It’s easy to focus your decision-making on an application’s current feature-set and functionality; after all, you’re trying to solve for a particular business problem that’s causing some level of pain. As important as it is to consider these things, something that is often overlooked but is maybe more important is whether your solution provider can scale.

Why does scaling matter? Because everyone generally believes we’re in the early stages in a paradigm shift away from on-premise software to hosted solutions, and decisions a provider makes about how to implement certain features now, especially integration points, when it has few customers, will likely determine things like application performance, quality of support, and overall product quality.

And down the road, not “designing in” scale now will make it more difficult to innovate later, increase overall management costs, and, perhaps most importantly, become a major competitive disadvantage against companies that have proven they scale well.

So ask your provider these questions:

Do your interfaces have standard API’s?
Have any of your integrations failed after an upgrade either to your solution or to any solution you integrate to?
How does your integration framework support support customizations?
Do any of your integrations read/write directly against a database?

Why does scaling matter if your provider can do the job today? Why do I need to even worry about tomorrow? Well, because scale is much more difficult to manage and even harder to fix quickly than building in a missing feature. Nothing will cause your Users to lose confidence in a solution like a poor performing or unstable solution.

As I said in an earlier post, we use SaaS providers too, and this is the first thing we look to confirm before we’ll start using anyone else’s application. It’s more important than the current set of features. Mr. Provider, do you scale? Show me how you do it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 5:59 am and is filed under Software-as-a-Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.