Zen 2.0

[ Via @yarapavan ]

[via James Governor’s Monkchips]

Adil Mohammed, co-founder of entrip, with his take on why the cloud is perfect for startups. This was a presentation he gave at CloudCamp in London.

[via random thoughts, by Fox Business]

Some key points:

• Sridhar talks about the ZOHO applications as cloud applications.
• Cost of delivering is much lower.
• Consumer offering is a loss leader, makes $$ from businesses.
• Turned down Salesforce.com acquisition offer.
• Recruit from non-brand name schools and put them through internal training system.

Good set of slides from Slideshare, by John Overton, on best practices for building a SaaS company, via bitcurrent.

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Moving to SaaS

Another slide deck from bitcurrent. It looks at the perils and best practices of moving an application from internally-run to software-as-a-service.

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Navigating the Labyrinth

Found another one that’s by Rackspace, but probably more vendor pitchy…

| View | Upload your own

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 should fit into the existing IT governance processes such as change management control.
• SaaS applications are easier to administer, customize, integrate. (This is an interesting point as customization and integration are often cited as the top concerns for not adopting SaaS.)
• IT organizations should involve business units early in the deployment process. (In theory, this is not all that different from on-premise apps.)
• With platforms such as Force.com, IT organizations and business owners can build applications in real-time together. (rapid prototyping.)
• According to Gartner, IT organizations spent 80% of their time on infrastructure and maintenance, and only 20% on innovation.

Definitely worth spending 15 minutes to listen to this.

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 [...]