SaaSBlogs.com: Most Popular Articles of 2006

Jan 4, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

There’s no doubt that a good deal of writings about SaaS in 2006 focused on the platform concept. Here at SaaSBlogs.com, we too have a propensity for the on demand platform, as indicated by four of the five most popular posts from 2006 according to you, the readers:

• Salesforce.com’s Apex: Benioff’s Handcuffs for On Demand
• Scale as a Commodity
• Where’s the “App” in AppExchange?
• On Service Delivery Platforms for SaaS
• How to Rewrite Standard Recursion through a State Stack & Iteration

It’s good to know that you coders out there also got good use out of that last article.

As we move into 2007 and SaaS growth continues at a dizzying pace remember to keep checking SaaSBlogs.com for new content, or subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date.

And of course, Happy New Year from SaaSBlogs.

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Forget Web 3.0 – Let’s Talk Software 3.0

Dec 18, 2006 by Matt Ammerman

If all SaaS was meant to be browser-based, it would have been called ‘Web Apps As A Service’ (WaaaS). So let’s not forget that when we’re talking about SaaS, we’re talking about the evolution of software, not just web apps. Given that, it’s a bit incorrect to say that SaaS is the natural evolution of Web 2.0. Instead, consider Web 2.0 to be an augmenter in the evolution of software. Perhaps SaaS would more accurately be called Software 3.0, rather than Web 3.0.

Thanks. I have to get that off my chest because believe it or not in browsing blog posts and comments across the web as of late, I still see many people saying things like “check out my site at www.something-that-ends-in-r-because-I-shortened-er.com. It’s a SaaS mashup that is the future of Web 3.0!” To which I reply…. “Huh?”

Web 2.0 in all its rich, protocol-driven, glory undeniably brought the user experience portion of Internet-based services, or web applications, closer to our familiar traditional software experience. But let’s not forget that as a whole this paradigm shift which we’re in is in fact called Software as a Service for a reason. Just because we happen to have undergone a user experience mutation in recent years, and now we append ‘as a Service’ to it, doesn’t mean we have to abandon our notion of what software actually is. According to Dictionary.com, software is “anything that is not hardware but is used with hardware.” Whoa. That’s a lot of things, that software.

An analogy: When you go to a restaurant and order a steak, you are receiving that steak as a service rather than cooking it yourself at home. Either way, it’s still a steak. While it may be flavored differently, it doesn’t take on different properties as a steak because it was prepared in someone else’s kitchen. The same thing prevails here – SaaS dictates that you use software cooked in someone else’s kitchen (the service), but don’t accept anything less than real software. In other words, don’t accept Web 2.0 when you’re really looking for SaaS – because if you do, you’re only getting a piece of the action. Consider Web 2.0 to be a mutation in the evolution of Software, but don’t forget that there’s a whole lot more to software that is still required for it to be software.

In late 2005, Phil Wainewright of ZDNet SaaS Blogs started an interesting series of articles with an introductory piece called “What to expect from Web 3.0“. In it, he asserts that Web 2.0 is merely a staging ground for what will ultimately become ‘a much more mature and durable Web 3.0 era’. Noting companies like Google, Amazon, and eBay as the major players of the Web 2.0 phase, he rightly (*sob* Writely) drops names such as Webex, Netsuite, Jamcracker, and of course Salesforce.com as potential leaders in this new Web 3.0. In setting up the piece, Mr. Wainewright stresses distinctions between his notions of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 by drawing a topology of Web 3.0. A piece of this topology is a layer known as ‘Service Clients’. To paraphrase the article, these are enterprise application clients as we know and love them, but with the augmentation that they are themselves provided as services. Fundamentally, we are talking about virtualization and service a la SoftGrid™ . However, let’s not go too far in this direction either.

So, does SaaS mean Web Apps? Mashups? Virtualization? Application Streaming? Thick Clients?

The answer is YES.

Incidentally, this is why the SaaS platform space is so interesting right now. There are platform players arriving on the scene everyday bringing enablement to the table. But who’s going to bring the SaaS platform that is so general purpose and all-encompassing that it allows vendors to produce the real software of the Software 3.0 era?

In summary, take a look at this fundamental diagram that shows Web 2.0 simply as a modifier to the progression of software:

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Apprenda & SaaS Platforms

Dec 14, 2006 by Sinclair Schuller

Matt just posted about a content/style update to the Apprenda website of major significance. Previously, we alluded to Apprenda being a “SaaS enablement” company, and while thats true, we’re also much more.

Apprenda is concentrating on creating a revolutionary on-demand platform. Right now, that’s all we’re saying. We plan on keeping the community/industry posted, but you should expect to see some more frequent posts related to SaaS platforms and their effects on the industry. The platform space is plenty of fun, full of value, and very exciting!

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Apprenda’s SaaS Platform: Throwing Our Hat Into The Ring

Dec 14, 2006 by Matt Ammerman

You may know us here at SaaSBlogs.com for our patented analyses (read: diatribes) on the major SaaS players and the SaaS industry in general over the past several months. Indeed, some posts have sparked great discussions and even a few heated debates.

Well, the truth is, we’re critical because we care. And why do we care? Well, you may have noticed that SaaSBlogs is run by the founders of Apprenda. Today Apprenda is happy to throw our hats into the SaaS ring by announcing that we are in fact developing a SaaS platform. Visit Apprenda’s website.

“Apprenda’s platform will give independent software vendors a business and technological foundation to build, deploy, and monetize their service-oriented applications for on-demand use without technological lock-in.”

For more information on our progress continue to read SaaSBlogs, or sign-up for our newsletter at Apprenda.com.

  

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The SaaS Swivel, Double Line, and Rig Setup

Dec 11, 2006 by Sinclair Schuller

I’ve been keeping tabs on an interesting company named Swivel for a little while now. I bumped into their blog recently, and have read a couple of articles, including one by ZDNet blogger Mitch Ratcliffe. The basic idea behind Swivel is to be a central place for intelligently parsed and analyzed data for use in interpretation. In essence, it is an “Analysis as a Service” (AaaS) platform (For the record, I hate making up names/acronym/phrases, but for lack of a better description, I had to). From my understanding, one can upload oodles of data, which the Swivel compute farm then operates on and provides analytic cross-sections of. Through these cross-sections, you’ll be able to extract valuable correlation (although I think that if Swivel is successful, it will catalyze the abuse of passing correlation on as causation. I have enough of this reading Digg). You don’t need to be an oracle to see that there is huge monetization potential around this concept. Right now, the Swivel website is very consumer, fun-data centric. Long-term, however, Swivel can be positioned as the analytic store-house for corporate data that requires analysis. Companies could add data (Ratcliffe suggested something akin to Amazon S3, which is a superb positioning in my humble opinion), let Swivel do its magic, and then interpret the neatly digested data for competitive advantage/market analysis/etc. But what’s more important is how a service like Swivel plays into the SaaS ecosystem and can benefit the end-user in a more general, more pliable case: integration. Bear with me on the forthcoming analogy.

To anyone that takes fishing seriously, the offshore swivel knot will be familiar to them. For those of you that aren’t anglers, the offshore swivel knot is generally used for big-fish trolling in deep sea or large fresh-fresh water fishing. Normally, you attach a swivel and clip to a fishing line (or in this case, a double line). The swivel and clip allows you to quickly remove a lure/rig from your line and snap on a different lure or rig without having to untie & retie. The offshore swivel knot is a special way to tie the swivel to the line such that there are multiple strands of line attached to the swivel. In the event that one strand snaps, the others can still provide support, hopefully long enough to get the fish onto the boat. Your choice of lure/rig to attach to the swivel is dependent on what type of fish you want to attract. Here is a diagram summarizing the knot and final setup (borrowed from Fishing Cairns):

(bigger)

This entire fishing setup is analogous to where I see Swivel and their value proposition fit in. Swivel has the potential to allow many different SaaS applications to tap into it’s tightly wound data without having to jump through hoops. Through Swivel, multiple (different) SaaS applications can tap into strong, reliable analyzed data without repetitive integration headaches, similar to how the clip allows an angler to attach different lures to the same, reliable knot. If a knot strand breaks, or analytic cross-section weakens, you have many more to rely on. Data and its analysis is part of the “special ingredients” involved in making any good application. Something like Swivel, horizontally coupled across different applications, will be ultra-beneficial to end users. They use the right rig (application) for the right fish (business need) without the hassle of having to retie the rig (integration of complex data).

Swivel and the concept of a data analysis platform are very exciting. I frequently go to Italy to visit family, and during one of my trips, an uncle said “Vai al mare, se ben vuoi pescare.“ The idea behind this proverb is that if you want to fish well (aka catch big fish) you need to fish in the sea (that’s where the big fish live). Well, the Internet is our sea. If they get it right, company’s like Swivel will definitely become a standard part of the tackle box.

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