Last week Appirio announced that it had secured Series B financing of $5.6 million led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm which has become notorious for also backing Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal. Sequoia also funded one of my previous employers, International Network Services (INS), one of the high-flyers of the 1990s.

Appirio’s latest round of funding comes on the heals of a Series A investment of $1.1 million which it captured earlier this year from salesforce.com and angel investors. Although there is lots of VC money chasing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing opportunities, it is rare to have a start-up collect two rounds of funding in the same year.

What makes this latest round of funding for Appirio of interest to me is the implications which it has for the overall on-demand services market.

As I mentioned, I was a part of … Read More »

A little over a year ago, I contributed a commentary to eWeek’s Channel Insider, entitled “On-Demand a Boon for the Channel”, that stated the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement doesn’t have to be the death-kneel for channel organizations.

At that time, many resellers and integrators feared that SaaS would ‘dis-intermediate’ them because of its direct sales and simpler deployment characteristics. There is no question that these attributes will certainly disrupt the traditional business models of many resellers and integrators who capitalized on the complexities of the legacy applications in the past. However, there is still plenty of complexity in today’s enterprise-oriented SaaS solutions to give innovative resellers and integrators a new round of business opportunities to pursue.

Just as in the past, customization and integration remain challenges in the new world of enterprise SaaS solutions. A year ago, I discussed in the eWeek article … 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 »