One challenge almost every ISV faces today is how to quickly get “cloudy” with least investment. From business side, SaaS is a new model for most ISVs, meaning it’s still hard to project revenue. Even worse, the SaaS service may cut into the license revenue of existing product. Technically, it may require a full re-design and re-implementation of product for maximum multi-tenancy. Putting together, it’s a big challenge for decision makers.
But it doesn’t have to be difficult with a right strategy. This post explains how to support SaaS without re-designing existing applications, which means a big saving for the ISVs. Read more... (328 words, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
Several years ago, I tried to install SAP NetWeaver. It took me more than a day, and N installations plus N-1 removals before I finally got it right. I searched with several search engines and read many forum postings on SDN. Hinted by one post, I renamed the 13 character machine name to 9 characters, then the magic happened all of sudden.
The result wasn’t too bad but one day of time wasted. Many things could be improved to avoid the pain there. The foremost is the installer – why didn’t it check the hostname and alert me of the limitation?
At that time, I didn’t know VMware. After joining VMware, I knew more about virtualization and realized that a virtual appliance (VA) could have been a big time saver for me had the NetWeaver been packaged as a VA.
The pain as such can easily push potential customers away. It would be a different story if you have somewhat dominance in the market like SAP in enterprise ERP – you can charge big bucks for consulting and training services. Most other ISVs are not in such a position. Even for SAP, it faces strong competitions from others like Oracle.
As a side note, SAP has a virtualized NetWeaver evaluation edition. More info can be found about the SAP-VMware partnership.
In general, ISVs can leverage virtual appliances in two different ways: Read more... (394 words, 2 images, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)
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