Klir Technologies Weblog

Knowledge Networking: The Next Generation of Online User Communities

During the past two years the consumer marketplace has been abuzz about social networking sites, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. The evolution of this Internet social paradigm has sparked a variety of topical discussions, debates and high-profile acquisitions. Yet a corollary application of this type of technology in the enterprise business sector has been woefully absent. That is, until Klir announced Analytics 3.0 at the end of September 2006, debuting the first “Knowledge Networking” capabilities in IT management.

In our product development cycle in the preceding year, we did NOT spend much time examining our competitors in the IT management industry. Rather, we spent time studying “what works well” on the web – principally in the consumer marketplace.

Social networking sites demonstrated highly desirable characteristics of viral growth, rapid user adoption and emotional attachment. Analyzing our abilities to apply this type of functionality in the business sector, while interesting, did not offer enough value to develop baseline professional networking capabilities (such as LinkedIn) within our solutions.

However, examining the business processes of our users revealed an innate desire of IT professionals to leverage the best practices of their colleagues – effectively, applying knowledge within a solution.  Today, this is achieved by hiring and paying for scores of subject matter experts – an expensive proposition based on the skill sets of a particular consultant or firm. Why not expand your world? Tap into the knowledge of Users outside your personal professional network. Browse contributions from Klir Users and Partners who have demonstrated expertise in their respective fields.

Klir Analytics 3.0 enables its users to publish, share and copy the best practices of others within the community. Effectively, all proprietary data of the User is stripped out of the “post” in the community; but the rule set and policies can be browsed, copied and instantly applied to your systems with a single click. That’s it. 

For example, perhaps you are not an expert on managing your Dell PowerEdge servers. Notwithstanding the fact that Klir can collects more than 100 metrics on Dell servers – what should you care about? What metrics are important? Fortunately, someone else in the Klir User community is an expert on Dell PowerEdge servers. Thus, you can quickly browse, identify and apply the best practices of another individual to your systems. Customize the dashboards, reports or alerts if you like. You can also rate, comment and see how many others have “copied” this same best practice to determine its value (same idea as a book review and comments on Amazon or Netflix). 

Sounds simple, because it is. However, the technical gyrations on the back-end are very complex. Fortunately we are in the business of doing the heavy-lifting and making these capabilities available to you for free.

The beauty of this patent-pending Knowledge Networking system available in Klir Analytics 3.0, is the simplicity of its use, design and application. The goal: spread the knowledge, value and expertise of other IT professionals with the community to better manage your IT resources. 

Our users are smart, so are you. We value the contribution of our Users and Partners to the community. Join the Klir community and leverage our Knowledge Networking capabilities to help you be more effective as an IT professional.

Build features that are only available from a SaaS product version – the big guys can’t match it.

As SaaS continues to take root in the marketplace, more companies are emerging that offer little more than a web version of an enterprise software solution. Consider the number of knock-offs of office productivity tools. There are literally dozens of vendors that offer word processing and spreadsheets free-of-charge over the Internet.

However, what is the motivator to change from my existing solution? While version control and sharing features are “nice-to-have” capabilities for collaboration, it is not enough to motivate a change in my habit. More importantly, given that I need to work on a plane, and already have MS Office at home and work, the incentive to make the change is little to none.

An overarching value proposition that cannot be readily duplicated by traditional enterprise software solutions is fundamental to long-term success as a SaaS provider. Specifically, you must deliver a capability, a feature, or information that is facilitated by centralized administration and management of user data. Two great examples:

1. Salesforce.com offers a good lesson by appealing to the VP of Sales, to manage, oversee and access data from remote field sales personnel. Specifically the added layer of oversight, reporting and visibility, has proven to be a sufficient value proposition to spur a migration from enterprise to SaaS CRM solutions, given the immediacy and availability of important sales data.

2. Concur Technologies empowers companies to control expenses and globally enforce travel policies from a centralized management portal. Concur’s solutions are particularly compelling because it readily improves business process and reduces internal administrative costs, while facilitating quick expense reimbursement for employees.

Both of these companies have captured the admiration of the industry, press and analysts, because of their ability to differentiate and erode market share from more significant, established enterprise software vendors. Their differentiation is based on a value proposition that compels a commitment to change and migrate from the old to new.

Competitively, the big guys have more money than you do as an emerging SaaS vendor. Get creative, and examine the business processes of your target user to evaluate how you can offer something compelling, unique and different that is facilitated by your SaaS business model. It must be significant enough to motivate change. 

"Nice to have" doesn't win.

An Open Forum – a Note to the Klir Community

In the first few weeks of the Klir Analytics 3.0 Beta program, we have already added nearly 800 registered users to the Klir Forum. For those of you who have installed our product but have yet to explore the Forum, the Klir Forum is intended to be “owned” by IT professionals who are interested in optimizing business processes and in delivering increased value to their organizations.

Demographically, Klir Community members are as diverse as their IT infrastructures. Every market segment and company size is represented, yet all community members share a set of overriding objectives. By introducing the first Web 2.0 community-based solution empowering IT professionals to publish, copy, and share best practice dashboards, reports, and alerts, we are committed to finding new ways to help our community meet those objectives.

Through the Klir Forum, we are opening our doors to any expert helper who wants to join us, and to any interested contributor who might provide thoughts and conversation. Through the forum, we will address your needs and be guided by your experience, and we’re confident that your participation and collaboration will generate new thinking, which will serve the collective needs of the community.

The Forum is designed to serve the needs of everyone, at every level of experience, from beginner to the most experienced IT professional. Obviously, it is our hope that the forum will serve as one of the primary conduits for feature and usability feedback, which will move our product and business forward. You are invited to help us find ways to solve more problems in better ways and share your expertise with like-minded professionals.

When you register for Klir Analytics, you’ll be provided with a user name and temporary password. You’ll also have the opportunity to create an alias, which will serve as your identifier in the Klir Forum. We’ll respect your privacy, as well as your right to identify yourself if you decide to do so. Our privacy policy is posted prominently on each of our website pages and our Forum guidelines can be found on our Help Wiki. We’re placing this forum at your disposal, and we hope that you’ll accept our sincere invitation to join and participate in the conversation.  Welcome.

3.0 Beta Launch & SaaScon

I am spending a nice relaxing morning, on a beautiful day in Seattle, finally getting a chance to catch up and reflect a little on a busy week. We had a very successful launch of the Klir Analytics 3.0 Beta on Monday, and also spent the first two days of the week (Monday and Tuesday) down in San Francisco at IDG's SaaScon event. I wanted to share some thoughts on both of these exciting events for the company.

A significant release like the one we had on Monday is always an exciting team event. The work that goes into a release like this is almost always intense, and pushes individuals as well as the team. It is sometimes easy to get lost in the forest in the closing weeks of a launch, as there are so many tasks that go into the final release, that you tend to forget the significance of the changes and the work going on. It really is incredible how much work was completed in such a relatively short period of time. Now that we are through the release (and surely back into another big push!) I hope everyone on the team will at least get a chance to take a step back and realize what an amazing job was done by all.

So what was done? A TON! We had four significant components to the new release. First is an entirely new front end UI. Included in the facelift was re-coding the front end in AJAX. Taking a page out of some of the interesting developments on the consumer side of applications, the interface is dynamic, flexible, and easy to personalize to each individuals preference.

The second significant update with the release is launching a community based forum and user group in connection with the service, allowing for collaboration and sharing of best practices. There will be a lot more to talk about on this subject in the coming months. There is incredible excitment, interest, and opportunity for the market - especially for small to mid-size companies with this new capability.

The third part of the release is that we are now delivering relevant industry content directly into the application. This means that users will have important and helpful content delivered directly to them at the time they need it most. This is going to lead to a significant improvement in the workflow and process that IT users typically go through when managing their IT investments.

And lastly, with this release, we are now offering a free entry-level version of the service. We are already seeing a large number of users coming in and registering.

So, as you can imagine, there was a lot to talk about in the release, and we were fortunate enough to get a fair amount of press around the announcement on Monday. Articles were published by eWeek, Network World, CRN, IDG News, and others. If you are interested in reading some of them, check out the news section of our main site. One of my favorites was Phil Wainewrights posting on his ZDnet SaaS blog. I have been following his writings for years, including a few years ago when he was writing a lot around the idea of Loosely Coupled. We also had the pleasure of meeting with him and other industry thought leaders at SaaScon, which brings me to the other item I wanted to share.

As I mentioned, we spent the first part of the week down in San Francisco at SaaScon. The event was interesting and well attended. One of the highlights of the show was getting to meet with some of the thought leaders in the space. In addition to meeting with Phil Wainewright, we were able to sit down with Tim Chou (former head of Oracle's On-Demand effort and author of "The end of Software"), who gave the opening address on Monday morning, and John Gallant from NetworkWork. It was rewarding to get really positive reaction and feedback from both of these guys, as they see any number of new ideas, approaches and companies in a given week.

So, all in all, it was a fantastic and exciting week. The new product looks incredible, the response from users and industry experts has been fantastic, and working on a great team has been rewarding.

Network Computing's Friday Freebie

I imagine most people didn't catch it, but we quietly released a free version of Klir Analytics this week (in place of the 30-day trial we used to offer), in part for preparation for an exciting update we have coming out in late September. We were excited to have Lori MacVittie at Network Computing find the decision interesting enough to include it in her blog post today in an item she calls "Friday Freebie".

We will be sharing more information in the upcoming weeks with regards to our new release. In the meantime, be sure to check out the "blogs" section of Network Computing. I've always enjoyed and appreciated the editorial team over there because in addition to being knowledgeable about the industry, they are just solid people.

SaaS: Don’t mistake it for differentiation leading to long term success.

9 Topics to consider if you are building a SaaS company.

Entrepreneurs today are flooding the marketplace with first-generation enterprise software, delivered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model. Enamored with the success of Salesfor    ce.com and prodded by Venture Capitalists (VCs), these budding entrepreneurs are making bold claims of changing the world and beating up big established players, simply because they deliver much of the same functionality through a SaaS business model.

Unfortunately, a SaaS-flavor version of enterprise software is simply not enough for long term success.

The secret is out, SaaS is a delivery model that major software vendors are already exploring, if not pursuing aggressively, because of the inherent benefits to customers. Consider investments in the past 12 months by Microsoft (Office Live), BMC (BMC Patrol Express) and Business Objects (Crystal Reports XI) to name a few.

Certainly, some entrepreneurs will get lucky. They will develop a first-generation SaaS model of software in a mature market, and yes, some of the “big guys” will elect to acquire these new start-ups for a healthy price. However, to become a company long term, requires a sustainable business model, real customers and revenues, which necessitates differentiation to be competitive.

At Klir, we founded the company as an ASP in late 2000. Our Company was inspired by the vision of delivering IT management solutions through a SaaS model. We have certainly made some mistakes along the way, but some good bets too. Set forth below are nine (9) topics that SaaS vendors should consider as their business evolves. I’ll be exploring these topics over several months on this blog and invite your comments, wisdom and feedback.

1. Do not attempt to match feature for feature – you’ll lose. Enterprise software companies built features to satisfy the appetite of every user. As a SaaS product developer, find the hungriest users and build the features they need to accomplish functional requirements (the 50-80 percent of product that everyone uses), then concentrate product development on SaaS-enabled capabilities (which cannot be matched by enterprise software).

2. Build meaningful features that can only be accomplished through a SaaS product version – the big guys can’t match it. Specifically, consider capabilities that would be valuable to a highly distributed enterprise or user group. This may include collaboration capabilities within a broader online community or user forum to publish best practices or templates.

3. Leverage meta-data and expose it to your users – everyone loves relevant data. The value of the data across your user base is significant, and the big guys can’t do it (since data resides inside customers’ premises). With large amounts of data, math is your friend – you can employ traditional statistical analyses or develop custom algorithms. Maintain privacy, but consider exposing aggregate meta-data and analytics that reflect industry trends.

4. Invest in your User Interface and make it “Dick and Jane” easy to use – the big guys aren’t so appealing. Consider the simplicity of successful consumer-based applications such as Google or Amazon. Business application developers can learn a lot. Note to self: AJAX is not a bathroom cleanser, but a programming language that equates to sex appeal in a Web interface.

5. Provide a personalized user experience. Whether it is “MyYahoo” or “MySpace”, consumer sites have taught us that users love to personalize their experience. Get it right in your business application and provide not only look and feel personalization, but customizable views and sorting capabilities.

6. Deliver now – you have got to be faster than enterprise software. Any SaaS product should deploy in a day (for a typical mid-sized company). If OLAP integration is an adjective to describe your architecture, good luck. It is all about speed to demonstrate your capabilities (e.g. Salesforce instant access to remote field sales personnel).

7. Be responsive to your customers - Enterprise software will be 12 months behind you. Engage your customers, solicit their feedback, build an advisory board, and readily adjust product roadmap priorities to reflect customer requests. Timely improvements, will win the loyalty of your user base.

8. Pricing: think nuts, both squirrels and elephants eat them. Gain an intimate understanding of your operating costs, and price your SaaS product to preserve margins while delivering value to your clients. Most business will analyze SaaS offerings over a three-year term versus enterprise software. Serve nuts and the squirrels will arrive; elephants will find you by following the commotion caused by squirrels.

9. “S”ervice is the most important letter in the acronym SaaS. Enterprise software developers go on vacation for two weeks after an 18-36 month product release cycle. The first two weeks after a SaaS product release is the most important two weeks for your Company, you have got to deliver. Now the work begins.

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting the Klir Technologies blog. We established this blog to facilitate exploration of a variety of topics related to our business and the IT management marketplace – both directly and indirectly.

Over the past 5 years, we have learned a great deal about the SaaS business model – pros and cons. In our domain of expertise, IT management, the challenges have sometimes been momentous, while others have been fairly trivial. Developing and introducing a new architecture for our business in a mature marketplace, dominated by BMC, CA, HP and IBM, has been a thrill.

Innovative concepts and capabilities facilitated by the SaaS business model, offer opportunities for significant differentiation and customer value, which are simply impossible to deliver through enterprise software.

In this blog we intend to explore every facet of the business: sales, marketing, engineering, operations and finance. Additionally, we will be inviting a variety of industry experts and analysts to share their thoughts.

Your comments are encouraged. We look forward to your participation in this blog.