Cloud/SaaS Knowledge Ecosystem: The Players

I’ve spent the past couple of days with some of the VMG team brainstorming about the opportunities we see in the Cloud/SasS market and how we want to approach them. One of the first things we did was to map out what that ecosystem looks like and how the knowledge flows between the different types of entities. Here’s a simplified view of that map:

In this post I’ll just give an intro to the types of players (the circles). Note that these categories represent roles as opposed to company types. Some companies will only fit one of these roles, but in this fast-moving, emerging space many companies play multiple roles. (I’ll tackle the flow of knowledge (the arrows) in a later post.)

Cloud Infrastructure Providers

Furthest upstream are the infrastructure and platform providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, Salesforce.com’s Force.com and upcoming VMforce platforms as well as several smaller Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) companies.

IaaS companies provide raw computing power, storage, and network bandwidth available in the shared public cloud or as a “private cloud”. PaaS companies build on that to provide software development platforms (e.g. Force.com) and ready-to-go building blocks of functionality (e.g. Amazon Payments) that make it easy to build SaaS applications.

SaaS Application Providers

Where IaaS and PaaS is all about the building blocks, Software as a Service (SaaS) providers deliver the complete applications that let corporate and consumer customers do real work (or play in some cases).

There are some big players that everyone knows, like Salesforce.com in CRM or Google Apps (and now Microsoft) providing office productivity tools. But there are also hundreds of smaller providers creating more focused applications for a particular niche. For example, our client Spigit provides collaboration tools to help companies manage innovation and our client Convio helps non-profits to manage their fundraising efforts.

Sales and Implementation Partners

The Cloud/SaaS world is VERY big on partnering. These are companies that are founded on the concept of focusing on a small set of core competencies and getting others to fill in the gaps.

At the top end, Google Apps is selling implementations of 50,000 users, but providing no implementation services. That’s right: none. They stay focused on their core competency of building the Google Apps to be the best it can be and rely 100% on partners to provide the services around that platform.

At the low end, even small $10 million per year SaaS companies rely heavily on partners, both for capacity and competency. On the capacity side many of these companies are growing very rapidly (and often irregularly) and partners can help increase capacity and even out the bumps.

Training is a great example on the competency-driven side. SaaS companies know that they need to train their customers, but realize that they don’t have much expertise in how to do so. They don’t have a training department and explicitly don’t want one. (Our partner Appirio regularly talks about never owning a server. Why would they want to own a training department??) They’re thrilled to partner with us and leverage our core competency.
They’re thrilled to partner with us and just have the problem go away.

End Customers

Finally there are the end customers using the SaaS applications. (Actually that’s not always final, since in some cases the application facilitates interaction between the customer and their customers.)

I’ll save diving into the needs of these folks for another post, but as a preview will just point out that there’s a lot of arrows coming into that circle.

~ posted by John Hathaway on 13 May 10
   tagged as: cloud, ecosystem, partnering, SaaS

 

3 Responses so far. Add Your Own.

Leave Your Own Comment.

Your Comment
Name (required) Email (required) Website  Submit Comment