A year ago, Vanson Bourne conducted a survey on behalf of Gemalto of independent software vendors (ISVs) executives about their software licensing challenges that discovered a majority of ISVs were dealing with an escalating assortment of organizational issues monitoring and monetizing their software capabilities. As many of these ISVs move to the cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models, they are facing even greater obstacles achieving their business objectives.

Corporations and consumers alike are no longer interested in acquiring on-premise or even downloaded software. They prefer on-demand, subscription or usage-based consumption alternatives that require ISVs to pursue new software design and monetization approaches. As a consequence, the Vanson Bourne survey found approximately nine in ten ISV respondents admit that their organization is experiencing challenges with their software licensing (91%) and their software packaging/bundling (88%).

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in E-Commerce Times … Read More »

This month marks THINKstrategies‘ fifteenth anniversary helping its clients achieve business success in the Cloud. (Of course, we didn’t call it the ‘cloud’ when we first got started.)

I founded the firm in November 2001 with the simple premise that the software and technology industry was going to move from a product-centric to a services-driven business model, and I wanted to help companies make this transition and transform their businesses.

While this idea may seem mundane today, back then the software and technology industry was still reeling from the Dot.com bust and demise of the first generation of application service providers (ASPs) and utility computing services companies. The major market research, management consulting and venture capital firms were abandoning the ASP and utility computing idea. THINKstrategies was the first independent advisory firm to focus entirely on the new services idea which we believed would become … Read More »

Over the past two years, major vendors have braced for the oncoming wave of the internet of things. As recently as 2015, Salesforce launched its IoT Cloud — its application for managing IoT data — to much buzz and fanfare.

But since the launch of technologies like IoT Cloud, the idea of a connected world of products and services suffered from caveats, such as “it’s still early days.” But despite the buzz that accompanied Salesforce IoT Cloud and its debut, it’s hard to deny that technology played only a peripheral part at Dreamforce 2016. The shift reflects a combination of factors that have forced Salesforce to reconsider how it has positioned its IoT strategy and what it needs to do to deliver on its promises.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in SearchSalesforce about the market implications of this shift in focus and … Read More »

Everyone knows that “software is eating the world” and the “sharing economy” is fundamentally disrupting a growing number of traditional industries. However, few would have expected a widening assortment of old-line companies to respond so quickly to these threats and take the lead in transforming their business operations into powerful, new software-centric organizations.

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, sees the rapid shift to the cloud as driven by “not just the Silicon Valley startups anymore, it is the core enterprise that is also becoming a digital company.”

This trend will accelerate in 2017, and it will raise the bar for software startups and consulting firms seeking to win a share of the growing enterprise revenue opportunities.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in Sandhill.com about the market implications of the emerging enterprise leaders in the software and services arena.

Although a growing number of organizations have been adopting a ‘cloud first’ approach to their business application and computing needs for a while, it has taken a long time for CFOs to feel comfortable migrating their own financial management systems to the cloud. However, a confluence of forces is finally driving them to make the move that could create additional momentum for cloud adoption across their operations.

It isn’t surprising that CFOs have been slow to adopt cloud-based applications to support their own departments. They’re paid to be conservative and risk-adverse.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ latest commentary in Datamation regarding the organizational and market forces that are convincing CFOs that it is time to put their concerns aside and move to the cloud.

SAP’s Beyond CRM initiative and Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud are going after customer data silos and trying to create a truly omnichannel picture. While most companies know they need to bring data silos together to improve customer experience, they are struggling with how to do so.

In response, some of the largest technology vendors are creating technologies that can bring together disparate pockets of customer data and give companies a more holistic view of their customers.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in SearchCRM about the escalating e-commerce battle that is reshaping the CRM marketplace and how marketing units operate.

Nearly 25 years ago, Michael Hammer and James Champy coauthored one of the most influential business books of the period, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, anticipating some of the important changes that lay ahead.

The corporate world was trying to cope with the growing pressures of globalization and the advent of personal computing. The public Internet was not yet upon us, but the need for businesses of all sizes to rethink how they operated was becoming imperative.

Those ideas became known as “business process reengineering.”

Those pressures have intensified in the new era of the Web, e-commerce and mobile devices, and the cloud has become the latest source of refuge for organizations trying to revamp their business operations.

Click here to read THINKstrategies‘ perspectives in E-Commerce Times about how the cloud is enabling a growing number of organizations to reengineer their business … Read More »

Salesforce is betting big that the long-promised attributes of artificial intelligence are ready to go mainstream and can help fuel the company’s next chapter of unprecedented growth. With a spate of acquisitions during the past eight months and analytics tools built into its platform, Salesforce wants to bring new systems of intelligence to customers.

The company’s goal: to embed artificial intelligence (AI) into every aspect of its operations and offerings, under the name Einstein.

The vendor’s marketing team is already stoking its PR engine to create plenty of buzz around the idea of the new Salesforce AI platform powering a fresh generation of smart services that will challenge IBM’s Watson’s analytic capabilities. The steady stream of news reports, interviews with CEO Marc Benioff and behind-the-scenes briefings are helping to build anticipation for Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ … Read More »

THINKstrategies, Inc. announced today that Nvoicepay has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Nvoicepay is transforming the way AP departments pay suppliers by leveraging the unique benefits realized from cloud computing combined with a customer-centric model of administering payment services. Nvoicepay delivers payment automation software enabling enterprises to pay 100% their accounts payable invoices electronically instead of writing paper checks. More than 2,500 customers rely on Nvoicepay to deliver the simplicity, visibility, flexibility and innovation of consumer payments into the … Read More »

The disruption of the IT and software industry by the rapid rise of cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continues to take a toll on the biggest players in the business. In their latest round of desperate moves to reposition themselves in the radically changing marketplace, the major companies of the past have been willing to relinquish many of their software assets to refocus their efforts on new market opportunities.

Unfortunately, the divestiture of these software businesses may be a classic, shortsighted “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” tactic that could have a detrimental long-term impact on their competitive position as strategic sources in the enterprise market.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times re: the market implications of these trends.