Haut Tech

They say everybody likes lists. Miles of virtual paper have been inked in pursuit of the “best recipes for chocolate chip cookies,” the “worst airline food,” and to complete the theme – the best diet plans. Ok then- we’ve got a list:
Ten Ways to Fail as a SaaS Company

In this article we’re picking up where we left off in Part 1 on our expansion of the podcast we did with Steve Plunkett, CTO of Servitizer and our panel of industry experts – Luis Aburto, CEO of Scio Consulting, Mikael Blaisdell of MBlaisdell & Associates and Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures. If you haven’t read the first part of our series already – please start there – because the background for the conversation is there.

The question I pose in the title of this article is the theme of the podcast we did this month for Haut Tech Conversations. It turned out to be quite a conversation and you can download it and listen to it in its entirety here. Our panel and guest brought up so many excellent points that I’m going to take the time to summarize and extend them in this “post interview” so they are not lost.

There has been a lot of ink wasted on “Best Practices” for SaaS vendors. From my point of view, most of them have been either self-serving (use our services, platform, secret sauce) or suitable only for framed embroidery beside your desk. We’re going to waste some more….

A lot has been said about what Software as a Service is and is not – and we’ve been part of the noise. I really feel however there is something bigger going on. There is a tsunami coming and SaaS is only one of many waves.

At the recent OpSource SaaS Summit 09, I had the opportunity to meet many entrepreneurs either operating a SaaS business or preparing to offer a product as SaaS. I was not surprised to see that the most popular sessions were based on marketing, sales compensation, sales channels and “Thriving Not Just Surviving.” In this economy [...]

Check your calendars March 19th, 12:00PM CST! Scio Consulting is partnering with Apprenda to offer a live webinar to answer questions for ISVs, startups and on-demand businesses that are transitioning to offering Software as a Service (SaaS).

There has been a lot said about the “maturity levels” of SaaS – so much in fact that the concept is now meaningless. Are we looking at it from the customer’s point of view? The ISVs business side? or their development side? or are we thinking like a supplier to the ISV? A hosting, platform or component provider to SaaS ISVs? Without some context – the whole discussion is an exercise in “analyst-speak” to put it kindly.

Late last week there was a lot of buzz around the announcement that the president and chief executive at Salesforce, Steve Cakebread and two of his top sales executives had left the company. It has generated blog entries with provocative titles (Is the Bloom Off the SaaS Rose? by Jeff Kaplan) and several sober assessments about the general effect the down economy is having on IT spending

The recent rumors that Twitter could complete a capitol raise of $250mm have set the “blogosphere” afire. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research did some number crunching and came up with a value of $73.52 per active user for Twitter. This follows news that the social media darling turned down a half billion dollar acquisition by Facebook. And – it’s old news but – the Gartner Group says social networks shouldn’t be ignored by retailers. Surprised? Maybe you should take another look at social marketing in your business model…