SaaS Blogs

Last night I gave a talk on SaaS to about 100 members of the NY Entrepreneurs Business Network and the NY BizSpark Meetup group at Microsoft’s office in New York (thanks to NYEBN and MSFT ISV Evangelist Gunther Lenz for inviting me). We had a very good discussion around the progression of the software industry from Client-Server to Web Applications and the ASP’s of the late 90’s on to the current SaaS paradigm. The changes to the leaderboard of the software industry at each step in the evolution were obvious to the crowd…

Mike Vizard over at IT Business Edge wrote a blog post a couple of days ago where he described SaaSGrid as potentially having “…the most impact…” on the Cloud market (using the word ‘market’ here very loosely) when compared to other cloud technologies like Force.com and Azure. I’m both flattered and clearly in agreement, but […]

On March 19th at 12:00pm CST, Apprenda will be teaming up with Scio Consulting for a live webinar focused on SaaS transitions for ISVs. 
From questions like “Where do we start?” to “How will our operations be different?”, we’ll be providing clear answers and focusing on the choices and challenges ISVs face when migrating their existing […]

It’s difficult to argue that current economic conditions have a silver lining or that somehow SaaS is immune to it. In fact, Trip Chowdhry recently remarked that 1st generation SaaS companies are hurting and have dim future prospects, with SaaS startups facing a bleak fate as well. That said, ISVs facing declining or stagnant revenue streams may […]

Uri Lederman of Konverge recently published an excellent post that maps the internal machinations of a non-SaaS ISV to those of a SaaS ISV. The key takeaway from that post is that the move from non-SaaS to SaaS is not only a revenue and model change, but also an operational change for ISVs. On various […]

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, […]

I bumped into a brief but impactful article by Renee Boucher Ferguson titled “ISVs Snub Salesforce’s Force.com Platform“. The post basically summarized a situation that occurred after OpSource’s SaaS Summit. Following a panel discussion on SaaS platforms, ZDNet’s SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright conducted a brief poll of about 250 software vendors asking the following questions (paraphrased):

How many people […]

It’s common place to equate Software as a Service with CRM, HR, or other “business function” style implementations. Although these implementations are not simple by any means, they generally do not require the computational rigor of an offering that performs complex mathematical analysis or photorealistic 3D rendering. In fact, it’s rare to hear that a […]

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 […]

A little over a month ago, there was a good post over at UnreasonableMen.net (with a follow up over a SmoothSpan) which highlighted egregious sales & marketing costs incurred by SaaS companies. The concerning thing is that SaaS pundits and ISVs state that subscriptions are easier to sell than perpetual licenses, yet we see these massive expenses. […]