6 articles from April 2008

SaaS ISVs: Know your customers or risk going to jail April 28th 2008

Many countries have strict “Know Your Customer” laws. SaaS ISVs will increasingly have to navigate their way through these laws.

ISVs must consider their jurisdiction, as well as that of their customers, suppliers, processing utilities and data storage providers. Not knowing enough about your customers can be expensive, and could even land you in jail. PaaS providers can add value to European ISVs by abstracting these jurisdiction issues and keeping track of future legal changes.

In Is jetting to Cuba this summer a bad idea for European SaaS ISVs? I reported on how the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) can impact non-US companies. A European travel agent appeared on the OFAC blacklist for selling Cuban holidays.

German SaaS survey: 2548 ISVs asleep at the wheel!

A recent survey of German ISVs revealed half have no plans to move to SaaS. Are these German ISVs right to ignore SaaS?

A recent survey of 5,200 small to medium-sized German ISVs caught my attention last week. A report by ComputerWoche summarised the findings of a SoftGuide survey on SaaS. SoftGuide is a software and IT services buyer’s guide for the German-speaking market.

Could it be true: SaaS is really Spying-as-a-Service? April 25th 2008

Companies must trust a SaaS ISV. Recent revelations about the CIA spying on the SWIFT international banking network don’t help.

We Europeans are complex when it comes to privacy.

At one extreme the UK has probably the world’s highest density of security cameras. At the other, tax returns in Norway have been public information since 1863.

Many share intimate details on Facebook and other social networks. When it comes to business data, however, they expect much more.

Jetting to Cuba: A bad idea for European SaaS ISVs? April 23rd 2008

Location still matters in the real world of laws, borders and trade disputes, as a recent example from Europe shows only too well.

While Cuba is a popular holiday spot for Europeans, a 46-year old trade ban puts Cuba off-limits to Americans. Strictly enforced laws prevent US companies from doing direct or indirect business with Cuba.

The US trade ban became a big problem for travel agent Tour & Marketing International. Although based in Spain, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) added them to a blacklist. Why? For selling Cuban holidays to Europeans (US citizens cannot travel to Cuba).

As a result, their US-based domain register blocked about 80 of their .com domains for Cuba-related websites. The domain register gave no notice and refused to transfer the domains (they must freeze all US-based assets).

Amazon EC2: Squeezing the profits from SaaS apps? April 8th 2008

A workload you can move from one utility to another gives you leverage to build negotiating power with CPU service providers.

As an SaaS ISV you can’t build a data centre; CPU cycles must come from utility providers. Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform is the current market leader. Microsoft is coming soon; Google and IBM will likely follow.

Relying on one CPU service provider, no matter who it is, is a bad idea. There is a risk a future monopoly provider could lock you in. Running your SaaS applications is a major part of your running costs. If your CPU service provider can lock you there’s a good chance your costs will increase.

Hiding by abstraction: Not enough for SaaS applications April 3rd 2008

Building reliable SaaS applications from non-reliable services demands fault-tolerance. Abstraction just doesn’t cut it any more.

Whether using frameworks, cross-platform toolkits or even application generators, abstraction has worked well for the different combinations of OS, database, networking and user interfaces that confront on-premise developers.

As an SaaS ISV you only have one platform–what technology doubts could you possibly have to worry about?

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