Existing ISVs and new entrants both face the challenge of moving to the SaaS model and the industry must look to its partnerships to make this work
David Grimes (above, left), NaviSite CTO spoke at last week's European Software and Solutions Summit on the changes facing ISVs. Talking to IT Europa Editor John Garratt, he said:
“ISVs are at the crossroads; they are at a point where there are the new opportunities, perhaps based on the business intelligence that we have discussed here today, and the new ISVs coming into the market face a new deployment model that is fundamentally different from the ISVs that have been around for ten or twenty years. So the crossroads is how we as a group of industry partners think about the greenfield, ie what the born in the cloud model looks like, while also considering all the existing solutions that are out there. The old model – on-prem- doesn't scale, has an overhead of management, and we see it moving to a hosted model.”
It is a big growth area for NaviSite, he says –but how do the ISVs move forward to a true multi-tenant, SaaS model? “It is a big task and I don't think most of them are ready to bite off that task. What I look at is how NaviSite can grow with them, provide a solution that is hosted and scales, and the value we can bring in providing managed services, on top of the infrastructure and let them focus on innovation in what they do.”
It is about partnership – even the event here today is the value; there is a really interesting mix here – an ecosystem that are mutually dependent on each other. How do we think about roles and responsibilities – an infrastructure vendor, ISV and hardware vendor – how do we inter-relate? The infrastructure exists to service the needs of an application, and in the model, the lines of responsibility and saying, 'It's your problem or its your's' really needs to be a partner relationship. This event has provided a real opportunity to cement those relationships.”