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.

Now that computing power has become dirt cheap and Internet usage ubiquitous, software developers are racing to put cutting-edge business apps into the hands of small firms in ways that could give a lift to the economic recovery. The trend has grabbed the attention of the tech giants, with Microsoft and IBM hustling to prepare hosted services.

Most small-business owners don't realize this yet, but a mother lode of technology that can free precious cash and manpower is available to them as in no other time in history.

Small firms typically buy basic clerical and accounting software in shrink-wrap boxes and run them on a company computer. The owner, or a harried employee, invariably gets pressed into service as resident tech expert.

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."

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OpSource CEO To Be Featured Speaker At Cloud Computing Expo

Santa Clara, Calif.—April 15, 2010—OpSource™, the leader in enterprise cloud and Software-as-a-Service hosting, today announced that CEO Treb Ryan will be a featured speaker at Cloud Computing Expo, to be held in New York City April 19-21. Ryan will speak about “Enterprise Cloud: More than A Myth” on Monday, April 19, from 5:30-6:15 p.m. ET.

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:

Many payment processing professionals have been debating the effectiveness and ROI of new security technology such as tokenization and encryption, yet one solution that seems to hold particular promise is Software-as-a-Service-based tokenization, said one expert.

Larry Wine, a payment processing security expert, wrote in an article for Computerworld that SaaS-based tokenization holds a good deal of promise for merchants looking to improve their PCI compliance and overall security. "By eliminating the storage of cardholder data, merchants realize a multitude of financial, operational and security advantages," he wrote. "A tokenization solution requires minimal up-front capital expenditure, if any. And it saves on the back end, too, by preventing costly breaches. If thieves know you don't have any valuable data they have no reason to break into your systems."

Wine also added that even if a hacker did manage to gain access to the data, the breach would be "extremely limited" because of the tokenization.
The PCI Security Standards Council is currently in the process of reviewing security technologies such as tokenization and encryption, evaluating the extent to which they will be included in the next version of the PCI DSS due out in October.

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?