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

By: Chintan

Chintan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:17:30 +0000

Agree that the SaaS providers need not do it just for the sake of ideology but as a complete eco-system it would surely help if the cost structures are of similar nature. Having a high capex in dedicated or co-located servers might not make sense in the initial phases of SaaS offering.

By: Walter Adamson

Walter Adamson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:30:28 +0000

Agree. The issue of how a SaaS provider configures and sources their infrastructure is irrelevant to the quality of their SaaS offer, provided the infrastructure is aligned and architected to that offer. I think that the people you mention typify the group of people who think SaaS is about technology, they’re a hard nut to crack. Another point, and only a point of view – which will never be resolved – your post to me restates the case which I support which is that “cloud” can be part of SaaS but that SaaS is much bigger. The concepts of cloud as an infrastructure apply to SaaS but are a subset of SaaS.

Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com./walter

By: Sameer Jejurkar

Sameer Jejurkar — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:55:24 +0000

Great post – couldn’t agree more. Just because you are a SaaS vendor who using IaaS/PaaS to build your service, it doesn’t mean that you are providing a better service. You could build your service using IaaS/PaaS and still mess it up.

Those who want to judge if a SaaS vendor is “putting their money where their mouth is” should perhaps look at other SaaS services they (i.e. vendor) are using – sales, accounting, office apps or perhaps even their own service for internal uses (akin to Google’s dogfooding program). That may be a better indicator of how much the vendor believes in the concept. That said, even if they use other SaaS services does not automatically mean that their own service is good/great.

By: Justin Pirie

Justin Pirie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:59:42 +0000

Spot on Sinclair.

I do think though, if I were a startup today I would look to leverage PaaS specifically but it doesn’t make absolute sense to change or re-architect just because that is what the current trend is…

That said, Google Apps is pretty amazing compared to exchange!

Justin

By: Sinclair Schuller

Sinclair Schuller — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:53:53 +0000

Ben, great post – I hadn’t read it before, but glad I did now. Ideology for the sake of ideology never made sense to me.

Jim, fortunately for us, time will be on our side in the long term and will produce evidence to support our case;-)

By: Jim Donovan

Jim Donovan — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:12:57 +0000

Absolutely right, Sinclair. Zealotry has no place in the decision; but no doubt the zealots themselves wouldn’t agree!!

By: Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:51:31 +0000

Sinclair – totally agree. There’s nothing I hate more than blind dogma. Those who berate cloudy people for not being 100% in the cloud do much to damage our nascent industry.
I blogged about it awhile ago – https://www.cloudave.com/link/installed-apps-for-saas-vendors – great to see you guys fight the ideology!