SaaS

ISVs caught in the chasm: between heaven and earth -- SaaS and on-premises

Mon, 2012-01-16 11:21 — Greg O'Connor

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the darling of today’s real world, enterprise-impacting cloud computing use cases. Industry analysts and research firms are tripping over each other extolling mega-CAGR for SaaS, with the 451 Group going so far as attributing 75% of PaaS spending for use cases that are attached to SaaS deployments.

In its 2011 research report “Cloud Computing Takes Off,” Morgan Stanley is bullish on the future of PaaS stating, “The low capex requirements, robust cloud enablement and rapidly improving developer toolsets are significantly lowering the barriers to entry for new application development [emphasis mine] – both in terms of cost and time to market.

Great. So the future is bright for new application development heading to the cloud. What about ISVs who have existing applications? Driven to the margin-eroding SaaS model, ISVs frequently find that their largest customers are not willing to surrender the on-premises option.

The SaaS/on-premises tension sets up a complex series of challenges for the ISV including questions of business models, maintenance of multiple product versions, and updating of software to name a few issues. With apologies to last century’s poet Robert Frost, smart money may rest on the ultimate victory of SaaS, but there are miles to go before on-premises sleeps.

There is – and will continue to be -- a lot of business in existing applications and the on-premises model.

In future blogs I’ll explore ways ISVs can use AppZero to navigate this changing market. But, for now, I’m offering a white paper about the universal need to successfully sell your software. Titled AppZero Use Case for Software Vendors: Sales Cycle , this paper introduces the ways AppZero can strip the labor required to configure and implement your PoCs and demos – whether on site or in the cloud. Resulting business gains include:

Slash configuration and installation time to zero, decreasing the cost of sales, improving PoC quality, maximizing SE resources, and increasing win rate with associated revenue
Easily deliver complex systems fully and accurately pre-configured
Improve customer experience and perception of quality and competence
Focus high-skilled technical service professionals on high-value services rather than on low-margin, repetitive, labor-intensive work that can be automated
Reduce time to value for customers and speed time to revenue

The intended audience for this paper is anyone responsible for generating software sales revenue, supporting a software sales cycle, or implementing software for a customer. Independent software vendor (ISV) sales, professional services, and sales engineers will be particularly interested in how AppZero software can directly impact the sales cycle, while IT professionals will find advantages in the time saved throughout the product lifecycle.

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me at @gregoryjoconnor

Moving enterprise apps to the cloud? Check out this 2-minute video.

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In Practice: From your machine, to EC2, and back in 1 minute

Thu, 2009-03-26 08:03 — Carl Hu

Agile development and deployment workflow

This series describes a development and deployment process optimized for the needs of software-as-a-service in terms of cost structure, agility, staging and test requirements. The resulting system will tolerate the failure of a local hard drive and crashes of a machine - physical or virtual. Offering good performance / low cost via Amazon's EBS and EC2 services, the system will provide the ability to rollback changes both on the deployed and development system (independently or together) using Subversion.

You can enjoy instantaneous feedback when you are developing code without affecting existing users of your website by using a two machine development and deployment lifecycle. Deployment can be a 5 second experience (as opposed to 5 minutes) using AppZero technology.

I have tried a number of lifecycle workflows for the development and deployment of Drupal websites. In this series, I will describe a two machine approach involving a local development and test machine and a deployment machine. Deployment of files will use the Subversion Version Control System; the local machine is Windows to make tools like Photoshop convenient to use; the deployment machine is a Windows machine from EC2; and we will use Apache, Drupal, and MySql.

The one-machine approach, topologically simplest, involves developing directly on the deployed machine on the Internet. I've found this approach, while seemingly simple, to have two serious deficiencies:

developing a new feature for a site can often involve accidentally breaking existing functionality or look-and-feel. This topology makes it difficult to evolve a site without showing the public every intermediate change.

tools like Photoshop are not convenient to use on a remote basis and ftp'ing files back and forth is a cumbersome process. Even text editing on a remote machine incurs painful latencies.

For these two reasons, I advocate at least a two machine approach. This allows you to develop on your local machine, disconnected from the Internet if necessary, with all the tools you like, and deploying when you desire. Of course, in a two machine topology approach, deployment agility becomes paramount. The difference between 5 seconds to deploy and 5 minutes makes the difference between wonderful and painful.