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In part one of this series, we proposed two situations that are occurring in this tough economy:

* Startups with experienced founders and a strong product idea but limited funds and time to build a team.
* ISVs with existing products who are faced with dwindling sales, lowered product development budgets and increased pressure to roll out new versions and extensions for their product line.

We posed outsourced product development (OPD) as one possible solution, but also exposed a few of significant risks involved. So what issues do you have to consider when judging OPD vendors?

This is a tough time to be starting a business, but many people in technology or with deep industry experience who have been recently laid off are doing just that. Companies with existing product lines are facing tough choices too. Can you afford to sit on your hands while your sales dwindle? So let’s imagine you’re one of those folks…

With so much uncertainty and emphasis on the economy at this time, it is no surprise that most of the “On-Demand” articles I’m seeing right now are about either the reaction of customers – SaaS adopters – or SaaS startups and vendors to the market. Jeff Kaplan wrote about it from an industry perspective this morning on Seeking Alpha.

I came across a good paper by Joel York of Chaotic Flow over the weekend that started a flow of thoughts about ISVs. The article is titled, “The Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts of SaaS” and it made me wonder – where can someone considering developing a SaaS application go for the “ins and outs” of the field? It is fairly difficult to do without sifting through a lot of vendor-led material that, while good, is clearly biased or paying out some cash to go to a series of conferences – where again, you will surf through a wealth of vendor-led discussions regardless of the venue.

Reviewing some of the latest SaaS products, and announcements of some “real soon now,” I’m struck by one constant theme: The first impulse of ISVs with existing, premise-based products is to clone those applications and “stick them in the cloud.” To me – this should be the first indication of possible failure. The web – [...]

The adoption of Agile approaches in software development has grown very rapidly in recent years. I remember that a couple of years ago a lot of people in the IT world hadn’t even heard about Agile. Today, most of the development groups I talk to claim to adhere to Agile, at least to a certain extent. But the reality is that many of them are not realizing the benefits in productivity and quality that they expected.

It seems sometimes like being in technology means learning a new acronym every day. And to make matters worse, every marketing department is busy trying to think up the next “market-leading, self-defining, world-beating…” term to define their version of “the ultimate truth.”

We’ve felt it – everybody has. The “credit-crunch,” the “downturn,” or whatever you want to call it. The impact of this latest wave of economic news is being felt globally. A lot of companies, small and large, have put their plans “on hold” indefinitely.

It has been a long time coming, but we’ve finally gotten our blog in place. We’ve wanted to have a place to speak to the industry and our customers for quite a while. We hope you find the posts here informative, short and useful.