Not to be undone by others in the industry, Savvis announced its SaaS Platform initiative at the end of September. Because Savvis is one of the first top-tier companies to put such a comprehensive program together, I asked Bryan Doerr to join me on the Converging On Microsoft podcast. Savvis has taken a “best of” approach, borrowing ideas from Jamcracker and OpSource for the software-as-a-service marketplace component of the offering. It also took a page out of OpSource’s book on wrapping services around what independent software vendors need to get their software onto the SaaS model. (Treb Ryan, OpSource CEO, was previously on the podcast.)
Where Savvis departs from the software- and technology-specific approaches of Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Google, is that it doesn’t force customers to use a specific software layer or infrastructure. It’s very much a hosting provider’s take on the problem, which of course plays to Savvis’ strength. During the podcast, we get into what Savvis has to do in order to compete with these software, marketplace and service-provider platforms; and that leads to an interesting discussion about the road ahead for Bryan and Savvis.
Take a listen to the podcast. I think you’ll enjoy this part of the conversation with Bryan. In a few days, I’ll be posting Part 2 of the interview, where Bryan and I get into how the economic downturn impacts SaaS ISVs, enterprises using hosting services, and hosting companies like Savvis that have invested a great deal of capital in their infrastructure.
Listen:
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