Once again Gartner is late to the party with its ‘bold’ predictions and customer surveys.

Gartner’s latest findings show that 95% of customers currently using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are likely to renew these services. THINKstrategies and Cutter Consortium surveys found this out three years ago.

In fact, anyone who really understands the SaaS market, knows that SaaS companies cannot survive unless they keep customer churn to a minimum which means achieving 90%+ renewal rates.

But, Gartner’s survey research still helps to validate the viability of today’s SaaS alteratives in the eyes of the old-guard IT decision-makers who tend to take Gartner’s word as gospel. It clearly shows that the SaaS market isn’t the latest overhyped idea, but a user-driven movement which is fundamentally reshaping the software industry.

This research will open the door wider for greater customer adoption of SaaS solutions and put even more pressure on … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that New Relic 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.

New Relic RPM is a SaaS, on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby, Java or JRuby. New Relic RPM can be fully implemented in minutes and provides deep, 24×7 visibility and code-level diagnostics for web applications deployed on traditional, dedicated infrastructures, private and public clouds, or any combination thereof. RPM’s real-time metrics enable application owners, developers and operations teams to quickly and cost-effectively monitor, troubleshoot, … Read More »

My past fews weeks have been consumed with weekly visits to the Bay Area to speak at SaaScon, moderate tracks at Under the Radar and co-host the AlwaysOn OnDemand conference, as well as numerous on-site client meetings. In between, I also had the privilege of presenting a kickoff keynote presentation at a VIP dinner for the State of the Cloud conference in Boston.

My hectic travel schedule has given me little time to comment on a variety of industry announcements which have occurred during this period. So, here’s my ‘lightening round’ assessment of some of the more significant events worth noting,

Cloud Conference Observations

SaaScon: When was the last time you heard CIOs talk about being heroes in their organizations? Well, the CIOs who spoke at SaaScon repeatedly described how the SaaS solutions which they’re implementing in their organizations are generating an overwhelmingly positive response from their end-users and corporate executives. … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that AccelOps 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.

AccelOps allows organizations to better leverage virtualization technologies and cloud computing by providing end-to-end visibility across performance, availability, security and change management while linking the physical and virtual infrastructure to business and business services. AccelOps integrated and service-oriented platform automates the collection, monitoring, analysis and detailed reporting on all performance and IT/event log data with a single pane of glass that cuts through networks, systems, applications, virtualization and technology … Read More »

Salesforce.com announced its intention to acquire Jigsaw today and is once again redefining the role of the software vendor and nature of software applications.

Jigsaw, a Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) winner, provides lead generation services via the aggregation of third-party data service feeds combined with a cloud–based, ‘crowd-sourcing’ model.

Jigsaw taps lead gen data from D&B, Hoover’s, LexisNexis and other data sources, and makes it available to sales organizations who in turn clean the data and share their own contact lists in hopes that they will build greater and better quality contacts as a result of participating in Jigsaw’s user community.

Jigsaw’s tight API integration with Salesforce.com makes it relatively easy for users to import third-party contact information into their Salesforce.com’s CRM system. The company’s CEO also told me that its API will be extended to connect to other CRM solutions, including Siebel and Microsoft … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Vivantio 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 program was announced in January 2009 to bring attention to SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Vivantio provides a suite of easy-to-deploy SaaS-based service management tools which enable customer service and support teams to increase productivity and save money. The flexibility and scalability of Vivantio’s solutions are reflected in its diverse customer base which includes public sector organizations, corporate customers and small service companies.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits Vivantio’s customers have gained from its SaaS solutions that earned … Read More »

I’ve heard good things about the Under the Radar Conference for a couple of years, but haven’t been able to attend the event because of scheduling conflicts.

After serving as a corporate partner last year but still being unable to attend, I finally experienced my first Under the Radar conference yesterday not only as an attendee but as the moderator of two of the event’s afternoon sessions.

It was a terrific experience!

The Under the Radar conference showcased startups focused on or taking advantage of cloud computing solutions, in a series of tightly choreographed presentations and panel Q&A sessions akin to an American Idol talent show.

The conference founders and staff leverages their expansive rolodexes of relationships to pull together a wide range of entrepreneurs, CIOs, investors, business development professionals and folks like myself to serve as judges and moderators.

While some of the solutions presented … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced yesterday that Caspio, Inc. has been named the first 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 announced in January 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.

Caspio provides an on-demand, do-it-yourself, web application creation PaaS which replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online. Caspio’s customers range from one-person entrepreneurs to Fortune-500 corporations, digital media giants, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Click … Read More »

I’ve been predicting for over a year, that despite the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market many aspiring best-of-breed vendors will not survive an industry shakeout or the short attention spans of their venture funding sources.

The latest case in point is Helpstream which discontinued operations this past month. I first reported on the company in 2008 when it originally launched as Pathworks Software and caught my attention because of the way it promised to leverage the Open Source pricing model and community building orientation.

In essence, Helpstream was one of the first SaaS companies in the helpdesk market to recognize the powerful potential of a social networking capability embedded into an enterprise app.

Since then, saleforce.com has picked up the baton and is very quickly demonstrating the tangible benefits which can be derived from merging a Facebook-like capability into its CRM/SFA solution with … Read More »

This week’s NCAA college basketball championship between Duke and Butler University offered plenty of life lessons for everyone, including the software and technology industry.

I took particular interest in the game because my oldest son is a sophomore at Butler which became the center of attention because of the ‘feel-good’ story surrounding the school. For anyone who isn’t aware of the dynamics that made the Duke-Butler championship special and didn’t see the game, it was a classic Cinderella and ‘David and Goliath’ story wrapped into one.

Duke is a pre-eminent basketball power with a long history of success on the national stage that has enabled the school to spend lavishly to attract elite ballplayers for decades. Butler is a respectable but little known ‘mid-major’ program which most people viewed as an unlikely challenger because the college is a fraction of the size of the top basketball institutions, spends less than 1/15 as much on its … Read More »