Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Governance and Sustainability

The world is still wrestling with the after effects of the economic downturn, high unemployment, budget deficits galore across states, towns. Oblivious to all these the technology industry seems to be charging ahead. In what could be tipped as the Cloud Computing arms race, large technology companies like HP, IBM, Oracle, Dell, Cisco, EMC are [...]

The recent announcement by Rackspace and their partners announcing the OpenStack, Open Source Cloud platform got me thinking. While I am still a skeptic, when it comes to the technology industry coming together and defining a common standard that all the vendors stood behind (as I wrote in my previous post), there are still ways [...]

Rackspace and NASA announced a Open Stack, an open source open standards based Cloud platform. To make it worthy of your attention, they have also enlisted Intel, Dell,  AMD, Citrix and a host of other smaller tool vendors into the program as supporters of this initiative. The OpenStack will be available in an Apache 2.0 [...]

Microsoft has never been known to be the first mover in any new technology or product. If anything, they end up being the last entry into any new burgeoning technology area. Case in point, Office applications, Database, ERP, Web Search, Game Devices and now Cloud. But also true is the fact they don’t stay last [...]

Storage leader EMC, the original acquirer par-excellence is at it again. Today they announced the acquisition of Greenplum to get into Cloud Computing and specifically database management. For a company that started out as a furniture reseller (I bet you did not know that !), they made successful transition into memory disk drives and eventually [...]

As with all monolithic technology companies Microsoft has had its challenges embracing Cloud and making big strides there. While they have got their feet wet by releasing the Microsoft Azure Platform as both a Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS)  and Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) offering, they still resonate more with the Private Cloud believers. (I firmly vouch my support a fully public [...]

Apprenda, the leading Software-as-a-Service platform for building .NET based SaaS applications, announced the release of their free community edition SaaSGrid Express yesterday. I think this is the first of its kind where a company is releasing a complete SaaS platform that ISVs can download and start building their SaaS application. In my discussion with Sinclair [...]

I was part of a small group of SaaS/Cloud leaders who got together to talk about Pricing strategies, organized by Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy). The group consisted of founders of early stage startups that were comparing notes with fellow startup leaders, on various pricing strategies that worked for them and virtues of each of them. Amongst [...]

The internet is littered with top 10 lists advising of the considerations for the cloud, which primarily are designed to help you decide if you should move to the cloud or not. But once you have made the important decision to migrate your app to the cloud, the below offers a list of important things [...]

In their quest for profitability, Ning recently announced that they will end the free service and become a 100% paid service. You can read the detailed announcement from the CEO Jason Rosenthal here. The writing was on the wall that big changes would be coming after Founder, CEO Gina Bianchini quit her job and Rosenthal [...]

Startups are a rage in emerging economies. Look at India, China or Brazil, you will find hundreds of startups sprouting all across the country. It just has become so easy to start and market a web business (even in developing countries) – increased broadband penetration, inexpensive computers, smart-phones, easy access to the Internet, free-for-all social [...]

Last week was cloudy in Silicon Valley and more so around the Santa Clara Convention center with Cloud Connect 2010. By the end of the conference anyone who had clouded thoughts should have walked way with the notion that this “Cloud Thing” is real and is here to stay. Yours truly had a front seat [...]

Open Source software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represent the two real disruptions in the arena of enterprise software. In the last decade both have experienced real success and challenged the inertia that persisted in the enterprise software controlled by proprietary vendors. New business models, Product offerings have provided consumers with choices on both the price-performance as [...]

As SaaS becomes increasingly the preferred way for delivery and consumption  for all things software, incumbent on-premise vendors are feeling the heat to come up with their own version of SaaS application. Customers unequivocally convinced of the  cost efficiencies of the SaaS model are resenting the hefty support contracts. The challenge of coming up with [...]

In my previous post in this series Graduating Cloud to the Enterprise, I covered Infrastructure-as-a-Service and highlighted some of the key gating factors for mass adoption by large enterprises. In this post I will analyze the benefits and challenges of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). To give you good sense of what Platform-as-a-Service would mean I will start [...]

Companies large and small added Cloud Computing as an agenda item to every key decision they made around IT last year. As companies continued to combat the budget pressures stemming from the financial downturn the cost-efficiencies delivered by SaaS, PaaS, IaaS are becoming increasing irresistible. These topics are no longer fancy acronyms that are restricted [...]