Software as a Service (SaaS)

Posted by Ben Worthen

Tech companies have been lobbying the government to make it easier for them to hire foreign workers. They didn’t have much luck with Congress this year, but they just got a hand from the Department of Homeland Security.

Making the homeland safe for tech companies

On Friday, DHS issued a press release saying that businesses could now hire foreign students who attended American schools for 29 months without obtaining an H-1B visa, the visa usually needed for highly-skilled workers, such as computer programmers and supermodels. The new program only applies to tech workers, or more accurately tech students who get tech jobs. DHS says that only students who have received a degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics qualify, and that they must take a job directly related to their field of study. Previously tech companies could hire these workers for 12 months.

What’s striking about the new rule is how it came about. Instead of releasing a draft and soliciting comments from the public – the typical process for governmental rule changes – DHS cited a clause in the Administrative Procedures Act, which is reserved for emergencies, to make the rule effective immediately.

Businesses had to file H-1B visa applications last week and demand was expected to far outstrip supply. The 65,000 visas will be awarded through a lottery. Tech companies have lobbied Congress to raise the visa cap, arguing that there aren’t enough workers in the U.S. to fill tech jobs and that it’s in the country’s long-term interest to keep the most skilled foreigners here. Congress didn’t buy it (or more likely, worried that raising the cap would prove politically unpopular), but DHS was convinced enough to argue that delaying its move long enough to get public opinion would “result in serious damage to important interests.”

(Hat tip to Techdirt.)

What basic criteria should we use to evaluate Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM? How is evaluating SaaS CRM different from evaluating on-premise CRM?

By Dennis Pombriant

You should evaluate Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM the same way you’d evaluate any CRM product — first, take stock of your needs and then try to find a product that best meets those needs. Also, you need to take into account the time and cost of customization, because no solution will ever be perfect.

SaaS presents additional issues to consider. We’re in a building phase for SaaS and most of the infrastructure that provides high reliability in other utilities, like the phone system, is still being deployed in SaaS.

One of the most important issues, in my mind, is backup and how well protected you are from experiencing downtime. I think it is unreasonable to think that you will never experience downtime, so you want to ensure that it will be minimal. In my opinion, a vendor that has a fully redundant data center to back up the primary gains points in the evaluation. A vendor that needs to ship backup tapes to another location in the event of a problem is a less desirable choice.

Evaluating and managing your expectations appropriately will be a big help in this era when the SaaS infrastructure is still being built out.

Criteria for evaluating on-demand CRM or SaaS CRM

Is Amazons Small Crash a Giant Crash for Cloud Computing?

Posted by Ben Worthen

Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 service –which companies can use to rent data storage on Amazon’s tech gear — crashed this morning, knocking many small businesses offline and highlighting one of the model’s drawbacks: You’re putting your operations in somebody else’s hands.

For some reason clouds are the go-to metaphor for the Internet

Many pundits believe that so-called cloud computing, where information is stored on centralized tech equipment and accessed over the Internet, is the computing industry’s evolutionary next step. Amazon’s S3 service is one of the most prominent clouds around. Customers rent space for their information on Amazon’s tech equipment – it costs $0.15 per GB a month to store data, with additional fees to transfer data in and out – which is often cheaper than buying and operating equipment of their own. On its Web site, Amazon touts that S3 allows customers to scale their data demands up or down rapidly, and that the service is available 99.99% of the time.

Amazon broke that promise today, albeit barely. S3 was down from around 7:30 am to 10:15 am EST. Several businesses that use S3, including the blogging service Twitter and the New York Times, were affected. Customers were understandably angry. “My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong,” says one message board poster quoted by the Times. “I’ll have to reconsider using the service now.”

A two to three hour outage, while not common, is the sort of problem that a corporate information-technology department experiences from time to time. It’s bad for business, but not the end of the world. But when you’re dealing with something that challenges the status quo routine, problems invariably draw attention to shortcomings with the model. In this case, it isn’t your techies that are trying to get your business up and running, but Amazon’s. You’re left to twiddle your thumbs while customers check out your competitor’s site. Will a black eye turn out to be a knock-out punch in this case? Probably not, but it’s a bigger story than if a few businesses had their sites go down.

Business Technology : What in the World Happened to Offshore Outsourcing?
Posted by Ben Worthen

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