Era of Analytic Applications – Part 1

I was talking to one of the prominent General Partners at a Venture Capital firm here in Silicon Valley over the holidays…discussing how the Cloud market is evolving. We both agreed that 2013 will mark yet another shift in the evolution of web applications.

I personally simplified this view of cloud evolution by defining its progression in the following periods…dating back to these noteworthy events:

ISP Era: Software Tool & Die is founded in 1989
ASP to SaaS Era: TeleComputing founder coins ASPs in 1996
IaaS & PaaS Era: Amazon EC2 is Launched in 2006
Analytics Application Era: Apache Hadoop 1.0 launched 2012

Sure, Apache Hadoop was technically released on December 27, 2011…but most of us were out drinking brandy eggnog then (just as I am now).

Lets just look at the beginning…when The World operated by Software Tool & Die started the first ISP. Pretty cool to think that they were the first dial-up service provider that offered direct access of the Internet to the general public.

Even though “Application Service Providers” or ASPs existed earlier, Jostein Eikeland, the CEO of Telecomputing (founded in 1995), is credited with coining the acronym ASP in 1996, according to Inc. Magazine.

Other notable events just following 1996 include the beginning of SaaS powerhouses such as:

Saba (Learning Management System SaaS): 1997
RightNow (Customer Experience SaaS): 1997
Kenexa (Hiring SaaS): 1997
Salesforce.com (CRM): 1999
Netsuite (ERP): 1999
Taleo (Talent): 1999
Cornerstone (Talent): 1999
Concur (Spend Mgmt): 2000
SuccessFactors (Performance Mgmt): 2001

Established players like Rackspace also started in this same time period. Rackspace was launched in October 1998 with Richard Yoo as its CEO. Although most hosting companies focused on the technology end of hosting, Rackspace created its “Fanatical Support” offering to focus on service and support. On March 28, 2000, Rackspace received funding from prominent VCs and the rest is history.

What’s incredible is the fact that companies like Rackspace were able to create such value based on the simple three-tier architecture of web applications, namely the database (RDBMS), web server (application), and browser (client). To think that billions of dollars of value was created on such a simple architecture.

If back in the 1980’s, someone told you that web applications which consisted of text, photos, and videos coupled with some dynamic HTML were going to create a multi-billion dollar market….would you have believed them?

So…what if I told you in the year 2012 that analytic applications which consisted of intelligent ways to interact with users on the web…allowing web pages to “come alive” through batch, near real-time, and real-time data analytics….was going to create yet another multi-billion dollar market….would you believe me?

Era of Analytic Applications – Part 2

Big Data Predictions for 2013

Big Data’s Fourth Dimension – Time

Enterprise Big Data Cloud

New Cloud Ecosystem

The Data Era – Moving from 1.0 to 2.0

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Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.