Having left my corporate budget responsibilities behind, I hadn't really thought of this.  Today's WSJ has an article on SaaS adoption.  One of the driving factors in large organizations is accounting.  Not, providing accounting services, but how software expense is accounted for:

"Early on, that attracted mostly small businesses that weren't previously using any software at all and could easily justify trying this new approach. But larger companies stayed away, having invested in the late 1990s in traditional software from the likes of Oracle and SAP AG.

Now that's changing, partly because of an accounting quirk. Companies are starting to get rid of their old software at a time when capital-expenditure budgets are tight. Traditional software and the hardware to run it are considered a capital expenditure. But Web-based services are typically sold as a subscription, which means corporate buyers can account for them as a maintenance expense, which falls into a different bucket.

As a result, companies are turning to start-ups such as Ketera, LucidEra Inc. and Workday Inc. that are offering Web-based services for tasks like controlling spending and managing employees. Meanwhile, a handful of older software-as-a-service companies such as Taleo Corp. and RightNow Technologies Inc. have gone public; another, NetSuite Inc., is widely expected to try to do so.

Big software makers like SAP and Oracle are themselves ramping up efforts in the area. Google Inc. is even getting involved, with Web-based word-processing and spreadsheet services for businesses. Research firm Gartner Inc. calculates the world-wide market for software as a service will grow to $19.3 billion by 2011 from $6.3 billion last year."

I don't know about everyone else, but I always found getting capital to be a battle.  But maintenance, well you have to keep the ship afloat.  Interesting to consider if you find yourself in the bootstrapping phase of architecture and/or technology adoption.

Posted by brendamichelson in business • technology trends | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Since January, when I traveled to speak in St. Louis and my luggage went to Detroit, I’ve been leery of checking my bag. Besides factoring in stops and layover time, I consider arrival time, engagement start time, the likelihood of shopping for business apparel, the ability to receive an overnight delivery, and my general luck. If all that adds up, I hand the bag over. Well, until yesterday that is. And that’s fine. I get it. Safety wins over hair gel.

So, why am I writing about this at all? I was thinking about the U.K. restrictions and enterprise IT. From today’s WSJ:

Rules are a lot stricter. All hand baggage is prevented from being carried into the aircraft cabins, except for a few exceptions such as travel documents, prescription medicine necessary for the flight and pocket-size wallets and purses, which must be placed in a plastic bag. As part of this rule, laptops, cell phones and other devices must be place in checked luggage.

Laptops, blackberries, smart phones, mass storage devices (iPods, voice recorders, usb keys) will be out of your people’s hands, and through dozens of others, for hours at a time. Of course, this got me thinking about data protection: removing unnecessary data, encryption and backups.

From there, I started thinking about USB keys and portable storage devices. What’s really inside a standalone USB key? Could a storage device (current or future form) be deemed safe to carry on? Will we find ourselves checking machines and carrying on the heavily encrypted data?

Then though, I started thinking about why mobile professionals carry data laden machines anyway. It’s to work in terminals and on the plane. At the endpoints, home, office, meeting, conference, hotels, there’s connectivity -- to people, data, and applications.

This made me jump to Ray Ozzie and how connectivity provides opportunity for everything-as-a-service.

So now, I find myself thinking about data-as-a-service, information-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, temporary storage, trusted data keepers, and traveling data light… Thoughts?

Posted by brendamichelson in technology trends • web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)