We're back in the SaaS market today to report on how Xactly Corp. is focusing on a lucrative niche in the Software-as-a-Service market.

Xactly's Vice President for Product Management Desta Buchowski talked about how sales compensation programs were a good target for a SaaS service -- and what benefits they bestow on management and sales forces.

Buchowski feels they provide a flexible, cost-effective model, a short implementation cycle and for their sales team, visibility into both current compensation but and "what if" calculations for selling certain deals.

"This is going to enable the company to really drive their business," she notes. "We want to incent the sales team right so they can sell more."

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NetManage has just announced OnWeb for Customer Information Control System (CICS), a software solution that can rapidly and reliably transform CICS data into standard XML for any integration project or SOA initiative.

Unlike screen-scraping technology, OnWeb for CICS runs natively on the mainframe. Archie Roboostoff, senior manager of product management at NetManage, was kind enough to join us and talk about the record occurences of the word "manage" in his title, OnWeb's role in processing CICS and obstacles still being encountered in the broader SOA landscape.

"The problem with CICS is that it's very hard to integrate in modern technologies like .NET and Java," Roboostoff pointed out.

Another barrier was that "some of the obstacles we found is the hesitation by the CICS manager to allow us onto the box; as you know, the mainframe is regarded as this mythical beast that's been running for 20 years," Roboostoff said.

But addressing the managers' concerns for downtime and security now allows OnWeb to take advantage of mainframe's speed, stability and uninterupted runtime; Roboostoff noted how Merrill Lynch is looking to use OnWeb to run one million messages per minute on their mainframe.

OnWeb also avoides screen scraping's vulnerability to screen landscape errors. "If an adminstrator changes the look and feel of a mainframe green screen, chance are the screen scraping will break," he said.

On general SOA deployments, Roboostof divided companies into the "whiteboarders" and "early adopters" who are working out the bugs -- chief of which remain security and management. "If someone deletes 10 million bucks from bank account, how do you track that back?" he noted.

"Really, it's a fundamental shift in way that hey manage their users enterprise wise. But once these customers figure that out, we will see SOA deployments really start to accelerate and become practical," he noted.

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Instant messaging is moving from consumer chat to invaluable corporate collaboration tool. Jive Software CTO Matt Tucker -- whose open source Wildfire IM messaging program is gaining quite a bit of traction in the corporate sector -- is confident that IM will eventually eclipse e-mail as a tool for business communications.

IM systems, Tucker notes, provides "faster communication and constant presence -- and it's less intrusive than calling on the phone."

But barriers remain, and Tucker spoke about ensuring HIPAA and Sarbox compliance and the advantages and disadvantages being open source give his company against big players like Microsoft and IBM who are also eyeing the IM market.

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StreamBase Systems is garnering considerable attention for its set of extnesions to SQL that enable processing and analysis of up to 500,000 real-time messages per second per CPU.

"If you're a company that cares about when your production line goes down, you want to know right now. If you've got a customer who is having a problem booking something on your site, the time you want to know is right now. If you want to detect a terrorist trying to get into your country, the time to know is right now," said StreamBase CEO Barry Morris.

"The tricky question is what kind of systems software is out there to address the problem ... if you like, we're really the Oracle for this type of problem," Morris noted before detailing StreamBase's StreamSQL standard -- which is being standardized by a group of companies that includes IBM and Oracle.

Morris also described his company's DaVinciCoder contest, a popular parody of Dan Brown's opus that provided $1,000 weekly and a $10,000 top prize to top-scoring contestants.

"It's a way to introduce people to this new world of stream and event processing that's fun," he noted.

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This week we're staying in the Software-as-a-Service space to focus on Jamcracker, a seminal survivor founded seven years ago as an .asp provider.

Last month, Jamcracker released version 2.0 of their Jamcracker Service Delivery Network. JSDN enables solution providers to instantly create turnkey online stores from which they can offer and deliver a variety of on-demand services.

VP of Marketing Don Best spoke about how Jamcracker survived the meltdown of the dot-com market in general and the .asp market in particular. Now, paper-thin margins have eased somewhat, security and accessibility has improved, and VARs, telcos and "anyone with a trusted relationship with their customer" are clamoring to add new services.

"Now the consumer is driving the expansion of the SaaS model this time...it is economical for them," noted Best, who added some success stories and ended with an upbeat multi-billion dollar projection for the SaaS market in the next two years.

For complete details, listen to the podcast. Download file

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Today's First Look takes a foray into the SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service Market, to look at Unleash Inc.’s project management software that could revolutionize how people at institutions, municipalities and corporations engage in enterprise planning.

"Unleash Inc.’s founder, president and CEO Diane Nerby detailed how her product will “engage people’s input, align them around a shared vision of success, and then drive results.”

The software scales from individuals who want to organize disparate objectives all the way to managers who want to organize far-flung teams into finely tuned collaborative teams.

A manager can create a series of Web-based forms that will define an objective, collect feedback and ideas from employees, assign responsibilities and deadlines and track progress.

Click on the link below for a full report.

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Bluespring Software has just released BPMSuite 4.4., which allows employees to participate in business processes through common desktop tools like Microsoft Office, Email and Internet Explorer.

"In many cases, the user doesn't even know we're there, but behind the scenes, we're managing a process and giving visibility into a process to make the business more efficient," said Jeff Mills, Bluespring's Vice President for Channel Development and Partnerships.

"There are literally hundreds of misson-critical processes where the intellectual property associated with with how well those are performed reside in people's heads rather than inside the organization...so it's a huge way to making all your employees as good as your best employees," Mills adds.

For complete details, listen to the podcast. Download file

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T3Ci (the T3 stands for “The Tag Tracking Company Inc.”) is partnering with IBM to provide Unilever North America with a breakthrough new RFID service based on the new Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) standard.

It will query and exchange RFID data across the enterprise and with training partners. T3Ci’s CTO Richard Swan detailed the benefits for vendors, retailers and customers. For example:

-- Manufacturers can track movement of their merchandise on and off selling floors and placement (or lack thereof) of special promotion displays within a store.
-- Retailers can be alerted when products near the end of their shelf lives; they can also track how employees are moving products on and off selling floors.
-- Consumers will see fresher -- and fewer out-of-stock -- items.

For a some fascinating looks at the future of retail and RFID -- including the price pressures affecting tag- deployment -- click on the player below or download the file.

For complete details, listen to the podcast. Download file

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