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The personal contents in this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution to any contributor's, commentator's, or author's current, past, or future employers.

No NDA's have been broken. Sources may come from both publicly available information and private individual conversations.

Copyrighted © 2001- 2010

R "Ray" Wang and Insider Associates LLC.

All rights reserved.

February 24, 2010, 2:01 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 6 comments |

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

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, SaaS vendor results remain [...]

February 17, 2010, 11:51 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 3 comments |

News Analysis: Salesforce.com Announces Private Beta Of Chatter

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, [...]

February 11, 2010, 10:57 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 3 comments |

News Analysis: Hasso Brings More Changes to SAP’s Management Team

New Changes Hint At Hasso’s Priorities
In a not surprising update, SAP makes changes to Executive Board and management.  Here are the changes:

Gerhard Oswald becomes COO. Gerhard has experiences in support, consulting, education, custom development, and quality.Gerhard’s contract has been extended till December 31, 2011.
Point of View (POV):  Gerhard’s been a long-timer at SAP with 30 [...]

January 25, 2010, 3:34 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 10 comments |

Monday’s Musings: The Hidden Value In SaaS Deployments

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 [...]

January 18, 2010, 11:59 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 10 comments |

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

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 [...]

December 22, 2009, 12:34 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 8 comments |

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

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 [...]

December 11, 2009, 11:04 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 6 comments |

Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
Re-innovation Now At The Heart Of SAP’s Focus And Strategy
SAP has faced a rough two years.  From the continuing market pressure on new license revenue, false-start launch of Business By Design (ByD), management restructuring, and issues with [...]

December 8, 2009, 1:41 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 4 comments |

Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

Begin Apps Strategy Projects With Bite-Sized Entry Points
Complexity often plagues today’s apps strategies.  With tight budgets, limited resources, and little time, organizations need to find bite-sized entry points. The need to meet ever changing complex business requirements requires a four-step, basic (A,B,C,D) approach:

Align your business requirements with the hierarchy of business needs. Every project [...]

November 18, 2009, 8:47 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 6 comments |

Quarterly Financial Tracker: Q3 CY 2009 SaaS Vendors Face Some Headwinds, On-Premise Still In The Tank

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 [...]

November 9, 2009, 7:00 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 2 comments |

Monday’s Musings: SaaS, SOA, Integration and How To Make A Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich In The 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 [...]

November 2, 2009, 8:56 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 8 comments |

Best Practices: Lessons Learned In What SMB’s Want From Their ERP Provider

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 [...]

October 26, 2009, 8:55 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 5 comments |

Trends: Master Data Management 2010 - Focus On Outcomes Drives Push For Value

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 [...]

October 14, 2009, 6:27 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 7 comments |

News Analysis: Oracle Formally Announces Fusion Apps

Oracle’s Fusion Apps Addresses A Broad Set Of Horizontal Modules

Oracle’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison announced the code completion of Fusion Apps in today’s late afternoon keynote.  Though Ellison did not give precise guidance on general availability (GA), he did hint that the product would be available, “sometime in 2010″.  The product currently [...]

October 12, 2009, 12:36 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 12 comments |

Research Report: Customer Bill of Rights - Software-as-a Service

Connect.  Collaborate.  Innovate.
Welcome to the first of many Altimeter Group research reports.  Before you dive deep into the Customer Bill of Rights: Software-as-a-Service report, we wanted to share with you a bit about the research process and how we work within the community.

Connect.  We strive to bring new people together and share our knowledge.  Knowledge [...]

October 9, 2009, 11:59 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Leave a comment |

Friday’s Feature: D&B Purisma Launches First Step To Hosted MDM Solution

Complete Customer Addresses Today’s Market Conditions
On October 5th, D&B Purisma Solutions group announced its first hosted business data management app.  When generally available in November 2009, Complete Customer will deliver a customer database that will be self managed by organizations departments.  Organizations and their departments will take ownership of their data in a hosted offering.  [...]

October 8, 2009, 11:36 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | One comment |

Thursday’s Thanks: Customer Bill of Rights - Software-as-a Service

This post has been cross posted on the Enterprise Advocates blog
A New Way Of Creating Research - Collaborative Input And Review
Some time early next week, we (i.e. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and I) will be publishing a Customer Bill of Rights - Software-as-a-Service.  Through the generous input of 57 collaborators and organizations, this document [...]

September 28, 2009, 2:30 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 4 comments |

Quarterly Financial Tracker: Q2 CY 2009 SaaS Vendors and Purpose Built Solutions Rack Up Big Wins

Most on-premise vendor continue to slip into significant YoY losses in license revenue and overall revenues.  Meanwhile, economic conditions continue to favor SaaS, best-of-breeds, and purpose built solutions. Major themes in the 2009 Calendar Year Q2 include:

Economic conditions drive demand for best of breed and point solutions delivered by SaaS deployment.  Consequently, SaaS vendors posted [...]

September 9, 2009, 8:21 pm | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 5 comments |

Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone

This post was co-written with Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event
Salesforce.com launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?
Salesforce.com’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks [...]

September 5, 2009, 5:29 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Leave a comment |

Vendor Event: Workday Rising

Title: Vendor Event: Workday Rising
Location: The Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-10-18
End Date: 2009-10-21
Description:
Better Together.
Dynamic interaction is the key to success. Whether it’s one to one, one to many, or many to one, communicating and sharing experiences builds the foundation of our collective success. Workday Rising™ is our chance to [...]

September 5, 2009, 5:01 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | One comment |

Vendor Event: Connections - The Ultimate Software Conference 2009

Title: Vendor Events: Connections - The Ultimate Software Conference 2009
Location: The Bellagio, Las Vegas, Nevada
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-09-15
End Date: 2009-09-18
Description: Join Us!
September 15-18 at The Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada
View conference agenda | View pricing details | View tracks & breakout sessions
Building upon a tradition established at last [...]

July 25, 2009, 11:24 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 4 comments |

News Analysis: NetSuite Acquires QuickArrow To Expand PBS Presence

On July 21st, 2009, NetSuite announced its intention to acquire Project Based Solutions (PBS) rival Quick Arrow for $20M.   A few quick facts about the acquisition

Existing customers will continue to be supported. NetSuite has committed to supporting the QuickArrow solution.  Customers have the option to move to NetSuite and OpenAir.  NetSuite will not force [...]

July 13, 2009, 6:00 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 2 comments |

Monday’s Musings: Why On-Premise Vendors and SI’s Should Go on the Offense with SaaS

On-premise vendors still see SaaS as a loss leader due to huge ramp up and punishing revenue recognition rules

When it comes to the topic of SaaS, many on-premise vendors appear to be living in denial, hoping that SaaS fails, and/or creating confusion in the market place.  These tactics have merit as a shift to SaaS [...]

June 24, 2009, 1:04 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | One comment |

Wednesday’s Whispers: Corporate Whispers and Monthly Market Trends - June 2009

CORPORATE WHISPERS AND MONTHLY MARKET TRENDS*
Starting this month, we’ll be splitting the trends in Corporate Whispers from the People Whispers series.  Catch the latest monthly random thoughts, trend points, and corporate trends.  Hearing from twitterati, software execs, and industry experts about:
User trends

Recent win by SUSEN Software over SAP enhances validity of the used software [...]

June 8, 2009, 7:28 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 5 comments |

Tuesday’s Tip: Seven Signs Your Software Vendor Can’t Innovate Fast Enough

Collective support and maintenance, constant innovation, best practices, and improved ROI represent the key arguments that led enterprises to packaged applications such as ERP. Today, this promise appears to be broken as enterprises question the value received for their support and maintenance monies.   In addition, on-premise upgrades require painful testing and down time [...]

June 2, 2009, 12:01 am | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | 11 comments |

Tuesday’s Tip: Now’s The Time To Consider SaaS Software Escrows

With 2009 rapidly becoming the “Year of SaaS” and the tipping point for Cloud Computing, it’s hard not to notice the growing number of SaaS start ups (along with the legacy application vendors rushing to provide an “On-Demand”, but not really multi-tenant deployment option).  My snarky SaaS bigotry aside, we can expect hybrid deployment options [...]