The ISV Survival blog: Put trust first to win at SaaS
ISV Survival helps B2B ISVs focus on trust—the most critical part of SaaS. If you are an ISV selling B2B software in a vertical niche, then ISV Survival is for you! Learn how to put trust first to win at SaaS with news, reviews and original content from ISV Survival.
CloudStatus.com is a new service that peeks inside Amazon’s cloud. 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.
…continue reading article “Taking a peek at what’s going on inside Amazon’s cloud”
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.
…continue reading article “paasTalk: Platform as a Service news for European ISVs”
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.
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?
The Japanese public were shocked that a 300-year-old sweet maker sold frozen sweets. SaaS ISVs can appoint a “Chief Trust Officer” to show they do not 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). They said they made their sweets fresh each day. Any sweets not sold that day were thrown out. This was not true. Akafuku had been lying for more than 30 years.
It was revealed that sweets not sold that day were not thrown out. They were frozen to be thawed and resold later. The labels of the frozen sweets were forged with future expiry dates.
Japan was appalled and the impact was immense. It was if Starbucks was exposed for selling instant coffee!
SaaS hosting uptime does not matter if SaaS subscribers cannot login. 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.
…continue reading article “99.999% Hosting uptime SLAs do not matter to SaaS subscribers”
B2B ISVs must have a live service status dashboard to keep their SaaS subscribers informed. Dashboards from DoubleClick, Intuit QuickBase, Salesforce.com and OpenDNS show some good ideas to adopt (and some bad ones to avoid).
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.
Friday’s Amazon S3 crash showed how vital it is to talk to users. ISVs must plan for downtime and actively keep users informed in times of trouble.
Early on Friday the Amazon S3 cloud storage service crashed in a big way. Lots of web sites, 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 centers. 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.
During and after the problem customers talked about the lack of feedback from Amazon. For the future Amazon will release a service health dashboard. This is a good step and is required.
How would you have responded in the same situation?
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 Datacenter. Invest early in backup and disaster recovery, but stick to one data center, at least until well after IPO.
How many data centers you have does not matter. What matters is your SLA, and there is no mention of service level agreements in the “10 Laws of SaaS”.
…continue reading survival tip “Bessemer CEO summit presents 10 laws of SaaS, ignores SLAs?”
We will look back and laugh at the time SaaS ISVs got away with no or very weak SLAs. SaaS will improve if ISVs pay real cash to customers for downtime.
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. What, though, if SaaS ISVs had to pay a real (and fair) amount of cash to customers for downtime? We expect planes and trains to pay if they mess up our plans. Why should SaaS be a special case?
…continue reading article “Can your ISV survive paying real cash for SaaS downtime?”
