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Multi-tenancy, the Holy Grail of SaaS. Do Customers Care?

Enterprise Software, SaaS June 30th, 2009

Two recent posts by Enterprise Social Software vendors Jive and Atlassian set up a huge debate amongst my fellow Enterprise Irregulars. Here’s the money-quote from Jive:

It’s not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "SaaS" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it’s been an industry mantra that it’s simply impossible to have a scalable SaaS business without multi-tenancy.

Both Jive and Atlassian went single-tenant. That’s a red flag with many SaaS purists. But there’s more then just tenancy. What if customer data stays behind the firewall, while the application is still provided over the web? Is that still considered SaaS? Do customers really care about such issues, or do they look for innovation in features and services?

And a bonus: the #1 SaaS icon supposedly delivers on-premise, if the deal is big enough…

Zoho Office for Sharepoint: Use SaaS, Keep Data Behind the Firewall

Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS June 23rd, 2009

One of the major roadblocks to SaaS providers’ entry to the enterprise is IT and Business concerns about corporate security, thinking of the firewall as the last line of defense.

Microsoft SharePoint has a very strong position in the Enterprise as the incumbents behind-the-firewall collaboration server, and for years smart Collaboration and Social Software vendors with better functionality, like Atlassian, Socialtext, Jive Software, Newsgator have been "playing well", adopting their services to SharePoint.

Now Zoho joins, announcing Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, which combines the benefits of a collaborative SaaS Suite with the (perceived or real?) security if keeping data behind the firewall.

Ma.Gnolia Data Loss – Is Your Data Safe?

SaaS January 30th, 2009

Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.

This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.

InfoWorld’s 2009 Technology of the Year Awards

SaaS, Technology January 21st, 2009

InfoWorld announced the winners of the 2009 Technology of the Year Awards in Applications, Middleware, and Data Management:

The Awards are presented in a slideshow format, and InfoWorld made it almost unreadable: there is an ad in between every single page, you either 20 second to flip a page, or have to click “skip” every single time, then click one more time to close another page that hides the slide. Frankly, I think they went way overboard with this.

That said, I did the work for you, here are the winners:

Mozilla Firefox
Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show
Day Communique WCM
Telligent Community Server 2008
Oracle Database 11g
Talend Open Studio
Denodo Platform

Congratulations to the winners!

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

Tags: applications, awards, data management, firefox, infoworld, middleware, zoho

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The Tale of Two Notebooks, and Yes, It’s All About Earning a Buck

Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups January 15th, 2009

One down, one running better than ever. Thanks to the irony of TechMeme, the two news are juxtaposed almost side by side:

Stopping development on Google Notebook – as several blogs point out, this does not mean Google Notebook is dead. You can continue to use it as your scratch-pad, just don’t expect any further development. (Update: you won’t be able to use the web-clipping Firefox extension anymore.) Or if you’re cautious, start migrating your notes.
Multiple Enhancements in Zoho Notebook – yes, ironically Zoho announced a bunch of enhancement on the very same day Google sent theirs to the deadpool. Kent Newsome calls it Zoho’s Lucky Day.

I’ve never considered these two Notebooks comparable, despite the common name. Google’s one was your web-based post-it notes, barebones, easy to use. Zoho’s version is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it. It offers a lot more, but may be “too much” if all you want is the yellow stickies. The two apps serve entirely different needs. But I don’t want to focus on the products here, did it before: Not All Notebooks Are Created Equal.

Let’s talk about the economics: Google is simply ditching some of the money losers which is clearly the right strategy in a recession when it saw it’s primary revenue source, advertising drop radically. A while ago (before the economy collapsed) Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu provided great insight into why getting into applications does not make much financial sense for Google, whereas it is Zoho’s primary business. Today we’re seeing that logic in action.

Of course Google is not the only one, we’re seeing startups shut down service, or give up the free-for-all principle and start charging for their services. Over at CloudAve we’ve discussed Jott as an example, but there are many others. We may have enjoyed all these free services, but deep down had to predict this bonanza would not last forever. It’s time for rationalizing business – after all, it’s all about making a buck.

Update (1/20/09): Surprise, surprise! (not really). Zoho came out with a tool to import your Google Notebook data into Zoho Notebook.

Update (1/22/09) Two days later here comes Evernote with an import process. Who’s next?

Tags: free services, Google, jott, recession, revenue model, Startups, web 2.0, zoho

7 Comments

Zoho Creator Expands Google AppEngine’s Reach

SaaS December 16th, 2008

I’ve written about Zoho Creator before – being techno-challenged myself, the key value for me (and I suppose for millions of potential users) is the ability to generate database driven situated applications without the need for any programming. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu made an interesting statement back in April:

In principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.

Well, it’s no longer just in principle: today Zoho announced the ability to use Zoho Creator to generate applications which are then deployed on Google’s AppEngine. Here’s a short video explaining the process:

The video focuses mostly on the process of how to create an app, convert it from Zoho’s own Deluge scripting environment to Python, then installing it on the Google AppEngine. You will get more detailed explanation elsewhere, let me just focus on why I find this an important step.

Zoho essentially expands Google’s reach, making it available to users without programming skills. It’s a perfect marriage: Zoho brings the ability to create programs without coding in a user-friendly graphical environment, while Google brings security for those who might worry keeping their apps and data with a smaller provider: now they can use the Zoho-generated apps in the safety of GoogLand. smile_wink .

The other important aspect is portability, and to quote Zoho’s Raju Vegesna, first they let data be free by releasing CloudSQL, and now they let your applications free.

We’ve already seen Zoho adapt Google Gears first, even before Google Apps; this is now another example of friendly coopetition with Google.

(Disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive Sponsor of Cloudave, my main blogging gig.)

Tags: appengine, cloudsql, coopetition, data portability, force.com, Google, google appengine, zoho, zoho creator

4 Comments

Your Computers Are Slowly Killing Themselves

SaaS, Technology November 14th, 2008

How old is your work computer? – asks the Wall Street Journal.

Mine is a year-and-a half old. The dual-core former screamer (obviously not the one the the pic to the right) has become an average slow machine now that quad-core is the standard, but I could not care less. I don’t need a faster, bigger computer for work, in fact not even for video-conferencing or watching movies.

In fact I (and most of us) don’t even need 1-2 year-old computers, either, now that browser is the computer.

Now, you’ve heard this a zillion times, but let me present another side: the more you use your computers, the slower they get. In fact it gets worse: you don’t even have to use your computers, they get slower by themselves.

Why, and more importantly, what’s the solution? Read the full article on CloudAve – while at it, might as well grab the feed here. smile_shades

Tags: computer upgrade, dual-core, gmail, Google, hardware, laptop, mcafee, netbook, notebook, pc, quad-core, security, virus-scan, Web Applications, zoho

4 Comments

Zoho Status Displays Availability for All Services – You Can Use it, Too.

SaaS November 11th, 2008

No service is a 100% available, and of course your SaaS provider’s outage always comes in the ‘worst time’, just when you have a deadline to meet… what really gets painful is when you have no information whatsoever on what just happened and how long the outage may be. Major providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon learned the lesson the hard way, and they both released their status dashboards after extended outages and the customer uproar that followed:

Free services rarely display such level of transparency, but that’s exactly what Zoho is announcing today: they created Zoho Status , a monitoring service which displays the health of all Zoho Applications – currently 24. Here’s a partial screen-print:

If it looks familiar, perhaps you followed my earlier advice on using Zoho’s Site24×7 service on your own site or even blog. I’ve been using it for two years now, and received alerts of outages that neither I nor my service provider were aware of.

Zoho took their own tools and turned it into a public availability display, monitoring their services from six different locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia. For now the display is rather “boring”, being all green. Obviously we’re all better off if it stays that way and we have no reason to check the status site. fingerscrossed

What makes sense, however, is to use Site24×7 on your own site, or on any service you are dependent on (you don’t have to install anything, it’s all external monitoring). As usual, it starts with a free level, adding extra paid services – the new addition today is the Enterprise version, allowing SLA definition, compliance tracking and reporting.

(This article is cross-posted from for CloudAve, the Zoho-sponsored Cloud-Computing / SaaS / Business Blog I am editing. Subscribe to our feed here.)

Tags: Availability, downtime, monitoring, outage, SaaS, site24x7, sla, status dashboard, transparency, uptime, zoho, zoho status

1 Comment

Google Releases Zoho Mail with Offline Support

Personal Productivity, SaaS October 10th, 2008

Yes, you read it right: the first announcement of Zoho Mail’s general availability, with Google Gears-based offline support did not come from Zoho, but from the Google Gears team, which released this video discussing Zoho’a use of Google Gears, synchronization, the Marketplace and a lot more a bit prematurely:

Somewhat used to it (see TechCrunch Releases New Zoho Service: Invoice) the Zoho folks decided to play along and released their own announcement.

This announcement somewhat symbolizes the interesting dynamics between Zoho and Google: competitors, yet collaborators. ReadWriteWeb is probably right:

But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology – such as Google Gears.

First of all what’s in today’s announcement:

Zoho Mail has been in private beta for over a year now. As much as we like to switch to native collaboration using web-based tools, email is still where most productivity workers spend 80+% of their time. Mail is the glue that brings it all together – so it’s important for Zoho to step out of background testing mode and make Mail publicly available. It’s also an integral part of the Zoho Business Suite.
Features: It’s an email service (everyone gets a user@zoho.com email account) and an email program that can consolidate several other email accounts, Outlook-style. It combines old and new: supports hierarchical folders a’la Outlook as well as Gmail-style labels, chronological view as well as the threaded conversation views made popular by Gmail.
Access anywhere, any time: Offline access is provided via Google Gears (for now Firefox and IE only), and it’s also available on the iPhone.
Integrated Chat – this is another “glue” application within the Zoho Suite, and several other features listed here.

So with all that, why am I unhappy? I’m a die-hard Gmail fan, mostly for its productivity boosting features:

Conversation threads
Labels
Search

Zoho Mail handles the latter two well, but I am not too happy with the way conversation threading works. My business conversations last weeks, include dozens of emails, and on a traditional mail system the threads are basically a pain to put together before responding to someone. Gmail handles it automagically, and as a side-effect, it presents a lot more information on it’s list screen – since the dozen individual emails are now compressed into one line.

But we all have different usage patterns. When debating the importance of threads, I looked at other Zoho Mail users whose conversations are typically one-off, so they won’t value threading feature at all. In fact not everyone needs productivity. Not everyone wants to go through a paradigm change.

AOL, YAHOO, Hotmail are the absolute web-mail market leaders,and they should do whatever it takes to keep their customers. Their mainstream users are corporate employees who use Outlook in the Office, whether they like it or not is irrelevant, they are used to it. When they go home, they may not email a lot. Some will check their emails daily, once a week, or less. They want a personal email that resembles to what they already know. For them familiarity is more important than productivity.

As much as I hate to admit it, I am NOT the mainstream Zoho customer. I am probably more a part of the TechCrunch 53,651 (even though it’s 1M now) than the mainstream customer base Zoho targets. And if it wasn’t clear before, the current crisis brought home the message loud and clear: only businesses with real revenues survive. Which probably means that for all my yelling and screaming, Zoho is quite right coming out with an email system that meets the needs of businesses who actually pay for it. After all, this is what enables them to offer all the other apps I like for free. And I like free. smile_wink

(Disclosure: I’ve been a long-time Advisor to Zoho and they are exclusive sponsor of my main gig, CloudAve. This article has been cross-posted there.)

Tags: business model, Collaboration, email, gmail, Google, google gears, iPhone, offline access, zoho, zoho mail

2 Comments

Zoho Launches Application Marketplace

Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS September 30th, 2008

Having seen the power of Zoho Creator & DB I predicted Zoho would create a Marketplace eventually. Ten days ago Information week leaked the news, we wouldn’t have to wait long – and now it’s here: the Zoho Application Marketplace.

Ever since the famous Google Chrome Comic book, the gold standard for product announcement is just that: comics. Ladies and Gentlemen, enjoy the following comic video announcement:

There’s a catalogue of business applications, but if you don’t find an app you need, spec it out, and receive offers from developers. Either way the apps are owned by the developers who set their own pricing and keep 100% of the revenue.

If they don’t take a commission, then what’s in it for Zoho? Clearly, having more situated software apps will drive up subscription demand. Zoho Creator (the platform Marketplace is built on) is free up to 10 applications, and there are several price levels above that.

On day one the ’shelves’ no doubt will not be fully stocked but Zoho hopes developers will quickly jump on the opportunity. After all there are over 100K apps used by the Creator community. Clearly not all marketable, but even less than 1% can create a lively market.

Marketplace comes on the heels of a new release, Zoho Creator 3 (see video)

Tags: application marketplace, apps markeplace, apps store, situated software, zoho, zoho creator

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Zoho Office for Sharepoint: Use SaaS, Keep Data Behind the Firewall

Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS June 23rd, 2009