CIO Insight recently published a slideshow about application adoption trends over the next year. According to a recent survey from SnapLogic, of which over 110 CIOs and other top execs took part, CIOs and other senior tech executives continue to pursue BI, analytics, productivity/collaboration, financial, sales and social media tools, as they strive to integrate IT with their organization’s strategic objectives.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

Aberdeen Research are one of the research firms that have been following the SaaS Business Intelligence trend for a while now. They recently published a paper called “SaaS Business Intelligence: Driving Agility through Self-Service“. The paper ultimately recognizes the fact that the increased adoption of SaaS in the business intelligence field validates that it is increasingly becoming a viable option for BI deployment in all types of organizations.

Instead of giving you a long-winded written summary of the report, we’ve decided to pick out some of the more interesting numbers!

While I was writing this post, I had the B52s (screaming) in the background. The DJ was playing one of their songs, they weren’t actually here in real life… although this wouldn’t have been unrealistic, seeing as during the opening Keynote of M.Benioff there were, amongst others, Neil Young and MC Hammer, who actually testified as being Salesforce users (Salesforce helped them during their tours, for example).

When Prince uses Bime to analyze the opportunity cost in banning the publishing of videos on Youtube… that will be the day 

2 days ago I stumbled across a great article by Derek Singletonat syscon.com.

The article, entitled “Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser“, discusses the new class of SaaS
(or cloud) application vendors and why they are racing ahead at great speed while the rest of the enterprise apps market ambles along with limited growth.

The author covers many of the common benefits of a SaaS solution, including multi-tenant architecture and the ability to be able to scale easily, the positive changes in which software is now evaluated and purchased (e.g. transparent pricing, free trials, flexible licensing etc.) and better UIs and UXs (user interfaces and user experiences).

Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the most rapidly evolving and changing industries. Here at Bime HQ we are observing a paradigm shift as users discard more traditional forms of BI for new players, more agile and more cost effective solutions such as Bime. We are seeing changing user habits whereby many users are turning to SaaS solutions for the lightweight infrastructure, flexibility and scalability. More generally, BI has now become a viable economic option for many more SMBs where it may not have been before, allowing small companies to unlock their large amounts of data!

Forrester Research are some of the best in the business for keeping check of this rapidly changing industry and providing market leading BI analysis and insight. They recently conducted a survey of BI vendors (in which we participated) and now they conducting asurvey of BI users in which you can express your expectations and your plans for implementing BI.

Forrester state the objective of the survey is “to help our clients understand business intelligence software vendor pricing and licensing differences, as well as attempt to see if there are some clear patterns in the total cost of ownership between different vendor products.”

We're happy to announce that our Spring 2011 Webinar Series kicks off on Thursday, April 21. This season we're covering hot issues, such as, how to sell digital content and avoid the 30% land grab that Apple and Facebook are taking from the pocketbooks of gaming and other digital content companies; ways to increase the lifetime of your subscribers; and optimizing your pricing and decide whether now is the right time to change pricing.  In addition to our CEO, digital innovator Gene Hoffman, we have two other insightful guest speakers that will share their strategies and best practices as digital industry insiders. This Webinar Series cover the following topics:

Selling Online Content Without Giving Up 30% to Apple and Facebook with Vindicia CEO, Gene Hoffman

Deloitte’s annual Technology Trends report examines the ever-evolving landscape of technology put to business use. Although it is written from the perspective of the CIO, it also informs business executives on exciting new possibilities to apply technology to address their most pressing business challenges. 

Read more here: Cloud Named a "Disruptive Deployment" in Deloitte's Technology Trends 2011 Report

Would you want a digital footprint from birth?

Remember when being “wired” as a kid meant knowing how to use a rotary phone to call granny? (Or that you snuck a snip of mom’s coffee?) Technology has hit warp speed and today’s tots are more wired than ever. New research reveals that a full 81 percent of children under the age of two in ten surveyed nations boast some sort online presence and 8 percent even have their own email address. All these tiny-sized digital footprints may seem cute now, but what happens when little Billy applies for a job and potty training pictures show up in his Google search?

For the original article click here

The Changing Landscape of Corporate IT

Two key business trends support a move toward an integrated central business shared service, according to the Corporate Executive Board

Here is a report from our friends from Bloomberg commenting on the ever-changing landscape of IT. The article points to these shifts as part of a larger investigation into the five-year outlook of corporate IT organization and management. Organizations that do not prepare for the shifts will struggle to exploit technology and will find themselves managing an inefficient IT function and an under-performing corporate center.

To read the full article - click here

Software as a Service (SaaS) presents a classic “disruptive innovation.” Of course, in 2010 that’s not new news.

What is remarkable is how closely the SaaS market’s evolution matches the definition of a disruptive technology that was described by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma (he later replaced the term with “disruptive innovation” in his subsequent book, The Innovator’s Solution). In fact, the SaaS dilemma that incumbent software vendors currently face is playing out almost page-for-page from Christensen’s books. As a result, we can use the disruptive innovation framework to gain insight into what’s to come in enterprise software.

After a decade of deriding SaaS technology as too simple, functionally incomplete and insecure, vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and thousands of incumbent “on-premise” software vendors are now embracing SaaS. It’s an awkward embrace – one that threatens to cannibalize existing revenue steams, divert resources and eat up profits.

Of course, the innovator’s dilemma doesn’t destroy every incumbent. These incumbent market leaders are powerful, resilient innovators themselves. But for armchair quarterbacks like us, this the next five years will present a fascinating game to watch.