Your Data and SaaS
February 28, 2007
The topic of ‘trusting’ your data to a third party when it comes to SaaS is sure to be around for some time to come. While I don’t think it’s a useful topic just from a security standpoint, I think it’s a valid concern in a larger context. I think there are three elements of Your Data and SaaS, Security of your Data, Accessibility to your Data and Backup of your Data. While some might argue these are different elements of product selection, I think they can be grouped into the single element of ‘Your Data’ for consideration.
I’m going to skip the discussion on Security here for the most part. I’ll only link to Phil’s article here and note that if you are unsure if Google’s application security, or that of many of the small players in the industry, is less secure than the laptops of any of your employees (or perhaps even their desktops in some cases) then you are significantly uninformed.
I do want to touch on the other two.
When you use a SaaS product what do you do if you’re not connected or if the provider is down? How to you get access to your data and continue to work with it? Accessiblity is important and that is why Offline support is going to continue to grow as a key feature in all SaaS offerings in 2007. If you are a small business considering and comparing SaaS products you should include Offlline support in your selection criteria. If the products your looking at don’t have Offline support now you should ask them when they plan to provide it and, in the meantime, what is the companies system availability like? You’ll want to work with a company that gives you access to your data with high reliability, especially if they don’t have Offline support.
Backup of your data is important. Whether it is provided as a downloadable file or sent to you on CD, you’re going to want to have your own copy for various reasons. The circumstances where your data would be lost by any reputable provider would have to be extremely extensive but theoretically possible and it should be a simple matter to have your own backup of your data. When considering SaaS providers you need to be able to get your own physical copy of your data.
These latter two items are also important in the larget context of Continuity of Business. First, your systems and data are stored in a separate location from your primary business (usually) and second in times of emergency when perhaps your office is no longer available or you must be relocated for one reason or another, using SaaS providers means that your software and data are available to you wherever you are.
BlueTie Adds 15,000 Small Businesses in 90 Days
February 15, 2007
BlueTie has added more than 15,000 new small businesses to its’ customer base in the first 90 days of launching it’s free version. The free version, as we’ve noted before, will be monetized via Featuretisements which are tightly integrated, relevant services for small business owners and employees. It’s a level of integration that hasn’t been seen before and it is going to be the monetization model for the future for many SaaS offerings. The days of trying to monetize web-based software by just putting in banner ads are numbered.
If a tree falls in the forest….
February 6, 2007
I think we’ve had some interesting posts in the last couple weeks and our visits remain consistent but everyone’s been very quiet on the comments. It’s Q1 and everyone’s probably very busy. Here’s a quick list of the most interesting in case you haven’t had time to read through. Click through to a couple and let us know what you think.
Why ‘Free-mail’ has a bad reputation
“…And finally, here’s the one I don’t understand:
“But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.”
I don’t know what this means. Why wouldn’t I want to trust my messages to a free service? What is the opposite of a ‘free service’ and why should I ‘trust’ them?”
Online Office Suite Review and Comparison
“…For those of you who are watching the online office suite marketplace, it also notes that Google and ThinkFree may be in negotiations. Do you think it will happen?”
Microsoft and Online Office Update
“…It’s a nice SWOT analysis of Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It ends with a list of options for Microsoft which I’ve placed into this handy Zoho poll. What do you think?”
“…The model that BlueTie is building is beyond ‘Free-mium’, it’s the monetization model of the future. How long before Goolge replaces those ads in Gmail with integrated services like this?”
WebEx has a email service available. The press release is here but I think requires a couple clarfications:
“WebEx WebOffice with email requires no additional hardware or software and is the only on-demand collaboration solution built for the way small businesses work.”
The “…only on-demand collaboration solution…”? What rock are these people living under. How about ‘WebEx has finally joined the rest of the on-demand collaboration solutions by offering email…’. Sure, sure it begs the question what does Collaboration mean but we’re not going to solve that one today, regardless of how you define it even now, there are at least two providers you can put in almost any [reasonable] definition of Collaboration.
The pricing states:
“WebEx Mail is $5.95 per mailbox, per month with discounts available for large deployments. To celebrate today’s general availability announcement, WebEx is offering a special introductory price of just $3.95 a month for a limited time. “
Which is true only after you have purchased the standard WebOffice at a minimum of $59.95 per month, so it’s really $59.95 per month PLUS $3.95 per person for email. Gee for my 5 user workgroup just a 33% increase in monthly fees to add email….
What’s in a Name?
January 10, 2007
I’m back. A little gap there while I headed to NYC for a short conference. Any guesses as to which conference?
I wanted to post a link to this article over at franticindustries. It’s another post on our prior topic of the ‘WebOS’ which was basically just agreement with simplerich. I’m still not convinced OS is the right nomenclature.
I know what your saying, does it really matter what it’s called? Well consider this, Gravity existed long before Newton called it Gravity but he’s still considered to have ‘invented’ Gravity (Seth Godin, The Big Moo, pgs. 17 & 18). So here’s your chance to ‘Invent’ what Goowy, Netvibes and PageFlakes have already created!
