I recently wrote a blog post titled “Mobility Matters” where I mentioned KPCB partner Mary Meeker’s annual report on Internet Trends.   In my post, I discussed how B2B software developers need to pay attention to what’s becoming a heavy industry emphasis on mobile platforms and the amazing growth/adoption rates of tablets and smartphones when compared to traditional PCs.

Yesterday, Josh Constine of TechCrunch  blogged about a recent mobile internet trends presentation by Meeker where she provided an update to some of the key stats from her early report in May.

Here are some updates called out from the TechCrunch post:

Over the last several weeks, I have been doing a fair bit of traveling. I found myself in the unfortunate situation of not having the use of my laptop for a few days while traveling internationally. Fortunately, I was traveling with a few key gadgets: my iPad, a cool iPad keyboard from Zagg, and my cell phone. I had almost everything I needed to get my job done and was able to get by well enough for the remainder of my trip. Although I am an avid iPad user both for business and personal use, this experience reaffirmed just how close we are in many ways to really being able to decouple ourselves from the traditional PC for many of the office- based work functions that most of us manage on a daily basis.

Architecting applications for the cloud has changed traditional software development considerations.  Many software companies simply are not sure how to do it.  At SafeNet, we’ve had some experience with architecting and developing our own cloud application, SentinelCloud, a service offering which supports software licensing for cloud and SaaS applications.

Michael “MiZu” Zunke, the CTO of our SRM division, provided some insight into our process and experience building our cloud application after finding this post about designing and architecting cloud apps, and explains what we learned by it.  His comments highlight the journey we took over 2 ½ years in developing SentinelCloud explains some of the key challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

Feel free to share your lessons learned with our LicensingLive community.  What were your top challenges in architecting your cloud solution?

The SentinelCloud team has been working hard to build and launch the latest addition to SafeNet’s family of Sentinel Software Monetization Solutions,  Sentinel Cloud Services.  While the service successfully made the transition from Beta to GA earlier this year, the team remains hard at work focused on customer evaluations and getting new customers up to speed, while at the same time planning and developing the roll out of new functionality over our quarterly release schedule.

Getting back to our interactions with customers … feedback has been nearly universally positive.  We have heard from customers of all types and sizes. .  Sentinel Cloud has appealed to  SaaS startups, transitioning on-premise software vendors,  and equipment manufacturers large and small. I would like to highlight one prospect who has completed their evaluation of Sentinel Cloud.

Software pricing and packaging is an art form and perfecting it is an ongoing battle. Add cloud services to the mix along with your on-premise offerings and you have a recipe for disaster. I have spent the last two years working with ISVs who are in the midst of planning and migrating all or a portion of their product portfolio to the cloud.   A significant obstacle is how to price and package their offerings to build a customer base, prevent cannibalization, and ultimately increase profitability.  I have decided that their stories and the successful approaches are certainly worth sharing!

As the head of new product development at SafeNet one of my key areas of focus is around bringing to market the types of tools and services ISVs need to help them manage the shift to the cloud – as you can imagine this means that I spend a lot of my time keeping an eye on what the industry is buzzing about!

Yesterday, a very interesting blog entry appeared on the ZDNet website broaching the topic of social licensing. This is interesting  – not only because Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is opinionated… unwavering and entertaining to watch – but also because the article touches on the nature of enterprise applications in the future: how enterprises can move towards building solutions by cherry picking features and building entire cloud based systems from different services.  A great example of this is Zuora – a saas billing company – that recently did a webinar – take a look at their reference customer xactly – and how they built out their back office by stringing together a host of different online services.  We think more of that is going to happen – and so does IDC – there are even some companies out there betting on this happening (Boomi) – and providing the glue to get all these services to talk together.