SaaS

Google keeps tripping over Microsoft's grave

Some have described Google as an advertising company. This might have been accurate at one time, but given the sheer breadth of Google's ambition and product mix, it's far too limiting a description.

Google is a search company. It's a cloud company. It's a subscription services company. And, as is becoming increasingly obvious, Google is the world's largest open-source company.

Tim O'Reilly has been telling us this for years, but it wasn't until I read this brilliant Keir Thomas article that I appreciated the clarity of O'Reilly's vision.

As Thomas writes, … Read more

Google, Mozilla, and enterprise software disruption

Who would you work for if not for the company that currently employs you?

For many right now this is a somewhat pointless question: with so many people unemployed, the answer is, "I'd work for anyone that could cut me a paycheck every other week."

Bad as things may be at present, however, they will get better. As the economy heats up, and it eventually will, which software companies are poised to make the biggest impact on the industry for the coming five, 10, and 50 years?

I asked this question over Twitter on Monday, and received … Read more

The enterprise sales model is dead

It's perhaps no secret that the enterprise sales model is broken. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and open source have picked the lock on the enterprise, enabling CIOs to try before they buy, disrupting the old model of paying far too much for demoware and roadmap dreams.

It's a welcome shift of risk from the buyer to the vendor, as Geva Perry highlights:

We're now witnessing an increasing trend of bottom-up sales. A casual decision made by developers on a day-to-day basis, not a grand strategy laid out by the CIO. Try-and-buy is the norm, and so are subscription payments … Read more

Is there a benefit to liberalizing software licensing terms?

The blog Confused of Calcutta recently raised an interesting topic: Should software vendors take more responsibility for their software? Should we sign up to "tenancy agreements" by which we agree to stand by our code and ensure it works well with others?

It's an intriguing proposition, one which I'm sure enterprise IT buyers (or, rather, their legal departments) would welcome.

I doubt it will ever happen, however, and I'm not sure there's much incentive for a vendor to introduce such licensing commitments. No one buys software because it comes with a kinder, gentler contract. … Read more

Cloud computing: Value is assumed, cost matters

Over the last 10 years, IT has moved further and further outside the firewall. Starting with ASP (application service providers) and moving to multitenant SaaS (software as a service) on-demand applications, and now into cloud-computing environments, the status of on-premise IT has shifted from being a necessity to an option.

An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it's cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.

I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.

The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?

Ryan told me that "SaaS is the business version of cloud computing," meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples. … Read more

Did Sam's Club expose a great SaaS opportunity?

The news this week from retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is that its Sam's Club wholesale stores will be selling a health care electronic records management software bundle to medical and dental clinics.

The New York Times covered the details, but the short-short version is that doctors and dentists can purchase the software for an up-front license fee (on a per-physician basis), and will receive the software and a Dell tablet PC for each license.

Boosting the value of the offering is the availability of $19 billion in federal stimulus funds to support conversion of clinics to electronic records management. … Read more

The Web makes software a process, not a product

One of the most disruptive aspects of the Internet is that it makes all content cheap and disposable. Though various industries--from music to software--have resisted the Web's commodity urge, none have managed to escape it. Whether music, journalism, or software, the Internet makes distribution and replication cheap which, in turn, makes content somewhat transitory and, hence, less valuable in itself.

As iTunes, Google, and Red Hat indicate, the best business models for the Internet age are those that focus on services around content, rather than on monetizing content directly.

Speaking of software, in particular, we've reached the end … Read more

Even an SaaS conclave is discounting rates

So much for finding safe refuge from the storm. Even a conference targeted at the quasi-esoteric world of software as a service is finding it tough to fill up the seats these days.

The SaaS Summit 2009 conference, slated to get underway next week in San Francisco, has chopped the price of its "full conference pass" to $495 from $1,195.

In a note, conference sponsor OpSource said it had reduced the cost because it "believes so strongly in the value and industry energy that will be created by bringing together the SaaS, Web, and cloud communities … Read more

How to evaluate SaaS for your business

In the early days of software as a service applications like those of Salesforce.com, you were required to stick with the company's approach to processes. Users realized what the the issues were early on, but many SaaS providers still don't offer much in the way of customization.

But the lack of customization is starting to be addressed with the advent of platforms like Force.com. Through the adoption of platform-as-a-service options, businesses can customize SaaS applications much the same way one can develop software or modify an open-source product.

In outlining "7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS,&… Read more

Subscriptions driving MMO game revenue

Massively multiplayer online, or MMO, games are generating serious dollars these days and doing so in a way that suggests that revenue opportunities are still nascent.

Counter to what we see with console games, the bulk of the revenue appears to be coming from subscriptions. Generally speaking, subscription revenue for MMOs and MMPORGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) is better than license revenue for console games because it has a longer life span. Call it support, maintenance, or whatever you like, but a recurring revenue stream is what drives every software-as-a-service and open-source company.

GigaOm has reported on the Top 10 money-making MMOs of 2008 and the ways in which they all make money.

A few interesting points it makes:

The top MMOs all require a piece of software to be installed to the local machine Subscriptions and prepaid cards are clearly working well Microtransactions are picking up