Don’t press the panic button. SaaS and cloud market opportunities remain real. But even the big players continue to suffer from scattered outages. The latest example involves Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a SaaS platform that has had some outages in recent days. It raises the question again: Will any IT company emerge as the Volvo — reliable, trustworthy, safe — of the SaaS market?
First, some background. According to the Microsoft Online Services team blog:
On January 28, customers served from a North America data center may have experienced intermittent access to services included in the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite.
Alas, some of the services continued to suffer from outages on Feb. 1 and 2, according to the Microsoft Online RSS feed.
Where Is the Volvo of SaaS?
Microsoft isn’t alone. Many prominent SaaS and cloud providers have suffered intermittent outages in recent weeks, prompting The VAR Guy to ask: Where is the Volvo of SaaS?
Quite a few folks emailed and called our resident blogger to offer their thoughts. One prime example: Intermedia, a hosted Exchange specialist that works closely with VARs and MSPs, points to a 99.999% uptime guarantee and a 100% data protection guarantee.
Will other SaaS providers begin to market around quality and value — rather than low-ball pricing? The VAR Guy is watching (and listening) for clues.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Tags: Business Productivity Online Suite | Hosted Exchange | Intermedia | Microsoft Cloud
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
VAR guy: The outages are newsworthy but the real story is in the last sentence of your blog. SAAS success is about value, not price! Too bad the big vendors haven’t learned that (yet). Do you think they ever will????
Frankie,
To answer your question, no the big vendors will never learn the value vs. price lesson on SaaS.
-TVG
I agree with Frankie! but there is a fact that we cant ignore – customers do come to SaaS in the first place because of price. The result: with the huge amount of SaaS vendors coming about these days, and everyone trying to be cheaper – we are probably due for more outages. The ones that will survive are the ones that will be able to showcase both quality AND price. The problem that many SaaS vendors are not taking into consideration is the fact that the frontloaded costs (sales process, hosting, etc) should not be resolved by lowering costs that impact quality, but rather turn to a more clever, fine tuned, focused and cheaper sales & marketing process. Also I hope that the hosting war that is now going on will help lower hosting prices while hopefully preserving quality (unless they all become horrible in effort of lowering price… oh crap…)
Benny
bennyshaviv.com
Benny: The VAR Guy thinks there will be more outages, along with SaaS players that completely disappear (forever) because they price too low.
-TVG