THINKstrategies announced today that Service-now.com 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 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Service-now.com is a leading provider of leading provider of SaaS for IT service automation. Service-now.com integrates Information Technology Infrastructure Library ITIL v3 process support, modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, and Web 2.0 functionality to provide a flexible, intuitive and self-managing application.

An example of Service-now.com’s business benefits is Unitus Community Credit Union which expects to reduce its annual total … Read More »

QuickArrow 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 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

QuickArrow’s professional services automation (PSA) solution helps service organizations manage their people and projects, by providing a comprehensive solution that includes time, expense, and billing management, project management, resource management, and advanced real-time reporting capabilities. By replacing homegrown solutions and labor-intensive spreadsheets to automate workflows, QuickArrow provides businesses the ability to streamline operations and achieve better visibility to optimize their services … Read More »

A friend at AT&T, Joe Weinman, continues to pump out thoughtful blog posts regarding the rapid evolution of the cloud computing industry. His latest post on GigaOm entitled, “6 Half-Truths About the Cloud”, includes a link to a previous post which offers “10 Reasons Why Telcos Will Dominate Enterprise Cloud Computing “.

I was drawn to his previous post because Joe added a link in today’s post for his definition of “CLOUD” – Common, Location-independent, Online Utility provisioned on-Demand.

But, I was also compelled to respond to Joe’s suggestion that the telcos are in the best position to capitalize on the growing demand among enterprises for cloud computing services.

I was originally attracted to the technology industry in 1982 not because I was a geeky engineer but because I was a MBA student looking for a hot new market opportunity and saw the impending divestiture of AT&T as … Read More »

Phil Wainwright has posted a terrific blog entry regarding the ‘green crystals’ that power Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant platform.

The concept of multi-tenancy has been a cornerstone of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement and a key element of the rapidly evolving cloud computing environment as well.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term ‘multi-tenancy’, it is borrowed from the housing market and aims to compare today’s leading SaaS/cloud computing vendors to condominium owners who can obtain more luxurious living quarters without the hassles of owning a single-family home by sharing a common infrastructure and operational services.

While this arrangement offers plenty of conveniences, it also requires some sacrifices when it comes to how far you can customize your particular unit, or version of software in the case of SaaS.

While the value proposition of multi-tenancy is easy to understand, it is hard to get a lot of details … Read More »

Ever since my early days as an industry analyst at IDC in the 1980s, I’ve been convinced that one of the most potent, yet under-utilized resources in the IT market are the major trade associations.

When I first looked at these associations, I thought of them as targets for research purposes. Now, I view them as a terrific channel to market.

Intacct is putting my ideas to the test by entering into a new alliance with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and its CPA2Biz subsidiary to encourage the association’s 45,000 member CPA firms and their 350,000 small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and “cloud computing” alternatives to traditional financial applications.

Under this agreement, Intacct and CPA2Biz will co-develop a new version of Intacct’s on-demand financial management and accounting applications to specifically address the needs of CPA firms and their clients. Intacct will … Read More »

Clarizen 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 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Clarizen is a leading provider of collaborative online project management software that allows businesses to easily manage all of their projects and resources in a single environment.

Click here to read more about Clarizen’s award-winning SaaS solution.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards.

The proliferation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing platform players continues to accelerate despite the failure of some early entrants and likelihood of more Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) casualties to come.

This past week, three more companies announced new platform strategies and solutions — Jaspersoft, ExpenseWatch.com, LongJump.

Open-source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft unveiled its v3.5 integrated analysis capabilities as part of what it calls the industry’s first SaaS-enabled BI platform. The new platform promises easy-to-use integrated analysis that doesn’t require a data warehouse or OLAP server. It also includes new in-memory analysis capabilities that enables the delivery of customizable SaaS and Cloud-based BI applications which can be integrated into reports and dashboards.

ExpenseWatch.com announced an open expense control platform which will permit small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to integrate their expense management data with a variety of business application. The new “non-proprietary approach” promises to allow SMBs … Read More »

HP unveiled a new Cloud Assure program this week, in conjunction with SaaScon, which responds to the growing concerns among enterprise decision-makers about the availability, security and performance of today’s rapidly evolving cloud computing services.

I think HP’s announcement is timely because enterprise IT/business decision-makers are interested in taking advantage of the burgeoning cloud computing opportunities, but apprehensive re: the reliability, accessibility and security (RAS) of these services. As a result, they’re looking for cloud computing services which give them a greater level of manageability, visibility and control.

HP is betting that it can capitalize on its the web monitoring services and skills it acquired in its Mercury Interactive deal, and its corporate brand equity as a network/system management (NSM) vendor to establish a strong position in the cloud computing management market.

HP’s biggest obstacle to success is that it isn’t considered a leading cloud computing … Read More »

IBM’s attempt to initiate a set of standards for the burgeoning cloud computing services movement has been met with a mixed response that reflects the varying perspectives and suspicions which have historically plagued the IT industry.

IBM’s Open Cloud maneuver deserves some praise because it puts the resources of many of the IT industry’s top players behind an effort to bring order to the chaotic world of cloud computing.

But, IBM’s initiative is also an easy target for cynics who can question the motives of these vendors who appear to be just as interested in ‘co-opting’ the cloud movement to suit their proprietary purposes as seeking to establish useful rules-for-engagement that can truly safeguard users of cloud computing services.

The fact is that it is in the best long-term interests of cloud computing vendors and users alike to put standards in place which govern the … Read More »

Rally Software is the latest winner of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award 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 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Rally Software is a leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making distributed development organizations faster and leaner by dramatically cutting the time, cost and effort needed to deliver high quality applications. An example of the business benefits of Rally Software’s SaaS solution is HomeAway Inc., the largest international network of vacation rental websites, with more than 360,000 paid listings of rental … Read More »