Salesforce.com today announced its latest acquisition and newest extension to its Apex platform and on-demand service capabilities aimed at applying Web 2.0 tools and best practices to the age-old issue of knowledge management in corporate environments.

This represents a bold move which will not only expand the population of end-users who can benefit from Salesforce.com’s solutions, but will also raise some new questions for its partners who are trying to determine how to successfully dance with the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry’s 800 pound gorilla.

Today’s announcement unveiled Salesforce.com Apex Content and Salesforce ContentExchange which are intended to help organizations better manage their documents and unstructured data within their existing Salesforce CRM applications.

Salesforce.com is promising that Apex Content will be offer a content management platform for unstructured data sources such as office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email. It will also enable developers to … Read More »

SAP announced today that Shai Agassi, president of its product and technology group and architect of SAP’s Netweaver software, is leaving the company to pursue his interests in alternative energy and climate change.

While these are honorable reasons to move on, it is very likely that his departure was also prompted by the overwhelming challenges associated with migrating SAP’s software to an on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, as well as some executive suite politics.

In addition to his broader responsibilities, Agassi was the chief architect and senior champion for SAP’s on-demand efforts which were launched in February, 2006. He joined the company in 2001, when SAP acquired his company TopTier Software. He was also among several SAP executives considered a potential successor to Chief Executive Henning Kagermann, who recently had his employment contract extended through 2009, creating a bottleneck among his lieutenants, including … Read More »

With the recent acquisition of WebEx by Cisco Systems, speculation has been rising that Salesforce.com may be the next major Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company to be bought. You can tell folks that you heard it from me first that the purchase will be made by Oracle within the next 18 months.

No, I don’t have any inside information. But, I can read the tea leafs and they tell me that Salesforce.com is too attractive for an even bigger player not to buy it. The software services company has over 650,000 subscribers and added 90,000 new subscribers during the most recent fiscal quarter ending in January 31.

While profits have slipped due to the company’s investments in new offerings and service infrastructure, the outlook for Salesforce.com’s services has never been better. Not only is customer receptivity growing rapidly, but Salesforce.com’s ability to penetrate new … Read More »

While Salesforce.com and its Founder/CEO/Chairman, Mark Benioff, get most of the attention and credit for setting the standard for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement, OpSource and its Founder/CEO, Treb Ryan, have done more than their share to evangelize the business benefits of SaaS and educate the software industry about the steps to success in this market.

Treb saw the opportunity to differentiate OpSource from the floundering hosting business by focusing on a nascent SaaS marketplace early. The company asserted itself as the “SaaS Experts” by establishing a professional services arm which helped aspiring on-demand companies understand the business of SaaS. It also initiated an aggressive marketing campaign in 2005-2006 which included an incubation program, countless webinars and the SaaS industry’s first conference, the SaaS Summit.

The company used the occasion of its second annual SaaS Summit in Monterey, CA, this week to unveil … Read More »

Among the reasons why many organizations are still hesitant to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the concern that it will be difficult to integrate their existing data sources into their new, on-demand software services.

While this may be a real challenge for some large enterprises that must contend with a plethora of custom applications, it is becoming less of a issue for other companies with relatively common applications and database structures, as a result of rapidly evolving SaaS solutions.

The latest innovation in the integration arena was unveiled by Informatica last week when the company announced its new On Demand Data Replicator, the first multi-tenant, cross-enterprise data integration on-demand service.

The On Demand Data Replicator enables organizations to quickly and easily replicate SaaS-related data to their on-premise transactional and master databases. The service is initially aimed at organizations relying on Salesforce.com and third-parties tied … Read More »

While much of the information technology (IT) industry and many CIOs, concerned about their traditional legacy business intelligence (BI) applications, were focused on the market implications of Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion Software, new entries into the market may represent a more important milestone in the evolution of this segment of the software industry.

On March 6, 2007, LucidERA unveiled its new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence solution. The company is founded by one of the truly good guys of the industry, Ken Rudin, who also has a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges represented by the SaaS model.

Ken started his career at Oracle. He then co-founded and was CEO of Emergent Corporation, a consulting firm focused on data warehousing projects for Fortune 500 companies which was sold to Keane, Inc. in 1999. At that point, Ken joined a new company, called … Read More »

While Salesforce.com was unveiling the first iteration of its new generation of on-demand vertical market software services aimed at the financial services sector this past week, Google was flexing its muscles as a viable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor with its first round of fee-based, packaged online desktop solutions aimed at enterprise customers.

Google’s new Google Apps includes integrated word processing and spreadsheet applications, as well as BlackBerry support for Gmail for $50/user, a fraction of the price of Microsoft’s Office suite. In order to overcome corporate apprehension about the quality of its new services, Google is offering guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, and increased e-mail storage. Yet, to show how far Google must go to fulfill its promise as a viable provider of on-demand enterprise apps, Google Gmail users suffered from a series of service failures during the first week … Read More »

Salesforce.com yesterday unveiled its first concerted effort to focus the power of its AppExchange partner network and Apex programming platform at a specific vertical market opportunity. Salesforce.com’s new initiative targets the financial services sector, in general, and the wealth management segment, in particular.

The new on-demand services come at a time when THINKstrategies’ research indicates that companies of all sizes are not only becoming more receptive to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but are increasingly looking for industry-specific solutions.

The new wealth management offering combines Salesforce.com’s core customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) software solutions with a set of third-party applications and business services focused on financial advisors who want to better serve their customers. It includes a set of standard features and functions upon which business partners and corporate customers can add their own components and capabilities.

The new wealth management service leverages … Read More »

Two announcements last week served as reminders that, despite growing interest in on-demand solutions, professionals services remain an essential part of the technology landscape.

On January 30, Salesforce.com announced a strategic alliance with Deloitte Consulting to extend the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) leader’s reach into the enterprise market. Salesforce.com already has a similar agreement in place with Accenture. But, the Deloitte alliance confirms the growing interest in SaaS among large-scale enterprises and the desire of a growing number of established consultancies to join the SaaS movement.

As I’ve stated many times, any suggestion that SaaS will eliminate the role of channel organizations in the software industry is ludicrious. However, there is no question that many value-added resellers (VARs) and consultancies will need to shift their focus from technology integration to process or change management projects. A clear example of this shift, as well as … Read More »

With the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement becoming generally accepted among organizations of all sizes, a growing number of SaaS vendors are seeking to differentiate themselves by creating on-demand solutions specifically designed to address the unique requirements of particular industries or vertical markets.

THINKstrategies’ SaaS Showplace includes nearly 600 company listings by industry. Many of these companies are simply targeting specific industries rather than offering industry-specific solutions. However, a growing number are designing their on-demand solutions to cater to the specific needs of targeted industries.

The shift in attention is timely according to THINKstrategies’ latest SaaS survey in conjunction with Cutter Consortium. In the second installment of our three-part series on the findings of this survey we will discuss how a substantial proportion of the survey respondents are either currently using industry-specific SaaS solutions or considering them.

Leading SaaS vendors, such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite, … Read More »