August Edition 

Hot August Arrives

Sacramento – where I live – has had an unusually cool summer this year. It looks like August will finally provide some of our “normal” plus 100 days, but I’m not complaining about a cool summer – no, but hot house tomatoes in July? That’s ridiculous.

But you’re here for another “sizzling” edition of our newsletter and we have a lot going on, so this one delivers. In this issue we have links to our latest webinar with Boomi and our new podcast – Haut Tech Conversations. We have widened our reach to take advantage of a range of new media outlets so our community can feed back and join in. It is a lot to handle frankly – so I hope the effort helps you in many ways now and in the future.

Haut Tec: SaaS Insights from Scio Consulting 

Haut Tech Conversations: Service Beyond the Hype Cycle – by Michael Dunham

I’m a big believer in social media – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve found some great points of view and industry insight with the tools that are available now. But I guess I’m a bit “old fashioned” – when I read a good article or see an insightful comment on Twitter – I want to talk to the person. So recently I’ve been doing just that: I’ve been calling my social media contacts and had some great conversations. In fact, we’ve all said, “This is great – too bad we didn’t record this conversation so others could hear it.”

It didn’t take long before a light went on. Why don’t we do just that? Why don’t we set up a podcast and talk about what we see and hear in the industry with some of the leaders? I listen to as many webinars as anyone, but honestly too many are canned sales presentations. They can be as hard to give effectively as they are to listen to. What we wanted was just a free-flowing conversation with no slides and as light an “agenda” as possible.

So – we opened an account on BlogTalkRadio and Haut Tech Conversations was born. Our first guest is Steve Plunkett, CTO of Servitizer. Joining us will be our panel of industry insiders including Luis Aburto of Scio, Mikael Blaisdell of the HotLine Magazine and Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures.

Steve and I had a conversation before the show on Skype. He’s a great conversationalist and I’m sure it will be an interesting show. Please join us live if you can on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 10am CDT on our show home page. If you can’t join us live, you can download the podcast following the show.

SaaS & Cloud: Service Beyond the Hype Cycle – By Michael Dunham

“Ok Mike,” your saying to yourself now, “We’re getting redundant.”   Yes, that title is the same as the one above - almost. But you see, in the process of starting the podcast, we decided we needed a community that would provide the questions and issues the podcast would expand on.   What I or any one person believes might be interesting isn’t enough and if we’re depending on me to find all the topics and guests, I’m going to be wrong about half the time. Instead we started a community on LinkedIn and we’re bringing ideas from there and around our social media sphere to fill in the gaps.   So if you are on LinkedIn – join us and help us build our community!

This article sets the stage for our new podcast as well as a number of articles on related subjects from many of our community members. If you want to participate, we’d be glad to have you. But knowing how tight budgets and time are today – even if you don’t think you have the time to join in – we’re happy to have you on the sidelines anyway. Truth is – you will see something that will spark your interest sooner or later and you will have to make a comment and add to the conversation.

The Role of VARs in SaaS – By Abe Sultan

The subject Abe tackled in this post is a point long debated in the industry – what is the role of Value-Added Resellers in an environment where the end-user is directly attached to the operations of the service provider?  It is a question that explores the edges of the question “What does service mean?” in this context. And not coincidentally, it is where I became aware of Steve Plunkett and Servitizer in a comment he added. Social media strikes again. Maybe that should be our subject next month for Haut Tech Conversations?

SaaS and the Servitization of the Software Industry – By Steve Plunkett

This is the two-part article that Steve wrote that cemented the idea that “service” was perhaps the most misunderstood part of the whole “as a Service” industry. Yes, this is a paradigm shift for each and every vendor who enters the XaaS (meaning “whatever” as a service) business model. But it is even more so for the industry and we have only started to see the shake out. This is where I think the conversations gets interesting and I hope you will also!