From the monthly archives:

April 2008

SaaS ISVs: Know your customers or risk going to jail

April 28, 2008
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Many countries have introduced strict “Know Your Customer” laws. The goal is to fight money laundering, identity fraud and to disrupt terrorist financing. SaaS ISVs are now service providers and so will increasingly have to work within these laws. ISVs must consider their jurisdiction, as well as that of their customers, suppliers, processing utilities and [...]

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Survey reveals 2,548 German ISVs asleep at the (SaaS) wheel!

April 28, 2008
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A recent survey of small to medium-sized German ISVs revealed half have no plans to move to SaaS. Are these ISVs asleep at the (SaaS) wheel, or are they right to ignore SaaS? Here in Germany you do not fall asleep on the Autobahn if you plan to survive for much longer. Ignoring SaaS is [...]

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Is SaaS really Spying-as-a-Service?

April 25, 2008
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Companies must trust an ISV to use their SaaS solution. Many customers have a real fear of losing control as their data moves into the cloud. The revelation the CIA was spying on SWIFT does not help; nor does the French government’s continuing BlackBerry ban. ISVs and PaaS providers can only succeed by working together [...]

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Is jetting to Cuba this summer a bad idea for European SaaS ISVs?

April 23, 2008
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Because PaaS applications and data are “in the cloud” it should not matter where they are. In the real world of laws, borders and trade disputes, however, location still matters. A recent example shows what can go wrong when European companies bump-up against US laws. While Cuba is a popular holiday spot for Europeans, a [...]

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Might Amazon EC2 cloud platform squeeze the profits from SaaS apps?

April 8, 2008
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You need to build a reliable SaaS application from a portfolio of unreliable platform services; the price of which you cannot control. To survive you must ensure you do not lock your application workload into a single utility provider. A workload that you can divide and easily move from one utility to another gives you [...]

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Why hiding behind abstraction is not enough for SaaS applications

April 3, 2008
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For decades on-premise ISVs have successfully hid behind abstraction. It was, and continues to be, an excellent way to manage technology doubt and implementation differences. SaaS ISVs have nowhere to hide. Building reliable SaaS applications from non-reliable services demands a fault-tolerant approach. Abstraction just doesn’t cut it any more. Whether using frameworks, cross-platform toolkits or [...]

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