Archive for the 'SaaS' Category
Idea Exchange Rocks
A couple of weeks ago, I explained how Intalio is outsourcing its product management function to customers using a process we call Demand Driven Development. Following the release of this article, I have been exposed to the Idea Exchange, and must say that I am very impressed by the quality of the implementation that Salesforce.com developed for an idea quite similar to ours. [Continue…]
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First Koral, then ThinkFree and EchoSign
Three months ago, I wrote about Koral, one of the best online document management systems currently available. Today, Salesforce.com will announce that they acquired the company, and are using its technology to build Apex Content and ContentExchange. This acquisition marks Salesforce.com’s entry into the ECM market, but I hope Marc and his team won’t stop there. [Continue…]
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SAP Should Get Serious about SaaS
The market for enterprise applications is not growing much anymore. Faced with this challenge, large enterprise software vendors have only two options: grow through acquisitions, or go after the SMB market, which has been traditionally underserved. This transition is particularly obvious for a couple of vendors — Oracle and SAP. On the M&A front, nobody could execute better than Larry Ellison and his team today, therefore I contend that SAP’s future lies in the SMB market. But SMBs do not like to buy software, mainly because they do not have access to the IT resources that are necessary to deploy and maintain it. Instead, they would rather buy it as a service, as Salesforce.com’s demonstrated so well. This is why SAP should really get serious about the Software as a Service model. [Continue…]
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Office 2.0 Startups Should Join the AppExchange
For a consumer-oriented Web 2.0 startup, eyeballs might be all it takes to get funded. But for an Office 2.0 upstart, paying customers are required to get investors even remotely interested in your venture. This creates an interesting challenge for entrepreneurs: where to find prospects willing to try new products, without having to spend any money on marketing? Part of the answer might be provided by our friends at Salesforce.com, in the form of the AppExchange. [Continue…]
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AppSpace Looks Great but Too Expensive
Yesterday, Salesforce.com launched its Spring ‘07 edition, and announced AppSpace, a platform allowing the development of customer-facing web based applications powered by the Salesforce.com application and the Apex language. AppSpace is currently scheduled to be available in April as a limited release, and looks very promising. Unfortunately, its current pricing will put it out of range for a broad category of existing or potential Salesforce.com customers. [Continue…]
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BPEL Works
You know that a standard works when you can go from one implementation to another, without too much effort. BPEL has been promising such interoperability for quite some time, but to the extent of my knowledge, it has never been demonstrated at a large scale in a production environment. Until now. Over the weekend, Coghead went from one BPEL engine to another, and it worked without a glitch. Today, we can safely say that as an industry standard, BPEL really works. [Continue…]
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Who Needs BPM as a Service
Two weeks ago, a couple of independent BPM vendors announced plans for the release of BPM platforms to be offered as a service. This got the BPM digerati all excited, and for a day or two, the most enthusiastic commentators were raving about the prospect of getting BPM on tap directly from your web browsers. Then, some cared to read the small prints, and quickly realized that they would have to wait a little bit more for their newfound dreams to come true. [Continue…]
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Inferences for ‘07
Last year’s inferences lead to an unexpectedly high 83% success rate. This will be hard to beat, especially because my new batch of nine inferences will be stated in more measurable ways, leaving little room for history rewriting. Let’s give it a shot anyway, and meet again on December 31st, 2007 for our yearly performance review. In the meantime, happy new year to all! [Continue…]
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Scorecard
364 days ago, I published my inferences for ‘06. A year has passed, and time has come to take a look back and see how good (or bad) I did back then. Tomorrow, I will publish a new batch, and review them a year from now. [Continue…]
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WebEx Connects the Dots
If you think of WebEx as a Web Conferencing company, you might be in for a surprise when you see a demonstration of WebEx Connect, which was announced yesterday. In a nutshell, WebEx developed one of the most innovative Office 2.0 user interfaces, connected it to the Cordys BPM 2.0 platform, and deployed everything on a grid, making Connect one of the most interesting on-demand platforms I’ve seen in a long time. [Continue…]
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Lucky Monday
Nobody likes Mondays, or at least I cannot fathom why anybody would. On such a day, a full week of work lies ahead of you, and it always seem like an extra day is needed to recover from the adventures of the weekend, whatever they might have been. Yesterday was a little different though, for it brought such as collection of good news that I found myself wishing that today would be Monday again, and the same would be true for the rest of the week. [Continue…]
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It is all Part of the Process
SAPPHIRE 2006, Day One — Morcheeba’s last LP (Part of the Process) must have been playing on Henning Kagermann’s iPod lately, for his keynote was all about business processes today. I expect to learn more about SAP’s long-awaited Business Process Platform (BPP) when I meet Kaj Van de Loo tomorrow, but here is what Henning had to say about BPM, eventhough he made no mention of the acronym during his speech. [Continue…]
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Grids are Beautiful
Last month, I wrote about 3TERA, the company developing the amazing AppLogic grid operating system. Today, I formally joined 3TERA’s Advisory Board. My own experience pales in comparison to the company’s other advisors, but I will do my best to add some value. [Continue…]
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3TERA
One of the many challenges faced by anyone implementing Office 2.0 applications or adopting the Software as a Service model is the scalability of the underlying infrastructure. Salesforce.com’s growing pain are closely monitored, but Web 2.0 services such as del.icio.us and Flickr suffered from the same ailments at times. Developing some online application with a clean user interface that will work consistently across multiple web browsers is difficult enough. Add the requirement to make the application scale to millions of users in a matter of months and the task becomes impossible to most. Here comes 3TERA. [Continue…]
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SAPPHIRE
I have been invited by SAP — or more precisely my friend Jeff Nolan — to join the bloggers corner at SAPPHIRE in Orlando on May 16-18. All expenses, including flight, hotel and registration are paid by SAP AG. [Continue…]
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The World is Flat Breakfast
The first IT|Redux breakfast took place today and was a great success. The goal of the meeting was to identify the 11th flattener, following Thomas Friedman’s list of 10 flatteners in The World is Flat. [Continue…]
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Accounting with Office 2.0
Salesforce.com has demonstrated that Software as a Service can work, both technically and economically. As a result, multiple alternatives are currently being developed, notably Zoho CRM and Sunrise, the upcoming CRM application by 37signals. It’s great news, for a cheaper alternative to Salesforce.com would be welcome. Nevertheless, there is one business function other than CRM that is in need of an Office 2.0 solution: accounting. [Continue…]
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The World is Flat
I just finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In his last book, Friedman identifies ten events and trends that are flattening the world we live in today. I agreed with most of the thesis, and tried to relate to it my own experience working at Intalio.
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Transparency builds Trust
Because most of my personal and professional data is stored into Salesforce.com, I am connected to it more than twelve hours a day, five to six days a week. As a result, I can monitor in near real time most service disruptions that have been plaguing this great application over the last couple of months. If Bruce Daley is right, such disruptions might be related to scalability issues with the Oracle database, mainly because the entire Salesforce.com application is running off a single Oracle cluster. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but two recent moves from Salesforce.com make me think that they are getting serious about addressing such issues.
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Basecamp for PRM
Salesforce.com is one of the greatest tools for CRM, but as such it works best with existing customers. For wannabe customers, also known as prospects, something slightly different is required. I call it PRM (Prospect Relationship Management), and I’m currently experimenting the use of Basecamp for it. In essence, Basecamp can be used as a […]
