Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

The company’s CEO, Treb Ryan, has been a tireless evangelist for the business value of SaaS and now the Cloud. He and his staff have invested heavily in educating and facilitating the industry’s growth through an endless stream of webcasts and whitepapers, and founding the industry’s most important annual gathering, the SaaS Summit, now known as “All About the Cloud” and managed by the SIIA.

Rather than simply offer a set of hosting services, OpSource put together … Read More »

OpSource and the Virtual Computer Environment (VCE) Company announced an alliance today which will offer joint solutions aimed at helping service providers (xSPs) launch public cloud services more quickly. This joint initiative is the latest effort by various vendors to enable  xSPs to fulfill their promise as potent ‘cloud brokers’.

VCE is a joint venture formed by Cisco and EMC, with additional investments from VMware and Intel, to create a new generation of networking, storage, virtualization and management technologies to improve xSP infrastructure operations. VCE’s primary product is the Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform for virtualization, data processing, networking and storage capabilities in cloud computing environments.

In this new alliance, OpSource is adding its cloud orchestration software capabilities to VCE’s Vblock Platform to enable xSPs to handle the user sign-up, provisioning, metering, billing, and reporting requirements associated with cloud services. Together, OpSource and VCE’s combined solution promises to eliminate needless development costs, accelerate the service providers’ time … Read More »

I moderated a panel at OpSource’s SaaS Summit this week entitled “Selling SaaS to the Enterprise” which included representatives from Cast Iron Systems, Oracle and the Business Objects unit of SAP, as well as the Manager of Global Operations Business Technology at Pfizer.

They all agreed that SaaS and cloud computing are making serious inroads into the enterprise but still face significant challenges, including scalability, security and flexibility issues.

In response to the flexibility topic, there was general consensus among the panelists that customers want a choice of on-premise and on-demand alternatives to serve various corporate requirements.

Although I’m very proud to have correctly predicted many of the major trends which have shaped the SaaS market evolution, I’ve never believed that the world would move entirely to an all on-demand environment for a variety of customer and vendor-driven reasons. Therefore, I’ve always expected … Read More »