the developer’s choice.

So, how do you get $5 from every developer on the planet?

Use social networks or any other communication tool you prefer to make the following offer:

  • For $5 per month retainer, you will provide an IP address for developers to use when building their applications. If their application is ever tampered with (and it has access to the Internet) the SOAP signal is delivered to your endpoint.
  • Your service will notify them upon receipt. Why not use Microsoft’s cloud services to host a simple SharePoint application for this? They can then take appropriate action.
  • You can optionally set some sort of per incident fee as well if you like.

Every developer who moves to Visual Studio 2010 will have all of the software you need them to have installed in their environment - so there are NO software distribution requirements.

All you need to do is write a simple hosted endpoint, provide the IP address, and collect the subscription fees.

This functionality is already exposed in the CTP release of Visual Studio 2010 – you can begin this project today without contacting PreEmptive at all (although, we are happy to assist if you want to take advantage of any/all of our commercial extensions).

What do you think? There is a similar service possible with Shelf-life (also included in the new Dotfuscator Software Services community edition).

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Posted in Application Lifecycle Management, Dotfuscator, IT Operations Management, Microsoft, Opportunity (swOt), Software Development Lifecycle Management | No Comments »