When you ask IT professionals if they use cloud computing or software-as-a-service, most start by saying "no". But if you ask some follow up questions, you will quickly find out about "that one application" that is a SaaS application.

In security, this effect is even more pronounced. Companies don't think they use security-as-a-service or "cloud" security. Yet, many do, in the form of messaging security: e-mail antispam and antivirus. This type of security outsourcing, where security is delivered as a service from the cloud and without on-premise hardware, is growing 12% year-on-year. It's becoming a great outsourcing option for companies that lack the skills or do not want to retain and maintain the skills in some security function.

Zuora is announcing a subscription billing model for cloud computing, called Z-Commerce for the Cloud.

Zuora’s cloud-based billings platform aims to alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions.

Symantec aims to help train partners to offer either on-premise or software as a service, saying SaaS will comprise 15 percent of its revenue within five years.

President and CEO Enrique Salem told media at the vendor's inaugural Asia Pacific and Japan Partner Engage conference partner programmes and enablement have been a key priority. He says the company's goal is to enable partners to participate in both delivery modes. He adds it will move more of its product portfolio to be offered as a service. It will also seek to boost partners' skills, he says.

"We're doing more to bring partners into SaaS and to face the specific issues they deal with in SaaS and help them learn new skills."

Sterling Commerce is introducing software-as-a-service versions of Sterling Order Management and Sterling Multi-Channel Selling. This means that the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite for managing the entire enquiry-to-cash process, is now available as SaaS.

Ken Ramoutar, vice president, product and industry marketing, said: “While Sterling Commerce has been offering cloud-based solutions for more than a decade, more and more customers are now seeing the business benefit of implementing a cloud computing strategy that helps them optimise capabilities while managing cost. Accordingly, we are expanding our offering to customers, giving them the broadest choice in how they define, deploy and extend our solutions to provide flexibility and the ability to quickly deliver ROI.”

A survey by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Sterling Commerce, found that 68 per cent of firms used on-premises systems exclusively for supply chain and/or integration while fewer than half of firms said that deployment model made their top five selection criteria.

If you are planning to invest and introduce a new Recruitment Process Automation system, it is not uncommon for you to get hassled about comparing features, advantages, quality, benefits, and prices. Immaterial of selection, your new software will play a major role in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and your Return on Investment (ROI).

How would you decide on the best recruitment software solution for your organization? In this article we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two renowned software deployment methods, which will assist you in taking the right decision on this critical subject.

Self-hosting Software Deployment:

SaaS software is much more dependent on being run by the numbers than conventional on-premises software because the expenses are front loaded and the costs are back loaded.  SAP learned this the hard way with its Business By Design product, for example.  If you run the numbers, there is a high degree of correlation between low-cost of delivering the service and high growth rates among public SaaS companies.  It isn’t hard to understand–every dollar spent delivering the service is a dollar that can’t be spent to find new customers or improve the service.

So how do you lower your cost to deliver a SaaS service?

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Article by Phil Wainewright

From the customer’s perspective, it’s all the same. If it’s provided over the Internet on a pay-for-usage basis, it’s a cloud service. Within the industry, we argue about definitions more than is good for us. Customers look in from the outside and see a much simpler array of choices.

Why is this important? It matters to how we market and support cloud services (of whatever ilk). Yesterday EuroCloud UK (disclosure: of which I’m chair) had a member meeting, hosted at SAP UK headquarters, that covered various aspects of the transition to SaaS for ISVs. From the title, you’d imagine it would have little content of relevance to raw cloud providers at the infrastructure-as-a-service layer. (One of our challenges in the early days of EuroCloud, whose founders are more from the SaaS side of things, is to make sure we bring the infrastructure players on board with us). But in fact, much of the discussion covered topics of equal interest at any level of the as-a-service stack: How to work with partners? How to compensate sales teams? What sort of contract to offer customers? How to reconcile paying for resources on a pay-per-use basis with a per-seat licence fee? What instrumentation and reporting of service levels should the provider’s infrastructure include?

Dell Corporation (Thailand) grasps the opportunity of virtualisation and cloud computing trend to pioneer launch its broad portfolio of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications through cloud-based services.

According to Anothai Wettayakorn, Dell Thailand managing director, technology has transformed from mainframe to mini computer, PC and client server, Internet to today's era of virtualisation and cloud computing where it's no longer an option, but is a must.

Citing Merrill Lynch, Anothai said cloud computing will triple by 2012, with current worldwide spending of around $42 billion, or 25 percent of overall IT spending, increasing to $95 billion in 2015. The growth of cloud computing in Thailand will coincide with the global trend.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.

Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.