Flipping the Switch to SaaS with Jamcracker

By Barb Mosher | Published May 16, 2008

Not so new to the SaaS market, but new to us at CMSWire, Jamcracker, a provider of SaaS delivery services is offering an integration kit that is designed to help you get your SaaS offering to market quickly.

Knowing how big a role SaaS is playing in the world today, this is the perfect time for Jamcracker to speed up the usual six week delivery of a company’s SaaS solution.

Jamcracker Services Delivery Network

Jamcracker is an on-demand services delivery company. They facilitate provisioning using their Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN). This network aggregates and distributes over 100 on-demand applications and services from a number of vendors and ISVs. They are quick to point out that they aren’t an application platform. They act as a “provisioning switch” helping companies connect to individual applications or platforms via channel partners.

JSDN Architecture

At it's core, if you have a SaaS application you have to sell, you can hook up with Jamcracker's JSDN and it's partner resellers can see what you have re-sell your service to their customers. Cuts out a lot of the work for you to get your solution to market quickly.

Prior to the introduction of the Integration Toolkit, Jamcracker’s technical team had to work closely with a new partner service, learning about how the service works, how users interact with it and how the billing is implemented. With this information and a little more, they would build an adapter for that service – a six week exercise.

Jamcracker Integration Toolkit

Their newest release, the Jamcracker Integration Toolkit (JIT) is an XML-based service integration framework that vendors and ISVs can use to publish their solutions to the JSDN Global Services Catalog. This will help speed up the availability of the service within the JSDN.

Figure: JIT Architecture Diagram

This toolkit essentially opens up Jamcrackers’ platform. It provides specs, APIs and certifications to the new service provider. Considering they know their own service best, companies can easily – beta tests showed an average of six days – connect their platform to the JSDN.

Once this is done, Jamcracker then completes certification, acceptance testing and support training for the application.

The JIT is available to qualified software partners free. There’s a whole area on their partner portal dedicated to supporting the JIT, including some training videos, JIT guide, a ton of FAQs and some sample XML files to start from.

If you have a great solution and want a way to make it available to wide number of VARs, professional services resellers and the like, Jamcracker may be an option for you.