Intuit has its eyes set on the software as a service (SaaS) market dominated by Salesforce.com, a move that will also take it into head on competition with Microsoft eventually.
Intuit announced a roadmap that boasted the Intuit Enterprise Suite, a set of on-demand applications that will link to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. “We want to have solutions that go significantly beyond accounting and bookkeeping,” said Angus Thomson, vice president and general manager of Intuit’s mid-market group, who added that the applications are being adapted to work with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions that will provide a More»

Labels: cloud computing, paas, saas

For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS).
There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first.

Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. More»

Labels: paas, platform as a service

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS clouds make it very easy and affordable to provision resources such as servers, connections, storage, and related tools necessary to build an application environment from scratch on-demand. IaaS clouds are the underlying infrastructure of PaaS and SaaS clouds. A common characteristic of IaaS clouds is that they are more complex to work with but with that complexity comes a high degree of flexibility. So, these are generally lower level services in the grand scheme of things; not in a derogatory sense of course. You’ll be dealing with virtual More»

Labels: cloud computing, iaas, paas, saas

McKinsey & Company published a report predicting the market size for Software as a Service (SaaS) will exceed $37B market over the next 5 years. In particular, the report described the need for Independent Software Vendors to SaaS-enable their products using special-purpose SaaS development tools. Matt Asay also wrote recently that the growth of the top 60 software companies is driven by SaaS.
McKinsey claims that traditional J2EE and .NET platforms are poorly suited to building SaaS applications. According to McKinsey, this opens More»

Labels: paas, platform as a service, saas, salesforce, software as a service