tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294880355377903512.post4607195300295033656..comments2007-10-01T09:00:18.795-07:00Christopher Keenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04452233158192995749noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294880355377903512.post-41021865657939391972007-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:002007-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00Matt - you are absolutely right. Today, the difficulty of knitting together open source products into a SaaS environment is challenging. For example, our upcoming Mavericks products integrates over 20 open source products!<BR/><BR/>For SMB, the current generation of proprietary SaaS offerings provide a valuable solution. I believe that the next generation of development platforms will provide a simple solution for Enterpresises by doing the open source integration work for them.<BR/><BR/>You also bring up a great point about the amount of business processing done with poor-man's workflow: Excel and email.ckeenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04452233158192995749noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294880355377903512.post-63039396633702430862007-09-29T10:34:00.000-07:002007-09-29T10:34:00.000-07:00You have a good point for businesses and IT organizations that can afford to spend money on development and hence have the ability and know-how to use open-source technology and also have the resources to purchase and manage the hardware to go with it. However, the costs to do any of this are out of the league of tens of millions of small businesses and most are not interested in it even if they can manage to afford it especially if it is not core to their business.<BR/><BR/>For such SMBs, a quick SaaS-based do it yourself approach is very practical and in fact what they are already used to. How many businesses are running large pieces of their operations using Excel and Email? Platform as a service is a much better alternative to many of these kludged together systems business users create on their own, and this is one of the bigger opportunities here I believe.Matt Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02733874918633625048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294880355377903512.post-8838660718509415832007-09-28T09:06:00.000-07:002007-09-28T09:06:00.000-07:00You are right! UnreasonableMen wrote a good piece on this called <A HREF="http://unreasonablemen.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=78&Itemid=42" REL="nofollow">SaaS, Opensource and Web 2.0</A> Ben Kepes also wrote a nice piece on this <A HREF="http://benkepes.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/take-the-best-of-opensource-and-the-best-of-saas/" REL="nofollow"> Take the best of opensource and saas</A>ckeenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04452233158192995749noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294880355377903512.post-70888185353738799302007-09-27T16:16:00.000-07:002007-09-27T16:16:00.000-07:00yeah nice take, very similar thinking here to unreasonblemen.netPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17508992633339277942noreply@blogger.com