VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced its intention to acquire Digital Fuel, a leader in IT Financial and Business Management SaaS solutions. Digital Fuel's solutions enable companies to plan, manage and optimize cost and value in the emerging world of cloud based dynamic IT. With this acquisition, VMware will enable enterprises to more effectively manage the business impact of IT environments, centralizing visibility of IT costs, integrating financial discipline into IT decisions, and delivering meaningful measurements and reports that drive engagement with the CFO and line of business stakeholders. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. The acquisition is scheduled to close in July 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

Digital Fuel's portfolio for IT costing, budget, chargeback, cost optimization, vendor management and SLA management integrates with a broad set of systems, applications, data sources and third-party management technologies to deliver comprehensive, unified financial analysis. These offerings, offered both on-premise within an enterprise datacenter and delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS) models for maximum flexibility, will complement VMware's portfolio of management solutions including vCenter Chargeback and Service Manager. The acquisition of Digital Fuel will enable VMware's enterprise customers to:

Council CIO John Holley says that the adoption of Objective Corporation's community and collaboration applications was fast, with only two weeks from purchase to go-live, largely because there were no infrastructure costs or special skills required.

“We were spending a lot with publication houses -- from $10,000 to $50,000 at a time -- so the system paid for itself in under a year,” Holley says.

The applications, uCreate and uEngage provide a platform for producing and disseminating information to constituents.

Pennsylvania based cable and broadband service provider Blue Ridge Communications has reportedly deployed TOA Technologies’ Software-as-a-Service solution to manage and optimize its field workforce to reduce operations costs and improve customer service.

Appian, the global innovator in enterprise and on-demand business process management (BPM) technology, today announced that Appian Anywhere leads the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BPM market both is features/functionality and in enterprise -- and SMB-level adoption.

As demand continued to rise through 2009 for the cost reduction and agility benefits of the Appian BPM Suite, more and more companies opted for the Appian Anywhere low-cost, low-risk “BPM in the Cloud” subscription delivery model.

According to the September 2009 “SaaS BPM: Silencing the Skeptics” report from Ovum/Datamonitor, “The ongoing recession has helped the cause of both SaaS and BPM. The SaaS model has endeared itself to customers that are wary of upfront capital investments, while BPM has helped businesses adapt quickly to the massive changes in the external environment... Datamonitor believes that this is the right time for BPM to take its SaaS strategy mainstream.”