It’s only a short while since Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle compared the IT industry with the fashion game. At the time, his analogy between cloud, saas and Chanel: ‘Last year it was Fuchsia, this year it’s Puce‘ drew plenty of laughter and understandably so. But then it is not so long ago that Mr Ellison was engaging in his own hyperbole around SaaS. This from BusinessWeek August 2003:
What technologies are you excited about now? We are the leader in bio-informatics, and a lot of things there are exciting. Sure, Wi-Fi, even 3G, is fairly cool, albeit expensive. But the thing I’m most interested in is software as a service. That idea that every customer who wants to do accounting on computers, or every customer who wants to do inventory, or manufacturing, has to figure out what computer to buy, what operating system to buy, what Cisco router and switch to buy, what database to buy, is just nonsense.
That was his entree to a pitch for what today is NetSuite. Cleverly done. Fast forward to 2007 where, in a number of statements, Ellison and Charles Phillips, Oracle president both seemed to poo-poo the idea of SaaS (err…now cloud.) Mr Phillips as reported by Phil Wainewright:
Meeting a growing demand from companies of all sizes for software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) tools that are easy to use, SAP AG today announced the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand solution. Targeted at casual BI users currently underserved by products on the market, the solution will deliver a complete BI toolset in one flexible offering. Its ease-of-use also will allow them to be up and running with no prior experience or training. With SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, business users will be able to access and visually navigate data from any source using SAP® BusinessObjects™ Explorer software. Even casual users can then combine that data in just a few clicks, and follow a guided path that walks them through reporting and analysis. The solution will have scalable pricing models based on business need, allowing companies to easily and cost-effectively scale as required.
Pixily's Online Document Management and Document Scanning Service is Now OfficeDrop
On February 20th, the document scanning and online document management service previously called Pixily changed its name to OfficeDrop. The new name is intended to better explain the company’s services and be much easier for customers to remember and spell.
“We loved the name Pixily, but we believe that OfficeDrop will help customers better understand our company’s value proposition and services,” said Prasad Thammineni, co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. “Over the past 18 months small businesses and home offices have embraced our service. Our new name will better reflect our commitment to helping customers manage their paper and digital files,” he added.
The company undertook an extensive process to find a new name. This process included brainstorming, crowd-sourcing, conversations with customers and analysis of over one hundred potential names. “I would like to personally thank all of our customers who took surveys and who spoke with us during this process. Your input and support was very helpful,” said Mr. Thammineni. Mr. Thammineni discusses the name change on the company’s blog, http://blog.officedrop.com/blog/2010/02/20/pixily-is-now-officedrop/.
Although the company is now rebranded as OfficeDrop, the management, staff, and ownership are remaining the same. All customer procedures and security practices will also stay the same, and the service customers came to enjoy under the name Pixily will be no different as OfficeDrop.
On February 20th, the document scanning and online document management service previously called Pixily changed its name to OfficeDrop. The new name is intended to better explain the company’s services and be much easier for customers to remember and spell.
“We loved the name Pixily, but we believe that OfficeDrop will help customers better understand our company’s value proposition and services,” said Prasad Thammineni, co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. “Over the past 18 months small businesses and home offices have embraced our service. Our new name will better reflect our commitment to helping customers manage their paper and digital files,” he added.
The company undertook an extensive process to find a new name. This process included brainstorming, crowd-sourcing, conversations with customers and analysis of over one hundred potential names. “I would like to personally thank all of our customers who took surveys and who spoke with us during this process. Your input and support was very helpful,” said Mr. Thammineni. Mr. Thammineni discusses the name change on the company’s blog, http://blog.officedrop.com/blog/2010/02/20/pixily-is-now-officedrop/.
Although the company is now rebranded as OfficeDrop, the management, staff, and ownership are remaining the same. All customer procedures and security practices will also stay the same, and the service customers came to enjoy under the name Pixily will be no different as OfficeDrop.
On February 20th, the document scanning and online document management service previously called Pixily changed its name to OfficeDrop. The new name is intended to better explain the company’s services and be much easier for customers to remember and spell.
“We loved the name Pixily, but we believe that OfficeDrop will help customers better understand our company’s value proposition and services,” said Prasad Thammineni, co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. “Over the past 18 months small businesses and home offices have embraced our service. Our new name will better reflect our commitment to helping customers manage their paper and digital files,” he added.
The company undertook an extensive process to find a new name. This process included brainstorming, crowd-sourcing, conversations with customers and analysis of over one hundred potential names. “I would like to personally thank all of our customers who took surveys and who spoke with us during this process. Your input and support was very helpful,” said Mr. Thammineni. Mr. Thammineni discusses the name change on the company’s blog, http://blog.officedrop.com/blog/2010/02/20/pixily-is-now-officedrop/.
Although the company is now rebranded as OfficeDrop, the management, staff, and ownership are remaining the same. All customer procedures and security practices will also stay the same, and the service customers came to enjoy under the name Pixily will be no different as OfficeDrop.
About OfficeDrop
OfficeDrop is a web-based document management and document scanning service that helps small businesses manage both paper and digital documents. OfficeDrop acts like a search engine for paper that quickly organizes paper and electronic materials online so information can be found in an instant, whenever and wherever it is needed. The service provides affordable, on-demand document management and mail-in and bulk document scanning services that help businesses save time and money, and enables them to be more environmentally friendly by reducing paper use. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, OfficeDrop was founded in 2007 and has won awards such as AlwaysOn Global 250 and MITX Technology Awards. For more information, visit http://www.officedrop.com/.
Companies looking for ways to save on long-term costs often consider cloud services, specifically software as a service. SaaS offers creative ways to address how companies use technology, which lets them focus on what matters most:their core business objectives. For IT organizations that deal with complex, expensive maintenance chores, the SaaS model promises to ease the burden and reduce costs and complexity.
Although SaaS sounds like an ideal technology solution, it is not a cure-all for everything that ails IT, and it doesn’t always make a significant impact on long-term costs and resource use.
That’s why it’s important for companies to consider a wide range of variables when determining what the cost savings from using SaaS might be, including hardware, storage and management. At Avanade, we’ve developed a cost-modeling tool that uses more than 120 real-world variables to measure the true impact of one enterprise SaaS offering—Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)—on capital expenses, operating costs, energy use and carbon footprint.
When the economy takes a downward turn, company IT budgets are usually one of the first casualties. This is the case with the current recession, as evidenced by an October 2008 CIO Magazine survey in which 40 percent of 234 IT chiefs surveyed said they are cutting spending, essentially freezing new IT initiatives, if not scrapping them altogether.
However, technology is a critical element of business, and despite the current economic climate, the need for reliable IT remains the same—especially when it comes to IT Maintenance or fundamental business applications such as email or customer relationship management (CRM). As companies across all industries face tough decisions about where to put their limited funds, here are three key reasons why the hosted or “software as a service” (SaaS) model makes a great deal of sense.
Along with several of my colleagues, I’m a bit of a software-as-a-service (SAAS) fan. I see it holding distinct value in many markets and if much of the current tech writing is anything to go by, the world of on-premise is all but over. That’s a massive overstatement but even so, the SAAS vendors would have us believe the on-premise world as we know it is being swept aside. Grand statements but with the ring of truth in at least some segments of the IT market.
