The Right Tools for the Job
Are today’s SaaS enablement technologies robust enough to support business to business SaaS? It’s a question I ask myself everytime I am introduced to a new ‘mashup engine’ or ‘online SaaS IDE’. Granted, there are some very impressive products out there right now, Bungee Labs’ BungeeConnect and CogHead for example. But initial impressions aside – are these whole product enablement environments robust enough to support extremely high levels of customization? Multi-tiered integration? Legacy integration? Complex computation and data types, and the myriad other requirements of the world’s most powerful business software? Even Salesforce’s proprietary Apex language born from Java seems a bit limiting in terms of programming expressiveness. Or so I’ve heard.
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. Â
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 EasyBakeâ„¢ 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.
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“[These web toolkit providers] alienate…software developers and engineers…those that have been schooled and trained in the complex sciences of computer programming and application engineering.”
Matt:
I think that this assertion is hits the mark for many of the tools that have recently emerged, but I hope that Bungee Labs does not fall into that category. Bungee Connect was designed specifically to address a developer/engineer audience. If you haven’t had a chance to see it in action, please drop me a line. We’d love to give you a full under-the-hood look at it.
–Ted
Matt, the bottom line is that a tool that targets a business user cannot be the same tool that targets a developer. This is where all these tools fail – they fall between two stools, trying to please both camps and ultimately failing everyone.
My blog “The top 10 rules for long tail software tools (as illustrated by Coghead)” at http://www.longtailsoftware.com/2007/05/top-10-rules-for-long-tail-software.html tries to address this issue.
-Jon
@Jonathan: I think you hit the nail on the head by highlighting the intended targets of these tools. I didn’t mean to denounce CogHead as a business tool… but as an enterprise software development tool, I think it falls short. Now, its target is the DIY business person, so of course it may become wildly successful. My personal feeling on this that I alluded to in the post is that business users don’t want to be pseudo-developers. That’s why they hire developers. Same reason that most of us bring our cars to mechanics instead of learning how to sort-of fix them.
@Ted: Thanks for the comment. I’ve watched the demos of BungeeConnect on the Bungee Labs website. The tutorials led me to believe that while it is a super (SUPER) impressive web-based IDE, it is meant for building data mashups – i.e. pulling Google data, Amazon data, etc. Kind of like Yahoo Pipes and so on. Granted, I think this is a hugely valuable tool and I do see the features that lend towards customization and developer tools. Bungee Connect is probably the most impressive of this type of environment I’ve seen yet, I just wonder if, like Jonathan said, it falls between the business camp and the developer camp. I’d be happy to get an under-the-hood demo. I’ll follow up on that privately.
Matt, absolutely agree – the last thing business users want to be are programmers. For one thing, their mind sets are completely different – programmers think in a highly structured manner, business users do not. So the approach has to be radically different if we expect them to want to build meaningful systems.
Matt,
I agree with you in your last post. “Business users don’t want to be psuedo-developers”. The key to understanding where these products fit is to segment the problems that are being solved as well as the people solving them. For a business user who has a project that needs tracking over a few months it doesn’t make sense to hire a developer. However, packaged solutions may not effectively solve the problem. That’s where a “do it yourself” solution makes a lot of sense. If you’ve ever spent time in a business environment these problems get solved all the time. Mostly by horrendously ugly Excel spreadsheets, paper, or email.
There are other problems like the genomic calculation that you referenced that are big, important, and warrant getting the best developers to use the most powerful (and not the easiest) tools they can.
As for a business to business example, Intuit has 15,000 users of QuickBase even though we only have 8,000 employees. We use it for all sorts of partner management applications such as outsourced customer service agents, supply chain partners, marketing agencies, etc. These are problems that our IT department would never get to solving but business users can solve on their own with QuickBase.
So, I think the key is segmenting not only the users, but the problems that they are trying to solve.
-Bill
Hi Matt – is there a list of saas platforms? I’ve tried to read most of your postings but can’t find the proverbial blog checklist or top 10. Coming from the internet marketing world there’s lots of php/mysql scripts and some hosted offerings, but it’s hard to find the actual platforms to build saas on. Apologies if this is a noob question.
Hi Peter,
Surprisingly, answering that question requires wading through a drastic amount of ambiguity. As we’ve noted many times on SaaSBlogs – too many call themselves or their offerings a ‘SaaS Platform’ (i.e. some call a platform a hosted environment, development libraries, hub & spoke style service buses, etc.) So, a comprehensive list of SaaS platforms might not exist just yet. If one does, I’d love to see it too so we can find the imitations and point them out; although it is a great idea for a near future article ;-)
There are, however, good sources for finding products and services in the broader realm of SaaS enablement. Check out Jeff Kaplan’s SaaS Showplace – specifically the SaaS Enabling Technology Suppliers here.
From the perspective of a true SaaS platform, I have to pursue shameless self promotion – http://www.apprenda.com is a good place to look at SaaSGrid, our comprehensive hosted SaaS platform. ;-)
Check out “Vaakya”, the World’s smallest, comprehensive technology (1.5mb) (On-demand Computing Environment and SaaS Platform) to build, test and deploy enterprise software applications
http://www.vaakya.com