Live from SaaSCon 2007

Apr 17, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Hello from sunny Santa Clara.  We’re at SaaSCon 2007 at the Santa Clara Convention Center today and tomorrow.  From the looks of the exhibit floor and the sound of the early keynotes this morning  there is plenty of opinion and information floating around. An interesting keynote was the ”Evaluating SaaS Infrastructure” keynote which described the challenges of providing SaaS applications from a “behind the curtain” vantage point.  More on that later.

The exhibition floor is poised to open up for the first of three showcase sessions in about fifteen minutes.  Apprenda is located at booth 410, and don’t forget Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller will be on the ‘Understanding Platforms and Ecosystems’ keynote panel tomorrow morning. 

We’ll be blogging as often as possible during the event.  If you’re in the Santa Clara area, hope to see you here!

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Vendor Perception of the SaaS Platform Landscape

Mar 28, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

We’ve written quite a bit here about Salesforce’s Apex… and, admittedly, we’ve taken a somewhat critical stance on it.  Questions of identity crisis and ambiguity have boiled down to “Is it a SaaS platform, or a CRM platform? Is there a difference, and does it really matter what they call it as long as it is what I need?”  Frankly, I don’t think Salesforce has done a clear enough job defining what it is, and what it isn’t.  If I simply relied on their homepage description of Apex:  “A ground-breaking platform for customizing and integrating CRM, as well as developing and deploying brand-new applications, ” I might chalk this up to semantics – but understanding how the Apex technology stack works, one gets a better understanding of how closely tied it is to the Salesforce.com application codebase.  This satisfies part one of their description – but the growth of Apex as a SaaS platform vs. CRM platform will rely heavily on how far it can deviate from the Salesforce.com application.  This, of course, remains to be seen.

As SaaSBlogs and pretty much the rest of the SaaS blogging community (SaaSWeek, Phil Wainewright, Jeff Kaplan, among many others) took note of last week, Opsource announced the Optimal OnDemand 2.0 SaaS Platform.  Opsource really caught our attention with this one because of the way Optimal OnDemand 2.0 seems to quell some of our contentions with Salesforce’s Apex platform concept and other ‘niche’ platform concepts to date.  Opsource’s core competencies have been in the hosting infrastructure and provisioning realm, but with OOD2.0 they are introducing value adds further up the stack that fulfill SaaS hosting requirements (read: vendor pain points).  It’s a tremendous boon to the notion that to build robust SaaS applications, vendors will rely on platforms that provide general purpose technological and business value rather than platforms with a bent towards a particular vertical market or spawned from an application codebase. 

The introduction of OOD2.0 is big not only because of its impact, or dent, in relative size to the landscape of SaaS platform offerings, but because of how much it contributes to the growth of the landscape in terms of overall value.  Given that the landscape is, at least for now, shaped by a veritable combination of niche platforms and newer large scope general purpose platforms such as Opsource’s OOD2.0 and Apprenda’s platform offering - which type of platform has more perceived value to the ISV?  For instance, if I aim to build a project management application, should I utilize a proprietary hosting platform that offers a toolset strategically designed for project management applications (perhaps even built from one) but is limiting in terms of scope?  Or do I want to host my application on a general purpose platform that provides multiple tenets of SaaS as a base but does not intend to provide toolsets for strategy-related aspects of the application?

A better question at this stage is whether not this type of question is perceived as one of semantics or of real technical merit.  If you’re currently building a SaaS application, or simply doing research for a future project, I’m interested in learning where your search has taken you across the unfolding landscape, and where you’ve seen the most value in terms of SaaS platform offerings.

 

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Let the Real SaaS Discussion Begin!

Mar 23, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Despite the many articles about SaaS that we have written, and will continue to write, it’s no secret that the real value SaaSBlogs presents to the community is as a hub for SaaS knowledge sharing and discussion.  All of you subscribers, lurkers and regular commentors alike, have plenty to say that we want to hear.  We’ve had some terrific comments that comprise a wide range of SaaS angles.  To make it easier for the discourse to grow here on SaaSBlogs we’ve added a small feature to the commenting section.  Now, when you comment on a particular article you will have the option to subscribe via email to future comments on that article.  If you choose to utilize this feature (on a per-article basis) SaaSBlogs will deliver followup comments directly to your email inbox.  How convenient.

 

 

Simply check the small box below the comment form to subscribe to the article’s comments.  Don’t worry, it is entirely possible to unsubscribe at a later date if you are no longer interested in being kept abreast of the conversation (Although that will never happen, right?). 

We look forward to continued readership growth and more added features that aim to promote SaaS discussion across the industry.  If there are any suggestions, please feel free to make them at any time either by commenting on an article of emailing Sinclair or myself.

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Get Ready for SaaS, says Gartner

Mar 14, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Via Business Two Zero, here is a press release recently issued by Gartner titled Gartner Says Service Providers Must Prepare Now for the Software as a Service Wave. The release opens with numbers: The worldwide SaaS market reached $6.3 billion in 2006, with a forecast of growth to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011.

I want to focus on a portion of the release that stuck out most to me. As I spend my days working at a company that aims to be the driver for ISVs’ SaaS strategies, my mind is trained to pick up on the subtle urgency behind this statement:

“Although the SaaS market is still relatively small, service providers need to make important strategic decisions now.”

Ok, maybe it’s not so subtle. Either way, here’s Gartner’s preliminary list of things that SaaS vendors should do to stay ahead of the SaaS ‘wave’ (by the way, ‘wave’ is their wording. I don’t like labeling SaaS a ‘wave’ – it’s just too fundamental and far-reaching of a shift.) Nevertheless, from Gartner:

“Use solutions built on next-generation Web services, SOAs and highly automated server farms to produce multitenant, mass-customizable solutions that facilitate agility while sustaining uniqueness at a reduced cost”.

“Make strategic decisions around whether to offer SaaS as simply one element of a broader portfolio or to fully evolve toward a SaaS-based delivery model”.

“Act now because of the scale of change required to successfully exploit SaaS opportunities”.

“Conduct thorough due diligence to be well-placed to take advantage of opportunities and manage risk as the market evolves toward SaaS”.

Egads! Not that it’s a surprise around here, but this further illustrates that the shift from software vendor to service provider will require herculean efforts on the part of SaaS providers – startups and existing vendors alike. It will be very interesting to see how this all shakes out; and from our perspective at Apprenda, how SaaS platforms will be perceived and utilized to address these 4 vendor pain points and beyond. The gateway for SaaS platforms to enter the market is, of course, first through the perception that the notion of the platform does indeed satisfy, ease, or otherwise unburden as many of these hurdles and new responsibilities as possible.

Given that, if history is any indicator Gartner’s list of things that SaaS vendors should do to prepare for SaaS will evolve quickly into a veritable checklist of things that SaaS vendors will look to outsource to a SaaS platform.

Are you currently developing a SaaS app? Are you using enablement technologies (such as platforms or libraries)? What are the pain points that you think should be addressed and which ones where the ones you had the most trouble with? We would love to know your thoughts and experiences!

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Impending DST Disruption Highlights the Benefits of One-to-Many Software Delivery

Mar 6, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Here’s another spotlight article from Phil Wainewright on ZDNet – DST spells disaster for shrinkwrap software.

The article zeroes in on the impending daylight savings time change (it’s this weekend in case you didn’t know – a date earlier than any prior year), and the havoc that it has wreaked on on-premise, aka ‘shrinkwrap’, software end users who must now navigate through patches and updates to accomodate the change.

The DST implications definitely illustrate an end user benefit derived from the SaaS delivery model.  Software built to support one-to-many delivery requires major patches or upgrades – planned or unexpected – be made only to the one running instance of the application core.  We often highlight the key economical benefits of SaaS for the vendors and end users alike – but it’s incidents like this that make us take a closer look at how SaaS might smooth out technological operations when they might otherwise become a disruptive nuisance.

What are some of the other, perhaps lesser known, ancillary benefits that SaaS end users have experienced since making the move from on-premise to hosted enterprise software? What other headaches have you avoided by using SaaS apps? We’d love to know your thoughts!

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