OpSourceac, the SaaS delivery experts and Scio Consulting, a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-related software development and consulting services, announced today that the two firms have formed a partnership designed to accelerate the adoption of the on-demand delivery model by software companies. Many software and web companies that wish to enter the growing SaaS market lack the resources and/or knowledge necessary to develop, let alone deliver on-demand products and services. Under the terms of this non-exclusive agreement, Scio will provide the software development and consulting necessary to create on-demand products for companies and OpSource will deliver and manage those applications.

Luis Aburto, CEO, Scio Consulting, said, aThis partnership will make it even easier for companies to enter the on-demand market. Not only will they receive needed consulting and software development services, theyall experience a seamless transition from application development to delivery. Our software engineers will develop customer applications for the same OpSource platform that will deliver the production versions. The services of Scio and OpSource complement each other perfectly.a More here

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Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT Market Research industry, today announced the results of its latest research on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market in Asia (excluding Japan). Springboardas data shows significant growth in awareness and adoption of SaaS across the region with the market increasing 92.5% in 2006 to reach a market size of US$154 million. Springboard forecasts that the SaaS market in Asia will reach US$1.16 billion by 2010, with a compound annual growth rate of 66%, to comprise 15% of the enterprise software application market.

^{Market Expected to Grow 83% in 2007 as Awareness and Adoption Rates Increase Significantly}

aWe saw significant increases across the board for SaaS through our research, which proves that SaaS has market momentum for the long run,a said Dane Anderson, CEO & Executive Vice President for Research at Springboard Research. aIt is a very dynamic time for SaaS in Asia with pure-play vendors like Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and WebEx gaining increased traction in Asia, together with smaller SaaS firms making moves into the region. Round that out with the large players in the industry like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft becoming more aggressive with SaaS, and the market for the rest of 2007 and 2008 is going to be very interesting,a Anderson added.

Springboard found that although customer relationship management (CRM) remains the largest SaaS application segment by revenue in Asia, representing 45% of total SaaS revenue in 2006, data shows that organizations are aware of and use many different types of SaaS applications. Springboard also found satisfaction levels with SaaS applications ran very high, with all application segments scoring between a 7 to 8 on a 10-point scale.

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Via Datamation: While more industries are taking to the software-as-a-service model, experts warn that offloading your applications does not mean offloading responsibility. aItas important to understand that even if you go with a hosted service, you still have to manage the quality of that application,a says Irwin Lazar, analyst with Nemertes Research.In the SaaS model, applications are hosted by providers over the Internet and companies are charged for usage rather than ownership. Lazar says the benefit of this approach is that IT groups do not have to spend limited budgets to buy and operate complex infrastructure. More here

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There was a good debate last week at O'Reilly Radar about the implications of open source software (OSS) in the movement to Software as a Service (SaaS). Of course it included all the "we vs. them." "we invented Web 2.0," "OSS adoption is massive," "we invented SaaS," and "we don't get no respect" that these inward-looking OSS blogs love.

But it showed why the IT industry needs to nail down some definitions and concepts before discussions like these begin in earnest. Political blogs are easy to follow because their followers have standard definitions for right/left, republican/democrat, blue/red, and so forth (if a third party were to ever take off in the U.S. it would put the political blogs out of business). Auto buffs have good online and cruise meetings because they all agree on the auto industry model. But IT industry conversations, especially OSS conversations, are more like religous wars with everyone talking past each other. More here

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The pharmaceutical industryas first Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM application for managed markets has been selected by Publicis Managed Markets (PMM), part of Publicis Healthcare Communications Group. This marks Verticals onDemandas first sale of VBioPharma and the first time an industry-specific CRM solution has been applied to such a specialized area of pharmaceuticals as managed markets. PMM, a comprehensive services provider for managed markets, goes live with Verticals onDemandas VBioPharma Managed Markets Edition at the end of July and will leverage decades of industry expertise to provide rich product insights for future versions of VBioPharma. More here

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Google's Postini acquisition and Salesforce's development capabilities lend enterprise-level chops to the software-as-a-service model With two important announcements, one this week and one last, we are finally starting to see a critical mass build around SaaS (software as a service). More here

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Microsoft and its partners must change the way they have traditionally done business to accommodate software as a service, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told attendees at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 10. More here

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David Linthicum on : SaaS and Virtualization
Virtualization has been a hot topic for the last few years as corporate America seeks to do things faster, better, and cheaper. Lately, I've been getting a lot of cross links with SaaS, so perhaps it's time to drill down on this topic a bit.A More here

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The GravityZoo Company has announced the first release of its GravityZoo music and video management application MediaZoo Beta One and announced simultaneously the release of the latest version of the GravityZoo Framework Beta Two.The GravityZoo Company is dedicated to enabling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the Web beyond Web 2.0 as the GravityZoo Framework enables multi-tenanted SaaS platforms to be developed in a highly networked world.

The company has also signalled its intention to release in the near future CollabZoo, the next generation collaboration environment to be used in the GravityZoo OpenOffice.org porting project. The GravityZoo Company will kick-off the porting project at the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2007) to be held in Barcelona, Spain on 19th-21st September 2007.

Marc Vrijhof, The GravityZoo Company co-founder and CEO says, i?1/2Wei?1/2re seeing global economic growth and competitive pressures forcing the increase in SaaS adoption. But global operations need global connectivity, mobility and collaboration and that means that customers are demanding greater access, better support and more specific solutions.

This is causing disruption in the current software development value chain with Web enablement as a stop gap solution, he adds.The GravityZoo Company, Microsoft, Adobe and Google all recognise this and are addressing the challenge with differing approaches and products in the market. All aim to provide Rich Internet Applications but only The GravityZoo Company is combining this with enabling SaaS adoption. More here

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SWsoft's Director of Technology, Ilya Baimetov, believes that virtualization plays an important role in the SaaS world. He even goes on to say that the benefits are so significant, that he belives no SaaS provider will be able to be competitive without using virtualization. To that point, he offers the following examples on one of SWsoft's Blog sites:Provisioning. Image-based deployment of virtual machines is much simpler and less error-prone than an installation process requiring many steps in the configuration. Virtuozzo, with extremely compact images, makes provisioning a snap. More here

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Pervasive Software(R) Inc. , a global value leader in embeddable data management and integration software, today announced Pervasive Data Integrator(TM) is providing a distinct competitive edge to Pointserve, a leading provider of Economic Resource Optimization (ERO) solutions for customers with distributed sales and service resources in industries ranging from property services like Pest Control and Lawn Care to infrastructure services like broadband and utilities to product services like equipment maintenance. As an integral part of its channel-delivered software-as-a-service (SaaS) launch, Pointserve turned to Pervasive for ease of integration and shortened time-to-value.Pointserve solutions typically deliver operational efficiency gains of 15 percent to 25 percent, giving its customers, partners and their customers the opportunity to deliver high-value services that improve customer retention and provide rapid, tangible return on investment. Pointserve saw a strategic opportunity to provide the small and midsized mobile services market with a SaaS-based ERO offering, but the product had to be easy to configure and use with rapid, low-cost transactional integration. Pointserve capitalized on Pervasive Data Integrator(TM) to seize the opportunity. Pervasive met Pointserve's requirement for rapid, lightweight, low-cost, loosely coupled integration. More here

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Via Techcrunch: Hereas a story that weave been tracking since last year - Salesforce and SAP competitor NetSuite just filed its S1 registration statement with the SEC, the first formal step in the IPO process. More here

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