The SaaS - PM Interplay - Part 1

The reciprocal relationship between Software-as-a-Service and Project / Program Management

Think of these questions

• Are there any specific challenges for a PM managing SaaS projects?
• Do SaaS PMs require special skills?

and these too...

• How will SaaS Apps / Cloud computing help PMs manage their projects better?
• How will current PM tools be migrated to SaaS compatible tools to help the Project environment?

These are a few questions which form the foundation of the relationship between SaaS and PM and will be critically analysed in this multi-part blog.


The interplay between SaaS and Project Management is an important consideration which will possibly decide on how the market develops and accepts this new concept called SaaS. SaaS is just not a new distribution methodology, as many definitions indicate, but will usher in a whole new change in almost every sphere of computing - be it ideation, development, testing, OR marketing, sales, support and integration.

A PM (project/program manager) has a special role to play in this new market where almost all the inputs required have to be provided by the PM community. From the service-offering training to the marketing teams, to enabling the reseller/vendor/aggregator (aka the partners) to provide the appropriate value-add to the offering and the support these partners provide to the end user.

From participating in various social groups for developing and enhancing the much needed standards for this new technology, to understanding the need and developing the technology further for simplifying the usage of various cloud-services development platforms especially for usage by non-technologists (non- IT community).

From allaying the fears of the adopting community by resolving the security, privacy, lock-in like issues, to giving the "rejectors" a compelling enough reason to accept this essential new step to the next order and in-turn pave the way for more innovation, especially, in the technology confluence space (The Appliance-IT-Internet integration). This will allow Web3.0 (the semantic web) a chance enough to serve the coming generations.

All these, apart from the usual typical PM/PgM capabilities viz.; managing the new technology implementation, risk management, reach to market, etc., will form the special list of PM skills the new market is looking forward too.

Why all these expectations only from a PM, when there are other specialists like product managers, architects, business planners, and the whole battery of other operators?

- because only a PM is an Executor in this group !(this apart from other reasons, that is). It is the responsibility of an executor to help make a new paradigm socially acceptable and politically successful.

A fantastic concept can miserably flop despite of all planning unless a series of successes makes the adopters wake up to the fact that it has arrived and has delivered its goods!


more in my next post...

Please do give your feedback, suggestions, to improve this discussion and the path it takes in the up-coming posts.

SaaS career plan for developers and designers

As cloud and SaaS get popular, how should developers plan their careers?

In the next three years, programming in cloud and SaaS environments would become inevitable. Developers need to start preparing for that. Experienced developers need to master distributed computing, SOA like concepts, web services design patterns, and related technologies to develop applications on the cloud and start learning to design the applications as well. Mature application development platforms have alleviated the burden, of manual coding, through visual models and application design suites. Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 is a good example of providing development teams with such modeling tools which auto-code complex code-parts for these large applications.

For freshers, there is a need to go beyond traditional basics which is focused on desktop or web applications and start learning to develop SaaS compatible applications.

For designers, SAS70 kind of certifications may help in coping with SaaS compliance requirements. Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), which is a group of large product companies, has been working on the standards to manage various apprehensions related to the SaaS space. Designers would surely benefit from the understanding of these problems and the emerging standards.

Software market is changing at faster pace then ever. Focus should shift from learning just programming languages, which may get out-dated anytime, to the understanding of concepts and technologies at large.

Indian customers response to offerings from cloud vendors

How have Indian customers responded to cloud services from vendors such as Amazon, SalesForce.com, Google and Microsoft?

Cloud is a logical place to cut cost and Indian customers are alert to that. I know of a captive center, of a large international business, in Chennai which recently adopted Amazon offerings and greatly benefited from capex savings in these recessionary times. Given that captive centers are usually behind in accessing latest technologies, I expect other ISVs to be making good use of these services as well. There has been a positive response to MS-Azure beta from ISVs. Mid-cap service vendors in Pune, Bangalore and other cities are offering service solutions to their customers on MS Azure. They have started building capabilities, around most of these and other successful cloud offerings, recognizing the growing interest in this space and plan big investments in next 3 to 6 months.

How does the demand side look in India?

Large enterprises already have experienced benefits of IT for over 10 years. They need SaaS to mature more and for standards to effectively address data privacy, security and application integration issues. The SMBs constitute the largest potential for SaaS providers at the moment. This is the long tail I referred to earlier. Now the big question is when would they start buying SaaS solutions?

They typically would have invested three to five hundred thousand rupees in obtaining various customized IT solutions to meet their needs and can be expected to be happy with them. Due to their existing investment, they would also be the hardest to move. Besides value proposition in SaaS, vendors need to convince them about the security (technology has improved, though its true availability needs to be ascertained as yet) and privacy of data, which is important as data moves to third party servers. We may see emergence of more hybrid solutions such as Microsoft’s Software + Services paradigm, under which data resides at customers (on-premise), while the software runs at a third party infrastructure (data accessed over the cloud).

SaaS application distribution mechanism

How would SaaS applications be marketed - individually or through an aggregator, channel partners, distributors, etc?

Many ISVs are trying to showcase their SaaS products individually. They typically have a product and an existing customer base and are now trying to expand market particularly to the long tail through SaaS. This market is attractive as it can generate volume business. They can enhance their value proposition by integrating with related products and offering a bigger solution to customers. For example: an ISV may provide email service, another may have a CRM solution. They can talk to each other and provide an integrated solution, which many customers are asking for.

Aggregating SaaS solutions is going to be a big opportunity. Package vendors who have large footprint across enterprise segments are potential aggregators. So are companies providing cloud services such as infrastructure, provisioning, metering and billing. To build global reach, as package vendors now seek channel partners, SaaS providers would seek aggregators in future.

What types of ISVs are making SaaS transformation

What types of ISVs are making this transformation and how complex is it? Further, can you give an early glimpse of the applications emerging in SaaS market?

All kinds of ISVs have an inclination to move to SaaS, be they startups or large enterprises. According to a recent private survey, 80% of Asian enterprises, including India, would make this transformation. You would find them across verticals in Telecom, Healthcare, BFSI and so on.

A variety of applications would be suited for delivery through SaaS. Data crunching / analytical applications, which can manage processor intensive operations and data mining in the background for business needs that may not need real-time data, can go as SaaS. Other good candidates for SaaS include: seasonal enterprise applications such as financial, payroll applications, which churn out quarterly numbers; high performance applications - which need auto-scale out and scale down and parallel computing applications that need to perform multiple tasks in parallel so that a huge project may be executed in a short period of time.

But there would be also be applications which cannot be offered through SaaS model currently. The obvious limiting factors include data security, potential lock-in with a cloud provider, efficiency of moving data in and out of the cloud, integration with existing services outside of the cloud platform, and legal/privacy concerns. Especially so, mission critical applications may not be put on cloud. Even if cloud becomes secure, there would be issues with networking delays.

To become SaaS players, ISVs would have to plan their transformation well. It would be easier for companies which have designed their products using technology available in the last three to four years. Many Indian companies typically started off as customized application providers and then evolved into product companies. They can seek to enter SaaS-2 immediately, only if they have designed their products well. A key test here would be how scalable their products are. Other considerations such as Quality of Service parameters (performance, resilience and so on), auto-provisioning, auto-customizability, providing for customer support would also need to be met. If the companies can meet these requirements, their journey would be easier.

How are Indian IT vendors responding to SaaS opportunity in Indian domestic market?

Indian IT market has been traditionally seen as conservative, but not anymore. More and more Indian businesses now recognize the importance of optimization through IT. Though many enterprises have implemented business software such as ERP, SCM, CRM, there is a long tail, particularly the smaller businesses, which are still shying away from IT for various reasons including the capital expenditure involved. SaaS is an excellent opportunity to tap the long tail and Indian ISVs are rapidly moving towards it.

Traditionally, software has either been distributed as a shelf-ware (software packaged and distributed in a CD/DVD) or, lately, within a more cost effective and far reaching web distribution model. When product companies embrace SaaS, they typically go through three phases:

Under the SaaS-1 model (the ASP – application service provider model of 1999-2000), software companies deploy solutions on their own infrastructure individual clients, who use direct secure connection to access the service. This saves clients expenses incurred on infrastructure, administration and personnel. But this model has drawbacks; the potential for cost reduction is not fully realized due to unutilized shared-loading of the hired infrastructure.

Under the SaaS-2 model, which offers multi-tenancy through virtualization at various layers viz.; OS, middle-ware, UI, etc. That is, they use multiple instances (install copies of their software on different virtual machines) and offer them to their customers. Benefits of shared infrastructure are utilized in this model.

In the SaaS-3 model, companies reach true multi-tenancy. They successfully re-architect the product and offer a single instance of it to multiple customers and realize the full benefits of the SaaS model. Here the product is able to utilize the underlying resources to the hilt thus providing full utilization of infrastructure and other resources (like the OS, web-server licensing cost) as cost reduction benefits are passed-on to the end customers.

Indian ISVs especially smaller and medium ones would move to SaaS-2 in the next 3 to 9 months. Globally, large ISVs decided to spend on re-architecting their solutions to move to SaaS-3.