At the time when my recent “SaaSy Discussions” series was already being published, I had an update briefing and great discussion with Colleen Niven Smith, vice president of software-as-a-service (SaaS) initiatives at Progress Software. Smith and Progress Software’s findings on SaaS industry dynamics concur with my assertions that growth of SaaS-based offerings is expected to outpace traditional on-site enterprise applications business in the not-so-distant future.

Combined competitive, organizational, and technological factors are expected to fuel SaaS solution growth, and many industry analysts project the SaaS market to be in the range of USD$14 billion to USD$17 billion within the next three years. Indeed, as mentioned in my 2008 blog post on Progress Software’s SaaS forays, 20 percent of Progress Software’s independent software vendor (ISV) partners that leverage the Progress OpenEdge platform for SaaS applications saw their businesses grow by over 40 percent in 2008.

In addition, there has been a much higher market valuation lately of on-demand SaaS providers as compared to their on-premise-software peers. There are also more optimistic expectations about SaaS companies’ performances and long-term growth prospects as compared to traditional “perpetual license” application businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Bringing all product stakeholders in a tighter loop within the entire product life cycle is one of the main strategies of the product lifecycle management (PLM) methodology. Following this idea, letting the customers (those who pay for and/or use the product) get involved as early as possible in the product design and development phases provides many benefits, including: more ideas for innovation, less design rework, higher customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, and more.

Today, including customer inputs in the design process is not only a theory, but also an increasing requirement from PLM users. Based on statistics from the TEC PLM Evaluation Center, among 50 possible business objectives for implementing a PLM system, the option of “including customer input in the design process” changed its ranking from 28^th (in the year 2007) to 20^th (in the year 2008) (see figure 1). Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series outlined the trend of enterprise applications vendors’ attempts to win their users’ hearts and minds (as well as wallets) via more intuitive and appealing user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. What that means is that users can now more quickly obtain all of the relevant information they need in a personalized way, with drill-downs and other slick navigational Web 2.0 gadgets.

For users, personalized screens and forms provide immediate access to issues that require immediate action or reassurance that situations are under control. Such intuitive UI allows users to diagnose the most critical business situations they face and immediately drill into the source transactional systems to get the data they need and decide on appropriate actions.

The analysis then focused on Infor and its Open SOA framework, which is the enabling linchpin for the vendor’s delivery of next-generation interoperable value-adding solutions. About two years ago, Infor espoused its so-called “Three E’s” strategy (“Enrich, Extend & Evolve”) to deliver agile and adaptive software components on top of the Infor Open SOA platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, how time flies and how many things have happened in the market these days to distract a market observer! Namely, only over a year after my SaaSy Discusions (Part I) and SaaSy Discussions (Part Ia) blog series, some time has at last become available for more discussions on the intriguing topic of software as a service (SaaS).

The title of this SaaSy discussions series might be somewhat deceiving, since the question might no longer be whether to go for SaaS or the on-demand computing deployment mode, but rather how to go about it for both vendors and users. Indeed, the current tough economic situation certainly has something to do with making this “go on-demand” decision a bit easier for both software providers and users. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series revisited Agresso’s post-implementation agility capabilities as a major tenet for the vendor’s continued growth in a hostile and depressed environment. The continued organic growth has been complemented by in-house developments, acquisitions, and/or partnerships.

More important, however, is the issue of whether Agresso has become a legitimate force to replace larger (and better known) competitors’ installations. Read the rest of this entry »

Another buzzword (albeit not another three letter acronym [TLA]) that has slowly (or not) but surely crept into our collective mind is certainly Web 2.0. Although there have been some attempts at defining the term, such as at Wikipedia, ZDNet or TechTarget (and there are also some noble attempts of ZDNet bloggers, such as Richard MacManus or David Berlind), it is most likely that 10 different folks will provide 10 different interpretations (albeit most of these will revolve around mentioning wikis, blogs, AJAX, mashups, JavaScript, podcasts, social networking and so on).

Generally, I would venture to say any website that uses a little more interactive and dynamic technology (i.e. not just publishing “flat” HyperText Markup Language [HTML] pages) and supports some kind of online commerce, community, or other value-added activity that is enabled by the network would have Web 2.0 traits. But, is it still more buzzword than anything else, and is it being used to put “lipstick on a lot of pigs” even now?

Or, is Web 2.0 a genuine set of technologies that can even provide the “richness” of traditional desktop applications (read Microsoft Office) to the Web-based applications, without all the price and/or performance pitfalls/traps that are often associated with Office Business Applications (OBA)? At least we need to keep a close eye on how the next generation of office workers are using social networking sites/communities like Tagging, Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messenger (IM), etc., as they can give us a clue how effective collaboration should be driven into next generation of enterprise applications (of course, provided the security and privacy standards have been met). Read the rest of this entry »

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) issued a press release on its newly published Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. This license affects the modification and distribution of software oriented toward Web-based services.

The popular adoption of Web-based applications as an alternate to in-house software implementations has meant that free and open source software developed for web-based usage can be picked up by companies outside of the ones that originally developed the software, modify it, and foist it upon the world as a new business without necessarily contributing the modifications back to the project. That is a bone of contention for many. Read the rest of this entry »