THINKstrategies announced today that GoodData 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 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.

GoodData helps companies track the metrics that drive their business by making it easy to collect, report on and share data across marketing, sales, support and operations. The company does this through a Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) Platform that delivers business dashboards in weeks instead of months.

Click here to read more about GoodData’s award winning SaaS BI capabilities which earned the company a BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program and to … Read More »

Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.

The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

The company’s CEO, Brad Smith, did a good job quickly apologizing to Intuit’s over 300,000 customers who were affected by the outage. His blogpost also explained the cause of the disruption and made a public commitment to put new policies and procedures in place to prevent the problem from occurring again.

Smith’s response was certainly better … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Security On-Demand 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 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.

Security On-Demand is a leading provider of comprehensive SaaS-based compliance and security solutions which help organizations maintain compliance with industry regulations, manage risk, and protect themselves from security threats.

Click here to read more about the business benefits which Security On-Demand is delivering to its customers.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards program and to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that FPX, LLC 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 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.

FPX provides a Configure-Price-Quote application that guides salespeople through the product configuration process. FPX’s configuration engine handles complex pricing issues to enable sales people to quickly produce professional, branded proposals that present the configured product in an understandable format. By eliminating configuration and pricing errors, FPX clients experience lower costs, faster sales cycles and happier customers.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which FPX has delivered … Read More »

Yesterday’s announcement by HP that it is cutting 9000 workers and hiring another 6000 as part of a $1 billion multi-year effort to redesign its data center operations and automate its enterprise services is the latest indication of the traumatic impact which today’s cloud computing phenomenon is having on the tech industry.

HP readily admitted in its announcement that its goal is to,

“…Consolidate Enterprise Services’ commercial data centers, management platforms, networks, tools and applications to create a more scalable, modernized and automated IT infrastructure that will better serve its clients’ needs.”

Although the company didn’t specify where its cuts would take place, I suspect that the bulk of the downsizing effort within the Enterprise Services division will involve offloading the legacy data center facilities and staff which came from the EDS acquisition.

My sources within the company have confirmed my original concerns about the acquisition … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Financial Transmission Network, Inc. (FTNI) 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 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.

FTNI’s SaaS ePayment platform offers extensive configuration options that make it ideally suited to a wide variety of industry verticals. FTNI’s PCI compliant solution is uniquely designed to offer banks and merchants a solution that not only clears multiple payment types but also reflects that payment activity in the merchant’s A/R system.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which FTNI’s customers have gained from its SaaS solution to earn FTNI a BoSS Award.

Click … Read More »

InformationWeek recently asked me to provide THINKstrategies’ perspective on the state of the cloud computing market.  In response, I’ve contributed a guest column for the publication’s Global CIO section which discusses how the initial success of Software-as-a-Service and a broader array of cloud services is quickly fueling a new generation of more mature enterprise-quality capabilities, which I’m calling “Cloud 2.0”.

I’ve been presenting this idea in my various talks at industry events and in client meetings.

So, what is Cloud 2.0?

Well, first here’s how I characterize Cloud 1.0:

Commodity-oriented, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings
Price and cost-savings are the primary customer value-propositions and motivators
Reliability, availability and security are the critical criteria for selection and key success factors
Primary ‘use-cases’ are cyclical or situational, non-core requirements
Primary customers are start-ups, software developers and business  end-users.

Cloud 2.0 is about:

Strategic business services aimed at ongoing operational requirements
Corporate decision-makers are seeking vendors that can offer broad … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that WaveMaker has been named the second winner of the 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 initiated 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.

The Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program which was initiated in 2009.

WaveMaker is an open and easy-to-use development platform for web and cloud applications. WaveMaker uses visual, drag and drop tools to generate standard Java applications, boosting developer productivity and quality without compromising flexibility. WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready and include built-in support for multi-tenancy and elastic scaling. As a result, WaveMaker … Read More »

Seven weeks of traveling came to an end in Florida today after attending SAP’s Sapphire user conference and speaking to Tech Data’s TechSelect executives about the channel implications of the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing market.

Prior to this week’s events, I traversed the country from Boston to the Bay Area six times to speak, host and moderate sessions at SaaScon, Under the Radar, AlwaysOn OnDemand, Pervasive’s Metamorphosis and the SIIA/OpSource All About the Cloud conferences, and conduct strategy sessions with a wide range of clients in between.

The common theme of all these events and client meetings is that SaaS has become a viable alternative to legacy on-premise software across nearly every application segment, and a newer wave of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing services is quickly disrupting traditional data center models across nearly every industry.

Concerns about hyperbole outdistancing today’s realities are being pushed aside by a growing number of customer success stories … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that PowerSteering 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 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.

PowerSteering provides project portfolio management (PPM) software that helps organizations manage a broad range of strategic initiatives that improve business performance in information technology, new product development, Six Sigma and Operational Excellence, and other business PMOs. IT and business users utilize PowerSteering to achieve better portfolio results through improved alignment of resources against strategic priorities, increased executive visibility of project portfolios, and streamlined execution of project management activities.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which have led … Read More »