Haut Tech

In our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing!

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

As anyone who follows me knows – I use Twitter and TweetDeck to watch the “virtual conversations” about SaaS happening around the ‘net when I can. Today some time was freed-up by a conference call that was delayed so I fired up TweetDeck and took a look around. Imagine my surprise when I read a meme had started around a blog post touting single-tenancy for enterprise SaaS applications.

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.

In this article, “Nearshore” refers to outsourcing software development to providers that are located in foreign countries in the same or adjacent time zones or that are geographically close to a client’s home country. For U.S. companies, this term describes outsourcing to providers located in Canada, Mexico and Central and South America. For companies in Western Europe, nearshore providers are logically located in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. At Scio, we work primarily with customers in the U.S. using a combination of U.S.-based and nearshore resources from our Delivery Center in Morelia, Mexico.

Recently I read a discussion highlighted by Herb Sutter on his weblog, Sutter’s Mill. Herb is a well-known and respected leader in development and C++. In his article, he covered many of the misconceptions that seem to exist around user interfaces for Internet-based applications. The question is – are developers and product managers thinking too rigidly when they approach a SaaS application? Do “Web 2.0″ and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have value in SaaS and On-Demand applications?

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?

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 – [...]