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Although in reality, business services provided through the Internet are nothing new, the number and breadth of services now available is certainly worthy of note. As a Gartner report recently noted – we are most likely at the peak of the hype cycle which in “Gartner speak” leads to the “slope of enlightenment” and eventually to mainstream adoption in the enterprise.

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.

I really enjoy working with entrepreneurs – helping them flesh out their ideas and making them successful. But too often I have to ask them – “What is going to make someone look at your product? How will they find it?”

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.

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