THINKstrategies announced today that LawGeex 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.

LawGeex is a contract review platform using artificial intelligence to help businesses save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars reviewing legal contracts. It combines AI machine learning algorithms, text analytics and the knowledge of expert lawyers to deliver in-depth contract reviews efficiently and quickly. LawGeex highlights which clauses may be unusual, problematic, or missing, and provides statistical benchmarks which simplify the decision making process across the business for standard … Read More »

Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite is a clear indication that the rapid adoption of cloud alternatives to traditional on-premises applications is shifting from front-office customer relationship management to back-office enterprise resource planning solutions.

Now, the question will be whether Oracle can buy its way into a leadership position in this emerging marketplace.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in E-Commerce Times regarding the market forces which are driving CFOs to adopt Cloud-based financial management and ERP solutions, and how these trends are reshaping the competitive landscape.

Nearly five years ago, Marc Andreessen famously proclaimed that “software is eating the world,” and he is probably surprised how much of the world is actually influenced by software today. Nowhere is this more true than in the brave, new world of the Internet of Things (IoT).

No matter which market forecast you read, the commonly held view is that nearly every product and service will be connected over the next decade. And these connections wouldn’t be of much value unless there is software in place to determine what data points should be captured and what actions should be taken in response to the information being collected.

Given that IoT’s business benefits must be measured in improved products and better customer support, as well as higher sales at lower costs, the software development process must be more inclusive than the past. DevOps … Read More »

While most businesses are focusing their efforts to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) in areas that will generate immediate cost-savings and operating efficiencies, a number of IoT pioneers are already leveraging a new generation of connected products to fundamentally change their business models.

As more organizations recognize the strategic impact IoT can have on their business, you’ll see many more leverage IoT to reposition themselves in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Click here to read THINKstrategies‘ latest commentary in E-Commerce Times about three companies that are moving down the path of redefinition in the IoT today.

The recent Salesforce.com acquisition of Demandware is but one in a spate of buyouts this year. According to data from financial services firm UBS, the first half of 2016 has witnessed a frenzy of software acquisitions, with 22 in total, and there are no signs of a slowdown.

With the Demandware e-commerce technology purchase, Salesforce has positioned itself to do battle with other enterprise rivals, such as Oracle, SAP and IBM, all of which have filled out their offerings with e-commerce technologies. Technologies like Demandware are designed to unify the customer experience — regardless of the communication channel in which consumers initiate a transaction — and interact with other customer data repositories such as customer account information, marketing data and so on.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in TechTarget’s SearchSalesforce regarding the market implications of Salesforce’s acquisition of Demandware.

The advent of a brave new world of connected products and services in the Internet of Things (IOT) is forcing organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry to reconsider how they will interact with their customers in the future.

As a consequence, a growing number of companies are thinking about how they have to redefine their businesses to better serve their customers going forward.

These ideas were showcased at the recent PTC LiveWorx conference in Boston. The event drew approximately 5,000 attendees from a wide array of enterprises worldwide to demonstrate how previously standalone technologies and applications now are converging to enable the idea of IoT to become a reality.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times regarding how building connected products is becoming an essential strategy for restructuring the vendor-customer relationship in the IoT.

With the single acquisition of LinkedIn, Microsoft has quickly gained the ability to fundamentally disrupt multiple segments of the enterprise applications marketplace. Microsoft is also making a “big bet” that the acquisition will also quickly revitalize various aspects of its own product portfolio and open new market opportunities for the company.

LinkedIn has built the biggest network of business professionals in the world with approximately 433 million members. Although it has also built a series of services to enable users to capitalize on the network, LinkedIn has not built tight integrations with specific software vendors (ISVs) to leverage its functionality in a seamless fashion. The Microsoft acquisition aims at changing this situation and making the LinkedIn interface even more important in the daily lives of business users.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in Sandhill.com about some of the market segments and … Read More »

Maybe the best indications that the Internet of Things (IoT) market is at the peak of Gartner’s hype cycle are the proliferation of industry conferences and vendor platforms.

And it is increasingly possible that the IoT industry could fall into the “trough of disillusionment” as many IoT solutions providers admit to me that finding buyers willing to make strategic investments in connected products and services is a real challenge.

The recent IoT World conference is the best illustration of the IoT’s split personality.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspective in Sandhill.com regarding the forces which are obstructing demand for IoT platforms and slowing growth of the IoT marketplace.

With every market forecast predicting rapid growth of the overall Internet of Things (IoT), industry and investor focus shifts to specific market segments that will experience the quickest adoption. While most of the attention is on particular applications and technologies, I think managed IoT services will be one of the biggest market opportunities.

One of the greatest challenges standing in the way of widespread IoT adoption is the lack of skills and experience to evaluate, acquire and integrate all the piece parts necessary to assemble an IoT deployment. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times regarding how these forces will fuel the emergence of a new generation of IoT managed services.

Since Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, first proclaimed that every industrial company will become a software company, a widening array of enterprises have begun to move down this path. However, becoming a software company takes a lot more work than just hiring a bunch of good software developers or hosting the software in the cloud. It requires a new way of thinking about what it takes to be a successful software company.

Major enterprises have been employing software developers to build internal custom applications for a long time. Many have been proud enough of their internal software development skills to share some of their results with the outside world. For instance, Capital One recently open sourced its internally developed Cloud Custodian AWS resource management tool.

In the old days, independent software vendors (ISVs) built their businesses during a period when the … Read More »