3months Agile Consulting Blog

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model is taking the world by storm with its promise of no-hassle On-Demand service subscription (typically for a monthly fee). More and more packaged-software vendors are at least contemplating a SaaS version of their product offering. But don’t be fooled! SaaS solutions live in a totally different context than more traditional desktop products! Web 2.0, Product Development 2.0, Mashups and the likes are ruling this world now. Product release cycles of 6 months or longer are just not acceptable anymore.

Being involved both in smartbeanz (a financial management SaaS solution) and in product development at Fronde I take a strong interest in the dynamics around SaaS. While my CEO Jim has some insight on SaaS strategies for packaged software vendors (read also Sinclair Schuller’s post) Troy Wing (CTO of Forcelogix) names Agile Development Methodologies as the number one factor for a successful adoption of a SaaS business model. I quote:

Software as a Service Development is all about low cost, high quality and speed of delivery.
You cannot afford to adopt a bloated and slow approach to delivering features.
Users will identify features and issues that will become showstoppers unless you can resolve quickly.
The ability to deliver new features quickly will also help retain user interest in your product.

I couldn’t agree more! For smartbeanz we have a monthly release cycle working off the highest priorities on the product backlog. Yes, we have a road map but user feedback and a ever-changing market place frequently forces us to re-prioritize or even add and implement new features which originally weren’t on the road map at all. At Fronde we are currently designing a product where we didn’t know what exactly it would look like when we started - yet we are very happy with were we got to now! None of this would be possible without an agile mindset, agile development techniques and short time-boxed iterations.

And if you’re still in doubt about the merits of agile development in a SaaS world read what Salesforce.com (the prime example of SaaS success) attributes its success to (download the report as PDF).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.