What ISVs should know about hosting/building on cloud/PaaS

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I had the pleasure of talking at an IBM hosted SIIA event yesterday and thought it worth sharing some thoughts. It was hosted by Phil Waineright (https://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/) a well known commentator on SaaS and comprised of a series of 5 minute "lightening talks" (as popularised by Cloudcamp) from various invited guests. Other than myself, these included IBM, BT, CohesiveFT, CODA (hosted on Force.com), Accounts IQ (OpSource) and Cast Iron. There were around 60 or so people in attendance with a healthy cross-section of SIs, Hosters and ISVs plus the obligatory IBM and of course Google too. 

 

The presentations and format I find really appealing - if you can't get your words out fast enough then the buzzer goes and it's on the the next presenter! Some of the presenters fell foul of the time limit but using the importal words "I've started so I'll finish" I managed to get my final point out there before Phil reclaimed the stage:)! I spent some time preparing for this over the past day or so and although time is limited it really forces you to focus on what you want to share. What is the one thing you want to get across? We often get an hour or more to talk to an audience and to my mind I think this can make you lazy about getting your point across.

 

Cast Iron are an interesting company offering "Integration as a Service" a key barrier for SaaS adoption that I would recommend taking a look at. Alexis Richardson from CohesiveFT (who hosts Cloudcamp) was great, I'm a big fan of AMQP plus their work on crossing clouds is great - plus we got to chat about Azure too which was great!

 

I took most notes from the guy from AccountsIQ - I thought he gave a great insight into being a SaaS provider and here's a map I drew up from it.

 

Click on image to set larger version

 

Plus here's the deck I used. I ended up with what I jokingly called a "maturity model" for which I got some positive comments. I've also added the mind map I put together while preparing for the session in the hope that I get points for showing my working out:)!

 

 

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