A recent post by Phil Wainewright about a company called Jamcracker left me completely confused. I read it twice and just couldn't wrap my head around the ideas this company was working on. I left a short comment to the same effect, something about "I now understand what I don't understand," and lo and behold the same day I receive an email from Don Best the Director of Sales and Marketing for Jamcracker. He kindly tracked me down and then put me in touch with Matt Tavolacci, Manager of Business Development. The two could not have been more forthcoming and helpful. And I think that I now understand Jamcracker's products and services and, more importantly, their significance. In today's post I just wanted to talk about one aspect of Jamcracker's offering - the on-demand software development kit, a bundle of services around Jamcracker's Pivot Path software product. Jamcracker readily acknowledges the importance of multi-tenant architecture in on-demand software solutions, a concept that we have discussed here several times. Multi-tenancy is the crux of the difference between software as a service and single tenant, traditionally on-premise software that is offered through an application service provider, or ASP. On-demand software as a service allows many customers to use the same instance of the software - thus multi-tenant. Jamcracker's Pivot Path software, and related bundled services, is the customer maintenance and support platform for launching on-demand software services to the marketplace. You can imagine the need for a system like Pivot Path when you think about not just one but perhaps thousands of companies, and tens of thousands of users, all using the same software, in the same instance. Bringing on new customers and their users quickly, setting them up correctly, supporting them and billing correctly can be a huge management challenge. The on-demand software delivery kit that Jamcracker offers, focused on the Pivot Path software, is the answer to this management challenge. My take is that this is an important development is the SaaS, software as a service, market. Consider a current vendor of traditional on-premise, software. Their first requirement is to rewrite the software to make it multi-tenant, not a small task, then to bring the new software service to the market and ramp up quickly. But everything has changed, from writing an order to fulfilling it, supporting it and billing for it. With a product like Pivot Path a software as a service vendor has the ability to setup the infrastructure they need to manage ramp-up without having to build it a single brick at a time during such a crucial period. In future posts I'll discuss how SaaS channel partners, like SightLines Consulting, a NetSuite implementation partner, see our role in the market and how Jamcracker may be a way to aggregate, or bundle, products and services for us. |
