A Blog About Software As A Service
This blog is all about software as a service (SaaS) for business. If it is in the cloud, you will find it here.
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Where are you going to put all your data?
Posted on May 4th, 2009 No commentsJust ran my daily google and twitter search on SaaS and IT management terms and saw several people linking to the following story on datamation: Online Data Storage to Surge. Two analysts from Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis say that the average home could have as much as 12 Terabytes of data by 2014. That raises the question: Where are you going to put it, and how are you going to back it up?
From the article:
All that content, though, has to be managed. The enterprise has all kinds of enterprise-scale storage, archiving, indexing and backup. There’s plenty of options for a Fortune 1000 company, such as refrigerator-sized storage systems from EMC.
For the home user? Not so much. There has been the advent of network attached storage (NAS) for home users and Microsoft does have its own consumer server, Windows Home Server.
For the most part, home backup is mostly low-tech, like dragging one folder to another hard disk on your own computer or a USB-attached hard drive. Coughlin said simplicity is needed because home users are not storage administrators, nor do they want to be.
“A commercial user may have more capabilities to do monitoring and management, and tagging and metadata. Home users don’t have the time or experience. It will become a crucial item for people with storage items,” he said.
SaaS seems to be the most interesting answer to me at least (note my bias by looking at the title of this blog!). I just don’t see the average home user spending time, money and energy setting up their own backup process. Why bother when they can back up their data remotely as a background process?
Sure, this is a site about B-to-B SaaS, but this article was something I had to highlight. When a report comes out showing that consumers of the future will have to rely on remote backups it just emphasizes the point that SaaS is here to stay. And with it, I think that IT departments will be starting to gradually accept the idea of SaaS for more aspects of IT management. But again, I admit it: I am biased.
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SaaS and IT Management with Divakar Jandhyala of eVapt
Posted on April 28th, 2009 No commentsJust found this video of Divakar Jandhyala of eVapt, on PodTech, in which Jandhyala talks about the other side of SaaS for IT Management: IT Management of SaaS. He talks about how IT departments are dealing with the adoption of SaaS solutions and what the IT department of the future will look like. Interesting stuff.
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SaaS For IT Management
Posted on April 28th, 2009 1 commentEver since I joined Aprigo in March of 2009 (ahem, last month), I’ve been developing our inbound marketing plan. With that, I’ve been doing a lot of keyword and topic research, and have been amazed at the amount of attention being paid to software as a service (SaaS) for IT management. Let me explain.
First, a little background on me.
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After graduating college, I went to work full-time as the marketing guy/webmaster/web developer at a high tech law firm in Boston. Though I was part of their IT department, I was really somewhat detached from the other IT folks. I was the web guy, so I really wasn’t part of ops. But it was an excellent experience, getting to work on the marketing side, the development side, and getting to understand the IT side all at the same time. I started a blog called lawfirmblogging.com, and really started to get into the social media and web marketing racket. The blog started to get a lot of attention, and I realized that’s what I really wanted to get into.
After 7 years, I was itching to join a startup. I joined matchmine in April of 2007 as their Web Community Evangelist. I’d moved to the B-to-C side of things and was working on promoting a company that was offering something for free. Again, awesome, awesome experience, and I learned a lot about building a user base, user acquisition, and inbound marketing. The company shut down in October of 2008.
After matchmine, I consulted for a few months until I joined Aprigo. So I’ve gone from a law firm to a B-to-C startup to a B-to-B SaaS company focused on IT Management. There. That’s my story in a nutshell. Onto the point.
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Now that the mini-bio is out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this thing. The idea that SaaS tools focused on IT Management are all the rage. Now, don’t just take my word for it, let’s look at what the experts are saying:
In this article, Andrew Conry-Murray talks about the move toward SaaS-ifying (just made that sucker up) IT managment. From the piece:A subset of IT management startups are taking the SaaS or hybrid-SaaS route, which promises simpler deployment than traditional premises software. Companies such as Paglo, which is aimed at small businesses, and Service-now.com, which targets Global 2000 customers, use the SaaS model to provide a variety of IT management services.
A new report from Forrester forecasts the future of this market. (You can read a summary here.) At present, it says SaaS-based IT management accounts for a measly 1% of IT management software. But by 2013, the report anticipates SaaS vendors will have a modest 10% of the market.
While those numbers probably don’t have the Big Four (BMC (NYSE: BMC), IBM (NYSE: IBM) Tivoli,HP (NYSE: HPQ), and CA (NSDQ: CA)) trembling, another figure might: Forrester predicts that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees will account for 50% of SaaS installations in 2009.
These are really interesting figures to me, as the SaaS model makes a lot of sense for the mid-market to small(er) size IT departments…as much as the Global 2000 companies.Here’s an excerpt from the Forrester article cited in the InformationWeek story:How Big Is SaaS In IT Management Software?
by Peter O’Neill
with Stefan Ried, Ph.D., Reedwan IqbalSoftware-as-a-service (SaaS) is disrupting the IT management software market. Incumbent software vendors are setting up new business units and adding SaaS offerings to existing portfolios; managed service providers are repositioning their offerings to leverage the trend; and new pure-play SaaS operators are extending their success by taking advantage of product churn in various established vendors’ service and asset management customer bases. Forrester has developed a market forecast model for IT management SaaS that shows that SaaS will grow from making up just over 1% of the $18 billion IT management software market in 2008 to 10% by 2013, by which time many of the brand SaaS providers could be well established.Like I said, it’s just an excerpt. If you want to read the whole article, it’ll cost you $749.I may be biased, but the SaaS model just makes sense. If you’re at a gigantic company with the resources (both in personnel and finance) to constantly install, monitor and patch hardware and software that is supposed to manage your data (think about that for a second), then a SaaS solution might not make much sense to you. But if you’re at a company that is constantly putting out fires, has a small IT group managing a LOT of data, and don’t have the time or money to support new IT Management software, then I’d imagine the subscription-based SaaS model sounds pretty attractive.But again, I’m biased.
