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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

A sales model typically used in Software-as-a-Service businesses to structure the sales organizations. In this model, the sales force is divided into two groups,  Hunters, who charter is to find and bring new customers and Farmers, whose responsibility it is to build relationships, nurture them and identify opportunities to upsell into those customers. This has […]

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 […]

I know every one and their grandfather has their own definition of what Cloud Computing is. As we go through the blogs, marketing paraphernalia we keep seeing the definition of cloud computing evolve (or disintegrate). So to that end I sought to find out what some of the top technology leaders felt and thought of […]

Established companies venturing into SaaS business or newbies starting off as SaaS companies have to deal with a lot of new and evolving challenges. Everything that you can possibly think of is different with SaaS model. To say that it is changing the software business is an understatement. Starting with delivery model, architecture, sales, support […]

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 […]

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 […]

Byron Deeter and Philippe Botteri from Bessemmer Venture Partners came up with 10 Laws of being SaaSy about a year ago. It was a corporate strategy for SaaS companies prepared in a slide deck. Bessemer 10 Laws Of Being SaaSy Fall 2008 Back when I came across this document in the SandHill Report, I had […]

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. […]

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.

Josh Greenbaum published a great article on Value Added SaaS, the incidental benefits of SaaS model besides the obvious cost benefits of being an alternative to on-premise. I have long shared this thought about SaaS wherein the barriers for true colloboration are broken by having the value chain players all on the same platform. At Siterra, […]

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 […]