SaaS Blogs

One question that has popped up in some blog posts recently is whether the notion of “private cloud” is a misnomer or if it conceptually even makes sense. Some of the conversation started when Andrew Conry-Murray posted that the term “private cloud” is bunk and no such thing exists. I have to completely disagree with […]

I love the idea that a balance exists between ideology and practicality. Questions of ideology and practicality always arise when it comes to building software, building a business, and building a software business. SaaS is no exception.
Interestingly, I had two different discussions with people who were of the position that aspiring SaaS company’s should “put […]

One topic that fascinates me is the discussion of commodity hardware. Recently, Abe Sultan, our VP of Engineering at Apprenda, spoke on a panel with a few other great folks regarding the topic of leveraging commodity hardware. People LOVE to talk about commodity hardware, but what does it really mean in the context of SaaS and SaaS […]

Coghead’s departure from the PaaS world sparked plenty of interesting debate. One small debate that caught my attention started on Phil Wainewright’s post about Coghead’s demise with a comment by Microsoft’s Eugenio Pace, which then spilled into a post Eugenio wrote here.
To give a brief synopsis, Phil argues that Coghead’s demise and the subsequent stranding of […]

Both conversations with various individuals as well as recent news of goodies like Google Gears and Microsoft’s Silverlight made me think long and hard about SaaS and ‘offline mode’ (for lack of a better term). Starting at the mile high view, one thing I noticed was a clear distinction between intended and unintended disconnectedness. What’s […]

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 […]

This is just a mini-post to aggregate the plethora of commentary surrounding the announcement of Google Apps Premier Edition.  Phrases like “in direct competition with Microsoft Office” abound, but overall it’s apparent that there are still a tremendous amount of questions surrounding the maturity level of the application suite.
Here’s a bit of what’s being said:

Don Dodge - Microsoft Emerging […]

Generally, most of my posts introduce a topic, question, or label (we’ll call it x), and then I provide a y to describe and foundationally support x. Well, for this post I’m going the opposite direction. For this particular x, I find that the sheer mention of it causes people to cringe and howl. Instead, I’ll give you y first, and then x […]

It was written only a month ago, but Robert Mitchell’s article ‘Virtual machines: the new ghetto in the data center’ is a classic in my book. Mitchell’s article draws up the similarities between data center engineering and urban planning. Like city planners, service providers must be careful that the efficiencies they introduce to their load-bearing […]

The clamor and buzz surrounding on-demand platforms for SaaS has been growing steadily. I recently wrote an article on Marc Benioff’s latest platform position. In the video interview I reference, Mr. Benioff highlights some key, defining aspects of platforms. Although in the article I discuss a prevailing ambiguity in Benioff’s vision, I must say that I agree […]