SaaS For IT Management
This blog is all about using Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT Management.
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Aprigo Sysadmin Appreciation Day Giveaway
Posted on July 21st, 2009 No commentsThis is cross-posted from the Aprigo blog.
Just two days ago we learned of a holiday that is in dire need of more recognition: Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and we want to celebrate. From the Sysadmin Day web site:
Friday, July 31, 2009, is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication. (All day Friday, 24 hours, your local timezone). Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgment. It’s the least you could do.
We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we’re announcing the Aprigo Sysadmin Appreciation Day Giveaway. From now until the morning of July 31st, sysadmins and IT Managers are encouraged to sign up here. The first 100 who sign up will receive a $10 iTunes gift card via email on 7/31. A little bit about Aprigo (for those of you who are here for the first time): We’re a Waltham, MA based startup building a suite of SaaS IT Applications that help IT Pros in mid-size companies better manage massive file growth both on-site and in the cloud. We’ll be launching the free version of our product next month, and if you sign up for the giveaway we’ll let you know as soon as our free product is ready. Here’s how the giveaway works: If you’re currently a sysadmin or IT manager at a company, just fill in the form here. On July 31st, we’ll send you an email with a code that you can redeem at iTunes. There are only 3 rules:
- You have to be a sysadmin or IT Manager at a company (ideally at a company with 100 or more employees)- We’d love to give these away to everyone, but hey, we’re a startup, so please enter only if you’re really a sysadmin at a company.
- Only one entry per person
- You have to use a valid work email address. We can’t accept entries from gmail addresses, hotmail, etc., as it’s incredibly easy to create a bunch of bogus email addresses to get repeat entries
And a little bit of radical transparency here: This is most certainly a marketing campaign. Since we’re about to launch a free version of a product that can help sysadmins and IT pros balance shrinking budgets with massive file growth, we want to be able to let them know when it’s ready for them to check out. So if you sign up for this giveaway, we’ll send you an email when we launch (and of course, you can always unsubscribe at any time….we’re not spammers here). That’s it. We’ve only got 100 of these, so as soon as we have 100 entries, the giveaway will end. Sign up today!
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Why Vendors Are Anxious About SaaS
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 No commentsI just read an article from Jeff Kaplan at THINK IT Services entitled "Why “SaaS Sucks”… From The Vendor’s POV", and Jeff gave an excellent analysis of what makes vendors nervous about SaaS. From his article:
I just gave a keynote presentation regarding the state of the SaaS and cloud computing market at SoftLetter’s latest SaaS University in Chicago, where the challenges of developing and delivering successful SaaS solutions were once again brought home in the discussions among the software executives and SaaS professionals attending the event………
………It was during the session focused on the latest accounting rules governing revenue recognition in the SaaS model that frustrations among the established ISV executives began to boil over as they learned that:
* After making significant investments in (re)architecting their applications to be delivered as an ‘on-demand’ solutions,
* After building hosting facilities or selecting a hosting partner to deliver their services,
* After determining how to package, price and promote their solutions,
* After developing a service level agreement (SLA) or comparable legal agreement that clearly outlines the company’s contractual obligations,
* After convincing a committee of IT/business decision-makers to try their solution,
* After determining how much ‘customization’ they can do for specific customers without breaking the common SaaS application and underlying service delivery model,
* After accepting a fraction of the value of application in an initial subscription fee agreement,
* And, accepting all the responsibility for the availability, reliability, security and performance of their SaaS solution…
* The aspiring SaaS vendors then discovered they would only be able to recognize their subscription revenues on a month-to-month basis, decimating their traditional software revenue recognition models.This harsh reality is what has kept the CXOs of the legacy, on-premise ISVs up at night hoping that the SaaS and cloud computing movement would disappear or be derailed by a major outage that would send customers fleeing back to the comfort of their on-premises software and systems safely hidden behind the firewall. Of course, the opposite has been true and SaaS/cloud computing market growth is accelerating as a result.
I think he makes some great points here and I encourage you to check out his blog. The point is this: SaaS is here and it’s not going away….and that’s because the market is demanding it. Vendors are going to have to figure out things like customization and revenue recognition because customers are making them change their model.
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Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency- What IT Managers Are All About This Year
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 No commentsAt first it seems illogical. With IT Managers reporting flat or decreasing budgets, you wouldn’t think that initiating new projects would make a lot of sense. Or does it? Well, when those initiatives are all about reducing costs and improving efficiency it does.
In her article "Budget cuts give IT management projects new life" in Network World, Denise Dubie gives some numbers that support the idea:
IBM in December 2008 and January 2009 surveyed some 421 organizations to better understand the impact of the economic downturn on IT budgets. More than 60% of those surveyed said the economy is the number one business issue affecting IT investment priorities. Eighty-five percent of the IT decision-makers polled by IBM reported flat IT budgets, while 10% said they had experienced significant reductions.
The survey also found that 75% of respondents continued, expanded or initiated projects designed to improve efficiency and reduce costs of business activities. Another 76% said the same about projects that promised to accelerate workforce productivity. About 72% were focusing their efforts on IT investments that improved access to and leveraged customer information, while 63% were working toward increasing customer retention and loyalty. And 39% indicated they continued to continue, expand or initiate projects to reduce capital costs.
IBM’s poll also revealed that following security and compliance, IT systems management and service management ranked the highest among IT executives’ priorities with 65% and 64% indicating that such projects would be continued, expanded or newly initiated, respectively.
I get it. See, there are a bunch of things on my "to-do" list. Things I’d do on a rainy day when there was nothing else to do. Cleaning out my apartment, fixing some things that are broken, etc. But I keep putting them off. Though not the strongest of parallels, I know, I think the same goes for IT Management. I’d imagine it’s pretty safe to assume that there are things IT Managers keep meaning to get to, but they fall to the wayside due to more important projects.
But with stagnant or shrinking budgets, those housekeeping items like storage management and reexamining archiving processes start creeping up on the importance scale.
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Collective Intelligence And SaaS- Learning From The Community While Keeping Your Data Anonymous
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 No commentsI just read an excellent article on Cloud Ave entitled “The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS” which covers one of the truly unique (yet almost never talked about) benefits of SaaS: the ability to benchmark against aggregate community data.
While the article talks about community data in the context of companies that are going to sell anonymous aggregate community data, it does a good job at pointing out the benefits of benchmarking against live data:
Benchmarking has long been a lucrative business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as specialized shops like the Hackett group - none of which were affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. Now that SaaS providers have access to the most authentic data ever, they can aggregate and process it, producing the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.
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Now clearly there’s a whole world of difference between selling aggregate customer data to advertisers, benchmarking, or sharing transactional data within your supply chain, but let’s now focus on what’s common in all these cases: new business models emerge, not simply representing additional revenue sources for the SaaS vendors, but also enabling them to deliver enhanced services to their customers, services that were simply not possible in the previous, behind-the-firewall fragmented data model.
Yes, this raises a number of serious questions: How far can SaaS vendors go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data, or services based on data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate? And just what is “aggregate enough” and “anonym enough”? The industry needs to address these issues as a first step towards a paradigm-shift: while current concerns about SaaS mostly focus on the security, privacy, and consequently isolation of business data, eventually a culture of controlled sharing for business benefits should develop.
Those couple of paragraphs make some great points about using community data for benchmarking purposes:
- Before now, small and mid-sized businesses simply couldn’t afford to pay for expensive research firms to give them “benchmarking”
- Even if they could, the quality of source data is questionable
- SaaS providers now have access to real, live data. The article uses the word “authentic” and I think that’s right on
The last paragraph brings up the point of data ownership and privacy/confidentiality, which is incredibly important. It calls into question notions of trust and security, both issues that absolutely have to be addressed by any SaaS vendor that features benchmarking based on live data. And when a SaaS company can ensure that the data displayed in benchmarking contains nothing that can identify any customer or company….well…..just imagine how awesome that will be.
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This Weekend In SaaS- A Roundup of SaaS stories
Posted on May 18th, 2009 No commentsYou know, I knew that SaaS as a topic of blog posts was really starting to heat up, but wow. I’m gone for two days and my RSS reader and inbox are jammed with new articles. So I thought I’d do a quick roundup of the posts that were most relevant. Here goes.
The Widening Gap Between SaaS Demand And Supply- At Avigdor Luttinger’s Blog, the post talks about the growing demand for SaaS-based software and the slow growth in supply. From the post:
So at present we have a growing demand for SaaS, and a stagnant supply of some 40 successful SaaS solutions that has little chance to grow and match the demand for more variety, due to the technical and financial barriers mentioned above. Consequently, we could expect some M&A activity as successful SaaS vendors would acquire failing traditional vendors with good IP, and then start porting that IP to their platforms. But that would take a few years – until new solutions become available in quantity.
Which means that we have a growing vacuum – on one hand stagnant supply, and on the other growing demand.
Over on Technocratica, Dr. Jim Butler has a great SaaS design checklist. His post describes the security, SLA, Subscription Servicing, External Services, Resource Sharing, and Flexibility/Extensibility. I had the pleasure of working with the good doctor at a previous company and can say with 100% confidence that the guy knows his stuff. Awesome post.
At edd blog online, Jeffery Fehrman has a post entitled Cloud Computing - Who’s Watching Your Back? Mr. Fehrman seems to really dislike the idea of having data hosted by a third party, and at the end of the post, he invokes the "police can search your data without a warrant" argument. From the post:
Oh yeah, and the courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don’t need one to read it from the backup tapes at your cloud provider.
Another emerging trend this weekend was the "Google went down for a couple of hours, so that’s proof that SaaS and cloud computing cannot be trusted" theme.
Google Outages Raise Questions About Cloud Future- this article, by Nicholas Kolakowski asks whether cloud-based services are really ready for the enterprise. From the article:
The downtime experienced by Google on 14 May, the latest in a series of temporary shutdowns experienced by cloud-based service companies throughout 2009, evokes one of those questions of burning importance to the enterprise: Are cloud-based services truly ready to meet business needs that require virtually continuous uptime?
Google’s occasional shutdowns reliably bring a great deal of media attention, as with the February incident that took down Gmail in the United States and the United Kingdom for about 2.5 hours. A few months before that, in August 2008, Google Gmail and Google Apps underwent 15 hours of downtime.
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"If your revenue is based on being able to stay in contact with people, and you have an outage, it can build to significant levels of damage quickly, so your tolerances are tight," Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said in an interview.
"The outages that Google experiences [don't] happen in a well-run enterprise," Enderle added. "I’m not sure Google gets the enterprise; even with Microsoft, it took them bringing in employees from places like IBM before they understood it. Google has not yet gone through that process, even with a CEO coming out of Sun—it requires a fairly large infusion of people who get the enterprise."
The Industry Standard has two posts, Cloud computing: Pros and cons and 10 cloud computing companies to watch.
VM times has an article on IT Management In The Clouds With SaaS, which talks about the evolution of IT Service Management from local storage to the cloud. From that post:
This IT Management evolution was all made possible due the maturity of SAAS, (Software as a Service), going main stream. Over the last years we have experienced an escalation of applications migrating from the desktop to the Internet. Apparently, the physical conditions of both the Internet and network infrastructure have matured enough and made the economic option of SAAS the obvious solution.
First of all, it’s always about the numbers. Now, organizations can question whether it is sensible to purchase, configure, host, maintain, air condition, and backup. Suddenly, worrying about application software and hardware is optional. Alternatively, for a fraction of the cost, a company can “rent” applications remotely using a PC browser or a cellular browser and they can do this anywhere and any time, 24×7.
All right, that’s all for today.
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Is SaaS Consolidation Inevitable?
Posted on May 15th, 2009 No commentsSramana Mitra has an article on Forbes.com today predicting that SaaS consolidation is highly likely, and wonders whether that’s a good thing. From the post:
The global recession, which has forced companies to cut operating costs and streamline information technology operations, has been something of a boon for the software-as-a-service sector, with major companies turning to cloud computing. Thus, I expect to see acquisitions in the SaaS space this year. SaaS companies like NetSuite, SuccessFactors and Citrix, which all recently reported solid quarters, are likely targets. Let’s take a closer look.
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My concern remains that we may be moving towards yet another "too big to fail" industry structure. If HP, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle go around acquiring everybody and their mother, we’re in for stagnation in innovation, a precarious concentration of industry power and leverage at the very tip of the pyramid, and an overall undesirable structural evolution.
SaaS is an opportunity for smaller companies to accumulate their own muscle, roll up their own smaller kingdoms and create an alternative power structure. I would much rather see that happen, than an accumulation of everything that matters into one of the five largest players!
Interesting article, and I understand this is really an opinion piece. She would rather see smaller companies in the SaaS sector. I get it. But when it comes to consolidation, remember, it’s a choice. Small SaaS companies don’t have to agree to be acquired by the big dogs. While some companies will choose to sell to a bigger company, others out there will stick it out on their own. I agree with her outlook: with SaaS taking off, there will definitely be a wave of acquisitions. It just makes sense. But this, like any other trend in tech, will be a self-fulfilling cycle. People see that SaaS is hot right now and form a SaaS business. Bigger companies acknowledge that the trend is hot and start acquiring SaaS companies. Other people see that SaaS companies are being acquired and decide to start their own SaaS startup.
It reminds me of the time of internet company acquisitions when "we’ll build something, get users for free, then Google will buy us" was a viable business strategy. Seems like a crazy idea now, right? The reason people tried that strategy is that it was working for others. Bigger, more established companies were acquiring tiny startups just because they had users. This led to a new wave of companies that counted on the acquisition trend to keep on going. When it stopped, companies were faced with a difficult challenge: find a way to make money with all these users. Those that were able to find a way to do that survived. The rest vanished.
I think the same thing is going to happen in SaaS. There will be a wave of acquistion followed by a wave of new SaaS companies looking to be bought out simply because they’re SaaS based. The big guys will stop buying them out just on the basis of SaaS, and the small SaaS companies will have to figure out how to make it on their own.
But hey, I could be wrong. It happens.
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SaaS For IT Management
Posted on May 5th, 2009 No commentsWell, I just picked up this domain today, and hopefully I’ll use this site rather than letting it collect dust. I’m Nathan Burke, marketing manager for a startup company called Aprigo. We’re developing a suite of software as a service tools for IT managers. That’s pretty much all I can tell you for now since we’re still in shhhhhh stealth mode. But I’m planning on using this blog to keep track of what’s going on news-wise when it comes to SaaS tools for IT management.
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