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QuickTakes Saugatuck QuickTakes are net / net 2-3 page assessments of key market trends and leading and emerging vendors – with a focus on key strategies, strengths and challenges, including product / service positioning, go-to-market tactics and marketing / partner relationships. Bottom-line SWOT analysis and net/net market impact assessment provided. In addition to viewing the list of QuickTakes below, organized by date, please take advantage of our Advanced Research Search capability to input a free-form text search, or the ability to search by author, by date, or by topic area -- or visit our Research Library by Topic.
03-18-10 Aria Systems Cloud Billing Solution Targets Recurring Revenue (M. West, 4 pages, QT-715, $$$) Aria Systems provides a Cloud-based billing and subscription management solution with support for the full complexity of a telecom BSS/OSS. Aria Systems focuses mainly on the B2B subscription and recurring revenue model, but targets multiple verticals including SaaS, telecom, gaming, digital publishing, insurance, energy and other utilities. Over the past year, Aria has experienced growth of over 300 percent, while enhancing its functional capabilities, including improved data analytics, API extensions to smooth the on-boarding of new customers, two-way synchronization with NetSuite and salesforce.com, administrative enhancements, and transparency for customers monitoring availability, coupled with high responsiveness and guaranteed response time for technical issues. Yet Aria faces significant competitors both in the Cloud and in the on-premise solutions domain, not to mention the DIY competition it must convince of the revenue value of monetization and customer management solutions. 01-28-10 On-Premise MetraTech Monetizes Complex Business Models (M. West, 4 pages, QT-696, $$$) Originally
serving the telecom vertical primarily, today MetraTech’s
proposition is managing complexity in any industry.
While over 40 percent of its revenues still come from telecom
providers, MetraTech delivers its on-premise monetization software
to customers as diverse as Microsoft, Swisscom Mobile Dish, and the
City of MetraTech’s solution is SAS70, Type 1 and PCI DSS compliant and offers broad and deep functional capability in nearly all areas of billing and payments with the ability to support complex business models that require complicated rating, mediation, settlement, billing, and customer care. MetraTech provides exceptional fraud management, audit and control functionality and focuses its consultative selling process on enabling monetization for its customers. MetraTech features billing workflow and business modeling that fosters innovation for its customers with flexible deployment and pricing options, including a hosted solution. MetraTech’s biggest challenge is the Cloud. Although it has a leading on-premise offering, MetraTech cannot afford to miss the opportunity to develop and deploy a true multi-tenant SaaS offering to broaden its market appeal, especially to the lower end of the market. Otherwise, MetraTech risks missing the opportunity to capture a fast-growing segment that shows no sign of diminishing -- SaaS and Cloud solution players. And, while it offers a truly comprehensive on-premise solution, MetraTech needs to upgrade its reporting capability and develop dashboards for presenting billing information visually to its customers or run the risk of being pigeonholed as an old-fashioned, on-premise solution. 01-22-10 Monexa’s Cloud-Based Billing Includes Flexible Channel Support (M. West, 5 pages, QT-693, $$$) Monexa
targets small-to-very-large enterprises with a Cloud-based, billing
and payments offering for online services, for SaaS and cloud
computing companies and
for more traditional businesses that are moving to electronic
billing. The Vancouver-based billing provider is most effective at
solving the recurring billing problem for larger online businesses
with reseller channels, including multi-level relationships. 12-23-09 RevX: On-Premise Revenue Management That Should Be Better Known (M. West, 4 pages, QT-682, $$$) RevX provides a comprehensive system for Cloud Computing and Software as a Service providers seeking a monetization solution that can be tailored to unique business and operating requirements. Its messaging-centric Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows for ease of integration and orchestration of third-party components into a single revenue management system. RevX is a privately-held company that has deliberately avoided venture capital funding, instead taking a path of self-funded growth in targeted markets. RevX is not itself a SaaS service; the company licenses its systems for on-premise use. The firm plans to launch an outsourced alternative for clients interested in outsourcing revenue management during their initial start-up phase, but with the option of bringing their systems in-house as their needs evolve. RevX has been successfully installed at over 235 clients including Earthlink, Cable & Wireless, Todocast.TV and Cincinnati Bell / Zoomtown. RevX’s greatest strength is its technical depth and real-world experience in serving multiple markets and addressing complex operating requirements, primarily with telecom, media and online entertainment companies. 12-04-09 Vindicia Manages Charge Card Fraud, Retention for Online Merchants (M. West, 4 pages, QT-674, $$$) Vindicia offers an on-demand billing and fraud management solution for online merchants. Formed by the founders of eMusic.com, Vindicia takes a unique approach to managing billing for subscription online services based on that earlier experience with online content and entertainment. While other billing services focus on automating accounts receivable, Vindicia presumes that capability and emphasizes the related issues of managing credit card fraud and charge-backs and improving customer retention. 11-30-09 OpSource: A Pioneering Platform for the Enterprise Cloud (M. West, 5 pages, QT-671, $$$) OpSource is a major Cloud services platform and billing solutions vendor which counts IBM among its main competitors, and both SAP and Oracle (two rivals in most things technological) among its clients. While its billing service is built to be part of its unique full-featured Web hosting platform, it also is marketed as a stand-alone SaaS offering, with about 20 percent of its billing installations being stand-alone. 10-16-09 Parallels Business Automation: Operational Foundation for the Cloud (M. West, C. Burns, 5 pages, QT-653, $$$) Most
widely known for its virtual Windows environment for the Macintosh
and its server virtualization offerings, Swiss-based Parallels is
also a leading provider of cloud enablement software for
major Cloud Computing hosting companies focused on the SMB market in
Europe and Hosting
Cloud services for SMBs is a demanding business, due, in part to the
manner in which SMBs acquire Cloud services. Our research shows that
SMBs typically do not simply acquire capacity of virtual servers or
storage. Rather, they acquire solution functionality. And the market
abounds with thousands of such solutions. Some, like telephone and
email, are needed by any business, while many others are designed to
meet the needs of specific verticals. To succeed, a hosting provider
must support a large selection of functionality. A
substantial advantage Parallels offers is that many of those
applications, including Microsoft Exchange and other dominant
software packages, are already packaged to run on Parallels
Containers and be metered by Parallels Business. This enables Cloud
service companies to build their application portfolios effectively
in a plug-and-play mode and avoid investments in installation and
integration. It is worth noting that SaaS companies are similar in
that they also provide a set of computer functionality to one or
more verticals in the SMB market and need usage metering and billing
for those services. Parallels has identified this market opportunity
and is aggressively pursuing it. This
QuickTake focuses
primarily on Cloud operations and billing functionality within the
Parallels Business Automation offering, which facilitates
establishment of a hosting or SaaS operation. Please see 10-05-09 Fast-Growing Zuora Offers On-Demand, Subscription Management and Cloud Billing (M. West, 4 pages, QT-649, $$$) A
two-year-old, pure-play Cloud startup, Zuora is already growing past
the $5 million mark and projects revenues of $8 million in 2009,
despite the difficult economic climate. Zuora fuels this growth with
a SaaS billing and payments solution backed by a deep management
team with strong pedigrees, including top executives from
salesforce.com, WebEx, Google (Postini), eBay and Oracle, and a
board that includes executives from Accenture, Cisco, and PayPal
President Scott Thompson. 09-25-09 Cast Iron Systems: Facilitating Integration of Existing Systems with SaaS and Cloud Offerings (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-645, $$$) As
user enterprises adopt more (and more complex and critical) SaaS
offerings, they need a way to integrate those with existing systems
and data. Cast Iron Systems is building on expertise and a strong
customer portfolio to improve its positioning and its abilities to
meet this opportunity. Founded in 2001, Cast Iron provides a series
of offerings that address the challenge of integrating SaaS and
Cloud application workloads with existing, on-premise and
off-premise workloads and data.
04-30-09 LogicWorks: Hosting the Future, Challenged by the Present (B. Guptill, 5 pages, QT-591, $$$) Logicworks
Corporation is a provider of enterprise-class managed hosting
services for mid-sized and large enterprises, SaaS providers,
e-commerce retailers, media firms and financial services providers.
In business since 1993, the firm focuses on developing and providing
unique and advanced classes of services to a changing client base,
actively seeking out and utilizing new technologies.
This is evident in the customized nature of their solutions
and client relationships, including dedicated account teams for each
client. The firm’s business model is both enabled and challenged
by this approach, as dedicated resources and custom solutions offer
unique advantages while engendering higher costs of sales,
development, service provision, and customer support. Larger firms
than Logicworks have found this approach to be too costly over time,
yet the firm has continued in business for over 15 years. Clearly it
has found a comfortable niche and a coterie of satisfied clients. 03-31-09 Sabrix: Redefining Transaction Tax Management (M. Koenig, 6 pages, QT-581, $$$) Now in
its tenth year, Sabrix is an established and growing player in the
Transaction Tax Management arena.
A complex business process that every company must manage,
transaction tax management is becoming more critical as state and
local governments look to maximize their revenues during the current
economic downturn. Sabrix
offers solutions to SMB and large enterprise markets that combine
leading-edge technology with a content subscription (tax change
updates across thousands of jurisdictions) and managed business
services. Sabrix competes in a market that was long been dominated by a duopoly, but is now seeing new entrants. To succeed, the company must position itself as more than just a tax automation solution, but rather as a strategic partner to the CFO. This will enable Sabrix to most effectively communi-cate its ROI message. Executing on a complicated sales model, which includes both telesales and field sales forces, as well as a channel strategy involving three tiers of players – tax consultancies, systems integrators and service bureaus – without creating channel conflict will also be a critical success factor. If Sabrix can do this – and manage the complexity of a solution with both an on-premise and off-premise deployment solution – then Saugatuck believes that it can emerge from the current economic downturn in a strong position to capture share in its niche market. Sabrix’s solutions can also become an important aspect of larger Finance solutions. 03-27-09 Mamut: Delivering SME Solutions on a Software+Services Vision (B. Guptill, 5 pages, QT-579, $$$) Mamut
is a publicly-traded Norwegian ISV and shared / virtual hosting
provider with a broad European presence.
The company develops and sells SME-focused, on-premise,
Windows-based business management applications with hosted
collaboration, workflow management, security, upgrade, support, and
maintenance services. The
company also provides hosting services developed to complement their
business software offerings (e.g., SME e-commerce, web hosting, web
conferencing, applications integration, and site design). Mamut
is a significant Microsoft partner, and has built most of its SME
business software and services on top of/in close integration with
the Microsoft Office suite and other key Microsoft offerings such as
Hosted Exchange and Windows Server 2008. Headquartered in 01-23-09 Citrix’ Xen: Real Pursuit of Virtual Markets (C. Burns, 3 pages, QT-554, $$$) User
IT organizations are striving to reduce infrastructure costs while
improving the IT’s responsiveness to their business users.
Implementing one or more forms of infrastructure virtualization is
one of today’s most popular approaches to these goals. 12-12-08 Neighborhood America Brings Social Computing to Government, Large Enterprises (M. Koenig, 5 pages, QT-537, $$$) A
pioneer in creating private social networking sites in government as
well as large corporations, After President-elect Obama’s successful use of social computing in his campaign, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as white-label “communities” built in platforms such as Neighborhood America’s, have a new legitimacy. Large enterprises and governments are becoming conscious of the internal uses for these tools to support ad hoc teams across wide geographies and support a flat organizational structure that taps the full talents of all employees, as well as the external uses for connecting more closely with customers, partners and suppliers. Though
market interest is high, 11-21-08 SVA-BizSphere: European Sales Enablement Startup Offers Value, Faces Stiff Market Challenges (B. Guptill, 4 pages, QT-529, $$$) A pioneer in sales information management, with a system originally designed to capture and analyze sales collateral and market data from 13 IBM sales regions across Asia, SVA-BizSphere AG is implementing a two-pronged strategy. For large enterprises, which generally are loath to let sales data out of house, it is selling its sales enablement software on the traditional licensing model. However, it is also working with a third-party development firm to create a SaaS version it hopes to field in 2009. BizSphere’s target customers are companies with worldwide field sales organizations and data management needs, as well as mid-size companies that only have a fraction of the software acquisition budget. BizSphere offers a traditional software product and is pursuing a SaaS offering. 10-07-08 Hubspan; On-demand Integration for the Extended Enterprise (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-512, $$$) User
IT organizations are striving to deliver improved corporate
operations and increase the relevance and currency of their services
to their business users. Two increasingly popular approaches are
implementing inter-company (B2B) links and adopting
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. However, both of these
approaches bring new challenges of integration. 08-15-08 Intacct Moves Financials into the Internet Generation (M. West, 5 pages, QT-494, $$$) Every company needs financial systems, but small-to-mid size companies that are outgrowing QuickBooks face a real dilemma – try to extend their present system beyond its capabilities and take risks with their finances, or replace it with a much larger, orders-of-magnitude more expensive system that requires the creation of an IT department to run. Intacct is designed to attack this under-served $10 billion replacement market with a SaaS alternative that provides best-of-breed financials with full integration to other best-of-breed solutions such as Salesforce.com for CRM – without requiring the large up-front licensing or the IT group that goes with on-premise systems. 07-28-08 Antenna Software: A Platform for Enabling Mobility-as-a-Service (M. Koenig, 6 pages, QT-487, $$$) Growing use of advanced mobile devices such as smart phones, WiFi-enabled PDAs, tablet PCs and similar tools is leading to increased competition among device makers to capture and defend share in the enterprise user market. The burgeoning plethora of devices (and their attendant networks) is forcing more enterprise IT departments to move beyond one-off mobility projects toward a coordinated and strategic approach to enabling and managing mobile access and use of enterprise IT resources. Many departments now seek enterprise mobility platforms and middleware to deliver functionality from back-end applications to handheld devices in a centrally manageable way. Antenna Software’s mission is to provide this capability via its open-standards, component-driven Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP), and its mobility development platform, the AMP Studio. AMP and AMP Studio are designed to deliver connectivity and interoperability that enable functionality from major business applications through virtually any carrier to any of the major mobility devices. Saugatuck believes that Antenna’s platform offers advantages in both flexibility and functionality over other offerings, particularly with regard to the ability to deploy “mobility-as-a-service.” However, these advantages could be short-lived if the company is not able to solidify its position in user enterprises. 06-24-08 Parallels Inc. – Virtualization and SaaS Enablement (C. Burns, 5 pages, QT-474, $$$) Saugatuck
research shows that user IT organizations are being challenged to
reduce costs of their infrastructures and to rapidly provide new
application functionality. To reduce infrastructure and support
costs, implementation of virtualization has become the most widely
adopted element in IT plans. And, for rapid delivery of new
functionality, users are increasingly turning to
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. 06-20-08 European BPM Leader IDS Scheer Targets North America and Asia (M. West, 4 pages, QT-473, $$$) With more than 20 years of experience behind it and
close partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft,
IDS Scheer AG has long established itself as a leading vendor of
rigorous business process management (BPM) tools. IDS Scheer holds a
dominant market share in BPM in Europe, but so far has only a minor
presence in the Unlike
Microsoft Visio, its chief competitor in the 04-28-08 Reflex Security – Security in an Appliance Form Factor (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-457, $$$) User IT organizations are being challenged to reduce
the costs of their infrastructures and to demonstrate social
responsibility by reducing electrical power consumption. As a result
virtualization is becoming the most widely adopted element in IT
plans. And, as more infrastructures are virtualized, more IT
organizations are learning that while virtualization can deliver
dramatic cost savings, it also brings new challenges in IT
management. One key challenge is security, for the network, and for
the infrastructure overall. 03-31-08 Hyperic – Next Generation Systems Management (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-448, $$$) User
IT organizations are being challenged on multiple fronts including
implementing Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), and integrating
and managing new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads.
Simultaneously, user IT management is turning to virtualization in
the hopes of reducing infrastructure costs. These
forces are causing IT management to evolve from managing assets to
managing processes, and transform from a “do it myself” to a
“help me do it” and eventually to a “do it for me” approach.
03-27-08 EthicsPoint: Transforming Compliance into Business Process ROI (M. West, 4 pages, QT-447, $$$) Portland,
Oregon-based SaaS service provider EthicsPoint focuses on turning
ethical and compliance issues into business practices that reach
beyond HR and corporate attorneys’ offices to support actions and
provide benefits throughout the organization. Founded in 1999,
EthicsPoint focuses on highly regulated industries such as banking
and financial, mining, health care, pharmaceuticals, retail,
manufacturing, and transportation. These organizations operate under
very precise, demanding business regulations that carry severe
penalties for non-compliance, including in some cases possible
prison sentences for CEOs, CFOs, and other senior managers.
Complicating this environment further, many of these companies
operate in multiple geographies (e.g., Despite the far reaching nature of many of these regulations, compliance and ethical enforcement activities in many organizations have been confined to a few specific operating silos such as HR, corporate security, and legal, and have been conducted either on paper or on spreadsheets, making the procedures difficult to share across the organization. 01-31-08 Transitive – Cross Platform Virtualization for Application Migration (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-431, $$$) Founded in 2000, Transitive Corp. provides unique capabilities for migrating applications from one platform to another without modifications and despite hardware and operating system incompatibilities. (See Figure 1 for additional company details and contact information.) Transitive positions their offerings as providing “Cross-Platform Virtualization” software that enables software applications to run on any hardware platform without any source or binary change. Saugatuck has categorized this type of functionality and Hardware Virtualization in our recently published Strategic Research Report “The Many Faces of Virtualization: Understanding a New IT Reality,” SSR-420, 28Dec07. 01-09-08 Plexus Online: New-Generation Manufacturing Management (M. West, 4 pages, QT-423, $$$) Born in the automobile industry and designed by manufacturing engineers, Plexus Systems, Inc.'s, SaaS service, Plexus Online, delivers next-generation ERP functionality in an easy-to-use, easily customized, integrated set of modules. Unlike older generation ERP systems such as Oracle and SAP, which were built around accounting systems and which have problems, therefore, capturing shop floor information in a timely manner, Plexus Online starts with events on the shop floor and populates information up from there. Thus it works the way manufacturing companies work. One of its chief features is complete traceability – if a defect turns up in a part or subsystem, Plexus Online can trace the defect back to its source, determine what lots are affected and then identify any finished products containing pieces from those lots and any remaining pieces from them in inventory, allowing the manufacturer to correct the problem. This is vital in high-precision, high-liability industries such as automotive and aero-space, where a defective part can be deadly. 11-14-07 DreamFactory: Delivering Business Essentials Across the Web (M. West, 4 pages, QT-405, $$$) Founded
in 2002, DreamFactory has focused on extending horizontal office
functionality – such as project management, interactive reporting
and dashboards, business forms and now document collaboration – in
the cloud and therefore across geographic and organizational
boundaries. DreamFactory’s focus is on the user experience, and it
defines one of its largest challenges as continually enhancing its
services and improving the user experience. In addition to offering
these SaaS solutions directly to customers, DreamFactory has found
market leverage by offering these services as native
add-ins to leading SaaS platforms salesforce.com, the
soon-to-be-released Cisco WebEx Connect, and potentially others. 10-26-07 Birch Street Systems: Verticalization is Key to Success for SaaS-based Procurement Solutions Vendor (M. Koenig, 5 pages, QT-399, $$$) Designed from ground up as a SaaS solution, Birch Street Systems focuses on a narrow niche market – optimizing purchasing for the food and beverage services of large hotel chains. This operation presents a complex problem since it must balance orders of non-perishable products such as hard cheeses that are best ordered in aggregate ze for a region or entire chain with orders of fresh food items such as mushrooms with very short shelf lives, that are best ordered locally and used as soon as received, and are usually seasonal. 08-21-07 VMware: Making x86 Server Virtualization Real (C. Burns, 3 pages, QT-377, $$$) Founded in 1998, acquired by EMC in 2004
for $625M, and publicly launched via IPO last week, VMware targets
user IT organizations with a functionally-rich suite for
virtualization of x86 servers. 08-02-07 Service-now.com – IT Management as a Service (M. West, C. Burns, 3 pages, QT-373, $$$) Founded in 2003, as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution provider, Service-now.com targets large and very large enterprises with a rich set of integrated applications as a platform for IT service management. 07-20-07 Pragmatech Software: Foundation for Sales Effectiveness (M. Koenig, 6 pages, QT-368, $$$) Pragmatech’s SaaS-based sales effectiveness solution, inciteKnowledge, is a purpose-built content management platform designed to support the activities of the sales rep throughout the sales process. Unlike its competition, inciteKnowledge takes a process-oriented approach to sales effectiveness that enables alignment between corporate marketing and sales management and the field. 06-26-2007 Ketera Technologies - Redefining the Spend Management Value Chain (M. Koenig, 5 pages, QT-360, $$$) Founded in 2000, and built from the ground up to be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Ketera Technologies staked out a claim early-on as a low-cost provider of easy-to-use enterprise spend management solutions for large and very large enterprises (Global 2000). Today, by adding complementary capabilities around analytics, compliance and business process improvement, Ketera is positioning itself as a must-have technology foundation for these global companies as they continue to wrestle with the challenges of managing their indirect costs. 06-08-07 Fiberlink: Managing the Mobile Device Lifecycle (M. Koenig, M. West, 4 pages, QT-355, $$$) Having already transformed itself from a provider of network access services to value-added managed services targeting the mobile device life-cycle, Fiberlink Communications can now lay claim to a leadership position as a developer of innovative SaaS-based mobile security technology. 05-31-07 Prolifiq Innovates with Analytics-Based 1-to-1 Messaging Solution (M. West, 4 pages, QT-353, $$$) An innovative company at the nexus of CRM, content and mobility, Prolifiq Software has evolved sophisticated tools for analytics-driven 1-to-1 messaging. Prolifiq’s strategy is to improve the immediacy, availability, efficiency and effectiveness of customer-targeted digital content through an in-the-cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that integrates well with content management systems and supports leading mobile devices. |
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