Consulting and Upgrades
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
In an interesting advertising campaign, online software provider Netsuite is claiming that their average customer saves $10,000 annually in electricity costs.
While that may be true (do they work in the dark after purchasing Netsuite?) – no mention is made of the recurring fees associated with Netsuite.
Based on public information you could be spending all of that $10,000 savings — and more (depending upon configuration as shown below).
Some NetSuite Pricing:
—NetSuite license pricing starts at $299 or $499 per month plus $79 or $99 per User
—Advanced Inventory module can be added on to your NetSuite account for $299 per month
—Advanced Financials module can be added on to your NetSuite account for $299 per month
—Advanced Billing module can be added on to your NetSuite account for $399 per month
—Incentive Compensation / Commission module can be added on to your NetSuite account for $299 per month
—Advanced Project Accounting module can be added on to your NetSuite account for $399 per month
—Add the SiteBuilder module to NetSuite for $299 per month (fully customizable Web Design, SEO Optimization, Multi-Currency shopping, Shopping Comparison feeds to Google Base, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Nextag and more ….)
—Add Advanced Analytics to NetSuite for $299 per month to take advantage of full circle Marketing Campaigns with outbound email promotions tied to Web Store Analytics and ROI per campaign
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:
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.
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.
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.
After the great presentation given by both Netsuite and Intacct, I was asked to give some feedback on the area of SAAS (software as a service) and highlight some of the topics covered in the presenation.
Here’s a brief YouTube video that the IT Alliance took of me during the conference which contains my thoughts:
