The Death of an ISV: How NOT to Succeed in your Move to SaaS

Jul 27, 2011 by Jesse Kliza

It wasn’t curiosity. It was thinking that the “good old” ASP model would cut it. It was thinking that little by little, they’d get away from labor intensive provisioning, manual billing, and some day refactor the Rube Goldberg contraption that made their “hosted” model work. Sound familiar?

Software as a Service has quickly become the preferred method of application delivery and consumption. Why is it that while many ISVs claim to provide some flavor of SaaS today, few are doing it with the same cost of delivery profile and operational agility as SaaS leaders like Salesforce.com, or Taleo?

Join Apprenda and Savvis on August 9th at 1:30PM EST for a webinar covering the most dangerous pitfalls that ISVs fall into time and time again. You’ll learn:

- The unprofitable truth about the ASP model
- Why multi-tenant infrastructure isn’t enough
- The real-world economics of SaaS leaders and laggards
- How to avoid building dozens of custom SaaS operations systems
- Key business and technical pitfalls when making an infrastructure choice

You’ll come away with everything you need to either “save the ship”, or leap frog your competitors with a SaaS strategy that rivals the best of the best.

Date: Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Time: 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT

Register Here>

We hope you’ll join us!

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The Cure for the Common Cloud

Apr 20, 2011 by Jesse Kliza

Let’s face it.  There’s a lot of hype around “the cloud.” Lots of promises, lots of claims, lots of vendors, and lots of lackluster results.  All the while, software engineers and architects are getting sick of it.

If you’re a software engineer or architect, what does the cloud do for you? It’s elastic and infinitely scalable, so you just put your app up there and everything magically works, right? The cloud solves all of your scalability challenges, all of your app delivery challenges, and it just plain works, right?

Wrong. You’re the one responsible for building the software that the cloud exists to host and deliver, and you know full well that there’s a lot more to it than that.

What about onboarding new customers or business units to your app?  The individual end-users – how do they get access, and to what are they entitled?  What about charging for different features, or different transactions?  What about managing the application lifecycle, and rolling out updates?  What about the underlying architecture to make use of the cloud in an intelligent way?  To actually take advantage of the raw compute power at your disposal, and not just use the cloud like it’s the late 90′s again and people are throwing their apps online like it’s going out of style.

These are the types of things that software engineers and architects are thinking about.

Haven’t we been through this before?

There are many significant engineering challenges associated with building and delivering applications today.  This is very similar to when we first started developing applications for the desktop PC.  Back then, everyone wrote code to manage memory, to interface with specific hardware, etc.  Then the desktop OS came along, and made all of that complex and time consuming (but CRITICAL) work a thing of the past.

While the challenges themselves were different, they were still challenges that were specific to the delivery method, rather than challenges associated with building the actual software functionality.  Those challenges will always be there, because the passion to innovate and develop applications that help facilitate better business performance, and meet the needs of end users is what drives great engineers/organizations.  HOWEVER, the challenges associated with the delivery method/paradigm go away in time, as layers of abstraction come about to solve those problems for us.

The “Cure for the Common Cloud” is Here

Now let’s get back to today.  Shouldn’t we expect that all of these challenges associated with building and delivering next generation software applications in this new cloud era will become a thing of the past?  Won’t we be able to focus on building great software again, and not worry about all of the complexities of the delivery method?  Someday?  Maybe?

Yes.  We can today!

A large and increasing number of organizations and developers have discovered the “Cure for the Common Cloud“.  They’ve found the abstraction layer that handles all of the complex engineering challenges associated with building and delivery applications today, and truly leveraging private or public cloud infrastructure in an intelligent way.  They’ve found the one technology that decouples apps from infrastructure, developers from IT/Operations, and business execution from IT implementation.

The Cure for the Common Cloud is here.  Do you have it?

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Transparency In The Cloud, Part I: The End-User Transformation

Apr 6, 2011 by Matt Ammerman

In case you didn’t know, the days of business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service are upon us.  If you’re a software developer and you haven’t begun planning a SaaS offering, stop reading this article right now, go gather your team and get started.  Seriously, you’re already late.

Ok, now that they’re gone, this article is for the rest of us: the B2B software end-users.

I have it on good authority, that in the next couple of years most of us are going to throw away our piles of compact discs and DVDs and replace them with bandwidth.  We’re going to say goodbye to license fees and free-up some square footage by dismantling our servers.  We’re then going to embrace the technologies that give us access to always-on, internet-based services which we will access from our new server-rooms-turned-corner-offices.  The benefits are manifold:  accessing software typically costs less than owning it, online services are accessible from any location and on a plethora of devices, and we don’t have to worry about things like hard drive failures when our documents aren’t actually stored on our hard drives.

The unfortunate side-effect of our herd-like flocking to internet-based services is that, by forfeiting our ownership of the servers and software that fuel our businesses, we put our destinies in the hands of software companies that, put simply, are software companies.  They’ve spent many years honing algorithms and interfaces that made us want their software in the first place but unfortunately, those years were not spent learning how to offer that software, as a service.  After all, we bought the servers, we provided the power, often times we even installed the software ourselves. Believe it or not, sometimes we’re better at running software than the vendors who sold it to us.

Fortunately, some software companies are comprised of incredibly smart people who do amazing and innovative things. They also have amazing tools available to them to supplement what they lack in experience. I have every bit of faith (*cough* SaaSGrid) that with some hard work (*sniffle* SaaSGrid), and a bit of help (*yelling* SaaSGrid), our trusted software vendors will seamlessly make the transition from shrink-wrappers to world-class service providers, without us noticing as much as a blip on our B2B, software-consuming, radars.

As end-users, we have an obligation to ensure this whole thing goes smoothly. We need to hold our service providers accountable.  One way to do that is by relentlessly asking questions. Interestingly, no one is more qualified than us to ask the appropriate questions, because we’re the ones who’ve been running software on-premises for 20-years. We know the scenarios and situations to avoid, and most of these scenarios translate into very good questions that each and every service provider should be able to answer in a way that not only gives you the warm and fuzzies but also makes technical sense.  Remember, we’re banking our businesses on these companies’ ability to learn how to provide software-as-a-service. I’d at least like to know that they have a plan.

In part two of the Transparency In The Cloud series, we’ll start a list of questions that you should ask each and every SaaS vendor you approach.  The questions are designed to help us guide the B2B SaaS transformation by making us all knowledgeable and empowered SaaS end-users.

Stay tuned!

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The Up-stack Scramble – Cloud Nine for Developers will be Trench Warfare for Vendors

Mar 23, 2011 by Devon Watson

The Cloud Computing industry has been in a state of technologic and rhetoric driven flux ever since the term “cloud computing” was coined. Coming from both a software and venture capital background, I enjoy paying close attention to the often incongruent evolution of both our industry’s capabilities and its marketing claims. This disparity isn’t unique to the Cloud industry. Most new markets experience this while the vernacular jargon gets socialized and standardized on. Case in point, the term Nanotechnology was actually coined to refer to the concept of self-replicating autonomous bots (ala Michael Crichton’s Prey novel), what the world got was a much broader and less grandiose set of mainly micro-scale innovations all loped under that industry name.

Similarly, Cloud Computing was initially taken to mean perfectly abstracted infinitely elastic computing scale in an on-demand basis. We don’t have this yet. What we have, and Im referring specifically to IaaS since it is our basic building block, is easy to configure, easy to provision, on-demand, utility priced virtual machines. This is a great progression for the software and IT professions, but it falls short of fulfilling the fanciful capabilities drawn in people’s minds. Cloud IaaS makes it easier and cheaper to do what we’ve been doing for years, but hasn’t profoundly changed the actual requirements, workflow or operational hassles that developers and IT administrators face. As a Senior Enterprise Architect at a large enterprise remarked to me last year – “we’ve run the course with virtualization, we did that years ago.”

Making compute power available has been solved – the current challenge is to put that instant-on horsepower it to work. To be clear – this is being done fairly well in some use cases: big data crunching (CG rendering, map reduce) and consumer facing websites come to mind because they have scale mechanics that rely on simple replication and balancing.

Business applications, however, are still beholden to the underlying topology of servers that supports them. The application itself and the IT system must be intrinsically wired together in order to function properly. For example – business applications often store large amounts of data and will store data across multiple servers. If user number 523 logs in and her data is on DB server number 5, how do you fetch that data when she sends a request through UI server 3? Answer – the application has to know who she is, where her data is stored and how to retrieve it. This enmeshing is necessary to solve many similar complexities, but makes it extremely difficult to take advantage of today’s current Cloud infrastructures – without completely re-architecting and rebuilding applications from the ground up and adding multiple highly complex new systems.

In order for this current world of instant-on cloud servers to be truly impactful and revolutionary for developers and IT operators we must continue to elevate them further away from the underlying mechanics and break the bonds between application and infrastructure. In order to do this, we need some middle tier that abstracts the application away from the underlying server topology and surrounds that application with the management, authentication, user-routing and scaling mechanics needed to seamlessly take advantage of newly provisioned resources. This is why we are seeing a universal up-stack migration by the industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft and SalesForce.com into the still-evolving realm of PaaS (platform as a service) where the original vision of throwing code into an autonomous external cloud of elastic computing power is starting to coalesce in a couple offerings.

SalesForce.com’s “Force.com” platform for instance holds true to the “deploy and forget” ideal, but ties the developer to a restricted programming environment based on their own proprietary programming language in return. To counteract this, SalesForce.com has made bold moves by first partnering with the leading provider of virtualization technology (the underpinnings of the cloud movement) VMware to create VMforce for Java and then acquiring Heroku for the Ruby programming language. It wont be long before these two additional platforms are able to take advantage of the value added capabilities built into Force.com. The last few months have also seen the acquisition of Makara (another PHP PaaS) by Redhat, giving this enterprise heavyweight a compelling Private PaaS story for their client base. Amazon, the standard in IaaS, has been building new up-stack capabilities in-house and recently released their Beanstalk service which simplifies scaling Java applications. Not to be outdone, VMware last week announced the acquisition of WaveMaker a Rapid Application Development tool that compliments their SpringSource acquisition. Its not hard to imagine a new RAD-PaaS offering with these capabilities.

Scrolling this stream of movement, it can be hard to divine where this is all heading and where the competitors will bump into one another. It all comes down to the application developers and what up-stack capabilities you can offer them that improve one or more of: their build-time productivity/speed; the business value they can incorporate into their applications or the ease/quality of the ongoing application delivery. The following graphic gives a basic snap shot of where we are and how I see this evolving.

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Webinar: Accelerating The Road To SaaS

Mar 22, 2011 by Devon Watson

Webinar announcement: Accelerating The Road To SaaS – 5 Ways To Get To Market Before Your Competitors

For SaaSBlogs readers who are interested, we are holding a joint webinar tomorrow (Wednesday 3/23 at 11:00 EDT) that will cover 5 key lessons critical to the speed of transitioning to a SaaS delivery model.  The webinar is co-hosted by our partner Tenzing, a leading IaaS provider for ISVs.

If you are interested, you can register here:  https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/897150934

Event Details:
Date: Wednesday 3/23
Time: 11:00 EDT
Location: online
Registration: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/89715093

Overview:
Whether your company is a SaaS start up or employs a more traditional on-premise software model, you need to find ways to accelerate and streamline your SaaS application development. The fact is software as a service is exploding; IDC estimating that by 2014, 85 percent of new software companies will be offering their product through a SaaS delivery mechanism.

This webinar explores how Apprenda’s SaaSGrid Application Delivery Fabric combined with Tenzing’s Cloud infrastructure delivers a true end-to-end SaaS delivery platform to enable ISVs to bring their SaaS offerings to market faster with the lowest ongoing cost of service delivery. Why reinvent the wheel when making the move to SaaS? If you are to survive and thrive you need to leverage best of breed technology that will get you into market faster and with the right capabilities to unlock the efficiencies of scale needed for long term success.

Join Will Childs, SaaS Practice Director at Tenzing, and Devon Watson, Director of Business Development at Apprenda, as they discuss their partnership and resulting platform that enables software vendors to dramatically accelerate SaaS delivery while reducing development cost and complexity.

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