Saturday Jun 21, 2008
Software multitenancy drives operational efficiency
Over the last week, I've been evolving a presentation regarding our multitenancy commercialisation efforts through Business Portal Server. For the most part it has been received positively.
In one session that I gave though, a VC (Venture Capitalist) who was participating in the group, stated that we gave an excellent presentation but our business model was flawed. I of course disagreed prefusely. The argument presented was the classic of the internet as a disintermediation agent between organisations who provide SaaS services and the consumers there of. However, the model I see, is that new channels will evolve through eco systems of organisations working together. These organisations will focus in their particular areas of expertise be it software application focused or technical infrastructure to form stronger composite services.
The larger organisations that I deal with for on-premise consulting are continuously trying to reduce the number of vendors that they interact with. The lower the number, the less points of interactions. The argument being here the more efficient the internal procurement process. I believe also, that there is limits to the number of meaningful relationships that can be maintained to add value.
The complexity of development and support of production SaaS infrastructure is growing rapidly in complexity. Its only natural for consolidation and specialisation to follow. How these organisations work together will form the new software channels. It will also be shaped, rightly or wrongly, by procurement processes which drive how organisations purchase.
Thursday Aug 16, 2007
Composite SaaS Services - who ownes what?
I've met some interesting people that have great plans to use SaaS mechanisms to provision their software in an Off-premise mode to clients. Its seen as a key way of being able to provide better services to existing customers. The additional benefits would also include more personalised and interactive updates of both application, domain knowledge as well as immediacy of engagement through presence awareness technology.
The interesting point though, is the perceived need to own all IP of the SaaS service, including the provisioning mechanisms.
What I'm working towards is a multi-tenant services with multiple application services, so clear identification of Intellectual Property (IP) is required to enable protection of each parties inventions. It does start to raise a set of interesting issues regarding composite services that comprise capabilities from the provisioning framework, as the applications IP will in all likelihood be dependent on the provisioning framework's IP.
One way I can see to overcome this is to create or use a standards mechanism for SaaS provisioning. However, I have not come across one yet. So if you know of one please let me know?
