SaaS Blogs

Phil Wainewright just posted a breakdown on SaaS platform/ecosystem flavors titled “What flavor is your ecosystem?” His breakdown is at a slightly different angle and a finer grain than my article categorizing platforms. The categorization seems to classify ecosystems and platforms based on implementation mechanism, which is an excellent categorization in its own right. At the end of the article, he states that “The most successful ecosystems will be those that offer the most popular balance between convenience and flexibility” which is a distilled and parallel version of an article I wrote awhile back regarding SaaS enablement selection and flexibility vs. transparency (It seems that according to Wainewright, convenience comes at a price, namely loss of transparency and a higher lock-in/coupling flavor with the enablement technology). I agree with Wainewright 100%. My bets are on flexibility. Although convenience can be a powerful thing, our industry has learned (I hope) from the effects of unnatural lock-in and random introduction of technologies that “go against the grain” already defined by the industry. The best solutions are those that get the job done with no added baggage. This does not, however, mean that convenience needs to be abandoned. Convenience can be delivered in a fashion that maximizes flexibility.

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