Consumer SaaS vs. enterprise SaaS

First; for those of you not familiar with "SaaS" - Software as a Service, here's my simple definition of what it is: Software as a Service is the business of delivering software via a browser over the internet, typically enabling a range of customers to use the same single instance of the application. (I have written a few blogposts related to this topic previously without really explaining what it is, sorry:-)).

There are plenty of famous services on the internet that can be labeled SaaS. Over the last few years we have all become users of SaaS solutions like Google Apps, hotmail, youtube, facebook and del.icio.us. The service my employer offer, itslearning.com is also a typical SaaS solution, but there is a slight difference between the earlier mentioned services and our own. Our customers are educational institutions, or enterprises, while the more profiled solutions are consumer-based. But even if Facebook get's all the coverage, a significant industry is now developing for enterprise-based SaaS software (the most famous being salesforce.com).

From time to time opinionated people in the educational sector seems to think that services provided by the likes of company will be wiped of the face of the earth by the more profiled consumer-based services. Where it so easy. There are a number significant differences between Consumer- and Enterprise based SaaS that will require a good solution. But if you want to try and prove me wrong and put us out of business with a learning platform based on consumer-based technology, here's a list of differences between customer and enterprise SaaS that you might want to think about:

Characteristics	Consumer apps	Enterprise apps
Revenue model	Ad-based.	Subscription fees.
Sales	word-by-moth, trends.	Tenders, DM's, knocking on dors.
Data privacy	Vendor "owns" your personal data.	Enterprise keeps full ownership of data.
SLA	No (remember skype going down for two days?)	24/7 Availability guarantees, response time guarantees, financial, guarantees. The list goes on.
Support	Not directly. Community driven discussion groups, blogs, etc.	professional help desk.
Training	Hey, if you can't use it - why sign up for it?	professional training services.
Integration and customization	Generic API's.	Consulting services, 3rd party integrators.
Development road-maps.	Innovation. What will be the next trend that signs up more users?	A mix between innovation, strategic development for expanding market shares and pleasing existing accounts.

Technorati Tags: SaaS

What did you do last summer?

In our line of business, the summer holidays are basically the only time of year when we can catch our breath and do heavy duty maintenance and prepare our data center for a new season of crazy growth. This summer we where painfully close to filling up our existing storage units so for months ahead we planned expanding our storage solution with a new piece of equipment from Dell/EMC, known as a CX3-20 SAN array. Being by far the biggest investment ever done by our company hardware wise, i thought I might share a few interesting (?) facts about this piece of machinery that you don't need a computer degree to understand...

• It can be set up to be connected via fiber channel to 128 servers.
• In theory it has 1000 times more bandwith than your average USB disk drive.
• It supports up to 120 disk drives (either "cheap" iSCSI disks or very expensive Fibre channel discs - depending on your I/O requrements).
• It's maximum raw data capasity is about 83 TB.
• If the SAN detects that a piece of hardware is about to fail an e-mail is immediately sent to Dell Gold support in Dublin. A harddisk can actually be changed remotely since there are several spare harddrives in the storage array.
• You could change one of it's power supplies without turning it off or in any way affecting it's operation.
• You could easily configure one of these to cost you as much as this one or approximately 2500 of these. :-)

it's learning is great!

it's learning is great. It's a terrific product, it's a good service and it's a great place to work. Maybe I'm not a very objective or credible as a source for this information having been one of the managers of this company for the past 4,5 years. Being one of the people with the initial idea to the product back when I was a student might also have clouded my vision. Perhaps there are even days when I don't feel this is true myself. (It doesn't happen very often, but we sometimes have days like this or this)

But that's not really my point. What I am trying to achieve is to counter-balance something that has been bugging me for quite some time. If you search for us using Google, one of the first results points to a web-site that compares our product/company with manure.

If you're a potential customer or just looking for some info on us, please read this:

• The mentioned web-page is, in my opinion, about as full of it as it claims it's learning to be. Please get a demo of our product before you make up your own mind.
• Last week we had more than 250.000 unique users logged in to it's learning one or more times - a proof that a lot of people find the software quite useful.
• Not only do we have the dominant market share in primary and secondary education here in Norway, we are also the supplier of virtual learning environments to some of the biggest universities in Scandinavia (To mention a few: University of Copenhagen, University og Malmö and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
• We're a company still largely owned by the former students that originally founded the company back in 1999 and our financial situation is very robust.
• We're qualified for the BECTA Learning Platform Services Agreement in the UK after a very througout tender process that looked at a lot of different sides of our product and services.

If you're an existing customer, a partner, a friend, a blogger, a competitor or just an opinionated fellow, please do the following:

• Comment this post. Let us know a little bit about who you are and what you think about or product, services or company. (I do moderate my comments because of random spam problems - but I will of course let critical remarks pass!)
• If you find this post interesting and feel slightly sympatetic please link to it or pass it on to others. This way mabye we can actually get this article up on Google's ranking to counter-balance some of the bad karma from the prevously mentioned post.
• If you do not think we deserve to be known to the world as escrements, please do not link to any web-site describing us in this manner, it will only increase its google ranking.

Thank you, yours sincerely,

John Arthur