View from the Edge

The Four Pillars of transitioning to the SaaS/Cloud Business Model…

I have the pleasure of spending a vast majority of my time working with ISVs or as well call them APs on their business strategy, specifically those that are looking to move from a traditional software business model to that of a Software as a Service(SaaS) business model.  Yesterday I was reading a favorite blog of mine Phil Wainewright’s Software as Services ZDnet Blog (http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/) and I thought it was a very insightful piece on the Four Pillars of the Transition to SaaS.  The four pillars he highlights are:

Partner strategy. It’s clear that providers have to work with partners— but it’s equally clear that the old partner models have to be radically revised.

Pricing, packaging and selling. Makes a huge difference in timespan and ease or difficulty of the sales cycle, and the value of upsells and renewals. Once these decisions have been taken, there’s then the question of how to organize and incent the sales process.

As-a-service infrastructure. A highly automated operational infrastructure is needed to deliver the necessary partner, sales and customer relations in a cost-effective and responsive manner.

Customer relationships. Moving from a product sales cycle to a continuous, iterative service provider relationship is a complete culture change both for vendors and for their customers.

It is as though he has been on the phone with me and talking to our APs – the only thing that I would change is the order, as the biggest obstacle for most of our APs is the PRICING, PACKAGING and SELLING.  I work very closely with our partners to help them understand that SaaS is not just a pricing model – but the pricing is critical to the successful transition to the SaaS business model.   Understanding the target market and who the buyer is and how they are looking to consume the service is absolutely critical to understand, before making the transition.

Next, I would put the infrastructure requirements – only because that is a “COST” factor in the delivery of the service – so you need to understand your underlying costs – before you price and package your offering – so that one is also a critical component.

I would be remiss if I did not next say that the “CUSTOMER” is next on the list.  I mentioned before knowing your “buyer” is important – but just as critical is the understanding of the customer relationship on a go-forward basis.  You are no longer just selling them a piece of software or an application.  In the SaaS business model – you are now a SERVICE provider and the relationship that you have with your customer is just different.  You are now their “go to” person whenever anything goes wrong…and so you need to be prepared to address all of their business requirements.  Otherwise they will leave you and go elsewhere.

Finally, the PARTNER STRATEGY, but I would look carefully at this in more than just one dimension.  The partnering strategy changes considerably in a SaaS model – mostly because you are now most likely relying on multiple players for successful delivery of your service/product to the customer.  For example – there is the provider of the Internet connection for your customer, there is the hosting or Cloud provider that will be responsible for the hardware, virtualization and operating system delivery and finally there is who you will partner with to deliver the integration and the access to other applications that need to work very closely with your business application.  There might even be someone in your ecosystem that in the past has delivered training and/or implementation services for your application – the question then is: are they still needed? If not, what have you done to your application to make it easier for end-users to get up to speed and knowledgeable on using the application?  Have you investigated the “ease of use” aspect of your SaaS application – or are you still thinking “old school”?  Is your application now more likely to be part of a broader ecosystem and how do you fit into that system? 

These are just some of the questions that you need to be thinking about as you transition to a SaaS business model.  Most of our APs that have made the transition will tell you that after a few years, it can turn out to be a very lucrative growth model.  However, that does not mean that it was an easy transition.  But just keep in mind we are here to help, as we also have thought about our partnering strategy as it relates to the SaaS business model.  As always – any questions – feel free to contact me at cosmith@progress.com.

Check out the latest Forrester Consulting study

We wanted to find out more about the economic impact that Progress Partners may realize by building applications with OpenEdge versus using a non-Progress platform. To help us, we enlisted Forrester Consulting to do some research. You can see what they discovered in this new report:  The Total Economic Impact™ of Progress Software OpenEdge Platform. Among the revealing findings:

• Developing with OpenEdge was shown to be 40% more  productive than alternative platforms
• ISVs choosing OpenEdge are able to deliver their  application 30% faster to market than when using an alternative platform
• Once deployed the support staff productivity gain is 80%  as compared to alternative platforms

Get the full report to learn more.

Exchange Online 2009 - Behind the Scenes

In early Spring 2009, when we began planning our first online conference, we had no idea what to do. We knew that we wanted to do something unique and different, but had no idea how long it would take get things done, what would be hard or easy, or how many people we would need. We didn't even know the right questions to ask. I spent a number of weeks educating myself, looking at and participating in online conferences other companies, universities, and organizations like the Smithsonian Museum were doing. Among other things, I spoke at BravePoint's Virtual InterChange conference, which allowed me to see what's involved in doing a live broadcast.

We eventually decided to do something akin to a TV "newsmagazine" style broadcast with a number of separate programs and "episodes", using a variety of media and techniques. What we produced in the end was, on the one hand, not too far from that, and on the other, not at all like that.

We had numerous discussions about what to do, how to do it, and who we could get to help.  Also many arguments about things which turned out not to be important in the end. Key to helping figure it out and get it all done was Cramer, a production company that has done a lot of work for us in the past for our F2F (face-to-face) conferences and all sorts of videos.

Among the things we discussed endlessly were how many technical sessions we should have and how long they should be. Would anyone come? How long an attention span would an online audience have? How many days would be people be willing to "tune in"? For how long? 2 hours? 4 ?  6 ? Would people leave if there was "dead air"?  What should we do about people in different timezones? How many sessions would we have time to produce? Is live or recorded better? Which is harder to do? We got many different answers to these questions. In the end we decided on two concurrent video "channels" starting with general sessions followed by a series of 30 minute technical sessions with a short question-and-answer period in the last few minutes of each one, and a live discussion channel. The sessions were recorded but the q&a period was live. Would that work? We wouldn't know until we actually did it.

When we opened the conference registration site, we got a huge surprise. After two days, we saw that about two hundred people had registered. Then, over the weekend, registrations spiked up over 3,000 and continued rising. At first we were thrilled. Then we learned that someone had posted a link to our registration page on several sites that enabled people to find places where they could get free stuff. We had free stuff. Anyone who registered would get a free T-shirt. Over 4,000 people who had no interest in the conference had signed up just for the free shirt. What else could go wrong? I loaded all the registration information into an OpenEdge database and wrote a 4GL program to rank all the registrations and identify the bogus ones so we could delete them.

Gradually, things came together and all the speakers got their materials prepared and practiced their talks. In early August, we began filming. I spent 4 weeks at Cramer's studios, working with the speakers while we were filming and then with Cramer's folks (thanks Theo!) editing video while others worked on the web site, registration, promotion, and many other things. It was a lot of work but it was fun.

Finally we were ready. The conference broadcast went live at 8:30 am on September 15. We held our breath. Everything worked, with only a few small technical glitches. Here's a picture of the control room for one of the channels.

When the broadcast was finally finished on the third day, we were relieved.  We made it.

As we discovered, 30 minute sessions worked pretty well. Almost. In hindsight, we learned that:

0) 23 minutes of content with 7 minutes of q&a time didn't allow enough time for questions for most of the sessions,

1) our speakers were not used to speaking for such short periods and had some difficulty with that,

3) there were (deliberately) no breaks between the end of one session and the start of the next. Feedback says we should have had them,

4) the "networking lounge" and discussions were hard to use and didn't work as nearly as well as they should have. In spite of the difficulty some good discussion did take place.

Still, I think those were relatively small problems.  In the grand scheme of things, I would say Exchange Online 2009 was a success.

Session videos for the Exchange Online 2009 conference are still available for viewing for another month.  If you haven't had a chance to visit, please point your browser to http://events.unisfair.com/rt/exchangeonline~sept2009

Canada Tech Peaks and PUG Meeting

My journey to Canada began with a flight from Manchester New Hampshire to Toronto on a sunny and mild Tuesday afternoon. I was thinking how convenient it was to fly from my home airport rather than having to take the drive and fight the traffic around Boston. The plot thickened when I was led out onto the tarmac to board a twin-propeller plane that holds somewhere around 20 passengers. I especially enjoyed the baggage handler on the ground, who, once everyone was on the plane, boarded, took off their reflective vest, closed the cabin door, and took their seat as the co-pilot for the flight! With good weather on our side, the flight was smooth and uneventful.   

The turnout for the Tech Peaks meeting on Wednesday morning was excellent- around 25 or so attended. By a show of hands, many turned out to be long-time Progress customers, some for over 20 years. My presentation topic was the OpenEdge Strategy and Roadmap, and among other things, helped the audience understand why Software as a Service is something that will likely have an impact on their business over the next few years, if it hasn't already. The audience was most engaged in dialog on the upcoming Transparent Data Encryption for 10.2B, and the future OE11 multi-tenant table support. I was followed by Frank da Costa who gave an excellent presentation and demonstration of Actional monitoring an OpenEdge environment, a new capability for 10.2B. The audience gained an appreciation for how easy and fast it is, without having to do any coding changes, for Actional to automatically build a map of the transaction flows through the system, the level of detail that is available from the console, and the ease that rules can be established to, in real time, monitor and alert on things like Service Level Agreements.

Almost forgot to mention that the hotel conference room looked out on 2 sides to an indoor shopping mall. I especially enjoyed the people who stopped to stare in the window to see what was going on- maybe new potential cutomers! While this wasn't an actual photo from the event, there was a small boy around 3-4 years old that did spend a minute with us looking in.

My second stop was in Montreal for a Thursday afternoon Progress User Group (PUG) meeting. The attendance here was also good- in the 20's, and the presentation topics were the same. I was taken slightly by surprise when the PUG President opened the meeting speaking in French, with the follow on topic on the Progress corporate overview also delivered in French. It was interesting to try and follow along, but the jokes went right over my head.

I was pleased to see that many in attendance had already made the move to OpenEdge 10.2A, taking advantage of the latest features that we have to offer. With 10.2B coming out soon, and planning underway for a major new OE11 release, anyone who currently finds themselves working with an older version of Progress/OpenEdge should take a look to see what new features they could be using to improve their business, and how they can get up-to-date. Progress Communities is always a great resource for information.

Thanks to all who coordinated and supported these events- it's easy to overlook the work done behind the scenes to make these events both possible and successful.

Obrigado

If you have been following this blog lately you can see there has been a lot of focus on customer-facing engagements including Exchange Online, the UK PUG, and Australia Exchange.  I just returned from the Brazil Exchange event, I’ll tell you about that in a minute, and you’ll hear about other events in upcoming posts about other customer facing events over the next few days.

So do we do it?  Why so many events?  Well we think we have an exciting and compelling strategy with OpenEdge 10.2B being released in a few weeks, work starting on OpenEdge 11, and a lot of focus on SaaS and Cloud.  But we also want to hear from you.  So speak up and be counted.  Make sure your account team knows about your issues  and concerns, go to a local PUG event or other regional event, and tell the Progress representative what you think, or head over to Progress Communities , and  layout your thoughts in one of our forums.

But now onto Brazil.  Brazil Exchange, held in Sao Paulo on Oct. 21, was another extremely successful event with over 525 attendees.  The general session was very much focused on Operational Responsiveness and how the entire Progress portfolio of products can help you achieve Operational Responsiveness.  As part of the General Session, Rick Kuzyk put together a very exciting demo showing OpenEdge, Apama, Sonic, and Actional all working together to provide real-time visibility in an automobile manufacturing yard complete with a mashup using Google maps, and showed the dashboard running on an iPhone.  Very slick!!

And there were 15 different breakout sessions covering OpenEdge, Actional, and Apama, and while they were “all Portuguese to me” (literally - except for mine and Rick’s), there was lots of interest in the key capabilities that we are providing including OpenEdge GUI for .NET (sold out crowd) , OpenEdge support for Actional, OpenEdge Management, and RIA.

Excellent job by the Brazilian team, and I would like to thank all of our Brazilian customers for attending this event. 

And don’t forget, there is a great collection of presentations still available on the Exchange Online site, so check it out because it all goes away on December 17^th!!!

Ken

Webinar Reminder

Hi

Just a quick reminder about the SaaS & Cloud Webinar that's happening tomorrow, Oct 28th.  See Nancy's post below for more details.

Mike

Australia The Tour, Part 2: Brisbane

Today we swapped sun soaked Brisbane for rain soaked Melbourne as we continue on our 3 city Australian Exchange tour.  Our final set of presentations are tomorrow (Friday) before we make the long journey back to Boston. OK, I know, you have no sympathy :)

But back to yesterday.  Brisbane was completely booked with once again 50+ people attending the day long event.  Brisbane certainly has it's own vibe, a little more relaxed than Sydney, but no less eager to participate.  During the tour I've been fortunate enough to share the OpenEdge roadmap detailing some of our thoughts and ideas for the next generation of OpenEdge.  Out of the potentially many new features, the one stand out proposal that generates the most questions & excitement is that of Multi-Tenancy.  Even for those not yet considering Software as a Service (SaaS), the thought of OpenEdge as a platform having built-in Multi-Tenancy capabilities right out of the box is a game changer.  Especially, if as hoped, it can be introduced in such a way that means little to no application changes for the thousands of OpenEdge applications out there today.  This feature alone would consolidate OpenEdge's leadership in the SaaS space offering end-users a huge library of Multi-Tenant applications almost over night.

As we've seen from other conferences, including the recent Exchange Online, the current hot feature in the product today is the OpenEdge GUI for .NET.  Shelley is constantly presenting to packed rooms, full of partners & direct customers eager to know how to make use of this great feature.  I had no personal involvement in the project that created it whatsoever, but each time I sit at the back of the room and listen to Shelley go through her pitch, my mind is always blown away by the engineering triumph that basically allows the running of a Visual Studio environment in OpenEdge Architect which is based upon Eclipse.  Not only that, but the fact that you can mix & match existing OpenEdge GUI with this next generation OpenEdge GUI for .NET is just a testament to the technical skills within Progress.  

As with Sydney, it was also good to see by show of hands how many people are currently using OpenEdge 10 and OpenEdge Architect.  I won't get on my soapbox again, but still it's good to see!

From a purely personal perspective, I'm also impressed by the number of people that have taken the OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) to heart and are really embracing it's principles as they take their applications forwards.  One of the challenges we always face is knowing how well our best practices materials are being received, and used, so events like this give me the opportunity to talk to partners and gauge feedback.  So if you ever see me at any of our events feel free to grab me and give feedback.  I won't bite, promise!

We had a fantastic time in Brisbane and certainly from the feedback at the end of day Cocktail party, the attendees were going home happy after a full days content. Or maybe that was just the free booze talking!!

So tomorrow is our final day and if it's anything like the past few days it will be a blast.  We did by the way gain our hour back when we flew south from Brisbane to Melbourne, not that I still understand how it works.  I had some discussions at the cocktail party about this, but again all the reasons seemed to tie back to the cows!  Either that, or it's all about reducing the hours of sun light so as not to fade curtains!!

As always, thanks for reading

Mike

Webinar on Cloud Computing and SaaS

Register to learn more about Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) and how you can plan and deploy and modernized OpenEdge applications that takes advantage of these new technologies.   We are making it easy to take the first step with a webinar on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 11:00 am EST.  Join Colleen Smith, Director of OpenEdge Product Marketing and SaaS along with Mike Ormerod, Architect, SaaS & Cloud Computing Strategy for this technology focused session.

Australia The Tour, Part 1: Sydney

We finally arrived in Sydney on Friday, after leaving Boston on Wednesday, 20+ hours of flying and somehow managing to misplace Thursday!  If you've ever had the chance to travel 'down under' you'll know that the journey is well worth the effort.  I've been fortunate in my working life to travel to many cities around the world, and I must say that Sydney is one of the few I could happily call home.  Don't get too excited though Ken, I will be returning back to Boston...this time!!

I'm writing this post on Tuesday from Brisbane, the day after the PTW event in Sydney.  And what a great event it was.  The registrations were fully booked out with 50+ people attending the day long festivities.  As I mentioned in my previous post there was lots of great content, much of which which was delivered by local Progress employee's with Shelley and I delivering a few sessions each.  At the close of the event even I was starting to get fed up of me speaking, so thanks to all those who stuck with me through my sessions and didn't fall asleep, or if you did, thanks for not snoring :)

It was a great chance to catch up and talk with many Application Partners and Direct Customers about their current situations and challenges going forward, in addition to hopefully answering a question or two.  No matter where I go in the world I'm always impressed with attendee's passion for OpenEdge and what they do with it.  It was also great to note the number of hands that were raised when the room was asked who's currently using OpenEdge Architect.  If you're reading this and you're not currently using OpenEdge Architect, I strongly recommend you go and have a look at the latest version in OpenEdge 10.2a, it really does make you more productive as a developer.  And that's not just marketing speak, a number of people yesterday were more than happy to extol it's virtues.

So many thanks to all those that attended the Sydney event and helped make it a great success.

We've now rolled into Brisbane where we'll present the same event again to a new audience. I must say, it's strange to fly an hour North from Sydney to Brisbane, and then have to alter my watch an hour back!  I kind of understand it when you travel East/West, but North??  The locals tell me it's something to do with the cows!!!

I'm not sure what's going on with the weather since we arrived, but we seem to have brought the New England rain with us.  The weekend weather in Sydney was full of showers, and when we arrived in Brisbane is was approaching 80+ degree heat and sunny, but we've been here a couple of hours and now it's throwing it down with rain!!

From what I understand Brisbane is fully subscribed so it should be another great event.  I'll keep you posted, and next time remind me to tell you about the will power of an architect and a certain Australian biscuit/cookie.

Thanks for reading

Mike

We're off to see the wizard !

And no, I don't mean Gus. I'm currently sat on the tarmac at Logan airport about to head for L.A on the way to Sydney Australia. Ok, so the title was a little corny! This is a posting full of firsts. My first blog entry on the OpenEdge Perspective, the first posted from an iPhone (so appologies for typos), and my travelling companion Shelleys first trip to Australia. By way of introduction I'm Mike Ormerod and I'm responsible for the Architectural Best Practices, SaaS & Cloud Computing technical strategy for OpenEdge. In my role I report to our VP of Technology Ken Wilner, the guy with the beard in the photos at the side there! We're headed to Australia to present at a series of PTWs located in 3 cities. As we go we will blog more to let you know how the trip is going. The conference agenda is packed full of great sessions with great content so we hope to see lots of familiar, as well as hopefully new faces at the events. The cabin doors are about to close so thanks for now and we look forward to saying more once we hit Sydney!