One of the key battlefields in the cloud computing market for 2010 which I identified earlier this year is IT service management (ITSM). Last month, I discussed BMC’s latest foray into the SaaS-based ITSM world, as well as Service-now.com’s recent win at PepsiAmericas.

Last week, Service-now.com issued a press release summarizing its 2009 accomplishments. The company reported that its recurring revenue increased approximately 136 percent in 2009. Cynics might discount the significance of this growth rate by suggesting it’s easy to report a substantial jump when you’re starting at a low base. However, the company’s CEO, Fred Luddy, revealed to me during a private lunch preceding a company marketing event in Boston that Service-now.com is generating signficant, albeit confidential, revenues and is on a run-rate to double its revenues again in 2010.

The company’s success in the enterprise was personified by the room full … Read More »

Back to back announcements this week have brought renewed attention to the IT service management (ITSM) market as a key battleground for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) competition.

On January 19, BMC announced its latest Remedy ITSM Suite On Demand solution, a SaaS-based offering which promises to integrate with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Business Service Management (BSM) platform.

That same day, Service-now.com announced that PepsiAmericas had selected its SaaS-based ITSM solution. In Service-now.com’s announcement, PepsiAmericas’ IT Customer Service Manager, Amy Irwin said, “Our old tool couldn’t meet our needs so we went shopping for a tool that could. We quickly determined SaaS would best fit our tool requirements.”

IT acceptance of SaaS-based solutions isn’t new. THINKstrategies first identified this trend in our 2007 customer survey in conjunction with Cutter Consortium.

However, SaaS vendor focus on this segment of the market has intensified over the past two … Read More »

As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players:

Collaboration Wars: Collaboration is the ‘killer app’ in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) segment of the cloud computing market. The rapid adoption of Google Apps has demonstrated the latent demand for these web-based solutions. Now, IBM is promoting the enterprise-class qualities of its LotusLive offering to win a share of the market. Cisco Systems is also intensifying its efforts to promote its collaboration solutions built around WebEx and Telepresence. I also think Microsoft will accept a greater level of cannibalization of its Office products to win a bigger share of the collaboration market with OfficeLive.
Business-Oriented Social Networks: These are closely linked to collaboration and have gained a tremendous amount of attention because of the explosive growth … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Service-now.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 program was announced in January 2009 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring 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.

Service-now.com is a leading provider of leading provider of SaaS for IT service automation. Service-now.com integrates Information Technology Infrastructure Library ITIL v3 process support, modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, and Web 2.0 functionality to provide a flexible, intuitive and self-managing application.

An example of Service-now.com’s business benefits is Unitus Community Credit Union which expects to reduce its annual total … Read More »