Loraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge continues to cover the issue of SaaS integration and her latest post adds some additional perspective to the issue as well as references a thoughtful post from Dennis Hall over at Pervasive Software on it. He lays out how extended sales cycles, implementation delays, and the challenges of integrating to legacy applications are the common pain points suffered by SaaS application companies as they face the integration hurdle. As large enterprises embrace these on-demand applications and their usage becomes more ingrained in core operations, the integration question will have to be addressed.
Bringing on-demand to the client side
Interesting write-up on the notion of a SaaS client or a "serviced client" via Phil Wainewright at ZD Net. The line between pure on-demand and what takes place locally is blurry especially if you look at the capabilities of Adobe’s AIR announced this week or Microsoft’s Silverlight. Makes me think of my post last year on the cycles of computing – centralize, decentralize, centralize, decentralize. So what say ye Jim – ready to admit I may have a point here?
Update: More on this and Salesforce.com’s take on AIR here.
Looks like I didn’t make the cut for Seattle’s most influential entrepreneur bloggers
Oh well…there’s always next year. This is an interesting list put together by Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa over on the Seattle 2.0 blog. A few I already subscribe to plus a few new ones.
Integration on the mind
The folks over at Forrester Research recently released a new report entitled "The State Of Enterprise Software Adoption: 2007 To 2008." Here’s an article on it (thanks Michael) and a couple of interesting quotes related to the priority around application integration as well as moving to a business process focus:
"The No. 1 software priority for 2008 is improving integration between applications, cited by 33% of IT senior executives surveyed by Forrester."
"If we take all our survey data, we see people looking at integrating applications, people looking at upgrading packaged applications, people moving from a function to a business process perspective,"
What do you do when you must put capital to work?
Invest in an undersea cable system linking Japan to the US like Google! Six companies are pitching in $300MM for the project, so not much of a capital outlay. Maybe somebody had a deal quota or there are a whole lot of Powerpoint slides describing how adding bandwidth to the world will help sell more ads. Regardless, this is a pretty interesting data point on the continued interest in infrastructure shown by Google including the recent 700MHz spectrum auction.
Out of the ashes Iridium soars towards an IPO
Wow. Everything old is new again, just this time with maybe a valid business model? This story from Barron’s highlights how Iridium is planning an IPO in 2009. This is after Billions of dollars of investment (mostly from Motorola), being picked up for $25MM, and actually understanding the target market was being eroded by terrestrial cellular coverage. Oh..and that little bit about the phone being the size of a shoe box and not working indoors certainly didn’t help. For full disclosure, I worked on a handful of market studies for the then "hot" mobile satellite communications market in 97/98 while at Arthur Andersen and, although our forecast was also on the rosy side, we identified cellular erosion as a key threat and dispelled the myth of the village phone in our results. That is where I learned about teledensity.
"…the original Iridium business plan – to be a cellular replacement for consumers – was “a misguided proposition that Motorola created.”
Ouch. Although the plan to supply this to "business customers" sounds eerily familiar, at least there appears to be some focus on defined use cases in maritime, trucking, oil and gas, etc. And of course the Billions of dollars in investment capital has long since been written off so the hurdle is much lower at this point. I look forward to watching the progress.
Top 10 reasons people move to Seattle hatched from controversy
I thought this was worth sharing. Follow this link for a pretty good list of top reasons for people to move to Seattle. This comes to us via BINC Search an LA-based search firm that put this together to pitch folks on moving here. It is also on the tails of a slap fest between Michael Arrington of Techcrunch and Glenn Kelman of Redfin on why Seattle is better than Silicon Valley. I’m not so sure about that as the Valley is unique in a way that no other place can be and has a significant entrepreneurial "family tree" advantage on other cities. Either way it worked out well for both generating some traffic and buzz for their respective enterprises.
I came across it via Seattle Tech Startups. If you are in the Seattle area and interested in start-ups, you should sign up for the email distribution list. Over the past couple years I have seen some pretty interesting discussions from the basics of how to start a business to some really animated debates between members. Check it out.
The road ahead for SaaS ERP
I thought this article via SearchCIO-MidMarket was worth pointing out for a few reasons. First, it continues to reinforce the buzz about using on-demand delivery for enterprise software. In this case the granddaddy of them all – Enterprise Resource Planning. Second, it lays out a bit of skepticism both about the general rate of adoption as well as SAP’s bold forecast of 10k customers on their Business ByDesign offering by 2010.
A recent SearchCIO-Midmarket.com survey found that although 22% of CIOs plan to purchase an ERP system this year, only 9% of those plan on a SaaS product and 15% plan on a hosted product. A full 52% plan to use a traditional on-premise product and the rest selected "I don’t know."
And third, lays out some of the obstacles to that adoption (via Ray Wang of Forrester Research) including integration.
"…the downright dismissal of SaaS as an ERP option is because of concerns over integration, security, cost, performance and lack of customization to a business’ needs."
On the integration front, recent landscape activity includes ERP newbie Workday (founded by Peoplesoft founder David Duffield) acquiring integration on-demand company Cape Clear. While not a blockbuster acquistion by an industry giant, it does point to needing an answer to the integration question as an enterprise SaaS application company.
Applying social media to B2B marketing
Thought this was a great overview presentation of applying some new techniques and fresh perspectives to business marketing.
Competition for the next platform
Good article by Mark Hall of Computerworld taking a look at the platform strategies of both Google and Salesforce.com. I continue to believe we are seeing the natural evolution from a new delivery model for applications (SaaS) to one that will eventually be applied to every major category of IT. Local Seattle on-demand database company Blist just raised $6.5MM on their march to make databases easier to consume and use.
Venture Vice 