SAAS

Monday's rumor that on-demand business intelligence provider LucidEra was shutting down has turned out to be true.

I received a number of pitches from competitors about why their solution is better, cheaper, etc., and one particularly well thought-out e-mail from Brad Peters, CEO of Birst, another on-demand BI provider. I've pasted the e-mail below with permission and it will end up on their blog sooner or later.

My understanding is that while LucidEra's shutdown is unfortunate and a bit of a drag for customers, there are multiple providers that customers can easily switch to and that LucidEra are being helpful with the data transference.

It's always unfortunate to see a fellow startup shut its doors, even when you compete with it, since strong competition validates an overall concept--in our case, on-demand business intelligence. The benefits are real. The value to customers is real. Unfortunately for LucidEra, their particular approach--specific applications, instead of general BI solutions--proved weak in the marketplace. … Read more

Some have described Google as an advertising company. This might have been accurate at one time, but given the sheer breadth of Google's ambition and product mix, it's far too limiting a description.

Google is a search company. It's a cloud company. It's a subscription services company. And, as is becoming increasingly obvious, Google is the world's largest open-source company.

Tim O'Reilly has been telling us this for years, but it wasn't until I read this brilliant Keir Thomas article that I appreciated the clarity of O'Reilly's vision.

As Thomas writes, … Read more

Who would you work for if not for the company that currently employs you?

For many right now this is a somewhat pointless question: with so many people unemployed, the answer is, "I'd work for anyone that could cut me a paycheck every other week."

Bad as things may be at present, however, they will get better. As the economy heats up, and it eventually will, which software companies are poised to make the biggest impact on the industry for the coming five, 10, and 50 years?

I asked this question over Twitter on Monday, and received … Read more

It's perhaps no secret that the enterprise sales model is broken. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and open source have picked the lock on the enterprise, enabling CIOs to try before they buy, disrupting the old model of paying far too much for demoware and roadmap dreams.

It's a welcome shift of risk from the buyer to the vendor, as Geva Perry highlights:

We're now witnessing an increasing trend of bottom-up sales. A casual decision made by developers on a day-to-day basis, not a grand strategy laid out by the CIO. Try-and-buy is the norm, and so are subscription payments … Read more

The tizzy created by Facebook's page design changes point out some valuable lessons that we should keep in mind as we head more into a SaaS and cloud-based world.

There are many differences between how shrink-wrapped applications and software as a service (SaaS) work, but one of them is that customers of shrink-wrapped software choose when, and if, they upgrade. They kick the tires to look around at the changes beforehand, download a trial, poll other users, wait for the .1 rev and the kinks to get worked out.

With SaaS, changes get pushed … Read more

The blog Confused of Calcutta recently raised an interesting topic: Should software vendors take more responsibility for their software? Should we sign up to "tenancy agreements" by which we agree to stand by our code and ensure it works well with others?

It's an intriguing proposition, one which I'm sure enterprise IT buyers (or, rather, their legal departments) would welcome.

I doubt it will ever happen, however, and I'm not sure there's much incentive for a vendor to introduce such licensing commitments. No one buys software because it comes with a kinder, gentler contract. … Read more

NetSuite on Thursday unveiled its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, expanding its on-demand enterprise software service to include cloud computing.

The company, which hosts enterprise software on demand, is branching out to allow customers the ability to push their core operations into the clouds.

As part of its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, NetSuite is launching a developer program, SuiteCloud Developer Network, and an online cloud-computing application marketplace, SuiteApp.com.

The SuiteCloud platform will be built on core NetSuite enterprise resource management (ERP) software, as well as its customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce offerings.

NetSuite is delving into cloud computing at a time when this … Read more

Over the last 10 years, IT has moved further and further outside the firewall. Starting with ASP (application service providers) and moving to multitenant SaaS (software as a service) on-demand applications, and now into cloud-computing environments, the status of on-premise IT has shifted from being a necessity to an option.

An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it's cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.

I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.

The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?

Ryan told me that "SaaS is the business version of cloud computing," meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples. … Read more

The news this week from retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is that its Sam's Club wholesale stores will be selling a health care electronic records management software bundle to medical and dental clinics.

The New York Times covered the details, but the short-short version is that doctors and dentists can purchase the software for an up-front license fee (on a per-physician basis), and will receive the software and a Dell tablet PC for each license.

Boosting the value of the offering is the availability of $19 billion in federal stimulus funds to support conversion of clinics to electronic records management. … Read more