Monday Aug 02, 2010
Ideal ISVs for Cloud hosted SaaS
In 2009, we did some interesting market validation to see how potentially large the Australian SaaS (Software as a Service) ISV (Independent Software Vendor) market was. As part of this exercise, I created a chart to help me to find the ideal candidate ISV for the cloud hosted SaaS provisioning project we were working on at that time.
The following diagram is that chart:
On the vertical axis we were focusing on the characteristics to on-ramp a new customer. With the horizontal axis representing the amount of consulting work required. The ideal candidate for us would of been an ISV, where the customer can self provision through the Internet without need for upfront consulting.
The intriguing item that arises from this, is that a traditional IT company focuses on selling Consulting services, or for that matter as an ISV it is potentially the Channel that provides the consulting. Here in Australia, we found few ISVs that purely concentrated on development of a product. In fact, it would appear more so, that consulting organisations have software that helps uniquely differentiate their consulting offerings in a competitive situation.
That then means that the complexity to get a new customer onboard quickly is not a priority. There were long sales cycles, with long implementation projects, where the business grew through providing more professional services.
Now this of course was in strong contrast to what we had researched on the Internet. The growth rates were going to be coming through SaaS enablement of software (reduce post-sales signup complexity and cloud hosted) to get customers onboard quickly. Or was it?
Well it is, but not within the Australian ISV markup that was concentrating on selling just within their local markets. The volumes of customers just aren't there. For some product offerings the market is for all intensive purposes saturated and their customers, at that time were not asking for SaaS based offerings.
As we were unable to find multiple ISVs that considered onramping new customers a current or perceived future issue we were unable to find within the Australian market, our ideal ISVs. I'm sure that one day they will exist, but I'm not just not sure when!
Tags growth saas isv complexity cloud | Comments 0
Wednesday Jan 07, 2009
Is SOA really dead?
A blog post titled "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services" was directed to me by a couple of persons. It highlights, what I first started to describe a couple of years ago as "Journalist led technology"; sometimes I do believe that it is Analyst led as well. That is, that the potential promise of the technology genres and acronyms, in this case SOA, take over. Without necesarrily having the real world experiences to back it up, to cut through the hype.
We most not forget that SOA means Service Oriented Architecture. It is an architectural style, that is a different style, then what has been used in the past in the client/server world of old. "to SOA or not to SOA" which I wrote about a couple of years ago, is always an interesting question.
"What are the alternates to a SOA style architecture?" still holds true in my opinion, that if you are not using a monolithic 80s/90s style client/server model, then there will be a business tier that exposes services at some granularity to be consumed by a presentation tier or another business tier service. Its the pace layering that becomes the issue (my thoughts here on timeless software).
To me Anne has highlighted the true issue that has been missed which is the important stuff: architecture and services.
Tags soa saas middleware technology analyst cloud journalist business | Comments 0
Sunday Nov 30, 2008
Cloud computing from the couch
I found this panel discussion from a new twitter follower today lucidera. It gives great insight into how some of the market leaders in this space perceive the future of SaaS businesses.
Tags google oracle cloud salesforce saas amazon sap adobe | Comments 0
Friday Jul 18, 2008
Focus on competitiveness with SaaS, not security perils
Some are expressing concerns about the security risks and perils related to compliance, availability and data integrity of using cloud based SaaS services. James Governor, summed it up nicely here, when promoting CloudCamp London by referring also in the title to Avoiding Monsters.
I'd argue that the services that will be first consumed through a SaaS mechanism will be transactions that do not offer a competitive advantage to that particular business. That is it just enables them to work more efficiently.
If so, what benefit will other organisations, or individuals, have with accessing information regarding these non competitive transactions?
Even if they did have a glimpse, that picture portrayed by that glimpse is only representative of that point in time and will quickly change to another picture.
What may be deemed competitive information, in this case, is the aggregate information of these transactions containing a dimension of time. Therefore with careful partitioning any potential security risks can be mitigated.
So avoid the FUD, as James said "Dangers and Perils - Here Be Dragons. Ah yes the beauty of FUD."
Tags competitiveness security efficiently saas cloud | Comments 0
Friday Dec 21, 2007
Predictions for 2008 using my del.icio.us tag cloud
Its that time of year, when writing about your predictions for 2008 is all the rage. I've been tagging some by others on del.icio.us with prediction2008.
I've included my current del.licio.us tags in descending order of importance. It highlights the areas that I have had an active interest in either for current work or for research of future activities. So i've used them as the subjects for my predictions for 2008.
my del.icio.us tags
- SaaS
- business
- web2.0
- ibm
- soa
- via:aqualung
- development
- collaboration
- innovation
- Microsoft
- architecture
- blog
- Java
- lotus+connections
- opensource
SaaS
Software as a Service will continue to become mainstream , as skilled resources become harder to find, internet connectivity latency decreases with the corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity. Wall Street will be even more attracted to the SaaS recurring pricing models, such that it will provide a higher potential exit price for Venture Capital backed organisations. Thus driving high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation in the SaaS sector then in comparison to traditional on-premise software delivery companies.
Business
Will continue to see their core Information Technology assets as a cost of doing business and will treat it as a commodity component. IT Consultants will find new ways to work with business, that is more closely aligned to business innovation within their specific industry. Nothing that new here, but internal IT skills will become less IT technical and more analytics driven. Marketing departments will take on more responsibility for analytics and data warehousing to improve marketing ROI.
Local markets in the developed world will continue to become a deeper shade of "red", as competition increases, driving exploration of new markets for growth through volume and innovation in delivery and execution.
Web2.0
Is a technical label, that has been assigned to represent a change of thinking regarding memes around a social and networked world. It has signaled the rise of the long tail, being that of the boutique network connected micro-economy. Organisations in 2008, will reevaluate their methods of engaging with the market, and the micro-economy, as the number of larger and mid tiered firms dissipate through M&As.
IBM
IBM will embrace cloud computing (eg blue cloud) but have difficulties in engaging with customers in this area; whilst it is still perceived internally as a hardware and people services company. Margins for resellers, will continue to dwindle (hardware and software) as IBM software sales, outside of SMB, finally exceed hardware sales and thus moves focus from hardware. IBM will continue to work on, but won't formulate wining strategies in 2008, to take market spend from Microsoft in the SMB software area. IBM's sales force in 2008, focused on on-premise engagement will have difficulties with the off-premise SaaS nature of cloud computing. In 2008, there will be some high profile success stories publicized for Blue Cloud.
SOA
Service Oriented Architecture will continue to drive new systems and rationalisation of existing within the larger enterprises. Adoption of the SOA Architecture Style within enterprises will increase. However, unless machine generated, WS-* style service adoption will decrease. Skilled IT Architects capable of service decomposition between business services and technical services will be in short supply for 2008.
SOA will continue to drive the demand for new on-premise middleware products. A number of new products will emerge in 2008, possible based on SCA/SDO, that allow utilisation of multiple programming languages and development paradigms.
via:aqualung
Thanks Ric 
lots of great material. Think more will come, including lots of great riffs and conversations. In 2008, I predict Ric will be writing more blog entries.
Development
The Art of Developing computer systems will start to influence education in the area of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Iterative agile development processes will continue to be favored over waterfall methodologies. Some procurement departments will explore contracts that allow iterative development methodologies, but this will still not be the norm in 2008. This disconnect between what developers do and what contracts state will continue.
There will be increased interest in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby and further exploration of languages or changes to existing languages to support parallel computing. Functional languages such as ErLang, Haskell and OCaml will gain more of the spotlight.
Google will continue to influence developers through its Google Code. Google SaaS based services will influence development approaches and continue to play havoc with administrators who favor closed firewalls and block external high use URLs. Google will utilise more personal profile data to improve search results and at the same time use it to increase Ad revenue from targeted advertising.
Smaller SMBs will gain trust in Google and really start to question the value/cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure.
Collaboration
Social software will gain some traction in more forward thinking organisations but it will still be an enathma to command and control based management. New products will be developed that utilise analytics in conjunction with project management methodologies to form groups/teams for delivery of specific deliverables based on a continuously moving project plan (isn't this what we do anyway manually?).
Innovation
Business will seek innovation to be internally driven and not from vendors, but will struggle with out outside influence. Australia will invest heavily in building infrastructure to support exporting of innovation overseas.
Microsoft
Will recover the market position lost with WindowsVista . SaaS (or as they call it Software plus Services) will continue to attract media spotlight as Microsoft seeks to gain new revenue streams and move focus from on-premise software. Huge internal debates over this will continue with little leakages, every now and then, to the market over the 2008 year. Headlines may move from Google vs Microsoft to IBM vs Microsoft, if Blue Cloud is a success.
Architecture
IT architecture will be important in organisations, as an enabler of structure. Many more titles containing the term Architecture will evolve in the 2008 year. IT Architects (of whatever title) will continue to find new ways of explaining the value of this abstract thinking to business and further consolidation of this knowledge will occur on the internet, such as at IASA.
Blog
PR agencies will learn how to influence the blogosphere. The informal citizen journalist will continue to eat into the revenues of traditional print media. Blogging in conjunction with bookmarking will become the preferred means over google to find "trusted" content and advice.
Java
This is the pinnacle year for Java, the programming language, in the enterprise world. As concurrent computing needs are accelerated through the multi-core focus of CPU vendors, it may be perceived that the effort to modify the Java language specifications is higher then the benefits gained by using other programming languages. SOA standards, such as SCA and SDO, are evolving to be language neutral, this will reduce the reliance on Java in enterprise middleware products.
Lotus Connections
This is an interesting product, that shows the possibilities of internet based software behind the firewall. The 2007 year saw, too many new products evolve from IBM in my view, thus there may be in 2008, a consolidation of products to compete against Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services in the SMB space. My blog receives a large number of hits for "sharepoint vs websphere portal" searches on google, so it wouldn't surprise me if Lotus Connections is rolled into WebSphere Portal Express for the SMB market.
Open Source
Will still be here at the end of 2008. Microsoft will continue to push new standards based around its technology stack. The next killer app may emerge if usability and visual issues can be addressed. Has Windows Vista opened the door for the Linux desktops? We'll see this time next year.
Tags business collaboration saas development architecture opensource blog del.icio.us web2.0 lotus+connections soa ibm google prediction2008 tag microsoft java cloud | Comments 0
