THINKstrategies  announced today that Right90 has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.  

Right90’s SaaS-based sales forecasting solution enables companies to quickly and accurately generate more accurate unit and revenue forecasts. And, by integrating with leading customer relationship (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Right90’s solution helps companies to achieve higher revenue, greater operating efficiencies and increased margins.

Click here to read more about Right90’s award winning business benefits.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Awards program and to apply for an award.

Based on the success of … Read More »

Today’s announcement of a new OpenStack consortium, led by Rackspace and NASA, could help the cloud  computing movement quickly overcome user concerns regarding vendor lock-in by establishing a open-source platform to encourage industry standards for cloud interoperability.

While there will always be cynicism and debate about the feasibility of creating industry-wide technology standards, this initiative appears to have ‘legs’ for a number of reasons,

The initiative promotes the use of generally accepted Open Source stack technologies and approaches which are already popular in the cloud computing industry,
The strength and diversity of the ‘charter’ members of the OpenStack consortium represents a powerful group of technology vendors, service providers and enterprise users.

Although vendor/service provider deployment of the OpenStack code and technology may still vary based on the proprietary interpretations of the standards by specific companies, this initiative will still have a positive impact on the overall … Read More »

For the past two weeks, I’ve been debating whether to respond to a commentary in InfoWorld by Neil McAllister which asked, “Is the SaaS Experiment Finally Over?”

But, I couldn’t hold back any longer when one of the many online publications where I’m a contributor, eBizQ, posed the question in a more provocative fashion, “Is SaaS Dead?”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond to McAllister’s column when it was first published because his argument was so ludicrous. He alluded to a variety of past SaaS and cloud vendor service outages to raise concerns about the overall viability of these rapidly expanding markets. And he used a series of Gartnerisms to warn against developer migration to the SaaS model.  

Yet, McAllister ignores the pervasive failures of traditional on-premise software which has inspired organizations of all sizes to explore and increasingly adopt SaaS alternatives to better meet their corporate needs.

The … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Post Vision Technology’s Project Portfolio Office (PPO) has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, and the first company based in Africa to be recognized by the program which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

Project Portfolio Office is a web-based application designed, developed and supported in South Africa to assist organizations to manage projects and project portfolios in various industries. It is offered on SaaS platform, and is an enterprise solution capable of bringing together all the elements necessary for typical projects.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which Project Portfolio Office delivered to the the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA), in conjunction with National Treasury, which launched the Siyenza Manje Programme, an initiative aimed at providing hands-on support to distressed municipalities … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that EasyVista Inc., member of the Staff&Line Group, has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

EasyVista.com IT Service Management and IT Asset Management solution covers all ITIL v3 processes in a single, integrated yet modular product. EasyVista.com has been designed for quick and easy deployment and enables users to extensively customize their application through a totally codeless interface. EasyVista.com also reduces recurrent costs making it significantly more affordable than conventional on-premise solutions.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which EasyVista produced for its customers which earned it a BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program and to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on … Read More »

I’m pleased to now be blogging on TechWeb’s Internet Evolution macro-site focused on the future of the Internet.

In addition to my regular postings here, I’ll be providing more of THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding key issues, opportunities and challenges surrounding the rapidly evolving cloud computing environment, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.

The Internet Evolution blog represents the latest media outlet partnering with THINKstrategies to distribute and promote our perspective on these increasingly important market trends. These media outlets include Datamation, E-Commerce Times and Seeking Alpha.

I hope you find our perspectives of value and welcome your feedback and additional suggestions regarding other media outlets which you think would benefit from our perspectives.

A commentary on InfoWorld’s website today caught my attention and compelled me to quickly respond in this space to try to once again set the cynics straight about the viability and business benefits of cloud computing.

The author of the commentary entitled, “Confessions of a cloud skeptic”, suggests that the only thing new about cloud computing is the false promise that you can move an entire data center operation to a third-party hosting facility.

I believe the author of this column got the newness re: cloud computing entirely wrong. It is the opposite which makes cloud computing special.

Specifically, it is the hyper-elasticity and self-provisioning capabilities which make cloud computing disruptive. Amazon has pioneered and dramatically changed the way compute power is packaged, priced and delivered.

As a result, organizations and even individuals can now purchase compute power in tiny increments to meet their specific … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that GoodData has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

GoodData helps companies track the metrics that drive their business by making it easy to collect, report on and share data across marketing, sales, support and operations. The company does this through a Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) Platform that delivers business dashboards in weeks instead of months.

Click here to read more about GoodData’s award winning SaaS BI capabilities which earned the company a BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program and to … Read More »

Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.

The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

The company’s CEO, Brad Smith, did a good job quickly apologizing to Intuit’s over 300,000 customers who were affected by the outage. His blogpost also explained the cause of the disruption and made a public commitment to put new policies and procedures in place to prevent the problem from occurring again.

Smith’s response was certainly better … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Security On-Demand has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Security On-Demand is a leading provider of comprehensive SaaS-based compliance and security solutions which help organizations maintain compliance with industry regulations, manage risk, and protect themselves from security threats.

Click here to read more about the business benefits which Security On-Demand is delivering to its customers.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards program and to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program … Read More »