Microsoft is finally recognizing the fundamental ways in which people’s lives and work-styles are changing, and it as a company and its technologies must respond to these changes.

Welcome to the world of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)!

Live Mesh is Microsoft’s attempt to catch up to the Web 2.0 movement which has quickly evolved into an Enterprise 2.0 migration process in which a rapidly growing number of companies of all sizes are shifting their IT strategies from on-premise products to on-demand services.

This trend is being led by Salesforce.com and Google, and being supported by hundreds of other start-ups and established vendors, including Cisco Systems, Dell and EMC.

Salesforce.com and Google’s alliance which produced a new set of integrated services last week is the most recent challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in the workplace.

Cisco Systems has been talking about the melding together of network-centric business processes for … Read More »

Last week’s second annual SIIA On-Demand Conference was a bellwether for the state of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry. Rather than being composed of the usual suspects of SaaS speakers—Salesforce.com, Microsoft, etc.—the event included an interesting mix of prominent players and start-ups who clearly demonstrated that we are well beyond the ‘why SaaS’ stage and deeply into the ‘how’ phase of this important movement.

The event opened with a packed house of over 300 attendees, many with senior executive titles, and a relatively new name to the SaaS market presenting. Donald Proctor, the Senior Vice President of Cisco Systems’ Collaboration Software Group kicked off the event promoting its vision of the next wave of inter-office SaaS solutions based on WebEx’s collaboration platform which Cisco acquired in March 2007.

Although I might suggest that this wave of inter-office SaaS solutions is well underway and … Read More »

In its continuing effort to outpace its competition, Salesforce.com unveiled a new “SOA as a service” strategy today.

This is the company’s latest attempt to extend its footprint across the software landscape and increase its relevance to a wider population of users, developers and partners. This move also offers another clue for how established independent (read: incumbent) software vendors (ISVs) can better position themselves in the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market.

(By coincidence, IBM kicked off its IMPACT 2007 user conference today by spotlighting its software and services aimed at the $160 billion SOA opportunity.)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a popular software development framework aimed at making applications more responsive to business requirements. Although the hype regarding the benefits and market acceptance of SOA far exceeds the reality, there is little debate that the proper implementation of SOA can generate meaningful returns … 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 »