Business and Operations Issues

On the panel:

- Phil Fauver, CEO, Employease- Steve Jillings, CEO, Frontbridge- Ken Rudin, VP CRM on Demand, Siebel- Treb Ryan, CEO, OpSourceHighlights:

- Ken insists that SaaS is a delivery model and not a new class of software
- emotional problems with hosting for many customers
- Siebel was at the beginning hesitant to embrace the SaaS model as it feared to cannibalize itself
- Treb highlights how much the role for software companies have changed now delivering bandwidth, infrastructure and helpdesk for users. Opsource helps companies to outsource these operations. This seems a bit like the ASP model in 1999 - but OpSource seems to have learned a lot since then.
- Frontbridge is a pretty interesting company doing all the security networking services on-demand and outsourced.
- Extreme Programming and on-demand are in a natural alliance as smaller and more often releases are common.
- SaaS deals are also much simpler than old-school software deals as they require less asset coordination. An SLA covers most of the points.
- Good point from Treb - recognize you are now a service provider and deliver superior services and not do risk evaluation only.

Conclusion: The challenges in delivering on-demand software are partly different than 'just selling licenses'. Many providers (incl. Siebel) have just done started the learning process. The same is true for customers as they switch to SaaS.