SaaS Blogs

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 […]

A SaaSBlogs reader recently sent me a link to an article by Dharmesh Shah over at OnStartups. In a nutshell, the post articulated that building a highly scalable architecture when creating a new application is premature and creates a large resource tax on a startup’s already limited resources. This led to a vibrant thread of […]

I’ve written about many of the obvious advantages of a SaaS platform before: harnessing a platform to reduce implementation time, cost of implementation and/or transition (for you ISVs with existing product lines), reduction in operational costs, and the list goes on. But what about not so obvious advantages? After some fruitful discussion with individuals at […]

A while back Matt wrote an article called “SaaS 101: The Benefits” in which he discussed some of the benefits of the SaaS model for end users and software vendors alike. Of course, where there’s a yin there’s a yang, and so this article (a long time coming, we know) will explore the other side of the coin.
For the Customer & End […]

Marc Andreessen posted an excellent article breaking down Internet platforms into three “levels”. If you only have time for one article you would be better off to read his than mine but to summarize, the levels are described as:

Level 1: API driven, app lives outside of the “platform” (Think Flickr)
Level 2: Plugging an extension via an […]

Are today’s SaaS enablement technologies robust enough to support business to business SaaS?  It’s a question I ask myself everytime I am introduced to a new ‘mashup engine’ or ‘online SaaS IDE’.  Granted, there are some very impressive products out there right now, Bungee Labs’ BungeeConnect and CogHead for example.  But initial impressions aside - are […]

Being in the SaaS platform space, one of my passions (yes, really) is to breakdown the SaaS provider model and figure out where costs are. The one area that is most intriguing is cost of revenue (CoR) - that is, costs directly associated with delivering the service to end users. This cost generally includes, but is not limited […]

Although SaaS is in and of itself of a unique and powerful model of software delivery, there is much to learn from industry’s that have produced either perfect or imperfect parallels. When I say ‘perfect’ I mean one with a distribution concept that provides a metaphor for SaaS, while ‘imperfect’ is more akin to an […]

When formulating the architectural foundation for a SaaS application, ISVs will inevitably encounter the age old build vs. buy decision.  SaaS enablement is hot right now, giving vendors a plethora of options on the buy side. 
Nick Carr has an interesting argument in support of the buy scenario - specifically urging vendors to buy into a horizontally aligned […]