Software as a Service Solutions

Dear reader

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Thank you for being a faithful reader all these years.
I will no longer be posting at this address.
Instead I have created another blog which is available at my website SaaSbyDesign. This is a company I have started which aims to deliver effective analytics solutions from the cloud. Please visit and I hope you continue to read my articles at this new address.

Blog Move

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:02:00 +0000

Hi there,

I am moving to a wordpress blog. I will post link when it is live.
Troy.

New evidence of "Recession Proof" SaaS

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:38:00 +0000

My proximity to New York has given me a close up view of the economic problems we are facing. I have many friends and neigbors who have either lost their jobs in large organizations or have problems sustaining their small businesses.

Having just returned from a trip to New Zealand, its been interesting to experience the general morale of NZ vs. New York. The problems are far more visible in New York at this point. That may change over time.

Anyhow I digress..

For the last 18 months, plenty of bloggers have talked about how SaaS will perform in a recession, now the "proof is in the pudding" so to speak.

Can SaaS really outperform traditional On Premise Software solutions in such a challenging environment?

Sramana Mitra writes that

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the leading SaaS vendor, yet again, reported strong third quarter results on November 20 that beat Street estimates in an increasingly gloomy economic environment: yesterday the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. Despite the challenging market conditions, Salesforce.com is set to cross the $1 billion revenue milestone. I believe the SaaS sector is relatively recession proof, and Salesforce.com’s performance this quarter is more evidence of the sector’s strength.

Now this has to be concrete evidence of the robustness of SaaS in all economic climates.

Admittedly Salesforce.com is the most dominant On Demand company on the planet, and by traditional comparisons its in the top 10 largest "software" companies in the world (not that Salesforce.com really wants to be labelled a software company).

However the core strengths of SaaS should help the smaller SaaS vendors as well. I am not saying its going to be easy for any organization, but the strengths of SaaS for an end user organization should at least give some sort of advantage when competing for a job

These strengths include
Lower Cost of Ownership
No internal technical resource requirements
Operational Expenditure vs. CapEx.

All of which are significant benefits during tough economic times. In fact these could generate revenue opportunities for SaaS. In particular within organizations who have had layoffs, have a hiring freeze and spending cuts, SaaS could well be a cheap way to provide services within these restrictions.

Not all SaaS vendors are going to survive through these times, but in comparison with traditional on premise vendors, I truly think SaaS has key strategic advantages which should see it in good stead.

An Update

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:29:00 +0000

Dear Readers,

Its been several months since my last post. I found myself prioritizing revenue generating work for the company I am currently involved with,
over most other things including my blog.

Well like many of you out there I am glad to see the back of 2008 and since 2009 has just commenced, I have decided to relaunch my blog afresh. I will continue to write posts to this blog, but am also looking at revamping how to deliver my blog posts to you. this will evolve over time and I will let you know when its ready.

Please be on the lookout for new posts, and I thank you for your patience.

There is no such thing as "functionally complete"

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:02:00 +0000

I just completed revisions to our Software Development Methodology handbook. It got me thinking about how many times I have written something like this and how its changed over the years.

As would be expected from a Software as a Service company, we approach things from an incremental development and update perspective.

We look to deliver new features every 6 to 8 weeks. We have a product roadmap which is a living and breathing organism. At the beginning of each year, we sit down (representatives from Marketing, Client Services and R and D are all there).
We look at the Roadmap and work out what is needed for the following year.
Once we satisfy this objective we then proceed to work out what is needed in the first 6 to 8 week iteration. As we release each cycle, we review the roadmap and determine the requirements for the following cycle.

This is the reasoning for my post title. At no point do we ever say our product/service is functionally complete. Back in the days of on premise software, we would pursue the venerable Waterfall approach. We would map out and plan for a development project of 12 to 18 months, aiming for at most 1 release per year. Users wouldn't even get close to the new version until it was close to being "functionally complete" as a product. I would remember our customers/prospects getting all excited by some great new feature we would show them in a presentation, but a year is a long time in business, and by the time the product update was officially released, all the positive "vibes" and excitement of the initial announcements would have truly been forgotten.

By having 6 to 8 week feature updates, we are continually registering small wins with our customer and prospect base and keeping strong the goodwill of those customers. It also makes the term "functionally complete" an anachronism. A service should always be evolving and adapting. If you wait for 12 to 18 months between releases, your product will die a slow death.

Google building Business Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:07:00 +0000

I read a very interesting post by software engineer Sergey Solyanik who tells his story of leaving Microsoft, going to work for Google and returning to Microsoft.

Its a balanced account of the reasons why he returned to Microsoft, What caught my eye and got me thinking was his opinions on the challenges Google has in building solutions targeted at business. Google along with its primary search products has built a series of popular "free" products. By being "free", Google enables its development teams to be more "agile" and release code to production environments frequently, however accordingly there seem to be fairly frequent introductions of new bugs and outages but by being "Free", the user base is also more accepting of these issues.

This would appear to be a major inhibitor to Business market dominance. As Google begins entering the business market, the dynamics totally change. You have to build apps which are an integral part of running a business, not just "free" nice to haves, otherwise you will need never get widespread adoptance. Businesses by their very nature are far less forgiving of problems and as such would prefer to pay to ensure adequate quality,reliability and support are in place for any products they choose to use in their business.

Technical Support for business with SLAs in place does not currently exist at Google.
This got me thinking about the Salesforce.com/Google Apps colloboration. This is a pretty smart move by Google. I have to think this would benefit Google more than Salesforce.com though. Google partners with a company with huge credibility in the business world and they also get to leverage the infrastructure for training and support of customers that Salesforce.com have in place. In a way, Google is outsourcing these functions to Salesforce.com.

This is all good for customers who are using Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but what about the others who don't use Salesforce.com but want to use Google Apps with agreed upon SLA's and support?

Its my guess though that Google is not going to setup huge Support and Client Service Departments, I think they will continue with outsourcing this part of the business and utilizing business partners.

Salesforce.com Data Centers are also more focused on running business apps with high percentage uptimes and SLA's in place. I am not sure how Google's distributed server farms will handle business applications at guaranteed Service levels.

Google are certainly big enough to make it in the Business Market, but its not going to be a quick win.

Is Microsoft Silverlight ready for prime time Business SaaS Development?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:09:00 +0000

There is no doubting the success of Adobe's Flex development product set in the SaaS Web 2.X world and there is no doubt with the release of Microsoft Silverlight Version 2 beta, Microsoft is attempting to head the same way.

Silverlight 1 was clearly targeted at simple website development with video streaming, animations and javascript/Ajax dev framework to enable a richer web experience, but it wasn't close to being ready for business application development.

I spent some time researching SL2 in my continuing endeavours for improving SaaS user experience. It introduces some major functionality including

1. A cutdown .NET managed code environment as an alternative to Javascript. This will be an attractive feature for the literally millions of .NET developers out there.
2. Ability to generate and use proxies for consuming SOAP and RESTful based services (A critical requirement for Business applications who need access to hosted databases).
3. More standard controls such as listboxes and datagrid.
4. Linq to SQL

SL 2 is definitely a huge improvement over SL 1 but there are still some major pieces to the puzzle missing.

1. Certain key controls are yet to be released including a tab control. Tabs are a very common metaphor nowadays in business apps. I cannot seem to find a combobox implementation, the most basic of databound controls.
2. Linq to SQL is great for handling collections of generated proxy data objects but what about situations where the data schema is not known at compile time, for example CRM and Business Intelligence Applications
3. Third party vendors are still building their Silverlight components, vendors such as Infragistics, and Telerik having announced their intentions to release but have yet to do so.
4. Cannot merge external resource dictionaries which makes it difficult for dynamic skinning.
5. No concept of a right click. Which makes it difficult to build right click context menus. Can be done by Javascript hookups, but is not a default behavior in managed code form.

So is Silverlight ready for SaaS? Well, due to its flexible UI design foundations (XAML) which enable you to build your own controls and the new capabilities for managed code development and Service consumption, the answer is yes (if you have time to work around the controls that are lacking). But I suspect that many ISVs will wait before adopting Silverlight as their primary UI platform for delivering SaaS applications, otherwise they risk reinventing the wheel.

Preparing for the Business Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:12:00 +0000

An interesting interview with the head of Microsoft Office products, Chris Capossela provides a clear indication of a couple of things.

Microsoft is investing heavily in Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is a serious player in not just the consumer space but in business also. ( And not just in Cloud CRM which Salesforce.com leads by a country mile, but in general business applications also)

According to this interview,

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research)
sees tens of millions of corporate e-mail accounts moving to its data centers
over the next five years, shifting to a business model that may thin profit
margins but generate more revenue.

Microsoft is adding 10,000 servers a month to its Cloud focused data centers. Thats 10,000 servers a month which apparently is equivalent to the entire server count for Facebook. Pretty impressive numbers.

The company said Coca Cola Enterprises Inc (CCE.N: Quote, Profile, Research)
signed up 70,000 seats for Exchange Online, switching over from IBM's Lotus
Domino system

70,000 seats for any software business is a major win, its a true Enterprise sale, and an accurate indicator of whats happening with the business cloud.

The article does indicate however the "Fence sitting" of Microsoft. They see themselves differentiated from traditional service players such as Amazon and Salesforce.com, because they still offer On Premise solutions.

I can see why On Premise for Enterprise, may still be preferred for some large scale multi country integration heavy type applications, but surely Microsoft must see its Email solutions heading up into the clouds? Email solutions don't differ from customer to customer which makes implementation and setup costs very low if not nil.

I know, I haven't used a locally hosted on premise email system in years, and don't see myself ever doing so again.

Its an exciting time as we see large scale vendors adapting to the presence of Cloud Computing in business.

A Microsoft Cloud Database. Now its starting to make sense.

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:52:00 +0000

I apologize in advance for this fairly technical article, but I wanted to post about this to highlight that Microsoft can produce some really impressive stuff on the Development side of things, even for SaaS.

It was announced fairly recently that Microsoft was planning to release a cloud version of its SQL Server DBMS, called Microsoft Data Services, (Whitepaper found here.).

There are a number of major players in this arena, including Google, Amazon and even Intuit but that isn't the focus of this blog post.

Despite Microsoft's sometimes "perceived" less than committed approach to SaaS and Cloud Computing in general, they always seem to come up with some great additions to their development platforms.

Their latest .NET framework 3.5 Platform introduces a component called Linq or Language Integrated queries. This component which is based upon Functional Language constructs and Lambda expression building blocks essentially provides a SQL language capability embedded in the C# and VB.NET language sets used by many. It provides an abstraction layer hiding database specific language constructs from client apps.

Example:

var query = from p in Contacts where p.LastName=="Wing" select p;

Linq can be used against all types of collections, and in fact the building blocks of Linq, Lambda Expressions and extension methods also simplifies many scenarios where you have to iterate through collections. In instances where you would traditionally write multi line code with a FOREACH statement you can replace with a single line.

string[] contacts= {"Troy","Jane","Kim"};
IEnumerable contactList= contacts.Select(p=> p += " Wing").
.Where(q=>q=="Troy");

So back to the reason why I am blogging about this and why its "starting to make sense", these technical features which can make developer's lives a lot easier, actually have a more significant and strategic use. They will form the development platform for ISV's to build apps against Microsofts Cloud Database. Because Linq is Database agnostic, it becomes the perfect tool to use in the SaaS world when building Multi-Tenant Client apps. It removes the need to write complex database specific code anywhere in your app.

It will simplify development, and provide the ability to bring to market a SaaS product requiring a database backend a lot more cheaply and quickly and perhaps open up the SaaS market to smaller organizations who normally couldn't afford to build such an app.

It would have taken several years for such significant features to be designed and implemented by Microsoft, so although I don't know whether this was intentional or not, Microsoft has been seriously thinking about architecture for Cloud Computing for quite a while.

SaaS Vendors: Practice what you preach.

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:11:00 +0000

I have been quiet in March, due to my company acquiring new customers.
Writing blog posts about specialist topics such as SaaS requires a fair bit of regular reading, which was reduced to a minimum for me.
So in lieu of that I am posting on an area which was quite a significant part of what I was doing in March, Release Management and Source Control.

Like many companies, I run a distributed team of developers, some in India and some in Chicago and myself here in the East Coast. Its a major challenge communication wise but very doable if you have the correct tools in place.

True to my previous blog posts, we use lots of virtual tools to enable that communication, but one area we have stuck to traditional methods is source control.
It was an old habit that remained with me throughout the years. We have the usual on site Source Server (running Subversion on Apache) which is only accessible from inside our office VPN with regular offsite backup storage. Now this works fine, but as with all server environments this requires regular server and security support. With customer deadlines, developers were up at all hours of the night, and our internal VPN was experiencing occasional outages. Our guys in Chicago were more than helpful in getting up in the middle of the night to resolve, but this got me thinking, why are we investing in an on premise source control environment while we are trying to persuade our customers to trust us with their valuable and confidential data? We of course use a market leader in enterprise hosting for our production application and database servers which is an environment totally independent and separated from our office network and VPN.

So right now I am looking at possible outsourcing scenarios.

Option 1: Configure your own source server but leverage the infrastructure of a Rackspace or an Opsource.

Option 2: Go fully Software as a Service with your source control.
One in particular I have been looking at is Dynamsoft. If you google hosted source control, they seem to dominate. They offer a variety of hosted options including a free version for up to 5 Mb of source code and packages for Enterprise and ISVs.

It may be hard to consider putting your source code into an external environment, old habits die hard. But the same rules apply to you as a SaaS client. Simply research the SaaS Source control vendors, understand how they protect your code, look at existing customers and be comfortable with backup processes and how you can maintain a copy of the code locally.

I think its worth looking at.

Who is using Force.com?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:10:00 +0000

A number of prominent blogs including Renee Boucher Ferguson, Sinclair Schuller and Bob Warfield this morning wrote about the outcome of an informal straw poll conducted during a panel discussion hosted by Phil Wainewright at the OpSource SaaS summit this week.

In a show of hands, Out of 250 ISV's attending the summit,only 2 were planning to use Force.com as their Dev Platform. (40 responded yes to building their own SaaS platform and 10 to a Software plus Services approach). Bob and Sinclair discuss their viewpoint on reasons why this was the case.

Some of these points included
1. Salesforce.com is not a neutral platform.
2. Its more of an "Extension platform" not a revolutionary one.
3. Bob adds that its too expensive an option.

So what is the sweetspot for Force.com? Bob rightly points out that it will appeal to Internal IT departments within Enterprise already using Salesforce.com as they are not as price sensitive. I agree with this as my experience at Dreamforce when Apex was first announced a couple of years ago, IT Department employees sitting at my dinner table were excited at the prospects of building their own modules, while the ISV's sitting at the same table were lukewarm.

I believe Force.com will find its dominant niche in areas which are CRM related. So I actually think its sweetspot will be vertical offerings of CRM. http://www.verticalsondemand.com/
, a Pharma CRM system built on force.com is a prime example of this.

The challenge of gaining a significant foothold into general SaaS platforms is a far greater one for Force.com. There are many SaaS solutions and ideas which are not customer centric at all. Maybe this is where Platform as a Service is heading? Specific Value Add platforms for specific business functions.

SaaS Presentation Layers exist out of the browser

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:46:00 +0000

In a recent blog post, SaaS Blogger Phil Wainewright made some excellent points on what defines a SaaS client.

Some purists may disagree, but my definition of a SaaS client goes outside of the browser to include a client that runs on the desktop machine so long as it’s still controlled and managed from the Web.

Phil's definition, reinforces the views I have repeatedly expressed in this blog.
Webifying Desktop
Software+Services or SaaS, the key word is Service not Software.

Phil discusses the real world examples of this happening, including RightNow who have showcased their new On Demand Release which utilizes Microsoft .NET Framework capabilities.

This is still true Software as a Service, because all the benefits of the Multi-tenant single code base exist in these flavors of SaaS client.

There are viable alternatives to pure browser based solutions, which up the ante in UI presentation and brings parity between traditional Client/Server (On premise) UI and SaaS UI.

What's next then? as per my previous posts I predict sometime in the future, Desktop and Browser will merge again. When a user boots up her computer, or utilizes their smart phone, it will be one and the same. SaaS will ensure accessibility to data in the cloud from all devices and not just via browsers. Cloud services will enable advanced deployment capabilities for SaaS client apps which will access services and data provided by a myriad of SaaS vendors.

Software+Services or SaaS, the key word is Service not Software.

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:33:00 +0000

Having read with interest Ben's previous post on Microsoft's Software + Services strategy, I feel like adding my 2 cents worth from a slightly different angle.

The keyword here is Service, which leads to me to think that Microsoft Office and competing disruptive products are not the best examples of SaaS. A critical strength of SaaS and where it will significantly disrupt (and already has in CRM and Project Management) is in the outsourcing of tools with a significant server side component with complex business logic, tools such as CRM, ERP and Accounting, Project Management, Business Intelligence/Performance Management, Talent Management,Sales Support, all requiring server side processing power and scalability.

The advantages of SaaS (excluding cost of ownership and pricing arguments of subscription over perpetual licensing) include eliminating needing to fund server infrastructure and support resources for maintaining your own data center, and multi-tenancy which ensures you always have up to date features without complex upgrades.

Whether your SaaS vendor chooses to provide a client side User Interface which is browser based using AJAX, Silverlight, Adobe or via a Microsoft Clickonce style (A Software+Services option) deployment is secondary to ensuring they provide a service which effectively and economically solves business problems (the Service component). The client side user experience is a key factor for user adoption but all the options above can provide that. The general user probably doesn't even care which one is used.

Microsoft certainly has its problems in the Web/Internet space and they are still playing catchup with SaaS but I don't think delivering SaaS is going to be a long term problem for them.

Use Office Live Workspace or Google Docs, or both?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:10:00 +0000

I just signed up for Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, which enables you to store office docs online and share them with whom you see fit. Currently,I use Google Docs Beta for publishing, in fact I use a lot of App Gadgets on my google page, Blog Reader, wikipedia and Linkedin and Google Analytics for Adwords and my Blog. But despite the availablity of online competitors I still use Microsoft Office for documentation writing, which still is a lot more usable than the online products.
On using the Live Workspace, its quickly apparent the Google Document Manager is more mature, its easier to share the document in less steps and the UI feels more cleaner and less cluttered.
I do like the Desktop sharing function in Office Live WorkSpace, very handy for presentations along with the ability to create Workspaces for different projects and clients. A major benefit also is the inherent offline capability of Office. Google is looking to provide that functionality at some point, but its not there yet, either way Microsoft Office will still have more functionality and usability.

I will continue to use Google Docs for sharing, but as Office Live Workspace continues to evolve I will probably use that when appropriate also.

Thats the beauty of Utility Computing, you can pick and choose who and what you use, you can choose to switch or you can decide that both offer benefits and you will utilize both when appropriate.

My favorite Google App is now a Windows Desktop App

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:01:00 +0000

I am a very heavy user of Instant Messaging tools.
At any one time I may have Skype open for voice and chatting to 2 or 3 people in New Zealand, Windows Live Messenger chatting with our offshore team in India, the implementation team in Chicago and Live Video call with my nephew, I also have been using Google Chat embedded in Gmail.

I can now add another to this list. I installed Google Talk Beta for the web (on my igoogle dashboard which is pretty cool way to chat) and the Windows version onto the desktop.

I am a little disappointed with the web based version as it appears to be a little sluggish and obviously lacks the voice call features of the windows version, but I am most impressed with the desktop version. Because its beta, functionality is not quite up there when compared to its more mature competitors. But the user experience is very intuitive, it looks pretty without too much clutter, responds well and it has a cool VoiceMail feature!!

Google has done a good job outside of the browser with this app. Their simple,uncrowded approach inside of the browser translates well to the desktop, but now with the superior response and accessibility of a desktop application.

I still believe the desktop will continue to be a major player even in the dominant arena of SaaS and Utility Computing. Perhaps there's something to Software + Services.

Complex Software Licensing drives companies to SaaS

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:14:00 +0000

I've blogged previously about how SaaS pricing should be as simple as possible and that SaaS is generally associated with a simple and easy to understand subscription based pricing model. There is good reason for this.

I've heard talk of including annual maintenance, upgrades and server hosting as invoice line items in customer billing. Which just adds unneeded confusion to something which is elegant in its simplicity.

Why should you keep it simple? Because you gain a primary competitive advantage over traditional software licensing.

A recent article in InformationWeek , titled "Software Licenses Are Too Costly And Complex, Survey Says",

provides evidence from a Forrester report, that customers are frustrated by traditional software vendor's licensing policies.

The article writes that

Forrester recently surveyed 25 customers of large software companies and 215 business and IT professionals. Eleven of the 25 big software customers complained that license agreements are too complex and maintenance fees are too high, according to the report by analysts Ray Wang and Elisse Gaynor

and finishes with

But Forrester is optimistic about the future. Growing interest in software as a service will force providers of traditionally licensed software to change their ways. The pay-as-you-go SaaS model "will give business owners a taste of streamlined, more easily consumed licensing," Forrester predicts, noting that SaaS also typically comes with a bundled license, maintenance, and upgrade package. Customers will "gain more interest in and grow more vocal for simplistic and holistic approaches to usage-based pricing agreements," the analysts predict.

As a SaaS vendor, it may be tempting to try to pass on costs of server hosting and R and D to the customer but ultimately that is unnecessary. In fact you dramatically increase the risk of driving customers away and increasing your "churn".

As more customers sign up and renew the following year,the SaaS Multi-Tenancy benefits that we are all familiar with, ease of upgrading software, efficient server utilization, reduced support requirements, reduced cost of ownership, all eventually drive marginal costs of new customer provisioning right down to an insignificant amount.

The Forrester Report is proof that customers want the simplified approach of SaaS pricing.

Microsoft, a Social Network giant

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Computerworld reports today that Microsoft is to join the Web 2.0 data portability group whose members already include representatives from Google, Facebook and LinkedIn and Yahoo.

The interesting quotes from this article include

Microsoft is a stealth social networking giant, with more than 400 million users with accounts at Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger or both, according to an interview late last week with Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online services business.

and

According to Nielsen Online, visit statistics from last August, 2 Windows Live Spaces and MSN Groups together make Microsoft the second-largest social networking provider, behind MySpace but ahead of Facebook and Classmates Online as well as Google and Yahoo's efforts.

We don't normally associate Microsoft with Web 2.0, but these statistics and Microsoft's B2B SaaS initiatives (Or using MS speak "Software + Services") indicate that Microsoft is still a force to be reckoned with and should not be underestimated in the Web 2.0 and SaaS arena.

SaaS meets Social Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:30:00 +0000

Last last year,The Unreasonable Men wrote a short series of posts discussing the convergence of SaaS and Social Networks and whether they are actually becoming the same thing. An interesting article was published today in Infoworld which announced that SuccessFactors, a Talent Management SaaS company which recently IPO'ed

is using Facebook to allow a richer employee profile that goes beyond the structured data that is typically captured in a HCM (human capital management) service, according to Jim Holinchek, a senior analyst with Gartner.

I also believe Microsoft is planning to do a similar thing with CRM 4.0.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out here. I know myself and colleagues I have discussed this with like to keep a distinct barrier between personal and work networks. Sometimes they happen to overlap but that is by choice not by default.
I am not sure if employees will want their facebook information used in a business context. Even if there is an "opt out" option there could still be pressure to permit the link to occur from your employer.

Will this type of convergence be common in 2008 and will it be a success? We shall see.

Technical Support for SaaS Applications?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:28:00 +0000

Jeff Kaplan just posted on the changes required for the sales and support models for On Demand Applications. I previously posted on how Selling to SMBs requires a lower cost approach, which supports what Jeff writes on Sales Strategies in the on demand world.

What piqued in my interest further in Jeff's post was his valid points about supporting an On Demand application.

Jeff writes

Similarly, the support function also changes in the on-demand world. Rather than rely on technical support to react to problems implementing and maintaining software, customers expect their on-demand solutions to be easy to deploy and administer.

In a previous lifetime, I was involved in a non SaaS organization where there were 3 levels of technical support all directly visible to the customer.

1. End User phone help desk
2. 2nd Tier support for Customer Administrators and for the data
3. 3rd Tier support handling Software problems and deploying emergency patches to all customers.

Major investment in Phone, Call Distribution, Server Access, remote control software (Webex/Goto Meeting subscriptions), People for multiple support shifts, and intensive training add significantly to the cost of running a traditional software business.

Add to this problems of high staff turnover, miscommunications, local language requirements (especially if outsourcing help desk functions) and Technical Support is a significant burden for both the ISV and the customer.

This extremely high cost and human resource intensive approach to support while necessary for a Non-SaaS ISV is deprecated in the SaaS and Web 2.0 world.

With a SaaS Single instance approach to the application with availability over the internet, direct phone support for day to day users is essentially eliminated due to the following

Hardware compatibility, software installation, database corruptions, Versioning problems are non issues in the SaaS world.
A consistent User interface reduces training costs and on the phone training support.
Because of the multi-tenant nature of SaaS, a user supported forum and Wiki is more likely to provide a solution to any problems a user may have.

You could also add a "Self Service web portal" which takes a user through a set of diagnostic steps for the most common problems a user may experience for example it could run diagnostics on your browser and check for security settings. If your business is such that you require person to person contact, a Chat function in your application is a more efficient mechanism,

This non-intrusive approach results in lower operating costs for the vendor which leads to maintainable low subscription costs for the customer. It also reduces the likelihood of customer dissatisfaction caused by communication issues with a Help desk and the inconvenience of having to call a help desk number numerous times and trying to talk to the person who was helping you previously.

Web 2.0 on a plane?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:36:00 +0000

I couldn't resist, I had to post one more time before our trip.

It was reported today in the Wall Street Journal that JetBlue (airline carrier based out of the NorthEast of the US) is about to pilot WiFi access to email and IM.

JetBlue has access to a very small slice of the ground to air spectrum, so we are a little way off getting full Internet access bandwidth capabilities. But its a huge step in the right direction.

Imagine all the productivity you could gain on those long flights? A Sales Rep could access SaaS CRM to prepare for a sales call, you could get all your expense claims into your SaaS Expense tracking system, you could review your financial status in your SaaS accounting package, you could just do some personal banking. You could even run a sales call from the air using Webex or GotoMeeting!!! No more excuses for missing an internal meeting just because you're in transit.

Its going to come too late for my pending 6 hour flight to LA and 12 hours from LA to Auckland but its something to look forward to.

Off to New Zealand

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:55:00 +0000

We're off to New Zealand for the holidays. Can't say I'm looking forward to the 20+ hour trip with a 9 month old, but it will be worth it. We're heading away from the North East cold of 19 degree F (-8 Celsius) to the early summer of New Zealand for a month. (Most of it will be in Auckland which is a bit like Seattle really. Plenty of rain, but when its sunny its fantastic).

The beauty of blogging is that its location agnostic, so I will be continuing to write regularly. I am sure there will be plenty to discuss as Ben Kepes and the Unreasonable Men and I are trying to coordinate a time to meet up. Really looking forward to that, I really enjoy reading their original thoughts and ideas on SaaS and the Web 2.0 world in general on their blogs.

We will be staying at my parent's house. I just had them order "broadband", so it will be interesting to see how the service holds up. NZ bloggers have focused a lot on speed of Network service recently both inside of NZ and international connectivity.

The next time you hear from me it will be from New Zealand!!

SaaS resistant to economic downturn, On Premise not so.

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:49:00 +0000

An article by Sean Gallagher in InternetNews.com reports that

"Goldman Sachs last week downgraded the vast majority of the software companies it tracks from "attractive" to "neutral" last week. "

What is notable about this report is that Goldman Sachs indicated they favored Software as as Service (SaaS) vendors to be more immune to the projected economic downtown attributed to the Finance and Mortgage problems being faced.

"The ability to quickly and easily turn on new applications with a
significantly lower initial cost of ownership makes SaaS an attractive offering for small- and mid-sized businesses," Friar and her team wrote, "significantly expanding the market for software applications. More broadly, and including enterprises, these benefits are likely to be key in a slower economic environment where purchasers of software may be increasingly skeptical of significant upfront investments which we anticipate to characterize 2008."

The same couldn't be said about On Premise, as the article also indicated that On Premise ISVs were more vulnerable to IT spending cuts.

This ties in well with the Unreasonable Men's Post on Will SaaS go the way of of ASP's, which indicates that SaaS is more than just hype and is here to stay. Although these Unreasonable guys accurately post that SaaS is more than a just cost saving device, this very feature makes it a more attractive option in uncertain economic times.

A day in the life of two technology workers

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:49:00 +0000

Time	Web 2.0 empowered Technology Worker	Traditional "On Premise" Technology Worker
7am to 8am	Walks 30 ft from bedroom to home office. IM's with team in India for daily handover of work, log details of IM in to SaaS Project Management Tool. Check Emails online using SaaS email.	Gets ready to go to work
8am to 9am	Skype with US East Coast team members, 10 minute meeting to discuss plan for the day and any urgent issues. Review any issues found by India Team. 1 Developer in NY is sick, but can continue working. Review Task/Issues List in SaaS Tracking Tool.	Sitting on Route 80E waiting for vehicle breakdown to clear.
9am to 9:30	Gets coffee and prepares work environment	Gets Coffee and chats with coworkers
9:30am to 12pm	Check out code from online Subversion and continue development, continuous IMing with other developers and project managers to assist in problem resolution. Add useful tips and hints to company wiki.	Check emails, has a question to ask India team but can't as they have gone home.Has to wait until tomorrow. Move onto next task. Status Meetings with entire US team. Delayed by 1 hour as Project Manager is stuck in traffic still. 1 team member calls in sick. Half an hour after meeting starts, CTO walks in and wants a recap meeting, meeting starts again.
12pm to 1pm	Lunch, Write post in personal blog, catch up on emails etc.	Sit in lunch room and complain about impossible timeframes
1pm to 5pm	Continue Development, stuck on a problem, ask social network for help. Problem resolved. Have an idea of a blog post, draft it out and post it. Decide you need to do some online shopping for the holidays. Complete development tasks for the day and decide to start on tomorrow's tasks to stay ahead. Think of a great UI idea, you prototype it and publish it on Dev Web Server for all to review.	Server problem at work, development delayed by half an hour as cannot get source code from server. You begin development, stuck on a problem, send an email out to colleague. Out of office reply received back. You skip the problem and decide to surf for a little while.
5pm-6pm	Skype Call with QA team, review work, testing starts. Project ahead of schedule, giving more time for QA.	Send an email to India asking them to continue work which was due yesterday andhope for the best. Send an email to Manager, stating due to server outage you are another 15% behind schedule. QA complains because they haven't seen anything in weeks. Head home.
6pm -7pm	Dinner	Stuck in Traffic
7pm	Urgent IM from QA, problem which needs fixing. Problem fixed	??
8pm	IM or skype with India to handover tasks for overnight processing	India reads email, can't understand the requirements, sends an email in response. No Progress for another day.

The Enterprise Web 2.0 Generation has arrived!

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:51:00 +0000

In an earlier blog post I wrote about why SaaS will become the natural choice for organizations.
I wrote

However what ensures the longevity of SaaS is the next group of CIO's who are in college or have recently joined the workforce. This crop will see Web 2.0 as a totally natural way of doing business as its what they do in their personal lives.
Storing files and documents, in Google, in Microsoft Live, social networking, wikis all are ingrained in this new generation and SaaS will become the obvious choice.

It appears the enterprise world is beginning to realize this.
An article by Heather Havenstein in ComputerWorld published today looks at how "Companies wrestle with tech demands of younger workers".

Chris Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co was quoted
Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.

"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."

Heather also states that IT executives are beginning to plan for the 80 Million children of baby boomers entering the workforce.

In the November 15,2007 Edition of CIO Magazine , editor Elana Varon interviews Gary Hamel,

Gary states that

If you're a CIO, you need to spend a lot of time out on the fringes of the Web because that's where the innovation is taking place. You need to spend a lot of time with people under 25 years old

These current trends all vindicate the work practices (which are contrary to traditional enterprise policies) I have in place with my development teams. I place no restrictions on Social Networking, IMing, private emailing, reading and writing blogs and wikis for my staff, in fact they are strongly encouraged. There are multiple benefits to organizations with these types of practices.

1. We don't really have set hours for working, and if an urgent customer issue,request or deadline arises in the middle of the night, our staff are easily contactable via these mechanisms and collaboration at midnight is often a common thing, our customers are often surprised at how often we deliver overnight. Cell phones are very seldom used in these situations apart from reading emails.
2. Often new product and usage ideas are generated by the usage of Social Computing tools at work and at home
3. Collaboration is taken to a new level, any "productivity loss" from social computing is more than made up by the improvements in communications and the reduction of miscommunication.
4. New staff members feel more comfortable contributing ideas and questions, as they are in an environment very similar to their "college social network".

Once again I will say:
This Web 2.0 generation will provide the tech leaders of the near future,the Cloud is here to stay.

Google, Firefox no match for Microsoft?

noreply@blogger.com (Troy Wing) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:39:00 +0000

Computerworld recently published an article States slam Google, Firefox as no match for Microsoft
It leads off with
In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla, and technologies such as Ajax and software-as-a-service, as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system and browser markets.
.
They essentially want the courts to continue antitrust monitoring Microsoft for another 5 years until 2012

Another quote:
In their most recent brief, the states countered Microsoft's contention that Web-based companies -- Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, eBay and others -- and new Web-centric technologies constitute what Microsoft dubbed a "competitive alternative to Windows."
.

The Department of Justice is supporting Microsoft on this one.

Setting aside any arguments of Pro/Anti-Microsoft camps, is it not fair to say that despite Microsoft's dominance in the the Desktop/OS market, companies such as Google have experienced phenomenal success and growth in the web 2.0 and as such would it not be hypocritical to recognize that success and then try to restrict Microsoft further?