Launching into the Cloud – A Vendor’s Perspective

Looking at the resignation letter on my desk, I don’t understand how we got it so wrong. He was our top salesman and was the most vocal about offering a cloud solution alongside our existing product. And now he’s joining our biggest competitor, who haven’t even considered the cloud. Why? Execution was clearly the issue….

Microsoft’s Azure Strategy Defined

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, speaking at PDC 2008 LOS ANGELES – The introduction of Windows Azure Monday at the Professional Developer’s Conference seems to put Microsoft on a collision course with every app hosting vendor on the market, in particular Salesforce.com. Doug Hauger, general manager of the cloud infrastructure services unit at Microsoft…

Conferences Highlight the Emerging SaaS Cloud

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…

Does Software as a Service Make Sense for SMBs?

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…

Don’t Spend Money Where You Don’t Have To

If you are a company with less than 100 employees you’re probably struggling with the IT infrastructure. It doesn’t do what you want it to do, but you can’t justify hiring more people to make it work the way you want. Why are you wrestling with this problem? It’s not your area of expertise or…

Why You Need to Weigh the SaaS Option

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…

The SaaS Steamroller

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…

SaaS: An Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come ? Again

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…