THINK IT Services

THINKstrategies announced today that OpenAir, Inc. has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program is the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

OpenAir, a NetSuite Inc. company, is a leading provider of SaaS-based services automation software, including professional services automation (PSA) and project portfolio management (PPM) solutions.

Click here to read about how OpenAir’s SaaS solution helped Bluewolf Group and Metricstream better manage their professional service operations so they could achieve their business objectives.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Awards and to nominate a company for an award.

I started this past week in Las Vegas attending the two-day Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop where a crowd of 200-300 people converged to learn about the rapidly evolving cloud computing phenomena from a cross-section of speakers from established players and virtual start-ups. 

This might not seem like a lot of attendees, but it was about ten times as many people as those who attended the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) track of Interop. And, the cloud crowd grew even bigger at the end of the first day of the Summit when an ‘unconference’ CloudCamp was held which featured a variety of ‘birds-of-a-feather’ style discuss groups fueled by plenty of oversized cookies.

The cloud computing theme also extended into the main-tent portion of Interop with the keynote sessions on the first day of the conference also focused on the topic. These sessions permitted HP, IBM and SAP to put their proprietary spins on the cloud computing idea which may have only created more confusion in the minds of the attendess about this amorphous concept.

While the level of interest in cloud computing was strong, the overall attendance at Interop was down due to the economy and lingering concerns about the swine flu. And, despite the attention cloud computing received in the conference sessions, there were few vendors demonstrating cloud computing capabilities on the show floor. Instead, it was a typical three-ring circus of technology box-pushers, card-trick magicians and over-the-top come-ons, including a vendor using a series of boxing matches to attract visitors to their booth.

I came away from the event with the firm impression that cloud computing has captured the attention of the mainstream of IT/network professionals who are the mainstay attendees of Interop. They recognize that cloud computing can have an impact on the way they acquire and utilize computing resources. They see it as a potential threat and opportunity in their infrastructure environment, and want to better understand how it works and how to maximize its benefits.

Even though the success of SaaS has spawned the broader cloud computing movement, many of the Interop attendees mirrored the broader population of IT/network professionals and chose to ignore the Interop sessions focused on the business implications of SaaS solutions.

The dramatic difference in attendance levels between the cloud computing and SaaS sessions also illustrates the great divide which has emerged in the minds of many vendors, analysts, press and event organizers who look at SaaS and cloud computing as separate despite the efforts of companies, like Salesforce.com, to brand them as one and the same.

Many of the SaaS vendors who continue to focus their marketing and sales efforts entirely on business decision-makers and avoid the IT department at all costs are pleased to have IT/network administrators distracted by the cloud computing hype. But, those who can’t circumvent the IT department are finding that the confusion and uncertainty surrounding cloud computing is compounding their sales and marketing challenges.

Sorting out the sales and marketing implications of these trends was the focus of a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) SaaS forum held this past Thursday at Sun Microsystems’ quiet campus in Burlington, MA. (It will be interesting to see if the Oracle acquisition breathes new life into the campus or results in it being divested and becoming more vacant.)

The forum drew around one hundred SaaS professionals and other interested parties seeking to learn more about today’s best practices for selling SaaS. The attendees learned that SaaS may be easier to develop and deliver, but is still hard to market and sell, especially in today’s economy. Why?

Because it takes a different approach than marketing and selling traditional, ‘legacy’ software. It takes greater customer-centricity, starting with the user interface design and extending through the ongoing support process. It takes a different marketing process, starting with messaging and continuing through every lead generation activity. And, it takes a different sales process, starting with training and including compensation and incentives.

The MassTLC forum did a good job of bringing together SaaS professionals to discuss these issues and challenges. It served as a catalyst to continue to build a bigger SaaS community in the New England area. But, it also illustrated that surviving in the SaaS market takes a series of successful steps that many vendors are still trying to discern.

THINKstrategies announced today that Plex Systems has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Plex Systems, the developer of the Plex Online SaaS solution for the manufacturing sector, has been selected as the latest winner of the BoSS Award because of the quantifiable business benefits its solution has generated for a wide array of companies.

Click here to read about the specific customer case examples of Plex Systems’ business benefits which led to the company winning a BoSS Award.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards.

Google’s latest service outage this past week generated a new round of attention and debate regarding the viability of the ‘cloud computing’ movement.

Although Google’s service disruption raises legitimate concerns about the reliability of today’s web-based solutions, the extent of the press coverage also demonstrated how pervasive the cloud computing movement has become.

The incident was not only reported and analyzed in the IT trade pubs, but in all the major business journals as well. This level of coverage clearly shows that SaaS and cloud computing are no longer peripheral trends, but have become popular alternatives to legacy software and traditional systems.

Another indication of this trend is the latest market forecast from Gartner, who I like to call a ‘lagging indicator’, which predicted last week that the SaaS market will equal $9.6 billion by the end of 2009, a 21.9 percent jump over 2008 revenue of $6.6 billion. Gartner forecasts that the SaaS market for the enterprise application markets will total $16 billion in 2013.

These forecasts come even as Gartner estimates that overall IT spending will decline 3.7 percent in 2009, and spending on IT hardware, including client computing (PCs), servers, storage and printing systems will drop 14.9 percent this year.

Gartner’s rationale for its SaaS predictions echo what THINKstrategies has been reporting for a long time. Yet, they are still hedging their bets when it comes to SaaS adoption in backoffice areas, such as ERP, despite the recent financial results of companies like NetSuite and Plex Systems.

Nonetheless, the latest outage at Google raises a new round of concerns among IT and business decision-makers who remain uncomfortable relying on third-parties for their day-to-day enterprise application or computing requirements.

In my view, these are legitimate concerns but should not prevent organizations of all sizes from ultimately adopting SaaS solutions and cloud computing services. McKinsey has produced an interesting comparative analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) or inhouse data centers versus SaaS and cloud computing alternatives.

I remain convinced that an honest self-assessment by IT and business decision-makers will lead to the realization that their data center reliability, security and performance palls in comparison to today’s leading cloud computing vendors. In addition, a thorough evaluation of their time-to-market, flexibility, TCO and ROI would also clearly favor the rapidly evolving SaaS and cloud computing alternatives.

Google reported that its outage was caused by ‘human error’, which is often at the heart of corporate data center disruptions as well. IT and business decision-makers have to determine how often and how long their organizations have to withstand these problems when their inhouse staff is to blame, and are their remedies any better than they would be if they turned to an outside vendor via SaaS or cloud computing. As I’ve stated before, this becomes a quality of support rather than a reliability of service issue.

In response to concerns regarding the quality of cloud computing support, my sources tell me that Google is rapidly hiring additional support people and significantly enhancing its enterprise support capabilities. 

While the SaaS industry has gained broad-based acceptance because of its relatively mature ‘packaged’ applications, the cloud computing sector still has a long way to go to win an equal level of adherents among mainstream organizations.

I had the privilege of participating in Cloud Slam ‘09, a virtual conference, on the state of the cloud computing movement last month. Click here to see and listen to my views on the state of SaaS and cloud computing, and the steps to success in making these markets mainstream.

You can also learn more about the cloud computing market this August when I’ll be chairing CloudWorld, in conjunction with Open Source World and the Next Generation Data Center conference, in San Francisco.

This week, I’m off to Las Vegas for Interop where I’ll be attending the Enterprise Cloud Summit and chairing a panel session regarding “SaaS, PaaS, and More”. I hope to see you there.

THINKstrategies announced today that Makana Solutions has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. 

Makana Solutions is a leading provider of on-demand sales compensation management solutions for small- and mid-size businesses. A case study example of Makana’s measurable benefits is Wilson Tile and Stone, a leading residential and commercial building materials provider.

Click here to read about how Makana Solutions helped Wilson Tile and Stone achieve its sales objectives.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Award program or to submit an application for an award.

As the idea of cloud computing gains greater attention in the tech industry and among business pubs, there is a brewing debate about whether organizations can create their own ‘private clouds’ to achieve their unique corporate objectives.

My latest commentary in E-Commerce Times discusses the pro’s and con’s regarding the idea of private clouds.

While Microsoft’s recent announcement that it had experienced its first down quarter in terms of revenues and profits generated plenty of headlines in the business press, a surge in the sales of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions aimed at chief financial officers (CFOs) deserves even greater attention.

Two SaaS announcements from NetSuite and Plex Systems clearly illustrate this trend.

NetSuite announced yesterday that its total revenue for the first quarter of 2009 was $41.6 million, a 22% increase over the first quarter of 2008. In my view, NetSuite’s success is due to a combination of factors. The company has done a better job of packaging, pricing, positioning and promoting its solution to CFOs. It has made its offering more modular, which in turn has made the pricing more attractive. It has also more effectively targetted CFOs who are at a crossroads between starter kits like QuickBooks and complex systems like SAP. It is also working more closely with channel partners to meet the needs of its customers. But, most importantly it is finding a more receptive ear among CFOs who are growing increasingly impatient with the inflexibilities and hassles associated with traditional financial systems.

Plex Systems is also finding greater interest in its SaaS-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions geared toward manufacturing companies. Despite being in one of the toughest industrial sectors and being located in one of the most economically devastated areas (Michigan), Plex Systems reported its revenues grew 33% in 2008, and it experienced a 25% jump in revenues during the first quarter of this year over the same period in 2008. Mark Symonds, the company’s President/CEO, told me that Plex Systems’ growth can be attributed, in part, to a rising number of CFOs within manufacturing companies who are trying to better manage their operations in response to the tough economic climate. These CFOs recognize that SaaS solutions, like Plex Systems, are easier and more economical to deploy, but even more importantly provide greater visibility across the organization and its extended supply chain.

As these CFOs experience the benefits of SaaS in meeting their financial management requirements, they will become important proponents for SaaS adoption across the enterprise, encouraging their business units and IT organizations to leverage SaaS as well.

THINKstrategies announced today that PHASE 2 International has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

PHASE 2 International delivers high-end business software applications via a SaaS model for businesses of all sizes, but especially small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The company’s applications include the IBM Lotus Suite: Notes, Sametime, Quickr and Connections; Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange (with support for Blackberry devices), Project Server, CRM, and Team Foundation Server, for software developers; and PHASE 2’s ShareMeeting.

PHASE 2 has created a SaaS Savings Calculator (www.phase2.com/savings) which is available free of charge to help corporate data center managers and small business owners calculate the 2-year cost of purchasing and maintaining software and systems in-house versus using SaaS solutions.

Click here to read about the case study example of the value of PHASE 2’s SaaS Savings Calculator is bringing Midwest Capital Group (MCG), a finance company specializing in structuring, pricing, and funding leases with Federal, State, Municipal, and Corporate customers.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Awards.