Making Connections in the Cloud
I just completed the last two stops in a multi-city tour of full day educational sessions on best practices for rolling out Software as a Service (SaaS). During the past couple of weeks I have had the privilege to present to and learn from audiences in Boston, Santa Clara, Tel Aviv (a hotbed of startup activity), and London. I was also privileged to be able to call on the tremendous presentation skills and knowledge of some experienced people that live the business of cloud services day to day. For anyone interested, all the presentation material is available on slideshare.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank:
- Phil Wainewright — blogger and head of the EuroCloud
- Dani Shomrom — SaaS Strategist and Founder and CEO of the Israel SaaS Center
- Rick Nucci — Boomi Chief Technology Officer at Dell Boomi
- Martyn Arbon — Chief Technical Officer, StepStone Solutions
- Avner Algom — CEO of the Israeli Cloud Association for connecting us to the excellent SaaS community in Israel
- Luke Freiler – CEO of Centercode – a SaaS startup who walked us through his years of dealing with monetizing SaaS
- Chris Cranfill – VP of Business Development for CloudOne
- And my colleagues Jake Fox and Shlomo Weiss for bravely daring the demo gods at these events.
There were some key themes that emerged at these events…
- On premise ISVs are allowing a gap to emerge between their delivery of SaaS and Enterprise adoption of SaaS.
- Going to the cloud is hard – but the opportunities to improve on many dimensions once there are tremendous.
- Monetizing SaaS needs careful thought and the ability to rapidly adapt.
- Funded startups enjoy freedoms that for profit ISVs do not – but they still need to deliver value… Free is not a business model!
- Startups often rush to market with great technology and forget many of the basics.
These events were so well attended and generated so many interesting connections, dialogs, and post session discussion groups that I expect we will do them again soon. In the meantime I am presenting at the SaaS University in Denver on April 26th and again at SIIA’s excellent All about the Cloud event in San Francisco on the 24th of May. I hope to see you there!