SaaS is all the rage these days. Cloud computing and SaaS are new paradigms and are one of the fastest growing segments on the web operations side. However, Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle has said that his company hasn’t participated in the software-as-a-service trend because there’s no money to be made there.
What Ellison is saying, essentially, is that SaaS stinks because customers would pay so much less to Oracle. There’s less consulting fees, integration fees, and no big up-front license fees. Ellison called subscription-based software “very interesting, More»

Labels: cloud computing, google, oracle, saas, salesforce, SAP

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

Google has befriended Salesforce.com and recruited the company to battle Microsoft. Salesforce’s customer relationship management software and Google’s suite of office productivity applications, which includes e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets programs will be integrated into a single software package that will be offered over the web.
The offering competes with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with the its Office suite. Google is seeking to displace Microsoft by offering a web based alternative.
Dave Girouard, Google’s Vice President said the product would have new features like letting users keep track of e-mail sent More»

Labels: frienemy, online services, salesforce, web applications

Google just announced the creation of an online marketplace for Google-related solutions released by 3rd parties. The site named “Google Solutions Marketplace” will organize 3rd party solutions built by using Google components. The aim of the site is to simplify match-making between the customers, products and professional services.
The Marketplace’s initial focus is to connect customers of communications and collaboration products like Google Apps and Enterprise search with 3rd parties that sell complementary products and services.
For users, the Marketplace has search, browse, and end-user ratings to make it easy to locate More»

Labels: online services, salesforce, Search and Marketplaces

Google gave the cloud computing initiative a major boost today by launching Google App Engine. Web developers can build and run their web applications on the Google infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.
The service is similar to Amazon Simple DB and SalesForce App Exchange where developers can online demand applications or SaaS applications. Google More»

Labels: Amazon, cloud computing, salesforce, web applications

It was another jam packed event at the Googleplex, with tonnes of great food, great companies and fantastic panel on “The Future of Online Platforms”. Before the speakers talked about the future, Ismail Ghalini, focused on the definition of the platform. Twenty years ago, we all understood what a platform is. It’s essentially an OS, and you had three options: MS-DOS if you want the large market, Mac OS if you’re edgy, and UNIX if you’re really technical. They all did pretty much the same thing, More»

Labels: appexchange, applications, Gdata, mashups, online services, salesforce