David Cummings on Startups

Category: Tech

  • A Strong SaaS Argument: Labor costs will continue to rise as hardware costs go down

    Jacques Chester over at Club Troppo has a nice piece titled “Shared Hosting is Doomed.” One of the arguments he makes revolves around the idea that over time labor costs for technical administrators will rise substantially while the costs of hardware will continue to drop precipitously. I’m in complete agreement.

    One of the big benefits I see for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is that the technical labor costs are spread over a large group of users in a very efficient manner. His argument, as it pertains to the low-end, shared web hosting environment is a positive for SaaS: increased technical labor costs will drive more companies to SaaS solutions.

    SaaS is going to have a greater impact than most people realize. I’m looking forward to it.

  • How consolidated are your systems?

    Do your CRM, CMS, ERP, etc systems “talk” to each other? If a customer calls up do you have one interface to see their entire history? Even with the profiliferation of affordable, high-quality systems like Salesforce.com, Pardot, and Parature, most companies don’t have a way to see the history of interactions with a client from one screen. Typically, companies also have custom spreadsheets or applications where related customer information is kept, in an even more siloed fashion.

    One major benefit typically found in true SaaS systems (not fake ones) is that of an open web services API (typically SOAP or REST). An open API, and a system that isn’t in your own private network (who wants to keep ports open in their Firewall?), is a good recipe for integration. More companies should invest in consolidated systems as part of a larger strategy to divest of non-core IT functions (like CRM and CMS).

  • Thoughts on Domain Names

    What’s in a domain name? We’ve spent a fair amount of time lately debating the name of our new product as well as the importance of a domain name to go along with it. Here are the domain name thoughts so far:

    • Keep it short
    • Include the product name in the domain name
    • Use real words (e.g. prospectinsight.com) unless there is one that is short and memorable (e.g. pardot.com)
    • Get a .com and don’t settle for another extension
    • Look at the domain name auctions and after market

    It is extremely hard to find a good domain name these days. Good luck!

  • Example B2B App SaaS Infrastructure

    After our hosting provider had internal network issues last week, setting up redundant datacenters became a top priority. After much debate, here’s what we decided on for our new SaaS infrastructure:

    • Enterprise-class round robin DNS with automatic fail-over
    • Two datacenters with identical infrastructure:
      • One Linux load balancer (1 dual core CPU, 2 GB of RAM)
      • Two Linux app servers (1 quad core CPU, 4 GB of RAM)
      • High-end MySQL database server (2 quad core CPUs, 12 GB of RAM, RAID 5)

    The database servers are configured in a master-master replication setup such that each datacenter is fully autonomous.

    Now, time to get to work and set things up.

  • One more thing put into the cloud

    After reading Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch (as recommended by my friend Wayt King), I’ve been trying to be more cognizant of what my company can put into the cloud and no longer worry about. Well, yesterday, we put our Asterisk PBX into the cloud courtesy of Aretta Communications. I must say, we should have done it a long time ago. Several benefits include:

    • Fully managed by a specialist
    • Daily back-ups
    • Phones still work even if the multiple T1s in our office go down

    For $100/month, we should have done it a long time ago. I love the cloud.

  • Comparing PHP/symfony and Ruby on Rails

    I’ve had the opportunity to develop SaaS products in both PHP/symfony and Ruby on Rails over the past year. Being very popular development frameworks, there have been numerous discussions comparing the two, along with anything else to make web apps. With first-hand experience, I wanted to offer my thoughts from a technical CEO perspective. Here are the pros of both frameworks:

    PHP/symfony

    • PHP language – PHP is a mix of a variety of languages like C, C++, and Perl making it is easy to pick up for classically trained programmers and newbies alike
    • Developer availability – PHP, an all purpose and wildly popular web programming language, makes it easy to find experienced developers
    • Deployment – symfony apps are very easy to deploy without bringing the web app down using rsync, assuming your script caching isn’t checking file timestamps every request (which isn’t the fastest)
    • MVC separation – symfony’s approach to the Model-View-Controller is very intuitive and logical being based on OOP and folder structures

    Ruby on Rails

    • Ruby language – expressive and readable language that has amazing flexibility to do things like modify a class at run-time
    • ActiveRecord – extremely elegant Object Relational Mapping that requires very little code to layout table relationships and enforce constraints
    • Lines of code – yes, it’s true, you can develop a sophisticated web app in RoR with fewer lines of code that you would expect
    • Plugins & gems – RoR’s plugins, as well as Ruby gems, provide a wealth of modular functionality

    I’m a big fan of both platforms — you can’t go wrong with either.