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Business Application News & Discussion

Tags >> All About The Cloud
May 26
2011

A few words from today's 'Next Generation in Cloud' session

Posted by: Eli Lloyd

Eli Lloyd

Consumers now more than ever expect ubiquitous access to information.  If there’s a singular takeaway from the ‘Next Generation in Cloud’ session hosted by Phil Wainewright at SIIA’s All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco, then that is it.

Phil asked the question in so many words, how do you educate people to use your products?

Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale shared his perspective,
“We’ve focused on trying to provide content of value in one or another forms.  It’s stating the obvious that if you have a SaaS offering, your customers are on the web, so you are offering the product on the web and that’s where you need to reach them.”  

He proclaimed, “The product really is the marketing”  

The point seemed to suggest that it is a good idea to give users exposure and educate them at the same time.  Using free trials or free offerings to get new users in the mix has a profound significance in delivering value, while allowing a risk-free surface impression of the product.  The conversation shifted onto the use of education tools like webinars. Mr. Crandell continued regarding this medium that the following rule should be in effect, ‘stay low on the salesy part, and high on the content part.’  He went on to share that using other tools like forums, knowledge bases and wikis have proven to also bring ‘content of value’

-some other good stuff from GoodData:

CEO of GoodData, Roman Stanek summarized the state of innovation this way. He indicated it used to be innovative companies had innovative IT people bringing innovation to companies and now its all about the innovative consumers themselves.  He also said in reference to their philosophy, “we don’t just deliver bits and bytes, we deliver the whole experience.”

May 24
2011

5 Thought Leaders You Should Connect With At The All About The Cloud Conference

Posted by: Matt Childs

Matt Childs

Here's a list of 5 thought leaders we feel you should connect with at the All About The Cloud conference this week in San Francisco. The rankings are in no particular order.

1. Treb Ryan

 

Treb Ryan from OpSource
Since 1996, Mr. Ryan has been instrumental in defining and creating services organizations that improve the quality and reliability of the technology infrastructures businesses depend on for communications and commerce. He is currently considered one of the leading thinkers in SaaS and sits on the Software Executive Board at the SIIA.

2. Rick Nucci

Rick Nucci from Boomi
Rick is the Founder and CTO of Boomi where he is responsible for product management and engineering. He is considered an industry expert on SaaS & Cloud integration , multi-tenant architecture, and API design and best practices. Boomi has a patent pending for Rick’s innovative Atom technology that powers Boomi AtomSphere, the company’s software-as-a-service offering. In his role at Boomi, Rick is constantly engaged with customers and partners to ensure alignment between business needs and Boomi’s product strategy.

Mar 02
2011

Letter from the CEO: Introducing Protoshare 5

Posted by: Andrea Fidel

Andrea Fidel

ProtoShare 5 is a huge milestone for us. We've worked on it for about 8 months--completed two releases of 3.9 in the meantime--and put in a huge amount of effort making sure we did things right.

I love Software-as-a-Service. We use Salesforce, Google Docs, BaseCamp and, of course, ProtoShare. Being able to easily share work and collaborate with colleagues is a revolutionary improvement to me. And yet, SaaS can be frustrating. As much as I love Salesforce, it sometimes drives me crazy waiting for pages to load. I've also noticed that the more I use it, the more those delays bother me. When I was learning the app, my mind was so busy absorbing information, that the short waits for pages were more of a relief than a problem. But now that I know what I want and where to get it, every extra click, and every extra page load is frustrating.

During the last 18 months, something else has been happening in technology that is monumental for SaaS companies. The browser wars are on again, and one major point of competition is significantly accelerated JavaScript engines. This has been great for ProtoShare, as we've seen our speeds increase through browser upgrades alone. But we also realized that we weren't doing everything we could to leverage these advances.

Jul 22
2010

"Cloud Washed" SaaS out of control! [Video]

Posted by: Matt Childs

Matt Childs

A blog post from Cloud Integration provider Boomi's co-founder Rick Nucci on this topic came across the tweet stream this morning and it really hit home.

Here's what Rick had to say about it:

The 80/20 Paradox: Remembering a core value of SaaS...

It is surprising to still see articles like this where people question the fundamentals of SaaS, I mean even Lawson is now talking about a cloud edition, despite their CEO publicly proclaiming SaaS's death by August 2010 a few years back.  But what Lawson and others are doing, known as "cloud washing", helps me understand why people question the value of SaaS.

May 14
2010

All About The Cloud: Cloud Computing Creates New Solution Provider Paradigm

Posted by: Jennifer York

Jennifer York
Cloud computing changes the way the channel attacks the market and is “not something for the faint of heart.”

But the cloud creates four distinct flavors of solution providers that put their own spin on cloud and SaaS models. And the market is ripe for all four types of cloud solution providers to take advantage of to make money.

“I think we all understand the cloud is very cool,” said Treb Ryan, CEO of cloud provider OpSource in his keynote address Wednesday at the All About The Cloud conference in San Francisco. Ryan said the cloud is cheap, fast, delivers flexibility, while offering interfaces that unlock new computing capabilities.

“The cloud is completely self-service,” he said. “It’s not something for the fiat of heart. It’s not something you can do easily.”