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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 convinced of the  cost efficiencies of the SaaS model are resenting the hefty support contracts. The challenge of coming up with a [...]

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. [...]

As SaaS model becomes more mature and moves beyond Sales Automation into the more involved functional domains of Human Resources Management, Project Management, Supply Chain and Financial Analysis,  IT executives in companies now have to define the right process to procure SaaS offerings. While it is still a software that you are buying, the dynamics [...]

In the regulatory climate we live in today, by adopting Software-as-a-Service/Cloud based services, business are confronted with two equally challenging choices. On the one-hand, SaaS provides companies with a controlled environment outside the control of their IT organization. The internal IT staff will have no access to the application, the data and infrastructure configuration that [...]

Aravo – the Supplier Information Management SaaS vendor announced that General Electric has selected its hosted solution to manage the Supplier Information for 500,000 suppliers across 100 countries in six different languages. Here are couple of key things I take out of this announcement This is further illustration that large companies are increasingly making investments [...]

While SaaS is making inroads in North America challenges abound as companies try to explore global markets and emerging economies.

A friend of mine, whom I have been trying-to-convert as a SaaS believer, sent me this article with a quote from Harry Debes, the CEO of Lawson Software, no less. http://www.webguild.org/2008/08/saas-industry-will-collapse-in-two-years.php What a statement it was !!. In his opinion, Harry makes a valid argument about customer acquisition costs/investment and the flight risk of customers [...]

On-Demand Human Capital Management (HCM) application provider Workday announced that it landed a largest ever SaaS deal to date. It announced that global electronics contract manufacturer Flextronics signed a 200,000 user deal to use the software to manage its entire workforce. While this is not going to be the standard size of SaaS deals that are going to be [...]

Software-as-a-Service as a software (or should I say service) delivery model is causing upheaval in the software industry. Everyone from large software vendors to System Integrators are forced to take a look at it despite their announcement to the contrary. SaaS changes a lot of things that are true in software industry as we known [...]