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The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and content industries, today announced the selection of twelve young Software as a Service companies as presenters during its OnDemand Conference, November 8-9 at the Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, CA.

These SaaS innovators were chosen from a pool of applicants that represent some of the most interesting new ideas in online software services. Each will give a five-minute presentation to the attendees and will be available at exhibit tables for further discussion.
A The selected Preview companies are:

Get it the way you want it

The (generally speaking uncustomisable) user interface of online business services is the last significant stumbling block they have had to face. This has meant that users of services such as those from Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor NetSuite have had to use the UI that comes with the service, even if it didn't really fit their business processes.A

That now changes with what the company claims is a first a a fully customisable UI that means businesses can have the interface that maps onto their business process needs.

This is at the heart of SuiteFlex, a new application development platform that is targeted specifically at the company's channel partners. This adds the ability to build their own vertical applications on top of the NetSuite business management system as well as an integrated, end-to-end customised UI for their customers, and then have it all available as an online, on demand service delivered via NetSuite.

The company has also launched Suite Bundler, which it defines as "Service as Software". This allows the channel partners to code and embed their knowledge of industry best practices and applications directly into the NetSuite system.

More here...

Etelos, a provider of open source SaaS business solutions, has teamed with 3Tera Inc. to enable Etelos' customers to utilize the latest in scalability technologies to easily increase computing power and manage Web applications on demand.

Companies running an Etelos application can now choose to deploy it with hosting providers that leverage 3Tera's AppLogic Grid operating system, giving them flexibility and control over their applications and infrastructure in real-time as their business grows. Using only a Web browser, an entire server infrastructure can be remotely managed, deployed and scaled on demand to give Etelos' customers scalable, highly available hosted environments faster and more cost-effectively than previously possible.

"Etelos and 3Tera share the belief that software no longer needs to be static or centrally located, and that Web 2.0, Office 2.0 and SaaS enablers should be able to easily manage, deploy and scale their applications without being constrained by the cost and complexity of owning and operating their own infrastructure," said Bert Armijo, vice president of marketing for 3Tera. "The new partnership enables Etelos customers running on demand, open source Web applications to cost-effectively compete in today's online marketplace."

As SaaS picks up steam, more resources are coming online to help with the transition to on-demand delivery.

Lots of businesses are starting to examine whether the emerging Software as a Service (SaaS) model will work for them. If you're one of them, consider this: It's working fine for a company that does twice eBay's volume of business.

Ariba Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., claims the world's largest supplier network, handling about $93 billion worth of transactions annually. It has annual revenues in the $300 million range and about 1,600 employees. Thus, deciding to rework its flagship solutions for helping corporations manage their corporate spending, a category known as spend management, was not an easy or quick decision. But, once decided, there was no turning back, says Rick Collison, Ariba's director of spend management solutions.

Ariba implemented the first wave of its SaaS offerings in November 2005, and has been solution complete on SaaS for about nine months. As with most companies' transition to SaaS, it's been a bumpy road, but worth the wear and tear. "We're walking, not running," Collison asserts.

In step with the brisk market for messaging gateway products, e-mail security and antispam vendor Declude on Monday launched a hosted version of its offerings.

Called Mailprotector, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering enables solution providers to resell Declude's antispam, antivirus and messaging gateway protection tools without having to install the vendor's appliance-based software on-site, said Kristina O'Connell, vice president of marketing at Declude, Newburyport, Mass.

Targeted at small and midsize businesses, Mailprotector can deliver comprehensive e-mail management and antivirus protection for an average price of just over a dollar per mailbox per month, according to O'Connell. Its low price makes Mailprotector a high-margin proposition, with resellers able to mark up the service by as much as 80 percent, she said.

Declude has flown somewhat under the radar for a while as far as brand recognition in the market for e-mail management goes, said David McCarty, marketing director at Intelek Technologies, a VAR and Declude partner in Norman, Okla.

NetSuite, Inc., the leader in on-demand business software suites,A announced last Thursday, the 19th, the keynote speakers for NetSuite Revolution 2006, NetSuite's partner conference to be held October 25-27 at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson will kick off the conference with an opening keynote speech entitled "The New SaS -- Service as Software." NetSuite Founder and CTO Evan Goldberg will give an overview of the future directions of the NetSuite application in his keynote. Additionally, NetSuite cherry picked industry luminaries as guest keynote speakers including Bob Anderson from the Gartner Group, Heather Clancy from CRN (Computer Reseller News), Rieva Lesonsky from Entrepreneur Magazine and Paul Greenberg from The 56 Group. For more information about the conference or to register CLICK HERE.

The keynote speeches will span a spectrum of insightful industry views including:

-- "The Next Generation Services Model" -- Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite.A A The on-demand revolution is here, and Software as a Service (SaaS) isA creating challenges and opportunities for organizations that want to build a professional services business to support the new web-basedA paradigm.A Zach Nelson will give the audience his visionary view of howA SaaS innovation enables solution providers to deliver process expertiseA A A A A A A and industry best practices to their clients encapsulated in softwareA delivered as a service.A

Australian outsourced provider of learning and development services BizEd Services has signed a three-year Software as a Service (SaaS) agreement for Hostworks to deliver Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office applications to its staff throughout Australia and New Zealand.

The Hostworks Software as a Service solution gives BizEd employees access to hosted versions of software applications including Microsoft Exchange, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project and Visio. These applications are purchased on a per-user, per-month basis, with the ability to vary the number of users as the business grows and changes.

BizEd Services IT Manager, Craig Horton, said the company faced a number of challenges to support staff working across multiple offices. aThe Hostworks solution means that wherever we travel in the world, we have a managed Exchange Server and file servers from one location,a he said.

Since its 2003 purchase of Dimension Data Central, Hostworks has made a major investment in deploying second generation SaaS technology.

QuickArrow, Inc., the Software as a Service (SaaS) leader in Professional Services Automation (PSA), announced today that third quarter revenue for 2006 was 42% greater than the same period in 2005, marking 12 consecutive quarters of revenue growth.

QuickArrow, Inc., the Software as a Service (SaaS) leader in Professional Services Automation (PSA), announced today that third quarter revenue for 2006 was 42% greater than the same period in 2005, marking 12 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. The company also added more than 1900 new users in the third quarter to achieve a 56% year-over-year increase in the QuickArrow user base.

QuickArrow added several key clients in the third quarter, including Progress Software, Spotfire Inc., Skywire Software, and Xenos. In September, the company hosted more than 70 companies at their annual SharedVision Users Conference in Austin, Texas. They also continued their educational client webinar series, SharedSuccess, with two new installments on Project Management and Advanced Analytics, their custom analytics and reporting tool.

Solution Lets Customers Manage the Entire Content Lifecycle as Part of the New WebEx Business Application 'Mashup' Platform.

A SpringCM and WebEx, the leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for collaborative business on the web, today announced that the SpringCM complete solution for Enterprise Content Management will be available via the new WebEx Connect application grid. This will provide seamless enterprise document access from anywhere,
collaborative editing and approval tools, and complete on and offline publishing capabilities within WebEx Connect based applications.A

The combined offering will allow customers, from anywhere in the world, to maintain a scalable and secure document repository for any file type, complete with full enterprise search and embedded optical character recognition (OCR), to collaboratively create, edit, update and publish documents. SpringCM will integrate with the WebEx offerings, and will allow customers to manage a greater part of the document lifecycle within WebEx.A A Press Release...A A

Autotask, makers of a business management platform for IT service providers, keeps users engaged with its product and on the edge of their seats by pushing out monthly updates of its software, according to users.A In April the company introduced support for live reports for managed services accounts. In May, it rolled out support for recurring contracts. Autotask Extend, which connected ASPs to a catalog of applications, debuted in June. And so on.A

The monthly releases enable the software maker to bring immediate and useable business value to users as they need it and will become the dominant delivery model for software as SAAS (software as a service) becomes the standard, replacing annual updates, said Bob Godgart, founder and CEO of the Rensselaer, N.Y., company.

"We're trying to get technology out as fast as [users] need it," Godgart said. "The market moves fast and their businesses move fast. They don't want to wait six months for a CD release to respond to it a| It increases the importance of the product in helping them do their job better, and that drives adoption."

OKERE, a management and technology consulting firm for on-demand business applications, today announced it has joined Informaticaas (NASDAQ: INFA) Service Provider Partner Program. With the alliance, OKERE is investing in the expansion of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) consulting practice to offer complete data management capabilities for this exploding market. Together OKERE and Informatica, a leader in data integration, will help enterprise companies realize the broader value of SaaS applications with fully integrated solutions.

As the leading systems integrator focused on deploying SaaS business solutions, OKERE has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies to integrate data between enterprise applications, such as those from salesforce.com, SAP and Siebel. As part of the alliance with Informatica, OKERE consultants will be trained and certified to implement Informaticaas PowerCenter Connect for salesforce.com, which allows companies to easily migrate, cleanse, replicate and synchronize data between Salesforce and on-premise systems.

A complete online lending solution is now available at a very competitive price.

Vuecentric Inc., developer of MortgageDashboard, the industryas leading mortgage loan origination system provided under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, has launched a new campaign targeted at individual loan officers who need a complete technology solution for online mortgage lending. The company has launched its ONE-derful (Originate Now, Electronically) promotion to provide the MortgageDashboard LOS, a lead generating website, a loan search and pricing engine and online status update all in a single package for only $499 for the first year. This offer is only available until December 31, 2006.

'LAVA On Demand' First On-Demand BI Offering Available as Both Hosted and Managed Service, Reducing Cost and Complexity of BI...

Celequest, the leading provider of operational business intelligence (BI), today announced LAVA(TM) On Demand, the first "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) offering for BI available as both a hosted and managed service.

"LAVA, the industry's first BI appliance, was designed to bring critical BI information to thousands of users without the complexity or cost associated with traditional BI offerings," said Diaz Nesamoney, chief executive officer of Celequest. "LAVA On Demand now enables customers to truly deliver BI to end users as a service, with zero administration and maintenance headaches and on a subscription basis. This offering also makes Celequest accessible and affordable for small to medium-sized businesses, dramatically extending the reach of our technology."

Salesforce.com is taking another step in its quest to become a dominant platform for enterprise applications with the announcement of Apex, which opens up its multi-tenant, on demand infrastructure and an enhanced programming language to any developer. The announcement took place at the company's Dreamforce conference, with live testimonials from Michael Dell, Maynard Web (CTO eBay), Bob Suh (CTO of Accenture), and other industry executives.A A

aWe have a vision for millions of applications on demand,a said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing at salesforce.com. aApex will give people unburdened freedom to develop an entire universe of applications never seen before. We are popping the top off of our platform, and with the advanced logic and the capability of our programming language, developers can write inventory management, ERP and transactional applications like ecommerce.a Application developers can also sell their wares via salesforce.comas AppExchange marketplace.

The software as a service application delivery model has seen significant interest within the Web hosting industry lately, as service providers hustle to build their solutions around the SaaS model.

Web hosting provider NaviSite (navisite.com) says its new ISV Sandbox solution, a joint offering with software giant Microsoft (microsoft.com), makes it easier for companies to develop and adopt a cost-effective SaaS offerings.

NaviSite says the ISV Sandbox provides ISVs, and anyone else who has applications that would reach more customers over the Net, with a secure environment for developing and testing the delivery of software applications to end-users over the Internet. For ISVs, assessing the viability of the SaaS model can be expensive, both in terms of cost and time, but the ISV Sandbox offers a ready-made platform for evaluating SaaS and testing SaaS-enabled software.

The new version of the ISV Sandbox, for developers on the Microsoft platform, is built using the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications, which is specifically designed to help ISVs shorten their time-to-market for SaaS offerings and to enable service providers to host and manage applications for ISVs.

Mike Mazur, the VP of channel sales and alliances at NaviSite says the ISV Sandbox solution enables partners who are interested in taking themselves, or their customers, into a SaaS environment to do so with a lower cost, which is often a big barrier to entry.

Open source and on-demand CRM are experiencing a convergence of sorts, brought together by online application exchanges.

Mirroring Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform, Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM today launched its own marketplace for business applications based on its open source CRM tool.

Entitled SugarExchange, the project provides a place for developers to capitalize on SugarCRM's commercial open source model, according to Clint Oram, general manager of SugarOnline.

Under SugarCRM's commercial open source strategy, customers can get one version of its CRM application with a free download and free access to the source code or pay for a proprietary professional edition that comes with additional functionality and support. CRM analysts and experts have predicted big things for open source CRM this year.

The market for software as a service is set to boom over the next five years a which is great news for companies such as Salesforce.com and others but could spell worse times ahead for traditional software vendors.

According to Gartner the software as a service (SaaS) market will grow from five per cent last year to accounting for 25 per cent of new business software revenues by 2011.

Robert DeSisto, research VP at Gartner, said trends in enterprise software have certainly begun to change.

However, DeSisto added SaaS is still well short of maturity and said many deployments are still focused on either individual departments or within the small to medium-sized enterprise sector.

IBMA launchedA alphaWorks Services, a new on-demand addition to IBM's research and development website, launched to coincide with alphaWork's tenth birthday (picture courtesy of the alphaWorks website). Two of the three services available at launch are targeted at enabling end users to build their own applications: Ad Hoc Development and Integration tool for End Users (ADIEU) and Web Relational Blocks (WebRB).

AlphaWorks is noted for tapping into technology waves very early into their development; but isn't it a bit late to catch the SaaS wave?

Following is a contribution from SaasWebgroup member, A Mahdi Abdulrazak, The GravityZoo:

One of the most exciting features of true SaaS is that it delivers software freed from all the complexities attached to desktop applications. Open Source is all about flexibility, sure, a nice thing, but it can also scare people away. Maybe you remember installing your last Linux distribution and getting all your applications up and running again? Although things are getting easier these days, Open Source is still quite hairy for the average user.A A A A A A

The simplest and most effective way to increase OSS adoption by the ordinary user across Open Source and proprietary Operating Systems like Linux, Windows XP and Mac OS X, is by guaranteeing the ordinary user a productive and non-complex use of the application.Deploying OSS in a SaaS model is exciting because it provides the OSS community a distribution model that is capable of delivering the current desktop applications as a service to the end-users across any operating system on fixed and handheld devices, thereby maximizing the application supply to the market. At the same time it guarantees the ordinary user the so desired productive and non-complex use of the applications provided. Apart from the latter it also allows for the quick realization of new software ideas via the re-use of open source building blocks and by mashing up existing services.A A A A A

The emergence of Web2.0 applications highlights the need for RIA's (Rich Internet Applications) that comply with true interactivity and rich end-user experience. There are tons of good OSS applications out there, what needs to happen is that they are brought to the Net. Only, how are we going to do this? Porting them to some AJAX framework? Maybe AJAX is a solution? I think the answer is no, we need something more solid and flexible. Something that enables SaaS, while at the same time giving the user a Desktop experience.A A A A A

It is just that what The GravityZoo Framework provides and thereby making it ideal for building Net-enabled applications. For software developers the GravityZoo technology is therefore an easy tool to build or port and host applications for deployment as a service over the internet.A A A A A

What would the software market be like if FOSS applications like OpenOffice or Gaim can be provided as a service in competition with their desktop equivalents like Microsoft Office? What will the competitive online landscape look like with players such as Windows Live and Google's Spreadsheet or Writely compared to fully SaaS-based FOSS aDesktopa applications?A A A A A A A A A