Sept/Oct 2009

The View from the Cloud

by Dave Hart, Chief Technology Officer, Convio

Cloud computing is certainly the talk of the industry these days. But, if you don’t understand what all the hype is about, you’re in pretty good company. According to a Wall Street Journal article about cloud computing, Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said, "I have no idea what anyone is talking about. It's really just complete gibberish. What is it?". 

This article will get past the hype and explore what cloud computing is and what it means to Convio, our clients and to the sector as a whole.

It’s hard to crisply define cloud computing, but in the most general terms you can think of it as just computing — that is data storage and processing — that you can use but that is actually occurring somewhere else. The cloud is the common metaphor for the Internet, so typically we think of cloud computing as access to hosted computing services through the Internet. The cloud can be public — as in the case of the Internet — but it can also be private, running within the confines of a corporate data center. Many companies are embracing the concept of cloud computing within their own environment through virtualization or other technologies that provide more scalable access to their own computing resources.

Solutions that are characterized as cloud computing generally have some or all of these characteristics.

• The service is sold on-demand or on a subscription basis. 
• The service is fully managed by the service provider.
• The service tends to be elastic, meaning that more capacity can be dedicated to a particular user on an as-needed basis.
• The service is typically accessible over the Internet.
• Generally, the service requires only a browser to access it, or loads necessary client components using an initial connection via a web browser.
• The service typically shares physical resources among multiple clients.

Cloud computing can generally be broken into three separate models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS). Let’s look at each of these models in more detail.

Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS vendors provide the software application and the hosting environment, and allow users to access the application over the Internet. Applications can be highly specialized, like Convio Online Marketing and Common Ground™, or may be very general, like Google Docs or Microsoft Live Office. SaaS is typically differentiated from the older concept of an Application Service Provider (ASP) by being inherently accessible from a web browser, and by being multi-tenant in that it shares a common data model as well as physical resources across clients.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS refers to providing a set of commonly used platform features that are relevant to a particular domain across the Internet. The leading example of this is the Force.com cloud platform from Salesforce.com. The Force.com platform provides many components which are necessary for any system that is heavily focused on database access for data entry, lookup, and reporting, and is constantly being expanded to provide additional features. The Google App Engine is another prominent PaaS play focused on building out consumer-facing web applications.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Although many companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Rackspace have now entered this market, the early leader in IaaS is Amazon. Amazon offers a variety of infrastructure services, including storage with Amazon S3 (Secure Scalable Storage) and computing capacity or virtual servers on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). IaaS frees a software developer from the large start-up costs associated with bootstrapping a new SaaS offering. 

Convio and The Cloud
At its inception, Convio recognized that nonprofits generally lacked the resources to develop, host, or maintain complex software systems and committed to SaaS as its delivery model. We feel that decision has been consistently validated and that our commitment to SaaS has enabled us to innovate at a faster pace and lower cost than competitors who have not embraced this model. A year ago, we recognized Salesforce.com as a leader in bringing PaaS to the market and built Convio Common Ground™ CRM on top of the Force.com platform. Common Ground includes all the functionality of a traditional donor database while adding on features for all other aspects of your nonprofit organization’s data and communications needs like volunteer and event management. Our partnership with Salesforce.com enables Common Ground to leverage core platform features around security, extensibility, and reporting that are common to all CRM systems, and allows us to focus our resources on building out the particulars of managing constituent relationships for nonprofits. We continually seek out opportunities to provide better service to nonprofits at a lower cost by integrating with cutting-edge technologies.