In November 2010, I took the decision to expand the company beyond my one-man operation and formed Bootstrap Marketing. Today (October 2011) Bootstrap Marketing is a 7 person company based in San Carlos, CA 94070. You can contact me at martyn@bootstrap-mktg.com or through our website www.bootstrap-mktg.com.

All input welcome especially if it’s supported by use-cases!

Maybe nineteen years in the US has prejudiced me more than I thought, but there is a definitely air of going back in time as I look at how UK SaaS vendors present themselves. Am I hopelessly Americanized or am I missing something?

OnRamp UK is up and running and I’m mothballing the OnRamp Consulting website as I plan to join the 21st century and use this blog as my main comms tool.

Innovation is as strong as ever and the costs of getting ideas to market, fuelled by low-cost SaaS based infrastructures, has never been lower. If only the VCs could figure out a model to put money to work in $100,000 to $500,000 chunks.

There are some incubators and seed funds who seem to be making this work and maybe it’s time that some of the major players took a closer look at this model. Any takers?

Next week, I’m attending the Atlassian Summit at the always enjoyable Sheraton Palace in San Francisco. I expect to see great things from Atlassian and their partner ecosphere, especially the always creative and engaging Rob Castaneda and his Aussie cohorts from CustomWare.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the availability of low-cost, scalable, development and deployment SaaS based platforms, is enabling entrepreneurs to bring great ideas to market more quickly and at a lower cost than ever before.

Good ideas in isolation are interesting but it gets really interesting when you start to see synergies and mutual leverage between these ideas and companies. For example, last week I met an old friend (old in a good way, John) who has a great idea that will enable companies to extract more value from their websites. In parallel, I am working with a web analytics start-up that could provide the tools and framework to identify exactly how to capture, model and quantify the potential benefits of this approach.

Today, I’m headed to the PNP Expo to hear 40 start-ups pitch. As I said, it’s a great time to be a start-up.

The IBM/Sun acquisition made sense but the Oracle/Sun makes great sense. And, as with the proposed IBM deal, you need to look to the software side of the equation to understand the true significance of the Oracle/Sun acquisition and, specifically, to Java. Java powers 1 billion devices worldwide, no kidding that Larry Ellison calls this the “single most important software asset” Oracle has acquired. Java also powers much of Oracle’s middleware, a product line that Ellison believes could generate as much revenue as Oracle’s database business.

In addition, Oracle acquires the MySQL database with its estimated 13 million open source customers; best in class processing and storage technology; and a loyal customer base that generates substantial upgrade, maintenance and support revenue.

Questions around business fit (hardware vs. software) and cultural fit (enterprise license vs. open source) will be around this deal for a while, but you can bet on Oracle figuring these out.

Sorry, IBM. You were outplayed on this one.

This trend is driven by companies that are not only building SaaS solutions, they are using SaaS infrastructure and value-add services to build their solution. For example, they build their back-ends on proven platforms such as Amazon’s  S3 and EC2 architectures and use components like Zuora or Boomi to address important “hygiene” level issues like billing and integration.

Building on these components has significant cost, risk mitigation, time to market and focus benefits.

• Cost - a 4 or 5 person development team, backed up a couple of contract marketing and business development specialists, can not only get a product to market, but get it to where it has thousands of customers.
• Risk Mitigation - using components that already support hundreds of thousands of end-users, massively reduces technical and quality based risk in areas such as scalability, security, performance and management.
• Time to Market - leveraging proven architectures and value-add components means less modules to design, less code to write and offers a much easier test and QA process since you’re working on a stable platform.
• Focus - this approach keeps the development team focused on building product features that create business value not on building undifferentiated infrastructure.

This trend has some very interesting, and, in my opinion, some very positive implications. 

For example, with a lower cost model and faster break-even point, companies need less funding.  If companies need less money, they have more funding options and this is, for example, driving increased interest in angel funding.  A further implication is that, with customers and revenue in place, companies expect to raise money on very favorable terms and to keep a significant part of their company’s equity for a longer time, maybe even through an eventual liquity event. It will be interesting to see how VCs respond to this trend: some already get it and are taking action, others are sat on the sidelines. 

Need proof that this trend and model is real? While there are many good examples, in my opinion one of the best examples is  www.syncplicity.com. Syncplicity is a company with a really valuable file synchronization, sharing and back-up solution that has been developed and brought to market by a team of less than ten employees and already has thousands of paying customers.