After a six and a half year career at Microsoft, first as a principal consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services and later as Architect and Technical Lead in the EMEA Microsoft Innovation Centre (MIC) in Denmark, it is time fo me to move on. Lately...

Sitecore's solutions architect has posted a series of excellent articles on the joint project we did. Have a look at Lars's view on his blog on what it takes for an ISV to move in to SaaS what an ISV expects from a SaaS Hosting Platform (SHP...

Scenario #4: Order fulfillment and order management in the store front and provisioning for new application tenants (subscribe) When & who? Once there’s something in the catalog to sell, the store front companies expose public facing order fulfillment...

Scenario #3: Managing the re-sellers hosting plans in the store front to include software items from the new application When & who? There may be multiple store fronts offering the same underlying software items for sale in different packages and...

Scenario #1: Defining the platform run-time instances and its capabilities Why? Describing and documenting a platform is always a good thing to do, but by storing it in a machine readable format opens up a new set of opportunities such as automation...

Spring is here and the sun is shining. As I live close to the beautiful Roskilde Fjord, I took a walk by the water front. I figured catching some rays wouldn’t be that harmful and maybe, just maybe, my eyes would revert to an oval shape again after a...

Multiple store fronts Since the ISV may chose to sell directly and/or through a hoster and/or an aggregator, we introduced the term “store front”. The store front is one or more places from which a potential application tenant can subscribe to the...

In-house vs. external hosting An ISV that wish to start offering an application throug a SaaS delivery model could choose to move down the stack and host the application in-house (sometimes referred to as “self-host”), requiring the ISV learn how efficiently...

During the last year I have worked with many ISVs from all over Europe & Middle East helping them to (re)architect their solutions for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. One thing stood out very clear. There’s a gap that needs to be...

This week I had the pleasure to give a keynote on SaaS at the Microsoft Europe Partner Senior Architect Forum. The session abstract was -"Software vendors are now making the transition from an on-premise installation delivery model to a software-as...

Something that really gets to me in the software business is the constant stream of meaningless buzwords, three-letter-acronyms (TLA's) and completely overloaded terms. I have been calling my self "solutions architect" or "architect advisor", because...

This week I had the pleasure to be at the Swiss Web Summit 06 and give a talk on Software as a Service for a mix of 200+ architects / developers. The session gave an introduction to what SaaS is, why threre is a renewed interest in building and using...

The Microsoft Solutions for Security and Compliance (MSSC) team has released updates to five previously released guides, including the Microsoft Identity and Access Management Series that I co-authored. The guides that have been brought up to...

I recently found out that two of my colleagues from the Microsoft’s Architecture Strategy Team in Redmond, Gianpaolo and Fred , are working on similar SaaS guidance that I planned for Europe, Middle East and Africa . I will pitch in with content to the...

Today there’s a lot of “buz” around Software as a Service – SaaS. But what is it? Is it really going to happen this time? Simply put, the current most common definition of SaaS is “Software deployed as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet”...

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When we talk architecture we talk in abstractions. We say we need capabilities such a persistent storage, document editing or a portal. We may say that the characteristics of the persistent store should be relational, but we don’t say SQL Server. For...

Today we have launched a new architecture community primarily for solution architects working for Independent Solution Vendors (ISVs). The goal of this community is to create a forum where architects from Independent Solution Vendors (ISV’s) can...

Welcome to my blog about solutions architecture and implementations on the Microsoft platform as well as a couple of other topics I care about. The topics include identity and access management, integration and interoperation with other platforms and...