Saturday, July 19, 2008

XaaS - How entrepreners decide on what the next "X" would be

Here is the context. In the IT world, for a very long time, we had two versions of offerings. Hosted service and a packaged product. Now, we have everything as a service. SalesForce promoted CRM as a service and propagated the idea of SaaS. Platform as a service, Storage as a service all followed suit.

I hate the current job search process and at the same time I love it too. I learned quite a few things by talking to several companies in a fairly detailed level. One of the startup I interviewed with was a victim of its own publicity and could not handle the traffic and miserably failed. They have come out of it through the use of EC2, Amazon's cloud computing(It is basically infrastructure as a service). Startups are stretched for resources and anything that would come as a variable cost is a welcome sign for them. Whether SalesForce, EC2, Google AppEngine or something else going to win or not is not merely dependent upon the alliances and standards but a lot on what and how entrepreneurs choose such services.

My question is, how savvy are the entrepreneurs to use such "X"aaS? Will they need some consulting help? Or, will there be a need for optimizers to come and help them choose the package, tariffs, usage patterns, etc?

1 comment:

Kohei said...

I guess how savvy entrepreneurs depends on each case, but I totally agree with you that any service that converts fix costs into variable costs are worth consideration. For example, I am considering Paypal for my site because it provides credit card processing capability without any initial fixed costs, though its variable costs are higher than other providers. I would give consideration to Amazon web services if their servers were located in Japan, but most of them are still in the States and I heard response time is quite slow if accessed from outside the country.