9 articles from February 2008

Amazon’s cloud: Take a peek at what’s going on inside February 27th 2008

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.

Service status: Widgets keep users in touch with SaaS February 25th 2008

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.

Live service status survey: 10/10 SaaS ISVs are hiding

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?

Trust: Sweet maker destroys 300 years of trust February 22nd 2008

The Japanese were shocked that a 300-year-old sweet maker sold frozen sweets. SaaS ISVs must show they don’t take trust for granted.

Akafuku was founded in 1707 and is Japan’s most famous sweet company. Their sweets are the traditional gift for visitors to the Ise Shrine, Japan’s holiest religious site. In autumn 2007 a story broke that shook Japan. Trust in the Akafuku brand built up over 300 years was not enough to protect them.

Akafuku makes bean-jam sweets (rice cakes wrapped in red-bean jam), claimed to be freshly made every day with any sweets not sold that day thrown out. This was not true. Akafuku had been lying for more than 30 years.

SaaS SLAs: 99.999% uptime doesn’t matter to users February 20th 2008

B2B ISVs will pay with critical trust if they fail to talk to subscribers, even for faults not under their direct control.

Amazon S3 was down last week. A lot of blogs covered this, discussing the need for 99.999% uptime. A lot of people invest their time improving hosting uptime. Even so, 5 minutes and 35 seconds downtime per year is very difficult to achieve.

The thing is, 99.999% hosting uptime does not matter at all to your SaaS subscribers. What matters is that they can login. If they cannot, then no matter what the reason, your SaaS system is down.

We must stop focusing on hosting uptime. Instead we need to start thinking about the total user experience. End to end uptime is the only thing that matters to SaaS subscribers.

Live status dashboards: 4 examples help B2B ISVs improve February 17th 2008

B2B ISVs must have a live service status dashboard to keep their SaaS subscribers informed about service status and planned downtime.

My last post was about learning from Friday’s Amazon S3 downtime. The main point is that you must keep your subscribers informed. A live service status dashboard shows the key data your subscribers need.

Amazon did not have this for S3. Subscribers were left to guess if there was a problem, and when it would be fixed. They have now said they will release a live service status dashboard soon.

Lets have a quick look at some live service dashboards. Look what others are doing to get ideas to improve your own dashboard.

Amazon S3 crash: Keep SaaS subscribers informed February 16th 2008

The Amazon S3 crash confirmed talking to users is vital. ISVs must plan for downtime and keep users informed when it goes pear-shaped.

Early on Friday the Amazon S3 cloud storage service crashed in a big way. Lots of websites, some very well known, could not access their data.

Amazon quickly found and fixed the problem. It was not a hardware or network problem as many assumed. Amazon said that the issue was a web service at one of their 3 data centres. The service checks all user requests and SSL links. It was slowed by a sudden peak in SSL requests. Non-SSL requests were blocked. The whole of Amazon S3 stopped.

Bessemer CEO summit: 10 laws of SaaS, but no SLAs? February 15th 2008

CEOs from leading SaaS ISVs improved their golf at a recent VC event. Their time would have been better spent improving their SLAs.

In his recent blog post, Philippe Botteri from Bessemer Venture Partners lists the “10 Laws of SaaS” from their recent invite-only event for CxOs. I agree with 9 of the 10 laws, but disagree with law 6:

6. One Datacentre. Invest early in backup and diisaster recovery, but stick to one data centre, at least until well after IPO.

How many data centres you have does not matter. What matters is your SLA, and there is no mention ofervice level agreements in the “10 Laws of SaaS”.

SaaS downtime: Can ISVs survive paying real cash? February 7th 2008

In the future we’ll look back and wonder at how SaaS ISVs ever managed to get away with having weak (or no) SLAs.

Web news is talking about the 2 3 4 5 fibre optic cable breaks in the Middle East. While the net was designed to be up all the time, there will always be faults.

How do you react when a fault impacts your subscribers? Do you tell them it is not your fault? Do you tell them they must just put up with it? Today many ISVs are doing just that.

With no or very weak SaaS SLAs, at best customers might get a refund for that month’s service fee. Because no real cash is at stake many ISVs have not invested.

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