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

The CSIA has  put on a great event tonight.  They managed to pull together top level executives from a broad range of Colorado's most influential companies ranging from Sun Microsystems to AIMCO to eBags to Vail Resorts.  The entire crowd was extremely open and willing to discuss their problems and the solutions they need or could bring to the table.

As expected,  the common theme of the night was the impacts of the economy on business and technology operations and the need to do more with less.  The top ten topics I heard tonight in no particular order were:

 The Parallels Summit 2009 is off to a strong start with great content in the keynote presentations and panel discussion regarding many aspects of Cloud Computing.  While a lot of the focus has been on how technology components enable hosting companies to integrate Cloud Computing concepts into their business models,  Andreas Gauger (Founder 1&1) summed up the opportunity for hosters by stating that service provider must find differentiated value add services to offer their prospective customers.  

I strongly agree.  To provide sufficient contrast from the large group of hosters offering Cloud Services or hosting services, these organizations can thrive by identifying a market niche (or several) that have a common business problem they must solve.  In medium to large sized organizations, one such problem is "I have this mission critical application that needs to be supported at a higher level than I have the staff to deliver in the current economic environment."  In other words, "I need my business (or SaaS) application delivered to my customers at lower cost and higher value than I have the resources to do internally".  This is a tremendous market opportunity for hosters.

Many Cloud Computing offerings today offer infrastructure as a service to varying degrees.  This solves the capex portion of the problem but does not address the application service delivery component of the equation.  To do that requires delivering or partnering to deliver significant managed services to address the whole business problem of their customers.   An approach that works well for many of our partners is Application Lifecycle Management Services bundled on top of hosting or cloud compute solutions coupled with existing managed services offerings like managed firewall, managed load balancer and managed backup.