One of the truisms of the technology industry is “he who cheapens the standard first wins.” By that I mean that many companies spend more time figuring out how to justify associating themselves with the latest buzzwords than actually understanding if there’s any value in them and building products accordingly.

Enter SaaS. I’m a firm believer in SaaS. In fact I refuse to install almst anything locally, whether on servers or on my desktop. (Although I did make a recent exception for the Photoshop CS3 beta.) It’s simply not worth it. Vista? Not until I get stuck in one of the inevitable upgrade traps they’ve no doubt planned for me.

So what’s the problem. The term’s being attached to everything these days and as a result users are beginning to get confused.
Now Zoli Erdos in responding to a post by Dennis Howlett jokingly (I hope) suggests SES, or Software Enabled Service.

Well, I’m not quite ready to make that switch . . . yet.

Allan Leinwand recently wrote
on GigaOM about EngineYard’s specialized Ruby-on-Rails hosting environment “What is different about EngineYard, however, is their hyper specialization . . .” He goes on to point out, though ” . . . EngineYard will have to constantly add more staff, which means the cost advantages of running a large cluster could simply vanish.”

I took a look at EngineYard’s website and agree with Allan that EngineYard is offering developers a valuable service. On his second point, though, the jury is still out. I’m openly biased (and if you’re reading this you’re at least partially biased as well), but EngineYard doesn’t need to own and operate servers anymore than their customers do. That’s not the source of their differentiation. Just as GM doesn’t make spark plugs and Apple doesn’t make disk drives, EngineYard can build their service completely on utility computing – allowing them to focus on what sets them apart, they’re knowledge of Ruby-on-Rails developers.

If they don’t – the next EngineYard will . . .

3tera just took an important step in it’s young life, we hired our first full-time sales VP. He showed up, we
configured his WiFi, setup his laptop to join the domain, added his cell number to the company directory, created a couple email
aliases, and had a fifteen minute conversation about his preferences between Salesforce.com
and SurgarCRM.

None of this phased me until I noticed a cover story in CIO titled
“Users that know too much (and the CIOs that fear them)” last night. Scanning the article made me realize that just as with our new sales VP, users expect to select many of their own tools and IT needs to see this as a valuable transition. I wrote a while back that, IMHO, the most important aspect of SaaS is that it eliminates IT as the middleman between users and developers. The CIO article is encouraging because it confirms that IT is beginning to see this value.

So, what’s the implication? This is just one guys opinion, but I believe there’s value in IT learning to view their users’ experimentation as a focus group. Dedicating IT staff to mining the user experience can help you learn where potential innovations, or simply connectors between apps, can add the most value.

It’s been quite a while since I posted here and I’ve actually gotten a couple emails asking why. Who knew anyone cared

So . . . what’s been happening here at 3tera. Lot’s!

We have a new AppLogic release about to hit the streets aimed at making volume deployments easier to maintain.

Our new training program, GridU, went live a couple weeks ago for subscribers at Layered Technologies and Utilityserve. In the next couple weeks we’ll be expanding promotion of GridU and opening it up to prospective users.

We’re working on a Webinar for April with Nicholas Carr, the one man who’s steadfastly promoted utility computing when most of the world had decided it was only hype.

And, last but not least, we’re about to add the first new member to our management team in well over a year.

It’s been an “interesting” couple of months, but 2007 is shaping up to be a break-out year.