The Cost of Sustained Market Leadership as a SaaS Company – New Whitepaper

Jun 17, 2010 by Jesse Kliza

Hi everyone,

We just yesterday released a brand new white paper entitled “Understanding the Cost of Becoming a Sustained Market Leader in the Software Business Through Software as a Service”, that we thought the community might be interested in. It’s vendor neutral, no product pushing, etc, and we’ve gotten great feedback thus far.  As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, so please speak up! :-)

You can access the full white paper here.

Topics covered include:

- What it means to be a SaaS provider
- The importance of highly efficient SaaS architecture
- Optimal strategies for achieving the SaaS stack maturity necessary to become a sustained market leader

The paper begins with an overview of providing a SaaS offering, the primary infrastructure and delivery costs, and the requirements for market leadership before proceeding into the complexities and benefits of single-instance multi-tenancy and a critique of several compensatory strategies. The paper then concludes with an explanation on how cloud middleware can solve these architectural problems thereby achieving the benefits of building your own multi-tenant stack without the onerous upfront R&D costs and long time-to-market or the poor customer management and lock-in deficiencies normally associated with leveraging Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

Here’s the link again to access the full white paper.

Should you have any questions or feedback on the whitepaper, please let us know.  We hope you find it to be a useful and informative read!

- Jesse

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How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company

Oct 6, 2009 by Jesse Kliza

We (Apprenda) had a great event recently down in NYC, and our presentation was extremely well received.  It was standing room only at the Public House, and Abe presented to a great group of ISVs and tech savvy networkers that came out to join us.  Thanks again to everyone who made it out!

For those of you that couldn’t make it, Abe recently wrote a great article for Datamation that included much of what was presented.  You can check it out here.

Alternatively, if you’re already pretty competent in failing as a SaaS company, we have just what you need to become a bonafide SaaS superstar. :-)

- Jesse

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A Hidden Gem in Your “Private Beta”

Sep 30, 2009 by Jesse Kliza

Lately, I’ve had the great pleasure of being able to work with startups from the Microsoft BizSpark program that are leveraging SaaSGrid to bring their SaaS apps to market. It’s really been a blast, and it’s great to see the success they’re having and the enthusiasm about our product and what it’s doing for their business. One of the topics that has come up lately in discussions has been the concept of a “Private Beta”. Having been responsible for the go to market strategies and successful launches of software products in the past, I’ve been fortunate to have learned a number of things along the way. One hidden gem that I think many times is overlooked during a software company’s private beta phase is:

Gaining an understanding of the SPECIFIC thought process of how users evaluate the product.

Everyone wants users to tell them how great their product is and what could improve. But what if rather than just going to market with a slightly better product, you could also go to market with a keen awareness of how your target market will be evaluating your offering? This isn’t the easiest thing to do, and in order to do it, your private beta needs to be structured with this objective in mind. It can’t just be “use it and tell us what you think”. You should have a set timeline for the private beta, with well defined milestones and feedback loops, just like any other project.

Here are 3 major things to consider that should help you on your way:

1) You want to understand what the private beta users expectations are going in, before you provide them with access. You want to understand what they hope your product will do for them, what they think it will do for them (based on your website, the information you’ve given them in the past, etc), and why they are interested.

2) Next, you want to understand their immediate first impression. When they initially are provided access, what did they think? What questions did they have immediately? What impressed them right away.

3) Further on, you want to understand the reasons that these users find value in the offering.

Capture this information, document it, analyze it…etc.

Ultimately, you want to understand what you can do to keep your future customers engaged and extremely successful at every point of their relationship with you. When they initially contact you, when they are evaluating your solution, when they sign on and begin using your product, AND hopefully when they are evangelizing your product to others.

BONUS: Here’s an example of a first step and email to kick things off:

Send a precursor email or call (depending on your participant numbers) that tells them that you are preparing to open up access to them in the coming week, but that first you would like them to tell you why they are interested and what they hope your product will do for them. Ask them to simply respond, so that you have some real data about their personal expectations and hopes for your product.

EXAMPLE EMAIL TO SEND FIRST:

Hello _______, Thank you again for your interest in <INSERT YOUR PRODUCT NAME HERE>. We are excited to inform you that next week we will be providing you access to <INSERT YOUR PRODUCT NAME HERE> in response to your interest in our Private Beta. Before that time we would like you to simply respond to this email and tell us why you are interested in particpating, and what you hope <INSERT YOUR PRODUCT NAME HERE> will do for you. We are collecting this data now, before you see <INSERT YOUR PRODUCT NAME HERE>, so that we have an understanding of what your personal expectations and hopes for our product are. Our goal is to make our customers/users wildly successful. Understanding your expectations prior to your initial impressions will help us to better hone our messaging, so that we can communicate the value of our offering most effectively. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to respond with this information and we look forward to working with you.

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Meet the SaaSBlogs authors in NYC…or join us for a webinar next week

Sep 15, 2009 by Jesse Kliza

As many of you know, SaaSBlogs is written and maintained by the creators of SaaSGrid.  We have a few events coming up next week, and we thought you’d be interested:

Going From SaaS Product Idea to Paying Customers in Under 6 Months (WEBINAR)
When: September 25th, 2009 at 1:00PM EDT
Where: Register Here!

This will be a great event.  You’ll have an opportunity to hear from Nate Rowe, CEO of Appoint IT, who recently launched their product offering, and was able to go from a product idea to paying SaaS customers in under 6 months by leveraging the SaaSGrid SaaS Application Server.

You’ll also get a chance to hear from Luis Aburto, CEO of Scio Consulting, and myself.  It will be a great discussion, and you’ll see why SaaSGrid is quickly becoming the solution of choice for ISVs large and small as they make the move to SaaS.

You can find out more details about the event, and register here.

“How to Fail Miserably as a Cloud Software Provider” (NETWORKING EVENT)
When: September 22th, 2009 at 6:00PM EDT
Where: Public House, New York City

This will also be a great event, and an opportunity to network with some movers and shakers in the SaaS and Cloud Computing space here in New York.  You’ll also have an opportunity to hear from Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller, and he’ll be delivering a presentation entitled: How to Fail Miserably as a Cloud Software Provider”.  If you’re in the area or can be, you won’t want to miss it!

You can find out more and let us know you’re coming here. We hope many of you can join us!

- Jesse

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Webinar Recording and Q&A Now Available – Sink or Swim: Transitioning your Software Business to SaaS

Mar 28, 2009 by Jesse Kliza

Hi everyone,

We had a great turnout last week for the webinar, and a number of people have asked if they could get access to the recording, so here it is. I’ve also compiled a list of some of the question from the Q&A session here, along with the answers.

Q&A

Q: We have our app completed, but are working on the provisioning/billing parts (hard for us). Can SaaSGrid provide a sandbox for our app such that we can deploy one copy of the app per customer? – our app is .net based and is a web application already. For us, our value is in our s/w, not in building special purpose billing systems

A: Absolutely, you can register for access to the SDK and a Sandbox account here. 

Q: What are the on-going cost advantages of using a PaaS like SaaSGrid?

A: Applications built “from the ground up”  without a PaaS incur massive ongoing R&D and maintenance expense. Your R&D team will have to manage the code base, fix bugs, and maintain the layer. This is expense will generally become disproportionate to the R&D of the actual app on an ongoing basis. Second, a home grown SaaS stack will normally reach a “freeze” point where no new added functionality is added. A PaaS is constantly looking to evolve and inject new value into the applications and business it hosts. A PaaS provider can help drive revenues up and costs down without the participation of the ISVs it works with. Last is flexibility. A PaaS environment is built to be horizontal and support any application. Good PaaS offerings like SaaSGrid also offer commercialization tools, lifecycle management tools, and support tools that become part of an ISVs day to day.

Q: What approximate effort is needed to make existing hosted applications into SAAS. Is the architecture to be re-designed or can be used as it is?

A: It depends on the application, but utilizing SaaSGrid, some existing application can be deployed as a pure multitenant SaaS offering with out any effort.  Others may require modifications before they can be deployed.  SaaSGrid does not require any proprietary work to be done to your application, it simply requires that you’ve adhered to current best practices for architecting your .NET application.

Q: What about ISVs that already have a J2EE application?

A: Currently, SaaSGrid is specifically focused on .NET based applications 

Q: What happens if the PaaS provider goes out of business?

A: Depends on the type of PaaS provider. If it’s a “custom stack PaaS” that has its own programming languages, the scenario is dire because the code can’t work anywhere else. Existing language/runtime PaaS offerings like SaaSGrid allow you to run your code on-premise, which at least lets you recover your application even though it won’t be a SaaS offering. At Apprenda, we’ve focused on a disaster recovery plan where our cloud partners that run SaaSGrid will continue to run the platform for a significant period of time, thereby mitigating any disaster scenarios and giving the ISV the ability to continue business as usual.

Q: What is the typical cost and timeframe for developing a SaaS application?

A: Depending on the complexity of the application, the SaaS aspect of an application can take up anywhere from 30%-70% of upfront development time and account for roughly 30% of ongoing costs and development effort. 

Q: What if my application is running on a different environment – can I still use SaaSGrid to manage my business (subscriptions, etc.)?

A: Currently, no. SaaSGrid exploits the fact that it manages the environment the applications run in to provide much of the business management aspects like metering and subscription based authorization magically, without writing a line of code. A huge amount of value exists in running within SaaSGrid that normally provides rapid ROI on time and money invested to moving to the SaaSGrid environment.

If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 1730+ members and it’s growing every day; make sure you are not missing out and join today.

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