Features-as-a-Service?
As the head of new product development at SafeNet one of my key areas of focus is around bringing to market the types of tools and services ISVs need to help them manage the shift to the cloud – as you can imagine this means that I spend a lot of my time keeping an eye on what the industry is buzzing about!
Yesterday, a very interesting blog entry appeared on the ZDNet website broaching the topic of social licensing. This is interesting – not only because Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is opinionated… unwavering and entertaining to watch – but also because the article touches on the nature of enterprise applications in the future: how enterprises can move towards building solutions by cherry picking features and building entire cloud based systems from different services. A great example of this is Zuora – a saas billing company – that recently did a webinar – take a look at their reference customer xactly – and how they built out their back office by stringing together a host of different online services. We think more of that is going to happen – and so does IDC – there are even some companies out there betting on this happening (Boomi) – and providing the glue to get all these services to talk together.
