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November 21, 2009

Platform MDM or MDM in a box?

Is “Platform MDM or an MDM in a box” a concept waiting to happen? My answer is yes, we can make this happen. Recently I was engaged in assessment of an "MDM in a box" offering for a large telecom client and I was impressed by the business model innovation they have taken to penetrate an already saturated market space. The green field telecom implementation has opted for an Opex based operating model through usage of shared networks and switching towers (hardware) with plans to chart out a large segment across all the circle and hubs in the Indian telecom market space. The general feeler was that the client would be willing to evaluate a Platform MDM offering.

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Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 03:38 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 27, 2009

How Secure is SaaS now?

Over the years SaaS has been revolutionizing the software industry and the advantages are well documented. One of the main deterrents of this fastest growing deployment model is regarding the security the SaaS applications have to offer. While more efficiency in terms of private clouds and on demand solutions are looked at by companies mostly due to the significant reduction in maintenance costs and other associated benefits, the single most important deciding factor in these IT initiatives continues to be the security of the deployed systems.

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Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 03:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 25, 2009

Cloud Computing and Software as a Service Applied?

Remember the days of Applied Engineering. Each of us was inspired by concepts of Applied Mechanics, Applied Thermodynamics, Applied consulting etc. It gave us an opportunity to explore the concept in a real time scenario. It is always with excitement, one enters the thermo dynamics labs to explore concepts of applied engineering. Time has come for us to break away and evaluate what the term applied cloud computing and applied Software as a Service means?

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Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 10:57 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

July 13, 2009

Social CRM: The place where everyone wants to be

I am a Liverpool fan. I regularly follow all the matches they play and visit a set of websites to capture the news at the club. Sometimes I don’t get to watch all the matches, if I’m travelling or attending some important meeting or busy with some personal task. I would be yearning to see if someone can send me the details through SMS for matches with video clips of the goals scored. I get some updates from a website which charges me way too much since it’s a UK based service. I have a Liverpool theme on my desktop and constantly discuss the club in Facebook and Orkut and other public forums. And this month when I visited the website of my mobile company to pay the bill I saw the link to download Manchester United ring tones etc. If you knew about the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United in the past season, you would realize how much that link irritated me.  I was thinking, “if only the company knew there are enough Liverpool fans in this part of the world. If only they knew I would be interested in such content on my mobile. If only there is a way for them to realize that I leave enough clues in public forums. If only…” This situation could be very true with IPL fans or in general any sports fan. This can be further extended to any interest that a regular person might have including cooking, travelling, etc etc.

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Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 05:43 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

June 16, 2009

Where Is SaaS Heading?

"Software as a Service is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms."[1]

SaaS originally got off the ground with customer relationship management and human resources applications. But recent trends have shown SaaS spread its reach into areas like online backup, Web conferencing, collaboration, and IT systems management. But the reach of SaaS into Enterprise Solution integration and Business Intelligence has been limited so far.

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Posted by T.V. Chandra Sekhar at 11:29 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

June 09, 2009

Where is CRM on the Cloud?

On Demand applications have long been the ‘Cloud’ face of CRM. This software as a service model still is the fastest growing CRM application deployment model. There have been numerous arguments about the feasibility and the cost effectiveness of the SaaS model. Nevertheless, the technology has developed over the last decade and users now are fully aware of how the model can play into their CRM roadmap. Then the storm began to brew over the ‘Cloud’. A pertinent question keeps popping up every now and then: Is SaaS Cloud Computing? For a more detailed view on this please read the blog on Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?

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Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 10:35 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

June 03, 2009

Has your SaaS TCO changed?

It is interesting to see how improvements in capabilities of SaaS CRM applications together with generic developments in SaaS space are impacting Total Cost of Ownership figures for SaaS CRM applications – negatively in some cases. One can see that happening at least in the following areas: Functionality, Integration Capabilities & Resource Availability.

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Posted by Alex Rishi Sankar at 07:30 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 01, 2009

Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?

There have been pertinent questions and interesting line of thoughts for the first post on Cloud Computing “Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?”. We will try to put things into perspective one by one. Firstly, lets deal with the confusion related to SaaS. Is SaaS same as cloud computing? More broadly, why is online video streaming, photo sharing and every, literally every, little thing available on the internet are being given as examples of Cloud Computing. Experts and hardliners may not necessarily like the idea of calling everything under the sun as Cloud.

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Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 06:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 17, 2009

SAAS – Where is the money, honey?

True, we are going through unprecedented era. There have been feelers that the US economy has been able to overcome the tide of recession. Goldman Sachs was able to report a profit (http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/story.html?id=1492381), this quarter, though they had to resort to usage of a $10 billion bail-out package from the US Treasury, as late as October 2008. This may lead to more banks trying to balance and juggle their financials to declare a profit, the subsequent quarters. So what does this have to do with SAAS? Well everything! Most companies who operate in the SAAS space have been failing to pass on their operational efficiencies to the client, leading to the client aggressively trying to cut the cost outlay for managing these hosted applications. Clients have evaluated switching over to a new vendor for the hosted application or have tried to bring in-house the functionalities delivered by these hosted applications. The SAAS players have aggressively tried to reduce the per user cost and has offered slab based bundling price to keep the exodus of their current clientele list.

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Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 04:13 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 11, 2009

Software as a Service – Maturity model and a way of Life for Small and Medium Business?

Software as a Service (SaaS) exploded into the market during the early 2000, however only non -core application have sufficient level of traction using the SaaS model. During the nascent phase of the SAAS buzz cycle, many CIO’s jumped into the band wagon hoping to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by going for a subscriber model or license fee (based on volumes) based model for utilizing non-core application E.g. Marketing life cycle management, Partner Accreditation System, Human resource and performance management, CRM solutions etc. However with the advent of Sarbanes Oxley and the need for transparency of data updates (organizational data hosted within organization and by SAAS providers) along with rampant case of Security breach of critical data during data management (storage, transmission and hosting from the organization to the SAAS provider) many organization has planned to manage such processes internally or have plans of pulling back SAAS implementation in-house.

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Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 03:32 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 02, 2009

Investment in CRM – Is it relevant NOW?

I was browsing our internal Blog community and came across some interesting points penned down by Khanchana on the relevance of CRM investments in the current economic scenario. Here are some interesting excerpts to take away from her blog.

 

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Posted by Haresh Parmar at 05:50 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

February 19, 2009

Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?

Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.

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Posted by Haresh Parmar at 06:50 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)