Understanding the "as a Service" Revolution
I recently wrote a piece that was published on Datamation that outlines 5 guidelines for implementing private PaaS in the Enterprise. Check it out here!
What do you think?
If you’d like to mingle with others in the Cloud space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 4200+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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Next week I’ll be travelling to Las Vegas to present at VMworld 2011. The session is going to focus around a reference architecture on how to auto scale the Apprenda Platform using vCloud Director and other VMware technologies while maintaining your applications running without disruptions. In the fast evolving space of cloud computing applications are becoming increasingly harder to develop and manage but expectations of uptime and reliability are higher than ever so taking advantage of a PaaS (Platform as a Service) layer like Apprenda’s can help enterprise IT and ISVs to excel in the cloud.
VMworld: August 29 – September 1
Session Details
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Title: Reference Architecture to Autoscale an Instance of Apprenda’s Application Fabric for .NET through VMware vCloud Director
Session: TEX2833
Registration: Content Catalog
Agenda
- Understanding Private PaaS Benefits
- Introduction to Apprenda’s PaaS
- Reference Architecture Breakdown
- Takeaway and Summary
Hope to see you all there but if you are not coming don’t miss the action and follow me on twitter at @asultan.
Cheers,
Abe
I just got back from Las Vegas from having participated in a panel for CompTIA Breakaway 2009 where the focus of the panel was on the role that VARs can play in the SaaS space.
First I need to get something off my chest that has been boiling inside of me since my first few conversations with some of the attendees and VARs at the conference: Hosted Exchange or managed IIS servers is NOT SaaS, call it Managed Services, or whatever you want to call it but it certainly is NOT SaaS and certainly not PaaS for that matter.
Now with that out of the way ;) it doesn’t mean that VARs don’t have a role in SaaS and frankly the reason why most VARs use the term SaaS interchangeably with Managed Services is because they really can’t be bothered with the details that actually define SaaS; they simply care that you use it as you go and it lives outside of your premises. SaaS just happens to be today’s cool buzzword, so why not ride the wave, right?
Anyways, back to the point I wanted to talk about; VARs and Channel players are normally considered the Trusted Expert for their customers and as such they can still provide expertise on SaaS applications and arguably much easier than traditional on premises applications.
There are many ways that VARs can make money in SaaS and a lot of them, the same ways they make money today; here are just a few:
Commissions: Many SaaS vendors have referral programs were you can make a decent commission by a simple referral. Even if some of the vendors don’t have an official referral program, I’m sure that most would be happy to talk to you about making something like that work for you if you are bringing them real business that wasn’t already part of their pipeline.
Training & Support: Become real experts of the solutions that you are proposing and go to the extent to offer training & support. Even if the SaaS vendors offer support and training on their own, you have the upper hand of up-selling your existing customers who already trust you as their loyal advisor plus it will make you that much better selling the solution since you know it so well.
Integrations: Native SaaS applications are inherently built to scale (the ones that are properly architected at least and if yours isn’t, check out SaaSGrid for some help!), this requires the applications to be built as service oriented applications so by default most properly written SaaS applications will automatically expose APIs for extensibility and integrations via web services. If you are a technical enough shop, you can actually provide value added services by extending the SaaS application or bridging two solutions much easier than you would normally be able to do in an on premises application.
Consolidation: If you are offering your customers multiple services, you can actually consolidate the services for them and give them additional benefits like central billing and alike.
Clearly these are only a few ways that VARs can play a role in the space and some changes to your core business model might need to be made but what I’m interested to know is really what you think? Are you a VAR making money with SaaS? If so, what are you doing and how is it different than your other traditional on premises offerings; also, how is it affecting your bottom line? If not, why not?
Join us and share your thoughts through the comments. Also If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 2400+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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Two weeks ago I had the honor to be invited to participate at a small panel at Structure09 in San Francisco CA next to Matt Mullenberg founder of WordPress, Robert Miggins VP of Business Development at Peer1 and Geir Magnusson Jr. consulting architect at the Gilt Groupe.
The topic of the panel was about the effects of running Cloud Computing on commodity hardware, but somewhere along the conversation, somebody asked a question that prompted a bit more explanation of the general effects of cloud computing.
See, most people are confused about the true benefits of cloud computing; often citing the cost of running a server from a cloud provider as being less than a traditional dedicated server from a traditional hosting company like Server Beach or alike. The fact of the matter is that running a server image from a cloud provider like EC2 is almost twice as expensive as it would be if you had a comparable dedicated server from a traditional hosting vendor. The reason is because the true value of Cloud Computing, is not in the cost of running a particular server in comparison to its traditional counterpart, but in the flexibility and elasticity that one gets to instantly scale up or down an application at times of high or low demands. For these capabilities, we gladly pay a premium.
The problem is that 95% of web applications (my personal estimate) are not designed to be able to take advantage of these properties and for a good reason. IT IS NOT TRIVIAL. Having the power to instantly scale up or down an application to only consume and pay for the resources that are required at that point in time is an amazing capability and if done correctly it WILL be less expensive than running on regular hardware from a traditional hosting vendor since you don’t have to run at over capacity all the time only of those peak times, but taking advantage of that power is harder than most people think.
Careful design and planning is required when building the application to facilitate this elastic scaling, but that is why companies like my own exist. In my opinion (and thankfully I’m not alone on this one), the future of software is on the web, but this new breed of web applications or SaaS Applications have many particular requirements that are key for their success that truly complicate the requirements to building the applications. Things like a true multi-tenant application, customer provisioning, application metering and billing only to mention a few are a must in order to succeed and are not trivial to design.
Cloud Computing is extremely powerful on its own because when done right, it can provide great financial rewards as well as operational rewards but understand that the hardware layer alone is merely a tiny piece of the puzzle. The true value of Cloud Computing will be much more appreciated when it is coupled with a platform layer like SaaSGrid that abstracts away the hardware layer and provides a unified foundation to enable the elastic properties at the application layer without the explicit interaction of the application developer.
What are your thoughts? Are you using Cloud Computing strictly for hosting or are you taking advantage of its elastic properties? What do you think about SaaS Application Servers like SaaSGrid?
If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 2280+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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Just a quick note to all readers, I’m going to be at the Structure 09 conference next week in San Francisco participating in a panel discussion titled “Hosting Cloud On Commodity Hardware“. If you are in the Bay area and are planning to be at the conference, make sure to pin me down to talk some Cloud!
Structure 09 is presented by Om Malik and The GigaOM Network team and it brings together customers, entrepreneurs and early influencers that drive the tech industry.
The Key Note speakers for this year’s conference will be Mark Benioff CEO of Salesforce.com and Paul Sagan CEO of Akamai and the speaker lineup is just as impressive so make sure not to miss out on it.
Looking forward to seeing you all there.
If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 2160+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
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