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Today's cloud computing phenomenon is causing havoc among many legacy hardware and software vendors who worry that the increasingly competitive market is going to cannibalize and commoditize their traditional products and services. One company that may sit in an advantageous position is Dell. I've l...

Salesforce.com is on a buying binge as it attempts to build on its extraordinary sales momentum and broaden its market penetration within existing customer organizations and among new organizations. Since the end of last year, Salesforce.com has acquired five companies starting with Heroku and Etact...

When the Software as a Service idea emerged from the embers of the failed Application Service Provider model of the past, pioneers of the new generation of software solutions pointed to its multitenant architecture as the critical differentiator that would make it more scalable, economical and succe...

When the concept of "cloud computing" first began to gain attention within the technology industry, I have to admit that I was convinced that it was one of the worst terms ever created. What's harder to get your arms, or head, around than a cloud? Talk about an amorphous idea. Don't get me wrong. I ...

I'd like to take this space to elaborate on one of the predictions for 2011 I made last month. I suggested that community clouds aimed at specific vertical markets and supply chain relationships would become more prevalent, as various organizations recognized the value of sharing cloud resources and...

As the year winds to an end, it is incumbent on all industry pundits to make predictions about what they envision for the coming year. Since I'm often lumped into this category, I'm obliged to offer my views about how the world will evolve over the next 12 months from a cloud computing perspective. ...

As I reported in this space earlier this year, a growing number of IT professionals are putting aside their apprehensions about Software as a Service and cloud computing, and investigating how they can utilize these "on-demand" solutions to address their day-to-day IT management requirements. Now, a...

One of the commonly accepted myths of the SaaS market and the broader cloud computing environment is that it is inherently a high-transaction business. This view has been fostered by the rapid growth of many commodity-oriented SaaS solutions and public cloud services. However, just as the overall te...

A popular parlor game in the technology industry is predicting new market opportunities and forecasting how quickly they're going to flourish. Despite all the investments that have been made in trying to turn this pastime into a science, it is amazing how often the market research firms still get it...

Since its inception, the cloud computing industry has been the beneficiary of various outputs of the open source movement. The symbiotic relationship between these two forces has helped to transform the technology industry and continues to reshape the marketplace. In my view, the open source movemen...

One of the most vexing problems facing organizations for years has been knowledge management. In the past, the task of capturing, organizing and disseminating valuable information so it could be properly utilized by end-users and business executives was an herculean effort that produced limited resu...

A lot of folks look down their noses at the prospect of Facebook penetrating the corporate world in a meaningful fashion. In fact, many people believe that the IT community will do everything possible to resist this prospect because of the security, privacy and compliance issues surrounding the soci...

Whenever people debate the enterprise-readiness of cloud computing, the discussion usually centers on reliability, security, compliance and integration questions. However, underlying these important concerns is an even more fundamental issue that keeps most IT and business decision-makers up at nigh...

A year ago, I suggested that the Software as a Service and cloud computing industry was entering a new stage in which vendors would begin putting greater emphasis on expanding their sales channels to broaden the addressable market for their solutions. Anyone following the SaaS/cloud computing indu...

IT professionals should embrace SaaS and cloud computing because they deliver tangible, measurable business benefits to organizations of all sizes. IT departments are relieved of many of the hassles associated with implementing and administering traditional, on-premise software and supporting the ap...

No software company has been more threatened by the rapid growth of SaaS and the broader cloud computing phenomenon than Microsoft. After decades of dominating the technology industry, Microsoft isn't even the most important player in Seattle anymore. That honor goes to Amazon, which single-handedly...

SaaS and cloud vendors face some critical challenges in 2010: They must deliver strategic value, avoid competing on price alone, convince enterprises to move core business operations, and fend off escalating security threats, to name a few. However, the year also holds the promise of ripe opportunit...

Plenty of industry observers are already issuing their predictions for 2010, but I think it is worth taking a look back at the past year's events to see how quickly the Software as a Service and cloud computing marketplace is evolving. So, following are 10 events that I consider bellwethers of the r...

In a previous column, I described why many IT professionals within small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as in large-scale enterprises, are beginning to embrace Software as a Service, and why managed service providers can't afford to ignore SaaS. A recent industry event brought my previous obs...

One of the biggest challenges in today's rapidly evolving cloud computing market, if you're an aspiring vendor, is how to clearly differentiate your offerings in an increasingly competitive environment. This is especially difficult because of the Web's knack for sucking the value out of everything i...