Success in our increasingly visual business world means knowing how to get your message across on video.
Although I have 30 years presenting experience, selling to camera is new to me. I therefore launched the SellToCamera blog in September 2009 to share what I discover, and to help business professionals learn to present on video.
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A new service that peeks inside Amazon’s cloud has been announced by CloudStatus.com. It is great to see others entering the market and offering added insight in core cloud services.
It is important to know how reliable your cloud provider is. The SaaS community heavily criticized Amazon when they had outages in their S3 storage cloud. As a direct result Amazon rolled out a comprehensive Service Health Dashboard. This gives a good insight into what is going on with the Amazon cloud services.
Any dashboard provided by a cloud provider opens the door to tainting the truth on performance and availably. It could therefore be useful to have an independent source of metrics to refer to.
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PaaS is a big change for ISVs who traditionally mistrust “all in one” solutions. Even so, PaaS is a strategic change in how successful SaaS ISVs will build and deploy solutions for their niche. The paasTalk blog delivers independent news and views on this important development, with an emphasis on the Europe-specific challenges facing ISVs moving to PaaS.
Things have been quiet here on ISV Survival as I have been launching paasTalk, my second blog. The slogan for paasTalk is “Platform as a Service news for European ISVs”.
The new paasTalk blog is for European ISVs and helps them to evaluate, select and implement Platform as a Service to build and deploy the next wave of SaaS solutions for their vertical niche.
paasTalk delivers the latest independent news and views on PaaS, with an emphasis on the cultural, legal, financial and infrastructure challenges of PaaS for European ISVs.
paasTalk will be more technical than ISV Survival, but will not be getting into bits and bytes. The target audience is ISV development managers and those responsible for making the core platform and technology decisions for the move to SaaS.
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Desktop gadgets and web widgets are popping up all over the place. These mini apps are ideal for ISVs to give subscribers real-time status updates for their SaaS services. They can also reveal key data and events.
Many subscribers extend their desktop using gadget or widgets. These mini apps from NetVibes, Google Desktop, Google Widgets, Microsoft Gadgets and Yahoo Widgets look good and can do a lot. There are thousands of free widgets to download, with many more to come.
Cross-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux with tools such as Yahoo’s Widget Engine, Adobe’s Flash-based AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight make it easy to build these widgets. They run outside of the classic web browser and can be placed as needed. Just park a widget where you can keep an eye on it. if you want, you can turn on sounds and hear status changes as they happen.
You can easily tap into this widget wave. Give your SaaS subscribers a free dynamic widget to show the live status of your SaaS service. Your subscribers get a good looking graphic they can put where they want. It is easy for your subscribers to keep an eye on your service status. They do not have to visit your special dashboard site.
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My survey of 10 SaaS ISVs reveals that none show live service status on their home page. Add your live status to build trust and stand out from your SaaS competitors.
Your SaaS subscribers expect you to make your live service status easy to find. If you are not open and honest on this point, then you take the risk your subscribers will think you have something to hide.
Trust is critical to winning at SaaS. Adding your live status to your Web site home page is a quick and easy way to build trust. Why then do so few SaaS ISVs show their live service status? Do they have something to hide?
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Hi, I'm Andrew Biss. In the software industry since 1980, I started to blog professionally in 2007 with ISV Survival, paasTalk and then SellToCamera.
In March 2010 I founded StoryComplete to help software companies sidelined by innovation build the skills they need to get off the sidelines, re-enter the game and win.
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