THINK IT Services

THINKstrategies announced today that Sabrix, 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 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.

Sabrix is a leading provider of transaction tax management software and services for companies of all sizes. Sabrix Managed Tax Service (MTS) is an outsourced sales and use tax compliance service that allows companies to entrust their compliance obligation to Sabrix tax experts. Sabrix MTS combines the services of professional tax experts with best practice methodologies and a SaaS version of Sabrix’s tax software.

Click here to read about the business benefits which Sabrix’s customers have gained which earned the company the BoSS Award.

Click here to read about the BoSS Awards and obtain information regarding the application process.

One of my favorite events of the year used to be Gartner’s Symposium in Orlando because of the locale and multi-day immersion in IT prognostications.

While I often disagreed with the POV of Gartner’s analysts, I found it useful to hear what they had to say because of their influence over enterprise IT and business decision-makers.

The past few years, I intentionally stayed away from the event because Gartner had fallen so behind the rapidly changing marketplace when it comes to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. Instead, I’ve enjoyed referring to Gartner as a ‘lagging indicator’ of market trends.

However, I was very pleased to read the news today that Gartner has put cloud computing at the top of its list of top strategic technologies for 2010.

Although I could discard this announcement as another example of Gartner’s slow recognition of key market trends, I also believe that it clearly moves Gartner’s thinking about the cloud computing market beyond the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ and ‘trough of disillusionment’ onto the ’slope of enlightment’ in its infamous hype-cycle.

(Of course, I’ve been suggesting in my presentations to client and industry audiences that IT and business decision-makers have been on this slope of enlightenment for more than a year.)

What is also worth noting is that eight of the other nine strategic technologies for 2010 identified by Gartner are also intertwined with cloud computing, with the only exception being flash memory on their list.

Hopefully, Gartner’s recognition of the cloud computing movement will be another ‘tipping point’ for this nanscent market, and 2010 will see even greater growth and maturation of this important new IT paradigm.

Nearly thirty companies have joined forces to form a new European Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing services business community, called EuroCloud.

The purpose of this new group is to bring together Euro-based SaaS and cloud computing vendors, enablers, integrators and industry experts to share best practices and promote new business opportunities across the continent.

The European Launch Promoters (ELP) are: Amazon Web Services, Cloudberry Associates, Cloudmore, Compubase, Dassault Systèmes, E-Kenz, Emailvision, Esker, Huddle, INES, ipsCA, McAfee, Microsoft Corporation, Mimecast, MrTed, NTRglobal, Odyssee Mobile, Oodrive, OpSource, Panda Security, Procullux Ventures, Qualys, RunMyProcess, Saas-it Consult, salesforce.com, Servoy, STS Group, SuccessFactors and Twinfield.

The group also includes the French ASP Forum, with 70 members, which has renamed itself EuroCloud France. EuroCloud also has local communities in the UK, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Spain. 

The group is actively recruiting additional members in hopes of growing to twenty (20) EuroCloud regional organizations and 500 members by 2014.

The formation of this new forum is timely because it provides further proof of the growing interest and demand for SaaS and cloud computing services worldwide. It can help educate those IT and business decision-makers in Europe who are still uncertain about the benefits and threats associated with SaaS and cloud computing. These were questions which I heard throughout my recent visit to Copenhagen.

The group can also build bridges across the nationalistic boundaries of the European community which have historically precluded geographically dispersed companies from deploying solutions across their enterprises in a consistent and cost-effective fashion.

While these would be welcome first steps, an association of this nature cannot be expected to fully address these issues. Too many proprietary interests among the individual members will prevent them from collaborating entirely. Therefore, there is still room for innovative SaaS and cloud computing vendors to devise their own Pan-European service delivery strategies building on the best practices and business opportunities identified by the group.

Nonetheless, EuroCloud is a welcome addition to the SaaS and cloud computing movement.

THINKstrategies announced today that Host Analytics 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 initiated by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Host Analytics is a leading provider of on-demand corporate performance management  (CPM) solutions that help finance and departmental executives improve their budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidations, dashboarding, scorecarding, reporting and analysis.

Click here to read more about Host Analytics’ award winnning SaaS solutions.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards and to apply for an award.

We’ve fallen into a lengthy pattern of rainy weather in the Boston area. Even though it’s starting to feel like we’re living in Seattle rather than Beantown, I don’t mind wet Sunday’s because they allow me to catch up on work and reading, and enjoy a guilt-free afternoon staying indoors watching football (the Red Sox season being over).

If you’re looking for some interesting reading that you might have missed during the past week, here are a few good articles:

1. The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet Age. This 10/14/09 Wall Street Journal article discusses the humorous way in which the French government is attempting to rename “cloud computing” because of its double-entendre meanings in the French language. It not only highlights the language barriers to promoting an idea internationally, it also speaks to the fundamental ambiguities of the cloud computing term which has slowed its adoption in many quarters.
2. To Do More With Less, Governments Go Digital. While the French government is trying to decide on the right term for cloud computing, this 10/11/09 NY Times article discusses some of the government initiatives in the U.S. aimed at  improving the quality and reducing the cost of services which were showcased during a two-day conference in New York City called, “Smarter Cities”. This event spotlighted a growing array of public-sector oriented projects which also includes the federal government’s new ‘appstore’, www.apps.gov, and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Laboratories $32 million project exploring the use of cloud services for scientific computing.
3. Looking at Life as One Big Subscription. This 10/11/09 NY Times article points out how consumers and corporations are increasingly migrating to subscription-oriented services rather than acquiring traditional packaged products. This movement is drving the growth of everything from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing to Netflix and Zipcars. It is the business implications of this migration process in the technology industry which has been the primary focus of THINKstrategies’ consulting services since its inception in 2001.
4. Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy. Today’s NY Times includes a profile of Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself to remain relevant in today’s cloud computing environment. The company’s challenges echo those of every other established independent software vendor (ISV) which must rearchitect its applications, redesign their go-to-market strategies, restructure its revenue recognition models, and reorient their corporate cultures to be services-driven rather than product-centric. Microsoft is facing the most serious of these challenges and struggling to find the right formula for future success. However, I think they have a good chance of surviving this challenge and capitalizing on the ’shifting clouds’.
5. Will Cloud Computing Obsolete SaaS? This San Francisco Chronicle column includes an interview with Larry Augustin, the CEO of SugarCRM, who suggests that SaaS companies must evolve their operations to better leverage the cloud in order to survive long-term. This point of view gets to the heart of the debate about the line of demarcation between SaaS and cloud computing. Are they the same or different? I’ve always had the view that the success of SaaS has been the primary catalyst for the emergence of a broader array of cloud computing capabilities. If there is a distinction, then it is that SaaS has evolved into an rapidly maturing set of ‘packaged’ applications sold and delivered via the web, while cloud computing is a wider set of web-based development tools and delivery resources available on a pay-as-you-go basis that enable users to build their own solutions.

THINKstrategies announced today that Boomi 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.

Boomi provides on-demand integration technology which connects providers and consumers of SaaS and on-premise applications via a pure SaaS integration platform-as-a-service (PaaS) without software or appliances.

Click here to read more about Boomi’s award-winning SaaS capabilities.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards program and to apply for an award.

A series of service outages over the past few days has brought into focus all the worst fears about the ‘cloud’ computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement. These incidents have also demonstrated how data center experience doesn’t necessarily translate into cloud computing excellence.

The most damaging outage affected T-Mobile users who lost their contact information in a SideKick server snafu by a Microsoft subsidiary, amazingly called “Danger”.

A severe data center outage grounded Air New Zealand last week. This time, IBM proved to be the culprit responsible for mishandling one of the airline carrier’s mainframe systems as part of a traditional-style outsourcing arrangement.

The cloud computing world wasn’t spared when one of the most promising SaaS vendors also had a system failure last week. Unlike the IBM and Microsoft outages, Workday was able to fully restore its customers’ records and salvage its customers’ satisfaction for important two reasons:

1. It had the proper back-up and recovery systems in place to safeguard the records.
2. It had the right notification and communications policies and procedures in place to keep its customers abreast of the status of their data and services.

These incidents clearly illustrate that whenever organizations entrust their data to a third-party, whether via a cloud computing service or a traditional outsourcing arrangement, it is important to carefully evaluate the vendor’s technical and operational capabilities to fully protect the data to mitigate potential business risks.

Despite IBM’s extensive data center experience and Microsoft’s vast resources, they were not up to this challenge. Instead, it is a relative neophyte (Workday) who outperformed the industry titans.

This is further proof that having the right service-oriented DNA, like at Workday, is far more important to succeed in the SaaS and cloud computing market than IBM’s traditional data center experience or Microsoft’s software product-centric expertise.

I’ve been suggesting for years that PC vendors could be great channel partners for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors, and Dell now has an opportunity to prove me right.

Today, Dell and saleforce.com announced that Dell will offer salesforce.com’s SaaS solutions to its small- and mid-size business (SMB) customers via its website.

This is a natural combination. Dell has been a prominent customer of salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM solutions. Salesforce.com uses Dell’s computers in its data centers. This week, the companies’ CEOs will be on stage together at Oracle’s Open World conference.

Selling software to its customers isn’t new for Dell. It has been offering Microsoft Office, Symantec Anti-Virus and other applications for a while. Adding salesforce.com’s on-demand solutions enables Dell to position itself as a fuller, ‘one-stop shop’ for SMBs.

This gives salesforce.com a strong new channel to market and builds on Dell’s core competency as a direct sales company, offsetting some of the challenges which will arise from Dell’s recent decision to acquire Perot Systems.

This is another example of the aggressive efforts SaaS vendors are making to broaden their channels to market and hardware vendors’ efforts to add SaaS to their portfolios, including NetSuite’s previous partnership with HP and Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx.

At the moment, IBM is putting its energies into promoting its LotusLive SaaS capabilities. It will be interesting to see how it responds to these competitive moves and positions itself as a channel to market for third-party SaaS vendors as well.

I was astonished to learn that salesforce.com’s founder and CEO, Marc Benioff, is speaking at next week’s Oracle Open World customer/partner conference.

Although Benioff is an alumnus of Oracle and Oracle’s founder/chairman/CEO Larry Ellison was an initial investor in salesforce.com, there has been no love lost between them publicly because salesforce.com was conceived to compete against Oracle’s Siebel division long before it became a part of Oracle.

Benioff has spent the past decade ridiculing the inefficiencies of on-premise customer relationship management (CRM) software and other legacy enterprise applications, along with traditional hosting models associated with Oracle. Ellison has returned the fire with his own tirades about the impossible economics of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. And, Ellison’s lieutenants in the Siebel On-Demand division have made increasingly aggressive efforts to undercut the success of salesforce.com over the past year.

Yet, folks I know who are a part of the Oracle inner-circle have said that Benioff and Ellison have been able to maintain a warm personal relationship despite their public saber-rattling. And, Oracle has benefited from the fact that salesforce.com’s has relied heavily on Oracle database solutions since its inception as a key component of its service delivery infrastructure.

I always viewed Ellison’s diatribes against SaaS, and more recent rants about the cloud, as a subterfuge aimed at deflecting attention from this fertile marketplace.

But, Benioff’s appearance at next week’s Oracle Open World conference may represent more than an appeasement against these ideas and political detente between the companies. The title of Benioff’s talk is, “The Best of Both Worlds: Customer Success in the Cloud with Oracle and salesforce.com.”

While Ellison was not a fan of SaaS in public, Oracle has fully embraced the concept of cloud computing from a marketing perspective, especially since announcing its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems.

My guess is that folks in Oracle’s On-Demand Siebel division are pretty upset about Benioff’s Open World appearance because they figure they can also pitch the benefits of the cloud, without inviting a competitor to talk to their current and prospective customers.

The same is probably true for the senior executives and staff at NetSuite, another Oracle spinoff and Ellison SaaS investment, which has always viewed salesforce.com as a sibling rival but hasn’t been invited to the Oracle party even though most industry observers believed it is more closely aligned with Oracle.

Two and a half years ago, I suggested that Oracle would buy salesforce.com in a hostile takeover to derail its success in the SaaS marketplace. Now, I’m beginning to wonder if it may be a friendly acquisition to capitalize on its escalating success.

After I initially speculated that Oracle would make a hostile takeover bid, I suggested that Google would be the white knight who would come to salesforce.com’s rescue because it couldn’t afford to lose this valuable partner and channel to the enterprise market. I’m not sure if Google would make the same move if Oracle initiates a friendly takeover bid.

The bottomline is that Benioff’s appearance at next week’s conference, and the topic of his talk, is another indication that SaaS and cloud computing are becoming more mainstream ideas and more viable methods to increase the effectiveness of enterprise applications and data centers.

THINKstrategies announced today that IDeaS Revenue Optimization 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.

IDeaS, a SAS company, is a leading provider of Pricing, Forecasting and Optimization solutions and services. Acquired in 2008 by SAS, IDeaS enables global organizations such as leading hospitality, travel and transportation companies to understand, anticipate and react to consumer behavior in order to optimize company-wide revenue and profits.

Click here to read more about IDeaS’ award-winning business benefits.

Click here to read more about the Best of SaaS Showplace Award program.