ISVSurvival.com: Software as a Service blog for ISVs is retired
Welcome to ISV Survival, my blog for strategy consultancy ISV Focus on what Software as a Service (SaaS) means to independent software vendors (ISVs) who will be forced by the market to adopt a new business model that exposes them to the financial and reputational risks of running production applications. I’ve now retired this blog, but if you’ve any questions then please add your comment to the relevant article or get in touch with me direct.
What’s ISV Survival?
ISV Survival is a blog for independent software vendors (ISVs) on Software as a Service (SaaS). Andrew Biss wrote ISV Survival as he learned to blog with ExpressionEngine. Learn more.
Tech Presenting is a blog that helps technical presenters get audiences to take action.
I’m curating the best tips and tricks, examples and resources using the lessons I’ve learned giving technical presentations in the software industry. Please join me.
What’s ISV Focus?
ISV Focus is a strategy consultancy helping independent software vendors (ISVs) respond to new opportunities.
I apply fresh thinking to conjure practical ideas and solutions based on my experience in VP-level positions at software companies in the UK, US, France and Germany.
A new service from CloudStatus.com peeks inside Amazon’s cloud and offers added (and independent) insights on core cloud services.
It is important to know how reliable your cloud provider is. The SaaS community heavily criticised 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.
ISVs can use desktop gadgets and widgets to give subscribers real-time status updates on SaaS service availability and performance.
Many subscribers use widgets to extend their desktop. There are thousands of good-looking 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 building widgets easy. They run outside the browser; just park widgets where you can keep an eye on them.
Of the 10 SaaS ISVs surveyed, none of showed the live service status on their home page. Finding a link was a hit-and-miss affair.
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?
