This is a reminder that if you haven’t already done so, you can sign up to download SaaSGrid Express on June 22.  Signing up before this Thursday, June 17, will grant you access to a webinar I’ll be holding called “SaaSGrid Express End-to-End Technical Workshop”.

This workshop will cover:

• SaaSGrid Express and how it differs from the full version of SaaSGrid
• SaaSGrid Express Installation
• SaaSGrid Express Provider Portal and Operations Center Walkthrough

The workshop is designed to give you a head start on getting to know SaaSGrid Express and will give you early access to the download so you can get started building your first SaaS app right away!

Cheers!

Matt Ammerman, VP of Client Services, Apprenda

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?

 Loading …

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?”