Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Governance and Sustainability

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 [...]

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 [...]

Compiere, the leading Open Source ERP vendor, announced today that it is being acquired by Indiana based Consona Corporation. This provides further evidence to what I alluded to in one of my earlier posts about SaaS stealing Open Source‘ thunder. It would not come as a  surprise to me if more open source application vendors [...]

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 [...]

The recent acquisition of Sybase by SAP got me thinking. Is it me or most leading large companies, thanks to their acquisition binge are beginning to resemble the erstwhile General Motors? Take a look at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM and CA, the top 5 pure play software companies (granted IBM is a little service heavy [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

2009 was a banner year for SaaS. With all the banter around Cloud Computing as an advancement in technology and it glories bandied around I would still be hard pressed to find a more compelling reason behind the larger success of SaaS – than the distressed economy. Companies with dwindling IT budgets ratcheted up the [...]

One of the key drivers of the SaaS model has been the transfer of risks, burden and costs of ownership from the software buyer to the software vendor. In a way, by adopting SaaS the customers are telling the software industry to get their act together and bear the risks for their own doing. For [...]

Automation of business operations drove the adoption of technology by companies to gain efficiencies and competitive advantage in the marketplace. With the operational areas automated, it led to the next imperative for companies i.e, leverage the large amounts of data being captured, stored, organized in various disparate business systems and deliver it to the right [...]

R “Ray” Wang of Software Insider blog recently wrote an interesting piece on how companies should consider and pursue resale of their unused, shelf ware they licensed or acquired as part of an acquisition. This he felt was an opportunity for companies to effectively manage their spend on software. Shelf ware to those who are [...]

In the last decade or so with Salesforce.com leading the charge SaaS has made deep inroads into every area of commercial business software. Starting with Sales applications then moving into other edge applications like Collaboration, Project Management, Document Management. In the last couple of years even core business processes like Human Capital Management (SuccessFactors) and [...]

John Wookey, executive vice president of SAP On-Demand shared his vision for SAP’s SaaS strategy in an interview with  InformationWeek. Given the multiple SaaS/on-demand strategies SAP has presented to date this new one creates some confusion. In the past SAP has always portrayed Business ByDesign as its on-demand offering albeit making it available only in [...]

I recently read a post from Sranama Mitra where she makes a excellent case for a impending SaaS consolidation wave. She initially posited that Intuit and ADP were due for acquisitions in the payroll, billing space. As if that was the nudge Intuit needed, it promptly announced a deal to acquire PayCycle. Now ADP it [...]

Dave Duffield’s SaaS startup Workday announced today that they closed a fifth round of funding – a whopping $75Million dollars. If you are a small startup desparately struggling for seed or Series A or Series C funding of a couple of million dollars, this news should feel like someone pouring salt on a open wound. [...]