Haut Tech

When you develop products in a repeatable, production fashion, you have to step back occasionally and take the long view so you can properly discuss the process with clients. We’ve been involved in that exercise recently and I thought it might be useful to share the what and why of our approach to software development for online products.

When I wrote the recent article “SaaS: 10 Trends for 2010″ I used the phrase “Best Case SaaS.” I realized from feedback and some thinking afterward though that many people don’t share my vision of what it is.

We recently started a project with a new client from the UK to develop a SaaS application for them using Innovation Games and found them to be very useful in developing and prioritizing product features and development plans.

I’ve noticed there are broadly two camps when it comes to developing new services for the Internet: Those entrepreneurs that feel they must do everything themselves regardless of the hurdles they face and those that want to focus on their core expertise and leverage outside services where possible.

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.

We’ve given a couple of webinars recently with our partners Apprenda (archived copy here) and OpSource focused on the key issues ISVs need to consider when developing a SaaS product. One of the areas we covered that received a lot of interest was “Platform as a Service” – PaaS and what it can bring to a SaaS product development project.

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.

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.

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.”