SaaS Credibility Survey

As you probably know, many businesses are wary of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications because of concerns about security, reliability, and vendor lock-in.

In addition to building the absolutely best IT infrastructure possible, what can SaaS vendors do to assuage end user fears?

Take this short survey (2-3 minutes) and let your voice be heard.

How Good Is The Interface to Your Web Site or SaaS Application? Find Out Now

I've written before about the importance of customer experiences. When I look back on the companies I've worked with over a couple of decades in high tech, the quality of experience a product provided largely determined the success or failure of the product overall.

In the software market, user interfaces obviously play a major role in a customer's experience and, hence, in a product's success or failure. Complex, cumbersome interfaces confused users, prolonged sales cycles, and often limited buyers to sophisticated engineers working in solitary roles. Streamlined, easy-to-use interfaces, often developed in concert with customers, led to faster sales, more efficient operations, and greater business success overall.

There's a wealth of material available on the importance of user interfaces and customer-driven design. Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, and Steve Blank all have important things to say on these topics.

Of course, if you're in the middle of a product launch, or you're a product manager working to an aggressive schedule, or you're a programmer sweating to make your deadlines, you probably don't have a lot of time on your hands to do in-depth reading and learn a new set of best practices.

Nonetheless, you'd probably like to make sure the Web site or software you're building meets the needs of your customers to the greatest degree possible, since this is the most direct and cost-effective way to:

• ensure rapid adoption by customers
  
• shorten sales cycles
  
• reduce customer support calls
  

So, busy with development and probably short on time and money, how can you ensure you've got the best user interface possible? How can you nip a problem in the bud now, before it turns into a full-fledged customer support nightmare later?

Introducing Mad*Pow

You can take advantage of a new service I'm now offering with my new business partner, Mad*Pow.

I didn't want to merely write about improving customer experiences, wringing my hands without offering a concrete solution. Instead, I wanted to be able to help any interested companies address this problem quickly and directly. So I met with usability designers, explained what I was looking for, and ended up forming a partnership with Mad*Pow, a leading experience design agency.

They're great folks. They're based in Portsmouth, NH, and their clients include:

• Aetna
  
• American Express
  
• ESPN
  
• Google
  
• Intuit
  
• Journal of New England Medicine
  
• NBC Universal
  
• Starwood
  

You can check out some of their projects here.

Incidentally, Mass High Tech just named Amy Cueva, Mad*Pow's Founder and Chief Experience Officer one of its "Women to Watch" award winners.

The company was founded in 2000, and, as you can see from the client list above and from their Web site, they've clearly grown into a dynamic, successful company. I'm thrilled to be working with them to address the user experience problem.

Rapid Strategic Analysis of User Experiences

So what does our new service entail?

First, we’ll interview you to understand your business objectives and design goals. Then we’ll conduct a thorough assessment of your Web site or Web application. Our analysis will include:

• Heuristic analysis by multiple testers and designers to uncover usability weaknesses.
  
• Competitive analysis (2-3 competitive or comparative sites)
  
• Marketing and messaging analysis
  

We will then deliver an annotated slide deck and a written report detailing our findings, including:

• Analysis of content, navigation, design, brand, and messaging
  
• Vision for the future—suggestions for improvements in all areas analyzed
  
• SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis summary of the user experience overall
  

Our report will answer these vital questions:

• Is your Web site or Web application’s user interface as easy to use as possible? Are any design elements confusing or cumbersome? How well does the interface serve its users?
  
• How well does the interface serve your various audiences?
  
• Does the interface support customers making full use of your offerings? Does it facilitate upgrades and cross-selling?
  
• How does the interface compare to those of your competitors?
  

In addition, you can ask Mad*Pow's design team to offer various design alternatives for your site or application.

We've designed this process to achieve quick turnaround: we expect to work from kick-off interview to delivered report in 5 business days. And we've priced it in fitting with the budgets that are prevailing in today's, um, wonderful economy.

You can read more about the service here. (PDF)

If you're interested in having our team kick the tires on what you're building, please contact us at experience @ bennettstrategy dot com.


Lightbulb photo by rpongsaj, some rights reserved.

Who's Using PaaS? The Answer May Surprise You

When Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Coghead hit the skids recently, other PaaS vendors such as Intuit QuickBase and TeamDesk were quick to offer Coghead customers free conversion tools and migration solutions, so they could keep their applications running smoothly in the cloud.

I was curious about the customers making this move. Had they been they using Coghead for in-house skunk works, pilot projects, or operational applications? In large companies, did management concerns about data security, SOX compliance, and other regulations relegate PaaS to department-level projects that were, shall we say, off the management radar screen? Is PaaS (when not an extension of a proven SaaS solution such as Salesforce.com or Sugar On Demand) simply a way of getting code up and running without having to requisition a server from a bureaucratic IT department? Or is PaaS something more?

To find out, I emailed TeamDesk, asking about their customers and the types of applications they were running. I promptly received a phone call from Val Karmazin, co-founder of ForeSoft Corporation, the company that offers TeamDesk. Promptness, it turns out, is a habit at ForeSoft. The company prides itself on prompt, reliable customer service.

ForeSoft offers four cloud computing solutions:

• BUGtracka project management and issue-tracking application
  
• dbFLEX, a platform for building business Web applications
  
• CRMdesk, a help desk application
  
• TeamDesk, a platform for building and easily configuring database applications, primarily for the back office
  

The company was founded in 2001. It's been profitable from the start and hasn't taken any outside investment. TeamDesk, launched three years ago, is now the fastest growing part of the business.

In our conversation, Val made a number of interesting points:

• The TeamDesk user community is a mix of people, and most of them aren't developers. What? I thought PaaS would appeal mostly to developers who were comfortable with Ruby, Python, Java, virtualization, and so on. That's not so in the case of TeamDesk. The platform is so easy to use and so easy to configure, thanks to a configuration dashboard, that many of the users are small business owners or IT engineers who know enough about databases to establish a relationship between two tables, but not much technical knowledge beyond that.
  
• Companies of all sizes are using the service. In addition to small businesses, Val named a major telecommunications carrier, a major shipping company, and a European office of a major Silicon Valley technology provider. Company size doesn't predict whether or not a customer will use PaaS; instead, the determining factor is company culture—how willing is the company to trust a PaaS vendor to do things right. Val says customers take advantage of TeamDesk's free trial, discover how easy to use and reliable the service is, and stick with it.
  
• Val points out the distinction between PaaS and SaaS is often illusory. When his customers use his platform to develop business applications that they then rely on day after day, haven't they created in effect a SaaS solution? Read TeamDesk's case study about the sales management application that Hochkoeppler Initiatives created for a customer, and you'll see what he means.
  
• TeamDesk users sometimes require a little more hands-on assistance from ForeSoft when they're getting started with the service, but so far the support workload remains manageable.
  

A couple of conclusions:

• PaaS is ready for prime time: customers are using it for business applications, not just for development projects.
  
• With the proper tools and application user interface, a PaaS vendor can reach beyond the development community to less technical users, broadening the pool of potential customers.
  
• Small, focused cloud computing vendors who execute well can run a profitable business.
  

Socialcast Helps Teams at NASA Communicate More Easily and Capture Tacit Knowledge

NASA, where the hard work literally is rocket science, depends on timely communication: not just between control centers and distant space craft, but also among workers distributed across NASA's ten major R&D centers. Recently the issue of inter-center communication has become especially important, as NASA undertakes its Constellation program to update the Space Shuttle. Previous NASA missions were usually developed at a single NASA center. The Constellation project, a major technical undertaking, spans centers and requires far-flung research and engineering teams to work together efficiently.

So it behooves NASA to find broadly applicable solutions for employees and contractors to exchange information—exchange it, and record it, too, for another transformation NASA is facing is the aging and retiring of its workforce. The average NASA employee is nearly 47 years old and has worked at the organization for 17 years. There's a lot of NASA history and knowledge walking around in lab coats and business casual. And many of those employees are beginning to retire. To preserve the organization's intellectual capital, NASA needs to find a convenient, unobtrusive way for employees to record and share their tacit knowledge.

These challenges were evident to a group of NASA JPL engineers who attended the KM World conference back in 2007. There they heard a talk by Tim Young, CEO of a social networking platform solution called Socialcast. Tim talked about the benefits of Socialcast, a SaaS service that enables company employees to post status messages, ask and answer questions, share documents, and so on.

The NASA engineers were intrigued and decided to launch a pilot project. Celeste Merryman, a pilot manager for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) at NASA JPL, and Douglas Hughes, a project manager at NASA JPL, ran the pilot project, which involved customizing Socialcast for the NASA environment. The new SaaS service was dubbed NASAsphere.

Now the results of that NASAsphere pilot are in, and they're quite compelling.

• NASAsphere participants invited 398 of their colleagues from around NASA, with 55% acceptance rate.
  
• Within the 60-day span of the pilot, the NASAsphere community grew from 78 activated accounts to 295.
  
• Communications truly crossed geographic centers. When employees posed questions, 93% of the answers came from users at remote locations. By the end of the pilot, at least one person from every NASA center had participated in the NASAsphere community.
  
• A survey of NASAsphere users found that 52% recommended the platform be implemented for contractors and civilians, in addition to employees.
  
• In the same survey, 45% of users said they expected they would contribute to the NASAsphere platform weekly.
  
• Not surprisingly, the report recommends a broader implementation of the Socialcast solution.
  

For more details about the pilot and its results, check out the NASAsphere SlideShare presentation here or the final NASA JPL report here.

Two SaaS Companies that Solve Business Problems for Customers

In a couple of recent blog posts (here and here), I raised the question of what type of cloud computing start-up would be likely to succeed in today's business environment, in which companies of all sizes are interested in cutting costs and minimizing risks. I suggested that business customers would feel comfortable with new programming paradigms (e.g., Salesforce.com's Apex) offered by large, stable companies, but shy away from similar offerings from smaller vendors. It's not that the smaller vendors won't get any customers; they just might have a hard time getting enough to stay in business.

Cloud Computing Opportunities for Start-ups and Other Small Companies

But, aside from infrastructure offerings, there are lots of great business opportunities for small cloud computing vendors. I believe that most of these opportunities share these traits:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Being small and new won't be problems (i.e., risk factors in the eyes of customers) for small vendors who demonstrate that:

• they thoroughly understand business process problems that are important to the customer, and they are dedicated to solving these problems
  
• they have a solution that directly addresses these problems in an immediately effective way
  

Getting Down to Business

Here are two software start-ups that offer examples of what I mean.

Compli is a SaaS company based in Portland, OR, that offers a software platform that enables car dealers to measure and manage their compliance with industry regulations. Through the Compli SaaS platform, car dealers can deliver compliance training to employees and employee test scores on compliance tests. As regulations evolve, and new state-specific regulations appear, dealers can distribute new compliance content to the appropriate employees and demonstrate "good faith" efforts at compliance.

Compliance is an important issue for car-dealers, an operational head-ache of sorts, and Compli's SaaS solution gives them an easy way to stay on top of the issue in a cost-effective way.

If you visit the Compli Web site, you'll have to hunt hard to find any references to SaaS and cloud computing. The words "SaaS" and "cloud" don't appear on the home page at all, and in the video featured on the home page, President and CFO Lon Leneve mentions SaaS only after discussing the scope and importance of compliance for car dealers. The company is focused on solving a business problem, and they're leveraging SaaS technology to do it. How's Compli doing? Last year was a record year.

I've written about Liquid Planner before, and I'll be writing more about them next week. LiquidPlanner offers a hosted project management solution that brings probabilistic analysis to project planning. In another words, while other programs like Microsoft Project force project planners to give a fixed estimate for how long a task will take, Liquid Planner lets planner input ranges and probabilities, so they identify risks up front. The result is planning software that's more detailed, more accurate, and more informative.

The solution includes other collaboration features, as well, but I'd like to point out that once again we have a SaaS company focused on solving an important business problem—project management—in a new and compelling way. Factoring probability into project planning makes so much sense, I think LiquidPlanner would be an attractive offering even in a traditional, in-house deployment; delivering LiquidPlanner as SaaS, so it can reach all members of a distributed project team while lowering hardware and software costs, only makes it more compelling.

And how's LiquidPlanner doing? Quite well. Business is growing. The company itself is a small, lean-and-mean team of ten people whose founders have extensive experience in data center management from Expedia. Steve McConnell, who has written authoritatively on rapid software development and software estimation, is an advisor to the company.

These two companies, Compli and LiquidPlanner, demonstrate the business opportunities available for SaaS start-ups. Both companies are focused on solving important business problems (regulatory compliance and project management) in new ways. The problems they're addressing will remain important to customers even in an economic downturn. The companies are leveraging SaaS to deliver their solutions broadly and cost-effectively. Both companies share share these characteristics:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Disclaimer: Neither Compli nor LiquidPlanner is a client.

Not All Data Integration Connectors Are Alike

Connectors are a vital part of any data integration solution. No matter what data sources you're integrating—databases, applications, flat files, Web services, etc.—it's awfully handy to have a preconfigured connector or at least a template to minimize the amount of hand-coding required to move data out of or into a particular data source.

The importance of connectors is perfectly clear to customers. In news stories, such SaaS Integration: Real-World Problems, And How CIOs Are Solving Them, which appeared in InformationWeek in October, customers are blunt about their expectations regarding connectors: vendors need to have a lot of them, one for every piece of middleware being integrated, and vendors better know how to make them work.

[H.B. Fuller CIO Steven] John is asking SaaS vendors lots of questions related to middleware, such as whether they have developed plug-ins for a specific middleware package and whether they have direct experience implementing that middleware. "If they say no to either, it's a strike against them," he says.

Recognizing the importance of connectors to prospects, most integration vendors parade their list of connectors on their Web sites.

And certainly, if you walk the tradeshow floor at events like the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference or the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, you'll find vendors rattling off the names of the connectors they have.

"SAP? Oh, yeah. We've got a connector for that."

I've written before about the misleading simplicity of this approach. Data connectors aren't like Converse sneakers. You can't simply amass a bunch of them (red, orange, purple, black), and assume you have what you need for every occasion.

Different data sources have different security and access requirements. Applications integrating with protected data need to ensure that the data remains protected. You certainly don't want to bypass all the security and access controls protecting, say, a SAP ERP system, simply so that social platform users can pull ERP data into their wiki pages. These requirements become even more pressing when you're dealing with data in the cloud, where it's outside the perimeter of an internally secured and controlled data center.

Another integration requirement, above mere "connectivity," is transformation. Data might need to be transformed ("groomed") or narrowed before being presented to a group. For example, if I'm pulling in sales numbers from the Tokyo office, I'd probably like to see the amounts in yen converted to dollars. It would be nice to have the integration solution do this, so that I know I'm using a tested conversion tool that the company officially endorses.

Beyond merely connecting, then, connectors may need to work as part of an integration solution that supports access controls, transformation, auditability, and orchestration (e.g., before providing data set X, ensure than operation Y is complete, so that X is valid and up-to-date).

The NetSuite Example

The other fallacy of the "Converse sneaker" approach to connectors is it assumes that all integration endpoints and APIs are more or less alike. There's a DB interface or a middleware API. You write to it. You're done.

Not always.

Some APIs are more interactive and complex.

NetSuite, the hosted provider of mid-market CRM, ERP, and accounting solutions, now has 6,600 active customers. So lots of people have reason to connect to NetSuite data.

Integrating with NetSuite, however, is more involved than integrating with other SaaS applications. Why? Because NetSuite provides a great deal of flexibility in customizing their basic record schema and in defining custom records. You can query meta data to discover some, but not all, aspects of the customization. So a connector cannot rely on an automated process for discovering how an account has been customized and access its data.

Ideally, a connector should mask as much of this complexity as possible from the IT user creating the integration, so a good NetSuite connector will take advantage of the flexibility of the NetSuite API, while hiding as much of its complexity as possible from the user building or using the integration.

SnapLogic, an open source data integration company, offers a NetSuite connector that automates as much of this discovery as possible, while supporting integration that works with custom NetSuite records. Here's an explanation from the SnapLogic documentation pages:

NetSuite allows customization of its schema by allowing users to define custom record types and by adding custom fields to existing records. This extension package can automatically discover all the custom record types in a NetSuite account at install time. However, NetSuite does not provide interfaces which allow the extension package to discover custom fields have been added to all existing record types. The extension package is able to do this discovery for some kinds of records (like entity records, item records and CRM records), but not all. For this reason, a manual approach has been provided for specifying the custom fields of records. The user can use the NetSuite UI to browse the records and find custom fields that are of interest. The user can then use the utility: netsuite/resources/customize_resources.py (provided by the extensions package) to manually add custom fields to the SnapLogic Resources that represent a given NetSuite record types.

The connector automatically discovers of the accounts data schema as possible, then supports one-time additions for custom data. Once this set-up work is done, the user has a collection of ready-to-use, snap-together building blocks for building integration pipelines.

Because the connection reads the NetSuites schema, generates components, and supports customizations, it's able to provide NetSuite customers with a flexible solution for integrating NetSuite with other applications and data sources.

A more perfunctory connector would look just as good in a check list of available connectors, but it wouldn't serve users nearly as well.

Integrating SaaS Applications

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) certainly qualifies as a hot trend in IT. According to Gartner, the SaaS market is growing at twice the rate of the software market overall. SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com are especially popular with SMBs, but even large enterprises with more than 25,000 employees are devoting 11% of their current software budgets to SaaS.

SaaS, then, is big and getting bigger. But getting bigger, too, is the challenge of integrating SaaS applications with the rest of an organization's IT infrastructure. After all, no organization can afford to let the latest SaaS application it subscribes to become another data silo. SaaS applications need to share data with other enterprise applications and IT assets.

Integrating SaaS applications can be difficult, in part because there's an technology mismatch between SaaS application design and the community of SaaS customers. Most SaaS applications feature SOAP Web services interfaces whose complexity and sophistication are far beyond the programming reach of SMBs, the biggest users of SaaS. Even in large organizations with SOAP programmers on staff, SOAP programming often remains a rare skill. SOAP programmers are usually assigned to big internal initiatives. They're usually not available to help a department integrate its data sources with a new, cost-saving SaaS application.

One of my clients, SnapLogic, has published a new white paper on SaaS integration. If you're working with SaaS applications now, or thinking of subscribing to Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, or any other popular SaaS application, the white paper is probably worth a read. You can register for it here.