Category: Business

Upcoming Talk: How to SaaS, Revisited

Back in 2007 I gave a talk on Selling your Software as a Service. The room was quite small but tightly packed, and several people have asked since then if I plan to repeat it. (I went back and listened to the recording of that talk, on the linked page; it holds up quite well. I recommend it if you interested in the topic!)

I finally have the right opportunity to do so; later this month at the St. Louis Innovation Camp mini-conference I’ll give an updated talk on the same topic, on Friday, Feb 26, in a time-slot to-be-determined. The talk:

The Software as a Service Business Model

In this talk, I will share some “lessons learned” from five years operating a Software as a Service business. Topics will include:

  • What is SaaS?
  • Starting a SaaS business
  • SaaS Product Management
  • Cash Flow
  • Customer Retention
  • Infrastructure and Operations

Amazon S3: Now Much Safer for Important Data

A few weeks ago when I spoke at the St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group, one of the possible cloud storage worries I brought up was the prospect of a few misplaced (accidental or malicious) clicks deleting large swaths of data. This applies with both S3 (the market leader) and other similar offerings. If you’ve tried out the various GUI tools for manipulating S3 “objects”, you’ve no doubt noticed that just a few clicks could delete thousands of objects (files) or even a whole bucket. Imagine a naive new employee (or worse) discarding terabytes of customer data; your business could be flushed down the drain in seconds.

Amazon has recently added a couple of features which greatly reduce this risk: Multi-Factor Authentication and Versioning. Using these features, it is now much more reasonable to store important data on S3 – the access needed to delete data can be controlled in such a way that even a malicious user, with access to credentials sufficient to do real work, nonetheless won’t be able to actually delete any data.

As the various cloud offerings mature, I expect all major providers to offer increased “safety” features, and for technical audits to verify and require their use.

iPad: Yet Another Opinion

Here are my initial, general thoughts about the much-hyped iPad. Clearly the world doesn’t need another blog post about this, but it sets the stage for something coming next.

  • As many have observed, iPad is most easily summarized as a larger iPod Touch, plus some of the mobile data capability of an iPhone. Although this has been expressed widely as a criticism, I note that a very large number of people have bought an iPod Touch or iPhone.
  • By making the iPad fit the above description so well, I fear that there is a tinge of Apple playing it safe for Wall Street. Playing it safe, has not been the strategy that invigorated Apple (and its financial performance) over the last decade.
  • This iPad “1.0” is somewhat short on hardware features. I suspect a second generation device will arrive in 2011 with a few more ports, more storage, more wireless, etc. 1.0 only has to be good enough to prime the market for 2.0.
  • The screen needs more pixels; the resolution / DPI is unimpressive. Also, OLED would have been nice; but Apple had to trade off some things to get to a price point, and the screen technology was obviously one of them.
  • The battery life Apple claims, even if it is vaguely close to reality, is fantastic.
  • I am surprised at the lack of a video camera.
  • I expect to see some kind of trivial tethering interoperation between iPad and iPhone over Bluetooth, sometime in the next couple of revisions of both products. I suspect that loyal Apple fans carrying an iPhone 3GS will end up able to use their iPhone mobile voice/data service for both devices… possibly with some extra monthly service charge.
  • iPad 1.0 will not replace Kindle or other eBook readers, though it might slow their sales growth a bit. But what about iPad 2.0, 3.0, with a better screen and even longer battery life? Once a beautiful color LCD device is good enough, monochrome eInk will be a very tough sell.
  • I will quite likely buy an iPad shortly after it ships; but I’ll be buying perhaps 25% to enjoy it as a consumer, and 75% as a means of more fully understanding the industry importance of the tablet form factor.
  • As a user of a “real” Apple computer (a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.6), I find the closed App Store software distribution model something of a disappointment, compared to a tablet form factor Mac OSX PC I could easily imagine; but I have another blog post coming about that in a few days, after I get some real (non-punditry) work out the door.

Upcoming talk: Cloud Computing User Group

The St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group launches on Jan. 21st at Appistry. Sam Charrington over there kicked it off, but I suspect it will shortly grow far past its Appistry roots.

I’m giving a talk (one of two) at the first meeting. Contrary to the initial description floating around, I won’t be speaking (in detail) about “Amazon Web Services from a Developer Perspective”. Rather, my talk will be broader, and from a developer+business perspective:

To the Cloud(s) and Back

Over the last few years, I’ve been to the Amazon cloud and back; on a real project I started with inhouse file storage, moved to Amazon S3, then moved back. I’ve likewise used EC2 and tried a couple of competitors. I think this qualifies me to raise key questions:

  • Should you use (public) cloud storage? Why and why not?
  • Should you use (public) cloud CPUs? Why and why not?
  • How do you manage an elastic set of servers?
  • Can you trust someone else’s servers? Can you trust your own?
  • Can you trust someone else’s sysadmins? Can you trust your own?
  • What about backups?

This talk will mostly raise the questions, then offer some insights on the some of the answers.

Update: Slides are online here.