22nd Feb DAY 3 of 7

This continues on my series of posts about how we are pulling together the SAAS workshop for the UK Architect Insigh Conference.

Today was a day of SAAS stuff - admittedly plenty of it was not directly related to the session - but all useful stuff. More on that in another post.

Richard, Will and I got a chance to think in more detail about how we will run the workshop. 150minutes is a big chunk of time to fill for a workshop and we need to make sure we don't just slip into using PPTs with lots of "one way" discussion to fill that time. We really hope to get a good discussion going in the room and started discussing a number of ideas that we hope would help:

In brief:

  • We need to get everyone "roughly on the same page". Hence we will start with a fairly "the world is good, the world is simple" run through of SAAS which will be primarily "one way". We will cover off what SAAS is, why it is important, what is happening in the industry, what is Microsoft up to around SAAS, what are some of the technical approaches to architecting for SAAS.
  • Then we switch to the "ah.... but.... what about..." bit where we begin to question some the above - to prod it, poke fun at it, question some of the sweeping statements we made - and hopefully start to generate some discussion
  • To help generate discussion we describe examples of the outputs we hope to generate from the workshop. Examples would include:
    • For a customer: "What are the top 5 things you should ask a SAAS ISV"
    • For an ISV: "What are the top 5 things you should ask your customers"
    • "What are the biggest blockers to successful SAAS"
    • "What are the hidden losses of switching to SAAS"
  • We also are looking at the best ways to get people talking. An approach I have used several time before is to present sweeping (and often incorrect) assertions. How do these sound?
    • "All applications should be delivered through SAAS"
    • "SAAS will never, ever become the norm"
    • "SAAS is totally irrelevant for large Enterprises"
    • "It is easy to take an existing application and deliver it efficiently via a SAAS model"
  • However we have other ideas in mind... just need to work them through some more...

We also got an insight on attendees. We have just over 20 - several are from ISVs, most are not. Should lead to some useful discussions.