Saving Energy with Online Service and Software

Saving Energy with Online Service and Software

Reduce your hardware costs

The Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model offers a two punch combination to carbon dioxide emission reductions. The first punch is purely from the economies of scale realized from centralized processing and a shared services model. Instead of thousands of customers individually operating thousands of servers and the power hungry facilities to support those servers, the SaaS multi-tenant model centralizes data center operations to use less equipment and a small fraction of the supporting facility costs. When you recognize that supporting facility costs outweigh the cost and emissions production of the servers and related computer equipment you get a handle on how material this savings really is.

Achieve Data Center Performance

The second punch to carbon dioxide emissions is born by the data center operator via thoughtful decision making and a desire for improved power consumption, cooling efficiency and equipment density.

RapidiOnline’s hosted services for businesses provide important steps in reducing business cost and contribute to a cleaner environment by using our central servers, helping the environment by using less power. Essentially we are eliminating the need for one data integration server at each customer location.

Reduce your paper with Web-Based Software Services

Web-Based Software services make turning paper-based business processes into fully automated data processes which are cost-effective, easy to use, sophisticated, and paperless technology without compromising data use, collection, or storage.

Online SaaS Solutions Make Sense

On demand Service at RapidiOnline offers a green IT perspective, to use less energy is efficient, environmentally thoughtful and economic. We would like to balance business requirements, reliable environment and energy ideas for improving your business processes.

Our Saas solutions are there to ensure your business data is equipped to make better business decisions using less paper, less waste and improved processes.

What can you do? ... to save energy and reduce carbon dioxide emission

• Perform your own internal investigation and demonstrate an explicit and vigorous management commitment.
• Solicit broad participation and encourage staff to identify and suggest practices that save energy.
• Create a plan backed with measurable goals for energy savings, power efficiency and carbon reduction.
• Update your procurement policies and practices to seek out and favor energy efficient vendors and solutions.
• Have IT management perform a baseline power utilization; be sure to measure power consumption for IT equipment and the data center infrastructure.
• If you don’t already, immediately begin routing the electric and utility bills to IT management and coordinate financial incentives among IT management, facilities management and possibly your CFO for future cost savings.
• Schedule periodic (I suggest quarterly) power consumption audits to verify monthly reporting and trend analysis.
• Create a program to recycle obsolete or discarded equipment and recycle technology-related consumables (e.g. paper and printer cartridges).
• Evaluate videoconferencing as a substitute for travel.
• Consider telecommuting where it makes sense.
• Consider replacing servers more than three years old with newer energy-efficient models. Also review the CPU performance-stepping technology which dynamically adjusts the processor energy consumption based on processor load.
• Minimize storage equipment by using SANs and other network attached storage hardware which consolidate storage space and save power.
• Push for multi-threaded software applications which take advantage of multicore-processor machines.
• Participate in an industry group or consortium in order to share knowledge and collaborate with other like minded professionals.

Green Ideas are good for the economy and your business.

by Beate about 19 hours ago

SaaS-based data quality and integration tools gaining momentum

SaaS-based data quality and integration tools gaining momentum

Cost and flexibility may be trumping security concerns when it comes to Software as a Service (SaaS) and corporate data, as the on-demand deployment model is beginning to gain a foothold in the marketplace, according to Gartner Inc.

In particular, on-demand data integration and data quality software showed signs of breaking into the mainstream, with 28% of companies that responded to a recent Gartner survey indicating that they have deployed SaaS-based data integration tools, and 24%, SaaS-based data quality tools.

According to an accompanying Gartner report, the SaaS deployment model makes experimentation with emerging technologies, including data quality, “less risky and gives enterprises a head-start over competitors,” fueling adoption. For the survey, Gartner polled around 500 data managers in six countries.

SaaS-based, or on-demand, technologies are usually accessed over the Internet and require little in the way of on-site hardware support or long-term contracts. As companies increasingly turn to SaaS-based applications for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning functions, they are also looking to on-demand-style data quality and integration tools to populate them with data from in-house legacy systems.

The SaaS data integration business model is often aimed at cash-strapped small and midsized business that nonetheless have pressing data integration and analytics needs.

SaaS stands to gain in down economy

The current dismal economic climate could make SaaS-based data management software an even more inviting option for many companies, as they struggle to secure capital in tightening credit markets.

“The barrier to adopting SaaS alternatives is low, with typically reduced startup costs, no license investment and no hardware investment needed,” the report stated.

Overall, Gartner predicts that the SaaS-based software market, including data management technologies, will reach $19.3 billion by the end of 2011, up from $6.3 billion in 2006.

This doesn’t mean that traditional, on-premise data management technology deployments are on the way out, however. The survey found that most companies use a mix of on-premise, outsourced and SaaS-based technology to meet their data management needs, with 65% to 75% of respondents employing on-premise software.

Especially for large enterprises, on-premise software “will remain popular for a variety of reasons, including the need to build custom software and the need for greater data security in some environments,” the report said.

A Different way of doing data integration

Exiting Year 2008 with both on-premise and on-demand data integration

It has been a very exiting and “eventful” year for us. It seems like and according to several reports the SaaS based data integration model is steadily gaining attention in the marketplace , so we have been busy with further development on especially in our on demand product range. Furthermore we have been traveling the world to get the product out there.

We have been out there to meet up with you in person at two big events taking place both in Europe and the US. We started out in Europe with participation at Cebit 2008 – the annual IT Fair n Hannover/Germany. After that we went to Paris to meet up with existing and potential partners at the annual Microsoft Dynamics NAV partner summit. As this was a great success we traveled to the USA in autumn in order to catch up with you again in Atlanta for the Directions US ‘08.

As it also is crucial to us speaking to partners and clients interested or specializing in SaaS solutions, we participated as attendees in the first Dreamforce Event – the biggest Salesforce.com event of the year – in London here in Europe.

As we believe in the SaaS deployment model beeing the way to go forward with in the future – especially in the down economy the world is facing right now, we were present at Dreamforce US ‘08 in San Francisco We were sponsoring a booth and it was great to see that the big interest in SaaS Data Integration. Hopefully there will be even more interest in the upcoming years.

We thank you all for your interest in our products and we are looking forward to working with you in the next year.

Read also SaaS-based data quality and integration tools gaining momentum

More Service Configuration…-

Hi

We have done another long avaited upgrade of the Service Configuration user interface – specifically the Transfer Edit capabilities.

Now there is auto-complete on all field names and table names in the Configuration. Please ensure that Design has been read (use the Read Design on the Configuration tab).

We will continue to invest time in the user interface so if you have any suggestions for new features that would make your life easier, then please contact me.

Thanks

Michael

Service Configuration…-

The Service Configuration area of RapidiOnline now opens in a new browser-window and the serviceid is now part of the URL.

This means that you have more space available to view and/or edit the Transfers etc. as we have removed the usual menu’s from the window.

This also means that you can work with several configurations (each one in a different browser-window) at the same time. The name of the configuration is in the title-bar, so that you can easely choose between your services.

I hope you like it !

Best Regards

Michael

MS Dynamics C5

Microsoft Dynamics C5

We are happy to announce that we now have full support for MS Dynamics C5.

C5 is very widespread used is Denmark and Norway/Sweden and to some extend also in England.

C5 can for example be integrated with MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 or with salesforce.com using RapidiOnline.

MS Dynamics CRM 4.0

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

We now have full support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

We support all three deployment models (OnPremise installation, partner hosted installation and CRM Online). The Online version (hosted by Microsoft) is only available in the USA for now.

New self-service portal for support

New Self-service portal for support

We now provide a new self-service portal for support on RapidiOnline.

You can find a link to the portal under the support tab.

If you are an existing customer, please ask our support for a login to the portal where you will be able to create Cases, follow the status of your cases and browse/search our Solutions catalog.

Looking forward to see you there.

Michael

New version of the Salesforce-Navision Integration

New version of the Salesforce-Navision Integration

We are happy to announce that a new version of the Salesforce-MS Dynamics NAV Integration is generally available. The new version is more complete than the previous one, and based on our experience with Salesforce-Navision Integrations so far.

The Integration contains the following:

- New Customers in Navision are automatically created in Salesforce as Accounts.

- New Accounts in Salesforce are automatically created in Navision as Customer (C/AL code/business logic is executed to validate data and set default values). NEW

- Updates to Customers in Navision are automatically transferred to the corresponding Salesforce Accounts.

- Updates to Salesforce Accounts are automatically transferred to the corresponding Navision Customer.

- Items in Navision are created and kept up-to-date as Products in Salesforce.

- Prices from Navision are created as a standard pricebook in Salesforce.

- Opportunities in Salesforce are automatically created as Sales Orders in Navision (C/AL code/business logic is executed to validate all data). NEW

- Booked Invoices from Navision are created as Sales History in Salesforce (an add-on application for Salesforce is available from us to contain these invoices and make them visible under the corresponding Account) NEW

We now provide our Navision Application Server (NAS) Connector with each Salesforce-Navision Integration (in addition to the RapidiConnector). This makes it possible to have the best of two worlds: Using the C/Front to access data in Navision in an easy (no coding needed) and fast (top performance) way, and using our NAS connector for the Tasks where C/AL code needs to be executed.

Any of the above features, can of cause be disabled, if you don’t need them !

And we/you can easely add field mappings or create new mappings for existing or custom objects.

We can get you started with a Trial version in just 1-2 hours in a web-session. Then you can see for yourself what we can do and how easy it is.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Michael

Configuration Application Access

Access to the RapidiOnline Configuration Application

We are happy to announce that the next level of access to the RapidiOnline Configuration Application is generally available. Before the configuration possibilities on RapidiOnline where limited to setting up access to the systems in use (for example access to the On-Premise MS Dynamics NAV, MS-SQL, MS RMS or to salesforce.com) and to modify the schedules when the defined transfers should run.

The final level of access now includes modifying the transfer definitions including field list and formulas etc. There is a copy transfer function, so that you can get started quickly by copying an existing transfer. In general all of the parameters on what should be transfered and what and how it should update the destination system can be changed.

This makes it possible for partners and customers to tailor the integration service to better suit their needs or to build entire new integrations. Before this service had to be delivered by the RapidiOnline team.

Although the RapidiOnline mainly has focused on the MS Dynamics NAV to salesforce.com integration, RapidiOnline actually supports a number of different systems and several other integrations are defined, for example an integration between MS Dynamics NAV and MS Dynamics RMS (Microsoft Retail Management System) that updates customer, product and price information in RMS from the central and provides the central Navision system with sales transactions in return. Also a pre-defined integration between MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 and MS Dynamics NAV is being build by one of our partners.

The RapidiOnline platform supports a number of different systems and we are seeking partners and customers with needs to integrate any of the following supported systems: MS Dynamics NAV, MS Dynamics AX, MS Dynamics XAL and C5, MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 and salesforce.com, MS-SQL, Oracle, DB2, iSeries, Lotus Notes, MySQL, PostGreSQL and NetSuite among others. Support for these products is not new – the support is allready build into the software that we use for the background transfer services and have been delivered successfully to many customers as OnPremise software by Data Backbone Software, Denmark (our sister subsidiary) for more than a decade.

Please contact us to hear more and to try out the configuration possibilities.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards

Michael Bock

Service Monitoring in RapidiOnline

Service Monitoring in RapidiOnline.

Hi

In the this weekend we released a new version of RapidiOnline where we have focused on implementing monitoring and test systems. We now have two independent systems in place:

The first system is used to test availability of each service running on RapidiOnline. This is done by sending a request from an external host to each service running on RapidiOnline (a service here is each customer specific integration service). The request asks the service to respond with some key information about availability, connected RapidiConnectors etc. The answer is evaluated and if there is any problem with the service, an email alert is sent to our support so that they can take actions to get the service running correctly again. Email addresses and request interval can be configured, but is usually set to each 5 minutes or less. All the test results are logged so that we can have statistics on each service uptime. As this monitoring service runs totally outside of the RapidiOnline hosting facilities, it monitors the general availability of RapidiOnline at the same time.

The second system is running on the RapidiOnline platform and checks each schedule defined on a specific service, in order to determine if the schedule was run without errors at the specified time. Schedules can be specified to run a specific transfer (for example sending changes to accounts from MS Dynamics NAV to salesforce.com) or a group of transfers. The schedules can be specified to run at specific intervals (for example each 2 hours or each 5 minutes) and furthermore you can specify after how long time of failure in a specific schedule, an email alert should be sent. Sending this email alert is done by this second system. Being able to set the failure interval individually for each schedule allows you to be alerted quickly if an important schedule is not running and allow other schedules that are less important some time to recover from errors by themselves.

The combination of the two systems above gives a complete monitoring of each customers integration service running on the RapidiOnline platform.

In this same update we also improved the logging facilities inside RapidiOnline so that now it is much easier to track down any errors using the log facility. The Log entries can now be viewed by schedule, by transfer or by transfer group allowing you to easily find the problem and take corrective actions.

Best Regards

Michael

Gaining Strategic Focus with Software as a Service

Gaining Strategic Focus with Software as a Service (SaaS)

If you haven’t encountered Software as a Service (SaaS) yet, you are sure to in the near future. A recent IDC forecast predicts that spending on SaaS will reach nearly $11 billion by 2009.

Increasing emphasis on IT alignment and governance as well as the convergence of software and services through the rise of SaaS are reshaping the IT environment to operate with a strategic focus.

The rise of software as a service (SaaS) or on demand solutions—is also transforming the IT landscape. Leading IT departments are leveraging the convergence of services and software to redeploy key IT people and outsource key IT operations to expert providers of those services. This helps shrink IT expenses, increase efficiencies and improve the reliability, scalability and security of IT systems. Most importantly, it helps IT departments focus their efforts and resources on technology initiatives that deliver strategic value.

Best practices when imp lementing software as a service

1. Identify the components, skills and knowledge critical to successful delivery of IT solutions to your business.
2. Ensure you retain the skills or add those needed to manage the vendor, the projects, and the service levels — not those required to manage technical resources.
3. Establish a governance process where you regularly review service level performance with the service provider, identify issues and problems, and put a value on and celebrate success.
4. Determine the root cause of shortfalls and problems. Be prepared to request changes from the service provider or in your own organization.
5. Map the benefits, improvements and success from the SaaS relationship to business performance improvement for your “customers.”
6. Use what you learn from correcting problems to avoid problems in the future. Make continuous improvement part of the relationship.

Keeping aligned

Today’s successful IT departments work to align their goals and strategies with those of their organization. They operate as disciplined businesses that deliver services to the business units in accordance with those goals. Alignment, best practices, and good governance are key to IT success. When done properly, leveraging the convergence of software and services can relieve IT departments from the tactical, technological headaches that used to take up most of their time, enabling them to focus on delivering strategic value to their organization. It can help IT departments consolidate, standardize and harness data and technology to deliver real strategic value and enhance their organization’s competitive advantage. And it can often help to provide them with the best practices that ensure success.

Source: “Shift from Tactical to Strategic Focus” http://go.techtarget.com/r/1581576/3662950

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed

Article published in DM Direct Newsletter-January 19, 2007 Issue By Ashish Nadkarni

Data migration is the process of migrating data from one location to another. It is not something new to the storage industry. Almost every IT organization has had to move data at some point or the other. There are different reasons for doing so: hardware gets obsolete and has to be upgraded, data gets bigger and cannot be handled by the array, the environment is being relocated, etc. As data becomes more complex and difficult to manage, the process of migrating data has taken on a life of its own. Consulting services organizations have made a business out of it. Data migration is no longer about knowing the technology, but about managing the process properly, in a manner that meets the requirements of your internal and external customers. Typical requirements include minimum downtime, (who likes downtime these days, anyway?) reconfiguration of any affected component, and the availability of resources and skills to adequately perform the migration. Whatever the reason may be, there are specific aspects of a data center move that need to be addressed to ensure success.

Before listing the specifics of what data migration entails, let us first define it in the context of data storage. Data migration is a one-time activity that is undertaken for a specific purpose. The purpose can vary from organization to organization, but it must justify the need to undertake the endeavor in the first place. Because any time you migrate data there is an element of risk to the business, if you find yourself migrating the same data all the time, you have other issues in the environment that warrant examination.

The second important point in any migration is that the type of data you are migrating influences what migration method you select. For example, if your database is being migrated using simple copy tools available to any user, and it is not shut down during the process, whatever you have copied may not be usable. The method must align with the data you are migrating.

What is a successful data migration? The ultimate goal is to get the job done with minimum impact to your environment.

Plan for success.

A data migration exercise, no matter how small it is, can have undesired consequences if not planned properly. No IT manager likes surprises, least of all being up at night worrying about data loss or unexpected downtime because of poor planning. Don’t cut corners – get a project manager involved . If your company does not have a project manager who is familiar data migration processes, look at bringing in a resource. Project managers with data migration expertise are out there. A project management expert should create a detailed project plan that includes tasks, subtasks timelines, roles, responsibilities and dependencies. All the parties involved should have an opportunity to voice their concerns (in a controlled manner) and key requirements are factored in while building the plan. A critical component of the project plan is also a well-planned test and back-out plan.

Get the experts.

While moving data may sound like any other IT project that can be handled internally, the reality is, it is not. This is especially true if the migration involves moving data from one physical resource to another or when you are moving it from one geographical location to another (i.e., a data center migration). Bringing in outsourced experts does not mean they replace the value that your internal resources bring to the table. Bringing in an outside resource that specializes in that technology allows your staff to focus on the day-to-day operational activities while the added, dedicated resource focuses on the details around the migration itself.

Know your objectives.

This may sound repetitive, but before you embark on a data migration project, you must be clear about the reasons you are crossing that bridge. Is it technical or purely financial? How much money do I have to spend on this project? What cost savings will the migration effort bring about? What sort of impact does the business experience when I do the migration? How much downtime can the business tolerate? Have I evaluated all my options before making the decision? A detailed analysis of all the reasons for the data migration, and their impact on the business, will drive you to the set of objectives to be applied to planning the process. Do not start looking at the technical options before you have completed this exercise. Do not even engage any third-party organization before you are clear about what the objectives are and what they will help you accomplish in the short, medium and long term.

Know your options.

There are many different ways to migrate data. There is no such thing as the right way or the wrong way. The method selected depends entirely on your requirements, such as downtime, resource availability and the amount of data you’re migrating. You don’t need to know every method in minute detail, but knowing the options will help you make an informed decision about how best to accomplish your objectives. If you are bringing in an outside resource to help you make the decision, keep in mind that while they may bring a fresh perspective, that resource may also prefer certain migration techniques if they are aligned with a storage vendor. In such cases, vendor-independent organizations may be the best suited to provide an unbiased analysis of your environment and the methods that are most appropriate to migrate your data. Also, keep in mind that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all data migration technique for all data types. The one-size-fits-all approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages is the ability to use the same consistent migration process across all platforms and applications. The disadvantages are the lack of flexibility to downtime and lack of customization. This approach may be best suited for large-scale migration efforts such as a data center move or an array-to-array migration, whereas other customized approaches will be preferred for small migrations, such as an application or database migration for a very specific purpose (like a server upgrade or platform migration).

Get an executive sponsor.

I am generally not into “marketing speak,” but having a senior member of management involved in a large-scale migration effort helps with visibility. It focuses the proper attention from all the internal groups, and priorities for all the individuals working on the project, internal or external. The executive sponsor assists during vendor escalations and facilitates quorum in the case of a difficult situation. He/she can also empower the project team to do the right thing by providing oversight during planning and execution.

Don’t be intimidated (take your time).

Yes, there are timelines and deadlines, but if success is what you are after, do not let anyone dictate timelines to you. This is especially true in situations where you have to move off some equipment because its lease is about to expire and the vendor is on your doorstep asking for their equipment. Get an extension on the lease so you don’t have to hurry up. A little money spent extending the lease is worth it, considering the amount of money your business may lose because of unexpected downtime or data loss. On the other hand, you have to be proactive in identifying potential data migration issues in your environment before they become “hot.” As part of your IT best practices, keep a record of leases, performance metrics and service level agreements (SLAs), which help you make a pre-emptive decision to move your data to a safer location before there’s a threat!

Now that we have looked at the soft side of data migration, let us examine the technology behind the mobility. One word of caution – technology is constantly changing, so what works best today may not be true tomorrow.

Online migration.

At the very center of the data migration and, to a large extent marketing hype from vendors, is the ability to do an online versus offline data migration. Online migration allows you to keep your applications online and running (in normal or slightly degraded operating conditions) while the migration is taking place. This is possible only if the technology used is capable of moving data in a manner transparent to the application accessing data. This happens when the technology operates at a level below the file system on which the application objects reside or if the application itself has the ability to move data to another location by “duplexing” its writes (i.e., writing to the source and destination at the same time). After the source and destination are in a synchronized state, the technology then switches the source and destination flags so that all new writes go to the new location. Examples of this type of migration are host-based volume managers.

Offline migration.

Offline migration, on the other hand, is the antithesis of what we described above. In these migrations, all data is assumed to be at rest; that is, it is not changing nor is any application accessing it. On the face of it, such migrations are the easiest to perform. You simply shut down your entire environment, copy all the data from the old to the new location by whatever method you please and then once the new location is ready, you simply switch the pointers to the new location. Pointers can be anything: mount points, drive letters, symbolic links, IP addresses, etc. In reality, however, this migration is not feasible if you are migrating large amounts of data in a mission-critical environment. The quantity of data can require extended downtime, a luxury you do not always have.

Hybrid migrations.

In an ideal world, all migrations could be done as pure online migrations without any outage at all. Reality is usually different. Many times, you have to update software on the host to facilitate the change, and sometimes the host itself may require a reboot to “see” the new storage. Sometimes an online migration can require a small outage to switch the source and destination. Usually, such outages are only to facilitate the source and destination switch. Examples of the latter are array-based replication technologies, appliance and/or software-based migration solutions.

Here are some of the most commonly used techniques for a migration:

Host based:

All operating systems provide basic tools to copy data from one location to another whether the location is on the same server or on another server that is accessible via IP. Additionally, a lot of operating systems these days have IO abstraction software known as logical volume management (LVM). Logical volume managers are great for seamless data migrations because they allow you to add “mirrors” to existing volumes (objects that are used to perform file system operations instead of raw devices). A volume-manager based migration can literally be performed as a zero-downtime migration if the host itself is not being migrated.

Application based:

Applications themselves can have a built-in copy function that allows you to duplex incoming writes to another location. Examples of such applications are databases like Oracle. Oracle Dataguard can be used to create an exact (and synchronized) database copy at a remote location, at a predetermined time, and all pointers can be switched from the local to the remote copy.

Appliance based:

In such migrations, an appliance is usually inserted in the data path between the host and the storage array. The appliance then transparently duplexes data access to another location. During a predetermined outage window, the host is then made to point to the new location.

Array based:

There are usually two subcategories here: array to array techniques are when you are migrating off an older array; or within the array itself, if you are migrating from older sets of disks to newer ones. Both methods are vendor-proprietary and, in most cases, require special licenses and services to implement. However from a one-size-fits-all perspective, these types of solutions tend to be more robust and predictable. For large, scale data migration projects such as data center migrations, these techniques are highly recommended. They do suffer from the typical “vendor lock in” syndrome. However, more vendors are beginning to offer cross-platform replication solutions that allow you to go from one vendor array to another one using the same piece of software.

Data migration does not have to be as strenuous or painful as moving a mountain, but it can be. To ensure that it does not, you have to plan it well. A well-organized IT shop will take data migration in its stride and plan it using the tight methodology and processes they apply to plan all other projects. Planning and using the proper set of methodologies is key to a successful migration.

How Real Is the Software as a Service Phenomenon?

How Real Is the Software as a Service Phenomenon?

Read about Research about SaaS prospects for 2007

One of the issues looming over the 2007 IT landscape is on-demand software, also known as software as a service (SaaS). Software vendors of all sizes and specialties are promoting on-demand offerings, convinced there is a substantial base of buyers, especially within the small business community, ready to embrace SaaS as a way of gaining access to next-generation software without incurring high up-front capital costs. At some point, this scenario will probably come to pass. But where are we on the adoption curve? To help answer this question, IT Business Edge worked with Info-Tech Research Group on a unique research project that provides insight into IT managers’ readiness to embrace SaaS.

The Spending Trend

Info-Tech surveyed more than 1,900 IT professionals, including more than 200 recruited by ITBE. In one area of the survey, respondents were asked to quantify the impact of SaaS as a proportion of new software spending over three time periods: two years ago, today, and two years from now.

The results show that SaaS, while still accounting for a modest portion of new software purchases, is a growing force in the industry. This year, on-demand software is expected to account for 20 percent more of your software acquisition budget than it did two years ago. If our respondents’ forecasts are correct, it will grow by a further 30 percent over the next two years. In the near term, the uptake has occurred primarily in small organizations (1-100 employees); these were already about 20 percent ahead of the industry-wide use of SaaS two years ago, and have increased by roughly 25 percent since then.

However, looking forward, it is large accounts that see the greatest proportional future growth. IT professionals in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees believe that although their organizations have been slower to respond to SaaS than smaller firms, they will experience strong growth – perhaps as high as 40 percent – in the proportion of new software acquisition budgets allocated to on-demand products.

What Is Driving the Growth?

It appears SaaS activity levels are beginning to catch up to the hype. The next question is what is driving this growth? The Info-Tech/ITBE research initiative tested reactions to four “positive” statements about SaaS, asking respondents whether they “strongly disagreed,” “disagreed,” “neither agreed nor disagreed,” “agreed” or “strongly agreed” to the following:

- On-demand software is acceptable in some circumstances

- On-demand software is the best choice in some of the application areas we use

- On-demand software is ideally suited to our business requirements

- On-demand software will be used by our organization in the future

The first of these statements met with broad acceptance. More than half of all respondents (and more than 60 percent within large enterprises) either agree or strongly agree with the notion that SaaS is acceptable in some circumstances, versus just 7 percent who disagree/strongly disagree.

When asked if on-demand is the best choice in at least some current application areas, the proportion of respondents who think SaaS is a fit in some aspect of their operations is double (36 percent to 18 percent) of those who disagree that it is the best choice in at least some active areas. “Ideally suited to our business requirements” is a more difficult barrier to surmount: Only 24 percent agree/strongly agree, as compared with an identical number that disagree.

In the end, though, the real test is whether IT professionals believe their future acquisitions will include on-demand products. Here, we find that 28 percent of respondents – including more than one-third of those from large enterprises – indicate their organizations will buy SaaS products in the future.

What Are the Inhibitors?

With so much momentum, what is holding SaaS back? It’s likely some common issues, such as a desire for the control that comes with on-premise software and the general tendency to embrace change only when pushed in some way from one’s current comfort zone, have the effect of impeding penetration of SaaS. To try to dig into specific inhibitors, though, our survey also looked at four “negative” statements:

- On-demand software is too expensive

- The on-demand model is not trustworthy

- On-demand software cannot be integrated within our environment

- On-demand software is not secure enough for use in our environment

While each of these statements describes an inhibitor for some of the organizations surveyed, they do not, for the most part, have a broad detrimental impact on SaaS adoption. For example, only 15 percent of respondents believe the on-demand model is not trustworthy. Just 19 percent believe on-demand software is not secure enough, and a still-modest 22 percent agree or strongly agree with the notion that on-demand products cannot be integrated within their environments. In all three areas, the number of respondents who disagree with the statement exceeds those who find the issue troublesome. In each case as well, however, “neutral” responses represent more than 50 percent of the total. Clearly, SaaS advocates need to do more selling to overcome these objections.

The survey shows that the primary impediment in the minds of prospective SaaS buyers is price. Although software vendors try to position on-demand offerings as a cheaper way to gain access to sophisticated products, approximately one-quarter of buyers from all sizes of companies agree that “on-demand software is too expensive.” This is double the number who disagrees with the same statement.

Conclusion

Will 2007 be the year of SaaS? No. However, the history of hype in our industry suggests that monumental one-year changes in IT management priorities are very rare, and that important shifts in the IT landscape build over time. From that perspective, 2007 is at least an important year in the evolution of SaaS. The model has already built an impressive foothold in the small business market, and it is poised to play an increasing role in the software acquisition strategies of mid-sized and large enterprises over the next two years.

Although salesforce.com has blazed the trail for SaaS, the future success of on-demand software will not be limited to CRM; there are opportunities for near-term increases in SaaS delivery of desktop productivity applications, content/data management applications, application development and maintenance tools, and security software, as well as the prospect of longer-term opportunity in areas such as ERP. A number of practical challenges remain on both the user and vendor sides of the SaaS equation – but the evident desire of both groups to embrace SaaS will almost certainly result in 2007 being an inflection point for the on-demand software model.

Source: Info Tech Research Group

A Key-Point-Definition of SaaS

A Key-Point-Definition of SaaS

The key to making sense of SaaS is understanding the process of transformation that software goes through once you move it off the customer’s premises and host it on the internet.

As has happened with so many terms in the IT industry, the definition of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has and always will be, a very broadly defined term, and therefore it’s inevitable that there will be many different subcategories of SaaS. That creates plenty of potential for misunderstanding and confusion, of course. The key to making sense of SaaS is see it in terms of the journey a software developer or architect might take as they plunge further and deeper into the SaaS model. At the outset, the product they’ll create looks very similar to conventional licensed software. At the end of their journey, it may not look like software at all. That’s the extent of the spectrum that SaaS covers. No wonder people often have difficulty categorizing SaaS or making comparisons between SaaS offerings. If they’re dealing with different ends of the spectrum, there may be no useful comparison to be made at all. So let’s embark on this journey and map out where it leads.

In the beginning

We begin with the two essentials of Software-as-a-Service: hosting and subscription. This is the starting point. The software runs on the provider’s premises, not the customer’s, and payment is by subscription spread over the term of the contract rather than as an upfront license fee. There are some basic advantages that flow from taking this initial step, mostly to do with amortizing the cost of acquiring, implementing and operating the software, especially if elements of those costs can be shared across more than one customer, yielding economies of scale. The lower initial cost and the relative ease of implementation on the provider’s ready-made infrastructure mean that this can still be an attractive model in certain customer scenarios.

But this is more than just a relocation exercise. Once you move software off the customer’s premises and host it on the internet, a whole new range of possibilities begins to open up. The journey mentioned is a journey of discovery, in which those possibilities gradually reveal themselves. Over the next few pages we will set out some of the most important revelations to be found along the way.

Shared instance/multi-tenancy

Multitenancy in SaaS (ie having more than one customer running on a single unit of live software) is a bit like grammar in language or harmonics in music. It’s OK to break the rules, but only if you’ve first embraced them and really understand the consequences of going against the grain.

There are still huge benefits to be gained at various stages on the journey to true multitenant nirvana. The most important is that customers don’t have to wait for a custom technical implementation. With conventional on-premises software, there’s a substantial timelag after purchase before the software is ready to run. With SaaS, the software is already up and running in the vendor’s data center in advance. This has an enormous impact both on the customer’s exposure to risk when getting started and on the vendor’s business model. Having the software already operational means that customers can go live in a matter of days or weeks, and they’re free to phase in the roll-out to cause minimum disruption to business operations. Vendors can offer try-before-buy trials and demonstrations at little or no cost, and there’s a low overhead to adopting an iterative style of implementation in which a pilot group of users can test the look, feel and structure of the application and give feedback before a full production roll-out begins.

Ideally (and this is a key stage in the journey to multitenant enlightenment) the provider’s implementation is a ‘black box’ to the customer, who has no interest in the underlying technology so long as the contracted outputs are being delivered as specified. It’s the provider’s business to tune the infrastructure to provide the best combination of performance, economy and management. The customer’s only concern is to get maximum utility out of the service provided, not to interfere in the provider’s technology decisions.

Astute readers will have realized that what I’ve just described conforms exactly to the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it’s no coincidence that those SaaS vendors who’ve embraced multi-tenancy have also embraced SOA. This leads on to important side-effects, such as enabling policy-driven configuration of applications as a means of customization rather than the custom coding favored by conventional software vendors. Multitenancy obliges vendors to push the envelope of SOA because their customers want the flexibility to modify how the applications work for them, even though the underlying software code has to be the same for everyone. SOA provides a framework for separation of concerns that can accommodate these apparently conflicting needs. A further benefit of using policy rather than code to modify the application is that it makes it easier for business users to control the application’s functionality and processes for themselves. This further enhances the capacity to deliver the business results the customer wants to achieve.

Shared services

Once your software becomes a hosted service, it opens up the potential to link it up with other services that are out there. For many vendors and users this is still a barely dawning realization, but it’s of fundamental importance. In many ways, the Internet is one great global SOA — still very rudimentary in many ways, but flexible enough to accommodate different levels of sophistication, and evolving fast.

Leading-edge SaaS providers use the Internet not only as a delivery mechanism to deliver their services to customers but also as an aggregation platform to enhance and extend their own capabilities by linking up with third-party services. A good example is longstanding HR provider Employease (now part of ADP), whose infrastructure includes connections to 3000 back-end partners providing a range of specialist services such as payroll processing, insurance and 401k schemes, compliance and so on. If Employease were a conventional on-premises software vendor, each of its customers would be obliged to forge every single connection for themselves. As a SaaS provider, Employease only has to make the connection once and it becomes a shared service, instantly available to any of its customers. The same principle can be seen at work in Rearden Commerce or Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Understanding the implications of shared services in an Internet environment is a further step on the road to enlightenment. It extends the horizons of SaaS providers beyond the confines of software alone, opening up the potential to connect to online providers of all kinds of business services and offer customers a complete, finished business result rather than simply a software toolkit.

By the way, it also puts SaaS at the core of present-day trends towards collaborative services architectures both within the enterprise (SOA) and beyond it (Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0). Every Web 2.0 venture is already a convert to this vision of Internet aggregation and delivery. In many ways it is the software vendors who are doing the catching-up.

Community of interest

SaaS vendors soon discover that delivering from the cloud changes the nature of their relationship with their customers in a variety of ways.

The most immediate change is their ability to constantly monitor their customers’ usage of the application. For one thing, this makes technical support a great deal simpler, because there’s no chain of ‘Chinese whispers’ as problems are reported back via helpdesks from the user to a support expert. Instead, the support person can take a direct look to see exactly what the user is doing. But this insight into user activity is even more useful at an aggregate level. It means that customers can evaluate their software and services based on what they see customers using, and then use those metrics to improve its usability, performance or functionality.

More recently, vendors have begun to realize that they can also leverage that global view to provide feedback to their customers on best practices, or allow customers to benchmark themselves against their peers. The aggregate view gives them insight that wouldn’t exist if each customer operated their own separate on-premises implementation, and by sharing the benefits of that analysis with their customers everyone can gain.

Since all customers access the application via the vendor’s website, it’s only natural that online user communities tend to thrive, since the vendor can promote the community and highlight recent discussions or useful material within it. Users can exchange best practice tips about how they use and configure the application, as well as sharing, exchanging or even marketing templates and other add-ons.

Underlying all of these changes is a convergence of interest between customer and vendor that’s more intimate than that experienced in the world of conventional on-premises applications. Perhaps it’s because SaaS vendors are able to move away from the conventional software sales process, where the need to close a big-ticket software license sale before anything else can happen encourages vendors to over-promise and under-deliver, thus breeding customer distrust. Or perhaps it’s because the continuous online relationship of the SaaS environment simply makes it easier to focus on making sure the product is working for customers in their day-to-day use of it.

Pay-as-you-go

I’m not going to argue, as some do, that the pay-as-you-go model of SaaS vendors means you’re free to walk away at any moment. Although the cost and timescale of implementation is substantially lower, it still requires an organizational commitment to get started with any software application, whether it comes over the Internet or in a shrinkwrap package.

But the need to engage you in those vital early months changes the vendor-client relationship and creates a powerful incentive to show early results. Subtle changes that SaaS makes to the software vendor business model — flowing from factors such as the ability to provide a fully functional pre-sales demonstration, and the tendency towards an incremental approach to adoption — increase the pressure on vendors to ensure their applications make it as easy as possible for users to get started and show early results.

Pay-as-you-go also means customers pay a single, known monthly amount for a functional service, instead of the various lump sums and annuities associated with conventional licensed software — licensing, maintenance, support, and so on, most of which are paid irrespective of whether or not the software is working as intended — along with additional internal costs incurred in maintaining the technical infrastructure, which are often under-measured.

Putting everything onto a single monthly bill that’s paid in exchange for delivery of a functional service makes it much easier for customers to see exactly what they’re getting for their money, and ties in better with service level agreements that allow customers to choose between differing levels of service quality, depending on budget and willingness to pay. Those vendors furthest along the path to enlightenment also see that it is their passport to participation in the emerging “business web” of interlinked Internet-based services, whether as an aggregator of third-party services or as a provider themselves of services to other aggregators.

Perhaps this introduction of the keypoints helped illuminate at least a part of the software-as-a-service landscape. Of course there are several more landmarks that I could have mentioned, especially on matters such as user empowerment, composite applications and processes, the relationship to open source and the role of partner ecosystems.

One closing point that should have become evident by now: SaaS is inadequate as a term to describe the end destination of this journey, which is both less than SaaS, by virtue of what it leaves behind, as well as more than SaaS, on account of what it gains from connecting into the collaborative Internet. Alternative terms already exist — I prefer to talk about on-demand services — so I don’t think we need a new buzzword. Essentially, this is just a new spin on business services, which is something we’ve had since before the advent of the Internet, or even of computing itself. It’s business services, automated by software and connected up by the Internet. Funnily enough, some of its early pioneers once formed themselves into an industry body called the Internet Business Services Initiative. Evidently they at least have always had a good idea where they were headed.

Abtract of Seeking the true meaning of SaaS by ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright

Software-as-a-Service Myths

Software-as-a-Service Myths

A consultant explains why this new breed of Web-based software has staying power

Published in Business week APRIL 17, 2006

By Jeffrey Kaplan

For years, organizations of all sizes have suffered the hassles and unexpected costs that accompany deploying and maintaining a variety of traditional software applications that, ironically, were intended to make them more productive. Now a new breed of Web-based services are pushing legacy applications aside and finally giving users the business benefits they’ve been seeking.

This new form of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has been spearheaded by Salesforce.com’s (CRM) customer relationship management and salesforce automation applications, and NetSuite’s “net-native” enterprise resource planning applications.

These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations – especially large-scale midsize businesses – have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.

Despite the success of these companies, many people are still skeptical about the long-term success of SaaS. Others are concerned that recent Salesforce.com outages represent a fundamental fault line in the SaaS landscape.

As someone who has consulted with a variety of SaaS users and vendors and manages a rapidly growing directory of SaaS players, which can be seen at saas-showplace.com, here’s my response to some of the most common myths associated with SaaS.

Myth #1: SaaS is still relatively new and untested.

Salesforce.com has been in business over five years, has more than 399,000 subscribers at 20,500 companies worldwide, and is growing at about 80% a year. NetSuite has been in business eight years, and company officials say it has thousands of customers globally using its online applications.

The oldest and biggest SaaS purveyor? ADP (ADP) – the world’s largest payroll application outfit – has been in business for nearly 60 years, generated $8.5 billion in revenues last year, and served about 590,000 clients worldwide.

Myth #2: SaaS is just another version of the failed application service provider, or ASP, and hosting models of the past, and will suffer the same fate as its predecessors.

While SaaS isn’t a new idea, the economic climate and rapid advancements in application development tools have combined to make today’s SaaS providers more successful than their predecessors.

The ASPs and hosting companies of the dot-com era failed for two reasons. First, they did not fundamentally change the architecture of their software applications, but simply resold legacy applications to organizations that didn’t want to house them on their own systems. The up-front and ongoing costs of hosting legacy applications proved to be too much for the ASPs to withstand.

The second reason the ASPs and hosting companies failed: Only a small segment of the market was willing to outsource their application needs to relatively untested outfits because most companies during the dot-com era felt that their IT operations and business applications were a strategic asset.

Times have changed. Today’s economic and competitive pressures make nearly any form of outsourcing fair game. Many companies now consider various IT functions and business applications commodities and not core competencies. This has made SaaS, essentially an outsourced application management business, more attractive today than ASPs and hosting services of the past.

Myth #3: SaaS only relieves companies of the up-front costs of traditional software licenses.

SaaS not only alleviates the costs of traditional perpetual licensing fees but also eliminates the need for additional IT infrastructure investments to support new applications.

A variety of enabling technologies, such as service-oriented architecture and Web services, permit SaaS to be more easily provisioned and metered based on actual usage levels. This means companies no longer have to pay for excess capacity. The bottom line? Lower total cost of ownership and quicker time-to-value.

Myth #4: SaaS is only for small- and midsize businesses and will not be accepted by large-scale organizations.

Companies of all sizes are taking advantage of SaaS. The scalability of the new generation of SaaS solutions enables users to test the reliability and performance of on-demand applications in limited deployments, and expand their adoption incrementally.

Many SaaS vendors have emulated Salesforce.com’s market penetration strategy of appealing to individual users with free trials or low-cost single-user subscription fees with the intent of permeating the market, and then winning business unit and enterprise-level adoption in major corporations.

Today, Salesforce.com counts a growing number of Global 2000 and other brand-name companies as its customers, including AOL (TWX), Avery Dennison (AVY), Nokia (NOK), Perkin-Elmer (PKI) and SunTrust (STI).

Myth #5: SaaS only applies to applications such as customer relationship management and salesforce automation.

While SaaS certainly makes sense for many front-office functions and team-oriented collaboration purposes, SaaS solutions are emerging to address nearly every business application need. These range from accounting and financial applications to supply chain and channel management solutions.

For example, Aramark (RMK), Dow Chemical (DOW) , HP (HPQ), Honeywell (HON), Hyatt Hotels, Roche, and Wachovia (WB) rely on Taleo’s (TLEO) SaaS talent management solution. On-demand supply chain management vendor Click Commerce (CKCM) boasts Arrow Electronics (ARW), Delta, Tyco (TYC) and Volvo (VOLVY) as customers.

Myth #6: SaaS will only have a minor impact on the software industry and will fade over time.

A third of the respondents to THINKstrategies’ recent survey said they are already using SaaS, and another third said they are planning to adopt SaaS in 2006. Other research firms have generated even higher ratios.

As SaaS gains mainstream acceptance, it is becoming an important disruptive force in the software industry. And as long as the quality and reliability of SaaS solutions continues to improve, the appeal of SaaS isn’t going to go away.

In response to these numbers and other industry trends, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stated in an internal memo that became public last fall: “This coming ‘services wave’ will be very disruptive….Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.”

Myth #7: It will be easy for the established software vendors to offer SaaS and dominate this market.

Nearly every established software vendor is being forced to determine how to revamp their legacy application business models to join the SaaS movement. This isn’t a small challenge.

Legacy software companies have to re-architect their applications to make them work on the Web. They also have to redesign their sales and financial models to accommodate the pay-as-you-go SaaS fee structures. And they have to rebuild their corporate cultures to make them more service-oriented rather than product-centric.

It could be argued that Siebel was acquired by Oracle (ORCL) last year because it wasn’t up to the task of fighting off Salesforce.com. Now Oracle, Microsoft (MSFT), and SAP (SAP) must respond to the SaaS movement while trying to avoid cannibalizing their existing software business in the process.

Myth #8: SaaS is only for corporate users.

Anyone who uses McAfee (MFE) or Symantec (SYMC) antivirus software to protect their home PCs likely uses their subscription and ‘live update’ features, which represent another example of SaaS. Microsoft’s new “Live” version of its popular Office productivity applications is aimed at small and midsize businesses and the home user. And don’t look now, but online gaming and video-on-demand also can be considered forms of SaaS.

Integration Trends for 2006- for-2006

Integration Trends for 2006

This is an abstract of an interesting BI Research article about Integration Trends for 2006

by Colin White

Published: January 23, 2006

From an integration perspective there are five areas that should be considered. The first four are associated with the main types of integration technology: user interaction, business process, applications and data. The fifth is concerned with how to bring these four types of integration together into an enterprise integration architecture. Let’s examine the likely trends in each of these areas for 2006.

User Interaction Integration

The direction over the past few years has been toward using a Web interface to support user interaction with corporate applications and data. The business portal is the favored technology for supporting integration at the Web-based user interaction level.

The focus in 2006 will be on how to create a single business user collaborative workspace by merging Web-based interfaces with the Microsoft Office desktop environment. At the workgroup level, Microsoft’s increasing integration of Office with SharePoint will lead to workgroup environments dominated by the SharePoint portal. The challenge will be in integrating this Microsoft.net workgroup environment with enterprise-level portals, which are based on Java-driven products from the other big infrastructure vendors like IBM and Oracle. Microsoft’s relationship with SAP is also likely to have an impact in this area.

Business Process Integration and Application Integration

The merging of business process and application technology has been driven largely by both vendors and IT organizations, who are moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based primarily on Web services.

The trend toward a SOA and Web services will continue in 2006. This environment will not only be used for integrating operational business processes, but also for business intelligence processes. This year will see significant growth in the use of operational business intelligence.

Data

More and more companies have developed an enterprise level architecture for supporting data integration in their organization. As companies move toward an enterprise approach to data integration, they must reuse and share data integration expertise and resources. This can be achieved by creating a data integration competency center. This year will see a greater use of the data competency center concept and on building an enterprise-wide data integration architecture.

Operational business intelligence typically requires access to more current data than the data provided by a traditional data warehousing system. As a result, interest in creating low-latency data stores for operational reporting analysis is increasing.

Another important growth area is master data management (MDM), which causes much debate from a terminology perspective. Master data is reference data that defines and supports the key business objects that underpin the main business processes of a company. Examples of this include customers, employees, finances, products, brands, suppliers and partners.

There is more to master data management than data integration. Master data management solutions usually offer collaborative, business intelligence and workflow capabilities.

Environment

The last area to discuss is how to create a complete business integration environment based on the technologies outlined above. The major issue that most large companies will face is that their enterprise-level systems will be based on Java and software from the big infrastructure players, though most of their workgroup environments will be supported on a Microsoft platform. This will probably be the number one integration issue for companies this year, especially since the Microsoft world is far less open than the enterprise-based Java one. While the Linux and open source enthusiasts will say this problem can be solved by replacing Windows with Linux and OpenOffice, this is not as easy as it sounds, even though some companies are doing this.

The common denominator between the Microsoft.net world and the enterprise Java world is Web services. This is why companies are taking SOA and Web services so seriously. Web services are one of the main ways of connecting the workgroup world to the enterprise. It will be interesting to review the situation again in January 2007. We will be able to see how far organizations have moved in this direction, as well as how effectively the vendors can make this integration easier to do than it is today.

Data Integration Architecture

We Need an Enterprise Data Integration Architecture

Data integration has come a long way since the early days of data warehousing. We can now identify three major data integration initiatives in our IT environments. And – guess what? They require a clear and concise architecture. Read on to understand the three initiatives making up an enterprise data integration architecture.

Data seems to fall into three categories: master data, operational transaction data, and data used for decision making. Each of these categories requires specialized technologies and architectural components. I would like to briefly go over these in this blog.

1. Master Data – Master or reference data has been in the news a lot lately.

This data consists of information about your customers, products, locations, and other major subject areas of interest to the enterprise. Today we have master data management (MDM) technologies that assure this form of data – both the current version as well as all of its history – is the best that it can be. The integrated and consolidated reference data is stored in a master data hub store.

2. Operational Transaction Data – This data consists of all the information about the activities occurring throughout the enterprise.

Basically it is what tracks the enterprise as it conducts its business. Purchases, call detail records, campaign activities, supplier orders, call center contacts, claims, and so on, are all examples of operational transaction data. This data must be managed much the same way as the master data and then stored in an operational data store (ODS).

3. Decision Support Data – This data consists of the historical snapshots of data used in strategic and tactical analyses.

Trends, patterns, mining, multi-dimensional analytics—all depend on this vast store of decision-making data. The snapshots are loaded into a data warehouse for ultimate delivery into the various BI applications and data marts.

You can see why an architecture is needed. All three forms of data require similar processes – the data must be collected, cleaned up, integrated, and populated into its appropriate store. All this data must also be accessible to the other environments and, in many cases, back to the operational sources themselves. The architecture becomes your road map, demonstrating data flows into and out of each data integration capability.

In addition, the three forms of data integration share many of the same technologies – EII, ETL, hardware, software, and even application software may be reused for each initiatives. Whether you create a physically distinct set of components for each initiative or create some form of mixed workload situation (combining two or more of these initiatives into the same component) is up to you. Study what each vendor has to offer, determine how the technology will fit into your architecture, ultimately supporting your overall data integration environment.

On-demand CRM

On-demand CRM

There are competitions among the leading software giants to launch Internet-based customer relationship management (CRM). SAP recently released its first Web-based CRM product. SAP has a competitor on CRM business – Salesforce.com. SAP’s move highlights the growing use of on-demand CRM by large enterprises. On-demand CRM ensured the technology’s ease of use, speed of deployment, strong customer service and flexibility. Salesforce.com has won a large number of customers in the recent years.

Despite the success of CRM applications, integration and reliability concerns continue to halt widespread adoption of hosted CRM by big enterprises. According to industry experts, only 10 to 12 percent of companies worldwide have shifted from traditional customer management tools to on-demand CRM. It represents a gradual migration to a computing model that has been around for years. Moving to on-demand CRM is the challenge of integrating it with their back-office systems such as enterprise resource planning, inventory control and supply-chain applications.

According to CNet News -

It’s primetime for hosted CRM providers- for-hosted-CRM-providers

It’s primetime for hosted CRM providers

According to AMR Research, the CRM providers with an on-demand software profile drive the CRM market. Leaders in this arena are Salesforce.com, Oracle, and SAP. The Software-as-a-Service model continues to contribute significantly to the market growth.

In an older post titled “On-Demand or On-Premise: The CRM dilemma,” I had reported the tussle between on-demand and on-site CRM solutions; the AMR report confirms that on-demand CRM has now taken an unbeatable lead. AMR believes that the boost from this sector will contribute $12.9 billion to the total CRM market growth for 2006. ZDnet reports:

Outsourcing 101

Outsourcing 101

Outsourcing has become a “charged’ word. It is an important concept to understand because of its business applications (both for corporations and for small businesses) and because of its political implications. The following is intended as a primer on the main topics related to outsourcing. We have included a (hopefully) balanced summary of the “offshoring debate” without a definitive conclusion as we do not intend to take a political stance on this issue.

Definition of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is the act of obtaining services from an external firm.

Business Process Outsourcing

In the corporate environment, the term “outsourcing” often refers to a particular type of outsourcing, business process outsourcing (BPO). BPO occurs when an organization turns over the management of a particular business process (such as accounting or payroll) to a third party that specializes in that process. The underlying theory is that the BPO firm can complete the process more efficiently, leaving the original firm free to concentrate on its core competency.

Roots of Outsourcing

The concept of outsourcing was first made popular by Ross Perot when we founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962. EDS would say to a potential client, “You are good at designing and manufacturing widgets, but we are skilled with managing information technology. We will sell you the IT services that you require, and you can pay us periodically with a minimum commitment of two years.” Today, EDS is a multi-billion dollar company with over 70,000 employees and is only one of many global BPO firms.

Offshore Outsourcing

Offshore outsourcing, or “offshoring”, refers to outsourcing to firms in foreign countries, often to take advantage of labor arbitrage. In the past 10 years, business process outsourcing contracts have increasingly been given to firms in developing countries. Typically educated workers in developing countries, such as India or China, work for a much lower wage than do similarly educated workers in developed countries, such as Japan. Savings from the lower wage rate must exceed the increased costs of management and risk associated with offshore outsourcing for it to be economically viable.

The Politics of “Offshoring”

Offshore outsourcing has recently become a hotly-debated issue in the national media. When the American economy began to pull out of recession in 2001, unemployment did not decrease as expected. Offshore outsourcing was blamed as a contributing factor to this “jobless recovery”. Information Technology was a particularly soft sector, and many American programmers lost their jobs to lower-paid foreign counterparts. Many economists however have recently conjectured that the higher-than-expected unemployment numbers were not the result of offshore outsourcing, and that offshore outsourcing has actually had a positive impact on the American economy. Undoubtedly the debate will continue into the presidential campaign.

The original source to this article is The Outsourcing Times.

The preceding article has been registered under a Creative Commons license.

Customer Data Integration

Customer Data Integration (CDI) makes CRM More Effective

One of the major problems facing CRM vendors and customers is the fact that they are not able to view all of the data available from their customers at the same time. Customer data integration (CDI) aims to solve this problem. CDI essentially involves a program that gathers data from a variety of sources and files all of the information into one database. The most important part being that this information is provided to the company in real time, so it can be utilized immediately. Having a program that allows information from multiple databases to be viewed in one database is helpful because businesses can view large amounts of information and therefore obtain a more holistic picture of a customer’s habits. Using this information, businesses can market their products more efficiently and have better customer service. According to CRM Daily:

Definition of Data Integration?

Data integration defined?

So how can the term data integration be defined? Mark Torr from SAS defines it beautifully and to the point in my opinion as

It deals with all types of data that gives a unified whole to an organization. It connects, cleanses, consolidates and creates value from all your data sources, by providing you with a clear picture of all your data holdings which enables you to modify, amalgamate and consolidate your data holdings. The results are then better answers to questions and faster with the assurance that the answer being given is correct.

Data Integration cannot be seen as just “a means to an end” because in many cases data integration is not directly driving things like BI and analytics; it is supporting operational processes or keeping operational systems in sync.

(The new data integration landscape; Mark Torr, SAS, sascom first quarter 2006, pg 9)