- VP of Customer Success – Critical to the SaaS Business Model
Source: IntereWest
Date: Mar 04, 2010
A SaaS company that does not have a senior executive in charge of Customer Success (i.e. controlling churn) is one that doesn’t understand its business model and not one likely to get VC-funding.
- Right Engineering SaaS Products
Source: SandHill blogs
Date: Dec 07, 2009
SaaS isn't shrink-wrapped desktop software and it demands a unique architecture to be easily customizable, and extensive user interface design to allow users to successfully adapt to a hosted SaaS application. This whitepaper identifies fundamental elements that can be used to achieve the goal of right-engineering your SaaS product. It includes detailed information on architectural strategies, best practices, databases, virtualization and challenges associated with SaaS products.
- How SaaS Solution Marketing is Different from On-Premise Application Marketing
Source: SandHill.com
Date: Oct 29, 2009
Despite the fact that the objectives and tactics are similar to marketing on-premise applications, SaaS targets different audiences (the people involved in the purchase decision ), presents different messages (needs to articulate the value of the full customer experience and isn't confined to just product features), and requires different processes (equire a marketing process geared for new releases every quarter, not once every two years).
- Survival of the fit-most
Source: ZDNet
Date: Sep 14, 2009
The essence of cloud computing is openness to connectivity, mobility and collaborative endeavor. Privately hosted, virtualized infrastructure may look like a cloud, but it is ‘fool’s cloud’ — like iron pyrite, the appearance is deceptive. Survival of the fit-most emphasizes: community aggregation; openness to connectivity; agile adoption of new resources; and better mobility
- Best Practices for Enterprise SaaS Growth
Source: SandHill.com
Date: Jul 23, 2009
SaaS adoption is now occurring in areas once reserved exclusively for on-premise applications, including mission critical applications such as ERP and HR in both small and large enterprises.. This blog covers best practices that software vendors can deploy to help smooth the operational disruption inherent in SaaS deployments - and to help grow sales in the process.
- Comparing the Cost of SaaS
Source: The Connected Web
Date: Jul 17, 2009
Many of the calculations routinely used to compare the cost of SaaS to conventional software are based on completely bogus assumptions. This isn't an act of deliberate deception, it's simply a case of people shoehorning SaaS into the same criteria framework they'd use to compare two competing licensed software products.
- Know Your Core: Providing Focus for Web Applications
Source: UXMatters
Date: Jun 15, 2009
As barriers to entry for Web applications continue to fall, clearly defining, developing, and maintaining the core essence of Web applications matter more and more. Define your Web application in concise terms, so people get the value you provide. Make that value obvious by bringing the core to life in your product. Build what defines you first and hold it sacred. Grow outward from your core and into new opportunities.
- SaaS Vendors: Stop Thinking Like Software Companies!
Source: SandHill
Date: Jun 10, 2009
Continuous improvement of the product is a big part of the value proposition of SaaS for users. They do not have to wait until the next version of a product, or do they have to install the next release, to be compliant in their industry, get the features they requested, etc. So SaaS vendors should eliminate"versions" or "releases" from customer-facing properties. In addition SaaS vendors should focus on the service, rather then the software so you move out of the commoditization trap.
- Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”
Source: SandHill
Date: May 15, 2009
Bessemer Venture Partners studied over a hundred SaaS companies - both pure-plays and hybrids - and condensed their findings into the following list of ten "laws" which help to govern the success of SaaS companies.
- Is multi-tenancy more important than just cost savings?
Source: Apprenda
Date: May 01, 2009
When we say multi-tenancy, it means that the software architecture is built to natively understand (and cope with) multiple constituents accessing shared volatile and non-volatile compute resources, maintaining virtual segregation and isolation despite said sharing. The big takeaways are: you need this for maintenance upgrades that just work, and for collaboration and data sharing.
- SaaS TCO - The Mirror Image of Total Cost of Service
Source: Chaotic Flow
Date: Apr 28, 2009
Total cost of service (TCS) is the the mirror image of total cost of ownership. If you think of the value that your customer realizes from your product as resulting from the sum of all the work that you do (TCS) and all the work that your customer does (Total Cost of Ownership) from raw idea through product delivery to realized benefit, then it becomes clear that creating a disruptive technology is really about taking costs out of the value chain, regardless of which side of the fence they sit on, because you pass your cost savings on to your customer in the form of lower prices.
- Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization
Source: UXmatters
Date: Apr 12, 2009
Executive buy-in is important, but communicating and selling the UX message across the organization, at all levels, is just as important.
- Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki
Source: Designing Social Interfaces
Date: Apr 03, 2009
A wiki of patterns for the book "Designing Social Interfaces" on social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners.
- Book review: Handbook of Usability Testing (2nd ed.)
Source: SAP Design Guild
Date: Apr 02, 2009
A beginners’ guide that helps readers gain an overview of usability testing. However, it also contains a wealth of useful hints for more experienced usability professionals.
- Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
Source: Pearson
Date: Mar 08, 2009
The 5th edition of this book provides updates on current HCI topics with balanced emphasis on mobile devices, Web, and desktop platforms. It addresses changes brought by user-generated content of text, photo, music, and video and the raised expectations for compelling user experiences.
- Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
Source: Boxes and Arrows
Date: Feb 18, 2009
Those teams that achieved the highest degree of shared, holistic understanding consistently designed the best web applications. The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment—a holistic view—the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was “siloed” into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.
- Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks
Source: UIE
Date: Feb 02, 2009
The very psychology that led to the design of every standardized solution out there can also lead to other, much more compelling designs. Put this psychology at the center of your decision-making process and you give yourself the ability to design incredible things that still work well for users.
- Components Versus Patterns
Source: UIE
Date: Jan 08, 2009
A pattern is a global solution to a common design problem. Components are a reusable, design system-specific chunk of a page.