Last week, I had the privilege of attending and presenting at Internet Capital Group’s (ICG) 2009 Strategic Growth Conference in Philadelphia, and came away impressed with the company’s portfolio of web-oriented businesses and vision for the future.

ICG was one of the pioneers of web-based businesses during the late 1990s, and is one of the few survivors of the Dot.com bust. Like THINKstrategies, ICG believed after the demise of the Dot.com era that there were could still be tremendous opportunities via the Internet once the enabling technologies and business models matured to meet customers’ changing requirements.

Unlike other investment firms which might have a set of ‘theses’ for the types of companies they fund, ICG has attempted to build a portfolio of companies that can leverage their commonalities to create additional … Read More »

SuccessFactors announced yesterday that Siemens AG has agreed to adopt its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based, on-demand performance and talent management solutions across its worldwide operations of approximately 420,000 users across 80 countries in 20 different languages.

This is the latest indication of the rapid adoption of SaaS-based solutions by companies of all sizes across nearly every industry and geography.

Specifically, this announcement is significant because,

It clearly illustrates that SaaS is well-suited for global enterprises, and further dispels the myth that it is just for small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) that can’t afford the luxury of traditional, on-premise enterprise applications.
It also shows that European companies are becoming more comfortable adopting SaaS solutions despite past concerns about off-site and/or out-of-country hosting of corporate data.
It demonstrates the declining power of incumbent vendors within customer accounts, as SuccessFactors outmaneuvered SAP which already had its software installed at Siemens and shares … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Project Insight, a web-based project management software for the mid-market developed by Metafuse, Inc., has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program.

The BoSS Awards program is an initiative by THINKstrategies which brings attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Metafuse is the software developer and publisher of Project Insight, a Web-based project management solution, which is used by hundreds of organizations and thousands of project team members.

Click here to read more about the reasons Project Insight was selected to receive a BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program or to submit an application for an award.

Friday’s Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s (MassTLC) UnConference on “The Future of Software and the Internet” was a tremendous success because it brought together over 250 area executives and entrepreneurs for a free-wheeling set of discussions about a wide array of industry trends and opportunities.

Some of the sessions were open debates about the meaning of current trends, such as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Others were open-ended explorations about how companies and individuals can capitalize on these trends to create new business opportunities, such as “cloud-solving”. Still other sessions turned out to be useful tutorials about the realities of the marketplace, such as one I attended about the inefficiencies in today’s capital markets that are discouraging tech IPOs and reshaping the way start-ups evolve.

Dealing with the unstructured nature of an unconference can be unsettling for folks like me initially. And some sessions … Read More »

Yesterday, Verizon Business introduced an on-demand, “cloud-based” Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution that will be an important indicator of whether telcos can succeed in the cloud.

Anyone who has followed my writings knows that my roots are in the telecom industry, having helped to launch IDC’s Communications Industry Research program in 1983 at the time of the AT&T divestiture.

I’ve watched the telecommunications giants make many failed efforts to penetrate the data center. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they tried their hand at systems integration and IT outsourcing.  In the late 1990s, they aggressively provisioned fiber optic cables and built out showcase network operations centers (NOCs) to exploit the Internet explosion and capitalize on the over-hyped demand for managed services which never fully materialized.

After the telecom industry shakeout at the beginning of this decade, the telcos bought their way into the Application Service Provider (ASP) market. Verizon acquired Digex and Totality via MCI, and AT&T … Read More »

Phil Wainewright provided a very interesting analysis of Intalio’s new ‘hybrid’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing offering which echos the approach I suggested last Fall.

My original blog was inspired by the belief that technology is advancing at a fast enough rate to make it possible to offer a fully contained SaaS ‘appliance’ deployable behind the firewall to alleviate customer concerns regarding data security, service availability and/or performance.

While some of my friends at Salesforce.com said my idea was crazy, my blog post prompted many SaaS and cloud computing vendors to comment that they were already offering flexible deployment options to satisfy various customer preferences.

Of course, the key to this go-to-market strategy is the ability to lock-down the code base so that the SaaS vendor is only supporting one version of the its solution, no matter where it is is deployed.

By putting their … Read More »

I started this past week in Las Vegas attending the two-day Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop where a crowd of 200-300 people converged to learn about the rapidly evolving cloud computing phenomena from a cross-section of speakers from established players and virtual start-ups. 

This might not seem like a lot of attendees, but it was about ten times as many people as those who attended the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) track of Interop. And, the cloud crowd grew even bigger at the end of the first day of the Summit when an ‘unconference’ CloudCamp was held which featured a variety of ‘birds-of-a-feather’ style discuss groups fueled by plenty of oversized cookies.

The cloud computing theme also extended into the main-tent portion of Interop with the keynote sessions on the first day of the conference also focused on the topic. These sessions permitted HP, IBM and SAP to … Read More »

Google’s latest service outage this past week generated a new round of attention and debate regarding the viability of the ‘cloud computing’ movement.

Although Google’s service disruption raises legitimate concerns about the reliability of today’s web-based solutions, the extent of the press coverage also demonstrated how pervasive the cloud computing movement has become.

The incident was not only reported and analyzed in the IT trade pubs, but in all the major business journals as well. This level of coverage clearly shows that SaaS and cloud computing are no longer peripheral trends, but have become popular alternatives to legacy software and traditional systems.

Another indication of this trend is the latest market forecast from Gartner, who I like to call a ‘lagging indicator’, which predicted last week that the SaaS market will equal $9.6 billion by the end of 2009, a 21.9 percent jump over 2008 revenue of $6.6 billion. Gartner forecasts that … Read More »

As the idea of cloud computing gains greater attention in the tech industry and among business pubs, there is a brewing debate about whether organizations can create their own ‘private clouds’ to achieve their unique corporate objectives.

My latest commentary in E-Commerce Times discusses the pro’s and con’s regarding the idea of private clouds.

Oracle took advantage of IBM’s failed efforts to acquire Sun Microsystems and swooped in with a more lucrative bid today which could reap greater rewards for the company’s rapidly expanding cloud computing strategy.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun could recast the entire computer industry by giving Oracle control of Sun’s Java software and access to its vast developer community, plus Sun’s Solaris-based server technology. These elements could bolster Oracle’s database systems and serve as a powerful web delivery engine for the company’s widening array of business applications and third-party developers.

Oracle had to be sweating bullets during the IBM/Sun negotiations because, “The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business…”, according to Oracle’s press release today.

Don’t let Larry Ellison’s past pronouncements that the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing trends are just over-hyped ideas. Folks within Oracle have been working hard to … Read More »