On November 15, IBM announced a plan it calls "Blue Cloud" for enabling corporate data centers to "operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms," it said in the press release.

The idea behind cloud computing, of course, has a lot to do with SaaS -- applications should be available through a Web browser from remote data centers rather than installed locally. Some call outsourced cloud computing by the moniker Hardware as a Service (HaaS).

By offering the Blue Cloud initiative, IBM hopes to enable customers to get started with cloud computing quickly.

The initiative has met great enthusiasm around the Web for the most part. IBM joins Amazon and Google in offering this sort of a service but IBM is well positioned to be a leader in the enterprise market for obvious reasons. ZDNet bloggers were mixed; analyst Dana Gardner points out that the announcement could herald a change in the relationship between companies' relationships with vendors. Joe McKendrick wondered whether cloud computing might be a major disruptive technology that essentially creates the $80 data center. Phil Wainewright was skeptical that Tivoli software might not be up to the task of managing cloud infrastructure.

Blogger Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch proclaimed that Blue Cloud was Web computing by another name and wondered how exactly IBM would handle the implementation. That is, of course, an interesting question. Industry commentator Amy Wohl raised the very same question but predicted at least a few large IBM customers would find the idea to be "a tantalizing proposition."

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Media outlet VNUnet discusses a new Gartner report that predicts that dynamics of the software licensing market will soon begin to hurt the profits of software vendors.

SaaS-based applications are getting more and more sophisticated, and with the lower cost of implementation and maintenance, some companies are starting to make greater demands of software vendors in terms of reducing licensing costs. In addition, new overseas markets that don't have to deal with legacy software environments tend to start from using low cost software and SaaS, the article suggests. Research VP William Snyder points out that today's software market is becoming something of a buyer's market, with increased alternatives available.

Covering the same report, CRM Buyer points out that software licensing costs are going to trend lower in coming years as CIOs look to reduce expenses.

On the issue of overseas SaaS growth, Business Line, an Indian publication, also reported predictions for SaaS growth in India (a growing market overall), particularly with small and medium-sized enterprises. The article predicts that Oracle and SAP will soon turn their eyes toward the market.

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The Free Software Foundation has approved the Affero GPL for Software as a Service applications, reports E Commerce News. The new GPL is based on the GNU GPLv3 but includes terms to let users access source code for software accessed over a network.

In the article, analyst Laura DiDio points out how the new GPL reflects a growing trend toward SaaS.

CNET News also covered the announcement, pointing out that:

"The Affero GPL license is increasingly relevant as companies such as Google employ customized open-source software to run massive online businesses with no requirement for sharing. However, intellectual property attorney Eben Moglen, who helped craft GPLv3, said other pressure can be brought to bear if companies take advantage of GPL software without reciprocating."

The Free Software Foundation apparently hopes that the Affero GPL will help with that issue. CNET reports that the FSF said that code written under GPL and Affero GPL may be combined in some circumstances.

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In the latest of a string of SaaS acquisitions, Dell has signed an agreement to buy Everdream, a SaaS remote service management provider. eWeek reports that Dell looked at the deal in order to complement the capabilities it acquired when it purchased the MSP company SilverBack Technologies earlier this year.

In other acquisition news, IBM also recently announced plans to buy Cognos, a business intelligence and performance management software vendor. Now, Cognos is not a strictly SaaS company but it does play in the space -- and Cognos itself recently announced a partnership with Daptiv (formerly eProject), which Intelligent Enterprise called the "tip of the Cognos SaaS iceberg." The Intelligent Enterprise article also speculates that IBM's intentions to "complement its Service Oriented Architecture strategy" with the buy may mean it intends to compete in the same space as SAP/Business Objects target with their union.

Commenting on the move, Judith Hurwitz wrote a piece for IT-Director.com in which she concluded that the deal makes a lot of sense for IBM and predicted that HP would begin targeting acquisitions in the same space.

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After acquiring successful on-demand security provider Postini, everyone’s favorite search engine turned SaaS leader, a.k.a. Google, quickly integrated Postini functionality into its Google Apps Premier Edition offering (read the press release here), which is quickly shaping up to be a major force in the on-demand office suite space. I thought it would be interesting to have a chat with Google about the integration and the future of Google Apps, and I was joined by Google’s Rajen Sheth, one of the product managers who work on Google Apps Premier Edition.

Can you talk a little about the rationale behind the integration of Postini functionality into Google Apps and what benefits customers will see as a result?

Sheth: The rationale behind the integration and the acquisition of Postini is twofold. One is that as we have been selling to businesses, we were realizing that compliance and email security are very, very important components to the story of providing a complete messaging solution to businesses -- a clear component we needed to have within our offering to offer to medium-sized businesses or larger.

The other thing about Postini is that they're one of the most successful SaaS vendors for messaging. So we thought that this would be a really great fit; what we did was basically within three weeks after announcing the acquisition, we integrated those technologies together. The core Postini functions were a specific policy-based virus filtering, content policy management product which basically allows the organization to choose what info they want to let through by email and control of outbound email based on keywords, and finally a 90-day message recovery package. That’s a 90-day rolling window of email for an organization, effectively a backup that they can recover from, which can be turned on as a service.

A part of the integration is also a promotional offer for Postini customers where we’re offering Google Apps Premier Edition to existing Postini customers for free until June of next year.

So what kinds of companies are typically using Google Apps Premier Edition and Postini right now?

Sheth: It varies across the board for both of those products, for Postini and Google Apps. We see customers of a variety of sizes from very small businesses to the largest of the large. We’re seeing interest in integration of these two specific functionalities across the board; many small customers activate and start using Postini functionality immediately after the integration. We’re also seeing a lot of interest from larger companies, so definitely an interest for our applications as a service.

Do you have any response to the market criticism from other office application suite leaders who claim that SaaS offerings aren’t ready for prime time?

Sheth: It goes down to the customers and we have over a half a million organizations that are using this, and most are businesses of a variety of sizes. We have educational institutions that are 10000 users apiece that are using this, and a few dozen enterprise pilots going on as well. We see a variety of feedback from the market that this is definitely a viable solution. The way that we do things is we really respond to user interest and to user needs, and our philosophy is to release something and continue to iterate, iterate, iterate. We've seen with Apps gaining more and more in the market at a high level.

What are the primary benefits companies are looking for with Google Apps?

Sheth: The main benefits that people are seeing the clear bens of SaaS in general. SaaS scales more effectively and us more cost effective as it scales, compared with the cost to deploy a solution in house SaaS is dramatically lower. As a service we can innovate very quickly and iterate as a service; one example is Prudential Realty in Chicago, which has several hundred real estate agents that they previously were not providing services too because agents were remote and not in one office.

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With the exception of Oracle, and perhaps Microsoft, it seems the large software companies out there are buying into SaaS -- literally. This week, EMC confirmed rumors that it would buy Berkeley Data Systems -- maker of Mozy, an online backup service. With recent SaaS acquisition announcements by companies like Adobe, Yahoo!, Cisco, and others, the trend definitely seems to be for vendors to enter the SaaS market through buying existing services.

Liam Lahey of eChannelLine reported on EMC's announcement and interviewed analysts who said the move is further evidence of the changing landscape for the SaaS field, and that the online backup field is increasingly "ripe for prime time." Lahey quotes IT analyst Michelle Warren of Info-Tech Research Group as saying, 'When major, tier one vendors move into a market especially through acquisition it is an indication that a market is maturing . . . EMC and Seagate entering it is a huge indication that this market is maturing."

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In responding to Microsoft's announcements earlier this week, numerous sources around the Web have some things to say. Sean Gallagher of InfoWorld wondered whether Microsoft could manage IT online. He pointed out that SaaS is well proven by Salesforce.com and similar companies but that Microsoft's efforts so far in the Live space just aren't really cutting the mustard.

Despite having an advantage by a wide base of existing customers that could theoretically migrate to on-demand applications, Microsoft's Live services "have been a bomb in the consumer and small business sector," Gallagher says, and the company could stand to work on its Internet services strategy.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet called Microsoft's approach equal to one of the three monkeys (along with SAP and Adobe): Speak no SaaS, and said that Microsoft's strategy appears to be launching of services complementary to its products but not offering anything that might compete against its on-premise software, but wondered if Redmond might merely be trying to buy time to develop a better online strategy at the risk of sending customers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Computerworld points out that Adobe seems to be taking a page from Microsoft's book and copying its "Software + Services" strategy and creating Web-based complements to its software in order to avoid risking cannibalization. Vendors definitely do seem to walk a fine line in their efforts to remain competitive while not teeing off their partners.

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I remember an old Dilbert comic strip in which Dogbert was using his newfound wealth to become a venture capitalist. Of course, his prospect's great idea turned out to be developing a new word processor for Windows, so Dogbert used his money to get the waiter to bludgeon the guy with a stale loaf of bread instead.

That image flashes in my mind every time someone decides to take on MS Office head-on, whether the challenger is called Google, Sun, IBM or whatever. Simply put, it's a tough nut to crack. Having said that, it's not a hopeless fight just because Microsoft happens to be dominant, nor would I shed tears on the Redmond giant's behalf if they indeed DID get dethroned.

One interesting new angle is that of Office Project, which so far has remained largely unchallenged. Well, no more. On-demand vendor and open source player Projity is setting its sights on Microsoft with the a "complete replacement" of MS Office Project. Ambitious? Yes. Odds of success? Slim, but far from DOA.

Projity has done a better job bringing its product to market than competitors such as Project.Net, another open source vendor, says enterprise software analyst Dennis Callaghan of the 451 Group. Time will tell if Projity's luck holds, but it's definitely an initiative to keep an eye on in the year ahead.

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Since Yahoo! announced its intentions to buy Zimbra, a company that offers a messaging and collaboration suite via SaaS, PC World reports that Zimbra users are largely grumpy about the news. Citing a discussion thread on Zimbra's website about the acquisition, PC World reported "a collective feeling of alarm" that Yahoo! is not ready to serve enterprise consumers and fears that Yahoo! would ultimately kill off the product as a separate entity.

Zimbra co-founder and CEO claimed the fears were unwarranted and called the fears mere paranoia. Read more here.

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In InformationWeek's CIOs Uncensored blog, Mary Hayes Weier reported that Larry Ellison has no interest in the SaaS trend because "there's no money to be made there." Because SaaS is so much cheaper than on-premise software as a rule, Ellison wants no part of the lower consulting, integration, and licensing fees until someone figures out how to make more money out of it. Instead, Oracle wants to keep targeting larger companies with traditional software delivery. eWeek also had a longer article about Ellison's comments.

Is Ellison on the wrong track? He definitely has a point, insofar as SaaS does have a potential to cannibalize vendors' profits when customers choose it over more expensive on-premise software. But if Oracle's competitors, such as SAP with its new Business ByDesign offering, decide to offer SaaS, then Oracle may risk losing potential business by not jumping on the bandwagon and giving SaaS-wanting customers what they want.

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The ripples continue from Capgemini's decision to support Google Apps a few weeks back. Last Thursday, Rhys Blakely of UK-based Times Online issued an interesting report on the increasing competition to MS Office from IBM, Google, and Yahoo. The three companies appear to have full intentions of targeting MS Office's position as the market leader in office suites.

Blakely quotes Tom Austin of Gartner as saying, "This constitutes a real threat to Microsoftas business model. Eventually, it will have to switch from limited-use licenses to software as a service. That will require a fundamental re-engineering.a More here.

Eric Knorr of InfoWorld had a different take altogether. Musing on Microsoft's "eery" silence about its increasing competition from SaaS desktops, Knorr wondered if Redmond might have a secret project in the works that it will unveil in the near future.

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An RBC Capital Markets survey reported by IT World Canada said that more than a quarter of IT managers from around the globe like the software-as-a-service model and an almost equal percentage are considering SaaS adoption. The numbers were drawn from a random sample of 800 IT managers attending the North American Technology Conference. The group also reported that TCO rather than security was the main barrier to SaaS adoption, and that CRM was the leading application being adopted through SaaS, followed by human resources. Read more.

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James Taylor: I had an interesting call with Aaron from SeaTab last week. SeaTab is a SaaS BI vendor focused on retail, CBG and supply chain. Aaron was briefing folks as SeaTab had a new release out - we did not get into the details as I was more interested in general questions but you can see the press release they put out here. Aaron went through the basics of the product, describing it as very user configurable, down to calculations in individual reports. The integration of structured data from almost any source is a big focus and the product boasts that it requires no physical data warehouse or marts - it has no pre-defined dimensionality. More here

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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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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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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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Via CIO-TOday:-Software-as-a-service offerings are expanding, and gaining more acceptance. How would you like to just stop deploying enterprise Relevant Products/Services software, stop monitoring application performance, and stop participating in the finger-pointing and second-guessing which occurs when there are performance problems? That's the basic attraction of software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Customers access SaaS applications and data via the Web and essentially rent the application from the SaaS provider on a per-user or per-month basis. The SaaS provider is responsible for delivering, securing and managing the application, data and underlying infrastructure Relevant Products/Services More here

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A new Wiki appliance by Socialtext is putting new spark in SaaS, taking the benefits of Software as a Service and combining them with the security of the Appliance model; in effect delivering SaaS behind the firewall. SaaS analyst and blogger Phil Wainewright sees both the Appliance and the SaaS models to be part of the same trend of making software easier to install and use. More here

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SaaS Week is now officially a part of the ebizQ network family!

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Vyew, which recently emerged out of Beta, introduces version 2.5, one of the first online applications to fuse both live meeting and asynchronous collaboration capabilities to improve content collaboration, online meetings, and workflow. It is ideal for a wide range of users, from independent professionals to small businesses and workgroups.With Vyew 2.5, people can create VyewBooks to share, present, and interact with other people around all forms of content such as Microsoft Office files, pictures, audio and video. Tools to create new presentations are also included within the suite. Participants can also share their desktop view for live sharing of files, images, and Web sites. The new version also enables people to print VyewBooks.

VyewBooks are now also portable in 2.5 with the addition of an embeddable Vyewlet generator. Vyewlets are read-only VyewBooks which can be posted outside of Vyew -- directly in blog posts, Web sites, social networks, and any online page -- to create dynamic, multimedia presentations to engage viewers. If and when a Vyewlet needs to be updated, it can be done so inside Vyew with changes pushed live to the Vyewlet via an RSS-like mechanism.

More here

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Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, revenues in India will exceed US$48 million by 2008, up from US$7 million in 2005, according to a study by Springboard Research. The analysts say this positions India as the fastest growing SaaS market in Asia Pacific. The study also revealed a mismatch: high levels of awareness, low levels of penetration, among Indian SMBs. More here

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Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, and Google [Nasdaq: GOOG] today announced that they have formed a strategic global alliance to help millions of businesses leverage the Internet to achieve success. ebizQ received the following: The newest product resulting from this alliance, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, is a robust offering that combines the power of Salesforce on-demand CRM applications with the Google AdWordsac platform to achieve integrated sales and marketing success. This joint solution provides businesses of all sizes with the same tools used by larger enterprises to successfully attract and retain customers. More here

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Via Column2: Following hard on the heels of LucidEra, which I reviewed in March, OnDemandIQ has launched Insights, a hosted dashboard and reporting service aimed at small and medium businesses. I'm very eager to see how these new SaaS BI offerings are accepted in the marketplace -- has anyone out there used them yet? More here

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OpSourceac, the SaaS delivery experts, today announced the opening of its European headquarters, located at Albany House, Market Street, Maidenhead, Berks SL6 8BE, U.K. OpSource is expanding operations into Europe to meet rising demand from local software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 companies for Web application delivery services. In addition, OpSource will be providing European application delivery services for its U.S.-based customers from its U.K. operations center.

Recent IDC studies on the ERP and CRM markets in western Europe forecast high double-digit growth rates for on-demand applications. aAdoption of the on-demand model in Europe has been a few years behind the U.S. despite high broadband penetration in Europe,a said Bo Lykkegaard, program manager, European enterprise applications, IDC. aThe current gap between on-demand adoption in the U.S. and western Europe is expected to narrow during the 2007-2011 period implying very high European growth rates. In the CRM market, IDC expects on-demand CRM applications to make up almost half of the net market growth of the entire CRM market in Europe during the next five years.aA More here

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ThinkFreeas Portable Edition is a clone of MS Office 2003 and has the same features of their online component (www.thinkfree.com), but you guessed itait works offline making it great for using it on a long flight or from your friendas or family members computer when you away from your home or office. You can store your docs to the U3 drive or your hard drive, plus you can edit MS Office docs in ThinkFree as well (and visa versa). For more features click here

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Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, today announced that it has Software as a Service (SaaS)-enabled its ProgressA(R) ApamaA(R) Algorithmic Trading Platform. Apama maximises the use of SaaS through: (1) its rich, graphical, web-based dashboards; (2) a new API that allows trading scenarios to be initiated and monitored from remote locations; and (3) its native ability to rapidly create client-specific white box trading algorithms. More here

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A discussion with Chris Smith, Vice President of Marketing with Alert Logic. Chris and Peter Schooff, Security Editor,ebizQ.net discuss the current state of security, Alert Logicas Security as a Service -- how it works, who it works best for, and how it would work against the Storm Worm -- and we also delve into compliance, and how Alert Logic is equipped to deal with the newest attack vectors expected with Web 2.0. More here

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

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Most of the start-up application vendors are selecting SaaS [Software as a Service] as their primary model, and increasingly as their sole model for delivering applicaA-tions.a

At least thatas what Dave Mitchell, director of software-as-a-service strategy for IBM, told me for a recent article I published in Database Trends & Applications. (The article is summarized here at my DBTA aEye on the Enterprisea blog.)

SaaS rules. A related survey, which I conducted for Unisphere Research in conjunction with the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), confirms that interest in the SaaS approach is running high among corporate end-users. The survey of 576 companies found that a sizable segment of enterprises are takA-ing advantage of, or are aware of, SaaS or on-demand software. About two out of five respondents, 39 percent, were already using SaaS applications, and another nine percent were considering adoption of SaaS-based solutions withA-in a yearas time. Those that already run on-demand or SaaS solutions reported that they were seeing benefits in terms of cost savings and skills availability. More from FastForward

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BT Business, in partnership with Microsoft, is bringing together specialist software developers and small business customers with the launch of the BT Applications Marketplace. The Marketplace is designed for companies that have developed business-focused hosted applications that are stable, supported and ready for market. It enables Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to publish and promote their software to small businesses via the dedicated Applications Marketplace web site, a part of BT Tradespace. Visit the tradespace here

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Read MAHDI ABDULRAZAK interview on porting Open Office to GravityZoo:

FOSSaaS (Free Open Source Software as a Service) OpenOffice.org will not only show that using Software as a Service can be desktop alike experience, it will also provide an entire suite of productivity tools. If OpenOffice.org can become a FOSSaaS showcase triggering the FOSS community to start moving towards a SaaS proposition, then Google Apps should start to worry.

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The demand for software as a service continues to increase as small and large businesses alike are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the lengthy times and costs associated with deploying traditional software.

However, the only way for SaaS providers to succeed as a viable alternative to traditional desktop applications is to ensure they deliver reliable performance and scale of their services.

Content delivery network operator Akamai Technologies (akamai.com) offers a Web application acceleration solution for secure and reliable application acceleration that enables SaaS providers to deliver services to any enterprise regardless of their size and geographic distribution. The solution also enables enterprises to reduce expensive operating costs related to IT build-out and performance-related service complaints.
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Modelled in part on successful SaaS (software as a service) ventures like Salesforce.com, A1S will mark a major change to SAP's business model of selling software that customers run in-house, paying an initial licence fee and ongoing maintenance.

Also like Salesforce.com, A1S will allow developers to build applications that bring additional functionality to the platform. The package will present around 2500 interfaces, implemented using a service oriented architecture (SOA). More here

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Pervasive Software(R) Inc. , a global value leader in embeddable data management and integration software, today announced Metamorphosis 7.0, its seventh Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Systems Integrator (SI), Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) vendor and Business Service Provider (BSP) executive summit, will be held May 3-4, 2007 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, Calif. Metamorphosis 7.0 offers a compendium of integration best practices and real- world experiences, including hands-on knowledge of complex integrations between SaaS and on-premises applications. The ISVs, SIs, BSPs and SaaS vendors presenting come from a wide variety of industries, such as healthcare and financial services, to educate one another on successful business and technology strategies that drive high ROI and rapid results for customers leveraging Pervasive's agile, embeddable integration. More here

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Via ECM Connection: Glovia Services Inc., a subsidiary of Glovia International Inc. and Fujitsu, believed to be the world's third largest IT services provider, reports that the company has experienced a steady rise i n acce ptance of the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This increasing popularity of SaaS ERP is especially prevalent among smaller, growth-oriented manufacturing companies. With the launch of its GSInnovate Solution six months ago, Glovia Services was an early-market innovator, with its completely web-based ERP application suite designed specifically for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Until then, the SaaS delivery model had been limited More here

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Software as a Service 2.0
Tuesday, April 24th
10AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT

Click on the following link to register for this Webcast, brought to you by WebEx and InfoWorld:
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A Iron Mountain a information protection and storage services company, today announced the general availability of SaaSProtect Escrow Service(TM) to safeguard Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, the data that runs those applications, and the associated customer data. SaaSProtect Escrow Service protects the subscribers of SaaS applications in the event of problems with the SaaS provider, significant outages, or other service interruptions. It also gives SaaS providers a way to build trust with their customers. Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain and the founder of the technology escrow industry, is the first company to combine automated data backup and rapid recovery with technology escrow for a complete SaaS protection solution.

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Symantec Introduces Security as a ServiceVia ebizQ: In a welcome shift, Symantec today announced that they will begin the beta launch of the Symantec Protection Network, which is to provide affordable security to small and medium sized businesses.

Symantecas first offering will be an Online Backup Service, which will provide a cost-effective and reliable back-up service for business-critical data, all from the convenience of a web browser. This service will assist with one of the most pressing problems smaller companies face today a disaster recovery. More here

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Lumen Software, a leading provider of commercial open source Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and portal solutions, today announced its flagship platform, Lumenation, and the Lumenation Software Development Kit (SDK), are available immediately for free download. The products give PHP and AJAX developers a way to rapidly build, deploy, manage, and sell SaaS applications.Lumen's SaaS platform is in use by more than 200 commercial customers with over 150,000 users of on-demand applications. Lumen's focus on the world's 5 million PHP developers validates the work of industry pioneers SugarCRM, developers of a large CRM application written in PHP, and Zend, creators of the world's most popular PHP application platform. Lumenation is the industry's first PHP platform to focus on SaaS developers, making PHP an effective alternative to proprietary SaaS development platforms such as Saleforce's AppSpace and Microsoft's Live Core.

"Lumenation is a superior alternative to proprietary SaaS development languages because the product's flexibility and openness make development of web-based on-demand applications quick and inexpensive," said Doug Clark, Managing Partner at RDClark Associates, a Kansas City based independent systems integrator. "Lumenation is easy to customize for people with very basic programming skills. I can easily make a profit for my business by selling commercial Lumenation applications and customization services to smaller sized companies or workgroups within larger organizations."

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Via cbronline.com: Software-as-a-Service is tipped to be one of the biggest trends to hit the technology sector in 2007, but its rise is being met with mixed emotions in the IT services community.

On the one hand, co-location companies, managed services providers, systems integrators, and consultants all sense an opportunity to help the independent software vendors build the data center and hosting infrastructure they need to deliver their applications through a web-based services model, as well as advize them on their pricing, billing, and go-to-market strategies.

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