Last week’s OpSource SaaS Summit was a milestone event for the on-demand services market on a number of levels.

The first SaaS Summit in Silverado in 2006 was a gathering of industry pioneers to discuss the potential of the on-demand movement. Last year’s Summit in Monterey was an opportunity to celebrate the growing success of the SaaS movement. This year’s Summit offered a chance to take stock of what it will take to scale SaaS to meet the needs of the mainstream market. The theme was platforms and web services, but the event also raised other issues.

With over 600 registered attendees, this year’s SaaS Summit was the largest vendor-oriented conference focused entirely on the rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market to date. While Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce user conference is still the biggest SaaS event of all, OpSource’s SaaS Summit has represented the benchmark … Read More »

Last week, I had the opportunity to return to Dublin, Ireland, to participate in the second Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Summit which I’ve helped Enterprise Ireland (EI), the country’s economic development agency, organize and moderate in the past nine months.

After a very successful launch of this symposium series in October with the first SaaS Summit, decided to host another round. The goal of our first session in the Fall was to educate Irish companies and entrepreneurs about the opportunities in the SaaS market. Our objective last week was to make them aware of the major challenges and offer steps to success, especially for those local companies seeking to penetrate the U.S. market.

In addition to identifying and recruiting each of the Summit speakers, I also had the privilege of kicking off the day with a keynote presentation summarizing the state of the SaaS … Read More »