Starting out in the Cloud

People love acronyms, and it’s all too apparent with cloud computing software.
Maybe it’s the novelty of the industry (people love writing stories about how everything is ‘going to the cloud’). Or maybe it’s the long names.

It is very evident that cloud computing providers are going to be huge in the near future. For many companies, moving computing to the cloud will offer a cost competitive advantage to traditional computing methods as noted in Ben’s recent post.

Before jumping straight to SaaS, it is important to understand the basics of the cloud.  Between the server and the client there are three levels of cloud computing software. Each level acts similar to the levels of traditional computing, from storage space and hardware to platform and software.

At the lowest level is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which provides storage and a base on which platforms and applications function. Above that, the next layer of cloud computing is where the computing platform runs, or the PaaS layer. The top layer is Software as a Service (SaaS) or the actual programs that manage, scale, and utilize the data on the cloud.

These lines are often blurred and many companies offer products that span multiple layers, but regardless, it can be important to understand the most fundamental layer: IaaS.

While Amazon and Rackspace are big names in the industry, here are some excellent solutions that may not be quite as well known:

1. Cirrhus9: This provider takes the top spot on the list because of its versatile user controls. Operated through an API, command line, graphical interface or a web-based control panel, this service offers more options than other cloud computing providers.
2. Savvis: Founded in 1995, Savvis is a veteran of the industry. With flexible month-to-month payment plans and a free file hosting service, this service is a safe bet for your money. Savvis is operated through an API, graphic user interface or a web-based control panel. Although it does offer backup storage, it does not offer a firewall for those users who rank protection as a top concern.
3. Appcore: Appcore is the most secure of this list of three cloud computing service providers. It offers a range of free features, from firewall to data encryption and intrusion detection. Plus, as a paid feature, users can get backup storage. Users operate Appcore through a web-based control panel and have a very wide range of protection and OS options and services available.

These three companies all offer great foundations to any cloud computing setup.  If you do not plan on managing the data on the cloud yourself, make sure to first ensure that your management company supports the infrastructure that you choose, because changing between infrastructures can be a huge hassle.

For more objective and data-driven comparisons, be sure to visit FindTheBest, where you can compare anything from cloud backup software to antivirus to tablets.
By FindTheBest Editorial
Tags: findthebesteditorial, SaaS beginnings

6 social marketing truths executives must understand

(Editor’s note: Reggie Bradford is CEO of Vitrue. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

With more than 20 years of experience as an executive in the technology and marketing spaces, I’ve learned a lot about how technology directly affects marketing strategies.

The arrival of sites like Facebook, Twitter and most recently Google+ have changed the way societies communicate. While many brand marketers have incorporated social into their plans, many still wrestle with questions like how much, to what degree, how to execute, and what is next? Simply “being social” is not enough. Here are six truths marketing executives need to know about this phenomenon:

The social sandbox is getting bigger: With 750 million engaged and active fans, Facebook is absolutely the most effective and important overall social network (and should be your main focus). You’ve probably heard the refrain about engaging on Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and emerging platforms, as well. But it’s foolish to not have an eye on Google+, which amassed 20 million users in only a month.

Despite its infancy, and some launch hiccups, Google+ has great potential – most notably its integration with other Google products, essentially creating a social layer across numerous properties. According to Experian Hitwise, 56 percent of Google+’s upstream traffic came from other Google properties, with 34 percent of that traffic coming from Google.com. 37 percent of its upstream traffic came from search engines, while 21 percent was driven by email. In the aggregate, Google+ could offer a valuable real-time multimedia content sharing and discovery social platform. Only time will tell.

Google+ also has promising features like its “circles,” a friend-grouping capability, as well as the “huddle” and “hangout” video-chat functionalities. And many have noted Google+ as simply offering consumers a place to “start over” with a fresh, a brand-new social slate. Smart brands have already taken notice, led by Ford, whose social media head Scott Monty noted: “It’s a priority for us to understand what’s on the cutting edge and where influencers are going and look at the technology shaping the way people are communicating. Normally we try to go where the mainstream are. In certain circumstances we’ll be an early adopter because we see the potential.”

Social networks are your best consumer connection: No other marketing channel offers such an effective, direct communication between your brand and your consumers. The two-way flow of that talk can lead to increased brand awareness and loyalty, which will drive your business forward. Buffalo Wild Wings learned this by combining a digital “Wall App” coupon strategy and traditional media. During a 27-day period, more than 179,000 coupons were printed, with almost 100,000 coming directly from the Wall App. The company had a 63 percent redemption rate of coupons from Facebook, helping to provide a healthy in-store sales boast for the promotional period. And they gained 57,000 fans during the promotion.

Don’t ditch traditional marketing just yet: Despite social’s power, brand marketers will need, for the foreseeable future, a solid execution of traditional marketing married with digital and social. TV still remains the dominant “branding” mass medium. And despite sagging readership, print newspapers, magazines and radio will continue to grab a share, albeit digital continues to erode the traditional “print” outlets.

Be strategic about integrating traditional, digital and social marketing to ensure consistent messaging and maximum reach. Social will continue to grow in importance, but it needs support of other marketing channels.

Great content trumps fan volume: A large fan base is good, but an active one is better. What you say and how you say it is more important than simply building a following. Publish content that garners engagement. Among those who are doing content right are: iTunes Facebook community, the NBA, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Tide.

These brands all take time to “know” their fans and deliver content that is exclusive and of value, whether that be follower-only specials, promotions and exclusives, rich video content or compelling information around their products. Philanthropic tie-ins cause consumers to associate your brand with social good and typically results in a higher level of brand loyalty. And social games can be an engaging, fun element that will give social audiences a reason to visit and interact with your brand.

You need to localize and target that content: Because the conversation is two-way now, it’s more important than ever to know as much as you can about your customers. As the space matures, marketers will need to deliver hyper-targeted, localized content –coupons, information, specials, stats, etc. –at the right time in the right format for maximum effectiveness. Learn to segment and put content into audience silos. MTV, for example, has separate Facebook Pages for each of its individual shows because the network knows that fans of “MADE” might not be fans of “Jersey Shore”.

Pay attention to key emerging trends: Changes in the digital world will affect what’s possible and relevant to your audience – and these changes aren’t mutually exclusive to your social marketing strategy. For example, mobile phones and tablets will likely become the main means of communication for the digital/social world, meaning brand marketers must have the sophistication and technological platforms to manage and deliver on those devices.

Other trends to keep your eye on include the rising trend of alternative commerce technologies and the potential with NFC (near-field communication) technologies for mobile commerce is incredible. We’re also seeing the rise of sCommerce with fully integrated Facebook storefronts, and the potential is great. The jury is still out on sCommerce, but it’s worth keeping an eye on it.

The advance of social technologies has given consumers much greater access and, in turn, control. Brands now have to sprint to keep up with them.

Pulled from/sourced: venturebeat.com

Tags: facebook, google, linkedin, reggie bradford, SaaS apps, social marketing truths, social networks news, social sandbox, twitter, venturebeat

Top Reasons Why SaaS is at ‘Forefront’ of Recovery: SIIA/OPEXEngine Report

SaaS is emerging from the recession as a software sector “at the forefront of the economic recovery,” says a report by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). To find out more, IDN spoke with the report’s author, Lauren Kelley, CEO and founder of OPEXEngine.

SaaS is emerging from the recession as a software sector “at the forefront of the economic recovery,” and is enjoying a big jump in profitability while SaaS capital requirements are decreasing, according to an industry report.

The 2011 Software Benchmarking Industry Report was issued by The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and OPEXEngine, a leading benchmarking firm for small and mid-size software firms.

An excerpt from the SIIA/OPEXEngine report states:

Over the past five years, we’ve seen the SaaS business model mature and become more efficient. Five years ago, even many of the $100M+ public SaaS companies were unprofitable, unlike today where almost all are profitable. And SaaS companies are taking less capital to get to profitability.

This year, almost all of the small SaaS companies we benchmarked are venture backed with an average of $10M in investment capital under their belts, whereas the larger private SaaS companies had taken an average of almost $40M in venture investment.

To find out what’s behind these healthy cloud-driven numbers, IDN spoke with the report’s author, Lauren Kelley, CEO and founder of OPEXEngine.

“Overall, SaaS companies are achieving profitability earlier and requiring less capital to get there than five to seven years ago for several reasons,” Kelley told IDN.

One major factor is the improvements in cloud-based infrastructure for SaaS. Kelley called this improvement in cloud “a definite meta-trend affecting SaaS vendors,” which is the availability and improved services offered in the area of IaaS and PaaS. [This] helps bring down the cost of hosting and supporting an increasing volume of customers,” she told IDN.

These improvements have delivered measureable benefits to SaaS providers, most notably through their ability to minimize required capital and extend burn rates, Kelley added. “VCs that I’ve worked with estimate roughly that it took approximately $50M in capital to bring a successful SaaS vendor to profitability five to seven years ago, whereas today, depending on the software application, it can take only $25M-30M, or less, in invested capital,” she said.

“Definitely the cost of infrastructure for hosting a SaaS business is going down, but it is difficult to give concrete numbers as it varies widely with different applications and different security and redundancy requirements,” she added.

Kelley also noted these other important factors:

• SaaS Integration. The ability to integrate a SaaS application hosted in the cloud with on-premise assets, is improving all the time, she added. “Given the increasing acceptance of SaaS applications within the enterprise, many of the ‘soft’ integration issues are being overcome, such as resistance by internal IT departments to SaaS, security concerns, and so on,” Kelley told IDN. Despite the recent advantages SaaS enjoys from the maturing of cloud integration, Kelley said there are still many “hard” technical challenges to integrating SaaS applications with internal assets.

• Maturing Business Models. The SaaS business model overall has matured and evolved because there are more experienced entrepreneurs and VCs in the sector today, who know what metrics to track, how to build and execute on SaaS business models, and manage cash flow for a SaaS subscription business as compared to traditional software sales models where a vendor is paid largely up front.

• Discipline. The recent recession forced much greater spending discipline on software companies. “For example, most VCs told portfolio companies to sink or swim without expecting much more capital, and most swam pretty well,” she said.

In summary, two eye-popping metrics indicate that SaaS will continue to attract investments, from VC as well as legacy software firms.

“If you look at the software IPOs of the past couple years, almost all are SaaS vendors, indicating these are the most profitable and showing the most promise for future growth,” Kelley told IDN.

Moreover, research shows “sales to the enterprise are increasing all the time,” she added. “In the 2011 Software Benchmarking, we found that revenue growth rates for vendors selling primarily to customers with over $1B in revenues was a median of 20% from 2009 to 2010; and we expect that revenue growth rate to increase in 2011.”

The SIIA/OPEXEngine 2011 Software Benchmarking Industry Report surveyed firms with up to $350 million in revenues. OPEXEngine’s benchmarking reports are key tools used by senior operating executives to support the budgetary, strategic planning and investment processes.

Pulled from original/Sourced: idevnews.com by Vance McCarthy

Tags: cloud integration, Cloud-Based SaaS Solution, ISVs, SaaS, saas integrations, SIIA

Apple Pushes Past Exxon To Become The Most Valuable Public Company In The World (Temporarily)

Well, I didn’t expect it to happen until the fall — but I also didn’t anticipate the stock market collapse. And yet, here we are. After yesterday’s plunge, and today’s rally, Apple has just overtaken Exxon as the most valuable public company in the world.

The feat happened briefly this morning, before Exxon surged a bit ahead once again (update below). As of right now, the two are separated by under $500 million. That’s remarkable when you consider that just three weeks ago, at the time of my post, the two were $60 billion apart.

But again, this is already a different time. Three weeks ago, Exxon’s market cap was at $410 billion. Today, that market cap is just a hair above $340 billion. The share price has plummeted from $85 down to $70. And with the broader market collapse, Exxon’s price fell nearly $5 yesterday alone. That wiped out nearly $25 billion in market cap in one day.

Apple got hit hard as well yesterday, but not nearly as bad as Exxon. And today, while Exxon’s stock remains depressed, Apple’s has been rallying. Hence, the changing of the guard.

We’ll see what the stocks end up closing at, but it seems pretty clear at this point that Apple will be formally crowned the most valuable public company in the world at some point shortly.

Update: Apple is now ahead of Exxon again. And the gap seems to be increasing — Apple has over a billion dollar lead.

Update 2: As both stock are now falling, Apple’s lead is increasing. Now over $3.5 billion.

Update 3: About an hour til market close, and Apple now over $5 billion ahead.

Update 4: And with just 30 minutes to go, Exxon has pulled back ahead, with a huge surge.

Update 5: And the massive last-minute surge sees Exxon close the day just ahead of Apple still in market cap.

Sourced: techcrunch.com

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where… → Learn More

Tags: Apple, exxon, software company, techcrunch

Facebook Conference: Adaptation to Social & Mobile Is Matter of Survival

As Bonin Bough, global head of digital at PepsiCo, said at PR News’ Facebook Conference in San Francisco on Aug. 9, “we’re drugged out on technology while computers are getting smarter.”

We’re increasingly hooked on social and mobile technology as computers lead us along and change the way we actually think and act.

This is not a value judgment—it’s just the way things are.

Bough’s concern is actually with the widening gap between where society is with social and mobile (addicted, strung out) and where organizations are (flatlined digital evolution). The reason for organizations’ slow adaption? Fear, according to Bough.

And being gripped by fear can be fatal for organizations. “Failure to adapt to the digital evolution is written on the balance sheets of companies,” said Bough.

I spoke to an attendee after the Facebook Conference who works at a large utility. He told me that he was asked by other attendees why his organization needed to be on Facebook at all.

“Were they at the same conference as me?” he asked me. “We have no choice but to adapt. We might have a monopoly in what we do, but there are still conversations about us on social networks, whether we’re involved or not. We have to be there. And the higher-ups are finally starting to get it. They were real resistant for a long while.”

Much of this resistance takes the form of higher-ups wanting to see a quick return on their investment in social media. That’s a legitimate request, but it’s also a stalling tactic. This is not a fad. And as Bonin Bough said, it’s up to communicators to see to it that their organizations don’t go the way of the dinosaurs—or Borders.

—Steve Goldstein

Sourced: prnewsonline.com

Tags: facebook conference, mobile media, PR News, saas news, social media, social news

Cloud computing, latest buzzword? Or glimpse of the future?

The odds are good that within the next five years, the popularity of Cloud Computing within the enterprise and government would grow significantly. Yet Cloud Computing alone is not the answer.

Cloud Computing has steadily been growing in popularity in the IT industry since early 2007. In non technical terms, I would define a CLOUD as a (C)OMMON (L)OCATION- INDEPENDENT (O)NLINE (U)TILITY on (D)EMAND SERVICE.

In recent times, I’ve been engaged in discussions on Social Networks, most especially on Facebook, as regards Cloud Computing because I’ve been a cloud evangelist a little over a year now and I’m dismayed by the pessimism a lot of Nigerian techies posit in these discusses.

First and foremost, there have been myriad variations on the definition of the Cloud. Everyone has a different perspective and understanding of the technology and the misconceptions surrounding the subject matter was obvious when Steven Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, had problems communicating his company’s cloud strategy & infrastructure, Microsoft Windows Azure, to a select group of C-level executives last November.

The vagueness surrounding this ‘phenomenon’ is largely attributed to what I call the ‘hype cycle’. Since February 2007, Cloud Computing has been a buzzword for enterprises and governments that are looking forward to saving costs and reducing their energy usage and carbon footprints.

For my non techie audience, Cloud Computing is basically an outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand and a somewhere on the internet experience that is always offered as a service. Even if you are not a good technology adopter or in technical parlance a ‘digital immigrant’, you would be surprised at how much you interface with the ‘Cloud’.

The mobile phones we possess, the email addresses (Yahoo!, Windows Hotmail, Google Mail etc) we have, the Instant Messengers (Blackberry Messenger, Yahoo, Windows Live, Nimbuzz, Meebo, 2GO, eBuddy etc) we use to communicate on the go are typical examples of Cloud Computing services.

It’s as a result of the fact that the physical layer of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) model has been abstracted. In plain sense for instance, it means an Airtel subscriber should not be concerned about where the server serving him/her is located but his/her focus should be geared towards the service that’s been delivered.

Neither should a Gmail user bother about where Google server is located because it’s completely unimportant. This generation is a serviced generation. Everything is now being offered as a service and the benefits of being serviced is too indispensable to avoid.

From a technical perspective, Cloud Computing is divided into 3 major tiers namely:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS): This is basically what everyone already has in form of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Wordpress, the various search engines, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter etc.

2. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is an offering Amazon pioneered as the grand-daddy with the Elastic Compute 2 (EC2). Developers and system administrators obtain general compute, storage, queuing, and other resources and run their applications with the fewest limitations. This is the most powerful type of cloud in that virtually any application and any configuration that is fit for the internet can be mapped to this type of service. Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure is known as Windows Azure.

3. Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is the newest entry where an application platform is offered to developers in the cloud. Developers write their application to a more or less open specification and then upload their code into the cloud.

Highlighting all of these, the benefits of Cloud Computing to enterprises, individuals and governments cannot be over-emphasized. Cloud Computing in every facet frees up budgets handcuffed by IT expenses. Instead of purchasing software licenses for new employees and locations, businesses simply add accounts to expand computing capacity.

Governments would benefit from it because it pools all disparate sectors as a whole and it would ensure openness, accountability and prudence. For instance, the Nigerian Government can create a cloud where citizens pay their tenement, water and electricity bills on a central platform. The Nigerian Police Force can create a Cloud Infrastructure we would name in this instance, The Nigeria Intellipedia® that would have sub cloud systems like The Police Reporting Software® which advertently takes away statements from being on paper to a central database and makes crime management a less cumbersome issue.

In moving with the times and trends, some young Nigerian entrepreneurs are creating overtly ambitious private Cloud infrastructures which is beginning to generate positive ripples. First is the Naija Info Bank ® which when completed would be the largest Human Resources database in Sub-Saharan Africa with a capacity of over 80 million users and secondly www.traffic.com.ng which is still in its Beta Phase and after completion would offer descriptive traffic report with GPS Coordinates of every nook and cranny of Nigeria. All you have to do as an end-user is to plug into the cloud and enjoy these services.

The odds are good that within the next five years, the popularity of Cloud Computing within the enterprise and government would grow significantly. Yet Cloud Computing alone is not the answer. The key to achieving great success is for enterprises and governments to use efficient software to integrate their existing on- premises infrastructure with the Cloud.

Pulled from/Sourced: dailytimes.com

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, cloud computing news, Internet Azure Services Platform Business CEO Cloud computing Cloud infrastructure Company Technology computing eBuddy energy Everything as a service Facebook forward Gmail Google Infrastructure as a , platform, SaaS, saas news, saas technologies

Microsoft Survey Highlights Cloud Movement Across the US

Microsoft today named some of the country’s top “cloud-friendly” U.S. cities. The rankings are based on the results of an extensive survey in which 2,000 IT decision makers nationwide discussed how they are adopting and using cloud computing.

REDMOND, Wash. – from Jan. 2011 – The forecast for cloud computing across key U.S. cities calls for new lines of business, more need for IT services, and potential job growth, according to a new survey released today by Microsoft.

Microsoft released the results of the study this week after interviewing more than 2,000 IT decision-makers in 10 U.S. cities.

Microsoft interviewed more than 2,000 IT decision-makers in 10 U.S. cities. The survey indicates that cloud computing is helping to create new businesses and jobs in each city.

The cities are ranked based on how local businesses are adopting and using cloud computing solutions – including hiring vendors to migrate to the cloud, seeking IT professionals with cloud computing experience, and creating new lines of business based on cloud platforms. The survey indicates that cloud computing is not only a growing sector of the IT services community, but helping to create new businesses and jobs locally.

Atlanta, Ga.

Atlanta ranks in the middle of the pack of “cloud friendly” cities. The majority (62 percent) of IT decision makers at large companies in Atlanta currently employ, or plan to implement, cloud-based e-mail and communications tools, like IM and voice, compared with 36 percent of those at small businesses.

Boston, Mass.

Ranked as the most “cloud-friendly” city for large companies, Boston boasts a high percentage of companies that view cloud services as an opportunity to be more innovative and strategic. Nearly half (46 percent) of large businesses have one or more cloud projects planned and underway, and more than half are already using the cloud for e-mail, communication and collaboration.

Chicago, Ill.

The Windy City ranks 9 out of 10 in the survey of “cloud-friendly” cities. The tide may be turning because half of IT decision makers at large companies there say cloud computing is an opportunity to be more strategic. Small businesses are also beginning to see the benefits, with 39 percent stating they are encouraged to deploy cloud services because they are cost-effective.

Dallas, Texas

Dallas ranks third among the most cloud-ready cities for large companies. Of IT decision makers, 46 percent believe the cloud is an engine of innovation, where only 37 percent of those surveyed nationally believe so. Of the local small companies, 46 percent say they are encouraged to buy cloud services for reliable security, almost double the response of enterprise companies (29 percent).

Detroit, Mich.

The Motor City ranks near the bottom of our rankings for “cloud-friendly” cities, but nearly half (47 percent) of IT decision makers in Detroit see the cloud as an avenue for creating business advancements, saying the cloud is an engine of innovation. The majority (51 percent) of respondents agree that investing in IT during the next five years will increase profitability.

Los Angeles/Orange County, Calif.

Los Angeles and Orange County rank fourth among the most cloud-ready cities for small companies. Of the IT decision makers surveyed, nearly half (46 percent) are investing in cloud services. Small businesses agree that the use of cloud services helps to ensure they always have the latest upgrades available to them, and focusing more strategic initiatives will reduce IT workload.

New York, N.Y.

A city of great contrast in cloud adoption between small and large businesses, New York businesses boast the highest number of enterprises nationwide using cloud-based applications. While nearly half (46 percent) of large companies have cloud projects actively underway, only a small percentage (14 percent) of New York’s small businesses say the same.

Philadelphia, Pa.

Philadelphia ranks among the top three “cloud-friendly” cities for small businesses. A majority (87 percent) of IT decision makers at large companies have at least some knowledge of the cloud compared with only half (50 percent) of small businesses. Regardless of company size, a high percentage cites low total cost of ownership as a reason to transition to the cloud.

San Francisco, Calif.

San Francisco ranks among the top “cloud-friendly” cities. More than half (51 percent) of IT decision makers at large companies in San Francisco know a fair amount about cloud computing, with 49 percent having at least one cloud project planned or underway. Also, 40 percent of IT decision makers at local small companies believe cloud computing is an engine of innovation.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., ranks as the most “cloud-friendly” city for small businesses. Of those businesses that have adopted cloud services, enabling a remote workforce and lower total cost of ownership are cited as the top reasons for the move. In fact, almost half (46 percent) of IT decision makers at local businesses report cost savings of at least $1,000 through their use of cloud services.

“I think the study is incredibly interesting, and it shows business and IT growth is a key output of the cloud,” said Scott Woodgate, a director in Microsoft’s corporate account segment, which serves mid-market businesses. “For IT professionals, it’s clear that becoming skilled in the cloud is an important call to action. For businesses, the cloud really empowers growth. Because of the nature of the cloud, you can take more risks and innovate at a much lower cost.”

IT Decision Makers: Cloud Is Creating New Business Opportunities

IT decision makers in financial services, manufacturing, professional services, and retail and hospitality see cloud computing as an opportunity to grow their business, drive innovation and strategy, and efficiently collaborate across geographies, according to Microsoft’s new could computing survey.

Among IT decision makers surveyed:

• 24 percent used the cloud to help start a new line of business. • 68 percent in the financial services said they have been asked to find ways for their companies to save money on the IT side. • 34 percent in professional services, and 33 percent in retail and hospitality, believe cloud computing is an opportunity for the IT department to be more strategic. • 71 percent in manufacturing said their IT departments must address the business requirement to work anywhere at any time in the next year. • 33 percent in professional services said their IT departments must find new ways to enable and support their company’s growing workforce.

The survey, funded by Microsoft, was conducted online and targeted IT decision makers from various industries in 10 U.S. cities. Microsoft ranked the cities according to their “cloud-friendliness” based on a number of results, including opinions and attitudes about cloud computing.

The study shows that one of two things is happening in business – either companies are turning to outside experts to understand and implement the cloud, or they’re looking within their existing IT departments for help, Woodgate said.

“For example, almost two-thirds of enterprise IT decision makers have hired or are planning on hiring vendors to help understand and deploy the cloud,” Woodgate said. “And 21 percent of IT decision makers are looking to hire new staff with cloud experience.”

RDA Corporation in Baltimore is one of the many cloud consultants investing heavily in the technology – and it’s paying off.

CEO Tom Cole said his company, which does IT consulting, planning, strategy and integration, spent all of last year introducing the concept of cloud computing to its customers.

In just one year there has been a surge in interest in the cloud, he said. Last year his company decided to invest in the cloud and started talking to customers about it in a major way, and now companies are approaching RDA on their own asking for help moving to the cloud.

“Adoption is a two-pronged effort,” Cole said. “No. 1, understand what the technology is and its viability in the marketplace and, once you determine it is in fact viable, ensure that you’ve invested in the people and tools to learn the technology and be able to apply it. Secondly, you’ve got to invest in a field sales team and customers to be able to understand who the early adopters are, how they can take advantage of the cloud, and what the market will bear.”

Cole said his company is heavily invested in cloud computing, adding that it’s not hard to pitch Microsoft Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform – as a solution. He said it’s quick and affordable to deploy; it’s easy to build, maintain, manage, and add devices; and it’s easy to build customized solutions that scale up and down when the need shifts.

Scott Woodgate, a Microsoft director of corporate account marketing.

From Microsoft’s perspective, Woodgate said, cloud computing has two other advantages: it lets small businesses act like big businesses, and it lets big businesses move quickly and cheaply like a small business by quickly scaling up and down in size as their IT needs shift.

“It works for small business adopters because they have limited IT staff but have similar desires to large-businesses in terms of productivity, running the business and satisfying customers,” he said. “For big businesses, there is an opportunity to innovate at a lower cost with multiple options rather than having to sink all of their chips into a single, big capital cost option.”

Some businesses still believe that cloud computing will mean job losses, based on new efficiencies gained by moving some IT services to the cloud. This belief, coupled with a shaky economy that wasn’t allowing for new IT projects, led to some reticence for businesses to adopt cloud computing more eagerly. However, the Microsoft survey shows that tide is turning.

The survey also showed that businesses still believe some misnomers about cloud computing – such as that it’s just a trend or a fad.

“People often compare cloud computing to outsourcing. I don’t think it compares well,” Woodgate said. “The skill set of IT workers is changing, and there is plenty of opportunity for IT directly in the context of the cloud. Also, the value proposition of IT is changing. They currently spend a lot of time keeping the lights on. I think with the cloud, they’ll be able to spend less time on that and more time on moving the overall business forward.”

Tom Cole, CEO of RDA Corporation in Baltimore, Md.

Cole said any talk of cloud computing contributing to job loss is “totally fictitious.”

“It does not drive people out of work. If anything, it creates business opportunities to add different value and lowers the cost of optimizing your infrastructure,” Cole said. “The planning, deployment, migration and support opportunities in the area of new venture startup are a tremendous way – at a low risk – to start something new, which means new jobs.”

Whenever there is a seismic shift in an industry, like cloud computing is for the IT industry, the changes may mean job shifting, Woodgate said. But in the long term, it will mean more jobs and higher-value IT jobs – such as creating new services for end users.

“With these changes, it takes time to get people’s skills up, it takes time to understand the cloud and evaluate how it can help you, execute your first project and then build on that success” Woodgate said. “Certainly the infrastructure for cloud computing exists today, so it’s great to see this level of interest. Microsoft began our journey to the cloud more than 10 years ago and we have some very strong offerings across productivity, management and software as a service.”

Pulled from/Sourced: The original article and images are located here: microsoft.com

Tags: cloud computing, cloud friendly, cloud friendly cities, it decision-makers, Microsoft, tom cole

Ford wins a rare corporate foothold on Google+

Ford Motor Co. has established a corporate presence on Google+, evidently securing a place in a test of how Google’s social network site will extend beyond individuals.

The Ford Google+ site had 1,222 followers on Saturday morning and featured posts such as a photo caption contest, a question about what people would like to see out of Ford on Google+, and promotion of a live chat with Ford’s director of marketing communications–with a Google+ video-chat hangout afterward.

The corporate presence is a rarity on Google+. Google has been deleting other corporate accounts, saying Google+ today is optimized for individuals. It plans to release the corporate version of Google+ later this year, but in the meantime is testing its ideas for how it should work.

It’s no surprise Google would want to add such a feature, especially given the fierce demand for Google+ membership right now. Facebook pages and corporate Twitter accounts are a fixture of the social marketing world, and Google needs to match those if it wants a competitive offering. Social networking is a hot topic today for businesses that want new ways of boosting sales, promoting their brand names, and engaging with customers.

Facebook today is the dominant social network, and it’s gone as far as suggesting that Facebook pages could replace company Web sites. That seems an unlikely outcome for many, but there’s no doubt that a social network presence is increasingly common.

Google+ is in a mostly closed beta, though Google has fleetingly added an invitation button, and Google+ members can invite their contacts by sending them an e-mail from the service.

Through another partnership, Google Maps users can send navigation instructions to some Ford cars through the Ford Sync service.

Read more: news.cnet.com

Tags: ford google plus account, google, google+ business profile, social buzz news

Twitter Acquires Social Analytics Platform BackType

Twitter has just acquired social analytics startup BackType. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

BackType’s analytics dashboard aims to help brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media in order to make more intelligent marketing decisions. For example, the company’s product BackTweets helps publishers understand the reach of their Tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs. The company assists more than 100 companies with their social media analytics, from The New York Times and Edelman to startups like Bitly, HubSpot, Hunch and SlideShare.

BackType will be joining Twitter’s platform team, where they will be developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners. Along with BackType’s technology, this also seems to be a pretty big talent acquisition for Twitter.

BackType also offers a WordPress plug-in that allowed users integrate relevant comments from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook back to the original post on WordPress.

BackType has raised over $1 million in funding from Y Combinator, True Ventures, K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Lowercase Capital, 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing, and others.

The company says that its BackTweets product will be offered to current users for free. But the company will no longer accept new registrations for BackTweets, and eventually the BackType product and API services will be discontinued.

get widgetminimize

BackType

Website:	backtype.com
Location:	San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:	2008
Funding:	$1.32M

BackType is a marketing intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media. BackType also powers social features for over 100 companies, including The New York Times, Slideshare, Automattic (creators… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Pulled from/Sourced: techcrunch.com

Tags: BackTweets, backtype, SaaS Social News, social analytics, startup, twitter news

WebDAM Solutions Announces Summer Webinar Series on Digital Asset Management

Free Webinar Series Starts July 14 For Both New And Veteran DAM Users

SAN MATEO, CA. (SaaS Newswire) June 30, 2011 — WebDAM Solutions, a leading provider of cloud-based tools to manage, share and distribute creative collateral, announced today a Summer Webinar Series on Digital Asset Management. The free webinars will provide an interactive forum for marketing and creative teams to learn valuable time-saving tools and tricks to more effectively manage their digital media.

“We are excited to introduce this webinar series as part of our commitment to customer success at WebDAM,” says Jody Vandergriff, VP of Marketing and Sales at WebDAM Solutions. “This information is relevant to anyone challenged with managing creative assets looking to build a framework to drive efficiency into their workflows.”

The free monthly webinars will cover a variety of topics ranging from metadata strategies to user adoption. For both DAM beginners and experienced administrators, each webinar’s lessons will provide tangible insight that can immediately be applied to everyday usage. The webinars will be led by the Customer Success team at WebDAM, with the goal of helping users develop best practices for implementing and managing their organization’s DAM.

“WebDAM’s webinar series is perfect for users across all levels of experience: new users, those researching DAM systems, and current DAM managers and users,” says Vandergriff. “No matter your experience, you’ll learn something with an immediate practical application for your DAM system.”

Each webinar will be taught by a subject matter expert and will allow attendees to ask questions and provide feedback to maximize their learning experience. The Summer Webinar Series scheduled topics are:

-Metadata 101: Building a solid foundation
-Controlled Vocabulary: Implementing a library of keywords to improve consistency and search-ability
-Building the Framework: Organizing your digital assets for any business
-User Adoption: Engaging your team with a communication plan

The webinar series kicks off on July 14 with Metadata 101. To reserve your seat for this webinar, register for free at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/124308249.

WebDAM’s webinar series is the latest in the company’s outreach program, providing advice and insight from industry experts to help users get the most out of their WebDAM experience. For more information, visit http://www.webdamsolutions.com or read the company’s blog at http://blog.webdamsolutions.com.

About WebDAM Solutions
WebDAM Solutions is a leader in digital asset management, revolutionizing the way companies manage and share digital media. Our flagship application, WebDAM, provides marketing and creative teams with online tools for managing, sharing, searching, retrieving, and distributing creative collateral in the cloud. WebDAM has been implemented across industries such as higher education, nonprofit, high-tech, healthcare, travel and tourism, manufacturing and government. For more information, visit http://www.webdamsolutions.com.

Media Contact:
Jody Vandergriff
VP of Marketing and Sales
jvandergriff(at)webdamsolutions(dot)com
415-227-4886

Tags: asset management software, asset software, digital asset management, SaaS asset management, webDAM, webinar series

Enteprise social business: Integration matters

At last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, held in Boston, I was taken aback when one pundit explained that organizations must learn to “do social.” This surprise kicked off my comments on a panel discussion about integrating social business tools with traditional enterprise applications.

Click the audio player at the top of this post to hear a recording of the entire panel. (Follow this)

Organizations exist to achieve defined objectives — Fedex strives to deliver packages faster and more reliably, Starbucks wants sell more coffee, and so on. The entire notion that companies should “do social” as an end goal is just silly. Make money as a goal? Yes. Deliver goods and service as a goal? Yes. Do social as a goal? Resounding no! Social software only has meaning when it adds value to concrete organizational business processes and goals.

Business processes define how people accomplish their work; these processes describe the flow of activities such as collecting money, paying vendors, and so on. Processes enable organizations to execute activities in a consistent and repeatable manner.

Processes also create information silos, which is a problem. For example, the accounting department may use a computer system that does not share information with manufacturing or sales. In many organizations, hodge-podge legacy systems, built over time, create islands of information that drive poor communication across departmental boundaries.

The traditional solution to this problem involves deploying systems such as ERP to connect and integrate diverse systems. While ERP does a great job moving transactional data across departments or functions, these systems don’t typically handle the organizational glue of communications among people. Historically, ERP systems were designed to control transactions, not to share unstructured collaboration data.

By enabling processes to become more efficient or yield better results, social tools can offer great value to the enterprise. However, accomplishing this goal requires bringing unstructured social data to the process in which people actually conduct their work. To be useful, social technologies must help people do their jobs, which means integrating with established enterprise systems.

Some established vendors recognize the need to integrate social data with transactions, for example:

• Salesforce.com’s Chatter product enables users to access traditional enterprise data mixed with team-oriented collaboration information related to their work flow
• SAP’s Sales OnDemand allows sales people to collaborate while interacting with data stored in the core ERP system
• Cloud-based ERP vendor, NetSuite, inked deals with Yammer and Qontext to bring collaboration tools into mainstream business processes

———-

As the gateway to broad enterprise adoption of social business, integration is a critical and often overlooked issue.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I participated on a panel, titled Socializing Legacy Applications: Are We There Yet?, that discussed integrating social business with enterprise systems. Analyst Tony Byrne, from the Real Story Group, moderated the panel, which also included Alfred Hsi, who is Director of Research and Innovation at Deloitte.

Enterprise integration is an important and challenging topic sitting at the intersection of enterprise technology, consumer software, organizational culture, and relationships between business users and their IT departments. During the panel discussion I called social business integration the crazy irony topic, because it’s so important and yet also misunderstood.

You can hear a podcast recording of the entire panel by clicking the audio player at the top of this post.

The discussion includes engaging comments from audience members on the leading edge of integrating social tools in large organizations and is well worth your listening time.

Pulled from/Sourced: ZDnet.com

By Michael Krigsman | June 27, 2011

Tags: social integration, social news, Social SaaS, social software

How Social Software Boosted Our Supply Chain ROI

Social software helped TEVA Pharmaceuticals shrink its manufacturing cycle time by 40% between January and April — when the company’s Oracle ERP apps couldn’t keep up with unpredictable market conditions.

Between January and April, the application of social software helped TEVA Pharmaceuticals shrink its manufacturing cycle time by 40%, and it’s likely to shrink by another 40% by the end of the summer.

At Enterprise 2.0, a UBM TechWeb event in Boston, TEVA Canada VP of supply chain Tony Martins gave a short presentation as part of a keynote with Tom Kelly, CEO of Moxie Software, and a longer one Wednesday afternoon. The social software implementation is, so far, a regional implementation at TEVA Canada, a division of the Israeli manufacturer of generic drugs that also serves the U.S. market.

TEVA already had structured applications in place built around Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain software, but they worked best at executing predictable processes, Martins said. Unfortunately, TEVA’s business had become unpredictable because of everything from shifting consumer demand and changing regulation to recent drug shortages that have been causing chaos in the market, he said.

TEVA is in the business of buying raw materials from companies as far away as India and Canada, mixing those materials according to a precise recipe, encapsulating them in pills, packaging them, and selling them through distributors. Things can go wrong at any stage of that process. Dealing with exceptions manually was acceptable when they amounted to maybe 10% of the business, but they were becoming more frequent, Martins said. “We found ourselves living in the world of ‘not supposed to happen’ where more than half the time managers, supervisors, and key resources were handling surprises–things that were off script.”

Whenever a business process didn’t fit neatly into an ERP application form, the resulting problem would have to be addressed manually, Martins said. Operations managers might not even find out right away that something had gone wrong, and while the message worked its way up the chain of command, precious time was lost.

Martins took his answer to this problem from the book Wikinomics, which introduced the concept of “spontaneous association,” or the ability of people to come together quickly to solve a specific problem.

Once TEVA introduced Moxie’s Employee Spaces, Martins said, convincing employees to share their work issues more widely was challenging at first. Also, not all employees were used to the social style of interaction, and even some of those who had Facebook accounts for their personal lives were puzzled about how to apply the same techniques to getting work done. But they learned to do it once they saw it produced results.

“Invariably, the person who has the problem is not the person who can solve it,” Martins said. Just by giving people a way of posting unexpected issues and allowing others to reply with suggested answers, he found problems were resolved much more quickly.

In addition to applying social software internally, Martins has created joint social communities with some key suppliers of raw materials. In one case, this resulted in a 15% reduction in lead time, while in another, where the social integration went deeper, the supplier cut lead time by 60%, Martins said. He also has plans to implement social communities for TEVA customers.

Sameer Patel, a partner in the consulting firm Sovos Group who facilitated Martins’ presentation, said he was excited about the session. “I’ve been trying for over a year now to find a good supply chain case study,” he said, believing it to be an area that’s ripe for a social shake up.

Pulled from/Sourced: informationweek

David F. Carr | June 23, 2011

Tags: ERP apps, oracle, ROI, saas news, social software, social software news

Ericsson to buy software firm Telcordia for $1.15 bn

SaaS Newswire

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Sweden’s Ericsson, the world’s biggest mobile network equipment maker, said Tuesday it would pay $1.15 billion (796 million euros) in cash for US communications software developer Telcordia.

Ericsson said the transaction was a key move in reinforcing and expanding the company’s position in operation support systems and business support systems.

The Swedish giant described Telcordia, based in the US state of New jersey, as a “global leader in the development of mobile, broadband and enterprise communications software and services.”

Currently held by private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Warburg Pincus, Telcordia has about 2,600 employees who will transfer over to Ericsson. It generated revenues of $739 million in the fiscal year ending January.

“The importance of operations and business support systems will continue to grow as more and more devices are connected, services become mobile and new business models for mobile broadband are introduced,” Ericsson chief executive Hans Vestberg said in a statement.

“Telcordia brings the good customer footprint, leading service fulfillment and service assurance and a strong presence in North America,” he added in a conference call, describing the transaction as “a strong business case.”

Telcordia chief executive Mark Greenquist also hailed the deal.

“The combination of Ericsson’s global leadership position and Telcordia’s long-standing expertise in solving the most complex communications challenges will benefit customers through new services and expanded capabilities,” he said in the statement.

Lars Soderfjall, an analyst with Aalandsbanken, told Dow Jones Newswires that Ericsson’s acquisitions were “generally positive for its earnings.”

Bernstein analysts agreed, describing the deal as “positive for shareholders.”

“Ericsson can make a very profitable use of Telcordia’s 2,600 employees and its global reach will surely improve Telcordia’s growth potential,” Bernstein said.

Ericsson said the deal, which is still subject to regulatory approvals, was scheduled to close in the last quarter of 2011 and come into effect at the beginning of 2012.

Ericsson shares closed up 1.66 percent to 88.70 kronor (9.70 euros, $14.05).

Pulled from/Sourced: Yahoo!

Tags: ericsson, software acquisition, telcordia

Oracle Announces Oracle Entitlements Server 11g

Delivers Industry-Leading Scalability and Reliability for a Wide Class of Enterprise Deployments

Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 08, 2011

News Facts

Building on Oracle’s commitment to simplify application security, Oracle today announced Oracle Entitlements Server 11g.

A key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle Entitlements Server 11g delivers a highly scalable, externalized authorization management solution for applications, middleware and databases and provides developers with shared services for fine-grained authorization to ensure quicker compliance and better business agility as policies can be quickly adapted as market, regulatory and business requirements change.

By externalizing authorizations and entitlements from applications, Oracle Entitlements Server 11g helps organizations centrally manage entitlements, provide a central view of access rights across applications in the enterprise and audit applications to track application access and use. When authorizations are externalized to a shared service, organizations can easily extend these benefits to both on-premise and private cloud applications.

Underscoring Oracle’s goal to deliver Service-Oriented Security, Oracle Entitlements Server 11g is integrated with Oracle Platform Security Services, the underlying security foundation for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Fusion Applications. With this integration, Oracle Entitlements Server becomes the strategic authorization solution for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Fusion Applications.

This latest release also extends Oracle’s comprehensive support for modern security standards including XACML, NIST RBAC, Enterprise RBAC, ABAC, OpenAZ and JAAS to provide greater customer choice and flexibility when it comes to enforcing granular security policies on the basis of user roles, run-time attributes or context-aware conditions.

Rest of the article at SaaS Newswire

18 year old launches IT company

UnIte launches new IT business in Sheffield

At the grand old age of 18, Adam Bradford, Director of UnITe and techmesh member successfully launched his business in Sheffield at Sparks Restaurant, Sheffield City College.

Adam, who is 18, is a former winner of Sheffield City Council’s BiG Challenge enterprise competition and is currently completing a one-year BTEC Diploma in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at the Academy, launched with Government backing by Peter Jones of Dragons Den fame.

His new company, called UnITe, provides IT training and support and software development services to businesses. The launch event featured presentations from young entrepreneurs at the National Enterprise Academy showcasing their work and the UK’s first 14-19 Young Entrepreneurs Club.

Amongst his portfolio Adam is an accredited Microsoft Office Specialist and has extensive experience and qualifications in IT and Technology usage and deployment. These range from a British Computer Society qualification in digital media production and digital marketing through to traditional IT qualifications and systems development experience.

The evening proved to be a reunion aswell – guest speaker with established business; ‘Reggae Reggae’ sauce entrepreneur Levi Roots, shared his own experiences and ambitious plans of his expansion to the USA at the event. Adam and Levi met in 2007, when Adam won the Big Challenge Award.

Adam Bradford Director of UnITe comments; “I am very keen to promote young people and inspire them to achieve their potential and overcome barriers. I have Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism, but I don’t let that stop me from achieving, and am very passionate about enterprise.

The launch event was a great success and Levi Roots is a great inspiration of mine, it was fantastic that he could attend and contributed so fantastically to the evening. The event not only marked the beginning of my business’ life, it also provided inspiration to future aspiring entrepreneurs starting up from a young age.”

techmesh Business Development Manager Helen Silverman comments; “The launch was a great success, it was both inspirational and informative and techmesh were pleased to support Adam and be involved. Adam and his fellow entrepreneurs provide great testaments to the kinds of entrepreneurial talent we have in our region”.

Photo Caption: Danielle Ward, Levi Roots, Adam Bradford, Edward Lamb and Helen Silverman of techmesh at the launch event.

About techmesh

At the heart of the region’s IT & Telecoms sector, techmesh works with organisations and individuals to help them exploit new opportunities and tackle any challenges they may encounter. techmesh enables them to form profitable relationships, expand opportunities to win new business and strengthen their existing in-house expertise. The organisation also provides a forum for IT & Telecoms leaders and professionals to keep abreast of the latest sector trends by providing access to a wide variety of external resources and support expertise.

Source: techmesh

Danielle Ward Chartered Marketer

Marketing Manager | Connect Yorkshire & techmesh

T 0113 384 5643 | W www.connectyorkshire.org | W www.techmesh.org

Leeds Innovation Centre

103 Clarendon Road

Leeds, LS2 9DF

Tags: enterprise competition, it business startup, Levi Roots, Microsoft Office Specialist, saas news, software news, techmesh

10 SaaS companies to watch

Some familiar, some not, these companies show what software as a service is all about

These days, companies are applying the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to just about everything, from core business functions, including IT, to industry-specific processes. This list, compiled with the help of SaaS trend watchers and users, provides a representative look at what types of software you’ll find offered in the cloud.

1. Company Name: Antenna Software

Headquarters: Jersey City, N.J.

What it offers: Mobile SaaS software and Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP) for building, deploying and managing mobile applications.

Why it’s worth watching: Antenna sits at the intersection of two of today’s biggest enterprise IT focal points: cloud computing and mobility. “With things getting pushed into the cloud in terms of where they’re hosted, and the devices that we’re using to access those applications increasingly being smartphones or tablets vs. laptops or desktops, a huge trend right now is enterprise mobility in the cloud. I’d even say that’s near the top of most CIOs’ to-do lists,” says Justin Perreault, general partner of Commonwealth Capital Ventures, an Antenna backer. That puts Antenna in a good spot: It offers mobile SaaS software as well as an on-demand software platform for building, deploying and managing mobile applications in the cloud.

How it works: The Antenna Mobility Platform comprises five interconnected components: AMP Gateway, which routes and manages all transactions between the backend systems and the mobile applications; AMP Studio, a “build-once, deploy on any device” development environment; AMP Enterprise Connect, for bridging between host systems and the AMP Gateway; AMP device-side client software; and AMP Management Center, a role-based Web management application.

Where it resides: In the Antenna Mobile Cloud, a platform-as-a-service environment within Antenna’s data centers, which the company says it runs as carrier-class network operations centers.

How much it costs: Mobile SaaS software pricing is an annual subscription fee per device for employee-facing applications and Websites, and an annual subscription price based on a range of expected users or usage for consumer-facing applications and Websites.

Who’s using it: Coca-Cola Enterprises, Hologic, E-Trade and Pitney Bowes, among others

2. Company name: Cloud9 Analytics

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

What it offers: Pipeline Accelerator, real-time sales forecasting and pipeline management SaaS for line-of-business managers

Why it’s worth watching: Despite some initial skepticism that business intelligence was too complex to tackle from a SaaS perspective, enterprise interest in BI as a service is taking off, says Jeff Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies, which compiles the SaaS Showplace of providers. Among many interesting BI SaaS providers, Cloud9 is representative of those focused on moving capabilities to the edge of a company. “BI used to be this thing cloistered in the corporate headquarters because it was so complex that the information could only be filtered out to the field,” Kaplan says. “What SaaS in general and Cloud9 in particular have done is make BI more readily available at the field level so frontline workers can take advantage of it and make better decisions.”

How it works: Cloud9 says it has deconstructed the traditional data warehouse infrastructure and processes and instead uses a technique it calls versioned replication. With this approach, Cloud9 makes no upfront assumptions about how warehoused data will eventually be used. Instead, it manages the warehouse separately from the solutions being built on it, thus turning the data warehouse tier into the system of record of historical truth. The automated data warehouse technology comprises a replication service and proprietary data management technology called versioned database. It offers a number of advantages over a traditional relational database, such as the ability to ensure that changes are cumulative rather than destructive, the company says. Cloud9 provides proprietary and industry-standard interfaces to the database technology.

Where it resides: Internal data center

How much it costs: Varies by deployment

Who’s using it: Dow Jones, Schneider Electric, Thermo-Fisher Scientific and Thomson Reuters, among others

How to become SaaS savvy

3. Company Name: CVM Solutions

Headquarters: Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

What it offers: CVM Supplier Central, supplier risk and performance management SaaS.

Why it’s worth watching? While ERP and traditional supply chain software has been slow to move into the SaaS model, some segments are slicing off and moving more quickly to the cloud, notes Liz Herbert, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. Supply risk and performance management, a category that includes CVM as well as companies like Achilles and Aravo Solutions, is among them. ThinkStrategies’ Kaplan calls out such supply chain SaaS activity as the evolution of the extranet model that sprang to life in the dot-com era. “The reality of extranets is taking shape as SaaS-based supply chain solutions,” he says. “CVM is interesting in that it created a software capability that ties multiple companies together so they can track their merchandise among themselves and use the Web to make that happen,” he adds.

How it works: Built on the Force.com application development platform, Supplier Central provides supplier management in three steps. First, it provides the ability for users to “clean” supplier information by consolidating silos of supplier data, standardizing names and information, eliminating duplication, and establishing family linkage and supplier groups. Next, it allows users to centralize and standardize information, automate manual processes, empower suppliers through online portals and survey suppliers for prequalification. Finally, with an eye toward supplier intelligence, users can use the software to monitor compliance and risk programs, track standard metrics, examine supplier performance, and automate corrective action plans and risk mitigation, CVM Solutions describes.

Where it resides? Force.com infrastructure

How much it costs: Pricing scales based on usage and product functionality required, but a company spokesman says customers can get started with CVM Supplier Central for less than $50,000 per year

Who’s using it: Booz Allen Hamilton, Colgate-Palmolive, Delta Air Lines, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart, among others

4. Company Name: Exoprise Systems

Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.

What it offers: CloudReady, a SaaS application suite for evaluating the readiness of on-premises systems, orchestrating cloud migrations and providing real-time performance monitoring for cloud-based applications.

Why it’s worth watching: Exoprise is among a number of SaaS providers helping companies make sense of all the stuff they have out in the cloud. The idea is to give IT professionals a way to “seize the benefits of the cloud quickly and confidently,” as Exoprise founder and CEO Jason Lieblich put it at the company’s March launch. ThinkStrategies’ Kaplan says he likes what he sees of the company’s strategy so far: “It’s starting by letting you take an inventory of e-mail usage so you can determine which of a growing array of Web-based or cloud e-mail services might be the best fit for your company. But really it’s setting up to do the same thing for any migration to the cloud.”

How it works: In a five-step process, users first tap into the CloudReady service and download ExoShell, a secure Web service application that lets Exoprise analyze the enterprise infrastructure without need for complex database and Web servers. They then configure, adjust and schedule their assessments. At the appointed time, ExoShell scans the messaging environment, gathering information on cost, reliability and end-user usage that it then securely uploads to CloudReady for analysis. Finally, users can use the customizable analysis results to help determine the right cloud offering for their organizations, Exoprise says.

Where it resides: Rackspace hosted data center.

How much it costs: Per-mailbox pricing for CloudReady Insight, available now, with pricing bands between $10 and $2 per mailbox, depending on the size of the total assessment; free trial available. CloudReady Monitor, in beta, also is available for free trial. (The third piece of the suite, CloudReady Control, is slated for availability later this year.)

Who’s using it: A mix of commercial, government and education institutions have run assessments, ExoPrise says, but has no names to share at this time.

5. Company Name: GageIn

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

What it offers: GageIn, content-driven business information networking and employee collaboration.

Why it’s worth watching: Collaboration is a leading SaaS segment, with lots of activity and interest in tools that have a Facebook-like look and feel. However, Kaplan says, GageIn has caught his eye with its content-driven approach. “So if you’ve got interesting content you build a network of relationships around that content instead of the more traditional Facebook-like approach of building around people,” he says. The question is whether GageIn, available in beta now, has legs. “My guess is that it’ll be acquired in the next 12 to 18 months and folded into another platform,” Kaplan says.

How it works: GageIn aggregates information about a company from corporate Web sites, news outlets, social content sites and other such sources. Users configure agents and keywords to receive alerts on business events such as new product announcements, mergers and acquisitions and leadership changes at companies of their choosing. Networking and social tools connect users and facilitate communications with an external business network and collaboration with colleagues. It runs on a proprietary J2EE-based platform that can directly and automatically convert business requirements into data access, business logic and user interface workflow modules, the company says.

Where it resides: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

How much it costs: Free public beta; following mid-summer general availability, the basic service will be available for free to individuals who follow five or fewer companies and for a fee for those who want to follow more than five companies. Enterprise customers – GageIn’s target market – will receive additional features; pricing not yet disclosed.

Who’s using it: Individual business users and unnamed companies participating in limited group tests and moving toward full-scale adoption, GageIn says.

6. Company Name: Host Analytics

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

What it offers: Host Analytics CPM, corporate performance management SaaS suite

Why it’s worth watching: Getting a tighter handle on spending is at the top of any financial or business leader’s wish list. Host Analytics offers software aimed at improving budgeting, forecasting and other money matters. At Schumacher Group, for example, Host Analytics has slashed the annual budgeting process from three to four months to a month or so, says Doug Menefee, CIO at the Lafayette, La., emergency management firm. “Our 100 to 125 budgeting managers would do everything in Excel files, like they do in most organizations. [Finance] would blast out a template, managers would populate their line items and send to a centralized resource. They’d be married up to create a giant Excel file, which would be reviewed and sent back out for another pass,” he describes. “Now managers access and update their chart of accounts in real time … and the finance and accounting departments see the impact on EBITDA, revenue and those types of things right away.”

How it works: Host Analytics, created using Microsoft’s SQL Server database, OLAP engine and application development tools, tightly integrates with Excel. Users make updates and run queries from an Excel-like browser interface. All applications use a single database model, which enables integration and sharing across the suite. In addition, Host Analytics can interface with any general ledger or other source system for automated loads from operational systems. An integrated OLAP/Relational architecture handles budgeting and multidimensional reporting, the company says.

Where it resides: Private cloud at Xiolink hosting facility.

How much it costs: $250 per user, per month

Who’s using it: Aon, Otis Spunkmeyer, Proctor & Gamble and Schumacher Group, among others

7. Company Name: KnowledgeTree

Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.

What it offers: KnowledgeTree, open-source document management SaaS.

Why it’s worth watching: Traditional on-premises document management deployments outnumber SaaS instances, especially within large enterprises, Forrester’s Herbert says. But in the right instances, the benefits of on-demand document management can be unbeatable. Anthony Mashkovich, IT director at Miramax, in Santa Monica, Calif., says he’s found that to be the case. Following the December 2010 sale from Walt Disney Studios to investors, Miramax has had to morph from a virtual to a physical company – and among other tasks, find a home for some 150,000 documents. “This was a large undertaking, but we needed to do something super fast while still fitting all our criteria. Going the traditional route of an EMC Documentum wasn’t an option. We had no infrastructure, and the cost would have been too high,” he says. “KnowledgeTree quickly stood out as the best choice, doing everything that a traditional Documentum system does but in the cloud and at a great price.”

How it works: KnowledgeTree enables traditional document management and collaboration features, including document versioning and auditing, metadata and content searching, workflow, tagging and tag clouds, RSS feeds and e-mail triggers. It runs on the Ubuntu platform.

Where it resides: Amazon EC2 and Simple Storage Service clouds.

How much it costs: Annual pricing for Professional, Team and Company versions, with unlimited users, is $86 for 20GB of storage and 1-GB file-size limit, $266 for60 GB of storage and 1-GB file-size limit, and $428 for 150GB of storage and 2-GB file-size limit, respectively

Who’s using it: Fujifilm, Miramax Films, Orbitz and Panera Bread, among others

8. Company Name: LiveOps

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

What it offers: LiveOps Contact Center Application Suite, which integrates call-center functions such as chat and e-mail, inbound call routing, interactive voice response and workforce management

Why it’s worth watching: LiveOps represents another aspect of the evolving cloud model in that it couples SaaS with business-processing outsourcing (BPO). In other words, Kaplan says, it’ll host the contact center applications in its cloud and provide the helpdesk or service desk personnel as well. “The demarcation between SaaS and BPO is blurring, and a lot of BPO folks, especially in India, are hurrying to get into SaaS. They’re doing so because they can no longer afford the labor arbitrage associated with the traditional business – companies stealing people back and forth and then having to deal with the customer satisfaction issues that go along with that,” he says. “Why not offer a SaaS solution that automates the process anyways?”

How it works: The contact center applications run on the LiveOps Contact Center Cloud Platform, which uses a Web-based architecture and grid computing technology. A company can let its own agents use the contact center SaaS applications or use the LiveOps virtual contact center, staffed by 20,000 remote agents.

Where it resides: Unnamed secure Tier 1 facility.

How much it costs: Varies by number of seats, total data volume and a range of other factors

Who’s using it: AAA, Salesforce.com and West Marine, among others

9. Company Name: Reval

Headquarters: New York

What it offers: Reval, a suite of derivative valuation and hedge accounting capabilities

Why it’s worth watching: Reval is a great example of how the SaaS model is penetrating into critical business areas – in this case, finance – at even the largest of companies, says Commonwealth’s Perreault. “Corporations of all sorts all do hedging of various types. If you’re doing business around the world, you’re hedging currencies and interest rates. If you’re a manufacturer, you’re hedging the commodity costs of your inputs – aluminum and natural gas if you’re GM, grain and other agricultural commodities if you’re Anheuser Busch,” he says. Reval lets financial officers get control and more effectively perform their hedging operations in corporate treasuries. Oftentimes, they’re bringing in Reval to replace decades-old systems or manual “two guys sitting in the corner with the world’s most complex spreadsheet” processes. “There’s so little innovation in some legacy functions, and this is just one example where SaaS brings much-needed newer functionality,” he adds.

How it works: Reval runs over a service-oriented architecture, using a Microsoft .Net framework and providing a Simple Object Application Protocol-compliant distributed system. Reval Connect, built on a Web Services architecture, provides the ability to integrate treasury management and other enterprise systems using common data exchange protocols, the company says.

Where it resides: Hosted data centers – primary production servers at Equinix, disaster recovery at Switch

How much it costs: Varies on number of modules, users and trades

Who’s using it: Google, Microsoft, United Parcel Service of America, Virgin America and Visa, among others

10. Company name: Taleo

Headquarters: Dublin, Calif.

What it offers: Taleo Enterprise, a talent management SaaS suite

Why it’s worth watching: Among all of the various SaaS categories, human resources management is “a very hot space,” says Forrester’s Herbert. Since HR software touches so many users, SaaS brings clear benefits such as ease of use and accessibility of the technology, she says. As discussed in Forrester’s recent report, “How SaaS Will Change Technology Sourcing Strategy,” Herbert says she expects recruiting and talent management SaaS offerings from companies such as Taleo to dominate this HR software area in the next three years. These companies also are focused on broadening their suites, hence Taleo’s 2010 acquisitions of Learning.com and Worldwide Compensation, Herbert adds. IDC also gives a thumbs up to Taleo, naming it an integrated talent management market leader for 2011 in a vendor analysis report released in March.

How it works: Taleo operates the Talent Management Cloud, which it says comprises scalable, elastic and secure infrastructure; an open, mobile and flexible software platform and a full suite of talent management applications. These include recruiting, performance management, compensation management, employee development and succession planning.

Where it resides: Internal data center

How much it costs: Varies based on factors such as market segment, company size and products licensed

Who’s using it: Children’s Health Care of Atlanta, Domino’s Pizza and Hyatt, among others

Pulled from/Sourced: networkworld.com

By: Beth Schultz of Network World

Tags: saas companies, saas news, software 10, software news