Gain insights into the challenges that business executives face delivering their business critical applications at a lower cost and higher value to their end customers.  CEO Jerry Champlin talks about a complete and proven approach to addressing business requirements, no matter the size or scope of the organization.

Social Media is obviously growing into a marketing necessity, and organizations of all sizes should take notice. In fact, a few nights ago I was watching the Denver Nuggets play the New Orleans Hornets in the first round of the playoffs and during a commercial break I got up to grab a drink and heard an NBA commercial advertising to follow the NBA on twitter. This new form of advertising social media is obviously on the rise and there are many reasons that Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter can be effective in companies of all sizes. I recently heard an analogy that I thought was a clear way to explain these forms of social media. Linkedin is the business meeting, Facebook is the water cooler conversation, and Twitter is the trade show. So with that in mind, how can you implement social media in your organization?

There has been a lot of writing concerning the SaaS Maturity Model devised by a handful of Microsoft engineers and evangelists.  This model essentially covers 4 types of SaaS deployment ranging from the ASP model to a dynamically configurable multi-instance multi-tennant model referred to as Level 4 SaaS Maturity.  This is a useful discussion, however it does not address how a company can go about getting a SaaS application to market.  In this series of posts and associated presentation which I will be giving at the OpSource SaaS Summit 2009, I will discuss this topic with a particular focus on Production Management and enhancing customer adoption through intelligent data mining.

Pain and Prototype

• Identify your customer's most important pain
• Prototype to meet requirements of a few key customers
• Validate USP and expand coverage

Beta Launch

• Production Operations Become Important
• Stress Testing Essential
• Deep application instrumentation necessary

Production Launch / Market Validation

• Scalability and Visibility
• 24x7 Production Operations
• Go to market evolves rapidly

Continuous Business Optimization

• Leverage BI to improve customer conversion
• Deep usage pattern instrumentation
• Use customer behavior proactively

What is Application Lifecycle Management and why is it important?

In an economic time when IT and technology operations budgets are being cut aggressively while technology is 5-10 times more important to business execution than it was 8 years ago, it is critical for business managers to understand how to make the most of their technology investments.  At the heart of maximizing existing and new investments is the concept of Application Lifecycle Management. 

It is no longer sufficient to simply build a business critical application  and throw it over the wall to a minimized IT operations organization and hope that they will somehow find a way to support the new application.  To ultimately maximize the value and investment in new technology, a more holistic approach must be undertaken.  The four key components to this approach are: