The Fortiva Blog

SaaS Archiving for Large Enterprises – Beating On-Premise Solutions on Performance & Price

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

When most people think of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), they associate it with small and medium businesses. While it’s true that SMBs make up a large part of the overall market for SaaS, it’s important not to underestimate the impact SaaS is having on larger enterprises as well. At Fortiva, our market consists exclusively of mid-to-large enterprises, and we’ve seen the demand for “cloud computing” increase significantly among the largest enterprises over the past year. In fact, we have worked with our partners to sign multiple global accounts with well over 10,000 mailboxes in the past few months alone.

There are a number of reasons for this growth in the enterprise space – at a high level, CIOs are realizing that in many cases, it makes more sense to take advantage of the expertise that a SaaS provider can offer, rather than trying to maintain a high level of IT expertise on-premise for all applications (which is increasingly impossible).

At Fortiva, we’ve worked hard to ensure that we can compete head-on with on-premise solutions on both features and security. Arguably though, our success in the enterprise market has been due in large part to two key things: low TCO and high performance. As Gartner analysts noted in their Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving, 1Q08 Update, Fortiva’s SaaS email archive is the lowest-priced managed offering on the market today – something we’re committed to maintaining without compromising on features or performance.

Keeping these commitments on price and performance while taking on more and more global enterprises means that we need to make ongoing improvements “behind the scenes” here at Fortiva. Today, we announced some of those changes in a press release, including dramatic performance improvements to our archiving solution that will allow up to 12-times faster processing for email, as well as greater efficiencies in the indexing of data and the application of policies to archived messages.

I think it’s important to realize that we never formally announce the majority of upgrades and improvements we make to our solution – they simply happen and are deployed to our customers without their knowledge. As our customer base continues to grow with the addition of much larger enterprises, we’re able to continually take advantage of greater economies of scale and newer hardware technologies, which in turn lower our costs to serve. The result is a solution that offers better performance than can be achieved with on-premise solutions, at a lower cost and without the headaches of managing a growing storage archive on a day-to-day basis.

The full release with all the details is posted on the Fortiva site.

Microsoft to Expand Microsoft Online Services for Businesses of All Sizes

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

An exciting announcement came out of Redmond today saying that Microsoft Online Services will be extended to enterprises with fewer than 5,000 employees. Last September, Microsoft announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Online Services for businesses with more than 5,000 users (known as “dedicated offerings”). According to the release, today’s announcement extends the same performance, scalability, security and service level capabilities to all businesses.

As the email archiving provider for Microsoft Online Services dedicated offerings, we are obviously happy to see Microsoft bringing their “software plus services” to a wider audience. Regardless of that, this announcement is a good thing for businesses that want the benefits that Microsoft’s Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office Communications products offer, but don’t want to dedicate significant internal IT resources to make that possible. At Fortiva, we’ve spoken numerous times about the difference between “core and context” applications, and how context applications are ideally suited for SaaS delivery, allowing businesses to focus on their core applications. Since all of these applications fall squarely in the “context” category, Microsoft’s Online Services can open the door for businesses to focus their resources on core areas that can make them more competitive – and that can only be a good thing for business.

To view the full release, click here. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-02AllSizeBusinessesPR.mspx

When Does SaaS Make Sense? Core vs. Context Applications

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

The benefits of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – from ease-of-use to lower cost of ownership – have been well publicized over the past few years, partly as a result of the success of companies like Salesforce.com. This increased attention has resulted in the SaaS model growing in both awareness and popularity among North American businesses. In fact, analyst firm Gartner Inc. is projecting a compound annual growth rate of 22.1% for the SaaS market through 2011. 

Despite the growth and the hype surrounding it, SaaS is not well-suited for every application. So that leaves many asking the question– how can I distinguish those solutions that are best suited for SaaS from those that I should keep in-house?

At Fortiva, we often explain this distinction in terms of core systems and context systems, a theory that was introduced by Geoffrey Moore in his book, Living on the Faultline: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy. According to this interview with Cisco Systems, Moore explains the core vs. context basics in this way:

The word “core” in business has typically been used to describe what you are distinctively competent at. We’re actually [defining it differently to describe] what distinctively differentiates you in the eyes of the customers. In an ideal world the two are the same. What you’re best at is what differentiates you. And as a result they pay you a higher margin than you otherwise could gain.

Focusing on your core means trying to put as much human capital and financial capital as you can behind processes that have this impact, because they’re differentiating. Everything else, once you accept that definition of core, we call “context.” Context is extremely important to the success of the company. If you fail to fulfill a context task, you could easily lose a customer, be out of compliance with regulation or law, or alienate an employee, a partner, or your community.

So essentially, core applications (those that differentiate a business and impact customer purchase decisions) are usually best maintained in-house, where a high degree of control and customization can be applied. All other applications are context – and are typically good candidates for SaaS deployments.

By outsourcing context applications such as email archiving to a SaaS provider, the burden on internal resources can be relieved, allowing them to focus on core systems and activities and ensure those systems are constantly improved and running at peak performance. At the same time, the customer benefits from the economies of scale, constant upgrades and high level of service that a SaaS provider can offer.

Is SaaS Destined to "Go the Way of the ASP"?

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

Is Software as a Service (SaaS) destined to “go the way of the ASP”? This is the question that Karen Guglielmo of SearchCIO.com posed to her readers earlier this week, after hearing some CIOs voice their concerns regarding the potential life span of the SaaS vendor market and whether they should wait for an industry shakeout. As the CEO of a SaaS company, I thought I would share my views on this issue.

While there are certain similarities between SaaS and ASPs – both are ways of outsourcing technology and both suffer from broad definitions – there are also fundamental differences that explain why SaaS is here to stay (and why ASPs largely disappeared).

• Solution Performance:
  The biggest difference between the ASPs of the 90’s and SaaS today is the ability for SaaS applications to deliver on performance promises. In the late 90s (the height of ASPs), significant bandwidth issues limited any solution delivered over a network. In most cases, ASPs offered on-premise solutions, managed offsite. These solutions weren’t built from scratch with the idea of supporting multiple customers, and they were further hindered by the bandwidth problem. The result was a poor user experience and a series of manageability issues.
      
  Since then, the bandwidth issues have been resolved and true SaaS solutions have been built from the ground up to cater to multiple customers. Consequently, they offer an end-user experience that is comparable to (and in some cases better than) in-house software. Web 2.0 technology has also provided the tools and technology to allow deeper integration with other applications, providing an added layer of benefit.

• Demands on IT: The other big shift has been a change in overall demands on IT. In the late 90’s, IT budgets were relatively generous and businesses were still figuring out  how technology could give them a competitive edge. There were also serious concerns about outsourcing, which led many companies to keep their IT initiatives house. This meant heavy upfront investments in hardware and software, and often led to serious shelfware issues with undeployed software going to waste.
      
  Today, outsourcing to places like China and India has become commonplace. As the complexity of software has increased, budgets have decreased, and the pressure on CIOs to deliver “more with less” continues. This means that businesses must take a focused look at those “core” applications that differentiate them, and apply their internal resources on those areas. All other applications (or those “context applications”) are serious candidates for SaaS solutions that can be quickly deployed without significant time and management effort on the part of IT and without significant investments in infrastructure. As an added value, these SaaS applications eliminate shelfware waste.

The simple truth is that a product or technology that is cheaper, faster and easier to deploy and maintain is not a “fad” that’s going away. While CIOs should be aware that there are a lot of vendors using the term SaaS for non-SaaS products, these “pretenders” are unlikely to be able to deliver on the promises of Software as a Service.

Jeff Kaplan, the founding and managing director of THINKstrategies, was right – businesses should conduct the same level of due diligence for SaaS solutions as they would with traditional software. This means measuring the time to deployment, the value to the organization, and the TCO, as well as assessing the viability of the company at large. But they shouldn’t ignore SaaS – CIOs that wait for “the bubble to burst” are missing out on a great opportunity.

 

Welcome to The Fortiva Blog

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

Let me start this post by introducing myself – my name is Eric Goodwin, and I am the CEO at Fortiva. I am very pleased to be writing the first post for the official Fortiva Blog; however, before I go on, I should probably explain why this doesn’t appear to be the first post on the site. We’re very fortunate to be “inheriting” a blog from our Chief Technology Officer, Chris Tebo, who has written some really interesting posts over the past few months (as Tebo On Demand). Chris will play a primary role contributing to the Fortiva blog as we go forward, but we have also invited other members of our staff to post their thoughts and questions here.

I hope that this blog will become a forum for exchanging ideas, sharing challenges, hearing feedback, and providing insight into the things we’re working on here at Fortiva. We are definitely doing some interesting things, not only around email archiving, but also in the area of Software as a Service. The best people to talk about those things are the extremely talented employees here that work so hard every day to make Fortiva the company it is today.

So, with that said, I look forward to both reading  - and sharing – the insights of our staff, and the exciting challenges we face as a SaaS email archiving company. I also hope to hear from you, and I welcome your comments and feedback.