Tag Archive for 'SaaS'

SaaS Vendors: Practice what you preach.

Published by TroyWing on April 10, 2008 in SaaS. 0 Comments

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.

Mirror Post can be found on Troy’s Blog.

 

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Zoho filling in the SME accounting space?

Published by Ben Kepes on March 30, 2008 in Collaboration, Design, IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 0 Comments

A few weeks ago I posted and said;

Next move I’m picking [for Zoho] is a filling out of the space between the current small business offerings and People, the first larger business offering.

That remark was particularly made to comment on the release of Zoho’s first offering that seemed poised to move them into the enterprise space. Today however we see that Zoho has released Zoho invoice. Check out the slideshow for an intro;

Already hints have been made that this is the first part of a full-featured accounting system - it seems logical - imagine a situation where a SaaS provider had a solution that included office productivity, CRM, accounting and collaboration - it’d make a pretty compelling case (and a strong foil to Google’s stickiness).

I’ve always waxed poetical about SaaS solutions being part of a wider platform play, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to see how Zoho can be stopped from creating an all encompassing platform of their own (OK - that’s a pretty generous statement at the moment but consider the velocity of their development thus far).

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Microsoft’s picture of a unified future…

Published by The Unreasonablemen on March 11, 2008 in Business. 0 Comments

{this is a mirror post of unreasonablemen.net}

And no it has nothing to do with Vista….

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=MbGMN5hTe5w[/youtube]

BUT, it does have everything to do with Microsoft Mesh and MS’s S+S strategy. Gianpaolo from the development team outlines a simple S+S example here.

I love Office 2007, the interface is clean, efficient and now very familiar. Far, far, far superior to any web based productivity tools I tested. The problem of course was collaboration and anywhere access. How do I share documents with others and/or how do I access my docs from anywhere. Now I use Office Live workspaces in conjunction to Office. The combination of the two is very appealing:

I use Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) locally to author a document, presentation or spreadsheet and Office Live workspace in the cloud to collaborate with others and as an anywhere access store.

MS’s view of interconnectedness between offline and online worlds, (on premise and cloud computing) requires some sort of synchronisation. This framework is essential for them to retain their incumbent desktop business while paying homage to the growing movement toward SaaS & into cloud computing.

Couple this with some IP based unified communications elements and you get all the functions depicted in the future piece. I’ve watched that video twice, and possibly like many of you found it to be a little surreal. But have a long think about the elements to achieve that.

Ubiquitous networks, unified communications (yip MS is into Telco, more in this bit), shared workspaces, cloud based storage and fileshare. Not that futuristic really…

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Is the collaboration war just Google v Microsoft?

Published by The Unreasonablemen on March 10, 2008 in SaaS. 0 Comments

This is a mirror post of my own blog unreasonablemen.net

Pop quiz.

Who is the second largest software company in the world?

Who is the second largest provider of on-premise email & collaboration software?

 

The answer to both is IBM. The interesting thing about IBM is that they have been virtually anonymous on the SaaS front. Up until now that is.

 I recently attended a seminar co-hosted by IBM & Saugatuck on SaaS. For the most part this was a bit of a disappointment (I’ll describe the IBM play in more detail below). The most interesting thing was the declaration of IBM’s own SaaS plans code named ‘bluehouse’. Interestingly this isn’t top secret, IBM has told the world all about it, it just hasn’t been picked up.

 

Collaboration services delivered on the Web
“Bluehouse” is the code name for a future software as a service offering from IBM designed for companies with five to 500 employees. “Bluehouse” extends the value of the Lotus Foundations family by providing extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing.

The suite outlined by IBM is very comprehensive, much more impressive than MS’s somewhat disappointing announcement of last week & includes email, unified Comms, document shaving, social network applications, video collaboration & a bit more.

Various aspects of blue house are very interesting. Firstly in a SaaS world the barriers that notes has in getting into an entrenched MS go away. Secondly brand value means that to many corporates this is a credible alternative Thirdly IBM hasn’t really got a lot to loose. This article (which is 3 yrs old) claims notes had 23% market share (which just feels way too high). The point is IBM is loosing the email race. But now with SaaS they could tank the price of email etc & get back in the game in fairly short order. Fascinating play that should definite spice up the email wars.

As an interesting aside. Go to the Software top 100 site & type in Google…. What does that tell you???

 

More on the IBM SaaS model.

 IBM appear to have done the math & realised that SaaS is actually quite threatening to their core hardware & software business. The rationale? In a SaaS world the ISV builds their ‘stack’ only once & will likely never move. That is the buying decision for H/W & S/W is centralised & baked in. So vendors like themselves miss out on all the business on-prem software drive & if they don’t get the ISV on their platforms ( DB2 , websphere , hardware etc) at initiation there’s no way back in.

So IBM’s play is to get to the SaaS vendors at start-up. Kinda boring but pretty real I guess.

 

 

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