McKinsey 2008 Enterprise Software Survey

McKinsey released a new Enterprise Software Survey. You can get this survey from : McKinsey Survey. This has great info about trends in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

IT Changes discussed in Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007

Gartner believes that there are five major discontinuities that will force IT organizations to change dramatically. The five discontinuities include:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Web 2.0
3. Global-class computing
4. Consumerization of IT
5. Open-source software.
   

"The five major discontinuities have the potential to completely disrupt vendor business models, user deployment models, whole market segments and key user and vendor brand assumptions," said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "These emerging discontinuities reinforce each other, and their combined effect will prove far stronger than each individual trend. IT managers who oversee applications must incorporate these trends into their long-term planning."

Opsource closes $15M funding

Opsource closes $15M funding. Great news for Opsource and its partners.

http://sanjose.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=122460&type_news=latest

SaaS Capital

Finally I got time to catch up on all the blog posts. I saw this interesting post from Phil Wainewright on SaaS Capital :
http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=336

SaaS enables the new pay-as-yo-go business model. But this is not always a great news for software vendors. It takes the new software projects a longer time to break-even and puts higher cash requirements on folks raising capital.

There is this new VC company called http://www.saas-capital.com/ that give debt financing to companys based on their on-demand software contracts. Great Idea.

IBM I-WANT-CONTROL Advertisements

Did you all get to see the new IBM advertisements with the theme 'I Want Control"? Some of the advertisements are pretty funny.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/iwantcontrol/

Their main message is around how IBM can help IT departments regain control of IT Operations. IBM traditionally is a big player in IT outsourcing, where they manage end-to-end IT for big corporations. With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) becoming a popular model even for big enterprises, it will be interesting to see how their IT outsourcing strategy will evolve.

On another note on how IT departments can make or break a marketing message; go through the following links:
Go to:

1. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/iwantcontrol/
2. Click on "Read all the Comments". This is below the "CTRL+ALT+DEL" message at the center of their page.
3. Click on any "i" to go to a comment.
4. You will find comments like "Our network admin informed me....."
5. At the bottom of the comment you will find a link to "Reply to or read all posts"
6. Click on that.........
7. Unfortunately this leads to a "page not found error!"

Is this a IT issue that could be detected before deployment?

New Venture

As most of you already know, I am now working for a small software startup eVapt Inc. in Austin TX. We are working on developing Operational Support Systems (OSS) / Business Support Systems (BSS) for the Software-as-a-Service provider market. For more info, look at http://www.evapt.com