Day One, Tuesday, July 20th

Morning

8:30 - 9:15AM

Opening Remarks and Keynote Address

The Prospects for SaaS in the Obama Economy

9:15 - 9:50AM

First Morning Second Keynote Address: Key SaaS Metrics from the Softletter 2010 SaaS Report

Now in it's fourth year, The Softletter SaaS Report is the industry standard by which SaaS technology provider measure their business operations and compare their financial and operating metrics agains their peers.

During this presentation, Softletter managing editor Rick Chapman will examine key metrics dealing with:

• SaaS revenue growth and profitability
• SaaS and participation in international markets
• SaaS pricing and subscription models
• SaaS resubcription and churn rates
• SaaS/Cloud infrastructure costs and models
• SaaS R&D costs and use of Agile development models
• PaaS choices and evaluations
• Implementation of mult-tenancy
• SAS 70, PCI, and European Safe Harbor implementation
• SaaS failover and escrow
• SaaS channels
• SaaS sales and marketing costs
• SaaS professional and customer service levels and measurements
• SaaS and product and community management

This session will provide the audience with insight into the industry's development and key operations challenges available nowhere else.

Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Softletter

9:55 - 10:30AM

Dealing with SaaS and Cloud Data  Security Concerns
 

A natural worry of many prospective SaaS customers is:  “How secure is my precious data?”  Corporate CIOs in particular can be very nervous about having private and proprietary information residing outside the corporate firewall.  In some industries and cases there is an alphabet soup of regulatory requirements to satisfy for preserving data integrity:  SOX-404, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FERPA, etc. 

As a SaaS provider, how do you respond?  Offering ironclad guarantees of data security is foolish.  You’re not Fort Knox!  Yet there are contractual and other approaches that can reassure your customers that their data is safe without leaving you open to huge liabilities if data security breaches do occur.

These and related topics surrounding data security – including what it will take to get state and federal governments on board the SaaS train -- will be tackled in this fast-moving presentation by a DC-based lawyer with deep experience in software licensing and SaaS legal issues.
 

Michael Whitener, Vista Law

Increase Your Bottom Line Value with Multi-Tenancy

There is a lot of debate about multi-tenancy. Most of us understand its value from a technical point of view, but what can actually translate to our bottom line? How does it change what we are able to do to increase operational efficiency and customer retention?
 
Multi-tenancy is not a magic bullet, despite what you may have heard. Implementing your SaaS application with a multi-tenant architecture offers great returns, BUT ONLY if you understand how to leverage it along with metrics, operational automation, your ecosystem, and the network effect of your customer base - effectively.
This session will answer questions concerning the value of:

• Different architectures for implementing multi-tenancy and maintaining flexibility.
• Reliability, scalability, maintenance, and product evolution to your clients.
• Multi-tenancy in operations across your product organization.
• Implementing metrics in a multi-tenant application.
• Your customer and user network, delivery network and ecosystem under multi-tenancy.
• Methods of implementing multi-tenancy without breaking the bank or slowing product release

Participants will come away with a clear understanding of how they can leverage multi-tenancy at every level of their service and increase their bottom line potential!

Michael Dunham, Scio Consulting

 10:30 - 10:55AM

  Network Break

 10:55 - 11:30AM

Protecting Their SaaS: Results from the Escrow and Failover Survey of Subscribers and Providers

The 2010 SaaS Survey reveals that 32% of SaaS firms are offering their customers complete failover protection in the event they go out of business, up 20% from last year. 32% of SaaS firms are also offering escrow.  Increasing numbers of  customers are requiring their vendors provide either failover or escrow protection. This session will discuss the results from recent Subscriber and Provider Surveys and their importance to SaaS Providers and investigate how SaaS firms can integrate failover and escrow protection into their sales processes and increase customer acceptance of their systems and services.

Frank Bruno, Iron Mountain

Your SaaS Infrastructure Choices:  A Comparative Analysis
 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. This session analyzes the choices available to your company and provides realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that will help you make the best choice for your operations and business peace of mind.

Bob Roudebush, BlueLock

 11:35 - 12:05PM

SaaS Integration: Addressing a Top Three Priority for SaaS Adoption

 
Data integration has always been a SaaS bete noire. The natural tendency is for SaaS to build  data silos and this unfortunate fact has been one of the biggest obstacles to SaaS adoption. During this session, Rick Nucci of Boomi will provide:

• Valuable analyses as to the trends and best practices around SaaS integration as you bring your SaaS offering to market.
• Insight into why savvy ISVs build their APIs as channels to their marketplace-and not just a connection point for other developers.
• Practical strategies for a well designed API that lays the foundation for successful integration and the overall adoption and retention of your application.

Rick Nucci, CTO and Co-Founder, Boomi

 SaaS INFRASTRUCTURE TRACK:

Accelerating SaaS Application Delivery
 

Bringing multitenant SaaS solutions to market from scratch can mean 12-18 months of development and years of ongoing tuning, upgrades, and feature creep. What proven strategies can SaaS businesses take to accelerate that effort? What leveraged technologies can start filling the opportunity pipeline within three to six months? What are the service implications of adopting someone elses technology? What are some success stories?

Rick will cover this topic in detail as well as provide his own experiences in developing multiple SaaS businesses and now helping LongJump's ISV and MSP partners launch their own SaaS initiatives.

Rick McEachern, LongJump.com

 12:05 - 1:05PM

Birds of a Feather Lunch: Sit With SaaS Experts to Further Discuss Your Needs and Concerns (Your Choice, of Course)

   Afternoon

 1:05 - 1:55PM

Afternoon Keynote Addresses

Europe, SaaS, and the Cloud
 

As our 2010 SaaS Report demonstrated, international markets are an increasingly important part of the SaaS growth equation. But while SaaS acceptance is growing steadily in Europe, the Euro market presents unique challenges and obstacles.

This session will proivde a continent-wide perspective on EuroSaaS and the growth of "Cloud" acceptance. Individual markets will be discussed and analyzed, with a focus on what types of localization, marketing, and technical issues and challenges characterize each market. In addition, Jan will be discussing where American companies can expect European companies to attempt to "colonize" the New World with Old World smarts and technology.

Jan Aleman, Servoy

 2:00 - 2:45PM

Keynote Address:  Analyzing and Optimizing the Customer Experience Online

SaaS  businesses are investing enormous energy and effort into connecting with customers. After all, this ability to connect with customers is key to getting, serving, and keeping customers. The ultimate measure of customer experience has been the face-to-face conversation. But what do you do when your customer isn’t available to meet face to face, or when it’s not possible?  And do you do when your customers prefer to not connect face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice, but rather prefer being online? The fact is, a growing number of customers are taking up residence online. This presents unique challenges for making the human connection in this new digital world.

This keynote provides insight into the nature of human behavior online. It helps uncover the myths and mistaken assumptions often brought to the online context. In a popular and accessible manner, it draws from recent insights from the disciplines of Neuroscience and Social Psychology to decoding customer behavior.  It provides insights for connecting with customers online. It give some provocative examples for new innovations being brought to the online customer experience. And it applies insights to the business of SaaS customers, where the product experience and customer lifecycle has all gone online.

Patrick Bultema, CodeBaby

 2:45 - 2:55PM

  Networking Break

 2:55 - 3:30PM

SaaS Selling Models: Building Compelling Value Models that Maximize Sales Success
 

SaaS may be hot, but your customers' budgets are tight and no one is interested in buying technology for technology's sake in a recession. This session focuses on how to position and explain the unique values of SaaS applications and apply them to your business value propositions and sales model.

Chuck DeVita,
Growth Process Group

The Dangers of Discounting: Maximizing Your Revenue and Profitability through Sales and Pricing Discipline
 

SaaS companies often make the mistake of reflexively offering discounts and negotiating reactively, leaving a lot of potential profit on the table.  For small software companies, the results can be the difference between life and death (a company with 10% margins that can leave 2% less money on the table raises its profit by 20%).

In this session we will look at how companies have applied better pricing and negotiation practices to improve sales and profit, and to increase the value of the company. In particular, we use case studies to examine:

• How different pricing models (user, usage, etc) lead to different discounting strategies
• "Good" and "bad" discounts
• How to make the whole sales negotiation process less stressful

Reuben Swartz, Mimiran

 3:40 - 4:30PM

SaaS and the Right Pricing Model
 

There's been a lot of hype recently about "new pay as you go" SaaS pricing models. The only problem with all of this is pay as you go is not new; Softletter's been tracking this model for years; "pay as you go" (or per usage or per transaction) pricing models are used by 29% of SaaS companies.

In this session, software pricing guru Jim Geisman will discuss the various pricing models available to SaaS companies and provide you with a roadmap to picking the model that best fits your business and revenue goals.

Jim Geisman, Software Pricing

SaaS SALES and MARKETING TRACK:
 

Search and Social Marketing for SaaS: Key Highlights from the Softletter and Position2 Social Marketing for SaaS Firms Survey
 

SEO. Social marketing. PPC.Smarter spends in a downturn.This session reveals the most effective tactics and approaches for SaaS companies who need to maximize their marketing in a minimal economy. And even better, you'll also receive actionable metrics on social strategies from the Softletter/Position2 social marketing survey.
 

James O'Gara, Position2

 4:40 - 5:20PM

SaaS and the Rise of Community Management (and the Death of Traditional Product Management)
 

The growth of SaaS spells the end of product management as it's been as it's been defined in the software industry for the last thirty years. After SaaS ERP vendor Plex transitioned from client/server to SaaS, it jettisoned its entire product management/product marketing management framework. Current product management functions such as tick list herding, MRDs, PRDs,  "Agile" product management and the concept of no responsibility, no accountability, and no authority are as relevant to SaaS companies as DOS 3.0 and floppy disks.

Replacing "product manager's" will be "community managers," a new breed of people who will be tasked with optimizing your SaaS community, monetizing it, and working in an environment of bottom line metrics and measurable performance. If you're thinking about pulling out your checkbook and wasting money on outmoded product management training courses, obsolete product management research, reports, and publications, and the latest theories on "Agile" product management, put that check writing hand back in your pocket and attend this session to discover what your CMs should be doing to put money IN your pocket more quickly.

Patrick Fetterman, Plex

 5:30 - 6:10PM

Panel Session:

Building, Leveraging, and Monetizing SaaS and Cloud Communites
 

A lively discussion on how SaaS companies can leverage the unique power of the SaaS computing and business environment to build and monetize their community of customers. Panel members are chosen the day of the conference and often include audience attendees.

Moderated by Rick Chapman, Softletter

 6:10 - 7:30PM

Networking and Community Technology Session: Kick Back, Enjoy Some Drinks and Hors D'oeuvres With Your Peers and Preview Some of the Leading Technologies Designed to Help You Build Your SaaS Community of Customers

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