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Cloud Computing Gets 90%+ Favorable Rating

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90% surveyed give thumbs up to cloud computing:

Seventy-five percent of the group said they valued strong customer service and technical support over higher hosting prices.

Twenty-five percent said the opposite. Interestingly, that ratio didn’t change relative to the size of the organization.

Top concerns: The ability to add computing power; the ability to move data easily between cloud providers; the pitfalls of vendor lock-in.

Forty-three percent said they are aware of people in their organization using cloud computing services not provided by the IT department for work.

Thirty-eight percent said saving time was the main driver for this behavior.

Just one in three acknowledged that it was because the IT department didn’t offer comparable services or employees simply didn’t want to deal with the IT department.

Finally, 48 percent of the polled IT pros said yes, they would take a job with a new company that does not use cloud computing. (Twenty-eight percent said no way; 24 percent were undecided.) It’s unclear whether this shows IT pros who seek a challenge, or who simply fail to see value in the cloud.


Via: ZDNET

Former Sage Channel Chief Taylor Macdonald Joins SaaS Provider Intacct

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In what has to be a coup for SaaS (software as a service) provider Intacct, industry veteran Taylor Macdonald today is announced as their new VP of Channels.

Taylor spent 9 years managing and building the reseller channel for Sage North America.

Taylor Macdonald Joins ERP SaaS Provider Intacct As VP Channels

NetSuite Earnings Call: We’re Losing Them As Fast As We Replace Them

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open air.jpgNetsuite reported another loss yesterday but you’d hardly know it from their earning’s call. They say the average per customer annual revenue is $38,000. I believe their customer license count was flat (so they lose them as quickly as Sage NA recent earnings reports said they do – http://bit.ly/bHw9wI ).

Except for the use of Cloud Computing this seemed like a similar call that Sage or Microsoft could have held.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Schulz Consulting is a Sage Business Partner so we are not independent or impartial with respect to our thoughts. Use the information here as the starting point for your own good independent thinking and forming your own conclusions.

NetSuite is targeting verticals though they didn’t spend much time saying which ones (I believe it’s wholesale distribution, software companies (same vertical as Intacct) and professional services).

The company is definitely moving away from servicing the low end (seemingly those paying $10,000 or under annually) due to churn. They claim that the users they lost were replaced by better (aka higher paying) licenses.

Recurring commissions are 30% (initial sale and renewal) to the channel. Only 20% of sales are through a channel ( a number which I think is unchanged from prior years).

Interestingly if I read the call right – the flagship (aka high end multi-company consolidation in real time) OneWorld offering ended the year with 50 users. Back in April 2008 when it was unveiled ( http://bit.ly/9Ev49E ) they claimed 38. So that’s a growth of 12 in about a 1.5 year time period. I am not 100% certain this is the same OneWorld flavor since on the call they refer to it was OneWorld SRP (services something or other).

UPDATE: I re-read the call and it looks like NetSuite has a product called OneWorld SRP and the 50 users represents those accounts using both OneWorld and Open World. Personally I find these product names too confusing and similar… but then again isn’t that what ERP has evolved to – using smoke and mirrors to sell…

Going forward Netsuite is changing their internal customer account managers so they each manage less customers. Previously it was a 100:1 ratio and Netsuite sees it moving closer to a 40:1. I think this is probably due to increasing complexity of their deals.

Of those buying the suite – 70% implement CRM.

I believe we have one of the best channel programs in the world and during 2010 it will even get better. -Zach Nelson CEO NetSuite

Nothing I read made me think Netsuite was an opportunity for any but the largest VARS with a heavy vertical tilt who would use Netsuite to complement but not be their complete service offering. This is the same thing that has been on display the last two years at the IT Alliance. The NetSuite partners on stage who tell of their experiences are all using NetSuite as a complement to other service offerings (financing, accounting, mergers, venture capital) and not as a traditional VAR model where they sold software/service plus implementation.

I think cloud computing is still coming and as VARS we’ll have to adapt – though adapting probably means developing a model where the services we offer are not the same ones that the publisher will offer (namely support, training, implementation). Unless we can add some “special sauce” there’s little reason to get back on the treadmill of selling a highly commissioned SaaS offering only to see the commission rug be yanked 10 years down the road when growth in the industry slows (as it will).

Read the full transcript:

NetSuite Earnings Call via Seeking Alpha

What is SaaS, Cloud Computing, PaaS and IaaS?

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clouds computing SaaS.jpg

There’s quite a bit of confusion around the definitions of cloud computing.

Some users and consultants use the term to mean any software program that isn’t stored and used directly on site.

Yet others have latched onto a whole laundry list of acronyms that more accurately describe different types of cloud computing.

For example:

SaaS – Software As A Service

Essentially based on the concept of renting application functionality from a service provider rather than buying, installing and running software yourself. Offerings within this range from services such as Salesforce.com at one end, delivering the equivalent of a complete application suite, to players like MessageLabs at the other, whose services are designed to complement your operational infrastructure.

PaaS – Platform As A Service

Platform as a service (PaaS), which is all about providing, a platform in the cloud, upon which applications can be developed and executed. Players like Google, again Salesforce.com (this time with Force.com), and Microsoft (with Azure) exist in this space. Facilities provided include things like database management, security, workflow management, application serving, and so on.

IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The proposition here is the offering of compute power and storage space on demand.

The difference between this and the other two categories of cloud is that the software that executes is essentially yours. In practical terms, the model is based on the same principles of virtualisation that we are all familiar with in the context of server partitioning or flexible storage. Rather than running a virtual image on a partition existing on a physical server in your data centre, you spin it up on a virtual machine that you have created in the cloud. Virtual disks can be created in a similar manner, to deal with the storage side of things.

For more details about cloud computing as well as to read an argument about whether this type of computing poses a danger to Internet Service Providers – read the full story at The Register.

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