Did SaaS kill the IT department?

One of the fastest growing segments in the software industry is Software as a Service (SaaS). Think of Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Dynamics Online, Netsuite, Zoho, Outright, Shoebox, 37 Signals products, or a myriad of others. These applications run on servers managed by someone other than the customer and the customers access their data over the web. The customer's data is stored on the managed servers and is typically only accessible through the application's user interface or an applications programming interface. As more companies begin to migrate much of their critical data into these applications basic IT principles are becoming a requirement.

The top concerns of customers evaluating SaaS applications revolve around data privacy, security and access. Customers are asking key questions about data ownership, backup, archiving and migration. When a customer's data is stored on the servers of an application provider, the customer still owns that data and a key requirement must be accessing it in a neutral way.

Many SaaS vendors offer complex and expensive options to allow customers access to the applications and data should the vendor cease operation. Few offer options for customers to access data offline during periods of downtime or other issues. Few offer the ability for the customer to restore data in the event of a data loss. And even fewer provide options or even clear instructions that would allow a customer to migrate to a competing service should the customer find a better fit for their business needs or just become dissatisfied with the vendor. In the world of IT these are basic requirements for any software application that a company integrates into their business. And these requirements do not go away because there is a "paradigm shift" with new buzzwords. Businesses must (and they will) demand the basic set of IT requirements for SaaS based applications.

When any business deploys and manages an application within their own data centers they expect that they will integrate that application into their existing set of operations tools. These are tools such as monitoring, virtualization, backups, deployment and so on. Many of the largest systems companies like Microsoft, IBM and HP provide extensive tool sets for managing the data center. The expectation is not that each new application that a company deploys will provide all of this basic IT functionality, rather the expectation is that the application will be capable of being managed by the existing tool set that a company uses. If your company is using Microsoft System Center for deploying applications, monitoring them in production, and backing up their data, you will not require, let alone utilize, that functionality from an application vendor that provides a new software package you are buying. Instead you will require that application vendor to allow their application to be fully managed by System Center.

In much the same way there is an emerging tools market for SaaS and online based applications that will provide much of the basic IT infrastructure that businesses have come to expect in their own data centers. Many of these tools such as online monitoring tool vendor Pingdom are already well established. There are many more companies that are being founded even now that will fill in across the remaining IT service gaps.

About Us:

Centripetal Software products, Aanhou Retrieve™, Aanhou Archive™ and Aanhou Migrate™, provide the ability for a customer of a SaaS application to retrieve full and incremental snapshots of their data so that they can access it at anytime, archive it in ways of their choosing, or migrate to competing services with zero downtime. Sign up today to join our beta program or to be alerted as new products are made available.

Website & Beta Release!

The website for Centripetal Software is now live. I'll still be tweeking it here and there and putting up new content, but the overall site is up and ready. There are a couple of cool things that I figured I'd call out here.

First, the rotating images on the front page were done by a local design company named Movement Designs, they do great work and do it quickly. Sean Naus is the owner of that company and is a pleasure to work with (and fun to surf with as well).

Next, I pulled together a How it Works screencast video that is a product overview and gives a short explanation of what it is our products do. It's not super flashy or anything, but gets the point across. I used a cool video screen capture product called Jing Project to record the video and audio. I'll write up more on that another time, but check it out as it makes screen casting super simple.

Finally, I'm also kicking off the Beta for the first product. Aanhou Retrieve™ for Basecamp is our first product to be released and I'll be sending out beta invitations as I get through them. You can request a beta invitation on our new site.

Business Cards

Well now that I have a new logo from 99Designs I needed to get business cards. I used Vista Print to do it all online. It was simple, I chose from their long list of templates, then plugged in my information, uploaded a few image files and tweaked things a bit, entered my credit card and they showed up on my door step a few days later. I'm quite pleased with the quality of these. My first attempt at it with my old logo and name did not turn out so good. It is important to use very high resolution images, even for something as small as a business card.

I'm not quite sure why, but I felt the need to have physical business cards. In all my years working at Sun Microsystems and Microsoft about the only use I found for the boxes of business cards I received with my name and fancy titles on them, was to drop them in the free lunch drawing at Chipotle or Starbucks. Rarely did I hand them out to people who would actually have some use for them. Now that I am running my own software company (Centripetal Software) will I have more use for physical cards? I'm not too sure. At some point I'll be doing a lot more marketing, but that seems like it will be mostly online. Maybe I'll be heading out to some conferences or meeting with clients where I'll feel the need to hand over a card. Until then I'll just post a digital copy here and then tuck the box of heavy card stock, 4 color, front and back printed business cards into the drawer of my desk.

99designs

My company, Centripetal Software, is a new software startup. I quit my job at Microsoft on Oct. 15, 2009 to work on it full time. One thing that I wanted to get done was to begin to have a more professional presence on the web and elsewhere. I figured this started with ditching the home made logo I had created myself and go get a professionally designed logo. I began looking around online and with people that I knew who did this sort of thing and quickly determined that I couldn't afford to have it done professionally. About this same time I was reading through Bob Walsh's book "The Web Startup Success Guide" and came across a company profile he has in the book for 99 Designs. This web startup was exactly what I needed. This is basically crowd sourcing your design work.

The process for getting a logo created starts out by creating a Design Contest. In order to do this I wrote up my Design Brief which included a brief introduction to my company, a bit about my target audience, and then described what I wanted in a logo including some pointers to other logos that I sort of liked and why I liked them. Once I submitted this information the important part for a boot strapped startup came next. I got to choose how much I was going to pay for the whole thing. I chose to give a $295 prize to the winner of the contest. This is basically a guaranteed payment to a designed who creates the logo that I select. 99 Designs charges a small fee on top of that so my entire bill came to $364, much less than the thousands I had been quoted elsewhere.

Within a couple days of the contest starting up, different desingers began to submit designs. I was able to comment on each and every design telling what I liked and didn't like and changes I would like to see in the designs. Most designers were quick to turn around new designs and post them for me to see. The contest lasted for 10 days and by the end of the contest I had received 141 entries, many of them were variations on the same design, but I'd estimate I received about 30 unique designs from 15 different designers. I ended up choosing the logo you see on this site and have posted it here as well. I was very happy with the entire process and what I received as well as the cost. In the end I received my winning design in a Photoshop file and the designer even included some icons using my logo that I had expressed interest in. My logo now graces my business cards, my website, and is all over the development version of my product (which will be released in the next couple weeks).

99 Designs does Logos, icons, web site layouts, twitter and blog themes and pretty much anything design related. I'll certainly use them again when I need some additional work done.

The Pros:

• The Cost! $364 complete


• The Options, with that many options I was sure to find something I liked.


• Easy Process, 99 Designs makes it easy to get design work done for someone who is not design savvy.

The Cons:

• Information Overload - I almost had too many designs to choose from and had a hard time picking in the end. It also took a significant chunk of time to comment on each design.