Home About Us  |  News Contact Us  |  New User Registration 

Research-based
Market Strategy Consulting

Our Services
Why Saugatuck
Published Research
Events/Conferences
Search
  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 Chicago (O'Hare Airport). Founded in 1998, MetraTech is a privately-held company with 110 full time employees and 50 contractors targeting multiple industries -- including wire line, wireless, SaaS, Cloud infrastructure, financial services, media & entertainment and transportation -- with its on-premise software offering.

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.

Developed originally for telcos and other traditional utilities a decade ago, Monexa’s billing-and-payments solution is PCI DSS compliant and highly scalable, featuring an integrated product catalog and a rating engine that supports virtually all kinds of recurring service-billing models. Monexa’s hosted storefront and self-service portal work “out of the box” with implementation services support provided by the solution developers to ensure customer fit and enable custom implementations.

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 North America . (See Figure 1 for company details and contact information.) Billing is a fundamental element of Cloud operations, and Parallels markets its billing software, Parallels Business Automation, separately from its hosting/ Virtualization service delivery platform Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. However, together, these offerings form a functionally rich foundation and many hosting companies, including several European telcos, use both.

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

Figure 2 for a brief description of Parallels other offerings, as well as Saugatuck QuickTake QT474, “Parallels Inc. - Virtualization and SaaS Enablement”, published 24 June 2008, for more information about Parallels other offerings in virtualization, automation, and management.

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.

Zuora has signed up a handful of enterprise customers including Sun MicroSystems and Reed Business Information, a global publisher that is part of media giant Reed Elsevier based in the UK (see Note 1).  Due to the pending Oracle acquisition, the Sun Microsystems account could be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, Zuora offers a functionally rich billing solution – order to cash – that can compete with many of the more established on-premise and Cloud solutions, particularly in its market sweet spot, the Cloud startup business.

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.   

Along with opportunities, however, challenges and competitive threats increase as SaaS usage and sophistication increase. And emerging SaaS ecosystems and platform providers can increasingly be expected to deliver integration-as-a-service thus obviating the requirement for intermediary integration offerings. Of course, such “built-in” function could potentially utilize a Cast Iron foundation.

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.

Experienced in enabling and supporting SaaS providers, Logicworks sees additional opportunities in Cloud Computing. Given its dedicated client focus, custom-solution orientation, and experiences/ expertise, the firm is gravitating toward what it calls “private Cloud” implementations – Cloud-based, dedicated IT infrastructures utilized by a single client.

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 Oslo , the company is 15 years old, has approximately 500 employees, and has been publicly-traded since 2004 (MAMUT.OL). They currently claim approximately 400,000 customer accounts in 16 European countries.

Mamut’s strategy of focusing on European SMEs enables it to effectively pursue a growth market with significant potential for future SaaS and cloud-based offerings.  It also puts the company at some risk of aggressive competition, including global SaaS providers.

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.

Citrix recognized this trend, and in late 2007 acquired XenSource – and with it its leadership of the open source Xen virtualization offerings. This acquisition vaulted Citrix into becoming one of the leading providers of virtualization and management software for x86-based IT infrastructures. Now, a little over a year later, Citrix is driving for increased market presence with a range of offerings across the spectrum of virtualization, from desktops to data centers. As explained in the Vendor Profile in Figure 1, this QuickTake is focused on the IT infrastructure virtualization portion of Citrix Systems’ overall product line and business.

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, Neighborhood America may be in the right place at the right moment. 

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, Neighborhood America faces the challenge of continuing to grow during a recession in a market segment that is filling fast with new entrants who are trying to capitalize on the “Obama effect.”  Success will mean building out a set of relevant and meaningful services with a rapid time-to-value that it can deliver itself or through a network of media and technology partners.  Also key will be making good use of just-released “connect” technologies from such public social computing and collaboration leaders as Facebook and Google.  In short, even with the solid base that it has built since its founding, execution in the coming twelve to twenty-four months will be critical to the company’s future success.

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.

Hubspan recognizes these integration challenges as growing opportunities. Founded in 2000, Hubspan (see Figure 1 for additional company details and contact information) provides a multi-tenant, Internet-based Integration-as-a-Service approach for IT organizations facing application integration challenges.

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.

Both of these trends yield potentially very lucrative market opportunities. To pursue some of these opportunities, Parallels Inc. is delivering several facilities for IT virtualization and a functionally rich set of tools for enabling software providers to rapidly bring SaaS offerings to market.

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 U.S. market –partly attributable to less market awareness in the United States , partly due to its rigorous academic approach, more favored in Europe .

Unlike Microsoft Visio, its chief competitor in the U.S. market, IDS Scheer’s ARIS provides a proven, rigorous business process model designed to improve corporate efficiency. This business process rigor is particularly valuable in highly-regulated industries, e.g., finance and pharmaceuticals, where formally-structured business processes are all but mandated by compliance concerns.  IDS Scheer products are found in many financial and pharmaceutical organizations in Europe . Now with a proven product and an economic engine centered in Europe, IDS Scheer is preparing to drive its expansion worldwide, particularly into North America and Asia. The world markets it is entering offer huge growth opportunity, but also significant challenges deriving from differences in culture.

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.

From its beginning in 2000, Reflex Security (see Figure 1 for additional company details and contact information) has focused on delivering security capabilities in easy-to-use appliance form factors. In 2006, Reflex Security expanded their offerings to include the first Virtual Security Appliance.

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.  

Founded in 2004, Hyperic Inc. (see Figure 1 for additional company details and contact information) provides a next-generation systems management toolset for IT infrastructures which are facing the challenges noted above. Hyperic HQ is a “help me do it” offering which provides important functionality and support to improve the productivity and effectiveness of an IT management organization.

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., USA , Canada , European Union , Japan , India , China , and Russia ) worldwide and are subject to different sets of regulations in each of those geographies.

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 ReportThe 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.

Having arrived early in this space, DreamFactory is working hard to raise the bar to competition, both by allying with leading SaaS platforms and by constant, user-driven innovation. DreamFactory faces potential competitive pressure from at least three directions – existing but so far ineffectual online office suites such as GoogleApps, possible competing services developed by the same large SaaS platform providers to which it is allied today, and Microsoft, which has long searched for an effective model for Web-enabling its dominant Office suite. DreamFactory's long term success will depend on how effectively it can counter these potential competitors and particularly Microsoft, as it deploys enhancements to its Office Live suite in the spring of 2008.

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.

Birch Street has carved out a unique market niche in part because hotel chains live and die not on back-end savings but by optimizing their occupancy rate. Thus the focus of automation and analysis in the industry is the front-end reservation system rather than back-end purchasing.

Birch Street’s initial challenge was to get the hospitality industry to recognize the potential of back-end optimization to provide significant improvement to a hotel’s bottom line. Its client list – including Hilton, Marriott International, Global Hyatt, Omni Hotels, Carlson Hospitality, Interstate Hotels and Resorts, Marcus, and Cipriani – shows its success. Today the company’s major challenge is that the growth potential of this market is limited. Once it has sold its services to the limited number of large and medium-sized hotel chains, it will need to either expand its services to its existing customers or move into new markets (such as hospitals, restaurant chains, institutional food services, high-end retirement residence chains).

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.

Service-now.com offers both fully-hosted and on-premise deployments of data and functions which include incident, problem, change, release, asset, configuration, service catalog, and enterprise application mapping discovery technology.

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.

 
Research Library
Research Reports
Perspectives
Research Alerts
QuickTakes
Analyst Inquiry
Vendor Briefing
Citation Policy
 

Focus Areas

Key areas of research and publication focus

C-Team Research
Fact-based insight into CXO business & IT priorities

Enterprise Applications
Transition to "Applistructure"

Software-as-Service (SaaS)
New business and delivery models

Virtualization/Utility Computing
Utility Data Center & Pay-as-you-go IT

Outsourcing
Including BPO and Transformation Services

The IT Ecosystem
The rise of Master Brands

Additional and on-going areas of research

Security/Cyber Security

Web Services & SOA

Customer-Centric
Technologies

Corp. Performance Mgmt.

Wireless
__________

 


Copyright @ 1999-2010  Saugatuck Technology Inc. All rights reserved.
8 Wright Street, Westport, CT 06880 - 1.203.454.3900 

Home  |  About Us  |  Contact Us