A Software Insider's Point of View

Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social

Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform.  Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities.   Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s.   With a 100 customers testing out user experience, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Purchasing in Q3 reflected both economic downturn and summer doldrums.  While on-premise vendors continued massive double digit declines in year-over-year new license revenue, SaaS vendors faced some pressures in keeping up with tremendous growth.  However, long term economic outlook still favor SaaS players and early indications on Q4 budget flush indicate that SaaS and Cloud [...]

Rapid SaaS Adoption Will Lead To A Repeat Of 1990’s Best Of Breed Integration Challenges

The proliferation and rapid adoption of SaaS solutions stems from 7 key benefits: richer user experience, rapid implementation, frequent cycles of innovation, minimal upgrade hassles, always on deployment, subscription pricing, and scalability (see Figure 1). Despite these benefits, organizations head full [...]

Competition Intensifies For The Small And Medium Organization’s Software Budget

Software vendors such as Oracle and SAP can no longer rely on their large enterprise customers for double digit year-over-year growth.  In fact, their customers have not only reached a saturation point in being able to consume new solutions, but have also faced demands to cut [...]

Market pressures and organizational maturity drives new master data management (MDM) trends
Conversations with 31 leading edge organizations seeking business transformation highlight shifts in the MDM trends of the past.  Organizations awash in data need to move beyond the clutter and get to the information.  More data does not equate to more information.  In order to [...]

Title: Vendor Event: Dreamforce 2009
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-11-17
End Date: 2009-11-20
Description: It’s time to master the cloud
It’s time to improve your sales. Sharpen your marketing. Collaborate with your teams and communities. It’s time to delight your customers with great service. Lay the foundation for the changes to come. It’s [...]

FORWARD AND COMMENTARY
“Shape Your Apps Strategy To Reflect New SaaS Licensing and Pricing Trends” represent the seventh report in an on-going series to provide clients with insight on how to better align their packaged apps strategies.  As more and more clients seek SaaS solutions as options to pipe in innovation and potentially control costs, clients [...]

With a few days left in the year, it’s hard to believe that 2008 is almost over.  Just like our paltry .401K’s and lowered gas prices, it’s like we reverted to the Dot Com bust.  Extreme contrasts in positions and tremendous change made 2008 both exciting, suspenseful, and frankly sobering like 2002.  In fact, it [...]

Sponsored by Fujitsu Consulting
December 9, 2008

2:00 - 3:00 pm ET / 11:00 am - 12:00 pm PT
Featuring:
R “Ray” Wang, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Joel Hoffman, SVP of CRM and Online Delivery, Citigroup MyFi
Join us to learn:

How SaaS and cloud computing is impacting the enterprise
How to successfully integrate SaaS solutions into your business
SaaS in Action [...]

Current Model Lopsided Towards the Large ISV’s
Rapid enterprise apps vendor consolidation over the past 5 years leave end user enterprises with fewer vendor choices and less competition.  The impact to services firms is a continued and increased dependency on the fortune and “good will” of the software vendor by IT Services firms.  However, ISV’s [...]

(Photo: Main show floor for Dreamforce 2008 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)
Over 9,000 attendees made it to the annual San Francisco pilgrimage to hear the high priest of SaaS kickoff the event.  This year’s theme focused on the future of Cloud Computing, a focus on [...]

The War for Mind Share In the Skies
The recent announcement of IBM’s Cloud Computing initiatives represents the latest front in the marketing and delivery battle for customers, partners, and ISV’s.  IBM has pulled together a mix of existing technologies and new developments into a four pronged attack that focuses on:

Cloud service delivery to end [...]

Emerging SaaS platform wars akin to on-premise middleware wars
With consolidation in the middleware market fairly under way, adoption of SaaS platforms (i.e. PaaS) by solution partners represents the next land grab in the enterprise software space. Current key players include industry leaders and specialists such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Magic [...]