Archive : SaaS and cloud computing

After many years on the marketplace, the benefits of SaaS – especially when compared to owning everything yourself – are obvious and well known: Flexibility to “dial” capacity up or down as needed, pay-as-you-go pricing, access to high economies of scale with low investment… However, SaaS pricing modes often lacks two things that we all [...]

Wikileaks is back in the news again today, with more information on its threat to disclose information on Bank of America. Any responses to block this will likely be followed with more DDoS attacks by Operation Payback. In light of this, it is easy to fall into the pattern of focusing on the “tax” that [...]

We often are asked about the risk of doing something new. However, what is the risk of NOT doing something new? Especially in a world filled with creativity and competition.

Jack Welch used to say, “Be Number 1 or Number 2 (or else get out of the market).” Does this same “Magic Number” apply in the information technology and software world (where innovation is continuous and Moore’s Law applies)?

Pricing software has always been an interesting exercise. The marginal cost to copy and provide software is virtually zero. However, the cost to develop it—and the value of the intellectual property that goes into its creation—is far greater. These two tensions have created a range of models that vendors use to price software. This post evaluates several of these, highlighting ideal (and non-ideal) markets for each.

Many of us use Twitter, a free cloud-based service, to market ourselves and conduct one-to-one business development. Unfortunately, hackers brought Twitter down several times already this month with Denial-of-Service attacks. This begs the question, “when should we invest in obtaining our own clouds—vs. sharing free crowds with others?”…