Will SaaS Companies Benefit from a Virtuous Enablement Cycle?

Dec 24, 2009 by Sinclair Schuller

Mike Vizard over at IT Business Edge wrote a blog post a couple of days ago where he described SaaSGrid as potentially having “…the most impact…” on the Cloud market (using the word ‘market’ here very loosely) when compared to other cloud technologies like Force.com and Azure. I’m both flattered and clearly in agreement, but one subtle comment in his post caught my attention: “More targeted SaaS application environments will evolve…”

I entirely agree with Vizard’s sentiment, which prompts the next question: how will targeted SaaS application environments evolve and why will more crop of them crop up. I think the answer comes from understanding some of the history behind SaaS enablement technologies, what they mean to those who use them, and what the results of those who use them mean to the market in general.

Most good SaaS (and non-SaaS) enablement technologies crop up because of need, or what I’ll call negative pressure. For example, at Apprenda we built SaaSGrid because the founding team (myself included) had worked on a variety of SaaS projects in a “ground up”  fashion (I’ll write about the Apprenda founding story at some point). We found that an inordinate amount of time was spent on SaaS specifics, most of the bugs and maintenance problems came from the home-brewed SaaS stack, and most attention was deviated from the actual business problem the SaaS offering was trying to solve, leading to a gross loss of focus and an attempt to build a dual competency (building a SaaS stack plus building a domain specific business application).  The lack of a foundational SaaS stack created negative pressure (a vacuum, if you will), causing us to found Apprenda and build SaaSGrid, thereby filling that void for all others that were destined to take on the arduous “build” path. Our customer base includes companies that were “on the fence” with respect to building a SaaS business that decided to move forward because SaaSGrid reduced the hurdle of architecting a SaaS offering and building a SaaS business so significantly that they decided to move forward. In essence, technologies like SaaSGrid act as a catalyst.

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From a macro-market perspective, enablement technologies focus on boosting product yield (essentially, SaaSGrid’s goal is to boost production efficiency and quality, thereby increasing production yield). This is what fulfills Vizard’s prediction of “More targeted SaaS application environments will evolve…” The catalysis of SaaS application development by application platforms like SaaSGrid boost yield, any success stories  reinforce  both the market story for SaaS and the enablement story, which will create positive pressure, or new enablement companies wanting to participate in or replicate the commercial success. The pressure isn’t void based, but in fact is rooted in the existence of success. This is a huge boon to ISVs with SaaS aspirations, because it means all eyes are focused on helping them achieve their goals.

Why is SaaSGrid so impactful compared to other technologies? Because we’re one of the few (and probably only from a technology perspective) that focus on bridging the gap of current technologies to a SaaS end-game, and not just on a generic “cloud” end game (i.e., we focus on the distribution model, not on the idea of ‘running code online,’ which is something very different). The idea of a “SaaS application server” is so fundamentally pure in its goals, that it resonates well with an ISVs aspirations and acts as that catalyst and foundation to success. Although this sounded like a big SaaSGrid plug, it’s truly rooted in my passion for this wonderful delivery model and the value we bring to other software companies.

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Do you have to leverage “X as a Service” to be a SaaS provider?

Dec 10, 2009 by Sinclair Schuller

I love the idea that a balance exists between ideology and practicality. Questions of ideology and practicality always arise when it comes to building software, building a business, and building a software business. SaaS is no exception.

Interestingly, I had two different discussions with people who were of the position that aspiring SaaS company’s should “put their money where their mouth is” and use cloud technologies exclusively to build out their SaaS offerings, stating that it was a form of hypocrisy to offer SaaS and not use Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service.

The question I have is whether it is necessary to bind yourself to “XaaS” technologies in order to be a SaaS provider. To be honest, I think that such a “requirement” is absurd. No, you don’t need to use IaaS or PaaS or anything of that nature to be a SaaS provider at all, let alone a good one. Not using XaaS says nothing about convictions. I find this sort of fanatical idealism a put off, and it’s interesting to me that people in the tech space moving to SaaS fail to realize that ‘Service’ is only new and special in the context of software. Humans have been running service business for hundreds of years. Do you think that telephone companies, electric utilities, cable TV companies, etc. only use services to run their business? No, of course not. There are many good reasons and cases to use XaaS suppliers to support your own SaaS business (EC2, etc.) and in other cases, you may need/want to run your own infrastructure. Currently, there is no clear cut rule or guide forcing one way or the other. The fact of the matter is , you can be a GREAT SaaS provider and run in a co-located space, in your own datacenter, on EC2, or whatever else you deem appropriate. What matters is the quality of service and the quality of the software.

Do you agree with the statement that a SaaS provider needs to be using IaaS/PaaS to be taken seriously, or do you feel that it’s OK for a SaaS provider to leverage non “XaaS” approaches?

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