Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — The financial crisis, now officially a recession, isn’t slowing some tech giants’ interest in acquisitions. Investment officials from a cross section of tech heavyweights agreed in a panel discussion here that the economic downturn isn’t swaying their interest in doing deals. “We won’t shy away from deals because of the…
Although companies will reduce their IT spending because of the economic meltdown, it’s not going to be all doom and gloom for the IT industry. System integrators and consultants will get a boost from the crisis in the financial sector, say analysts, as institutions that have taken over or bought others seek to align their…
One of the things that keeps IT interesting is the same thing that makes it so maddening—change. Nothing changes as fast as hot technology in the early stages of the adoption curve. And while Software as a Service (SaaS) is actually the latest incarnation of application hosting, and therefore not strictly new, it has become…
Software as a service (SaaS) providers are aiming their marketing efforts directly at the SMB market. This is because the value proposition of getting a sophisticated solution without all of the headaches of complex deployments and management is very attractive to organizations that have limited IT resources. It also makes a lot of sense when…
As enterprises adopt multiple applications delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), a new integration wrinkle emerges: connecting black boxes that cannot be customized by the enterprise. More Tech Trends on CIO Update Riding the CMDB Tidal Wave, Part One: Understanding IT: An Industry in Transition Report: Most Aren’t Rushing Into Web 2.0 Should IT Embrace Consumer Technology?…
This is the final installment of a three part series on Software as a Service (SaaS). The first article, SaaS: An Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come , explored the evolution of SaaS as a viable alternative to in-house application hosting. A follow-up article, titled The SaaS Steamroller and Enterprise Software Vendors details the reasons…
Last month’s article, the first in this series, discussed the evolution of software as a service (SaaS) from the application service provider (ASP) model to today’s SaaS poster child, Salesforce.com. It discussed the forces making some companies re-think their approach to delivering IT services to the business, and move toward a service-provider, rather than an…
Industry veterans are familiar with the application service provider (ASP) concept. The idea is that a business software company, or its designated partner, hosts an enterprise software offering for end-user IT organizations. This eliminates the need for IT to plan, deploy, support and modify the software in-house. While the ASP concept has always seemed like…
A cross-functional team with representatives from IT, Finance, and Legal should be involved in the acquisition of mission-critical software as a service (SaaS) applications. SaaS is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet or VPN. Better…