Earlier today, Google announced its acquisition of On2 Technologies, a video technology company and maker of video compression technologies for the web and mobile networks. On2 Technologies is located in Clifton Park, New York - Apprenda’s hometown.  Speculations abound about Google’s plans for On2’s technology, here are a couple takes on the acquisition:

1. ZDNet
2. Business Journal

So, congratulations to Apprenda’s neighbor On2 Technologies!

“What it Takes to be a SaaS Provider”

Please post comments and let’s start discussions around any topic or point made during the podcast that you’d like to elaborate upon.

We (Sinclair and Matt) are in Barcelona at Microsoft’s TechEd EMEA Developer conference. We’re exhibiting Apprenda’s SaaSGrid platform at booth B15. Stop by if you’re here at the conference or in Barcelona. It’s a good chance to talk more about any conversations we’ve had here on SaaSBlogs, see a demo of SaaSGrid, or just chat with us.  We look forward to seeing you.

Before his first post is published here on SaaSBlogs.com, I want to introduce our new co-author Abe Sultan.  Abe is a frequent commenter here on SaaSBlogs and throughout the SaaS blogosphere.  I’m also happy to disclose that Abe holds the VP of Business Development position at our company, Apprenda. We’re very much looking forward to writing further articles with Abe as part of the SaaSBlogs team.

 - Matt Ammerman

• Software Engineer - SaaSGrid (disclosure: as mentioned previously, SaaSGrid is the platform that my company, Apprenda, will be releasing to beta soon.)
• User Interface Engineer

In the exciting world of software as a service, Apprenda’s development teams are hard at work inventing and perfecting techniques for cutting edge service delivery and the distributed hosting of web services.  If you, or your brilliant coworker/sibling/friend/ex (why not?), are interested in such endeavors and are comfortable working in a fast-paced and agile development environment, we’d love to hear from you.

At this point, there’s not even a support number to call and Jatol.com users aren’t even able to retrieve their stored data or web site files. As I read further down the discussion chain, I started thinking about how awful it would be if I were running a web-based business in a situation like this - the mere thought of surmounting catastrophic shutdown such as this is mind boggling.

While it may seem obvious to some, this story specifically highlights a very important part of what enterprise SaaS ISVs should look for in managed services: providers that can assert serious service level agreements and back them with real ramifications.  For instance: transparent multi-tiered redundancy, consistent and thorough backups and archives, potentially even software and hardware escrow services (see ‘catastrophic shutdown’ above). The bottom line is that hobbyist devs hosting websites or even working applications with reliable hosting companies count downtime in minutes, while enterprise count downtime in thousands of dollars.

The tricky thing about SaaS is that it fundamentally requires the ISV to at least purport to be the ‘provider’ of software.  While hosting may be outsourced and ISVs become at least the ‘P’ in ‘MSP’, it is vitally important that the backing ‘MS’ be up to par.  If you’ve dealt with an MSP (without naming names) and had service level ‘experiences’, what are your thoughts on MSP preparedness for SaaS?  Are MSPs ready to host enterprise SaaS applications that generate the aggregate load of potentially millions of ISVs’ users?

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With advanced security, archiving, and message filtering in place, Google’s hopes are that this move will shine a new light on the Google Apps suite as a viable hosted business suite to enterprise users who often must conform to compliancy requirements in security and data archiving.  It’s a good move, and one that Google pretty much had to make in some form or another.  They’ve established over 100,000 Google Apps users who will speak for the suite’s usability and aid in productivity.  Now they’ve set their sights on converting the hordes of users who haven’t been convinced that usability benefits and frills outweigh security and compliancy concerns.

As always, Phil has an interesting piece that takes the news and goes another step… “What next for MessageLabs?”

CogHead made a statement in their early advertising that has stuck with me for awhile now - they said [paraphrasing] that “CogHead wasn’t designed for computational fluid dynamics calculations”, instead spotlighting ease of use for the business individual. The idea: an environment to quickly build business process applications, and it’s so easy that anybody in your business can do it.

The problem I have is not with the ingenuity or inventiveness of these types of environments. I think there is a ton of very cool, and applicable, things that can be done with them.  But I feel they alienate one crowd that, well, we owe pretty much everything to - software developers and engineers.  Those that have been schooled and trained in the complex sciences of computer programming and application engineering.  Believe it or not, but these folks are masters of an art - because there is a significant amount of expressiveness that goes into architecting an application, writing code, and optimizing it.  Furthermore, business to business SaaS includes applications and services that fundamentally require a powerful computational platform and languages expressive enough to harness the power of that platform.  I spoke with a vendor the other day who is looking for the right tools to develop an online service that provides genomic computation.  Yes, that’s right - genome sequencing for researchers, on demand.  

Some of the feedback I’ve read and heard from developers who’ve gotten their hands on languages such as Apex leads me to believe that developers’ hands are tied - even if they stretched the technology to its limits there’d be so much more they’d want to do with it that it’s almost not worth their time.  They’ve spent years honing skills in the .NET languages, in Java, PHP, Ruby, in name your favorite programming language - and now they’re being handed Javascript-based online IDEs and proprietary languages and told to deliver enterprise SaaS applications.  They’re being told by managers to port existing client\server code to an on-demand architecture using tools that simply don’t match up.

The tools exist, and developers have been using them for years.  They’re experts.  Perhaps SaaS enablers should focus on bringing the existing developer toolbet to the SaaS world, instead of enabling the rest of the business world around them with brand-spanking new tools that limit and eventually alienate developers.  Frankly, I think the novelty of so-easy-your-manager-could-do-it development tools will eventually wear off and the business world will turn back to developers looking for programmatic magic.  But, that’s a whole other post for another time.

The point is, handing an enterprise software developer some of these enablement tools and asking for a business-to-business SaaS application is like handing Mario Batali an EasyBake™ oven and asking for a six-course Italian dinner.  No matter the amount of genius and talent involved, there’s only so much you can do with a 100-watt lightbulb.