Evolving into a Web 2.0 company

So what is this Web 2.0 thing anyway? I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Having gone through the Internet rise and fall, I am always skeptical of band wagons, buzz words, and hype. Call me cynical, but “Blogosphere” and all the other current terms associated with what amounts to basic guestbook (do you remember guestbooks?) mean nothing to me. So Web 2.0 seemed to me to be just another way of refering to “software as a service”. That said, we’ve made a dedicated push to migrate our transactional based products into hosted services. Why? Because over the last three years we’ve experienced the headaches of developing, documenting, distributing, and maintaining server software. Although the one time costs of selling a single CMS license is signifcantly higher than one month of subscription on the Booking Server (about 100 times actually), the cost of supporting that single license is much higher. Here is what I learned:

  1. Although you can define specific configuration requirements for the installation of your software, there is no way to guarantee that your customer will have the required configuration. There are too many variables when configuring and installing a server to test all possible variables.
  2. Enterprise software clients expect a high level of support and service that is difficult and expensive to provide with limited internal resources.
  3. Creating and maintaining documentation in multiple languages is expensive and tricky when your software products are always changing.
  4. Releasing updates and upgrading remote installations is time consuming and is never guaranteed to work out. You just don’t know what a client server might be doing.

So by shifting our focus to hosted applications, we avoid these pitfalls. That notwithstanding, there are still more challenges to providing software as a service, but for the most part, it has already resulted in the following key benefits:

  1. Rapid development because we can maintain a single code base.
  2. Distribution of updates and patches is no longer an issue.
  3. We can maintain higher security by controling server configuration.
  4. We can integrate more closely with server level components and thereby enhance the overall functionality of the system for all users.
  5. We replace low volume high priced one time revenue with high volume low priced recurring revenue. The result will be a more stable revenue cycle.
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