Site Archives SaaS Platform

What’s the long term cost of not using a PaaS?


If you’re an ISV considering SaaS as a delivery model (whether it’s for a new product or migrating an existing one), you’re going to inevitably bump into SaaS platforms as a potential means of building your service. Once you do, you’re presented with two options: (1) build a fully integrated SaaS offering yourself which includes your actual […]

What PaaS Isn’t: An Application with an API


For some time, I thought I was alone in battling the cloud taxonomy war. With SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, RIA, etc. being tossed around on a regular basis, I often find myself looking for clarification when it becomes obvious that someone’s definition and understanding of one of these acronyms is different than mine and those that […]

Update from Microsoft PDC 2008


We’ve been here at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles all week and as many of you already know, this week has been all about delivering software as a service and cloud computing.  Ray Ozzie’s keynote really set that tone and kicked off the week. Microsoft’s Azure announcement is exciting - and it will be interesting […]

A Great Video Describing a Fictitious SaaS Platform


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, […]

According to ISVs, Salesforce’s Force.com is Not the Platform for SaaS


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 […]

Should You Scale-proof SaaS Offerings Early?


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 […]

The Not So Obvious Advantages of a SaaS Platform


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 […]

SaaS 101: The Drawbacks


A while back I wrote an article called “SaaS 101: The Benefits” in which I 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 […]

Level 3 Platforms & Creativity


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 […]

The Right Tools for the Job


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 […]