Comments for ISV Survival

Comment on Nozbe: TOS for SaaS GTD solution fails to build trust by Name

Name — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:56:51 +0000

4 years later and the TOS never changed.

Comment on SaaS SLAs: 99.999% uptime doesn’t matter to users by Growing Up – Graduating From Ping | Rigor

Growing Up – Graduating From Ping | Rigor — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:48:33 +0000

[...] Can users connect to and log in to my system? [...]

Comment on SaaS SLAs: 99.999% uptime doesn’t matter to users by How Do We Define Availability? | Rigor

How Do We Define Availability? | Rigor — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:29:05 +0000

[...] you are a SaaS provider, can you answer the question “Can my users log in?“; or if you are an eCommerce company “Can my customers complete a purchase?” To [...]

Comment on ISVSurvival.com: The first article by Andrew Biss

Andrew Biss — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:46:09 +0000

This is a test comment to try out the WordPress plugin that allows you to subscribe to new comments by email.

Comment on Live status dashboards: 4 examples help B2B ISVs improve by Italy B2B

Italy B2B — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:07:43 +0000

B2B ISVs cannot afford the downtime Amazon experienced therefore must take precaution ahead of time. They must realize the cost of downtime and act accordingly. It is surprising to see how some B2B companies don’t realize that

Comment on SaaS downtime: Can ISVs survive paying real cash? by Suman Chaudhuri

Suman Chaudhuri — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:52:09 +0000

I agree with you that SLAs are really important for ISVs if they want their SaaS business model to succeed. Whereas it is obvious to me that customers should demand a strict SLA from their SaaS provider, what many people often do not demand (and ISVS definitely should demand this in their SLA) is the role and responsibilities of the consumer in consuming those services.

SaaS is all about providing customizations – the consumer needs to customize the UI, the workflows, the data model (to a certain extent) and the challenge for an ISV is how to provide these customizations without compromising the system and allowing their customer to create rogue behavior. So whereas the ISV’s architecture should carefully plan for these scenarios, often times not all such scenarios can be prevented a 100% and hence the SLA should also clearly explain to the customer what types of behavior from the customer might not be supported since it will cause anomalies within the system. Not outlining these will simply cause more problems for the ISV in the long run.

I discuss the importance of SLAs and why they are important to both parties in my post below:

http://sumanchaudhuri.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/saas-goveranance/

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

Suman Chaudhuri

Comment on SaaS downtime: ISVs will always take the blame by Andrew Biss

Andrew Biss — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:23:43 +0000

Hi Suman,

Thanks for your comment.

I agree with the points that you make in your post.

What makes the switch to SaaS so disruptive for ISVs is the impact on everything the ISV has done in the past.

One of the main reasons users like SaaS is that they do not have the hassle of building and maintaining their own IT setup. With SaaS the burden clearly shifts to the ISV, who now also has to write the software and keep it up and running.

Multi-tenancy is a method ISVs can use to reduce their costs. The users, however, do not care! As long as they can get the software service at a fair price, it works and can be used when they need it, then they are happy…

The technical features and benefits we are used to talking about when selling business application software go away. In the past we often found someone in the user’s own IT group who cared about the bits and bytes. With SaaS this (rightly) drops away.

Users do not care about technical details of how the software is implemented. That is a concern for the ISV, not for them. This is good. It is a positive sign of the IT business maturing.

SaaS will drive this maturity even faster, as the emphasis rightly moves away from “software” and towards “service”, where it belongs.

Comment on SaaS downtime: ISVs will always take the blame by Suman Chaudhuri

Suman Chaudhuri — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:04:06 +0000

Hi Andrew,

Good article. I agree with your thoughts. That is why ISVs that are planning to adopt SaaS due to customer pressures need to think of SaaS as a multi-dimentional approach that tackles:

- technology
- business
- marketing
- operational
- cultural

All these aspects are equally important to a successful SaaS strategy. You can read my thoughts on this at:

http://sumanchaudhuri.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/multi-facets-of-the-multi-tenant-architecture/

Comment on ISVSurvival.com: The first survival tip by Norbert Nigg

Norbert Nigg — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:17:56 +0000

Hello Andrew,
Congratulations to your website and your blog. I’ve only had a first glimpse and I’m really impressed by your site. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
Regards,
Norbert