Zen 2.0

IT Finance Connection had an interesting podcast with Ariel Kelman, Salesforce.com’s senior director of platform product marketing. Ariel made a number of interesting points in the podcast: SaaS is good for companies and IT organizations that want to increase focus from infrastructure to innovation. IT organizations should consider SaaS applications just like other applications and [...]

We will be writing a series of blog posts on the tough questions that SaaS providers can expect to get from customers or they should ask themselves. The questions will span many different areas including security, compliance, sales, marketing and operations. This is Part 1 of the security questions. As we mentioned previously here, one [...]

I saw this video a few weeks back and wanted to share it here. At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod [...]

Computerworld has an interesting article titled Survey attempts to answer why companies still shun SaaS. (I believe it’s originally from CIO.com.) A late 2007 survey of North American and European software IT decision-makers found that just 16 percent of respondents said they were already using or currently piloting SaaS applications. Conversely, more than 80 percent [...]

Saas Week just posted a new podcast on Common SaaS Misconceptions with Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly. Download file here. Chris, in the podcast, talked about 3 major misconceptions: security, integration and legacy concerns. Security (and data privacy for that matter) has been, and will likely continue to be, the biggest concern. Chris argued that [...]

McKinsey & Company and Sand Hill Group recently released a survey called “Enterprise Software Customer Survey 2008.” This report focuses mainly on the SaaS market. The survey received responses from over 850 enterprises and had some very interesting observations. 62% of the respondents believe that innovation is on the upswing 31% of the respondents believe [...]

As described in a previous post, the infrastructure layer of the whole setup is about space, pipe, firewalls, VPNs, routers, switches, physical server and storage. In order to maintain such infrastructure, a company must employ a whole team of network, security and storage engineers. Even with hosting providers such as Savvis and Rackspace providing professional [...]

So why are we defining all these terms here again when everyone else has already defined them here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc? Heck, there’s even a definition for Web 3.0 and beyond. Wait, let’s not forget the authoritative definitions from Wikipedia on Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service! Whew…are we there [...]

In the past 10 years or so, offshoring countries such as India and China have utilized the tens of thousands to help US and European countries develop products in the traditional software market. As the SaaS model becomes more and more accepted by the general market, we will be seeing these countries be more focused [...]

According to this CNET news, A Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives said Thursday that she plans to introduce legislation next week that would force Internet providers to record customer information for one year. Personally I think it’s stupid for the gov’t to create such mandate, especially for the reasons they are citing. [...]