New SaaS CEOs view business differently

Today, LiveOffice LLC, an e-mail archiving software as a service vendor, will announce that Nick Mehta has become the Torrance, Calif. company's new CEO.

Besides adjusting from the laid-back attitudes of his old home in Northern California to the even more laid-back atmosphere in Southern California, he says running a SaaS business will be big change for him as well.

"In some ways," he says, "a SaaS vendor has to think like a [on-premises] software customer thinks."

Mehta, who came to LiveOffice from Symantec Corp., where he was a vice president and general manager, says as a SaaS supplier ultimately he's responsible for all of the operational issues that IT normally does for software because it's now run in his data center.

Maybe not.

Mehta should have a chat with Rafael Laguna. In January Laguna became CEO of Tarrytown, N.Y.-based Open-Xchange Inc., which offers a SaaS version of its Web-based messaging and collaboration open source software.

According to Laguna, Open-Xchange 6.x, the full-multi-tenant version of the product, is sold to service providers "who know how to run large data centers," such as 1and1 Internet Inc., the globe's largest Web hosting provider. The service providers then offer the advanced features of Open-Xchange to their users for premium prices. The data center operational issues remain with the service providers, freeing up his technical talent to create more features in the product.

Maybe that's why later this summer you'll be seeing Open-Xchange offer integration between its address books and those at LinkedIn Corp. And it's maybe why Open-Xchange will be adding support this year to the iPhone and the Mac. After all, Open-Xchange techies are not busy with rebooting servers and reconfiguring switches, so they have to fill their time doing something.