SaaS Summit 2007 - Dublin - Go raibh míle maith agat!
It was an honor to present last week at the SaaS Summit in Dublin, organized by Enterprise Ireland, an agency that promotes Ireland's industry. I was very impressed by the whole event and especially by Benjamin Mosse and Naomi McMahon from Enterprise Ireland New York office, who organized my trip and made me feel at home. Thanks Benjamin and Naomi!
The event started with Jeff Kaplan's keynote. Jeff is a well known guru in the SaaS space. If you don't read his blog, do it now! He summarized the state of the SaaS market.
After Jeff, it was my turn and I used my time to cover the top technical considerations for building and running SaaS delivered applications.
20% of my session was about the challenges LitwareHR highlights and provides guidance for (scalability, multi-tenancy efficiency and customization). The rest 80% was about "Service Delivery Platforms" and the implications for ISVs and Hosters.
I used Silverlight Streaming as an example to illustrate the concepts of my presentation about a specialized & optimized delivery platform; the compliance requirements, etc. which I think people liked (based on the feedback I got during lunch at least).
I'm going to write a blog post on that particular example based on the feedback I got.
I was followed by Clint Oram, lead in Europe for SugarCRM, and John Maughan from Cape Clear Technologies. Both gave great presentations. I liked John's to-the-ground and "from the trenches" perspective. I liked Clint highlighting the importance of hybrid approaches (from 100% on-premise to 100% on-the cloud and everything in between).
After this first round of presentations we had a Q&A panel with all presenters that was moderated by Jeff. Good set of questions from the audience, and although this might have been a self selected crowd, I found all attendees understanding the SaaS space very well.
After lunch, Phil Wainewright, another well-known analyst on SaaS, talked about opportunities and challenges of SaaS in Europe and contrasted them against the US. Very interesting data.
The rest of the afternoon I listened to Christopher Gesell from Verizon Business who covered Verizon's global capabilities as a SaaS delivery hoster, Conor Halpin from LeCayla who talked about billing & metering and delivered the funniest session of all (see photo below) and Frank McCracken from Saaspoint, who shared with us the benefits of being a member of the Salesforce.com partner ecosystem and the importance of professional services in the SaaS world.
After that, Phil moderated a similar Q&A session with these presenters. All decks should be available for download from the event's site soon, so stay tuned.
The rest is history: Guinness, Rugby, etc. I missed the Hurling match on Saturday unfortunately. I was really looking forward to it, next time maybe...
Great Event. Great People. Great City. Thanks for the opportunity!