On User Density

May 8, 2007 by Sinclair Schuller

My last post discussed cost of revenue related to delivering a SaaS-offering to a subscriber base. Shortly after publishing it, I noticed that Gianpaolo Carraro posted this article, which toward the end discussed the relationship between cost and electricity/space within a datacenter. A while back, Gianpaolo described another metric: tenants per database and he described it as “density.” I think that really summarizes the electricity/real estate metric and is the best way to look at any SaaS metric. Drive cost of revenue (and even operational costs) down: maximize your density metrics. As a SaaS provider, you need to identify any “Users per X” or “Tenants per Y” and figure out ways to make that ratio bigger. Doing so will improve cost predictability, buffer against sudden cost change (distribution property), and most importantly it will build your economies. Changing these ratios isn’t easy, however. Most of the time, good density is achieved through advanced application architectures, good infrastructure configuration and carefull planning.

What are you doing to maximize your density metrics? Where are you having most problems? Let us know, we would love to know.

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SaaSCon Recap

Apr 23, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Last week was SaaSCon 2007, the definitive conference for B2B Software as a Service (not to be confused with Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0, or Office 2.0).  The conference was at the Santa Clara Convention Center Tuesday and Wednesday.  For those that attended, the conference offered a wide spectrum of keynotes and workshops revolving around all aspects of SaaS – from SaaS revenue modeling to application architecture.  Sinclair has already mentioned an interesting analogy conjured up by Treb Ryan from OpSource.  Gianpaolo Carraro and Eugenio Pace from Microsoft’s SaaS team gave a detailed architecture overview of their Litware HR sample SaaS application.  Also of note, Apprenda unveiled details about its forthcoming SaaS platform, SaaSGrid.  Because we were busy at the Apprenda booth meeting hundreds of SaaSCon attendees, we had trouble finding the wherewithall to blog during the event in any consistent fashion.  Therefore, for those of you that were not in attendance, I’d like to offer an aggregation of others’ blog content about SaaSCon 2007:

Adventurista – SaaSCon recap

Marty’s Blog – Death By A Thousand Duck Bites

Dave Terrar (Business Two Zero)

(Note that in Dave’s post, he expresses a disappointment with the lack of blogging coming from the actualy event.  Dave, I agree.  And I’m sorry.)

Jeff Kaplan gives probably the most thorough roundup of SaaSCon on his blog.

Lee Thé from Application Development Trends provides a great analysis of some of the core offerings that were on display at SaaSCon, including Apprenda’s SaaSGrid platform.

These are a few of the interesting recaps from SaaSCon 2007.  There sure was a lot of information packed into a two day conference.  Perhaps too much (SaaSCon organizers – 3 days next time maybe?).  If you were there, and have written about the event please feel free to post links in the comments.  Do the same if you’ve found more blogging out of SaaSCon that I haven’t linked to here.  Thanks!

 *UPDATE* – Eric from Marty’s Blog wrote a great article yesterday that is born out of some of the concerns that smaller ISVs may have when exploring the larger enablement platform technologies.  These concerns – such as platform companies that introduce functionality that threatens their own ecosystem players – came up at SaaSCon frequently.

 

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