Webinar

We're doing a webinar with Microsoft and Mural entitled 'Coming Of Age with Software-plus-Services' on Thursday 11 March. The dry run is tomorrow so it will be interesting to see how that goes. It should be interesting for ISVs. There's a lot of good stuff coming out of Mural regarding the S +S Incubation Centre Program at the moment. I'm genuinely impressed.

Also, the SaaS/S + S marketplace is so different nowadays to what it was say 3 years ago. Then, it was very difficult to talk about the business benefits as you were too bogged down in the concept. These days the awareness is so much more and you don't have to argue the corner quite so vociferously as you once had to.

I think the main thing is everyone's living on the web now. They're twittering and Facebooking, buying online and booking online. Business applications such as hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or our ISV partners SaaS apps are a logical conclusion.

You can always take me to task on the 11th if you disagree. Or blog it, or twitter it, or send me an email from your hosted mail account...

SaaS Microsite

We've launched our SaaS microsite. It's essentially a forum to promote some of the fantastic applications on demand our ISV partners are delivering to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. It's essentially something I've been planning for a while and it was a case of seizing the day to get it underway.



As time goes on we'll be looking to expand the site and integrate it with some third part tools to make it a real portal. As a hosting provider committed to SaaS delivery we want to use as many angles as possible to ensure success for our partner. After all, this reflects on us too!

We've got some great partners so having the likes of large ISVs such as C3, KCS, LexisNexis Visualfiles, KCS and Northgate alongside new, smaller ISVs such as Matrix, PureNet, MS2M and Solarvista is a great advert for SaaS.

Any feedback is welcome on the site, as well comments on how we can build on it and improve.

Partners- a conduit to the real world.

One of the great things about our model is we work with a large number of partners day in, day out. These are typically ISVs who are using us to manage their infrastructure and have a number of individual mini platforms (I say mini. Some are pretty bloody huge but you know what I mean). We get a real insight into the sectors of the economy in which they work which we would never have if we were working in a vertical niche ourselves.

The same is true (more so?) of our Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM partners. We’ve created a network of some really first class and really rather interesting MS CRM partners over the last year or so. One of the things I always find illuminating is what their drivers are and how they tackle the marketplace. Like our ISVs it varies, sometimes fundamentally, from partner to partner and indeed geography to geography.

Take the financial crisis. Not the best place to go looking for new business- or so you’d think. Some of our partners who are targeting this sector (Mayfair, admittedly, rather than the City) are getting a lot of traction with the hosted message. The opex versus capex attraction weaving its magic. Because, ultimately, people need software- it’s just paying for it, and the infrastructure to deliver it, that becomes a bit tricky. One to watch I think.