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SaaS is not a “one-size-fits-all” business. There are many options now for platforms and services you can use and the number is increasing every day. A lot of the information available is laden with marketing hype. How do you make the right decisions?

In Part 1 of this list we covered the first five points – so if you haven’t read that already, I encourage you to go and read that first. For everyone else – here’s the remaining five points in my hit parade.

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

Scio Consulting and Apprenda have announced a strategic partnership to offer enablement services for software companies looking to bring their products to the on-demand business model rapidly and efficiently by using Apprenda’s SaaSGrid , a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery platform.

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…

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 – [...]

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.