Yesterday, I was talking with Marta Cruz, from Nextperience. This is the brief review about the chat (to don't forget it ;-) ):

I've been reading The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen. According to the author, it's very difficult for a traditional company to innovate its business. Several examples along history support the idea. E.g. Hard Disk Industry, Mechanical Excavator Industry, and Minimill Steel Technology.

In a legacy business, the value network is built for a purpose. It can not be changed to support a disruptive technology.

When a disruptive technology is taking its first step, it's going to be incomplete, not ready for prime time. The legacy customers are not going to see with good eyes the new idea. Management is not going to be supportive for wasted budget in a new field; refurbished ideas are going to win. The scenario is posed to support projects oriented to "update" old technologies.

So, new technologies are developed by new companies. The new company has no other choice to develop its new business (cutting the old ties). Even with imperfections, the company will find a market to survive. In the mean time, it will improve the innovation to better compete and win new market. At the end, it will surpass the old technology.

SaaS is growing based on new companies understanding how to adapt the software to be selling as a service. It's a paradigm shift. It's easier to say it, than to apply it. (Remembering the ASP Bluff from the .com era)

Traditional software companies have no good chances. They are fighting in a new arena with a legacy structure and narrowing revenues; trying to keep their traditional customers happy, reuse the current bolts, and cutting costs.

If we are standing in a new company with brand new ideas, let's cut the old ties. We have to forget the habits, and rethink the business for the new customer (I'd like the idea of a natural-born digital native). Let's deconstruct the products and services and rebuild them around the digital native.

Excellent article from ArsTechnica "The Cloud: a short introduction". Visual clues to understand the concepts:

• The lowest cloud tier is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which looks to the client like a dynamically scalable pool of compute and/or storage resources. The basic metered unit of IaaS is usually either a single virtual machine (e.g., Amazon EC2) or an abstract storage object of a certain size (e.g., Amazon S3).
• Next up the ladder of abstraction is platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which provides API-level access to a cloud infrastructure layer. Examples of PaaS are Google AppEngine and Force.com....
• The final and most popular tier of cloud service is software-as-a-service (SaaS). Google Apps and Salesforce.com are the two paradigmatic SaaS examples...

No need to write more, please, follow the link to the original article: ArsTechnica "The Cloud: a short introduction".

In the last year, I've heard a lot of opinions and noise around SaaS, PaaS, and Cloud Computing. And the marketing is not helping.

The original intention of my previous post "A Bird's Eye View of Cloud Computing, SaaS and PaaS" was to visualize THE categories. However, I think there's a general need of simple high-level criteria.

What We know "Now everything is on line"......Let's be naive: SaaS = Software Cloud Computing = Hardware PaaS = Software for Developers / Operations We can refer to "cloud computing" as running on line as a general concept. But, talking about hard stuff, a company is providing a software service or a hardware service, so it's SaaS or Cloud Computing. Examples: SuccessFactors vs Amazon EC2. Who Based on these simple concepts, you can know if you need Software or Hardware.  If you are looking for a SaaS, you have to find the right package for your needs (features vs monthly pricing). From SMB packages to full enterprise services. If you are looking for hardware (and the associated network connectivity and human resources to keep the service running), you have to choose between the minimum hosting package to world-wide load balanced servers. Cloud Computing "by nature" is a very high load service. For any regular (small and medium) website, you can easily use a simple hosting or collocated server. PaaS is a tough call for developers, it changes the standard development model to easy the process to publish and operate a software service.

How much

Next post :-)

We've been working for our SaaS, OQUMA Quality Management Application Service, in the context of NAVES 2009 Competition, organized by IAE Entrepreneurship Centre.

The Center for Entrepreneurship of the Universidad Austral’s IAE Business School is the platform for the development and incubation of new, innovative high impact projects. The Center was founded in 1999 and was the first center for entrepreneurship in Argentina, focusing its activities on three main fields: Research, Training, and the Incubation of new Companies. NAVES (New Entrepreneurial/Business Adventures) is a business plan competition open to the public in Argentina. The project has a 23 year track record for developing and working on business plans. We are proud to announce that our project is NAVES 2009 Semifinalist!

OQUMA - http://www.oquma.com (Today, we are still in BETA)