Punching Soup - Tag: softwareasaservice

The Long, Winding Road to Online Collaboration

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:39:23 -0700

For the past two years, Adobe has been evolving a suite of online collaboration tools at its Acrobat.com website (the first services came online in June 2008). The latest iteration launches today with the release of Acrobat.com Workspaces. This new service lets users create virtual workspaces where they can share files and folders with others [...]

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Freemiums for SaaS

Bob Warfield — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:41:48 -0700

Time for my first Learnings post about my Helpstream Experience. Freemiums are a fascinating subject. Whole books have been written about the concept of extracting value from something that’s free. The FOS (Free Open Source) movement is all about free, and we benefited tremendously from it at Helpstream. Not one single software license fee was paid [...]

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The Venture Singularity

Niel Robertson — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:57:08 -0700

At a somewhat recent dinner with Brad Feld (@bfeld) and some other great Boulder tech entrepreneurs we got into a discussion about Ray Kurzweil’s book on the Singularity. A heated debate ensued whether his theory about the convergence of technological computing capacity, and our ability to understand (and thus integrate computing into) the brain was [...]

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Coupa Heads for the Clouds — eProcurement, T&E and Beyond (Part 3)

Jason Busch — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:36:00 -0700

In this post, I'll continue my analysis of Coupa's T&E capabilities by walking through a typical submission and approval process (read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series here). I know this sounds like a deathly boring subject for many, but trust me, it...

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Tuesday’s Tip: Understanding The Many Flavors of Cloud Computing and SaaS

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:16:01 -0700

Confusion Continues With Cloud Computing And SaaS Definitions Coincidence or just brilliance must be in the air as two esteemed industry colleagues, Phil Wainewright and James Governor, have both decided to clarify definitions on SaaS and Cloud within a few days of each other. In fact, this couldn’t be more timely as [...]

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Defining Cloud is Simple. Get Over It. The Burger.

James Governor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:44:51 -0700

My efforts at cloud definitional work began with 15 Ways to Tell its Not Cloud Computing. In the intervening time the forces of complexity and, yes, pragmatism have triumphed. We’re now making the long transition from simple and public to complex and private – hopefully some simplicity will make it through the process. Talking of simplicity, [...]

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Security risks of multi-tenancy

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:16:10 -0700

To dispel some of the confusion about security and to help people evaluating whether to go multi-tenant, here is a quick overview of the main risks.

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The Cost Difference Between On-Premise and SaaS

Brian Sommer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:26:20 -0700

The SaaS vs. On-Premise cost differential turns out to be quite significant. Large enterprises are starting to embrace SaaS applications for more than cost reasons.

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PSA/PPM Goes Vertical – Better Time to Value for ChangePoint Solutions

Brian Sommer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:25:47 -0700

Compuware Changepoint has created a faster time to value solution for technology firms. PSA and PPM solutions are getting deeper vertical chops.

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Friday Rant: Are Acquisitions Good For Spend Management Users?

Jason Busch — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:03:00 -0700

There's been a lot of chatter in the market these past few weeks about acquisitions. Some larger players are clearly headed to Costco to look for warehouse bargains (smaller formats and Ma and Pop shops aren't worth the time for these larger players,...

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Redux: Will Google Enter the Business Applications Market?

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:27:26 -0700

If you think I am here to spill the beans, you’re wrong. On a purely speculative level, if there is some news to come, and if there is an embargo related to it, then I respect that. And it’s all a big IF. So no, I am simply dusting off an old post I wrote [...]

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Four pillars of the transition to SaaS

Phil Wainewright — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:51:18 -0700

One of the most interesting phenomena to arise when you bring as-a-service providers together is the instant sense of camaraderie and a shared outlook. Barriers come down and people start to discuss their challenges and experiences, relieved to discover that others are encountering similar questions. It’s especially noticeable at gatherings in Europe, where opportunities to [...]

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Monday’s Musings: Decoupling Support From Maintenance – What Apps Vendors Can Learn From Microsoft Dynamics

R "Ray" Wang — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:30:24 -0700

Who Says Support Has To Be Bundled With Maintenance? About a decade back, vendors would offer support and maintenance as two separate line items on their contracts. Support would run about 5 to 10% the license fee and so would maintenance. Keep in mind, average support and maintenance fees were under 15% back then. Here’s a [...]

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RightNow’s New Customer Service Agreement Genuinely Important

Paul Greenberg — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:19:19 -0700

Once in awhile there is something that isn’t only important coming out of the vendor community but actually kind of refreshing. Given my right-brained proclivities, I didn’t think it would come from the world of contracts (that’s a Ray Wang specialty), but interestingly enough it does. RightNow released the details of its new Customer Service Agreement [...]

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RightNow promises an end to SaaS shelfware

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:54:12 -0700

I’m at the top of London’s totemic Gherkin landmark tower listening to SaaS CRM vendor RightNow’s announcement of what it calls the ‘Cloud Services Agreement’. CEO Greg Gianforte is challenging SaaS and software vendors to emulate a proposition that, to me, always should have been on the table from every reputable SaaS vendor. Essentially, RightNow is promising [...]

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Aravo’s $50K Supply Risk QuickStart (Part 1)

Jason Busch — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:08:00 -0700

Last week Aravo announced a new $50K Supplier Risk QuickStart program that offers one of the first affordable and integrated software/services programs to tackle multiple areas of supply risk. Having been briefed on it, and knowing Aravo's overall ap...

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Who’s to blame for “Excel hell?”

Thomas Otter — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:11:57 -0700

My blogging mojo had left the building for a while, but for better or worse it returned today. When I speak to enterprise software vendors they often moan about Excel. They say it is not secure, and that most spreadsheets contain errors. They preach about the dangers of information silos, of decisions made on old and [...]

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GoToManage – Citrix Buys Paglo – Quick Analysis

Michael Coté — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:08:16 -0700

Citrix buys Paglo to add IT Management to it's GoTo line.

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Quarterly Financial Tracker: Q4 CY 2009 SaaS Vendors Continue To Trump On Premise Vendors In YoY Growth

R "Ray" Wang — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:00:09 -0700

The Year Of SaaS Shows… And Yes, In This Economy. The recession continued to take its toll on software sales with a slight impact to the SaaS vendors. Growth rates have come down from the high 30’s to the low 20’s. But with “flat” the new growth metric in this down economy, results remain impressive. Traditional [...]

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Coupa and Ariba — Analyzing Comparative Claims (Part 1)

Jason Busch — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:18:00 -0700

Last week, Coupa launched an attack campaign against Ariba. Today, I'll start a series in which I'll analyze Coupa's claims and compare them to reality. My goal is to clear the air for those who read the campaign and want an unbiased, outside opinio...

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Digging Deeper Into What Drives Performance

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:57:18 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Dave Karel, VP of product marketing at SuccessFactors and Dave Willis, senior VP of marketing of Inform, recorded just after SuccessFactors announced its acquisition of Inform. In this podcast, learn how Inform’s analysis software helps companies understand more about how to motivate their best performers, and find out why SuccessFactors is [...]

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The State of Professional Services 2010

Brian Sommer — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:27:14 -0700

If you've got a service organization, do you know how it stacks up to others? Dave Hofferberth at SPI Research did a quick interview with Brian and shared a few nuggets from their latest (and quite detailed) report.

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Friday Rant: Coupa Sam Talks Smack to Ariba Spendman

Jason Busch — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:03:00 -0700

This is a rant. I won’t pretend to dig into details of the accuracies, fallacies, and potentially overlooked comparisons in Coupa’s latest napalm drop on Ariba. No, I’ll save the meat of my analysis for a regular post or two next week that takes a more objective look at some of Coupa’s claims in its [...]

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SAP’s Vishal Sikka on SaaS

Phil Wainewright — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:19:03 -0700

Published here for the first time, my interview last summer with SAP CTO Vishal Sikka may shed some light on the company's intentions for SaaS and cloud after its tumultuous management shake-up last week.

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SuccessFactors Acquires Inform: What’s The Real Issue Here?

Naomi Bloom — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:00:47 -0700

There’s been some terrific discussion in the blogosphere about SuccessFactor’s recent acquisition of Inform, and I won’t repeat here what Ventana Research, Knowledge Infusion OnDemand and others have had to say about what looks like a smart move for SuccessFactors and a potentially important contribution to HR’s ongoing quest for the “holy grail” of actionable [...]

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Ariba’s Earnings — What Stands Out (Part 1)

Jason Busch — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:28:00 -0700

After reading through Ariba's earnings transcript and consulting my own notes from the call, I've come away with a fairly optimistic view about how Ariba performed in its most recent quarter, and a positive outlook on how Ariba looks to perform in c...

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Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion

Naomi Bloom — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:00:22 -0700

I started my career as a programmer writing payroll applications in machine language to run in 4K memory. Over more years than most women would admit, I’ve focused my career on the application of information technology to HRM in order to achieve breakthroughs in business outcomes. Rather than being satisfied with cheaper payroll operations or faster [...]

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Enterprise Software in Harvest Mode

Tom Foydel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:24:49 -0700

Over the weekend I met a fellow in a local hardware who was looking for some very unusual screws. We got to talking and I found out that he supplements his retirement pension by re-conditioning dental chairs, of all things. Evidently it’s a decent money maker for him and he enjoys the hobby. The conversation started me [...]

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How SaaS Helps Enterprises Effect Change

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:02:56 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, one of the pioneers of a new generation of professional services companies that specialize in software-as-a-service and cloud computing. In this podcast, learn what attracts large enterprises to SaaS, and find out why adopting SaaS can help change the culture of an organization and effect business [...]

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Why Your Cloud Applications Should Be Multi-tenant

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:03:10 -0700

Image via CrunchBase Listen to my conversation with Rick Nucci, chief technology officer of Boomi, a SaaS integration vendor, who we last interviewed here in April 2009 on the topic of SaaS Integration, Simpler through Sharing. In this podcast, learn why multi-tenancy is such a crucial ingredient for software-as-a-service and other cloud services, and find out how [...]

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Mimecast’s $21m shows strength of SaaS in Europe

Phil Wainewright — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:34:32 -0700

With a crop of Europe-based SaaS ventures expanding into the US, the forming of a new industry group and signs of new funding opportunties for smaller European start-ups, the omens look good for a flowering of SaaS and cloud adoption in Europe.

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A Quick Look at Ariba’s Results — Notes From the Earnings Call

Jason Busch — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:48:00 -0700

I'm in the process of listening to Ariba's earnings call (always a good gauge of the overall market) and plan to report on a number of the specifics early next week, along with the recent quarterly -- and yearly -- performance of Ariba competitors in...

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Middle America’s Manufacturers Adopt SaaS ERP

Phil Wainewright — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:13:46 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Mark Symonds, CEO of Plex Systems, which delivers ERP software-as-a-service to mid-market manufacturing companies. In this podcast, learn why middle America’s manufacturing companies are turning to SaaS to operate their business systems, and find out what sort of business is most likely to adopt a SaaS solution as the logical delivery [...]

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Monday’s Musing: The Hidden Value In SaaS Deployments

R "Ray" Wang — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:34:16 -0700

Gains In SaaS Adoption Driven By Speed And Cost Savings Preliminary data from Q4 earnings data show continued traction among SaaS solutions. Expect SaaS deployments to gain steam in 2010 as organizations finalize their SaaS apps strategies to take advantage of 7 key benefits: Richer user experience - SaaS apps bring Web 2.0 usability to the enterprise [...]

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Monday’s Musings: Next Generation CIO’s Face 11 Skill Shifts In A Disruptive World

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:59:05 -0700

The Era Of CIO Dictatorships Ends With 2009 Less than 5 years ago, the mighty CIO controlled his or her organization’s destiny by shepherding multi-million dollar projects and ruling with a fist. Business leaders had to pay homage to the IT team and they hated it. The economic crisis, advent of the cloud and SaaS, and [...]

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Enterprise Clouds Going Hybrid

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:26:49 -0700

Listen to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan, managing director of strategic consulting firm THINKstrategies, and one of the foremost analysts tracking software-as-a-service, on-demand and cloud computing. In this podcast, learn why it’s not enough to simply port an existing software package to the cloud without rearchitecting it, and hear about some of the ways enterprises will [...]

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Why freemium is bad for business

Phil Wainewright — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:38:42 -0700

I’ve never been comfortable with free products for business use, even though it’s difficult to avoid using them if you’re a small or one-person business (web analytics, for example, has been all but wiped out as a low-end paid service by Google’s free offering). As a long-term observer of the scene, my worry is that [...]

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Information silos and IT governance failure

Michael Krigsman — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:16:30 -0700

"Governance" is a badass sounding phrase that simply means establishing policies to enable consistent management by exception. But many governance initiatives are doomed to fail.

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NetSuite: Hyperbole and the credibility gap

Michael Krigsman — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:18:11 -0700

Let's face it, enterprise software is pretty dry, but sometimes there's drama -- even if it's kind of lame.

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Peopleclick Authoria – A Perfect Merger or Act of Desperation?

Jason Corsello — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:06:35 -0700

Today, Authoria announce the merger with Peopleclick to create Peopleclick Authoria. Bedford Funding, the private equity firm that owns Authoria is spending $100 million to acquire and merge the companies. I’d love to say I had my crystal ball out when we recorded the Bill Kutik Radio Show a few weeks ago and predicted [...]

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CRM 2010 Watchlist – Part IIA

Paul Greenberg — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:00:12 -0700

Cover of Bad Boys (Special Edition) Okay, you saw what I think about the Four Bad Boys of CRM the other day. Now onto the next not-really-a-tier tier. You’ll note that this year, I’m changing the way I do my ZDNet blog posting to the “more-if-you-click-here” so they just don’t look so damned long. This one [...]

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2010 Watchlist: Mining the Off-Peak Cloud

Phil Wainewright — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:52:42 -0700

Over the next week or so, I'm going to highlight several emerging trends in computing that I believe will be very much worth watching in the coming year as important sources of innovation and competitive advantage for those who harness...

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CRM Watchlist 2010 – Part I

Paul Greenberg — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:00:09 -0700

Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Oh, wait, you probably think that I’m talking about which companies to watch in 2010. Nah. I already made those decisions. I’m talking about how to deliver the list. Should I do it the splitscreen method? One big post? Several parts? Well, I’ve made my decision. Three parts, over a few days. Broken out [...]

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Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:34:42 -0700

Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option The proliferation of SaaS solutions provides organizations with a myriad of sorely needed point and disruptive solutions. Good news – business users can rapidly procure and deploy, while innovating with minimal budget and IT team constraints. Bad news – users must depend more on their [...]

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Five failure predictions for 2010

Michael Krigsman — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:56:04 -0700

It's time for predictions about failure for 2010.

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The Year in Review in Software & Services

Brian Sommer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:44:32 -0700

2009 had some interesting twists to it as far as the software and services industries go. Here are top five services stories of 2009. 1) The breakup of BearingPoint – BearingPoint had some big bills to pay this year. When the time came to do so, they couldn’t. The company began the process of selling off parts [...]

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Chicken Around the World

Tom Foydel — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:25:09 -0700

Every once in a while I write a post that’s crazier than most. These normally happen late at night when my internal defenses have given way to a glass of wine. This post is along those lines. The basic question that I’ll try to answer is “Will the Cloud and SaaS save the current roster of Enterprise [...]

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SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management software launched

Tom Raftery — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:23:38 -0700

I wrote a piece on SAP’s new Sustainability Performance Management (SPM) tool a few weeks back. At time of writing it was very much in the realms of speculation as the product was, as yet, unreleased. Last Thursday, Dec 10th, SAP announced the release of the software and having been given a preview of the software [...]

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Cloud economics: The importance of multi-tenancy

Michael Krigsman — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:13:25 -0700

Recent discussions about SAP's Business byDesign have highlighted the importance of multi-tenancy as a component of on-demand software economics.

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SAP Business ByDesign Update: Multi-tenancy, In-Core Memory DB and More

Brian Sommer — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:16:43 -0700

The story of SAP's Business ByDesign product continues to unfold. It looks like SAP is going to move this product forward more in 2010. Since its debut, the product continues to improve - read this post to find out how.

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