Day One, Tuesday, January 26

Morning

8:30 - 9:15AM

Opening Remarks and Keynote Address

The Prospects for SaaS in the Obama Economy

President Bush is gone and with the passage of the stimulus package, the economy now belongs to President Obama. Let alone the fears of a "jobless recovery," will the next economic upturn leave IT spending behind? Half of CIOs will see flat or declining budgets in 2010, and IT spending won't return to 2008 levels until 2012, projected Gartner as of the end of October. Peter Coffee of salesforce.com, former Technology Editor of eWEEK, shares perspectives on building and positioning SaaS and PaaS solutions as key components of recovery plans for both private- and public-sector IT players.This important keynote will examine different economic and recovery scenarios and prepare you to grow and prosper regardless of the eventual outcome.

Peter Coffee, Salesforce.com

9:15 - 9:50AM

Keynote Address: Key SaaS Metrics for 2010

Softletter has developed the most comprehensive series of SaaS business metrics in the industry. If you need real benchmarks and metrics, we have them (often with trend lines that span four years) and for many of these numbers we're the only source. Do you need to know how well free and trial usage access programs work for SaaS companies perform in terms of conversion to sales? How fast SaaS direct and telesales organizations close major sales? What are typical churn rates for SaaS companies? What are the most (and least) effective SaaS marketing programs? What are the latest trends in implementing SaaS escrow and failover agreements for enterprise sales? What the % of contribution to revenue from sales of professional service you can expect? In what key financial operating ratios do SaaS firms enjoy advantages? You don't have to guess at the answers; we have them, and after you attend this session, you'll have them too.

Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Softletter

9:55 - 10:30AM

Burning Legal Issues in SaaS Deals
 

SaaS transactions pose unique legal risks and opportunities.  Do you know what they are?  Attend this whirlwind presentation on the legal issues – from data protection to SLAs, and from IP rights to escrow – and find out.

Michael Whitener, Vista Law

TRANSITION TO SaaS  TECHNICAL TRACK: 

The Successful SaaS Sprint
 

You've taken a deep breath and made the decision to jump into SaaS. But you already have a client server product and a whole lot of tested, working code. What do you do? There are many technical issues you'll now face. What is the best development platform for our product? Should we commit to a PaaS platform? How are we going to address multi-tenancy? And these are just some of the challenges.

Each question has many possible answers and making right choices is a process that requires time and careful consideration of the impact across many variables. In this session, attendees will receive guidelines and criteria for approaching these technology decisions in a structured manner.

Luis Aburto, SCIO

 10:30 - 10:55AM

  Network Break

 10:55 - 11:30AM

Crowdsourcing as a Creative Lever for Growth

Social networking, user generated content, self-service and self-help are all ways the global “crowd” on the Internet are interacting with your SaaS applications and others.  How would you like the crowd to contribute all the content to your business – AT NO COST -- like they do for youtube, Wikipedia, yelp and others?  They are consumer apps you say? Say no more, because the consumer dynamic of social networks and crowd behavior is moving to enterprise markets and you can now “crowdsource” numerous aspects of your business. Ever heard of Amazon S3? EC2?  Mechanical Turk?  Understand the implications of having access to human worker capacity in as flexible and scalable way as you can contract for computing resources and storage “in the cloud.”  This session will help prepare you to learn how to create competitive advantage leveraging crowdsourcing APIs integrated into your SaaS system.

Ray Solnik, Dolores Labs

SaaS FINANCES TRACK:

SaaS and the Drive to Profitability
 

In a recession-impacted business environment, the pressure on SaaS companies who've received significant third-party and VC investment is being ratcheted higher. SaaS firms are under pressure to make money and reach profitability at an accelerated rate.

Unfortunately, many of these investment sources rely on metrics developed for client server and desktop/retail companies. The result can be a serious disconnect between what you're achieving in terms of your businesses growth and the perception of that growth. This session will enable you to manage this perception gap as well as practical strategic and tactical advice from a CEO who's currently successfully dealing with these challenges.

Sam Mele, Firm58

 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?

Pankaj 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 2009 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: Your SaaS Infrastructure Choices: A Comparative Analysis
 

 The numbers from our 2009 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to higly managed service systems and 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.

Brian Wolff, BlueLock

 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

SaaS FINANCES TRACK:

SaaS and the M&A and VC Markets
 

Unlike the dot.com/ASP meltdown of 1999-2001, SaaS is not suffering the same devastating plague of bankruptcies and business failures. Nonetheless, many SaaS firms are "stuck" with lower growth, extended bootstrapping cycles, and lack of access to new capital. This session will examine changing market conditions and analyze how current developments are affecting your growth, liquidity, and venture options.

Robert Chalfin, The Chalfin Group

 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

TRANSITION TO SaaS TECHNICAL TRACK:

Solution Accelerator: A Rapid Development Approach to SaaS
 

Softletter's SaaS Report reveals that only 15% of SaaS companies have made the commitment to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider platform provider. While these services offer a distinct set of benefits, issues such as vendor lock-in, lack of control and inflexibility in the development platform constrain software vendors from readily embracing PaaS.

This session explores the question: Is there a way to realize the benefits of PaaS without the associated challenges? This session will explore alternatives to PaaS and will outline an accelerated, technology approach to building SaaS applications hosted on a virtualized (Cloud) infrastructure from firm such as Amazon, Azure and OpSource.

Gowri Subramanian, Aspire Systems

 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:

Their Cloud, Your Cloud, or Our Cloud?
 

A lively discussion on the different Cloud approaches being introduced into the market, Cloud hype, and how to best leverage Cloud technologies to ensure your success. 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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