The recent flurry of major vendor announcements regarding their new Cloud Computing initiatives, latest acquisitions and offerings clearly shows that the “Cloud Rush” is in high gear.

Here’s a quick list of the announcements which have caught my attention over the past few weeks in chronological order since HP unveiled its Cloud ‘vision’ last month, and my views regarding their significance,

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire newScale, 03/29/11  – Cisco Systems has been pushing into the ‘new data center’ environment for a while with its Unified Computing solutions. It acquired newScale to improve its provisioning capabilities to make it a more viable Cloud vendor for enterprise customers and service provider partners.
Salesforce.com to Acquire Radian6, 03/30/11  – Now that Salesforce.com has succeeded in popularizing its Chatter social networking capabilities, it wants to give its customers the necessary tools to monitor, manage and measure the effectiveness of these … Read More »

THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that FinancialForce.com has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program of THINKstrategies’ new Cloud Computing Showplace which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

FinancialForce.com focuses entirely on building business applications on Force.com, the Cloud Computing platform from salesforce.com, including accounting, billing, professional services automation (PSA) and services resource planning (SRP). Its applications help fast-growing organizations and dynamic enterprises align Finance, Sales and Service in a way that enables profitable growth. The company is a joint venture of UNIT4 and … Read More »

THINKstrategies, Inc.  announced today that TrackVia has been named the latest winner of THINKstrategies’ new Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s cloud computing solutions.

The CCBV Awards program was launched in 2010 to recognize Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers delivering tangible business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits include lower costs, faster deployment times, greater profitability, etc.

TrackVia is a provider of an application development platform designed to make it easier for business users to build their own database-driven applications and avoid the backlogs which typically plague IT and traditional inhouse software development organizations.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which earned TrackVia THINKstrategies’ latest CCBV Award.

Click here to learn more about THINKstrategies’ CCBV Award program or to apply for an Award.

The CCBV Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace … Read More »

HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker unveiled the company’s latest corporate strategy yesterday with plenty of fanfare, but little flourish.

The theme of his talk and HP’s new mantra is providing “connectivity” to the Cloud to move “Everyone On”.

While the picture he painted of this new world order and HP’s strategic response covered all the bases, there are still plenty of pieces which must come together in order to make it a reality.

Apotheker’s ‘vision’ was certainly well-conceived and his presentation was well-scripted. No one can argue with his view that,

“We see clearly a world in which the impact of cloud and connectivity is changing not only the user experience, but how individuals, small businesses and enterprises will consume, deploy and leverage information technology.”

I would also agree that “HP is well positioned to be the trusted leader in addressing this opportunity.”  But, it faces plenty of problems capitalizing on this opportunity.

Apotheker’s … Read More »

Salesforce.com unveiled a series of important enhancements to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service-desk management capabilities this week aimed at helping businesses more effectively track and respond to the escalating volume of data feeds from Facebook and Twitter.

The company’s Service Cloud 3.0 announcement coincided with its CloudForce 2011 event at the Javits Center in NYC, in the backyard of ‘Corporate America’, the financial services sector and the traditional media world to maximize its attention.

The new round of enhancements were primarily focused on enabling users of Salesforce.com’s service-desk management platform to better monitor Facebook and Twitter feeds, and track their response to comments, complaints and other service requests via these increasingly important social networks.

Salesforce.com made sure to brand each feature as a separate offer to ensure it gained as much attention as possible, including Salesforce.com for Facebook and Salesforce.com for Twitter.

The new monitoring capabilities are actually enabled … Read More »

The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a full-day analyst briefing and attend the kickoff session of Parallels’ 2011 Partner Summit. [Disclosure: Parallels paid my travel expenses to attend the event.] This year’s Summit built on the momentum of last year’s conference by unveiling numerous enhancements to its portfolio of Cloud enablement solutions, including:

Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hosted PBX
Microsoft System Center Hyper-V Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Syndication

Parallels also promised to make an increased investment in its Application Packaging Standardization (APS) Program to permit greater portability of Cloud services.

What I especially liked about this year’s … Read More »

Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m neglecting this blog because I’ve been invited to publish my perspectives on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing movement in so many other online venues. Anyone who isn’t following my writings in these additional outlets may have missed my most recent views since the start of 2011. So, here’s a quick list for your reading pleasure,

E-Commerce Times: Pushing the Cloud From Madison Avenue to Main Street, 02/11/11

Datamation:Capitalizing on Cloud Computing: Not If, But When, 02/08/11 

E-Commerce Times: Clouds Go Vertical, 01/14/11 

You can also click here to find my most recent blogposts regarding the latest M&A activity, conference dynamics and end-user focus in the SaaS and Cloud arena on TechWeb’s Internet Evolution microsite.

Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, announced last night, clearly indicates that the company is committed to becoming a major player in the rapidly evolving and expanding Cloud Computing marketplace. It will also trigger a new round of similar acquisitions in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment of the Cloud Computing arena.

Verizon’s decision to acquire Terremark was a “classic make/buy” choice, according to the company’s executives during their telebriefing this morning. The acquisition accelerates Verizon’s move to the Cloud by leveraging Terremark’s proven capabilities. Terremark offers enterprise-class IaaS solutions which fit well into Verizon’s portfolio and target market. Terremark also has excess hosting capacity in its Miami and Culpepper facilities, and now has the additional financial resources and channels to market to fuel more rapid growth.

Verizon will allow Terremark to retain its brand and independent operations. In fact, Verizon executives suggested that they may move … Read More »

I’ve published two commentaries recently in leading industry publications which describe how the next wave of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions will target ineffecient business processes.

The first was in Sandhill.com discussing how the line of demarcation between software, business and information services is blurring.

The second was in E-Commerce Times examining how Cloud services are going vertical to address industry-specific requirements.

I hope you find these perspectives helpful and worthwhile.

There is no question that cloud computing was the top enterprise tech topic in 2010. Microsoft even succeeded in popularizing the term in its “Into the Cloud” ad campaign at the end of the year. Yet, most of the discussion and debate surrounding cloud computing in 2010 was focused on defining the term and its potential value.

Fortunately this debate didn’t prevent a diverse set of early adopters from capitalizing on the rapidly expanding assortment of cloud computing solutions being offered by a potpourri of emerging and established players. The growing number of cloud users are producing a compelling set of customer success stories and clear ‘use cases’ for employing cloud computing alternatives to legacy systems and on-premise applications.

THINKstrategies has been chronicling many of these success stories in our ongoing Awards programs — the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) and Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) … Read More »