SaaS

“The cloud will change IT as nothing before it has. It may end up removing the last vestiges of the captive IT organization that "owns" its enterprise as surely as the enterprise owns IT. CIOs are right to start addressing it now.” – The Why of Cloud, Richard Hunter, Gartner Inc., December 2011 The Rise of the Cloud For over a decade now I have…

The calendar’s switched over, which means it’s that time of year again: full work weeks and prediction pieces for where cloud computing’s headed in the coming year. A few predictions caught our eye: Picking up on the security threats to businesses, IT Business Edge’s Mike Vizard, citing security firm Blue Coat Systems, offers four security trends…

Taleo’s no stranger to the cloud. The company has been providing on-demand talent management solutions, coupled with the industry’s largest ecosystem of customers, partners and candidates, since 1996. Talent is among a business’ most valuable assets — and talent is often hard to come by. Taleo provides businesses of all sizes the talent…

We noticed lots of chatter last week about the rise of cloud adoption and how easy implementations (or so they seem at the time) often create problems down the road. It’s true, of course, but nothing that can’t be solved with an empowered IT department steering the ship. SaaS Adoption on a Tear: Hollis Tibbetts wrote in ebizQ about how cloud…

As (almost) always, it was a busy week in the cloud. Here’s our take on some of the week’s biggest news. SaaS: The Best Possible Model for SMBs & the Enterprise SearchCloudComputing.com ran a story on cloud computing’s trajectory from an IT outsourcing strategy to the full-blown platform that it is today (“The Reinvention of SaaS”). We…

Last week there was an interesting article in the New York Times by Kevin J. O’Brian about the challenges to rolling out the cloud in Europe, and how it is happening despite them. The biggest issue is that data privacy laws severely restrict transferring people’s personal information outside of the 27 countries that form the European Union. This…

Interesting post from on the cloud downtime dilemma from Software Advice. It cites a Radicati Group study, which found that among popular on-premise email systems, there was an average of 30-60 minutes of unscheduled downtime per month, in addition to the 36-90 minutes of scheduled downtime – so between 66-120 minutes of total downtime per month…

Signing up partners is easy. Building effective partnerships is another story. I have spent the last 20 years working on different software partnering structures. Between HP, BroadVision, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, I have learned a lot about what it takes to create a great partnership. I am now working on a new startup with some old…