THINKstrategies announced today that Pervasive Software (NASDAQ: PVSW) 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 initiated in January 2009 by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Pervasive Software helps companies optimize their data investments through embeddable data management, agile data integration software and by enabling next-generation analytics. Pervasive’s data integration platform accelerates the sharing of information between multiple data stores, applications, and hosted business systems across a broad range of diverse integration … Read More »

I had the privilege of serving as the chairman and ‘master-of-ceremonies’ at this week’s CloudFutures conference for ISVs migrating to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in San Jose, CA.

The event succeeded in drawing over one-hundred attendees seeking to better understand the complexities associated with leveraging the rapidly growing array of cloud computing services to develop and deliver SaaS solutions.

While this number may not seem significant, it was exactly the scale of event that I expected given the time of year and proliferation of cloud-oriented conferences. It was also an ideal size to delve into many of the thorny issues surrounding SaaS and allow the attendees to freely interact with the speakers, as well as one another.

In many ways the event resembled the SoftLetter SaaS University sessions where I’ve served as a keynote speaker and sponsor. While I’m still a big supporter of those … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Ultimate Software 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 that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Ultimate Software is a provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions. The company’s SaaS-based UltiPro solution helps businesses streamline their human capital management (HCM) operations without relying on internal IT resources, or worrying about hardware procurement, installation, upgrades, and maintenance, while enabling them to better control the most critical HR and payroll functions.

Click here to read about the business benefits generated by … Read More »

As I recover from yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

Salesforce.com’s new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I believe that building an ‘enterprise-class’ social networking component makes sense and adds a timely new dimension to salesforce.com’s fundamental functionality.

Marc Benioff justified salesforce.com’s move by claiming in his keynote address at Dreamforce that neither Facebook nor Twitter were willing to fortify their services to meet the needs of enterprise users.

But, what … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Task Performance Group, Inc. 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 is a THINKstrategies initiative aimed at bringing attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.
 
Task Performance Group is a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) E-commerce automation solutions that facilitates the effective management of collaborative commerce for retail, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, transportation, financial and other industries. The company’s SaaS-based MegaXML solution accepts any type of input and delivers output in any format, making front-end and back-end systems more flexible and adaptable to meet users’ unique requirements. MegaXML improves any EDI business … Read More »

Day 2 of Dreamforce came with a little less enthusiasm than yesterday’s kickoff as many of the attendees recovered from the previous night’s parties. Today’s focus was on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which salesforce.com calls “Custom Cloud 2”.

Unlike yesterday’s meandering keynote regarding the Sales Cloud 2, Services Cloud 2 and new Chatter social computing capabilities, Marc Benioff immediately went to work at convincing the Dreamforce audience of the power and growing adoption of salesforce.com’s PaaS capabilities by quickly introducing the CEO of BMC, Bob Beauchamp, who unveiled its new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT service desk application developed on the Force.com in a couple of months.

BMC’s use of Force.com to ‘SaaSify’ its application is another important endorsement of salesforce.com’s PaaS by an established independent software vendor (ISV). It is particularly compelling for other ISVs who have grappled with the technological and operational challenges of migrating their applications to a … Read More »

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing movements have converged on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for the latest salesforce.com lovefest—Dreamforce.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid my travel expenses to attend this event.]

Despite the downturn in the economy, or maybe because of it, this year’s Dreamforce has attracted over 19,000 registrants, up from around 10k a year ago. The opening keynote session was bursting at the seams with people and energy.

The event comes a day after the company announced its latest quarterly results, during which the company added 4700 net new customers, bringing its total user count up to approximately 67,900, up 31% from a year ago.

This growth is especially impressive given that one of the company’s primary growth engines in years past was the financial services sector which imploded over the past year. Despite these potential setbacks, salesforce.com is on a run-rate to exceed $1.2 … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Cast Iron Systems 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 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.

Cast Iron provides integration solutions and Integration-as-a-Service which allows providers and consumers of SaaS and cloud computing solutions to more quickly and economically connect their on-demand and on-premise applications and systems. Cast Iron offers its customers unmatched deployment flexibility – they can choose a completely cloud-based integration service called Cast Iron Cloud or on-premise integration appliances (physical or virtual) … Read More »

I was invited to participate in a panel discussion regarding cloud computing at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference in Phoenix this past week.

The event attracted a cross-section of young people seeking to build careers as entrepreneurs, older people hoping to restart their careers as entrepreneurs and current entrepreneurs looking for new ideas to accelerate their success.

The topics ranged from new market opportunities such as eHealth and clean technology to management best practices for building successful businesses.

My panel was moderated by Bob LaLoggia, CEO of StormSource, a Scottsdale-based company which offers an assortment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, including Appointment-Plus, MessageRover, ZipLine, and Virtual Assistant Manager.

The other panelists represented various perspectives of the cloud computing world– Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox; Dave Rice, CEO, TrueCloud; Marc Chesley, VP of Development and Technology, InfusionSoft; Sam Pietrofeso, Senior VP of Product Development, GoDaddy; and Dave Wallace, … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today that Intuition 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 initiated by THINKstrategies in January 2009 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.

Intuition provides a web-based learning management system (LMS) as a truly net-native, multi-tenant application. The SaaS solution has been designed to facilitate the delivery of learning at a fraction of the cost of traditional learning platforms. It is simple to deploy, intuitive to use, flexible by design, and fully customizable to meet an organization’s needs. It also enables organizations to perform sophisticated tracking, … Read More »