SaaS Blogs

SaaS enablement technology is a driving force behind the adoption of SaaS. When going the route of using enablement technology or an underlying platform for a software as a service offering, the decision can be nerve racking. After all, you as a software engineering firm or vendor are molding part of your strategy as a business entity around something external and out of your control. While browsing for new and interesting bloggers, I bumped into David Terrar’s Business Two Zero blog. Two articles caught my eye: AppExchange - killer app or all hype? and a similar article for Jamcracker entitled Jamcracker = AppExchange without the CRM tie in. Cutting through some of the article, Terrar implicitly provides some insight to what is and is not important on the enablement level which closely aligns to where I see Apprenda going in the future.

In the former of the two articles, Terrar states that “…it sounds like the AE [AppExchange] platform itself is a much thinner technology base compared to things like Netweaver.” The title of the former is quasi-parallel to the statement I’ve highlighted. The real take away is that software vendors do not like to be tied down, locked in (as in “vendor lock in”), or otherwise gagged by their technological decisions. However, these same vendors do not want to use software components or foundational platforms that prove too rigid, preventing them from exercising the full extent of their creative capability. Once a vendor has decided that some set of enablement technologies fit their technological needs, they need to analyze their decisions based on a strategic approach. The strategic approach really needs to focus on the two aforementioned factors.

When deciding on what technology to use (for example, Jamcracker vs. AppExchange) the attributes of ‘Transparency’ and ‘Flexibility & Control’ should come into play. Transparency is most simply described as the factor that determines the amount of vendor lock-in experienced. The more transparent the technology, the less lock in. Vendor lock-in is reminscent of being a consumer in a monopolized market: The technology has created the unfortunate constraint of being a corral of sorts, preventing a consumer of that technology from investigating other solutions in an inexpensive fashion in the event that the quality of the prior has been reduced to unsatisfactory. Flexibility & Control determines how much creative muscle you can flex with the technology you have. Some technologies drastically dampen a developer’s capabilities. We can strategically map these two concepts (see matrix above) as relating to the integrative risk that a development firm takes on, how coupled or “married” it is to the technology and the effect of the technology on its market agility (ability to respond to market needs).

Enablement technologies for delivering software as a service are all over the chart. For example, it seems as if Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and NetWeaver fall somewhat under the category of very low transparency. AppExchange is very meta-data oriented. Their own marketing material(PDF) -See Page 3- states that the meta-data model has limitations, but then try to spin it with a phrase indicating that the limitation is a boon to the developer…right… Although I do not have direct experience with AppExchange, after much research and discussion, they seem to fall somewhere in the lower left quadrant of the matrix, as does NetWeaver. Being forced to develop the server side with nothing but meta-data and a constraint hierarchy (p number of pages, n number of ‘custom objects’) seems cave-manish and can definitely be defined as ‘opaque.’ In addition, it heavily reduces the amount of flexibility. Others fall in less restrictive quadrants, but nonetheless require the ISV to carefully make a platform choice because of the restrictions inherent to their technology sets.

I urge anyone reading this that is looking to develop or deploy an SaaS application to stay tuned and remember this article!