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Welcome to the May edition of the Scio SaaS Newsletter, a practical and informative guide to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and On-Demand Business Best Practices, incorporating insights gathered from our experience building SaaS solutions for clients and along with industry highlights from leading practitioners and analysts in the industry.
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Haut Tec: SaaS Insights from Scio Consulting
The discussion of SaaS architecture and its place in the “Clouds” continued to be a subject of interest this month – following my appearance on Blog Talk Radio with Jon Hansen of the Procurement Insights blog. My interview with Jon included a more probing look at where SaaS fits in the Cloud Computing space and where it is going. My take on it is – Internet-based services, in whatever form they take, are here to stay. It doesn’t matter in the long run if people continue to see infrastructure services as different from the business and personal services provided by applications or not. Widely available broadband and commodity desktops, laptops, notepads, and mobile access are making SaaS applications a logical choice for a wide range of businesses.
Recently I’ve been working on enhancements for Scio’s Assessment Consulting for SaaS products. In the course of re-aligning our service to work more closely with our Agile-based development practices, I realized that although we really weren’t enforcing the evaluation of marketing and its integration in the product design process. It is a key consideration and you only have to research the leaders in the SaaS market a little to know that they have all investigated invested in ways to increase their reach by integrating multiple inbound channels into their service. Marketing isn’t the only area where a SaaS product can leverage the value of the Internet so you can expect more insight into the business operational areas that can be integrated to SaaS applications in the near future. See how your marketing integration measures up by reading more on our blog.
Best of SaaS: Industry Insights We Read
Joel knocked one out of the park again by putting much of his best writing together in an “e-book” for free download on his site. His SaaS Economics 101 is a great primer on the key issues for developing and operating a competitive SaaS business. This is a strong, business-led approach to SaaS and if you haven’t gone over and downloaded it now – you’re missing out!
Bob Brown brings his own take on the marketing integration question with quotes from Treb Ryan of OpSource and Tim Dilley of Netsuite to highlight the importance of building a platform that is open to channel integration. I don’t think that APIs are the only tools available to do this – and in some ways it is troublesome for early stage SaaS companies because of the changes that are likely in the data structure early on. That said – it is part of the solution and needs consideration in design and development of SaaS applications that want to leverage the power of the Internet.
Those of you that are having a great year and are already enjoying the fruits of your labors from a SaaS product may not care, but early this month Gartner released yet another rosy forecast for SaaS. I’ll grant you that this isn’t unusual – Gartner and Forester have been predicting SaaS growth for some time – but in a period of uncertainly we all like to hear positive predictions:
“The market for software as a service (SaaS) is forecast to reach $9.6 billion in 2009, a 21.9 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.6 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The market will show consistent growth through 2013 when worldwide SaaS revenue will total $16 billion for the enterprise application markets.”
So – are you ready to get your share of the growth? Not sure? Scio’s SaaS Readiness Assessment that can help you figure that out….
Best Regards,
Jeremy Beck
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Agility in On-Demand Product Development
Scio Consulting, LLC | San Jose, CA
Tel: 408-404-3897 x301
http://www.sciodev.com
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Events on the Horizon
Enterprise Cloud Summit,
May 18-19, 2009 in Las Vegas from INTEROP – Read More...
Softletter’s SaaS University
in Chicago, June 30 – July 2 2009 – Read More…
Some Blogs We’re Reading
Agile PM Blog
Cloud Ave
Chaotic Flow
Pricing Blog
Thinking Out Cloud
SaaSBlogs
Scio Application Services
SaaS Strategy Consulting
SaaS Product Design
SaaS Technical Assessments
SaaS Application Development
SaaS Application Support
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