Great Service is Hard

One of the hardest things a business can do is provide great service. For software companies moving into providing services in the Cloud, this is a big paradigm shift. It's not good enough any more to just throw out a new version of your product a couple of times a year. Now you have to engage in continuous improvement and engagement with your customers. That's not easy, especially if you haven't ever provided Services like this before.

Seth Godin has another great post on some of the balance required to provide great services. Read it here.

On a separate point, I don't really like the term SaaS (Software as a Service) for the simple reason that it should be less about the software / technology and more about the services. I would like to see this acronym fade over time and get replaced simply with Services. That's what it's really all about for customers.

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT

The Return on Investment of SaaS

#saas #cloudcomputing

Want to know if software as a service (SaaS) really has a long term economic benefit? Well, Forrester Research issued a nice report in July 2009 covering this very topic. Click here to go to the report (subscription required).

Firms almost always consider SaaS as a cost-advantage over on-premise software in the short run due to its quick implementation times and pay-as-you-go pricing. But many firms question the long-term value of SaaS, wondering if the rent-versus-own model necessarily has a cost crossover point and if so, when? As SaaS continues to move into a broader range of applications and into larger, more strategic deployments, Forrester examined client decisions across a range of SaaS solution areas and found that firms obtain long-term value with SaaS solutions.

In the report Forrester considered three key questions:

1. Benefits. How will your company benefit from SaaS?
2. Costs. How will your company pay, both in hard costs and resources, for SaaS?
3. Risks. How do uncertainties change the total impact of SaaS on your business?

If you get the opportunity you should read this report, especially if you are considering investing in SaaS or even if you are skeptical about the whole concept.

Here's what Forrester says are the key benefits of SaaS:

• Reduced cost of adoption: SaaS helps by reducing the licensing, training, and support costs of adding additional users.
• Quicker adoption: SaaS helps by decreasing the time to ramp up new users, maximizing their productivity from using the application.
• Improved adoption: SaaS helps by enabling more users to use the application.
• On-premise cost avoidance: SaaS helps by eliminating maintenance costs; reducing full-time help desk and server support, and transferring staff to higher value, proactive roles.
• Improved flexibility: SaaS helps by reducing spend on excess capacity.

There is one extract from the report I particularly like:

"...Many of the firms that Forrester interviewed talked about the significant effect that user adoption has on the usefulness of analytics and reporting on data contained in solutions and therefore the ability to drive useful business decisions from solution information."

The power of Analytics to drive your product and company strategy cannot be underestimated. I wrote about this previously. For end user companies the ability to utilise analytics should be a major factor in the move to SaaS models because this type of analytics is much harder (not impossible) in the on-premise world. For software companies they need to seriously consider the design of the user interface of their Services because it has been proven over and over again that high user adoption rates correlate to a well designed user interface and if you want to really exploit analytics to understand your customers more, you need to achieve higher adoption rates.

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd

What is Cloud Computing?

#CloudComputing

I've written many posts about this over the last few months. Check out my Blog archive.

Here is a great presentation compendium about what Cloud Computing is all about. It was created by Ben Kepes and uses the Cloud itself to show the presentation and some relevant videos.

View it here

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd

The end of dumb software

Here's why traditional desktop or client/server software is going to lose in the battle against smart Cloud based services.

Seth Godin's post: The end of dumb software

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd

More on Cloud Security

#cloudcomputing

The other day I posted a quick note on Cloud security. As a follow-on to that post the following two articles are worth a read.

eWeek writer Wayne Nash wrote an interesting piece called "Is Cloud Computing Secure? Prove it?"

“Security is not a product that can be purchased,” Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of research operations for The 451 Group said. “It’s a way of life, an implementation of the proper architecture, and the proper selection of tools, programs and procedures. No product that I know of is either secure or insecure. The same is true of the cloud computing environment.”

Over on CloudAve, Krishnan Subramanian proposes that "Cloud Security Needs A Rethink But The Evolution Will Be Slow".

I was going to take out some key points from his last two paragraphs but it's all important so I've included it all here.

This transformation is not going to happen overnight. It is an evolution with too many players in play. There are customers who need a mind shift on how they perceive about the security, there are the cloud service providers who should offer the highest level of security in their infrastructure and, also, build trust with sensible contracts that will add confidence to the enterprise customers (a few red and green dots doesn't cut the slack) and, finally, regulators who should understand the advantages of fast evolving technologies and make the regulations in tune with the technological development. On top of all these things, the cloud technology is still in the early stages and needs to mature further.

Unless we see an evolution on all the above said fronts, it is difficult to visualize a world where public clouds are the only way of life. In fact, even with the evolution of all the above said players, the very fact that the world is diverse and the needs are diverse implies that there will always be some need for the so called private clouds and internal clouds. I do agree that the economics of public clouds will eventually move more and more customers into the public clouds but the evolution will be slow and not complete. There is no point in arguing if private clouds should exist or not. Rather, we should be focusing on developing better standards for interoperability, security, etc. and let the market forces decide on the evolutionary path of the clouds.

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd

Not all downloads are illegal

Great commentary on this topic from JP

Read article here

...Whatever you may have been told, the internet was not actually created to become a new distribution mechanism for failing entertainment industries. There is considerable pressure on the industry to change, to innovate. New business models are emerging, based on patronage, on subscription, on advertisements.

We have to allow the innovation to continue. Today, even the worst enemies of downloaders would accept that somewhere between 13% and 16% of all downloads are legal and paid for, whatever those terms now mean. There are 6 billion people out there, all getting connected to the commons that is the internet. The industry should learn from Grateful Dead and Prince and Nine Inch Nails, focus on growing the size of the pie to make sure that 13-16% represents a very big number. Because that is possible, even likely.

And:

Most people are law-abiding. Most people want to make sure that artists are rewarded. Sometimes laws are out of date and need changing. Sometimes business models are out of date and need changing.

In the internet we have something precious and valuable. In the millenial generation we have something precious and valuable. It is time to keep our heads and do the right thing, foster innovation, encourage cultural expression and adaptation. And avoid seeking to alienate an entire generation…. in order to try and implement a failed proposition.

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd

Cloud Security

#cloudcomputing #saas

The lower down the stack the Cloud provider stops, the more security you are responsible for implementing and managing yourself.



Is the Cloud more or less secure?

• Without context, this is a stupid question.
• The reality is that we are just as insecure as we've always been!

Kevin
ZeroTouch IT Ltd