Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source and Governance

SAP has launched a new business intelligence (BI) offering for casual users that it claims will tie together all of its software-as-a-service BI products into one offering.

Business Objects BI OnDemand, will allow customers to create BI charts that include data, reports and analysis from SAP’s full client design tools, such as Business Objects Edge and Business Objects Enterprise, using desktop tools such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and cloud applications like Salesforce.

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 the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As companies continue to adopt SaaS, they need to start thinking about the technology procurement differently. Conducting due diligence on the software vendor should be the foremost consideration.

SaaS adoption brings with it a lot of benefits in the Cost savings, quick ramp up and at the same time brings challenges in the IT Governance area.

A friend of mine, whom I have been trying-to-convert as a SaaS believer sent me this article about 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 an article it was !!.
In his opinion, Harry makes a valid argument about customer acquisition costs/investment and the flight risk of customers off-boarding just as [...]

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 it. [...]