A retrospective from someone familiar with the SaaS ISV trenches

Mar 24, 2008 by Matt Ammerman

This post simply serves to provide a link to a post on another site, but I felt it very appropriate to shine the spotlight on a brilliant post by Ben Yoskovitz on Instigatorblog.com entitled ‘Lessons Learned Running A SaaS Business‘. While we tend to focus on the relative “newness” of SaaS, it’s always important to remember that there are people who have been approaching, solving, re-approaching, and re-solving the challenges associated with SaaS for some time now. Ben outlines some key points from a “looking back” perspective. Give it a good read, there are tons of gems throughout – especially for those building go-to-market strategies for SaaS products.

read more

Introducing Our New Co-Author: Abe Sultan

Oct 12, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Hello everyone,

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

 

read more

Are you a SaaS expert AND a software engineer? Meet Apprenda.

Sep 20, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

If you read this blog and/or subscribe to our SaaSBlogs RSS feed, than we already know that you have an interest in SaaS.  Now, if you’re a software engineer on top of that, then we urge you to head on over to www.apprenda.com/careers and check out the currently available positions:

• 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.

 

read more

Enterprise SaaS != Web 2.0: A Quick Hosting Perspective

Sep 10, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

I like a good mystery just as much as the next guy, and this story’s got it all.  If you haven’t got the time or interest to read the whole forum thread, here’s the synopsis:  Jatol.com (no hyperlink provided because of said mystery), a notable web hosting company seemingly popular with development crowds has simply vanished.  Literally.  Websites down. Domain missing. Phones disconnected. Believe it or not, even the owner is missing! 

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?

[poll=6]

 

read more

Google Buys Postini Solutions

Jul 10, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

The SaaS world is abuzz around Google yet again with yesterday’s news that Google will acquire on-demand communications security firm Postini Solutions for $625 million.  The acquisition is aimed at bolstering enterprise security and management confidence in the Google Apps online suite, and seems to be a direct mirror of Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Services strategy which was born from their own 2005 acquisition of Frontbridge Technologies. 

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?”

 

read more