ISV

Interview with New Member: Techcello

December 28, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA is delighted to welcome our newest member Asteor Software. I had a chance to sit down with Shankar Krishnamoorthy to learn more about their application development platform.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA. Tell me a little bit about Techcello and what makes your solutions unique.

Shankar: Techcello is a cloud ready, multi-tenant application development platform – used by ISVs and Enterprises to build their products and applications faster and better. We are featured as Gartner Cool Vendor and Nasscom Emerge League of 10 company. ISVs who are looking at building green-field SaaS products or migrating their existing on-premise products to SaaS look at using Techcello as the platform for building their SaaS products. And, large enterprises use our Techcello platform to build their applications such as dealership management system, benefits management systems, etc. because of our strong security engine, tenant hierarchy capabilities, business rules & workflow features, developer productivity components, etc. Invision, Secova, Duosoft, Roferez, Sutherland Global Services are some of our prestigious customers who have used Techcello extensively for building their applications.

Approach to application development on top of .NET is unique in Techcello. We have productized the complex portions of building software (architecture, plumbing, data security, etc.) into Techcello and let the developers focus on building their business specific functionalities rather than bogged down by engineering complexities. They consume the API/Webservices provided by Techcello for these complex functionalities. While developers will stay with their usual development style and approach for building the software, it will be governed by Techcello so that complexities are taken care by Techcello and also the developers are lot more productive. This saves anywhere between 90 to 150 people months of effort in application development on a typical large project. So, time to market is faster. Apart from saving cost and effort, the fact that our customers use .NET technology, which gives them the complete control and flexibility in their technical approach/decisions. We believe this provides a very unique advantage for Techcello.

Rhianna: This past year you conducted a survey on SaaS/Cloud Multi-Tenancy. Can you tell us a little about your findings?

Shankar: We asked ISVs “Where are you on the road to Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy”. We mapped Cloud adoption (Current and Planned), SaaS adoption (Current and Planned), Multi-tenancy adoption (Current and Planned), Development Approaches and Platforms. The responses show that there is a positive trend across the industry towards Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy in that order. Most companies understand the challenges, skills and investments required to build Configurable, Multi-tenant applications for a scalable Private or Public Cloud. They recognize that shifting to SaaS requires different kind of approaches both towards software development and operationalization. And, they prefer to stick with 3GL platforms such as.NET and J2EE for such development. This is more towards getting freedom, flexibility and talent. The results can be viewed here : http://blog.techcello.com/2012/04/cloud-saas-multi-tenancy-techcello-survey-2012/

Rhianna: What are some of the biggest challenges that companies face when engineering a Multi-tenant SaaS application?

Major challenge is the need of understanding multi-tenancy holistically. Each tenant data has to be secured at all levels – whether it is user data, business rules, workflow, extension fields, etc. Application architecture has to be built on top of data security considerations. This also leads to several non-functional requirements. People often underestimate the effort here. Overheads can be as high as 30%. For example, Multi-tenant SaaS implies a single code base for 1000s of customers. That brings in a lot of other implied needs such as the ability to customize the data models, views, rules and workflows at the end user / tenant level. The set-up as well as enforcement of “Who sees / does what” in the system, should also be dynamically managed during run time as it may vary depending on the region / vertical / customer. Many products are designed for global use and hence we need a layered hierarchy of tenants and users. Add to these, the obvious challenges of performance and scalability on the Cloud. Building all these capabilities is not rocket science. But the expertise and experience required is not easy to find; plus, it consumes good amount of time. Developers often prefer to focus on the business functionalities and rightfully so. But it is too risky to leave these critical engineering aspects to be closely coupled with business features. Even for customers who want to build the whole stack ground up, we always recommend that they create a separate framework team internally to build and maintain the engineering stack.

We have written an ebook on Simplifying multi-tenant application development and it is available for you to download from our website, www.techcello.com. We have covered all aspects of engineering a multi-tenant application development and it has received rave reviews from some of the readers/customers.

Rhianna: I saw a white paper you published on Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). How do you define the NFRs and why is it critical to do so?

Shankar: Non-functional requirements are something which you may not define explicitly in your product specifications, but, expect that the product should have these. Performance, Security, Scalability, Configurability, etc. will generally come under NFR as these are not generally spelt out explicitly. If the NFRs of a custom .NET solution built for a specific customer consumes 10-15% of overall effort, the NFRs of multi-tenant SaaS products could take as high as 30%. If the product does not meet NFRs expected by a customer, it can lead to several issues (eg. Unsatisfactory performance of the software, unsatisfied customers, revenue loss, etc.). Thinking about them in the form of a productized framework (whether it is built in house or bought from outside), is critical for the long term TCO and maintainability. Many people have gone to the market with Multi-tenant products thinking that it is nothing more than adding tenant ID to the database tables. And they often have to re-engineer / re-build as they go along or compromise on their competitive advantage. CEOs and CTOs should take an active role in evaluating the NFR Check list. Based on the positive feedback we got for our white paper, we have now built an excel sheet that helps CEOs and CTOs think and choose what NFRs are needed now and in the future and calculate the effort and money that needs to be invested on them. Please write to info@techcello.com to get more details on this ROI calculator.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: ISV, paas, saas

Executive Profile – Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat

December 19, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA Software Division Executive Profile

Name: Gunnar Hellekson
Title: Chief Technology Strategist
Company: Red Hat

Gunnar Hellekson is the Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. He is co-chair of Open Source for America and one of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 for 2010. He is also an active member of the Military Open Source working group, the Freedom 2 Connect Technical Council, New America’s California Civic Innovation Project Advisory Council, and the CivicCommons Board of Advisors. He is especially interested in cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model.

Home town: Honolulu, Hawaii

First job: Slaving away on an AS/400 for Louis Vuitton’s Honolulu operation when I was in high school.

What are you currently reading? “Industry and Empire”, by E.J. Hobsbawn

All-time favorite music: Reggae. I’m from Hawaii, so that’s mandatory.

What is the best meal you have had recently? The “Heather” from Taco Deli in Austin.

What is your next (dream) career? I’m doing it right now.

Hobbies: My wife, my dog, and fancy cocktails.

What do you think is the hot button issue for the software & services industry going into 2013? The elimination of customization and craftwork, and the introduction of standardization and automation.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Cloud/Gov, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: ISV, Open Source, Red Hat

Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

December 12, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA is delighted to welcome new member LiquidPlanner. I had a chance to speak with their CEO, Liz Pearce, to learn more about the company and the project management market.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: ISV, project management, saas

Interview with New Member: Recurly

November 21, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA recently welcomed Recurly to the membership. I spoke to their CEO, Dan Burkhart, to find out a little more about the company and the subscription billing marketplace.

Rhianna: Tell me about Recurly. What makes your billing management solution unique?

Dan: Recurly was designed from day one to provide a subscription billing management as a ‘self-serve’ offering. Every single design decision since the first day had this approach in mind – from our application architecture, to our APIs, our interface design and even our pricing and overall transparency of our service. This has afforded us a tremendous competitive advantage, because our application itself is our greatest sales tool. In our business, establishing trust with our customers is a very large part of customer acquisition, and there is no better way to quickly accomplish that than by NOT hiding anything, and by delighting our customers within the first 60 seconds after signup.

Rhianna: You have been particularly successful aligning yourself with strong channel partners. What makes a strong channel partner for Recurly and why are these partnerships core to your business?

Dan: Recurring billing is a painful thing for companies to get set up and operating smoothly. We do everything we can to eliminate payments-related jargon, and to reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver value to our customers. Our customers are able to go live in days, rather than months required from other enterprise solutions. For channel partners, this means that our service can also be resold very easily because it is designed to be a ‘light-touch, high velocity’ sale.

We have found two distinct kinds of channel partners to date:

Marketplaces – [Ex. Recurly powers billing for Salesforce's AppExchange Checkout] https://vimeo.com/40358739
Merchant Services Providers – [Ex. Recurly is partnered with TSYS, which has hundreds of salespeople seeking to solve problems for merchants on a daily basis]

The best channel partners are those that share a common passion for helping our mutual customers succeed. In addition, the best partnerships tend to emerge out of a ‘value-sharing’ disposition, rather than a ‘value-capture’ mindset. We always seek to align ourselves with companies that value relationships and show a willingness to invest in growing them over time.

Rhianna: You refer to your solution as “bought not sold”, a formula many other companies would love to have. Did you ever think it would take this direction when you founded the company?

Dan: As a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ service, we don’t require our customers to enter into long-term, unpleasant contracts. This creates a very different construct from the very early stages of the conversation. For example, if a customer has a set of requirements that we cannot support, we are the first to acknowledge that. We’d rather lose the business than sign up a customer that will be disappointed 60 days later.
By offering Recurly on a month-to-month, pay-as-you-go model, we know that if we disappoint our customers on any level, they are free to leave us at any time. (In fact, one of our core promises to our customers is that we will make it easy to migrate should they ever decide to leave us. We never hold their data hostage – and this only accelerates our goodwill with our customers). This immediately engenders trust because it shows that we have confidence in our offering, and we have nothing to hide. There is a bit of an implied guarantee to our customers with this approach.

Many of our original customers are now getting acquired by larger companies, or individuals are moving to senior posts within new companies, and their positive opinions of Recurly are being carried with them. This is very pleasing to see customer goodwill working as our most effective marketing tool.

Rhianna: Is it true that you can get subscriptions up and running on a website in just days? Even with custom integrations?

Dan: Our customers move from sign-up to production on average in less than a week. Highly customized integrations require several weeks at most. We provide tools to easily integrate PCI compliant checkout forms into our customers’ websites. When publicly traded companies come to us, their legal teams require more time to review documents than it takes developers and product people to get ready for launch.

Rhianna: There is a lot of competition in the subscription billing space today. Where do you think this market is headed in the next 12-18 months?

Dan: The market is growing incredibly quickly. With the costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power all declining together, the distribution model for applications and services has naturally followed suit. With this change in the distribution model, pricing models have naturally evolved towards ‘pay-as-you-go’, (subscription or recurring) billing models. In this new world, you pay for what you consume, or ‘pay to play’.

Cloud and SaaS services are by definition offered on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. Digital content, media, and entertainment are also increasingly offered on either a ‘pay per download’ or subscription basis.

Purchasing psychology of consumers has also evolved. As recently as 5-10 years ago, companies felt that they had to own every last aspect of their own operations in house. During this same era, we were also still buying music CDs in music stores and storing them on our shelves.

Today, companies are increasingly comfortable with ‘renting’ capacity via cloud services, along with renting ‘expertise’ that simply isn’t cost-effective to own internally. Subscription billing fits into this latter category. When you consider the total cost of ownership for enduring PCI audits, as well as the enterprise risk of storing customer credit cards, this category becomes one of the first areas to be considered for outsourcing to experts.

We couldn’t be more excited about this market opportunity and the overall future for Recurly.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: Billing, ISV, paas

Interview with New Member, Transverse

October 24, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA recently welcomed Transverse, a SaaS billing platform provider. I had a chance to speak with their Co-Founder, President, & CEO, James Messer. James is an 18 year veteran of the telecommunications and IT industries and I asked him about Transverse’s position in the marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Transverse and what makes your billing platform unique.

James: For businesses looking to increase revenue or roll-out new business models, TRACT billing from Transverse is the only all-in-one activity-based billing platform that can meter/rate and bill based on customer behavior. Unlike basic subscription or expensive legacy billing systems, TRACT provides a simple solution to complex billing challenges and enables companies to engage with customers.

Rhianna: Tell me more about activity-based billing, what are the advantages?

James: Consumers are using monthly services to download songs, stream movies or view a digital news article, but most would prefer to only pay for what they use and that’s where subscriptions are limiting. Businesses can provide a more personalized experience for consumers while creating new revenue streams by charging on an activity basis instead.

Rhianna: You talk about this evolution of billing, how it has gone from Billing 1.0 to Billing 3.0. What do you mean when you refer to Billing 3.0?

James: Billing 3.0 means billing is a valuable tool that extends beyond finance department. By capturing revenue in an accurate, timely fashion using activity-based billing, other groups (such as the marketing department), can use the resulting analytics to identify and respond to emerging customer trends faster than competitors. With Billing 3.0, billing becomes a powerful enabler of product innovation and rapid introduction.

Rhianna: I noticed you have a number of partners, payment and technology partners. How important are these partners to the Transverse go-to-market strategy?

James: Partners are a key ingredient to helping our customers succeed. These include active payment partners, such as PayPal, Chase Paymentech, CyberSource, Authorize.net, and First Data. Additionally, we partner closely with technology companies like SugarCRM, Pervasive, OpSource, Rackspace Hosting, and OneLogin to enable seamless integration and ease of use.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software, Software Events Tagged With: Billing, cloud computing, iaas, ISV, saas

Interview with New SIIA Member, PaySimple

July 25, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA recently welcomed PaySimple to the SIIA community. After presenting at the SIIA Strategic & Financial Investment conference last month, I had a chance to chat with their CEO, Eric Remer. Read my full interview below.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about PaySimple and what makes you unique.

Eric: PaySimple simplifies the way small businesses bill and collect payments and empowers them with technology to make their business more efficient. Our cloud-based accounts receivable automation solution includes support for multiple payment types, across multiple payment channels (mobile, web, recurring, and invoice) all integrated with customer management. This solution uniquely meets the needs of small businesses in the services sector. With PaySimple, 85% of customers save time and 55% get paid faster. PaySimple also offers custom-branded programs for large enterprises looking to provide value-added solutions to their small business members. Partners in market today include American Express, JP Morgan Chase, Western Union, Vantiv, Jack Henry and ADP.

Rhianna: Your sweet spot is small businesses. As those businesses scale, can PaySimple scale along with them? Are their specific requirements for retaining those customers?

Eric: We are fortunate in that many of our customers have grown significantly since they began using PaySimple. While our solution is easily approachable for the business just making the switch to automated billing, it also has a robust feature set to support the evolving needs of growing businesses. Some examples include multiple users and roles, sophisticated reporting and proven scalability.
We’ve found that once a small business uses the system, they are likely to remain a customer for life. PaySimple places a strong emphasis on helping customers get started including uploading their customers and processing their first transaction. Most of our customers will achieve an ROI in their first month of usage. In our experience, the vital keys to retaining small business customers include a product that is easy to use, that provides ongoing tangible value all backed by amazing customer support.

Rhianna: As our lives become more and more mobile, how important is mobile to your business strategy?

Eric: Mobile is a key component of our business strategy. It is vital for small business owners to be able to conduct business and access information anytime from anywhere. PaySimple launched iPhone and Android apps last year and have continued to enhance and expand these apps in 2012.
We’ve found that small business owners not only want to use mobile devices to collect payments, but that they also find the ability to manage their business from anywhere very valuable. Some of the most common actions taken with our apps beyond payment processing include checking the receivables overview dashboard and interacting with customers such as pulling up a map, or placing a phone call.

Rhianna: You have received a couple of awards recently, JMP Securities Hot 100 Companies and Red Herring Americas Top 100 Private Companies. What does that recognition mean for PaySimple?

Eric: The recent recognition and awards we’ve received have been a great honor. We view these awards as another market indicator that the receivables automation movement is going mainstream to help small businesses improve their cash flow and manage their business more efficiently. We are excited to be recognized by these organizations for our innovative approach to helping small businesses and the enterprises that serve them.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Digital Media & Software Investment Conference, Mobility, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: ISV, PaySimple, saas

Interview with New Member: Techcello

Executive Profile – Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat

Calling all Young and Innovative Tech Companies

Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

Interview with New Member: Recurly

Interview with New Member, Transverse

Interview with New SIIA Member, PaySimple

About SIIA