ISV Survival blog (comments) – Put trust first to win at SaaS

Italy B2B commented on: “4 Examples help B2B ISVs improve SaaS live service status dashboards”

Italy B2B — 2008-05-28T01:07:12+00:00

B2B ISVs cannot afford the downtime Amazon experienced therefore must take precaution ahead of time. They must realize the cost of downtime and act accordingly. It is surprising to see how some B2B companies don’t realize that

Suman Chaudhuri commented on: “Can your ISV survive paying real cash for SaaS downtime?”

Suman Chaudhuri — 2008-03-04T05:52:38+00:00

I agree with you that SLAs are really important for ISVs if they want their SaaS business model to succeed. Whereas it is obvious to me that customers should demand a strict SLA from their SaaS provider, what many people often do not demand (and ISVS definitely should demand this in their SLA) is the role and responsibilities of the consumer in consuming those services.

SaaS is all about providing customizations - the consumer needs to customize the UI, the workflows, the data model (to a certain extent) and the challenge for an ISV is how to provide these customizations without compromising the system and allowing their customer to create rogue behavior. So whereas the ISV’s architecture should carefully plan for these scenarios, often times not all such scenarios can be prevented a 100% and hence the SLA should also clearly explain to the customer what types of behavior from the customer might not be supported since it will cause anomalies within the system. Not outlining these will simply cause more problems for the ISV in the long run.

I discuss the importance of SLAs and why they are important to both parties in my post below:

http://sumanchaudhuri.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/saas-goveranance/

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

Suman Chaudhuri

Andrew Biss commented on: “ISVs will always take the blame for SaaS platform downtime”

Andrew Biss — 2008-02-04T14:23:24+00:00

Hi Suman,

Thanks for your comment.

I agree with the points that you make in your post.

What makes the switch to SaaS so disruptive for ISVs is the impact on everything the ISV has done in the past.

One of the main reasons users like SaaS is that they do not have the hassle of building and maintaining their own IT setup. With SaaS the burden clearly shifts to the ISV, who now also has to write the software and keep it up and running.

Multi-tenancy is a method ISVs can use to reduce their costs. The users, however, do not care! As long as they can get the software service at a fair price, it works and can be used when they need it, then they are happy…

The technical features and benefits we are used to talking about when selling business application software go away. In the past we often found someone in the user’s own IT group who cared about the bits and bytes. With SaaS this (rightly) drops away.

Users do not care about technical details of how the software is implemented. That is a concern for the ISV, not for them. This is good. It is a positive sign of the IT business maturing.

SaaS will drive this maturity even faster, as the emphasis rightly moves away from “software” and towards “service”, where it belongs.

Suman Chaudhuri commented on: “ISVs will always take the blame for SaaS platform downtime”

Suman Chaudhuri — 2008-01-31T23:04:32+00:00

Hi Andrew,

Good article. I agree with your thoughts. That is why ISVs that are planning to adopt SaaS due to customer pressures need to think of SaaS as a multi-dimentional approach that tackles:

- technology
- business
- marketing
- operational
- cultural

All these aspects are equally important to a successful SaaS strategy. You can read my thoughts on this at:

http://sumanchaudhuri.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/multi-facets-of-the-multi-tenant-architecture/

Norbert Nigg commented on: “Hello world! The first survival tip on ISV Survival”

Norbert Nigg — 2007-10-17T11:17:27+00:00

Hello Andrew,
Congratulations to your website and your blog. I’ve only had a first glimpse and I’m really impressed by your site. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
Regards,
Norbert