SaaS Blogs

I recently had the pleasure of showing a demo of SaaSGrid to Eugenio Pace at Microsoft (who had some nice things to say about SaaSGrid in his latest article “Northwind Hosting exists, it’s better than what you saw and it’s called SaaSGrid“) A side conversation we had during the demo was the impact of PaaS on an ISVs application structure, code base, and business processes. We did agree on something very important: that a SaaS platform should do as much as possible for the ISV with as little impact on the application it hosts.

In my opinion, non-intrusiveness is core to net total value delivered. A PaaS offering’s net value should be measured by it’s total value minus any penalty associated with intrusiveness. For example, a PaaS offering might save you 8 months worth of engineering time, but if it requires your engineering team to learn a new programming language and technology stack, use an impactful and unfamiliar programming model, restrict your deployment capabilities, and hamper your business processes, you may have wiped the 8 months worth of savings away! Clearly, there are some cases where a move to a new language, development paradigm, etc. is warranted (if that weren’t the case we would have never moved from Assembly to C#), but we are not at one of those cut-points. Interestingly, modern technology allows us to do things like “endow” an application with SaaS with very little intrusiveness whereas in the past, this may have required a new stack.

In your opinion, when is a new programming language, technology stack, etc. warranted (i.e. what’s the value threshold for deciding to leap into a super-intrusive stack)?