THINKstrategies announced today that FPX, LLC 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.

FPX provides a Configure-Price-Quote application that guides salespeople through the product configuration process. FPX’s configuration engine handles complex pricing issues to enable sales people to quickly produce professional, branded proposals that present the configured product in an understandable format. By eliminating configuration and pricing errors, FPX clients experience lower costs, faster sales cycles and happier customers.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which FPX has delivered … Read More »

Yesterday, Spiceworks announced that its user base now exceeds one million IT professionals across nearly 200 countries. The company’s rapid growth has dispelled a number of industry myths and represents a prime example of how I’ve been suggesting the tech industry is being redefined.

Here’s a quick list of some of the myths busted by Spiceworks’ success,

Ad-based, free services don’t work in the business-to-business (B2B) market,
IT professionals are not willing to use ad-based, freemium services to satisfy their day-to-day management needs, and
IT professionals are too concerned about the security issues associated with social networking to join an online community like Facebook.

Welcome, to Spiceworks — an ad-based, freemium service aimed at IT professionals which not only gives them access to a solid set of management tools, but also gives them the benefit of sharing information and insight with their peers through a Facebook-like … Read More »

Yesterday’s announcement by HP that it is cutting 9000 workers and hiring another 6000 as part of a $1 billion multi-year effort to redesign its data center operations and automate its enterprise services is the latest indication of the traumatic impact which today’s cloud computing phenomenon is having on the tech industry.

HP readily admitted in its announcement that its goal is to,

“…Consolidate Enterprise Services’ commercial data centers, management platforms, networks, tools and applications to create a more scalable, modernized and automated IT infrastructure that will better serve its clients’ needs.”

Although the company didn’t specify where its cuts would take place, I suspect that the bulk of the downsizing effort within the Enterprise Services division will involve offloading the legacy data center facilities and staff which came from the EDS acquisition.

My sources within the company have confirmed my original concerns about the acquisition … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Financial Transmission Network, Inc. (FTNI) 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.

FTNI’s SaaS ePayment platform offers extensive configuration options that make it ideally suited to a wide variety of industry verticals. FTNI’s PCI compliant solution is uniquely designed to offer banks and merchants a solution that not only clears multiple payment types but also reflects that payment activity in the merchant’s A/R system.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which FTNI’s customers have gained from its SaaS solution to earn FTNI a BoSS Award.

Click … Read More »

InformationWeek recently asked me to provide THINKstrategies’ perspective on the state of the cloud computing market.  In response, I’ve contributed a guest column for the publication’s Global CIO section which discusses how the initial success of Software-as-a-Service and a broader array of cloud services is quickly fueling a new generation of more mature enterprise-quality capabilities, which I’m calling “Cloud 2.0”.

I’ve been presenting this idea in my various talks at industry events and in client meetings.

So, what is Cloud 2.0?

Well, first here’s how I characterize Cloud 1.0:

Commodity-oriented, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings
Price and cost-savings are the primary customer value-propositions and motivators
Reliability, availability and security are the critical criteria for selection and key success factors
Primary ‘use-cases’ are cyclical or situational, non-core requirements
Primary customers are start-ups, software developers and business  end-users.

Cloud 2.0 is about:

Strategic business services aimed at ongoing operational requirements
Corporate decision-makers are seeking vendors that can offer broad … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that WaveMaker has been named the second winner of the new Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s cloud computing solutions.

The CCBV Awards program was initiated in 2010 to recognize Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers delivering tangible business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits include lower costs, faster deployment times, greater profitability, etc.

The Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program which was initiated in 2009.

WaveMaker is an open and easy-to-use development platform for web and cloud applications. WaveMaker uses visual, drag and drop tools to generate standard Java applications, boosting developer productivity and quality without compromising flexibility. WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready and include built-in support for multi-tenancy and elastic scaling. As a result, WaveMaker … Read More »

Seven weeks of traveling came to an end in Florida today after attending SAP’s Sapphire user conference and speaking to Tech Data’s TechSelect executives about the channel implications of the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing market.

Prior to this week’s events, I traversed the country from Boston to the Bay Area six times to speak, host and moderate sessions at SaaScon, Under the Radar, AlwaysOn OnDemand, Pervasive’s Metamorphosis and the SIIA/OpSource All About the Cloud conferences, and conduct strategy sessions with a wide range of clients in between.

The common theme of all these events and client meetings is that SaaS has become a viable alternative to legacy on-premise software across nearly every application segment, and a newer wave of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing services is quickly disrupting traditional data center models across nearly every industry.

Concerns about hyperbole outdistancing today’s realities are being pushed aside by a growing number of customer success stories … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that PowerSteering 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.

PowerSteering provides project portfolio management (PPM) software that helps organizations manage a broad range of strategic initiatives that improve business performance in information technology, new product development, Six Sigma and Operational Excellence, and other business PMOs. IT and business users utilize PowerSteering to achieve better portfolio results through improved alignment of resources against strategic priorities, increased executive visibility of project portfolios, and streamlined execution of project management activities.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which have led … Read More »

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing market consolidation appears to be heating up with the second important acquisition announcement of the day coming from SuccessFactors who plans to buy CubeTree, a “social business platform” which permits greater communication and collaboration across organizations.

This is also SuccessFactors’ second acquisition, following its purchase of Inform in February.

Integrating social networking software into enterprise environments has been a hot topic since the idea of Web 2.0 first emerged. It has gained even greater urgency as Facebook and Twitter have become mainstream communications tools among business professionals on an ad hoc basis and corporations in a more concerted fashion.

But, the utopia that everyone is seeking is an integrated approach to social networking which embeds its capabilities into broader enterprise applications in a ‘seamless’ fashion that eliminates the integration issues, alleviates compliance concerns and encourages end-users to take fuller … Read More »

IBM announced its intention to acquire Cast Iron Systems today, bringing to an end the long-standing parlor game of which integration tool vendor would be the next to be acquired after Workday grabbed Cape Clear in 2008.

This is an important endorsement of the importance of the integration tools market in general, and Cast Iron Systems in particular.

Integration is often listed as one of the top three concerns among IT and business decision-makers who are thinking about migrating to the ‘cloud’, along with security and reliability.

According to IBM’s software head, Steve Mills, Cast Iron Systems fit IBM’s acquisition criteria by offering “Adjacency” and “Synergy” that can enhance IBM’s capabilities and revenue opportunities in the following areas,

Websphere middleware
Process management services
Professional and hosting services
Cloud enablement solutions

The integration tools sector has been very competitive with Boomi, Hubspan, Informatica and Pervasive Software recognized as the other leaders.

Cast Iron Systems has differentiated … Read More »