Last Friday’s government report indicating a dip in employment levels sent a scare through Wall Street and raised the spector of recession on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

The irony is that more than half of 112 IT executives recently surveyed by the Society of Information Managers cited the ability to attract and retain IT personnel as their No. 1 concern for 2008. As I indicated in my previous blog, these concerns are among the ten reasons why I think on-demand services will soar in 2008.

Nonetheless, I’ve also received a growing number of resumes from IT/telecom professionals seeking positions in the on-demand market. Some want to get into this rapidly growing market. Others are looking for new jobs because their previous companies failed or have been restructured to better position themselves to capitalize on the on-demand services movement.

In response to … Read More »

The consolidation of the legacy software market continued this past week with SAP’s announced plans to acquire Business Objects, followed by Oracle’s announcement that it intends to buy BEA Systems.

These transactions clearly indicate that the traditional, on-premise software market is undergoing fundamental changes. The most obvious driver of the latest announcements is the growing importance of business intelligence (BI) and analytics as a key ingredient in any meaningful enterprise application.

In an ideal world, these acquisitions would mean that customers no longer have to carry the burden of integrating these capabilities into their enterprise software environments. Instead, it would be logical to expect the business intelligence and analytics capabilities to become a ‘plug and play’ component of the SAP and Oracle’s software portfolios. However, it is more likely that these acquisitions will simply make their software solutions even more complex to … Read More »

I’m pleased to announce that THINKstrategies unveiled today a new set of packaged services aimed at helping Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Managed Service providers (MSPs) ensure that they have properly designed and can reliably deliver their web-based solutions.

Our new Readiness Assessment Services (RAS) have been developed in response to the rapid rise in demand for SaaS and Managed Service alternatives to traditional, packaged applications and network/system management (NSM) solutions among end-user organizations of all sizes. This demand is attracting a rapidly expanding array of start-ups and established vendors attempting to capitalize on this new market opportunity.

We at THINKstrategies have found that many of these companies are not fully prepared to succeed in the SaaS and managed services markets because they’ve under-estimated the organizational, operational, sales, marketing and financial requirements of these service-oriented, subscription-based businesses.

Despite the growing interest and acceptance of SaaS … Read More »

In my most recent THINKstrategies Update newsletter, I stated that the winners in the increasingly competitive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Managed Services markets will be the companies who own the trust of the customer. In that newsletter, I highlighted some of THINKstrategies’ latest publications which spotlight innovative approaches to building trust in both markets.

Yesterday, Intacct Corporation asserted itself as a leader in the trust-building business by unveiling a new “Buy with Confidence” program aimed at assuring the success of customers using its on-demand financial management solution.

Under Intacct’s new program, the company is committing to deliver the following levels of service to its customer:

1. Service Availability: Intacct is guaranteeing 99.8% service availability. If it fails to achieve its goal, it will provide a AvailabilityPlus subscription credit of 10% of the customer’s subscription fee for each percentage point below the service level goal, … Read More »

In January, THINKstrategies joined the growing legion of multimedia Internet producers with our Spotlight on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) podcast series aimed at educating and evangelizing about the business benefits of today’s new SaaS solutions.

We are now expanding the scope of our podcasts to discuss encompass Managed Services as well. As with our initial podcasts, we will continue to examine ways in which customers and solution providers are leveraging managed services to achieve their business objectives.

Our latest podcast is a discussion of managed service trends, as well as SaaS developments, with Chris Hoffmann and Scott Donohue, two of principals of Triple-Tree, LCC, a leading investment bank which helps emerging and established companies achieve their corporate objectives in the on-demand services industry.

Click here to listen to THINKstrategies’ latest podcast.

I hope you find the podcast series valuable. Please sign up for our new RSS … Read More »