SAAS Workshop March 5th: SAAS - is it the new answer to Cross Platform?

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27th and 28th of Feb DAY 4 and 5

22nd I was thinking SAAS. 23rd I was thinking "I wonder if that huge wave is going to get us!" - yep, I took the family for few days holiday in Lyme Regis and was met with a rather choppy sea on the first day with some great waves rolling over the sea wall at high tide. Hence it was the 27th before i was back to work and once again thinking SAAS. In theory!


Eric on holiday

Alas the 27th vanished with hardly any work done for the workshop - there were just too many other things to do after my break. The 28th was better - began to get nicely stuck into LitwareHR and found some very useful resources and decks which we may or may not used - dependent upon how chatty everyone is on the day.

I did have one of those "moments of enlightenment". I was thinking about my last 11 years working with ISVs and I remembered that for best part of 3 years the most common topic when meeting with an ISV had to be Single Platform vs Cross Platform. Or rather:

"I'm an ISV - why should I go single platform with Microsoft when I could just as easily deliver a cross platform solution using Java. If I go Microsoft, some of my prospects will not even look at my product. If I go Cross Platform I can sell to everyone"

I won't revisit how I used to handle these conversations but it is interesting to think of the impact of the on-demand model for architecting applications on this discussion.

  • Customer no longer cares what the application runs on: If the application runs outside of the customers organisation then the customer shouldn't care what it runs on - just that it runs well.
  • ISV can happily target a single platform:  If I am an ISV that has gone with the on-demand then I can sell to customers who only use Microsoft technology, only use HP-UX, only use IBM, only use Linux. I only ever need to target one platform. Maybe Windows, maybe Linux but certainly only one. My life is simple.

Is SAAS the new Cross Platform solution for an ISV?