Browsers are in the news recently, with leading vendors making announcements and headlines in a variety of ways, from new releases to uninvited downloads.
In the last week, two announcements from Google have directed a spotlight onto an area that Saugatuck believes will have a significant impact on the long-term evolution of the IT industry: the emerging importance of SaaS development and SaaS enablement platforms, collectively Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
It is now widely acknowledged, as Saugatuck had predicted, that SaaS has crossed the chasm and is entering the business mainstream. Saugatuck believes this current wave of adoption will challenge SaaS vendors to ensure their offerings are "enterprise-ready" and at the same time will challenge business users and their IT counterparts to manage the on-boarding and ongoing value of these on-demand solutions proactively.
Saugatuck Managing Director Bruce Guptill spent two weeks in late February and early March this year traveling in India, Malaysia, China and Australia as part of a worldwide series of ISV-to-SaaS briefings conducted with IBM. Along with the briefings, Guptill met with 26 independent software vendors, value-added resellers, and managed services providers in a variety of one-on-one interactions and meetings. His discussions highlighted several regional differences between the Asia-Pacific...
Over the past several years, Saugatuck has conducted dozens of business strategy consulting engagements with independent software vendors (ISVs) and SaaS start-ups – focusing on SaaS business strategy development and validation, new market assessments and opportunity targeting, positioning / messaging, and the development of a variety of go-to-market strategies and programs.
What is Happening?
Out of this work, combined with recent case-study...
Last week, Saugatuck founder and CEO Bill McNee spent the week in the UK, France and Germany, participating in a variety of SaaS-related conference and briefing events. In addition, he had a series of insightful meetings that provided a great window into where Europe stands as it concerns SaaS market adoption today, and where it is headed over the next few years.
This Research Alert provides a summary of key findings from that trip, to help inform and guide readers as it concerns...
Software-as-a-Service is poised for continued strong growth over the next few years, as it moves well beyond its initial focus on providing low-cost and “fringe” islands of automation in the cloud, to richly configurable and customizable “core” business solutions leveraging next-gen workflow.
This extended year-end Research Alert highlights five key trends in SaaS for 2008 and beyond:
1. SaaS Marketplaces and Platforms Proliferate
2. SaaS...
In our continuing thread of research providing guidance to application ISVs transitioning to SaaS, Saugatuck has repeatedly been asked about the viability of leveraging virtualization technologies, so that they can extend the life of their conventional on-premise solutions – versus immediately going down a path of building a new or adjacent multi-tenant application from scratch.
This Research Alert provides some important guidance (pro's and con's) for ISVs relative to...
SaaS has already entered the second of three successive, growing waves of adoption, delivery and robustness – even as many user and vendor organizations still struggle to understand the impacts of SaaS on their business, their customers, and markets in general. The third, and largest wave, is now building on the horizon – as SaaS continues to evolve toward becoming a platform for mission-critical application workloads.
What is Happening?
While the...
Cloud Computing and the Four Waves - Enveloping All Aspects of SaaS