Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Marketing strategies

Here is a great video by Gail Goodman from Constant Contact where she shares the challenges they faced as they tried to reach critical mass and the ramp.

Is SaaS really the best model for delivering software? That was the topic of a discussion I had today, with a friend of mine, who is a CEO of a SaaS company. Ironically, he runs a SaaS company that serves other SaaS companies. SaaS was all the rage 4-5 years ago and now with a [...]

Uncle Larry is at it again!!. First he threw a left hook at SAP by announcing a in-memory offering just when SAP was hoping to bask in the glory of their results and highlighting how, with HANA, they would unseat Oracle in their customer base. If that was not enough now to negate SAP’s acquisition [...]

2010 was a blockbuster year for Cloud Computing, no two ways about it. The year started with naysayers pooh-poohing Cloud Computing as YATF (Yet Another Technology Fad) only to come back and endorse cloud with a backhanded compliment albeit calling it Private Cloud. A lot was achieved in terms of bringing down the hurdles that [...]

The world is shrinking and the traditional boundaries between Desktop, Client-Server, Web and Cloud technologies are getting blurred. While some of your business applications should be strictly on-premise, some have to move to the private cloud and some travel to the public cloud. The users community of today’s applications are spread across Product divisions Geographies [...]

Cloud Computing has created enough of a challenge for companies. On the one hand, they have investments made into traditional on-premise technologies which has developed firm roots in the enterprise, thanks to all the customization, resources etc. On the other hand they see these new Cloud solutions, all of which they wished their existing vendors [...]

As we end the year 2010, a year that can be considered as  a blockbuster year for Cloud Computing, I thought it was time to take a look back. The rhetoric around “True” Cloud and “False” Cloud is still bustling along with gay abandon. The year began with Larry Ellison chiding – “What the hell [...]

Today when I logged into Facebook to accept an invite from an old friend, I was surprised by an invitation from Facebook to accept their email. I am told they are still in the “Invite Only” phase of granting email address. They had already generated an email address for me. I tried to see if [...]

As I write this post from DreamForce, my second year attending the event, the buzz here is incredible. The last two days have seen a slew of announcements from Salesforce.com. Being a showman is definitely not something Marc Benioff would complain being tagged as. Force.com for all the accolades still carried the tag of being [...]

Service Levels have always been a critical business continuity metric that companies have tracked. This has been true even through the years when companies managed their entire technology portfolio themselves. With technologies increasingly moving to cloud, SLAs and the Recovery Metrics (RTO and RPO) are more critical for both the service provider and service consumers. [...]

Last week I attended CloudExpo West in Santa Clara and had an opportunity to listen to many sessions, talk to quite a few vendors and those seeking cloud solutions. Amongst other things, lack of standards repeatedly came up as one the gating issues for wider adoption of Cloud in enterprises. I have continuously maintained that - Cloud [...]

I know there have been other Top bloggers lists that have been created elsewhere. But there have been a few bloggers that I have been following who probably don’t care about being in any lists whatsoever. But don’t confuse that with the passion they have for Cloud Computing and SaaS. They come from different trades [...]

Last week I attended a presentation by Adrain Cockcroft (@adrianco), Cloud architect behind Netflix’s amazing move to Amazon EC2 infrastructure.  Check out the video of the 90 minutes long presentation. It was an excellent presentation with a good mix of technical and business areas covered. (Besides that Netflix also sponsored large number of Pizzas for [...]

Cloud Computing has slowly but surely seeped into every aspect of technology. All the Cloud-in-a-box, not-in-a-box, babble notwithstanding, there has been steady progress made on multiple fronts.  With the challenges around Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) all but conquered, technology vendors have firmly and steadily moved up the stack to kill the Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) monster. In attacking the multitude [...]

The bastardization of term Cloud has exceeded all expectations and then some. It has gotten so crazy that not a single technology discussion goes by without someone tossing around the word Cloud but has no innate association with the real Cloud. If the technology geeks debating about it is not funny enough we have clowns [...]

Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud – the resounding noise of everyone trying to define their version of Cloud Computing just got a whole lot louder. With Larry publicly chiding the “Cloud-Washing” by wannabe cloud vendors, Oracle was in a bind. They could not simply turnaround and come out with their own cloud offerings. Now [...]

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 worldly challenges 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, [...]

The traditional software (on-premise) sales model relies on the both direct and indirect distribution, leveraging the indirect Channel (the Channel) to build a loyal customer base and to generate a large portion of sales. Value Added Resellers (VARs), and System Integrators (SIs) play a major role in the evangelizing, demand generation, pre/post sale activities and [...]

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 [...]

Software-as-a-Service business with all the virtues that it purports also demands that the service provider be agile. Agile, not only, in terms of the way product is built but delivered and managed. Unlike in the traditional software days, subscription revenue model requires that SaaS solution provider measure every process and continuously adapt based on the [...]

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 [...]

Penetration Testing is a process wherein you simulate the actions of a real hacker. A series of activities, aimed at various parts of a IT infrastructure, are performed to gain access to the data and network devices that one should not be having access to. The activities conducted during a penetration testing could assume the [...]

Intrusion Detection is the process by which you determine if there has been attempts to gain authorized access to data or application that is deemed as confidential. The source of  intrusion could be through any of the following means application, either through Unauthorized Accounts, SQL injection, URL hacking or cracking passwords network infrastructure, through open [...]

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 [...]

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the average cost of acquiring a customer for a business. While it applies to most businesses, it assumes a higher degree of importance in a subscription based business like SaaS, Cloud Infrastructure to measure the profitability on a given customer. Customer Acquisition Cost is measured as ratio of the (Total [...]

Note: Aprigo has since changed its name to CloudLock. So any reference to Aprigo is just for history. If Data Overload, Fileshare sprawl, Data Breach, Regulatory Compliance are part of your day-to-day jargon at work then this should interest you. In this age of exponential growth of information, dynamic global workforce, companies have had to [...]

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 [...]