Tuesday, March 4, 2008 by Lincoln Murphy
On December 31, 2007 I wrote a post about what 2008 will hold for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In that article I stated that 2008 will be the year the small ISV enters the SaaS market in a big way. It was, and is, my opinion that in order for this to happen, certain barriers to entry had to be removed. For instance, it is one thing to build an application, and it is yet another altogether to architect that system properly for scalability and business continuity. Additionally, existing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, especially those that resemble RAD tools in deployed software, require developers to learn and program around proprietary APIs or even worse, learn an entire, also proprietary, programming language. Finally, pricing is generally such that an entrepreneur or start-up that builds a SaaS product and wants to launch into a production-ready environment must shell out a lot of money for dedicated systems at a host or "virtual" systems at a SaaS enabler or other "clustered" type of host.
What if there was a system that SaaS application developers could leverage without changing the way they build their software, that would allow them to rapidly deploy their SaaS or Web 2.0 solution on a platform that can grow with them (elastic) and provide the business continuity that their clients require? What if the pricing structure was such that you can start for free, deploy a prototype, expand and contract your available resources on-demand, allowing you to instantly scale to handle whatever load is required, always paying only for what you use and nothing more. If this type of system existed, this would be the key to lowering those barriers to entry for small ISVs and would allow that large influx of vertically focused and tight horizontal niche SaaS to come to market as I predicted.
Guess what? It does exist and I've decided to put my money where my mouth is! I've joined Morph Labs, the creators of the Morph Application Platform. Morph Application Platform allows Ruby on Rails developers to quickly (it takes 6 minutes... see this video) deploy an application that leverages grid computing technology (currently using Amazon S3 and EC2) and provides the afore mentioned benefits.
My role with Morph Labs is Business Development Manager and I am going to be building out the user community and affiliate network in the United States. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, ISV that builds applications in Rails, an offshore/near shore development company, or anyone else that would like to participate in our Beta program, please sign up here. This is your chance to test the system and tell us what you think, request features that don't exist, and generally have a hand in building something necessary for the industry.
Also, if you have a Ruby on Rails or SaaS group and would like us to come show you what the Morph Application Platform is all about and how we believe it can help your developers and entrepreneurs, please give me a shout at lincoln //at// morphlabs //dot// com. Labels: development, entrepreneurship, SaaS, software, web
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Monday, December 31, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
I'm not going to attempt to predict the future, but I believe 2008 will be the year of the Small Vertical (intra-vertical focused) and Niche Horizontal (spanning only a few, related verticals) SaaS ISV. The headline producing SaaS ventures in 2007 were the big players, with horizontal offerings. These were Salesforce.com (CRM), Business Objects (BI), and NetSuite (Office Productivity). Just as in the deployed world, "big" horizontal applications are the same ones that have traditionally received the press. And 2008 will not be much different. Small ISVs that until now have remained in the "deployed" software and traditional licensing game will begin to break out. I predict that 2008 will see the largest influx of vertically focused and niche horizontal SaaS offerings to the market to date. The future of SaaS (the long tail, if you will) is the Small Vertical and Niche Horizontal products and tools. These will be new tools, tools ported from "deployed" solutions, and internal tools utilized by technology services organizations they would like to productize.The problems I wrote about in my articles in early 2007 regarding selling SaaS solutions to the Enterprise for the most part still hold true. Sure, the climate is changing, but many of the objections are still being faced. These challenges are actually a good thing for well-prepared ISVs as they provide barriers to entry for those SaaS vendors that are not ready to overcome them. In 2008, these barriers will become an even larger part of the story as more and more small ISVs attempt to sell SaaS products to F1000 companies. Large, well-funded, and well-connected, SaaS vendors had to overcome these same hurdles to get to where they are, but had the resources to wait out the market; small ISVs do not have that luxury.Since I work with companies to bring their vertically-focused and niche horizontal on-demand software and technology service products to market, 2008 will present some interesting challenges and opportunities.Happy New Year!Labels: business, marketing, SaaS, software, technology
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
 John Ludwig posted a link to a presentation by Amy Jo Kim at ShuffleBrain titled "Putting the Fun in Functional – Applying game mechanics to functional software". I'm not even sure why I clicked on it, I'm not a gamer, but I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.While the entire presentation is great, the best lesson of all, IMHO, comes on slides 46 & 47: "Customization creates investment and creates barriers to exit". This is huge and it was nice to see someone lay it out like that. We are always talking about lowering barriers to entry, but it is rare to see someone write about barriers to exit. When building a product, it is difficult to constantly play "let's out-feature the competition". While you must always have new or updated features in the pipeline (ideally developed and ready to launch in a competitive response), the reality is a better product will always come along and people will want to switch (its human nature). Your user, I'm sorry to say, will sign-up for an account (if it's free), look around, go back to the service they currently use, and, if you've done your job, determine that it would simply be too much work to switch.As much as I have issues with the current crop of social networks, the reality is, they have this down pat. The nature of a "social network" implies that I am actively connecting with other people, and therefore am making an implicit investment. The problem for non-social networks is that you have to work at building this type of user investment. Take the image hosting service Flickr. They have built in a number of features that, to take full advantage of the system, require investment. The user can look at other photo-sharing sites that come online, and probably will, but as soon as they look at the work it will take to move their images and the associated meta-data, this becomes quite daunting and they will stick with Flickr, thank you very much.Image viaLabels: business, design, experience, functional, networking, product, social, software, technology, user
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I help companies bring their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web applications to market by leveraging the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces, the first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Ruby on Rails.
I am located in Dallas, Texas. Contact me via email.
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