Tag Archives : cloud computing

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?”…

This week was the first Open Government & Innovations (OGI) conference in Washington, DC. What was special about this was that it combined the Obama Administration’s push for Transparency & Open Governance with the momentum to adopt “All Things 2.0.” It was a great conference. However I came away with some second-level observations that highlight some execution challenges we will all face to us Gov 2.0 effectively to help address our larges public policy problems…

Many intermingle the terms “Application Service Provision (ASP)” and “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).” However, these can be very different. It is important to confirm what your getting when you buy and ASP-based solution to ensure you avoid surprise costs…

I could title this, “Confessions of a Serial In-house Build-over-buy Guy” as I was guilty of doing this many, many times. Regardless of how good your team is (I have been privileged to lead some of the best) and how unique your requirements are, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to build “it” in-house (vs. using a Software-as-a-Service model). To see why (and for my counter-arguement as to when it is wise to do this), keep reading…

Regardless of your political orientation, the wrap-up of 2008 has clearly not been what we all hoped for in terms of the economy. The recent free-fall in the economy has affected much more than the financial capital markets–it has hammered the IT and software capital budgets of nearly every business (just ask any large-ticket enterprise software vendor if you do not believe me). As a result, there is no better time for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)…