18 articles by Andrew Biss
- ISVSurvival.com: Software as a Service blog for ISVs is retired
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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.
- Amazon’s cloud: Take a peek at what’s going on inside
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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?
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Web news is talking about the
2345 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.
- SaaS downtime: ISVs will always take the blame
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Data storage is very reliable, but still has unexpected and catastrophic failures. That’s why you backup your data. You must plan for when things go wrong. It’ll almost certainly not go wrong in the way you expected, but it will go wrong — sooner or later.
I’ve seen my fair share of data disasters over the years so I use a variety of media and archive cycles for local backups. For offsite backups I use Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a remote storage solution built on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for data storage and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for block-level file updates and other services.
- Web 2.0 apps: Driving expectations for SaaS ISVs
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in 2008 your customers will more and more expect you to offer your business applications via SaaS — whether you are ready to or not.
A long time ago (or so it seems) a similar tale unfolded as customers forced ISVs to shift applications from character mode to GUIs. The pressure for change did not come from the ISVs. I am sure you also had managers who thought GUIs were a backward step in productivity for business applications. Product managers often claimed “our users do not want a mouse.”
- Nozbe: TOS for SaaS GTD solution fails to build trust
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For day-to-day task planning and management I use a light version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method.
Earlier this year I saw a reference on the ZDNet Office Evolution blog to a new SaaS GTD tool called Nozbe from apivision.com. I was reminded of it when lifehack.org included Nozbe in their 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007.
Over the holidays I thought I would give Nozbe a try and see if it could replace my current Microsoft Outlook solution. My initial impression of the site was positive, until I clicked on the Terms of Service link at the bottom of the Nozbe home page.
- Trust: SaaS ISVs need trust architecture to survive
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If you are trapped underwater the Rule of Threes says you can survive 3 minutes without air. Your top priority is clear and simple: find air to breathe, and quickly.
What should your top priority be when rebuilding your ISV to survive and profit from the shift to SaaS? Reading press and analyst reports on SaaS you might think your top priority should be building a scaleable back-end platform. Or, maybe your priority should be to select the right rich-client development tool.
These are certainly important issues, but they are not your top priority. Your top priority in rebuilding your ISV is to create your SaaS Trust Architecture. It really is as clear and simple as that.
- Head in the sand: Lies ISVs want to believe about SaaS
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You know the shift to SaaS is life-threatening for your future as an ISV — you are doing something about it and reading ISV Survival! Still, you will need to convince colleagues who have not understood the risk your ISV is facing from Software as a Service.
A good place to start is Rick Chapman’s presentation: The SaaS Tsunami: An Analysis of why and how Software as a Service is changing the market.
- Connections: ISVs, Software as a Service and survival
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Trapped underwater and no air to breathe? Lost in the mountains and no shelter for protection? Stranded in the desert and no water to drink? Stuck in a wasteland and no food to eat?
What should you do if you are in one of these life-threatening situations?
First thing: understand your situation and set priorities. This might seem obvious; sadly, the news regularly reminds us otherwise. People often set the wrong priority and the price they pay is their life.
- ISVSurvival.com: The first survival tip
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The ISV Survival blog will contain survival tips posted on a regular basis. These are shorter items that link to other websites, blog posts, news articles etc. I hope the survival tips will help you rebuild your independent software vendor (ISV) to survive and profit from the shift to Software as a Service (SaaS).
- ISVSurvival.com: The first article
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The ISV Survival blog is about 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.
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