This is the fourth article in a series with excerpts from this year’s workshop titled, “How to Eat an Elephant – Developing a Real-World Product SaaS Product Roadmap.” Each of these articles will cover one part of core subjects in our Cloud Product Roadmap.  If you are just joining us – you can return to the first article in the series and find out more about the workshop background and other articles in the series.

Excerpt: How to Eat an Elephant Workshop by Scio Consulting

Planning and developing a Cloud product can be a daunting prospect, especially if using cloud-based infrastructure and services requires a departure from your “comfort zone” in more traditional installed and server-based products. One of the biggest concerns is developing the architecture for the project. For an implementation on something like Amazon Web Services how do you decide on the break-down of the application between the various services Amazon provides? Can you model the utilization scenarios and understand your costs in different situations?

Before you begin that consideration – let’s first make it clear that straightforward server virtualization is not the key feature of Cloud technology. Where Cloud implementations really shine in their value is in the ability to provide highly elastic capacity for specific application elements. This means the architecture can to break out client service elements that are based on utilizing elastic storage, moving large amounts of content, or have bursty characteristics.  Simple server virtualization schemes are limited reaching these scenarios economically because they are based on replicating a the server footprint rather than extending individual application  components.

On the other side of the coin, the “client side” of the application is not the only thing we’re concerned about. We also need to consider an operational side of the application that will support our product strategy and business model.  Hobbling operations by relying on manual processes to onboard customers and handle operations is not a sustainable way of dealing with the “back office details” of the service.  Generally, the operational side of an application will scale in a linear fashion. These components will scale in relation to the number of clients rather the usage patterns of application features by clients. That means utilizing different scaling strategies for various parts of the application. It also means cost modeling needs to be split between dynamic services that are consumed directly by client use and the more linear use patterns of components that are required to operate the service.

To understand the issues, let’s go back to one of the basic problems of a SaaS or Cloud product. There are several elements of these applications that are critical to operations but take considerable effort to plan, develop and implement:

• Multi-Tenancy – For most SaaS and Cloud Services, multi-tenancy is the core approach to application management, generating new instances, and structuring client data. Multi-tenancy is implemented in the database of the application itself.
• Application Management and Availability – Regardless of whether they are designed for the Cloud or not, modern applications are not monolithic. As we have discussed, they are actually a group of components that may have different use patterns and performance characteristics. Managing performance and scaling for the entire application is a basic requirement, but in a component model, you may need to manage performance and response at the component level to leverage the opportunities that true Cloud architecture offers.
• Product Management – Configuration, metering and billing are necessary to manage service packages that can be offered to clients. It is likely your packages will change over time, so your management system needs to be flexible and accept a wide range of scenarios. If you plan to leverage reporting to determine feature acceptance and value, you also need to be able to monitor feature-level usage over time.
• Usage Metering & Billing – If your service has usage-based billing, no matter how it works, you need some way to translate usage into billing. What seems simple can be come complicated quickly when you are faced with various combinations of partial months, changing user counts, differential pricing by user role, promotions, and other unexpected complications. Being able to respond to a changing elastic deployment. It requires much more effort to maintain reliability over changes to the core and operational sides of the application. In the best case, the basic architecture of the application platform supports the kind of load-balancing and instance version control that makes this possible.
• Subscription Management – A subscription is the package of services that a client has subscribed to and pays for in regular periods.  Although they are utility-based, very few Cloud Services can adopt a totally unpackaged, spot use model.  Granular spot use models are hard for the client to plan for because they can represent a risky “uncapped expense.”  And – unless they are based in regular use by a very large client base, they can result in a cash flow that is impossible to plan on. Because of this, regardless of how the service works, most SaaS and Cloud Services will have subscription-based packages and require on-going subscription management and the ability for clients to change subscriptions based on the current feature pricing schema.
• Access Control – Users must be able to access the features related to their role within their company subscription and if the service includes a suite of applications – their access needs to reflect their participation in the suite.
• Customer On-Boarding and Provisioning – When a customer signs up and is accepted, the application should be able to use the information provided at signup to provision a client instance and provide the necessary credentials, roles and access needed to the customer without any manual intervention or coding.
• Service Management and Configuration – When web services are used to provide the different components of an application, each service needs to be managed, versions need to be tracked and dependancies need to be respected. Without a management tool, this work needs to be done manually and can greatly complicate the job of managing new component rollouts.
• Contextual Logging – All servers and applications provide some level of logging – but if there is no mechanism to tie log information to users, clients and features, it can require a lot of effort to track down issues. Some sort of contextual information attached to logs speeds support efforts and improves overall customer support and reliability.

Taken together, these features require considerable planning and development effort to implement. They are not part of the core product value a SaaS or Cloud Service delivers, but they make the difference between a business model that operates and scales successfully and one that becomes burdened by too much overhead to scale repeatedly and successfully across enough customers to reach profitability. As you can see, these components will technically scale in relation to the number of clients the service has, not the features in use by clients and users.

SaaSGrid is one of a relatively small number of middleware servers or platforms that vendors can build on to provide these operational features and it will run either directly on servers or as virtualized servers on a service like Amazon Webservices. In either a virtualized or “bare metal” installation, a tool like SaaSGrid can lower the effort required to develop and implement a SaaS or Cloud product by as much as 60%.

So, when we get down to it – fully leveraging the capabilities of the Cloud for an application means understanding component-based architecture, the expected scaling characteristics and use patterns of each component, and finally the “orchestration” or web services messaging that allows all the components to act transparently across many clients as one application. On the business side, all of these elements have to be packaged and modeled to develop client offerings that have prices aligned to value and use. And – building a SaaS or Cloud product means planning for both client and operational functionality.

<Read the previous article in the series<

Do you need to know more about developing SaaS and Cloud Services to develop your application and business model? You should consider joining us at:

How To Eat An Elephant

Developing a Real-World 
SaaS Product Roadmap

28th April 2011

from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm
  (including breaks)

The Venue

Embassy Suites – Southeast

7525 East Hampden Avenue

Denver, Colorado

Prices

• How to Eat an Elephant Workshop – Standard price – $499
• Register NOW for our Denver Workshop and take advantage of our Apprenda-SaaSGrid Special Price
  

Agenda

• The Business Case for the Cloud - Assess if the Cloud is for you by identifying the business opportunity, investment needs, risks, etc.
• SaaS/Cloud Product Strategy – Define the competitive and positioning strategy for your product within your context and your market.
• Your Cloud Business Model - Define how your product will make money and what is needed to make it happen.
Developing your SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap – Develop a tactical roadmap to align funding, development and marketing objectives.
• Key Technical & Functional Requirements of a SaaS/Cloud Product – Understand the architecture and functional elements required to deliver your service smoothly and profitably
• Cloud Readiness Checklist – Identify key requirements of SaaS and Cloud operations, customer support, legal, financial considerations, sales and marketing that you will need to prepare for to make your product successful.

You can take the workshop by itself or in conjunction with

SaaS University

THE Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Application Conference

At the Embassy Suites, Southeast – Denver, Colorado – April 26th to 28th 2011

Prices

• SaaS University Package – Regular Admission – $999
• SaaS University Early Birds – $799 (Early Bird Registrations On April 15, 2011)

Get an additional discount from Scio – Regardless of when you register

• Because we are participating in this event, you can get an additional $150 off your registration.
• Just enter the Scio’s Discount Code: SCIOsave150 when registering for SaaS University.

Go to SaaS University Denver Registration Page

This is the third article in a series with excerpts from this year’s workshop titled, “How to Eat an Elephant – Developing a Real-World Product SaaS Product Roadmap.” Each of these articles will cover one part of core subjects in our Cloud Product Roadmap.  If you are just joining us – you can return to the first article in the series and find out more about the workshop background and other articles in the series.

Cloud Product Roadmap – Technical Architecture

Excerpt: Reviewing the Roadmap Template for Technical Architecture

In this installment, we going to look briefly at what needs to be in your Technical Architecture plan rather than review a part of the presentation from the workshop.    We provide MS Word templates for each element of the Cloud Product Roadmap, which can be modified and brought together to document your plan.

So just for the sake of understanding the outline – let’s review the major points of a Technical Architecture plan as for SaaS and Cloud products we see it:

• Technical Architecture Design Model
• Technical Architecture Design Process
• Architecture Design Elements
  • High-Level Architecture Requirements
  • Application Architecture Design
  • Tenancy Approach
  • Scalability Approach
  • Metering Approach
  • Security Authorization & Authentication Approach
  • Audits & Compliance Approach
  • Provisioning & Implementation Approach
• Gap Analysis & Third-Party Solutions
• Cost Estimation & Optimization

It is important to note at this point that this is not the complete technical plan. The roadmap also needs to include Development and Maintenance Processes, Operations and the Support Approach. You will also notice something it doesn’t include: Long, detailed descriptions of end-user functionality. This is because we recommend companies with SaaS and Cloud products use Agile development processes. Using an Agile approach means that the application is planned up front at a high-level using “user stories” that describe the main points of functionality needed by users. These descriptions will be broken down in more detail during the development process, but within the context of the evolving application. This allows the product manager to consider what the application needs to do, but spend less time on about how the functionality is implemented. Today developers leverage a wide range of tools and frameworks to deliver rich functionality more quickly and with better quality than in previous years. But each set of tools has its own implementation pattern. A product manager that spends too much time specifying HOW things need to be done, rather than focusing the outcomes, is likely to be wasting time on specifications that don’t leverage the frameworks properly or creating work-arounds with increased risk and development effort.

Another aspect of this plan are the elements included specifically for Cloud and SaaS applications. Tenancy, Scalability, Metering, Provisioning and Implementation are all architectural issues that concern online applications. In our experience, it is common for product management to focus on end-user functionality and leave the specifications for operational purposes until a later time. In many cases, this means the development team either ends up “back-porting” critical functionality into the application or tacking it on the side somehow. This usually means that important opportunities to do it right the first time are lost and in many cases issues like metering never have the flexibility they need. The point of our templates is to help our clients to consider these and other critical elements at the right time in the planning process – before choices are made and effort is expended that is hard to back away from.

The Design Process

If you have an existing product or assets in the form of technical assets (libraries, web services, algorithms, etc.) you can migrate, the first thought is of course leverage them to build the new Cloud or SaaS product. Using them provides a level of comfort and could lower the total cost of development. However, depending on what the assets are and what technologies are involved, they may also become a constraint that will prevent you from optimizing costs, performance, processes and the user interface. ISVs with existing products quite often consider ways to leverage their existing assets – even going so far as to just host instances of their application for clients ASP style to get something in the market quickly. Their basic thought is that the value of SaaS or Cloud all based in the delivery model. Typically startups design their applications from the ground up because they rarely have technical assets to consider.

Existing assets that are not already setup for the Cloud can also suffer from a lack of operational features to automate customer on-boarding and implementation, feature packaging and pricing, and usage metrics. Conversely, building from the ground up doesn’t mean you have to build everything. Using the Cloud model, you can leverage best of breed components to fill the operational gaps and allow you to focus on developing your core value.

You can also leverage specific SaaS and Cloud platforms that provide a many of the operational elements of Cloud products and usually enforce a level of code consistency. These can greatly lower the effort required and can offer capabilities that you can use immediately but would rarely put in your first product version. The build or buy decision in this case is usually a product of business priorities for budget, effort and the time required to bring a product to release.

So, in essence, the design process is a series of choices and compromises that finally arrive at the approach for the final product. The choices can be difficult but are usually made easier by making a series of strategic business and product decisions before you begin to consider the technical architecture. Making decisions on the technical architecture before key business and product decisions are made can lead to wasted development effort and increased risk that the development process will take longer than planned.

Special Attributes of Cloud Products

Current Cloud products, particularly those that take advantage of services like Windows Azure, can scale compute, storage, and delivery in direct response to needs in a specific dimension. That means if the application needs more storage, but doesn’t need more compute power, storage capability can be scaled up (or down) by itself. Conversely, if the application needs to process a great deal of data, it can add compute until it reaches a satisfactory performance for the job at hand. This ability to scale elements of the application separately provides opportunities to approach design problems in new ways. Where before we scaled simply by adding more servers, which included all elements whether we needed them or not, we can now scale just what we need to meet demand. This changes the design process to include considerations for issues like:

• What processes can be handled by a compute role, possibly from a queue, and processed in the background to reduce front end pressure?
• What degree of scalability will be required by each process?
• How will the application scale up and down? What will be monitored and how will it trigger change?
• What types of data will the application use and what resource can be used to store it?
• Are there content distribution needs that could take significant bandwidth?
• Does our scaling model fit within our pricing, packaging and overhead model? Are there better ways to accomplish same end with a lower overhead? What are the trade-offs?

Each cloud platform has its own capabilities and design patterns so there is a learning curve in deciding which applies to a specific product and project. But once basic decision is made for the platform, the next level is to consider how to design the application so that it can scale and leverage the platform transparently and make the best use of its strengths. It is best not to duck the decision and just go for a simple virtual machine approach because, with the exception of a few special cases, most of the value leveraging a cloud platform will be lost in the process.

If working with the interplay of decisions between your product strategy, technical architecture and business model is something you are struggling with – you should consider joining us for our workshop!  It will help you parse your priorities and bring together a roadmap for product development that meets your needs.

<Read the previous article in the series – Next article>

This series will be covering more in the days leading up to the event. But reading these excerpts will not give you all the material and is no substitute for attending and joining in the discussion.

How To Eat An Elephant

Developing a Real-World 
SaaS Product Roadmap

28th April 2011

from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm
  (including breaks)

The Venue

Embassy Suites – Southeast

7525 East Hampden Avenue

Denver, Colorado

Prices

• How to Eat an Elephant Workshop – Standard price – $499
• Register by April 1st for our Denver Workshop and take advantage of our Early Bird Pricing

Agenda

• The Business Case for the Cloud - Assess if the Cloud is for you by identifying the business opportunity, investment needs, risks, etc.
• SaaS/Cloud Product Strategy – Define the competitive and positioning strategy for your product within your context and your market.
• Your Cloud Business Model - Define how your product will make money and what is needed to make it happen.
Developing your SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap – Develop a tactical roadmap to align funding, development and marketing objectives.
• Key Technical & Functional Requirements of a SaaS/Cloud Product – Understand the architecture and functional elements required to deliver your service smoothly and profitably
• Cloud Readiness Checklist – Identify key requirements of SaaS and Cloud operations, customer support, legal, financial considerations, sales and marketing that you will need to prepare for to make your product successful.

You can take the workshop by itself or in conjunction with

SaaS University

THE Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Application Conference

At the Embassy Suites, Southeast – Denver, Colorado – April 26th to 28th 2011

Prices

• SaaS University Package – Regular Admission – $999
• SaaS University Early Birds – $799 (Registrations By April 1st, 2011)

Get an additional discount from Scio – Regardless of when you register

• Because we are participating in this event, you can get an additional $100 off your registration.
• Just enter the Scio’s Discount Code: SCIOsave100 when registering for SaaS University.

Go to SaaS University Denver Registration Page

Installment 2: Our 2011 Workshop Series

This is the second article in a series with excerpts from this year’s workshop titled, “How to Eat an Elephant – Developing a Real-World Product SaaS Product Roadmap.” Each of these articles will cover one part of core subjects in our Cloud Product Roadmap. If you are just joining us – you can return to the first article in the series and find out more about the workshop background and other articles in the series.

Cloud Product Roadmap – Product Strategy

Excerpt: Lean Product Development and the Customer Development Process

The Product Strategy section of our Workshop covers the Lean Product Development approach and how it leverages the Customer Development Process. One of the opening slides mentions this quote, “Product strategy is like a roadmap, and like a roadmap it’s only useful when you know where you are and where you want to go.” (McGrath 2001)

This is the core idea behind our Product Strategy presentation and our Cloud Product Roadmap – helping companies considering SaaS and Cloud products to find where they want and need to go.

Lean Product Development rests on a basic premise: The product features that customers will value are unknowns. In the case of a software, regardless of how it is delivered, that means the features and services the application will offer are simply a hypothesis until they have been actually evaluated by users in their own context and use. By using Agile development and practices and evaluation by key customers, product management seeks a minimum feature set that will provide the greatest value while reaching the widest customer coverage. The Agile development approach provides a system of relatively short development cycles or iterations that produce features that users can evaluate immediately.

The Customer Development Process provides the basis for customer involvement, particularly during early product development. The founding team seeks clients who can understand the product vision. These clients will become early adopters and customer development partners during application development. The Agile development iterations are used to test the feature hypotheses with the customer development partners to validate that the features developed provide real value and will drive sales. The point is to find a product that reliably produces value for enough customers to sustain a business model that can be scaled.

Based on Customer Validation, the process continues into creating market demand and scaling sales to reach positive cash flow. The product development doesn’t end however, it continues throughout the lifecycle of the application as the customer pool grows, continually feeding discovery and learning. At the same time, the company itself manages a process of transition from being a product development organization to an operational machine that can continue to execute and serve customers as sales scale.

The key starting point for this process of product and company building is finding the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is a product version with the minimum features needed to solve the core problem of the target market. In most cases, it is a lot less product than is necessary for a market release. This is an important difference from the traditional product development process where the aim is to bring together as robust and complete a feature set as possible that will fend off possible competitors and produce an apparently over-whelming feature advantage. This is possible because traditional product development processes depend on the assumption that the market is known and the needs of users are fully understood. It works well when the product line has a solid history of success and the product management team has been participating in the market for some time.

Internet-based applications and services, however, have the possibility of reaching new markets and customer segments that were out of reach in the locally-installed, licensed model – even for ISVs in the market with products. While a SaaS or Cloud product developed with traditional product development methodology could capture its existing customers, it could easily miss newly available market segments with unexplored problems.

To address this gap, Lean Product Development and the MVP approach are aimed at testing the value hypothesis and allowing the visionary early adopters to “fill in the gaps” when it is validated that the MVP is solving a real problem. If the MVP isn’t solving the core problem, the cost of re-evaluating and approaching the opportunity from a different direction is small and early adopters can aid in defining the issues contextually. In this approach, the risk of wasted effort and time are minimized, and the opportunity for clarity in solving the real problem is greatly improved. Once the MVP is proven, the vision can continue to be achieved in small increments without the waste of producing a laundry list of features that in the end no one will pay enough for to realize a profit.

The advantages of Lean Product Development:

• Reduces the risk in bringing a new product to market
• Reduces investment prior to positive cash flow
• Accelerates time to market with a viable product
• Aligns product features with proven customer needs
• Provides a rapid, dynamic feedback loop from the customer that drives product design, product packaging, price structure, and competitive positioning

The competitive positioning issue is one that is worth a few extra words. The Customer Development Process engages customers and creates a shared sense of product destiny. In turn this increases customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. These are critical to success for online services like SaaS and Cloud Products. It produces a product that fits a client base tightly and is a barrier to competition. It has been shown that products with a Replace Strategy need to be perceived to be nine times better than the product they replace to gain market traction. The longer a customer is retained in a Lean Product Development model, the greater the barrier the competition will have to overcome.

<Read the previous article in the series – Third Article in the Series>

This is just one of many critical subjects we cover in our workshop.

This series will be covering more in the days leading up to the event. But reading these excerpts will not give you all the material and is no substitute for attending and joining in the discussion.

How To Eat An Elephant

Developing a Real-World 
SaaS Product Roadmap

28th April 2011

from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm
  (including breaks)

The Venue

Embassy Suites – Southeast

7525 East Hampden Avenue

Denver, Colorado

Prices

• How to Eat an Elephant Workshop – Standard price – $499
• Register By April 1st for our Denver Workshop and take advantage of our Early Bird Pricing

Agenda

• The Business Case for the Cloud - Assess if the Cloud is for you by identifying the business opportunity, investment needs, risks, etc.
• SaaS/Cloud Product Strategy – Define the competitive and positioning strategy for your product within your context and your market.
• Your Cloud Business Model - Define how your product will make money and what is needed to make it happen.
Developing your SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap – Develop a tactical roadmap to align funding, development and marketing objectives.
• Key Technical & Functional Requirements of a SaaS/Cloud Product – Understand the architecture and functional elements required to deliver your service smoothly and profitably
• Cloud Readiness Checklist – Identify key requirements of SaaS and Cloud operations, customer support, legal, financial considerations, sales and marketing that you will need to prepare for to make your product successful.

You can take the workshop by itself or in conjunction with

SaaS University

THE Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Application Conference

At the Embassy Suites, Southeast – Denver, Colorado – April 26th to 28th 2011

Prices

• SaaS University Package – Regular Admission – $999
• SaaS University Early Birds – $799 (Registrations by April 1st, 2011)

Get an additional discount from Scio – Regardless of when you register

• Because we are participating in this event, you can get an additional $100 off your registration.
• Just enter the Scio’s Discount Code: SCIOsave100 when registering for SaaS University.

Go to SaaS University Denver Registration Page

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working on a workshop we will be doing as a series in several cities this year. The workshop is focused on the key business and technical requirements for success with SaaS and Cloud Products and based on our experience in the field and our consulting practice.

May I introduce:

How to Eat an Elephant

Developing a Real World SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap

Get Your SaaS/Cloud Product Off the Ground!

If you want to develop a profitable, successful SaaS or Cloud product in the most efficient way – you must attend this 5-hour workshop. This event is for anyone considering a SaaS or Cloud product, in the process of developing a product or dealing with the issues of offering a product that isn’t reaching its potential.

Who Should Attend?

Entrepreneurs, CXO’s, product managers, and key executives in startups, ISVs moving to SaaS/Cloud Service or existing companies in the field.

Benefits

There are many ways to navigate the maze of choices that you face in bringing a SaaS/Cloud product to market. By attending this workshop, you will learn how to create a SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap for your project that optimizes your resources, accelerates your time to positive cash flow and maximizes your chances of commercial success. This workshop will expose you to the tools and techniques Scio uses as a part of its SaaS/Cloud Consulting Practice to help our customers introduce new products.

Answers Key Questions for SaaS and Cloud Products

• How can we build and release our product incrementally so we can leverage our cash flow and customer feedback? How do we select a value-based feature set?
• What are the critical steps in the process of releasing a new SaaS/Cloud product?
• What technologies or services could we leverage and what are the tradeoffs?
• What do you need to operate the business and operational side of a SaaS/Cloud business?
• What skills do we need or should we bring in?

You will hear industry best practices, our field tested experience, get your questions answered and learn about resources you can use to plan your Product Roadmap.

Agenda

• The Business Case for the Cloud - Assess if the Cloud is for you by identifying the business opportunity, investment needs, risks, etc.
• SaaS/Cloud Product Strategy - Define the competitive and positioning strategy for your product within your context and your market.
• Your Cloud Business Model - Define how your product will make money and what is needed to make it happen.
  Developing your SaaS/Cloud Product Roadmap – Develop a tactical roadmap to align funding, development and marketing objectives.
• Key Technical & Functional Requirements of a SaaS/Cloud Product – Understand the architecture and functional elements required to deliver your service smoothly and profitably
• Cloud Readiness Checklist – Identify key requirements of SaaS and Cloud operations, customer support, legal, financial considerations, sales and marketing that you will need to prepare for to make your product successful.

I hope you will join us for one of these workshops. The events are small and interactive so we have opportunities to speak directly to your questions and projects. Our unique balance of business and technical topics comes from our experience. We want our clients to have successful products and these workshops are designed to help attendees do just that.

Calendar

We will be adding new locations throughout the year, but we have some great opportunities for you now that you should consider:

March 9, 2011 – Austin, Texas

Our first workshop in this series is scheduled for Austin, just before the popular South By Southwest Conference. The workshop will be at Plaza 7000, just off Highway 1. The location is easily reachable from anywhere in the Austin area.  Ample free parking is available on site. Coffee and lunch will be provided.

The regular price for this workshop is $499 per person and $299 per person for groups of three or more from the same company. To kick off this series, you can apply the discounts below:

• $200 off the regular per person price – Use the code “austinHTEAE2011” or use this link to apply the discount directly when you open the registration page on EventBrite.
• $100 off the per person group price – Use the code “austinG3HTE2011” or use this link to apply the discount directly when you open the page on EventBrite.

Your host and speaker in Austin will be our CEO, Luis Aburto

SaaSUniversity – April 26-28, 2011 – Denver, Colorado

SaaS University offers 28 sessions and 6 keynotes by experienced industry executives and four additional, optional workshops over three days in Denver, Colorado. We’re proud to be a part of the fifth year of this industry-leading conference given by Softletter. I will be presenting Lean Product Development for the Cloud on as a part of the Transition to SaaS Track on the first day and our workshop will be part of the optional sessions on the third day.

• The regular admission to the 2-day conference is $999. If you register before April 8th, you can save $200, making your price for regular admission $799.
• Our workshop 5 hour workshop on the third day is $499.
  
• You can save $100 off the entire price of your registration, whether you stay for our workshop or not, by applying the discount code SCIOSave100 when you register.
  

Please join us at this great event by registering here.

Your host and speaker in Denver our Vice President of Service Engineering, Michael Dunham (myself!)

I can think of many reasons to be at SaaS University in Washington, DC, July 20-22, beyond my session and Scio´s workshop. But I want to be clear: The sessions at SaaS University are always changing, always relevant to developing SaaS products and successful SaaS businesses. It is the only venue available with a focus on helping SaaS vendors navigate a complex business model.

This time I have the honor to be presenting a session on the second day titled: Increase Your Bottom Line Value with Multi-Tenancy.  Here is the session summary from the University agenda:

There is a lot of debate about multi-tenancy.  Most of us understand its value from a technical point of view, but what can actually translate to our bottom line?  How does it change what we are able to do to increase operational efficiency and customer retention?

Multi-tenancy is not a magic bullet, despite what you may have heard. Implementing your SaaS application with a multi-tenant architecture offers great returns, BUT ONLY if you understand how to leverage it along with metrics, operational automation, your ecosystem, and the network effect of your customer base – effectively.

This session will answer questions concerning the value of:

• Different architectures for implementing multi-tenancy and maintaining flexibility.
• Reliability, scalability, maintenance, and product evolution to your clients.
• Multi-tenancy in operations across your product organization.
• Implementing metrics in a multi-tenant application.
• Your customer and user network, delivery network and ecosystem under multi-tenancy.
• Methods of implementing multi-tenancy without breaking the bank or slowing product release

This session is strategic for C Level executives and product managers planning, implementing, or enhancing a SaaS offering. Participants will come away with a clear understanding of how they can leverage multi-tenancy at every level of their service and increase their bottom line potential.

This session is replacing a similarly titled session by planned Lincoln Murphy because of a scheduling conflict he has encountered. I want to thank him for his recommendation that I take his slot. I must say, although I want to keep the same broad focus for this session, my approach to this subject is different than Lincoln´s. My background with multi-tenancy comes from planning SaaS products with Scio´s customers and many years of working with companies on Internet-based business models.

In itself, multi-tenant architecture is not new.  The same could be said of the SaaS business model. What is still new is the broad market attention to on-demand services and the opportunities that virtualized infrastructure gives to business. The knowledge of how to leverage architecture and technical choices to impact product features, customer value and operational effectiveness is what is lacking in my experience. This is what I will lead discussions on in my session at SaaS University.

In addition, if you aren´t aware of it, SaaS University has a third day of full day workshops that provide a ¨deep dive¨on specific subjects. Our own session is Charting Your Course to SaaS, which will help it´s participants navigate all the choices they face in developing a SaaS product while they develop a road map that can get them to market and positive cash flow sooner.  I can also personally recommend Jim Geisman´s Right Pricing Your SaaS System: Beyond the Basics – Advanced Workshop. Jim and I had the opportunity recently to give a workshop together and I greatly enjoyed the experience, and I know our audience did also. Ideally, product teams should consider sending representatives to both workshops because they are complimentary points of view that are very important to understand.

So, with that background, here is the overview of our one day session at SaaS University for July 22, 2010:

Charting Your Course to SaaS – SaaS University, Washington DC, May 22

This is the third time we’ve offered this comprehensive workshop on SaaS and it continues to evolve as we respond to the needs of our participants. Following our joint workshop with Jim Geisman of Software Pricing Partners, we’ve continued to tighten the content and for SaaS University, will offer a more interactive format for this workshop, especially during the afternoon. The aim is to keep it small enough to allow everyone a chance to move the discussion toward the issues that interest them most.  It remains however, the only workshop that covers the business, operational and development issues that are critical to success in SaaS.

Companies that can benefit by attending this workshop:

• A new venture or as an ISV with on-premise products considering developing a SaaS offering
• A service company with significant vertical expertise than could be delivered and monetized in a SaaS model.
• An existing SaaS provider who made choices opportunistically that now constrain growth and cash flow.
• A SaaS entrepreneur with limited funding that needs to achieve positive cash flow early with products that evolve with the market.

Company challenges this workshop can help overcome:

• Building out a suite of products but are unsure of the strategies, metrics, and operational models needed to grow.
• Developing a framework for sorting out technical and strategic choices required to move to the SaaS business model.
• Facing significant operational problems including efficiency while keeping churn under control in an existing SaaS product.
• Developing a product roadmap and unsure of what can be accomplished and timeframes

Topics to be Covered:

• How is a SaaS Product and Business Different?
• Reference Framework for Creating Your Roadmap
• Making Strategic Development Choices
• Operating A SaaS Business by the Metrics
• 10 Ways to Fail at SaaS
• Applying Lessons Learned to Your Issues

Who Should Attend?

This workshop and seminar is important for anyone considering a SaaS product, in the process of developing a product or offering a product that hasn’t reached its potential, including: Entrepreneurs, CXO’s, product managers and key executives in startups, vendors moving to SaaS or existing SaaS companies.

About Your “Professor”

Mike Dunham, Vice President, Service Engineering for Scio Consulting, has over 25 years background in the development and introduction of new technology working with startups, government and the largest enterprise software companies. He has worked with Scio for five years, regularly authors articles on SaaS and the software industry and hosts a series of podcasts on SaaS best practices. Mike leads Scio’s professional services helping companies develop and bring to market new SaaS offerings.

The workshop costs $695, but you can get an Early Bird Price of $495 when you combine it with your SaaS University registration - total package price of $1290. As a way to bring together a great amount of information in a short period of time, the combined package is a great opportunity. As we get closer to the event, I’ll expand on the agenda, but this is a great time to start planning and get your team together to attend SaaS University in Washington, DC!  I hope to see you there…

The relentless change brought to us by the consistent doubling of computing power that Moore’s Law describes continues and is now likely to change at least some SaaS applications in the near term.  What do I mean? Consider – we now have a very competitive mobile application market and thanks to Google Chrome and now Apple Safari, it has crossed to the desktop on browsers.

Meet the New Paradigm

The event that brought this to mind was the announcements of the release of Safari 5.o.  Leaving out the typical “improved performance” claims – two things were apparent – it is now a platform and it is designed for use in a cross-platform, mobile environment. On the platform side, Safari has joined Chrome in providing an extension system that allows developers to in effect, build secure and stable, rich clients into the browser. We’ve seen this for a while in the form of the “app stores” that are proliferating for mobile devices like smart phones and the “iPad” category (however you define it).  On the mobile, cross-platform aspect, the browser is now tuned for mobile users.  It is very noticeable if you try the new Reader function of Safari. It is quite usable on a desktop or laptop, but it really shines in the limited real estate of mobile devices. Multiple page articles merge seamlessly into one. Space wasting banners, sidebars and menus disappear. The browser becomes a credible, focused article reader for all devices.

What does this mean for SaaS? Take this evolving “browser as a platform” trend together with the announcement of iOS 4 (the artist formally known as the iPhone OS) and the growth of the Google Android and Chrome OS and you have a quickly changing landscape of operating systems tuned for a rich mobile environment and a browser-centric application implementation system. These advancements mean the expansion and adoption of HTML 5.0 is moving even faster than many of us thought. They will make the often tricky environment of JavaScript and Ajax less of an issue and the user experience of properly-tuned SaaS applications much more fluid and “desktop like.”  It means that locally-installed, OS dependent applications are becoming ever less relevant and cross-platform, network-delivered services are becoming increasingly rich and useful.

Frankly, as interesting as this news is, it also points out that SaaS is a very fluid environment. Keeping ahead of it is increasingly difficult. Knowing how to manage a SaaS product and chart a plan to navigate development is critical. Knowing what you need to support scalable SaaS operations and what you should embed in the application is critical. Understanding your user environment and what is expected in your market is critical. The list goes on and there has to be a way to understand the landscape and to make the choices easier. And the point of this article is – there is – it is SaaS University.

As a company, Scio has stayed involved with SaaS University because it answers the need our clients and the SaaS community has to have current knowledge about our industry and important issues. Because Softletter produces regional events quarterly, you can plan to attend when and where it makes sense and take advantage of the evolving content as you need to. The tracks and workshops are well attended, but generally sized so the sessions can be interactive and remain relevant. If you’ve been to the larger, vendor-led conferences – SaaS University offers content that is focused on providing valuable insight to SaaS entrepenuers.

The next SaaS University event is in Washington DC, July 20-22, 2010. There is a full two-day agenda of sessions in two tracks covering a wide range of subjects and a third day that offers a choice of four in-depth workshops. On that point in particular, I want to highlight our own workshop, Charting Your Course to SaaS.

Charting Your Course to SaaS – SaaS University, Washington DC, May 22

This is the third time we’ve offered this comprehensive workshop on SaaS and it continues to evolve as we respond to the needs of our participants. Following our joint workshop with Jim Geisman of Software Pricing Partners, we’ve continued to tighten the content and for SaaS University, will offer a more interactive format for this workshop, especially during the afternoon. The aim is to keep it small enough to allow everyone a chance to move the discussion toward the issues that interest them most.  It remains however, the only workshop that covers the business, operational and development issues that are critical to success in SaaS.

Companies that can benefit by attending this workshop:

• A new venture or as an ISV with on-premise products considering developing a SaaS offering
• A service company with significant vertical expertise than could be delivered and monetized in a SaaS model.
• An existing SaaS provider who made choices opportunistically that now constrain growth and cash flow.
• A SaaS entrepreneur with limited funding that needs to achieve positive cash flow early with products that evolve with the market.

Company challenges this workshop can help overcome:

• Building out a suite of products but are unsure of the strategies, metrics, and operational models needed to grow.
• Developing a framework for sorting out technical and strategic choices required to move to the SaaS business model.
• Facing significant operational problems including efficiency while keeping churn under control in an existing SaaS product.
• Developing a product roadmap and unsure of what can be accomplished and timeframes

Topics to be Covered:

• How is a SaaS Product and Business Different?
• Reference Framework for Creating Your Roadmap
• Making Strategic Development Choices
• Operating A SaaS Business by the Metrics
• 10 Ways to Fail at SaaS
• Applying Lessons Learned to Your Issues

Who Should Attend?

This workshop and seminar is important for anyone considering a SaaS product, in the process of developing a product or offering a product that hasn’t reached its potential, including: Entrepreneurs, CXO’s, product managers and key executives in startups, vendors moving to SaaS or existing SaaS companies.

About Your “Professor”

Mike Dunham, Vice President, Service Engineering for Scio Consulting, has over 25 years background in the development and introduction of new technology working with startups, government and the largest enterprise software companies. He has worked with Scio for five years, regularly authors articles on SaaS and the software industry and hosts a series of podcasts on SaaS best practices. Mike leads Scio’s professional services helping companies develop and bring to market new SaaS offerings.

The workshop costs $695, but you can get an Early Bird Price of $495 when you combine it with your SaaS University registration - total package price of $1290. As a way to bring together a great amount of information in a short period of time, the combined package is a great opportunity. As we get closer to the event, I’ll expand on the agenda, but this is a great time to start planning and get your team together to attend SaaS University in Washington, DC!  I hope to see you there…

Last week our team, like lots of other members of the SaaS community, attended the OpSource/SIIA SaaS Summit 2010 – titled, “All About the Cloud.”  We had a busy and meeting-filled week, as I’m sure many did.

Because SIIA and OpSource gave this conference jointly – it was somewhat different than the OpSource led conferences we have attended in the past. Instead of being an industry conference tilted towards a single vendor’s customer base and prospects, it was much broader, bringing in a wide array of SaaS vendors and industry providers.  Since OpSource has been an industry leader for some time, I wouldn’t attribute the change entirely to the influence of SIIA. More likely it was the combination of the two constituencies along with a bit of a push from the uptick in the economy. Whatever it was, it was one of the biggest groups I’ve seen for SaaS/Cloud conferences in a few years.

It was perhaps most surprising to see the “maturity” of the industry in our guests. Most of the vendors were not from start-ups or ISVs moving to SaaS – instead they were established SaaS vendors – regardless of the lifecycle stage of their product offerings.  This shifted the conversations we had at our booth from “what does it take to build a SaaS product?” to “how do I scale my architecture?” or “how can I extend my offering to bring new services to my customers?”

This is a good thing to see, but I wish the presentations had been more geared to the audience and less to information about vendor’s products, but it could be said equally that no one knew for sure how the attendance would balance out long enough in advance to plan for it. I think that will even out next year, now that there is some history in the combined event.

Jim Geisman and I gave a workshop following the summit that was quite successful as we “filled the house” with as many guests as we could comfortably engage with. It was a wide-ranging group with representatives from some of the largest software vendors in the market to some new entrants from Latin America.  If there was a common theme among them it was the need to understand the options and structure of product development and pricing for SaaS. The folks from DreamSimplicy were good enough to feature a video of our workshop on their website.

There is certainly a void when it comes to clear information that isn’t filtered by a supplier’s agenda. We all do it – but there are also some who push their value above everything else. And, unfortunately, there are several instant pundits in the industry who really have less background than opinions.  From that point of view, I am proud to be associated with someone like Jim Geisman for this workshop because his background shows in the depth he can bring to the subject of pricing.  To say you can’t “afford to get your pricing wrong” may be a bit of an overstatement – companies change their pricing and survive – but it can certainly be as much of a market killer as developing a product that misses the mark.

In no particular order then – some notes and learnings from the Summit:

• Pick your strategy, play through, check your metrics, adjust and play again. I saw several companies who were trying multiple strategies for product, pricing, marketing, etc – simultaneously.  The result is – every attempt is a one-off with no way to measure one against the other logically or if the strategy might or might work if tried more than once.  The people trying to execute on all these ideas are playing a difficult game. Which idea really has legs? Which one do we really want to go with? And by the way – what do their customers think of this apparent lack of single purpose?  It’s difficult to navigate no matter where you stand.
• Look for your weak spots, eliminate them or optimize as well as possible. I heard many stories of early decisions that will eventually put a SaaS company in a no win situation.  Your infrastructure maintenance costs are eating into your cash flow at an ever increasing rate as you grow. Or – perhaps you want to change your pricing or offer a discount and it seems like the only way to do it is take payments manually and adjust the books, unless you want to redevelop your pricing and billing system…. It is easy to say you might have seen these things coming, but that’s Monday morning quarterback speak.  It sounds too simple, but there is help in the Theory of Constraints: First, optimize the situation as well as possible, looking for ways to manage the issue at best you can. Don’t stop there, leverage the stop gap only as long as needed to develop a true solution to the problem.  If you’re losing opportunities or burning cash in SaaS, you’re killing yourself, slowly but certainly.
• If you have an opportunity to speak to your peers and prospects, give them value. This sounds a little simplistic, but it’s worth a thought.  We need to take every opportunity we can to expose our products to new customers, especially in this tight economy, but you can’t spend the time you’ve been given with a blatant sales pitch.  The audience paid to sit in front of you.  What can you give them for their attention? Knowledge. What do you know? What have you seen? What experience do you have you can share? If that is the sum total of your talk, it will be remembered. If it is embedded in your new product announcement, it is more likely people will hear it.  To many of the presentations at conferences today are symptoms of our economy.  Our audience is looking for positive news and knowledge, just like we are.
• SaaS is a business model – not a technology. I still see far to many attempts to sell SaaS as a technology and the same is true when we switch to using “cloud” as a substitute term.  There are technical advances that are becoming available because of the growing SaaS/Cloud market, but they are just enhancements of what otherwise is a service-led, cash flow based, business model.  Companies in the field need to be successful at reaching an adequate size market with a positive cash flow and technology can only assist in achieving that goal.  Understanding the business of online services and planning to scale effectively is critical to success.

I hope to get more chances this year to get out and be in the field and at conferences to hear and share more ideas and experience.  It is a great opportunity to learn more about what is happening “inside” the business of SaaS.

Our workshop with Software Pricing Partners following the SaaS Summit: All About the Cloud is now finalized! Seating is limited so please check the details below and sign up NOW:

SaaS Offerings: How to Develop, Price, Operate, and Succeed

• One Day SaaS Executive Workshop Covering Technical and Business Topics
• May 13, 2010 at the Donatello Hotel (near Union Square) San Francisco

Executives responsible for succeeding in the SaaS market need to make a series of critical choices in developing, packaging and selling their offerings. This one-day workshop provides the insights and tools needed to make the right choices.

Many of the challenges SaaS companies face can be met by balancing and integrating technical considerations with the business aspects of SaaS. Companies that can do this can bring their products to market rapidly and become cash-flow positive quickly.

This workshop is the first to integrate pricing and business models with development and deployment. The workshop will be held on May 13th, the day after the OpSource and SIIA event SaaS Summit: All About the Cloud at the Westin St Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. The workshop venue is conveniently located one half-block from the St Francis, at the Donatello Hotel on Post Street.

Which companies can benefit by attending this workshop:

• A new venture or as an ISV with on-premise products considering developing a SaaS offering
• A service company with significant vertical expertise than could be delivered and monetized in a SaaS model.
• An existing SaaS provider who made choices opportunistically that now constrain growth and cash flow.
• A SaaS entrepreneur with limited funding that needs to achieve positive cash flow early with products that evolve with the market.

Company challenges this workshop can help overcome:

• Building out a suite of products but are unsure of the pricing and operational models needed to grow.
• Developing a framework for sorting out technical and strategic choices required to move to the SaaS business model.
• Facing significant operational problems including efficiency while keeping churn under control in an existing SaaS product.
• Ensuring the pricing model, development framework and operational plan will work in complex, highly competitive markets.

Topics to be covered:

• What Makes the SaaS Model Different and Difficult?
• Making Development Choices Strategically
• How to Choose an Effective Pricing Metric
• Creating a Lean Product Development Roadmap
• Using Packaging and Licensing to Increase Success
• Finding the Right Price Levels and Discounts
• Operating a SaaS Business
• Auditing Your Plans with a SaaS Reference Framework

Because of the value of this workshop, the importance of the SIIA/OpSource conference for SaaS providers and the convenience of the venue, this is an excellent opportunity to “put it all together.” The workshop content makes it well suited to a mixed group of business and technical members of your team because it joins the issues of both sides into a single view.

Per Person Pricing

Group Promo Codes

Three or more members of the same team:

• On or before May 3rd – 57KA5G
• After May 3rd – 7GNGBH

All attendees will receive copies of the workshop materials. The workshop fee also includes a “working lunch” and refreshments during the day.

Secure Registration with Acteva.

Hotel

The Donatello Hotel has a limited number of rooms available for workshop attendees at $139 during the period of May 9-14. This is an excellent opportunity to save with a very convenient location if you are also attending SaaS Summit/All About the Cloud Event.

• To receive this discounted rate, you must the contact the hotel directly at 415-441-7100 – and ask for In-House Sales and  the “SCIO Pricing” discount.

About the Speakers

Michael Dunham, VP of Service Engineering – Scio Consulting
Mike Dunham has more than 20 years of hands-on experience helping major corporations and government agencies succeed in an increasingly technical environment. As Scio’s principal consultant, Dunham provides clients insight into trends that affect business and technology planning so the processes Scio uses can bring clients’ ideas to life. As the VP of Service Engineering, Michael defines Scio’s service products and operational processes. A native of Sacramento, CA, he holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of California at Davis.

Jim Geisman, Principal and Founder – Software Pricing Partners
Jim is an acknowledged expert in software pricing and, since founding the firm in 1982, has helped several hundred companies develop effective pricing models and strategies. His consulting spans established and emerging software companies delivering B2B solution via desktop, enterprise-class and, more recently Software-as-a-Service / on demand software. Jim has been a board member or advisor to several early stage technology companies. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

A quick introduction on our podcast: