Newsletter

March, 2012

Greetings!

Welcome to the March Cirrostratus Group Newsletter.

 

On February 29th I presented on the topic of DEVOPS at SaaS University in Austin, TX and I've included a copy of the presentation in this issue. I've also highlighted some additional resources that I've added to my website and I talk about a recent SaaS related product announcement that I think is of interest.

 

Please contact me if I can be of assistance to you or your organization. I would be very interested in hearing about your plans for the Cloud.


Paul Ressler
The Cirrostratus Group

 

 

Regular and High Quality SaaS Product Releases
 

Snarling Dog

The presentation that I gave at the recent SaaS University Conference in Austin, TX on the above topic was well received. Take a look at the presentation to see how the picture at the left relates to the topic.

 

Regular and high quality software releases and deployment are a key part of the SaaS business model. DEVOPS is an emerging set of practices and tools for streamlining communication and collaboration between software development and operations.  SaaS companies are using these practices and tools as a way to streamline the software release and deployment processes.

 

I have put a downloadable copy of the presentation on my website. If you have any additional questions on the topic or would like for me to give this presentation at your organization please let me know.

SaaS Legal Resources

Signing Document

I tend to get questions about SaaS legal agreements since the legal agreements are often where service delivery commitments are documented. I am very comfortable with the business terms in a SaaS legal agreement however I am not an attorney and there are legal aspects of a SaaS agreement which I cannot provide advice on.

 

I have read a blog on the topic of SaaS legal agreements for awhile and recently had the opportunity to meet the author, Jeremy Aber of Aber Law Firm. I have added a link to his website and blog on my website and if you are looking for legal advice on SaaS agreements I would suggest reading his blog postings or contacting him.

Managed Hosting Magic Quadrant

In Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant reports they separated out the report for managed hosting from the report on Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Previously the report had been a combination of the two which didn't really make sense since in many cases the leaders in one were not leaders in the other area. The Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service report has been out for a couple months but the Managed Hosting report was just recently released.

 

If you are thinking about vendor selection for these types of services or are interested in how Gartner views your current vendor these reports can provide some baseline information on the pluses and minuses of the top providers.

 

As is usually the case the providers who do well on the magic quadrant provide free copies of the reports if you give your contact information. Here is a link to a provider who will give you free copy of the Managed Services magic quadrant. I have also added this link and links for the Public Cloud and PaaS Magic Quadrants on my website.

SaaS Acceleration
 
Riverbed and Akamai have teamed up recently to provide SaaS Acceleration services. The fact that these companies are combining their two different types of acceleration is interesting and could definitely help with network performance for certain SaaS applications. They are currently supporting three popular applications but more are planned.

What I find most interesting about the way that they are marketing this service is that they are marketing entirely to enterprise organizations. Their marketing effort make it clear that SaaS is a fact of life for enterprises, network performance problems exist, and improving these performance problems is the responsibility of the enterprise.

SaaS and hosting providers have always had an implied responsibility for network performance even though they have no control over it and it is almost always excluded from SLAs. When the customer has a performance problem, as a practical matter it has always been the provider who had to work to resolve the problem. It is nice to see a solution which accepts the inherent performance issues in the Internet and puts the responsibility where it truly needs to be. Although this is only one offer, hopefully it is the beginning of a trend.

 

Contact Paul Ressler at the The Cirrostratus Group

In This Issue
Regular and High Quality SaaS Product Releases
SaaS Legal Resources
Managed Hosting Magic Quadrant
Riverbed and Akamai
Cirrostratus Group Services
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