Month: April 2012

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Adding Up SaaS Applications

Incorporating SaaS applications into an enterprise’s business processes can offer a number of advantages, including:

  • focusing internal resources on core strategic strengths instead of infrastructure services
  • being able to pick the best fit from a variety of mature low-risk best-of-breed applications
  • lowered internal IT hardware and support costs
  • well-defined costs

But as always, nothing comes for free and the cost of individual applications adds up quickly. For example, assuming a sales and development SME on a growth track with 100 employees, including a 10-person sales team, a couple senior admin/HR roles, consolidated project management across the organization and a product engineering team who working with part numbers and bills of materials, and using the following SaaS applications:

  • Taleo Recruit for talent recruiting – $500/month (Taleo Business Edition Recruit module, 5 users)
  • Saba People Cloud for basic talent management – $500/month (based on competitor Kapta pricing of $5/person/month)
  • Salesforce for customer relationship management – $1250/month (Enterprise version, 10 users)
  • KnowledgeTree for document management (engineering, legal, administration, etc.) – $2000/month (100 users)
  • Basecamp for project management – $99/month (100 projects, 40 GB storage)
  • Aligni for engineering to manage parts and bills of materials – $199/month (< 10,000 parts)

The total is $4,548/month, and doesn’t include an ERP system for managing financials – which could add another $3,330/month (for either a basic system with limited extensibilty, or the base price for an extensible system before add-ons and customization).

Now, I’m not saying this isn’t money well spent, and for many organizations it is. But bear in mind it’s cash off the bottom line and attention (a rare and precious commodity) taken away from something else in order to learn something new. Carefully consider the complete value – and the complete cost – before signing up for another monthly payment on a credit card, because that’s the easy part.

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SourceForge, Encryption, and U.S. Export Control Restrictions

I was registering the Adapto project on SourceForge today, and when I got to the Export Control question, ended up spending more than few minutes researching U.S. export regulations relating to software and cryptography. Be warned though, I am not a lawyer and the following is not legal advice. I urge you to consult a professional for advice specific to your situation.

SourceForge is operated by Geeknet, Inc., a publicly traded US-based company. When someone outside the U.S. downloads code from a SourceForge project, SourceForge is actually exporting the code from the U.S.

Export of software including cryptography functions from the U.S. is controlled by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) according to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the Commerce Control List (CCL). This includes software that only calls encryption functions in an external library, such as the PHP openssl_public_encrypt and openssl_public_decrypt functions.

In 2010, the BIS amended the EAR by excluding software products where the use of encryption is ancillary to its primary function and the primary function is not information security or the sending, receiving or storing of information, where the cryptographic functionality is limited to supporting the primary function of the software product, and when details will be provided upon request to a U.S. authority (see EAR Controls for Items that Use Encryption on the U.S. BIS website).

Adapto is a small PHP framework targeted at creating data management applications with minimal code. Although Adapto includes cryptographic functions (implemented through PHP library functions), they are provided only for potential use by an application program and are not used in the normal operation of the framework. They are also not used in the tutorial demo application included with Adapto, and so it appears export of Adapto from the U.S. is not controlled.

Since Adapto does incorporate encryption, it has been noted in the SourceForge project Metadata, but since it is not controlled based on the above analysis, the project does not require reporting to the U.S. government as noted by SourceForge.