One of the most vexing challenges facing today’s IT and business decision-makers is how to integrate critical corporate data across a widening array of on-premise and on-demand systems and applications.

Many believe that the age-old data integration issues of the past have only been compounded by today’s rapidly expanding assortment of Cloud-based solutions which raise the expectation of easy end-user access from anywhere at any time.

While there are a growing number of application program interfaces (APIs), Web-based connectors and Cloud-oriented systems integrators that are reducing the difficulty of overcoming this integration issue, it still represents an important impediment that many organizations are reluctant to face.

Intuit announced a new program yesterday aimed at addressing the data integration issue. The Intuit Anywhere program promises to give software developers a new method of extracting QuickBooks data directly into their third-party applications, including web and mobile.

This new data export and integration capability … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Accept Corporation 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.

Accept Corporation’s SaaS-based Accept 360 Innovation Management solution empowers product teams to more quickly develop compelling products that generate greater revenues, because they’re better aligned with the market and company strategy.

Click here to read more about the measurable business benefits which earned Accept Corporation the latest BoSS Award.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Award program or to apply for an Award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies … Read More »

My past fews weeks have been consumed with weekly visits to the Bay Area to speak at SaaScon, moderate tracks at Under the Radar and co-host the AlwaysOn OnDemand conference, as well as numerous on-site client meetings. In between, I also had the privilege of presenting a kickoff keynote presentation at a VIP dinner for the State of the Cloud conference in Boston.

My hectic travel schedule has given me little time to comment on a variety of industry announcements which have occurred during this period. So, here’s my ‘lightening round’ assessment of some of the more significant events worth noting,

Cloud Conference Observations

SaaScon: When was the last time you heard CIOs talk about being heroes in their organizations? Well, the CIOs who spoke at SaaScon repeatedly described how the SaaS solutions which they’re implementing in their organizations are generating an overwhelmingly positive response from their end-users and corporate executives. … Read More »

One of the knocks against Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the broader cloud computing movement is that these web-based, on-demand services can’t be customized to cater to the complex requirements of specific enterprises.

While SaaS solutions have increasingly included a growing array of user configuration capabilities to respond to the individual needs of various organizations, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions have emerged over the past couple of years to permit end-users and third-party developers to build their own apps to meet their unique requirements.

The latest indication of the escalating power of these PaaS tools is today’s announcement unveiling Salesforce.com’s new Force.com Visual Process Manager. This new feature will allow users to design and build business process-oriented applications quickly so they can automate them across corporate departments.

Although the new Force.com Visual Process Manager won’t be generally available until later this year, it is the latest sign that cloud computing alternatives … Read More »

Phil Wainwright has posted a terrific blog entry regarding the ‘green crystals’ that power Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant platform.

The concept of multi-tenancy has been a cornerstone of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement and a key element of the rapidly evolving cloud computing environment as well.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term ‘multi-tenancy’, it is borrowed from the housing market and aims to compare today’s leading SaaS/cloud computing vendors to condominium owners who can obtain more luxurious living quarters without the hassles of owning a single-family home by sharing a common infrastructure and operational services.

While this arrangement offers plenty of conveniences, it also requires some sacrifices when it comes to how far you can customize your particular unit, or version of software in the case of SaaS.

While the value proposition of multi-tenancy is easy to understand, it is hard to get a lot of details … Read More »

The proliferation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing platform players continues to accelerate despite the failure of some early entrants and likelihood of more Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) casualties to come.

This past week, three more companies announced new platform strategies and solutions — Jaspersoft, ExpenseWatch.com, LongJump.

Open-source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft unveiled its v3.5 integrated analysis capabilities as part of what it calls the industry’s first SaaS-enabled BI platform. The new platform promises easy-to-use integrated analysis that doesn’t require a data warehouse or OLAP server. It also includes new in-memory analysis capabilities that enables the delivery of customizable SaaS and Cloud-based BI applications which can be integrated into reports and dashboards.

ExpenseWatch.com announced an open expense control platform which will permit small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to integrate their expense management data with a variety of business application. The new “non-proprietary approach” promises to allow SMBs … 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 »