The last few years have offered easy and exciting ways to demonstrate packaged software to customers.  One of the frustrating things, both as a prospective customer and a product manager, is getting a sandbox demonstration environment together (especially for complex not-available-through-SaaS types of software – which usually means most enterprise software available today).
First there [...]

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I’ve been paying more attention to the SaaS data portability space, especially since data portability in general is an important and currently undervalued area of enterprise software.
Here’s a round-up of three that I know of that focus on enterprise data (including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft applications):

Jitterbit
Talend
SnapLogic

Of the three, Jitterbit is my favorite [...]

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Bill McDermott, SAP’s president and CEO of global field operations, spoke with InformationWeek earlier this month and covered some finer points about SaaS.  Two points in particular that caught my interest: many companies will be disillusioned by SaaS once they realize it’s more expensive and complex than they anticipated, and that SaaS won’t work [...]

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Missing no opportunity to take a swipe at the competition, Oracle’s Senior VP of CRM On Demand Anthony Lye talked about Salesforce.com’s recent 40 minute service outage with InformationWeek’s Mary Hayes Weier.
In an interview with Weier, Lye discussed Oracle’s approach to CRM On Demand as opposed to Salesforce.com.  In particular, Lye brought up CRM On [...]

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Salesforce.com experienced an unusually long outage on Tuesday, which had the site down for most customers for about 40 minutes.
One of the really great things about Salesforce.com is their service status page, that outlines whether the service is up and available, down for planned maintenance, or experiencing performance issues.  This is the type of [...]

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I caught an interesting article by Larry Dignan over at ZDnet that talks about what we’ll likely see as upcoming FUD around SaaS vendors and viability in a down economy, expanding on an earlier post from Vinnie Mirchandani about methods that SaaS providers should use to calm customer’s possible fears of a company collapse.  [...]

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Sun Microsystems announced today that they acquired the cloud computing firm Q-Layer.
According to the official press release:
The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive [...]

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