The other day I had a phone session with Don Best, VP of Marketing at Jamcracker, who was pointed my way by Phil Wainewright (cheers Phil). I knew the company started a while ago, and I actually had an incorrect understanding of what they are about, thinking that they were only involved in helping software companies with on premise software get in to the on demand world, but they do much more than that now. This conversation also tied up with a podcast on ebizQ that had been sitting in my “to do” list for a while. Don told me the story.Jamcracker has been around since 1999, founded by K. B. Chandrasekhar, and so should be congratulated as one of the companies involved with ASP and SaaS who have worked through the dotcom boom of the 90s and then bust of 2000, and are still around to tell the tale. Don calls that period a false start for the on demand industry. He quite rightly points to the lack of availability of broadband, and the paper thin margins amongst the barriers back then.
Jamcracker didn’t fold up shop but have carried on and productised the ASP aggregating that they were doing then. Their current offering is, essentially, a marketplace for on demand or SaaS based solutions. I’ve recently written about Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which is a hybrid of both marketplace and technology platform for developing applications. Jamcracker’s Service Delivery Network, or JSDN is only a marketplace, but without ties to any specific vendor or application. To use AppExchange, you would need to have a Salesforce seat. The other difference is that, whereas the Salesforce focus is on the end user, Jamcracker are looking to provide a channel to market for VARS, Systems Integrators, ASPs, Telcos - anyone with a trusted relationships with customers. Their solution is intended to provide a single point of access for on-demand services, and aims to manage the entire customer lifecycle for those that use it.
In practice this means that a customer can pick and chose the applications from a catalogue, test drive them and then buy, and Jamcracker handles all of the billing and back end support processes. From the resellers point of view Jamcracker are providing adaptors so they can plug their SaaS product in to JSDN and get an instant storefront to enable them to resell their solutions and services. For some VARs, SIs or Telcos they are offering JSDN as a private/white label service so the marketplace could be branded by the company.
As well as enabling the solution as a delivery mechanism for the SaaS providers (or content providers as they call them), they are also aiming this as a vehicle for smaller VARs to establish relationships with other content providers to combine and resell a number of different web services for their local customers. In the ebizQ podcast, Don mentions an example of a local US VAR integrating the complete range of applications required by a K-12 school. If Jamcracker are using their aggregation expertise to help integrate a range of SaaS services then I can see enormous potential for JSDN - I plan to investigate this aspect and get some more examples.
Don talked about a number of vendors that are dropping out of AppExchange and moving to Jamcracker, as well as providers who are using both marketplaces. For SaaS providers and VARs this service looks well worth exploring. If this approach can help address some of the integration issues, it should be good news for the end customers as well.
Don talked about a number of vendors that are dropping out of AppExchange and moving to Jamcracker, as well as providers who are using both marketplaces. For SaaS providers and VARs this service looks well worth exploring. If this approach can help address some of the integration issues, it should be good news for the end customers as well.
Update: I asked Jamcracker for an example of a company who has moved away from AppExchange, and they highlighted Jotspot Tracker. I’ll investigate to find out why.
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