The first part of this blog series described the opportunity for software as a service (SaaS) or on-demand enterprise applications, especially in the current difficult economic milieu. But before any vendor can embark on delivering a SaaS offering, it must understand several misconceptions about SaaS.

Part two then analyzed the first two of the top five SaaS assumptions that Gartner recently outlined in its research.  Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start this blog post with a huge disclaimer: I have no intentions of wilfully beating up on SAP whatsoever!

Sure, the enterprise applications titan has lately been embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit with archrival Oracle over improper use of support data through its TomorrowNow third-party support (recently discontinued) subsidiary.

As if this wasn’t enough, SAP is being sued again, and this time over an allegedly failed software implementation. Namely, in late March, Waste Management Inc. filed suit against SAP with claims of fraud (or gross over-promise, if one wants to sound a bit gentler here). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog post introduced the common software deployment models and Consona CRM’s approach in that regard. To the end of enabling Total Customer Management (TCM) via an adaptive CRM offering, Consona CRM is built with a superior core infrastructure (customer data model, BPM, BI, SOA) and a holistic, best-of-breed product portfolio.

Consona claims to be one of the market’s rare CRM offerings that is both operational and collaborative, with many years of a broad range of consulting, technical, and business process services that have created the related methodology and blueprint.

Consona CRM Portfolio

The vendor believes that it offers the best value for price in the market due to the extensive product’s flexibility and adaptability, ease of customization, configuration, integration and upgrades, and due to the depth of the product’s extensibility.

These capabilities come from the combination of Onyx Adaptive CRM (i.e., BPM, BI, SFA, customer service, customer data management and customer data integration [CDI]), KNOVA (i.e., self-service and knowledge management [KM]) and the partnership with Million Handshakes (part of Portrait Software) for marketing automation. Read the rest of this entry »

Much has been said and written lately, on TEC’s web site as well as on many other peer sites, about the on-demand deployment model, especially about multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS). The opinions there have ranged from an absolute infatuation with the “technology of the 22nd century” or so (thereby rendering the traditional on-premise model completely passe) to much more reserved and cautious stances.

My idea here is to start with a series of blog posts discussing the various quandaries about these subtle (or not) technology choices and nuances, and to also give many protagonists in the market a chance to voice their opinions too.

Today’s topic is sort of “Which model will win at the end of the day, if any?” In my opinion, co-existence of the two deployment models will continue for quite some time to come, since each has its advantages for certain situations. Anyone who thinks one model will dominate for every possible use of software is just not an enterprise software connoisseur, is not a serious person, or is just an aggressive salesperson. Read the rest of this entry »