1. Ivan • March 21, 2012

   Interesting post Sinclair. It relates a litlte to some stuff I’ve posted regarding the intersect (and best facets) of OpenSource/SaaS.Level three structures could IMHO build a better practice open source methodology whereby the core platform code was rock solid, locked down and stable, but all the apps that formed the eco system around that where nicely plug and play (a la open source development)Keen to talk more about the third way bending the best of open source with the best of SaaS and some new thinking business modelsdrop me an e sometime

2. BekExpaclekal • May 2, 2012

   Today is documentation indisposed, isn’t it?

3. Laila • May 5, 2012

   I also believe this will end up being a golndime for SaaS vendors.We started to work toward this at a client of ours in the ecommerce space. The theory was that aggregated sales data could be analyzed and then pushed back to suppliers to provide sales data and through the websites in real time to provide sales and pricing data in near real-time. We are only at the beginning of the project but it looks very promising. From the website side of ecommerce, being able to determine upsell, cross sell and relative pricing information from aggregated data could have more value than anything the platform itself provides in cost-savings.I believe that most clients of the SaaS vendor were comfortable with allowing the SaaS vendor to use this data as long as it remained non-identifying. The ones that complained did so for competitive reasons, not for privacy.

4. Rosario • June 12, 2012

   Andrew and Sinclair,Agreed, I think that a possible way to inocrporate this as part of the SaaS offering could be by allowing their tenants to opt in or out of the service making a concious decition of how their data is treated.Clearly there needs to be value other than just the data to the people contributing to make this service available and I think that finding that value is the tricky part since it could be very different by tenant or even by industry.

5. Nicholos • June 12, 2012

   Hi Sinclair,Here in Germany many small to medium-sized ISVs are often owner-run, they have a tnenedcy to be conservative. Many ISVs have been in business for decades and take a while to adapt.I remember talking with ISVs when applications were changing from text to GUIs in the early 1990s. Many ISVs felt strongly that GUIs were just toys and that real users would not need them. In their view, productivity was much higher with a keyboard, so why would anyone change? For SaaS I think there is an even bigger reluctance to change because of the broad scope of SaaS. They know how to change (later, of course, no hurry…) from one platform, programming language or database to another. SaaS is different; this time they must change all parts of the their business.The owner of a German ISV told me why he did not want to selling products on the Web. His reason? Because “we might have too many customers and not be able to cope.”I think the impact of SaaS on their business scares many ISVs. They would rather wait and see what happens rather than risk “rocking the boat” in their day-to-day business. I agree ISVs are taking a big risk that a new competitor will enter their niche and “eat their lunch”!A key advantage of PaaS is that the platform solves most of the infrastructure issues. A new competitor therefore has a head start and does not to rebuild everything the existing players already have.The move towards simpler products compounds this advantage. A new competitor can (initially) support the top 10% of the specific niche features and deliver then by SaaS. If they can do then this I think most customers look at the new solution.Customers often have a long history of using an a specific on-premise solution. Even so, given a simpler, easier and cheaper choice I think the chances of getting them to switch are good.Andrew.

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