Swimming with Services

Partnering Is Key to Software as a Service

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DMNews: OneSource Information Services Inc., a Donnelley Group company of infoUSA, will offer its Account Intelligence product to Salesforce.com customers worldwide on AppExchange, the company said yesterday.Account Intelligence for Salesforce.com is a tool that lets Salesforce.com users access OneSource's business information. The tool is part of the OneSource Catalyst line of customer relationship management integration modules.

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Most of the vendors and customers I talk to,normally get confused by Multi-Tenancy.Some SaaS providers don't explain how a software application is delivered to the customer. Most of the vendors give this answer we are a SaaS Provider, we deliver applications "On Demand".As a analyst my job is to explain things in a simpler way to cutomers." As the discussion continues around the web regarding single tenant and multi-tenant, here is a very simple explanation of Mutli Tenant Architecture by Gianpaolo.

Multi-tenant architecture is designed to allow tenant-specific configurations at the UI (branding), business rules, business processes and data model layers

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We are starting a SaaSwebgroup, a network of weblogs that write content about Software as a service. Combined, these blogs can reach a large readership of influential technology and business professionals.If you would like to join SaaSWebgroup please leave a comment here with your Name, E-mail address and URL or E-mail me at jkannoth@saasweek.com
We will shorlty update this blog with features and benefits of joining this webgroup. Any comments or suggestions please let us know.

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Aberdeen Report: More than 50% of study participants are using or considering using on-demand or software as a service applications to manage portions of their supply chain -- early adopters report "overwhelming benefits"

More than 50% of respondents say they are now using or considering using on-demand or SaaS applications, especially for externally facing processes with suppliers, customers, and transportation carriers.

Current SaaS users report strong benefits over on-premise applications in the areas of ROI, implementation speed, ease of upgrades, and customer service.

Click here for more

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Hosted Dynamics CRM at Convergence. http://demo.hostedmscrm.com

Source: Satya's blog

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A news article from PC Magazine via Yahoo news. The software-as-a-service paradigm is expected to take center stage at Microsoft's Convergence conference, kicking off this weekend in Dallas. Listed here is few highlights of this news coverage .

• Microsoft is leaving CRM hosting to its channel partners


• Microsoft's CRM team delivers Titan, it will roll out one or more "connectors" designed to integrate CRM 3.0 with other Microsoft applications


• Microsoft itself is moving off its internal Siebel CRM system in favor of Microsoft CRM


• Microsoft recently released an RSS connector for Microsoft CRM.

Microsoft on Monday will outline some of its goals for the next version of its Dynamics CRM product at the conference, a Microsoft representative said.That product, code-named "Titan," and/or Microsoft CRM 4.0, is expected to provide true multi-tenancy capabilities, enabling Microsoft and other hosters to provision multiple customer accounts on a single server. That capability, if and when introduced, would put Microsoft more squarely in Salesforce.com's camp.

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Zoho Virtual Office is a web-based, groupware, collaboration software. Online services that includes Email, Documents, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Notes, Links, IM and more. Check out all the services from Zoho and please let us know can Zoho be called software as a service product suite.

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Interesting article on open source crm and shared-source crm.

The truth is, nobody knows how many deployments there are of open source CRM -- not even the analysts," said Clint Oram, co-founder and general manager of Sugar Online. "They typically get their usage numbers directly from vendors, so if we can't tell you, then they certainly can't."

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Phil Wainewright in his blog post made his 5 predictions for SaaS which is actually a coverage of blog post posted by Dan Farber. Here is our thoughts on his blog post.

ZDNet SaaS:"The blogosphere will turn against Google for failing to launch a hosted Office challenge to Microsoft. Meanwhile Amazon will quietly carry on expanding its presence in the on-demand market without anyone noticing. "

ZDNet SaaS:The on-demand model will entrench itself in a range of application areas unnoticed by the mainstream software vendors, including corporate purchasing, HR management, travel and expense management and website marketing and analytics.

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The iCentera solution places the ability to create unique website portals in the hands of marketing, sales, and service people who own the relationships and have the requirement to communicate with specific individuals and groups. This ability replaces the need to build custom intranet or extranet website portals. iCentera provides very good integration with outlook and salesforce.com

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Software as a service: The next big thing
SaaS at the barricades

Some IT managers see SaaS as a godsend, with time-to-market and low maintenance core to the appeal. aItas a CTO no-brainer,a says Jon Williams, CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a Salesforce.com customer. aI love the fact that I donat need to deal with servers, staging, version maintenance, security, performance, etc.a

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Nsite a Software-as-a-Service company, provides the most flexible On-Demand Quote, Proposal and Channel Management solution for small and mid-sized businesses. The on-demand applications that Nsite provides can be customized by business users in a few minutes to adapt to each customer's unique approach to channel and quote management.

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Anyone who is interested in SaaS should attend this webinar replay "How Enterprises can Enable Service Provider Integration".
Highlights of this webinar:

How to understand how the SMB marketplace can easily and cost-effectively connect popular mid-market applications and those offered by on-demand service providers

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ZDNet Blogger Phil Wainewright's update on SaaS Summit

A gathering called the SaaS Summit, which took place a couple of weeks ago in Napa Valley, California, gave attendees a chance to explore the differences and discover what it really means to be an on-demand (or SaaS, if you must) vendor. Several of them have been emailing me their impressions. What comes over most is how much there is to learn about being an on-demand vendor compared to the conventional perpetual licence software model. The way that you price, how you partner, your go-to-market strategies and, of course, how you develop and operate the software, are all quite distinct from how traditional software vendors have worked.

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Two interesting blog posts from Richard MacManus Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot's Joe Kraus on the Web Office and JotSpot to release 30-50 pre-packaged wikis in 2006.

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Joyent offers simple, powerful, web-based software that provides small teams with email, calendars, contacts. This Web based service is built using Ruby on Rails, the interface is simple and clean you just need a javascript enabled browser.For 15 dollars a month Joyent is a good Email/Calendaring solution for your small business. Joyent also has two other online service TextDrive, a website hosting solution and Strongspace a online storage space for your files similiar to GDrive and XDrive.

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NetSuite Inc. has launched a suite of hosted business applications designed specifically for software companies .NetSuite-Software Company Edition, the suite includes customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities tailored specifically for the software industry.

NetSuite was founded in 1998 by Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison and a former Oracle executive, Evan Goldberg. Ellison remains the majority owner in the company

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Techcrunch made a blog post about (Actually a Coverage made by BusinessWeek)Amazon adding a new and different kind of service: an unlimited data storage service aimed at software developers who are creating new Web sites and services. Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, made a interesting point "They're building a system to sell digital goods", few analysts feel amazon is trying to enter online storage market through developers instead of directly competing with XDrive,AOL and GoogleDrive.Software Developers or Small Technology companies can sell addon features or service based on s3.

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How about accessing your complete Microsoft Office suite online, In Web 2.0 when everybody is talking about Writely,ThinkFree launched in 2000 "As your office in cyberspace" etablished itself as a next-generation productivity solutions for platform independent, anytime, anywhere-computing. ThinkFree usability extends beyond PCs and is perfect for Internet-connected devices, including thin client and mobile computing platforms.

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David Linthicum's ebizQ blog post had some interesting facts and checklist before you go with a software as a service providers.
7 things to look for in SaaS

• Ability to deploy rapidly
• Ability scale
• Ability to adjust cost with need
• Ability change quickly
• Ability propagate new features
• Ability to drive real time
• Ability to define the value within current business

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The hosted CRM vendor has recently announced that they will focus on enabling customers to run "their entire enterprise on The Business Web" according to CEO Marc Benioff. Already a third-party company called iCentera offers portal and content management functionality through Salesforce.com.

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Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG , Reports Despite hype and venture capital money, the ASP (application service provider) model of the late 1990s failed in spectacular -- and very public -- fashion. But industry leaders and analysts who gathered this week at the Software as a Service Summit in Napa, California, said that current market conditions give the new generation of ASPs, which the industry now calls software-as-a-service (SAAS) providers, a far better chance at success.

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