Owner: SaaStream: SaaS, CRM & Enterprise 2.0 URL:http://www.saastream.com Join Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:27:24 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: SaaStream is tracking developing trends in "Software as a Service" (SaaS), CRM & Enterprise 2.0 as they relate to enterprise adoption and their impact on business performance.
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Enterprise 2.0 … Show me the ROI 2007-10-12 12:09:18 While Enterprise 2.0 is often described as “web 2.0 meets the enterprise”, what Enterprise 2.0 encompasses is much bigger. Enterprise 2.0 represents a radical change in the way businesses operate and is as much about the people, the culture and the processes as it is about the technology, tools and platforms.
More than simply Web 2.0 applied to business, Enterprise 2.0 could indeed be considered as the synthesis of new technologies, models, processes and mindsets that are revolutionizing the way business is conducted. Technologies and models have also emerged that have had a dramatic impact on the future of the industry: open source, offshoring, services-oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS). Rather than one single trend taking the lead, Enterprise 2.0 will be the combination of all of these new technologies and models.
In this context, measuring the impact and evaluating the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 is fast becoming a hot topic. Although these may not always
How businesses are using Web 2.0? 2007-10-12 12:09:18 The McKinsey Quarterly recently published the results of a Global Survey conducted earlier this year on how businesses
were using Web2.0.
This McKinsey Global Survey highlighted that respondents (2,847 executives worldwide, 44 percent of whom hold C-level positions) show widespread but careful interest in this trend.
Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, they say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead, they place the greatest importance on technologies that enable automation and networking”.
Key take-aways from this report include:
More than half of the executives are pleased with the results of their investments in Internet technologies over the past five years, and nearly three-quarters are planning to maintain or increase investments in Web 2.0 technologies in the coming years.
&nbs
SaaS Beyond the Tipping Point: Three Waves, Four Key Management Challenges, Five Strategic Planning Positions 2007-10-12 12:09:17 The issue of whether SaaS is truly a core disruptive technology and business services phenomenon is no longer in doubt. SaaS is now a basic fact of life in IT and in business. Already, SaaS has moved from simple to sophisticated – and from a departmental adjunct, to becoming a fundamental part of business and IT infrastructure & operations. SOA, Open Source, Collaboration, Mobility, Mash-ups and Web 2.0 are now converging on SaaS platforms, providing rich, configurable applications and business value.
While the pace of growth and change has been fast, longer-term success with SaaS will require that both users and vendors rethink how business software deployment strategies and architectures will evolve so as to fully understand the impacts of this new delivery and licensing approach. This is one of the important conclusions of Saugatuck Technology’s research report published earlier this year, “ThreeWaves
of Change: SaaS Beyond the Tipping Point”.
Saugatuck Technology, a Read more:Management
, Strategic
Which consumer 2.0 are you? 2007-10-12 12:09:17 Blogs, podcasts, video-sharing sites, social networks ... You will find below great graphical representations of Forrester's Social Technographics® research results … a very informative set of charts as to the demographics of Internet users and how they spend their time online.
Almost every demographic group is engrossed in the Web, even if with different levels of participation depending on their profile. Whether they can be considered as creators, critics, collectors, joiners or just spectators, users are getting smarter about the Web 2.0 tools.
I have always been very surprised to discover how so many companies know so little about their customers, especially when it comes down to their use of social technologies and online behaviour.
Forrester categorises social computing behaviours into a ladder with six levels of participation (Social Technographics®). Companies pursuing social technologies should analyse their customers' Social Technographics firs
SOA, the DNA of a flexible, agile & innovative company 2007-10-12 12:09:17 Depending on who you talk to, Service Orientation is either the biggest disruptive innovation in software, or merely a rerun of object-oriented programming and development. Whatever the perspective, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is heavily promoted as the way forward for businesses struggling to create more flexible and agile business processes while reducing the cost of application development and maintenance. Given all the “noise” in the market about SOA, let’s try and identify precisely what the main benefits provided by this approach are.
Due to the current focus on business flexibility, growth and innovation, the technology that most expedites these business goals is Service Oriented Architecture. Innovation requires change and SOA makes it easier for companies to change.
The Service Oriented Approach to linking software systems and applications is transforming the way many organisations share information. This approach improves existing methods of sharing data by p Read more:company
The Shifting Balance of Power: When CRM becomes CMR 2007-10-12 12:09:16 Many organisations aspire to be customer-centric, yet few have figured out the recipe for successfully transforming their business. It seems like it was just yesterday that companies were discovering the importance of implementing CRM technologies and strategies aimed at acquiring new customers, managing effectively customer interactions, selling more to current customers, analysing the effectiveness of marketing activities and providing better customer service. All in the name of building stronger, longer lasting business relationships. Well, today is a new day, and the customers now decide who they do business with, as well as how and when they will do so.
"CMR" – or "Customer Managed Relationships" started to be spoken about 2 years ago but still gets little airplay despite Web 2.0 gaining increased traction as a full-fledged platform fostering collaboration, participation and community building.
Companies will only achieve improved results in this “customer managed world” i Read more:Shifting
, Balance
How will emerging technologies affect your company? 2007-10-12 12:09:16 Gartner has released this summer the latest iteration of its “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2007", the broadest aggregate of Gartner’s hype cycles - a graph which charts how technologies
are built up and adopted. The idea is that technologies follow a basic path of adoption - going from a trigger point, through overblown hype and then enduring disillusionment, before finally becoming more mainstream and accepted. A hype cycle offers a snapshot of the relative maturity of technologies. It highlights overhyped areas against those that are high impact, estimates how long technologies and trends will take to reach maturity, and helps organisations decide when to adopt or evaluate emerging technologies.
The three key technology themes identified by Gartner this year are:
Web 2.0: The community, technology and business innovations of the web continue to evolve and specific approaches and technologies have progressed including wikis, mashups, enterprise RSS, social Read more:company
Community Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management and Marketing Performance Management to transform marketing by orders of magnitude in the years to come 2007-10-18 19:32:43 You may have come across a recent post I published about the latest Gartner “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” which actually represents the broadest aggregate of Gartner’s hype cycles. Let’s now focus on the Gartner's “CRM Marketing Applications Hype Cycle” in order to get a better understanding of the maturity, adoption rates and benefits of marketing technologies in particular.
According to Gartner Dataquest, by 2011, the marketing technology software market will be worth more than $3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 17% for overall software revenue. This growth in marketing investment is driven by several factors: CEOs' focus on organic growth, in which marketing is playing a central role in customer-centric businesses and CRM strategies,
Interest in collecting, analysing and leveraging customer insight into relevant and timely customer communications,
Need to align marketing with sales and customer service through improvements in the definition Read more:Management
, Performance
, orders
Word-of-Mouth or when the unbiased opinion is trusted around the globe 2007-10-25 13:02:46 You may have come across one of my posts entitled “Which consumer 2.0 are you?” urging marketers to develop a better understanding of their customers’ online behaviour and devise a coherent and adapted social strategy accordingly. You probably also remember a recent post called “The Shifting Balance of Power: When CRM becomes CMR” where I was addressing how marketers should understand how to craft the collaborative customer experience and better engage the customer in order to increase profits, improve marketing efficiency and develop customer satisfaction.
Well … Nielsen released a couple of days ago the results of their “Online Global Consumer Study” surveying Internet users on their attitudes toward many types of communication channels, including consumer-generated content. This worldwide study shows that while there are more marketing channels aimed at consumers than ever before, yet more than three-quarters of Internet users surveyed find that consumer opinion
s a
Europe poised for SaaS explosive growth 2007-10-30 17:14:19 Earlier this year, Saugatuck published a Research Report, covered in one of my recent blog post entitled “Three Waves of Change: SaaS Beyond the Tipping Point”. This report is describing the rapid acceptance of SaaS over the past year and clarifying how SaaS is shifting and evolving as well as how these changes will affect both user and vendor organisations over the next several years.
Another interesting Saugatuck Strategic Perspective entitled “SaaS Adoption in Europe
: A Closer Look at Rapid Growth” identifies the similarities and differences between North America and Western Europe, as SaaS adoption currently explodes across all market segments.
A quiet but steady growth in demand is indeed occurring in Western Europe. If, as suggested by Saugatuck, European adoption of SaaS lags North American adoption by 12 to 18 months, we can expect that European use of SaaS for mission-critical workloads will also spike over the next year or two, following very similar patterns.
Sales 2.0: Taking sales to another level 2007-11-11 19:58:27
Yes, the '2.0' hype is getting somehow out of hand and the moniker now comes to Sales … There’s been a lot of talk recently about 'Sales 2.0' and how companies can benefit from adopting Web 2.0 concepts and technologies in sales. The movement is under way to classify and clarify this latest version of sales-related technology. So before we dismiss Sales 2.0 as yet another buzz word, I have selected, as a starting point for defining it, a video where David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com, discusses the advantages of combining Web 2.0 technologies with new selling techniques.
Delivering a simple definition of Sales 2.0, this video is nicely illustrating how organisations should integrate digital marketing and web 2.0 technologies in order to increase sales cost effectiveness and efficiency.
It is true that an increasing variety of online marketing techniques are available, many of which are extremely well suited to reach specific target audiences and highlight the value of its Read more:Taking
, level
Acronyms soup … A pain in the –aas 2007-11-18 16:39:37 I wanted to echo an excellent post from ZDNet's Phil Wainewright about the over-used '2.0', ‘-aaS’ and ‘-oriented’ monikers.
clipped from blogs.zdnet.comThe tendency to slap ‘-as-a-service’ on the end of anything that’s offered as a shared service is now starting to rival the over-used ‘2.0′ meme.The good news is that the concept of delivering business technology in a services idiom is hitting the mainstream. The bad news is that slapdash use of contrived modifiers like -aaS, -oriented and ‘2.0′ makes it all sound like gobbledegook to the average Joe in the street.So why can’t we just talk about ’services’ and be done with it? Businesses have always delivered services — from long before software and the Web came along to help them do it better, cheaper, faster. Do we really have to call that business-as-a-service? Service-oriented business? Business 2.0? Let’s not make it such a pain in the -aaS. This is how forward-looking organizations do business
Unleashing the power of remote collaboration & virtual team management 2007-11-25 14:25:28 When thinking about factors that distinguish top performing companies, the root of their success often can be traced to the human equation. But how many companies are able to tap more than a fraction of their workforce potential? How many are able to take advantage of latent talents, ideas and contributive strengths waiting to be switched on? How many are able to unleash the power
of remote collaboration & virtual
team management? The companies that find the means to use a larger fraction of their human resources will undoubtedly supersede their competitors. That is their edge in the global economy.
With increased globalisation, virtual leadership has started gaining a strong foothold in recent times. As the workplace evolves, the techniques for managing employees are changing. Today’s leaders and managers are faced with a different set of challenges for managing employees who work in various locations across the globe or telecommute. Managing in the virtual environment can be q
Driving successfully web 2.0 into the enterprise 2007-12-09 19:38:01
There are risks and challenges associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different.
It is quickly becoming evident that successful implementation is arising from business strategy, aligned with clearly defined outcomes & objectives, and supported by organisational structures, company's culture and adapted technologies. Like any other project, it requires thought, preparation, support, energy, and communication.
A lot of companies are currently planning their web 2.0 strategies and are discovering the opportunities as well as facing the challenges of adopting these technologies in the workplace. This "ZDNet At the Whiteboard" video entitled "Web 2.0 at Work" is examining the pain points of implementing Web 2.0 tools at work, and offers a strategy as well as key considerations for a successful deployment and adoption. The business case, system adoption and issues around fragmentation are typical pain points that companies are dealing Read more:Driving
, enterprise
Total economic impact of Software-as-a-Service: The foundation of a sound technology investment 2007-12-23 14:28:11 As firms look to focus on core business processes, software-as-a-service (SaaS) provides an increasingly attractive alternative. Companies of all sizes are weighing advantages of SaaS which has emerged as an important deployment option in customer relationship management (CRM) but is also eliciting interest in other areas such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), security or backup just to name a few.
The key cost drivers for any software implementation are the cost of the software application, the hardware required to run the system and the people services required to design, deploy, manage, maintain and support the application. Nevertheless, in addition to typical cost drivers (such as capital expenses, design and deployment costs, ongoing infrastructure, operations, training and support costs), companies also need to look at intangible costs when completing a TCO analysis. Some of the intangible cost factors that affect TCO include reliability and availability, interoperabil Read more:Service
, investment
, Software
, Total
, impact
15 golden rules for Web 2.0 2008-03-10 19:05:23 Introduction This article was originally designed to address the questions which were sent to me by large customers wanting to launch Web 2.0 initiatives. Very often, these clients wanted to jump on the bandwagon, but didn't know how to do...
Enterprise 2.0 fear factor: Overcoming risks, uncertainties and doubts 2008-02-27 07:22:04 There are risks associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, as well as with partners, suppliers... Read more:factor
Changing your marketing mindset: 12 steps to the interactive future 2008-02-12 17:15:41 We recently touched on the subjects of the many forms of web marketing tactics that could potentially be utilised as part of your digital marketing arsenal as well as the effectiveness and increased use of these online tools. So while... Read more:Changing
, steps
How are companies marketing online? 2008-02-04 17:02:59 Although there are many online
tactics available to supercharge your digital marketing plan, not all of them deliver the same effectiveness or even are appropriate. It is obviously highly depending on the target audience you are trying to reach and...
36 online techniques to supercharge your 2008 digital marketing plan 2008-01-28 16:49:25 Got your marketing plan ready for 2008? Let me first ask you this simple question since you would be surprised (or not) to discover that a startling 40% of marketing professionals don't even have a formal marketing plan. Surprisingly, not... Read more:online
Predictions for 2008 ... Eight business technology trends to watch 2008-01-18 16:37:30 While every day seems to bring a whole bunch of predictions and thoughts for this new year (and the decade to come!), I have selected this excellent article from The McKinsey Quarterly entitled "Eight
business technology trends to watch
". In... Read more:Predictions
New Year's top resolution: Managing your online reputation! 2008-01-13 20:15:38 Well, 2008 has arrived, along with the New Year
's resolutions and the ever-present pundit predictions. Now that we're on the other side of the New Year, I thought I would share my thoughts on what I feel should be one... Read more:online
SaaS predictions for 2008 and beyond 2007-12-27 15:45:45 With only a few days left before 2008 hits us, I thought it was the perfect timing to dive into what Saugatuck Technology just reported as being their SaaS predictions. Their recent research alert highlights five key trends in SaaS... Read more:beyond
Can software accurately reflect the work 'place'? 2008-03-16 12:07:19 by Dr. Lee Schlenker Although IT vendors can proudly claim that computer technology is nearly ubiquitous in business today, many managers remain quite sceptical of the ability of software solutions to help them learn about the different realities of business... Read more:reflect
E-mail usage: 12 worst practices and recommended strategies for better communications 2008-04-03 07:35:17 You can digg this by clicking here 12 worst practices of e-mail usage in the workplace and recommended strategies for increased productivity (in 6 installments) Illustration by Yann Gourvennec As announced in a previous post, this is part one of... Read more:better
10 steps to 2.0 interactivity nirvana 2008-04-17 03:41:51 It occurred to me in the past few weeks that there was some kind of missing link in the evolutionary state of the twenty first century corporation towards interactivity. As expressed in an earlier article entitled "15 golden rules for... Read more:steps
Integration strategies for better SaaS adoption 2008-05-13 17:06:01 I recently provided highlights on the role and impact of SaaS in a modernised IT environment and am trying to permanently observe the emergence of innovative offers that will bring the SaaS (r)evolution to its second and third steps. Over... Read more:better
How to get started with corporate blogging (1/3) 2008-05-29 03:24:18 Introduction Once your Corporate stakeholders have understood why Web 2.0 is more than a fad and why its marketing could benefit from it (Read our 15 golden rules for Web 2.0) and once they have established how their 2.0 strategy... Read more:corporate
how to get started with corporate blogging (2/3) 2008-06-02 11:52:54 preliminary questions First and foremost, define the purpose of your corporate
blog even before you start writing the first line. What is the objective of this blog? Is it about awareness? Is it intended for you to share knowledge with...
how to get started with corporate blogging (3/3) 2008-06-02 11:51:26 the do's and don'ts of Internet Blog writing Writing in a blog is not very complex, but there are a few guidelines which should be respected as much as can be. This list of do's and don'ts of Internet blog... Read more:corporate
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