GoodData Session at Cloud Expo
September 24, 2009 - Terry Pratchett once wrote that “Gravity is a habit
that is hard to shake off”.
We could make a similar comment about the financials of SaaS BI companies. As
much as startups in this field would like to shake off their bad economics,
reality always catches up.
We’re seeing one after another SaaS BI startup to go out of business. Back
in June it was LucidEra and earlier this week Blink Logic ceased operations.
But anybody who only briefly looked at Blink Logic’s finances (it was a
public company) shouldn’t be surprised by this event.
Why do so many of the attempts to marry BI and SaaS fail? The problem is that
Saas BI sounds simple … simple enough to take an existing BI asset
(integration engine, open source analytical ... (more)
SaaS Journal on Ulitzer
Back in the old good days of enterprise software, we did not need to worry
about our customers. We delivered bits on DVDs – it was up to the customers
to struggle with installation, integration, management, customization and
other aspects of software operations. We collected all the cash upfront, took
another 25% in annual maintenance. Throwing software over the wal... (more)
BI on Ulitzer
Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure
of Commercial Open Source Software.”
Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work
for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued.
I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion
shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure jus... (more)
BI on Ulitzer
A long time ago I came to the conclusion that “independent industry
analyst” was an oxymoron.
But the willingness to sell independence for cash reached a new low with
TDWI’s New SaaS Business Intelligence Portal.
Please visit the link and see if there is any trace of independence left...
... (more)
Moore’s Law states that computer system performance/price ratio will double
every two years. And that was very much my expectation when Good Data started
using Amazon Web Services almost 2 years ago. But I had to wait until today
to see Moore’s Law at work: Amazon announced 15% drop of EC2 prices. The
price of the small Linux instance was constant at $0.10 per hour for the last
two years... (more)