SaaS

Web 2.0 won't pay the bills, but collaboration will

Sometimes it's all in how you ask the question. As Dan Farber at ZDNet reports, Forrester asked a wide range of enterprises how much they plan to spend on Web 2.0 technologies (plumbing), and then asked essentially the same question but focused on what that plumbing can create - social collaboration - and found that purchasing interest was much higher:

Collaboration is increasingly a big business. Just ask Microsoft which minted $1 billion on Sharepoint in 2007, making Sharepoint Microsoft's fastest-growing product (measured in terms of revenue) ever.… Read more

Hosting files and downloads with Amazon S3 is easy as pie

This weekend we moved our Mule Enterprise distribution to Amazon's S3 service and so far it's been pretty fantastic. A couple of simple calls not only allow for a file to have download permissions but also allow for time-bombed URLs if you need them.

Add to that the fact that the bandwidth is blazingly fast (shockingly fast, I dare say) and the move to the S3 cloud is a huge win--and a major market disruptor.

Despite having blogged about Amazon's EC2 and S3 before, I didn't understand the full impact until now. Kudos to Amazon.

I … Read more

First take on Loopfuse Marketing and Sales Automation (Verdict: Fantastic)

We just launched our new website and started using Loopfuse for analytics and marketing automation and I can't believe how cool the product is. The dashboards and tracking mechanisms are like crack for marketing people--we just can't look away.

LoopFuse makes marketing automation simple, enabling you to generate demand and identify qualified leads so you can focus on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, revenue growth, and overall business success.

You can get your Loopfuse-as-a-Service, or as an open source product. I can't believe these guys haven't been acquired already.

The future of enterprise software: Bungee's in the cloud, for the cloud model

Open source and SaaS dramatically change the way enterprises consume software. But today I heard this taken to the nth degree, with a shift in a company's revenue model, as well. Bungee Labs helps enterprises (of any size, but with a particular focus on the tens of thousands-strong SMB market) build rich Internet applications (RIAs) in the cloud, for the cloud.

It's one thing to build RIAs using desktop development tools like Adobe's Flex. This is a good model and will persist for a long time. Bungee Labs, however, represents a future that I think we're rapidly approaching: a future in which developers write for the web with the web and deploy "to" the web without skipping a beat. It's very cool.

Even better is how Bungee prices this service.… Read more

Microsoft Open Value Subscription is none of the above

Back in June of 2006 I wrote a post about Microsoft's attempts to insidiously subvert and usurp the open-source community. In that post, I opined that Microsoft was using clever marketing to make nice with the open-source community with the launch of a developer site called Codeplex.

This week Microsoft launched a SMB program that contains the words "open," "value," and "subscription," none of which are common to Microsoft products, culture, or marketing.

Digging in a bit, I found myself confused not only by what the program portends to be but why it would be called it "Open Value Subscription," unless they were hoping to leverage buzzwords and concepts related to open source and SaaS (software as a service). It's such lame and dishonest branding, the marketing group should be ashamed. … Read more

Aria Systems: Open source in the corporate door, out the employee door?

I spent some time the other day talking with Ed Sullivan, CEO and co-founder of Aria Systems. Aria is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) billing and customer management company with an interesting raison d'etre: Ed nearly lost all his gear in an online game when the system couldn't process his payment. He figured there must be a better way to do billing. He was right.

The company, which has raised $4 million from Hummer Winblad, perhaps points to ways in which SaaS companies - which often skim the cream from open source without giving commensurate value back - can serve as good open-source citizens.

First, though, I found it interesting to hear how Aria does particularly well serving its own breed of user:We specialize in recurring business models. Compared to NetSuite, we don't do inventory management all that well. So, Aria is very strong in gaming (video games, not gambling) and in servicing other SaaS companies (i.e., if you can meter it, we can help to monetize it). We can get customers up and running in a matter of hours, in many cases. More complex integrations take more than a couple of hours, obviously.

It immediately struck me that the stars are aligned for a company like Aria, given the shift toward services-based business and accompanying subscription models. Ed concurred:… Read more

Ghosts in the machine: A review of Nick Carr's The Big Switch

I figured I knew Nick Carr's central thesis behind his new book, The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny, before I started. I've read Nick's blog religiously for years and was fortunate to have him keynote last year's Open Source Business Conference.

The thesis runs something like this: IT didn't used to matter very much because interchangeable software systems widely used throughout industries means IT no longer provides a basis for competitive differentiation (see pages 56-57). In the next phase (dubbed "utility computing"), traditional IT matters even less: data centers are the new utilities, allowing more efficient deployment of software applications than any one company could hope to build on its own. Jack into the network of data and services and get on with your business.

What I wasn't anticipating was where such nonchalance could lead socially. This comes in the second half of the book, and left me wishing that Nick's arguments weren't so lucidly advanced. It would have been nice to caricature his argument and move on. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's possible.

But first Utopia, before further discussion of Carr's Dystopia.… Read more

Netbooks: Almost a do-it-all small-business suite

Per my previous rant on Web start-ups that lack a Big Idea, here's one I appreciate, since it's trying to solve a real problem: NetBooks. This company has built a Web-based suite of interconnected apps designed to run a small business.

It's a noble effort, because the small-business market is murder. It's not that there's a lack of customers, it's just that they are so hard to reach and so different from each other. Building a universal small-biz app is a tricky balancing act.

It looks to me like NetBooks might eventually pull it … Read more

Google Apps in 2008: More and more like the offline world they left behind

Reading about Google's plans for Google Apps in 2008, I'm struck by how much the new world of online applications is having to mimic the old world of offline applications to thrive. As much as we may want to leave our desktops behind, they clatter along after us, tethered to us by our need to have a physical location.

Google will enable the offline functionality through its Gears technology, which will enable some very interesting things:

Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? [Google's] answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.… Read more