On Demand — is it just “one damned thing after another?”

The struggles of on demand make that old Churchill chestnut seem appropriate.  Especially since they’ve made it to Business Week (here), which should be a buy signal according to my “Business Week Reverse Lock” theory.  It is a Sarah Lacy piece, so I figure that it has to be somewhat plugged-in to the Valley’s, ummm… wisdom.  And I [...]

Your Platform-as-a-Service Racing Form

Well, not really, but Charles has next best thing: a strong post Handicapping PaaS.  If you’re into noodling about the future of the on-demand “great game,” it is worth a close read. 
Go to the comments as well, some good back-and-forth as well as my take (comment five).

SaaS/On Demand not immune to the downturn

Per Joe Panettieri’s article (here), I’ve never agreed with analysts who believe that the SaaS/On Demand players would somehow be recession-proof (read my earlier rant here).  There’s a lot about the business model that’s compelling, but not this.
The ease with with one can consume services — which certainly does promote usage — is matched by [...]

Enterprise SW value, complexity, and R&D

Dennis Howlett’s extended response (here) to Vinnie Mirchandani’s post demanding more simplicity — or begging Steve Jobs to find it — in enterprise apps (here).  Dennis effectively boils down Vinnie’s argument to this:
Why is it that despite all the interest in SaaS and Enterprise 2.0 that the industry offers so very little apparent bang per [...]

Closing the Hire-to-Fire HR loop

Nice to see that innovation is still coming out of Yahoo (here).  Or at least out of Yahoo’s struggles.
Is this the next HCM on demand opportunity?  You’d think SuccessFactors or Taleo would have this nailed, but maybe there’s still time to dust off the ol’ elevator pitch…
HT: Fake Steve Jobs Jerry Yang

SAP R&D Spend, Frugality, & Innovation

I don’t have the stats handy, but SAP has sunk a lot into R&D over the last five years.  I think we’re up to about 20 percent of revenue (2 billion EUR +) from about 15 percent in the early 2000s.
This sustained investment makes some of the recent headlines decrying reduced innovation a bit ludicrous, frankly.  [...]

Stickiness of SaaS/On Demand

Maybe it is just me, but I’ve never understood the idea that SaaS/On Demand applications could be simultaneously sticky and consumable.  It seems to me that processes/process steps that can be consumed — purchased and used only as needed — won’t likely have all that much ”stickiness” — hard to replace/move away from. 
This issue came up [...]

Benioff: SAP and Innovation…not!

Just ran into a new SAP blog at techtarget.com (here), written by Demir Barlas.   The first post I read highlighted Marc Benioff at salesforce.com ranting about how:
…SAP has “not seen innovation in the last 10 years.” Those comments were made in a recent interview with ZDNet, in which Benioff twice claimed that SAP has not been [...]

When is salesforce.com going to scale?

Another impressive revenue quarter for CRM, but when are we going to see more bottom line from that vaunted SaaS scale?  George Gutkowski at Seeking Alpha has some comments (here).  
I suppose that salesforce.com can plausibly say that they’re not seeing scale because of the platform play, but wasn’t force.com supposed to leverage what they already had [...]

SFDC outage — Can one really “test” packaged software

Apparently SDFC went down for a few hours on 11 February…
Salesforce.com’s release testing process is broken. Testing should have caught these problems before they were released into the wild.
OK, testing “should have…” is a truism.  But don’t we forget what inherently complex machines packaged enterprise software are?  Once configured and filled with data, aren’t they [...]