Microsoft’s Huge Investment to Support You Launch Your SaaS Business

In this post, I’d like to highlight one of the potential opportunities that you can avail if you use, or plan to evaluate the Windows Azure platform to deliver your new SaaS offering. Whether you run a development shop, you are an Entrepreneur, a startup or just a smart guy with a bright idea, there’s something for you in here – so keep reading.

Some background to help you put the information below into perspective: this post is about Microsoft’s Azure “Incubation” group and our services that you can avail. “Incubation” in Microsoft terms means a huge investment to help the market adapt a new technology, develop the market and support its potential players (Entrepreneurs/startups/ISVs – Independent Software Vendors) until the technology becomes commodity and self-sustainable. “Incubation” doesn’t mean that the technology is immature – we use the word “Incubation” in a sense that we give the technology (Azure in this case) a support to grow up in peace. It’s similar how some of the best schools or caring parents support talented and gifted kids to help them achieve their maximum potential. We have an entire world-wide “Incubation” group, established purely for this goal and I’m part of this amazing team. Year-on-year, the Incubation division re-organises itself – new virtual teams are formed to support new technologies and other teams “graduate” once the technology has hit the mainstream stage. You can imagine the cost or running such a division … Not every technology or product enjoys an Incubation investment though – we tend to create Incubation teams for technologies that we believe will shape the future.

I work in the Windows Azure Incubation group in the Central & Eastern Europe regional team and I have a network of colleagues all around the world who do the same role as I do. We work with some of the brightest ISVs and Entrepreneurs to support their SaaS/Cloud strategy and service launch: day in – day out. The level we engage on, most of the time, is pretty deep. I personally like to work as an integral part of my clients’ project team as an advisor/consultant and help the team succeed. Geographically, I cover Hungary, Romania, Greece and Bulgaria. As you might have seen in my previous posts, my work involves a number of different areas – UX (User Experience), Service Business Models, Pricing Strategy, Market Targeting / Persona Work or even a high-level Marketing Strategy to name a few. I work with CEOs of smaller/medium-size ISVs, Entrepreneurs and a number of start-ups to maximise their potential and success factors for their Azure-based SaaS services. Some of them find me before their first attempt (read this post here about how I help startups even by pushing their car stuck out of the mud), others find me later – once they failed once or twice and need someone with experience to make sense of all their learnings and succeed at this time.

Call-to-Action

If you are an ISV, startup or entrepreneur, this is your free opportunity to pull in a SaaS/Cloud Strategy Consultant of Microsoft’s quality bar to maximise your chances of winning and going to market faster, more efficiently and more attractively. Do you have an existing product and you see a potential of moving it into a SaaS model (read this article first)? Or do you simply have an idea and the capacity to implement it on Windows Azure? Would an experienced SaaS/Cloud Strategy Advisor come handy who helped dozens of ISVs already to go to market with their SaaS offering? Reply to this post in the form below and I’ll contact you back shortly to discuss how we can help.

Tasters

To give you a flavour, below is a selection of some of the SaaS services that we helped to plan, build and launch together with our field teams in the local countries at Microsoft. These are only a few – there are several hundreds more …

Temenos Core Banking solution for Microfinance and Community Banking – check out the video on the link – it’s a good one.

Metanga provides an end-to-end customer monetization platform for your Cloud or SaaS business. Metanga lets you build products, enroll customers, define pricing, offer promotions, manage accounts, sync with CRM, generate bills, collect payment, and even offer customer self-care. All via a powerful, cloud-based solution.

GreenButton is a high-performance on-demand computing platform. One of the most popular scenarios to use it for is to rendering complex 3D animations (cartoons) in huge graphic resolutions, on-demand. This latter scenario helps animation studios avoid purchasing hundreds of servers for video rendering or wait for weeks until the rendering is done in their existing infrastructure.

AntVoice Group social apps – 50.2 million users used it already.

Do you see your service as the next one in line? Let me know by replying to this post in the form below and let’s speak how we can help you to make it happen.

David Szabo, Cloud Strategy Advisor, Firestarter and Rulebreaker at Microsoft. Startup-addict, SaaS & Cloud consultant, blogger at http://cloudstrategyblog.com and LEGO serious play facilitator. Follow me on Twitter!

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