A retrospective from someone familiar with the SaaS ISV trenches

Mar 24, 2008 by Matt Ammerman

This post simply serves to provide a link to a post on another site, but I felt it very appropriate to shine the spotlight on a brilliant post by Ben Yoskovitz on Instigatorblog.com entitled ‘Lessons Learned Running A SaaS Business‘. While we tend to focus on the relative “newness” of SaaS, it’s always important to remember that there are people who have been approaching, solving, re-approaching, and re-solving the challenges associated with SaaS for some time now. Ben outlines some key points from a “looking back” perspective. Give it a good read, there are tons of gems throughout – especially for those building go-to-market strategies for SaaS products.

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A Great Video Describing a Fictitious SaaS Platform

Mar 5, 2008 by Sinclair Schuller

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, operations, revenue modeling, etc. but still gives an ISV autonomy, complete control over their offerings core definition and the interactions their customers have with the application. It’s a lengthy 30 minute video, but well worth the watch.

If you watched the video, how receptive are you to the ideas Eugenio outlined?

 

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Enterprise SaaS != Web 2.0: A Quick Hosting Perspective

Sep 10, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

I like a good mystery just as much as the next guy, and this story’s got it all.  If you haven’t got the time or interest to read the whole forum thread, here’s the synopsis:  Jatol.com (no hyperlink provided because of said mystery), a notable web hosting company seemingly popular with development crowds has simply vanished.  Literally.  Websites down. Domain missing. Phones disconnected. Believe it or not, even the owner is missing! 

At this point, there’s not even a support number to call and Jatol.com users aren’t even able to retrieve their stored data or web site files. As I read further down the discussion chain, I started thinking about how awful it would be if I were running a web-based business in a situation like this – the mere thought of surmounting catastrophic shutdown such as this is mind boggling.

While it may seem obvious to some, this story specifically highlights a very important part of what enterprise SaaS ISVs should look for in managed services: providers that can assert serious service level agreements and back them with real ramifications.  For instance: transparent multi-tiered redundancy, consistent and thorough backups and archives, potentially even software and hardware escrow services (see ‘catastrophic shutdown’ above). The bottom line is that hobbyist devs hosting websites or even working applications with reliable hosting companies count downtime in minutes, while enterprise count downtime in thousands of dollars.

The tricky thing about SaaS is that it fundamentally requires the ISV to at least purport to be the ‘provider’ of software.  While hosting may be outsourced and ISVs become at least the ‘P’ in ‘MSP’, it is vitally important that the backing ‘MS’ be up to par.  If you’ve dealt with an MSP (without naming names) and had service level ‘experiences’, what are your thoughts on MSP preparedness for SaaS?  Are MSPs ready to host enterprise SaaS applications that generate the aggregate load of potentially millions of ISVs’ users?

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Will ‘Beta’ Fly in B2B SaaS?

May 9, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

“Beta”

The word somehow snuck its way into the plethora of Web 2.0 buzzwords. 

• GMail and Google Calendar!…beta. 
• Windows Live Alerts, Gallery, QnA, Soapbox, Office, and Mail!…beta. 
• Flickr!…gamma. (?) 

These services have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users and yet they still wear the beta badge.  Some have done so for nearly 2 years.  Clearly, there is an understanding and acceptance amongst the Web 2.0 user base that these services provide service ‘as is’ with little guarantee of anything.  We’ve heard stories of Gmail accounts being wiped, for instance.  And despite this, people are banking their entire business on Office 2.0 services.

I wonder to what extent this will fly in the enterprise SaaS world, where SLAs and guarantees make or break deals on a daily basis. From the consumer standpoint, trust is everything in SaaS.  From the provider standpoint, adoption is everything.  So the question is: Would consumers trust enterprise SaaS applications that wear the beta stamp?  Is it wise for providers to open up public betas of enterprise SaaS applications, or does the trust issue become prohibitive?  Obviously a major difference here is that the services listed above are ‘free’, while enterprise SaaS applications will presumably require subscription fees right out of the gate.  I’m just looking to get a handle on the psychological aspects of using beta software in the enterprise and how that translates to the SaaS model.

[poll=5]

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