paasTalk: Platform as a Service news for European ISVs

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.

The first posts on paasTalk

To give you an idea of the sort of posts which will be appearing on paasTalk I have included links below to the first three paasTalk posts. Please come over to paasTalk and see what is going on. I look forward to seeing you there!

Could the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform squeeze the profits from SaaS applications?

You need to build a (reliable) SaaS application from a portfolio of (unreliable) platform services–the price of which you cannot control. To survive you must ensure your application workload is never locked into a single utility supplier. A workload that you can segment and easily relocate from one utility to another gives you the credible threat you need to establish negotiating power with your CPU service provider(s).

Why hiding behind abstraction is not enough for SaaS applications

For decades on-premise ISVs have successfully hid behind abstraction. It was, and continues to be, an excellent way to manage technology uncertainty and implementation differences. SaaS ISVs have nowhere to hide. Building reliable SaaS applications from inherently non-reliable services demands a fault-tolerant approach. Abstraction just doesn’t cut it any more.

If you think SaaS solves all your platform troubles then think again!

ISVs have invested massive resources over the years to abstract their applications away from the underlying platform. This was required as every on-premise customer had a (slightly) different infrastructure. SaaS solves this problem once and for all with respect to the customer’s infrastructure. With SaaS the application is only installed once, and the ISV gets to choose the platform. Even so, there are still hard choices to be made–the exact same choices ISVs were facing 25 years ago.