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I will cover major differences (in both technology and management) between cloud application development and development of traditional enterprise software.

What does business expect from SaaS?
Simplicity, efficiency, transparency. The cloud brings affordable efficiency to the business.

SaaS company economics: 3 working and 1 dead-end sales models.
Sales model is defined by 2 factors: product price and its complexity.

The key factors of choosing cloud application: simple and intuitive user interface.
Since potential client of cloud applications cannot typically use help of sales representatives, the product must be simple enough to sell itself.

Multi-tenancy lowers maintenance costs but makes it hard to customize applications.
Successful SaaS applications are ready to be used out of the box with common feature set for all customers.

Release management: frequent updates (new versions each 1-3 month). Incremental roll out of new versions.
Cloud applications are developed rapidly. Often new versions are tested against selected part of real users.

Why does experience in enterprise application development is bad for creating SaaS?
Instead of writing detailed specifications we launch beta version of Minimum viable product as early as possible.

Methodologies that helps: Customer Development and Agile
Customer Development assumes that we do not know who potential clients of our application are. We gradually adapt the product for actual market needs by verifying our hypotheses.

Author: Askar Rahimberdiev

Askar Rahimberdiev

CEO and co-founder, MoySklad

Askar Rahimberdiev is CEO and co-founder of MoySklad—one of the first Russian vendors of SaaS products. Since LogneX inception in 2007, Askar has been defining company’s vision and building its operations.

Askar Rahimberdiev has over 10 years of experience in software business. Prior to founding MoySklad, Askar Rahimberdiev held engineering and managerial positions at hi-tech companies. His previous position was a product development manager at OILspace where he was responsible for delivery of SaaS products for energy market. Prior to that, he was a project manager at Auriga, one of the leading Russian outsourcing providers. Askar holds M.S. degree from Moscow Aviation Institute.