I agree with Andre Yee’s point of view on SaaS (Is SaaS Dead?).  Andre makes some great points to refute the conclusions made by Neil McAllister in his post, Is the SaaS experiment finally over? In fact, I would go as far to say that the problems that we are seeing now should be expected as part of the transition from delivering Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) applications to delivering SaaS solutions by traditional ISVs.  Andre Yee highlights three points in his post: bad applications, reliability and performance, and shelfware.  As he correctly points out, these problems are not endemic to SaaS, as suggested by Neil McAllister, but a function of poor execution by many SaaS vendors. (more…)

In recent months there has been a noticeable resurgence in the need for Business Architecture at both tactical and strategic levels. In my experience, there are many Enterprise Architects (EA’s) thinking about Business Architecture, but very few who are really doing Business Architecture.

The Standish Group, an IT research organisation, documents this annually and has historically found that 31.1% projects are cancelled before completion, 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimated cost and only 16% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget. (more…)

Broadband and ubiquitous Internet access have fed the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and led to the  birth and growth of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), which in turn have started affecting the traditional Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). ISVs were instrumental in defining and giving momentum to the software market during the 1990’s and 2000’s.  Today, however, SaaS is driving the world’s 60 fastest-growing software companies. Existing ISVs are feeling the pressure from pure SaaS start-ups. Calls from the market for SaaS alternatives to their traditional licensed product offerings further add to their woes. What’s an ISV to do? (more…)

I reviewed a recent webinar given by Pascal Matzke and John McCarthy from Forrester Research on the Future of IT Services.  It was a “teaser” that provided insight into their soon to be released paper.  As veterans and leading analysts in the sector, they have watched the sector grow and mature.  They believe we are at the crossroads of re-invention.

Part of their position is the belief that the wholesale benefits of the labor arbitrage and staff augmentation approach that fueled Indian offshore growth wave is coming to an end.  It’s been a decade of hyper growth and the sector will start to level off as organizations have successfully achieved large scale reductions in TCO through the use of offshore labor.  With legions of offshore developers available to enterprises around the world competition will focus on rates as savvy sourcing managers continue to seek cost reduction.  But, assuming that labor cost can never reach zero, how much lower can it go before quality and service risk outweigh the cost benefits? (more…)

We are now moving from the out of the early adopter stage and into the early majority stage of the Software as a Service (SaaS) technology adoption cycle.  An exploding number of organizations are considering SaaS to take advantage of the lower up-front costs, lower total ownership costs, and faster implementation when compared with traditional licensed software.  While evaluations of traditionally licensed software by organization is a well understood activity, the relative youth of the SaaS market means many organizations are still developing their evaluation methodologies, while others have suffered through SaaS horror stories. (more…)

The recent announcement by Apple that it has sold over one million iPads in just 28 days has developers chomping at the bit to create apps for the iPhone OS.  However, for many of these App Store success story hopefuls, there are at least two problems that they face before writing even a single line of code.

If one would like to develop a native app for the iPhone OS, they must either take a time machine back to 1988 and learn the nasty, archaic language known as Objective-C, or they must take a leap of faith and hope that Apple’s recent Developer Agreement changes don’t apply to Adobe and other vendors offering tools that translate various languages into native iPhone code. (more…)