SaaS Panel Discussion Recap

As mentioned before, last Wednesday I moderated a panel discussion on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for IIT-PNW at Google Kirkland campus, an amazing experience. Our panel guests represented broad spectrum of SaaS ecosystem and the audience liberally peppered them with questions on wide variety of topics.

Interestingly, only consensus we had between panelists and audience was that SaaS will grow further and will have significant impact on various business and consumer activities.

• Defining SaaS. Web 2.0 vs. SaaS. Consumer vs. business focus. SaaS meant different things to different panelists and audience members.


• Start small. Target small. Improve quickly and frequently. Generate demand quickly. Scale as you grow. Enable experimentation.


• SaaS strengthens and grows further as web access becomes ubiquitous and available on various devices, specifically growth with internet access through mobile devices.


• Migration from Software-as-a-Product (SaaP) to SaaS. Benefits of frequent feature enhancements and quick customer feedback. Concerns about accessing data and services offline. Migration from pure web complemented by desktop client option.


• Most SaaS growth in application area and little in infrastructure area. But greater and quicker adoption in infrastructure area.


• Main benefit of application SaaS in collaborative namespace. Main benefit of infrastructure SaaS in someone else responsible for muck.


• Tools and platforms for SaaS development. Doubts about reaching a stage where operating system as SaaS in near future. Concerns on how the evolution in API access will impact the existing integrations in place.


• Concerns about Security, scalability and vendor lock-in. High switching cost with infrastructure SaaS.


• Business model - subscription vs. ad supported. Differentiation through service, experience and collaboration.

One of the panelist recounted how he sold his house from retouching images, creating flyer to final selling using only online tools. This reminded me of recent blog post by Phil Wainewright about how Appirio runs its business completely using on-demand integrated application infrastructure.

Panelists believed that SaaS margins will not be as high as SaaP and potentially declining, contrary to McKinsey's expectation of profitability improving as market grows.

Overall a great panel discussion event, thanks to great panelists and engaging audience.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is being considered a trailblazer and in an enviable position in infrastructure SaaS market. EMC/Unisys initiative shows product vendors caught off-guard with S3 growth.

How will SaaP vendors adopt to SaaS?

Cost vs. Benefit for Caching Appliances

Gary Orenstein at Gear6 sent me preview material with his press release for CACHEfx appliance launch.

I guess writing nice things about vendors once in a while has some benefits. May be, I will be crawling into doghouse, by the time Gary finishes reading this post. :-( But, somebody got to ask the hard questions.

Gear6 Unveils Industry’s First Terabyte-Scale Caching Appliances to Accelerate Data Intensive Applications

CACHEfx appliances support a baseline of 250,000 I/O Operations per Second (IOPS), 16 Gigabits per second of throughput, microsecond response time and scale linearly to handle millions of IOPS. The Reflex OS™ virtualizes appliance memory into a scalable coherent cache pool, optimizes data delivery through parallel I/O channels, and provides robust intelligent cache services.

CACHEfx centralized storage caching solutions are available now starting at $400,000.

My jaw dropped after looking at starting price tag of $400,000. My first reaction was "Damn, this thing is expensive!" The performance stats like 250K IOPS and 16Gbps throughput are impressive but let's be realistic how many customers can afford to pay $1.60 an IOPS to speed up applications, beyond hedge funds and stocks/options traders. I am looking forward to a ROI/TCO justification in near future.

How big is the market for caching appliances anyway? I hazard to guess that $1.6 an IOPS eliminates most web companies with intensive data access performance as well as a large portion of HPC market.

When and where can caching appliance threaten the parallel and clustered storage solutions?

SaaS, Opportunity for Innovation

I will be moderating a panel discussion SaaS, Opportunity for Innovation at Google campus Kirkland, Wednesday, May 16th. The panel discussion is part of May monthly meeting of our alumni organization IIT-PNW. I am looking forward to facilitating a great discussion among our panel guests and audience. Our esteemed panel hails from wide spectrum of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) ecosystem.

• Russ Arun, General Manager, Windows Live Communications, Microsoft. His current role includes Mail, Messenger, Manageability, Storage and back-end services for Windows Live.
  
• Charlie Bell, Vice President, Utility Computing, Amazon. His current role includes the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3).
  
• Kevin Marcus, Chief Technology Officer, Intelius. His current role includes technology ecosystem of a SaaS offering.
  
• Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager, Google. His current role includes web search related projects with prime area of interest in building large scalable systems.

Would you like to attend the event? Please send an RSVP to IIT-PNW President, Mohan Venkataramana at mohan_13 [at] msvi [dot] org. Please mention this blog post in your message. The admission to this event may be limited due to the capacity restrictions of facility and IIT-PNW's primary responsibility to IIT graduates.

Would you like to be the "mystery" panelist? If you are opinionated, hail from SaaS ecosystem, don't belong to organizations already represented on the panel, send me an email with your contact info, interest, background and introduction.

It is going to be a very interactive event, slide-free, prop-free, whiteboard may be. All panel guests will have 5 minutes to introduce SaaS (What, Why, Where, Who, How) from their viewpoints followed by 40 - 60 minutes of audience Q&A.

Do you have a question on SaaS topic for our panel guests? Send me an email. Please indicate if you like your name and affiliation to be withheld. All responses will be posted on this blog.

Our last panel discussion Mobile Advertising - Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities moderated and blogged by Chetan Sharma had overwhelming response and very engaging audience. Unfortunately, being at Storage Networking World (SNW) in San Diego, I missed this great evening.

Look for a recap of the event sometime later in the week.