THINK IT Services

Last week’s OpSource SaaS Summit was a milestone event for the on-demand services market on a number of levels.

The first SaaS Summit in Silverado in 2006 was a gathering of industry pioneers to discuss the potential of the on-demand movement. Last year’s Summit in Monterey was an opportunity to celebrate the growing success of the SaaS movement. This year’s Summit offered a chance to take stock of what it will take to scale SaaS to meet the needs of the mainstream market. The theme was platforms and web services, but the event also raised other issues.

With over 600 registered attendees, this year’s SaaS Summit was the largest vendor-oriented conference focused entirely on the rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market to date. While Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce user conference is still the biggest SaaS event of all, OpSource’s SaaS Summit has represented the benchmark for vendor-oriented conferences since its inception in 2006.

This year’s Summit marked the first time that many of the leading names were overshadowed by lesser known players with far more compelling messages.

Microsoft’s General Manager of U.S. ISV and System Integrator Partner Businesses, Greg Urquhart, outlined the company’s SaaS enablement capabilities but did little to convince the conference attendees that Microsoft is committed to quickly delivering its own SaaS solutions.

By the same token, Salesforce.com’s President and Chief Customer Officer, Jim Steele, wasted an opportunity to convince the Summit attendees that Salesforce.com is a leader in the rapidly evolving cloud computing market by dwelling too long on the basic virtues of SaaS.

Everyone I spoke with at the Summit agreed that it was Josh James, Co-Founder and CEO of Omniture, who stole the show. James provided an engaging and enlightening presentation about the factors which have led to the phenomenal success of his company. James provided valuable information and insight, punctuated by a key takeaway that every successful company should have a ‘number’ that drives its growth. In the case of Omniture, it is a monthly statistic based on a formula calculating sales growth specifically for its web performance metrics business.

I was privileged to moderate a panel of journalists that concluded the Summit. The panel consisted of Eric Knorr, Editor – Infoworld, John Pallatto, West Coast News Editor – eWEEK.com, Ben Worthen, Staff Reporter – The Wall Street Journal, and Aaron Ricadela, Writer – BusinessWeek. These prominent business and tech industry writers offered their candid perspectives regarding the state of the SaaS market and the key obstacles that must be overcome in order for SaaS to become truly mainstream.

Ironically, Forrester Research issued a new report prior to the Summit suggesting that the SaaS market will cool off in the small- and mid-size market in 2008. A drop in the rate of growth is conceivable because of the law of big numbers, but is unlikely because there are so many vertical and horizontal market segments still to be addressed.

As is often the case, the real value of last week’s SaaS Summit was the opportunity it gave attendees to network with their peers and get a reality check about industry best practices from informal discussions rather than formal presentations.

My guess is next year’s SaaS Summit will be far bigger someplace in Vegas and we will be discussing an even broader array of business opportunities and challenges.

In the meantime, this month’s SaaScon user-oriented event will be the next opportunity to gauge the state of the SaaS movement.

Until then, we should all be thanking OpSource for making the SaaS Summit possible and using it to help drive the success of the SaaS industry.

Last week, I had the opportunity to return to Dublin, Ireland, to participate in the second Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Summit which I’ve helped Enterprise Ireland (EI), the country’s economic development agency, organize and moderate in the past nine months.

After a very successful launch of this symposium series in October with the first SaaS Summit, decided to host another round. The goal of our first session in the Fall was to educate Irish companies and entrepreneurs about the opportunities in the SaaS market. Our objective last week was to make them aware of the major challenges and offer steps to success, especially for those local companies seeking to penetrate the U.S. market.

In addition to identifying and recruiting each of the Summit speakers, I also had the privilege of kicking off the day with a keynote presentation summarizing the state of the SaaS market and identifying the key technical and business issues that aspiring SaaS vendors must overcome.

I was followed by Eugenio Pace, Microsoft’s SaaS Architecture Strategist, who discussed the technical considerations for building and hosting SaaS applications. Clint Oram, the GM of SugarCRM in Europe, how the SaaS and Open Source movements are interconnected. He also raised questions about whether SaaS can succeed in a pure on-line, on-demand form. John Maughan, the Director of Engineering of Cape Clear Technologies, then identified the integration requirements for SaaS applications. We concluded the morning with a Q & A session in which the Summit attendees asked the speakers to delve deeper into some of the issues they raised.

The afternoon began with a talk by Phil Wainewright, the well-known SaaS blogger for ZDNet, on the differences between the U.S. and European markets. In addition to identifying some of the reasons for these differences, Phil also identified some of the interesting European-based SaaS vendors who are becoming prominent players in the market.

Phil was followed by Christopher Gesell, the Director Product Marketing at Verizon Business, who outlined how aspiring SaaS vendors can leverage global infrastructure providers to optimize their service delivery capabilities. Conor Halpin, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of LeCayla Technologies, then demonstrated how SaaS vendors must escape the constraints of traditional business models by deftly untangling himself from a straitjacket during his presentation. Conor’s entertaining display was followed by an equally enlightening talk by Frank McCracken, the founder of Saaspoint, an Ireland-based professional services and development company that has experienced rapid growth by focusing on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange opportunities.

Of course, no gathering in Dublin is complete without capping it off with a few pints at the local Guinness brewery. The next morning, I had a series of fascinating one-on-one meetings with very interesting Ireland-based SaaS companies–CashCollector, OpenPlain, Iquate and NetTeam.

As I found during my first visit to Dublin, the country’s booming economy, broad-based technology sector, supportive government agencies and collaborative entrepreneur climate make it a perfect ecosystem for SaaS companies.

Keep an eye on the SaaS Summit website for copies of the presentations, and contact me if you’d like to get more perspective on SaaS activities in Ireland.