SaaS Blogs

For those who don’t know who Malcolm McLean is, I’ll give a brief introduction. Malcolm McLean invented the modern shipping container: you know, the ones that come in on cargo ships, are craned onto trucks and trains, and that provide a standard for transporting goods worldwide. So why are his ideas important and what does […]

One of the much-touted benefits of single instance, multi-tenant SaaS is the ability for ISVs to respond to market demand and introduce new functionality and versions of their application to their entire customer base relatively easily. In other models, this was a nightmare and would actually dis-incentivize creativity and “staying ahead of the game.” This […]

Eugenio Pace from Microsoft’s SaaS Architecture Team published a great webcast describing the potential relationship between ISVs and hosters and how a SaaS platform fits in. It’s worth the watch. One of the major takeaways from the video is that a good platform marginalizes an ISVs efforts involving things like multi-tenancy, onboarding of new customers, monetization, […]

I bumped into a brief but impactful article by Renee Boucher Ferguson titled “ISVs Snub Salesforce’s Force.com Platform“. The post basically summarized a situation that occurred after OpSource’s SaaS Summit. Following a panel discussion on SaaS platforms, ZDNet’s SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright conducted a brief poll of about 250 software vendors asking the following questions (paraphrased):

How many people […]

It’s common place to equate Software as a Service with CRM, HR, or other “business function” style implementations. Although these implementations are not simple by any means, they generally do not require the computational rigor of an offering that performs complex mathematical analysis or photorealistic 3D rendering. In fact, it’s rare to hear that a […]

If you’re a SaaSBlogs regular, you’re probably a big fan of the SaaS delivery model. One thing you also probably know is that one of the downfalls of the delivery model stems from the fact that it increases overall cost of failure and cost of downtime since it moves usage from a decentralized (aka on-premise) […]

It’s common place to discuss SaaS adoption as being driven by either an ISVs need to remain competitive or tackle new markets, or by customer demand to move responsibility away from internal IT to an outsourced provider. I support this as being very true, and we can thank these two constituents as being the driving force behind recent adoption. But is that all of the muscle that the SaaS movement […]

In my previous post, I discussed pricing strategies for SaaS offerings. To summarize, my proposed strategy is to put profit-generating emphasis on upgrade/feature add-ons tacked on to your core offering and not on your application’s core recurring base price (which could lead to an unnecesary adoption barrier). This begs the question: “Ok, Sinclair, that sounds swell […]

Pricing strategy is a major component of any business, whether brick-and-mortar or bits-and-bytes. In addition to being an important strategy to hash out, it is also generally quite tricky to do correctly. Should pricing be value based or cost based? Should it focus on maximizing income per unit or volume? For all of the things […]

A SaaSBlogs reader recently sent me a link to an article by Dharmesh Shah over at OnStartups. In a nutshell, the post articulated that building a highly scalable architecture when creating a new application is premature and creates a large resource tax on a startup’s already limited resources. This led to a vibrant thread of […]