SaaS Blogs

I’ve been keeping tabs on an interesting company named Swivel for a little while now. I bumped into their blog recently, and have read a couple of articles, including one by ZDNet blogger Mitch Ratcliffe. The basic idea behind Swivel is to be a central place for intelligently parsed and analyzed data for use in interpretation. In essence, it is an “Analysis as a Service” (AaaS) platform (For the record, I hate making up names/acronym/phrases, but for lack of a better description, I had to). From my understanding, one can upload oodles of data, which the Swivel compute farm then operates on and provides analytic cross-sections of. Through these cross-sections, you’ll be able to extract valuable correlation (although I think that if Swivel is successful, it will catalyze the abuse of passing correlation on as causation. I have enough of this reading Digg). You don’t need to be an oracle to see that there is huge monetization potential around this concept. Right now, the Swivel website is very consumer, fun-data centric. Long-term, however, Swivel can be positioned as the analytic store-house for corporate data that requires analysis. Companies could add data (Ratcliffe suggested something akin to Amazon S3, which is a superb positioning in my humble opinion), let Swivel do its magic, and then interpret the neatly digested data for competitive advantage/market analysis/etc. But what’s more important is how a service like Swivel plays into the SaaS ecosystem and can benefit the end-user in a more general, more pliable case: integration. Bear with me on the forthcoming analogy.

To anyone that takes fishing seriously, the offshore swivel knot will be familiar to them. For those of you that aren’t anglers, the offshore swivel knot is generally used for big-fish trolling in deep sea or large fresh-fresh water fishing. Normally, you attach a swivel and clip to a fishing line (or in this case, a double line). The swivel and clip allows you to quickly remove a lure/rig from your line and snap on a different lure or rig without having to untie & retie. The offshore swivel knot is a special way to tie the swivel to the line such that there are multiple strands of line attached to the swivel. In the event that one strand snaps, the others can still provide support, hopefully long enough to get the fish onto the boat. Your choice of lure/rig to attach to the swivel is dependent on what type of fish you want to attract. Here is a diagram summarizing the knot and final setup (borrowed from Fishing Cairns):

(bigger)

This entire fishing setup is analogous to where I see Swivel and their value proposition fit in. Swivel has the potential to allow many different SaaS applications to tap into it’s tightly wound data without having to jump through hoops. Through Swivel, multiple (different) SaaS applications can tap into strong, reliable analyzed data without repetitive integration headaches, similar to how the clip allows an angler to attach different lures to the same, reliable knot. If a knot strand breaks, or analytic cross-section weakens, you have many more to rely on. Data and its analysis is part of the “special ingredients” involved in making any good application. Something like Swivel, horizontally coupled across different applications, will be ultra-beneficial to end users. They use the right rig (application) for the right fish (business need) without the hassle of having to retie the rig (integration of complex data).

Swivel and the concept of a data analysis platform are very exciting. I frequently go to Italy to visit family, and during one of my trips, an uncle said “Vai al mare, se ben vuoi pescare.“ The idea behind this proverb is that if you want to fish well (aka catch big fish) you need to fish in the sea (that’s where the big fish live). Well, the Internet is our sea. If they get it right, company’s like Swivel will definitely become a standard part of the tackle box.