Ken Novak Presents at Linux World 2007 in San Francisco

August 23rd, 2007

If you missed Ken Novak at LinuxWorld 2007 in San Francisco, here’s a summary and the slides. Ken detailed the strengths of Software as a Service (SaaS) as a business model in “How Virtualization Enables and Threatens Saas.”

• SaaS firms tend to have shorter sale cycles.
• SaaS is a pay-as-you-go business model where customers only pay for the services used.
• SaaS providers scale as the demand scales.
• Remote access from anywhere is built in, not an after thought.

SaaS lacks the software customization and integration that are available with traditional software. The trade-off with SaaS software is updated continuously allowing for rapid customer input and improvement. Additionally, traditional software supports a single tenancy model which is simple and clean.

Virtualization is succeeding in the market place because it offers lower cost, improved software management, and streamlined operations like backup, disaster recovery and load balancing.

An interesting application of virtualization is enabling utility computing. Virtualized utility computing handles the scale up and scale down for SaaS companies. As importantly, multi-tenancy management issues are now the responsibility of the utility company: the SaaS firm’s development and release environment now looks like a simple, clean single tenancy.

Here’s the full presentation: LinuxWorld07Slides

Entry Filed under: News, Software appliances, SaaS