Success. Success. Failure. Success. Failure.

That’s it, that’s my story. It’s been my heartbeat. I’m a Serial Entrepreneur with a 60% track record, which is comforting, except that I’m coming off my latest failure at Helpstream. 60% is way in excess of what most any VC ever gets….

I am fond of saying you learn a lot more from failure than success. Call it a consolation prize, but I do learn a lot from the failures, though I also learn from the successes. Since I am just off a Failure, clearly I have not yet amassed enough learnings to have a perfect picture of how to navigate the treacherous waters a startup sails on to success. Hence there are new learnings to be discussed. The Helpstream Learnings Series

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Understanding the Design of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application
Development Platform

This paper explains the patented technology that makes the Force.com platform fast, scalable, and secure for any type of application. Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 47,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com’s foundation is a metadatadriven software architecture that enables multitenant applications.

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The second article in a series about designing multi-tenant applications identifies three distinct approaches for creating data architectures. (25 printed pages), including: Three Approaches to Managing Multi-Tenant Data, Choosing an Approach, and Realizing Multi-Tenant Data Architecture.

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Quick video presentation of the challenges existing enterprise software providers face in transitioning to SaaS, cloud computing and managed services markets, including the 5C’s of Failure: Company Culture, Cannibalization, Commoditization, Channel Conflict and Customer Confusion…

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This post comes from reading some blog entries like the post our friend Abe Sultan of Apprenda wrote for Datamation – How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company and my own conversations with software company executives. Before anybody says it – it is not every way there is to fail at SaaS. And like any limited list covering a big subject – the items are over broad and not necessarily indicative of the most common ways to fail.

But that said, these are the things that really irritate me and I’m sure irritate those who have lived these errors – as happens in the life of an entrepreneur. So, if you are or are considering offering a product with the SaaS business and delivery model, you might want to consider about the common trip points mentioned in this article…

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As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players

1) Collaboration Wars

2) Business-Oriented Social Networks

3) Platforms-as-a-Service Wars

4) Cloud Governance…

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