NetSuite launches 2007 version of SaaS enterprise software
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InfoWorld - NetSuite, the other hosted CRM company, laid out version 2007.0 this week of its CRM, ERP, and PRM (partner relationship management) SaaS (software as a service) solution.
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SAP has won a $35 million contract to install its human resources software for the US Postal Service. The NetWeaver-based system will replace the Post Office&#39;s current 25-year-old legacy application
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will release architectural guidance for organizations looking to offer SaaS (software as a service) on Thursday. A sample application that is designed to illustrate what Microsoft categorizes as key architectural principals of SaaS will be featured. "The app itself is a fictitious HR application," said Tim O'Brien, director of the platform strategy group at Microsoft. "The functions it provides from an HR standpoint are less interesting than the architectural principals underneath," O'Brien said. The application is single-instance and multi-tenancy, and guidance is provided on resource-sharing as it pertains to an application. "Multi-tenancy is a real important architectural concept for companies transitioning to SaaS," because scaling is required, said O'Brien. There are challenges to getting software to scale so another instance of the application is not required, he said. Also featured are rules for security to make sure data does not leak from one tenant or user to another. The application in question uses Microsoft's C# and managed code technologies. The Visual Studio 2005 platform also is featured, as are Microsoft's SQL Server database and Internet Information Server. Microsoft is intending to show how to deal with SaaS issues using its technologies, but the intent is more to focus on implementation, O'Brien said. "This is more of an architectural challenge," O'Brien said. Microsoft's guidance is to be released on MSDN. Microsoft plans to offer its Dynamics CRM package and Office Live software in a hosted SaaS format later this year. Users are looking to SaaS to either move application maintenance out of their own data centers or to try an application before buying it, said O'Brien. The future will entail users hosting applications internally and utilizing SaaS, he said. An analyst noted Microsoft's belief in a hybrid model for software delivery. "This is basically Microsoft [providing] a first step in guidance down that road," said Lyn Robison, an analyst in the application platform strategies service at Burton Group.
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Thinks modular for NetWeaver There'll be no more big updates for SAP's ERP software until 2010, as SAP entices customers and developers to adopt new products and initiatives for its NetWeaver SOA strategy.â¦
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SaaSWizard is announcing Monday its SaaSWizard 2.0 rapid application development platform for building SaaS and internally hosted applications, sans programming.Positioned for hosted business-to-business applications, the Java-based platform enables developers and original equipment manufacturers to quickly assemble applications that can be hosted by SaaSWizard or inside a corporate firewall, SaaSWizard said.SaaSWizard offers a business rules engine to automate back-end processes."I'd say the main focus of the new version of functionality is the business rules engine," said Colin Earl, SaaSWizard CEO."It allows you to configure the program to automate business processes," such as a sales request that has been submitted but not responded to in several hours, Earl said. Business rules can be defined to escalate a request like this, he added.Version 2.0 also features dynamic data modeling, enabling custom tables and table relationships to be created quickly; graphical drag-and-drop workflow, and a virtualized grid environment. This environment ensures that an application will continue to run when a server or other component fails.Other new features focus on application customization, auditing and advanced access controls for organizations to meet regulatory mandates. SaaSWizard 2.0 also integrates with LDAP directories and Windows management Instrumentation, for automatic discovery of users' computer environments.Also included in version 2.0 are a charting and reporting engine, with dozens of default charts, and drag-and-drop dashboard compilation, for combining charts from multiple tables.A user of the product vouched for its ease of use. "I would characterize it as a rapid development platform that doesn't require programming," with a graphical environment for developing custom applications, said the user, Steve Chipman, founder of Lexnet Consulting Group, a value-added reseller (VAR).Lexnet used the platform to develop ManuLogic, a support application for equipment applications. It can either be hosted or installed on-premises."I like [SaaSWizard] because it's a SaaS platform that's available to a VAR and in general VARs are insulated from the revenue share on SaaS-driven applications," Chipman said. But with SaaSWizard, Lexnet is able to build an application that it could resell, he said.SaaSWizard 2.0 is built on an open source technology stack featuring Linux, the JBoss application server and the MySQL database. Solaris, AIX and Windows also are supported.Additional capabilities include:* Email integration.* A text search engine.* Single sign-on.* Multi-language support.* Customization.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Tuesday it plans to introduce a Web-based version of its sales  and marketing software in 2007 as it targets rivals like  Salesforce.com , Oracle Corp. , and SAP AG   in a fast-growing market.
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German business software vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.
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As part of its update of its EnterpriseOne suite, PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) has launched two new applications targeted toward the established customer base of what used to be J.D. Edwards (Nasdaq: JDEC) -- manufacturing enterprises.
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NetSuite announced plans for an initial public offering, which observers say could be a milestone for the software-as-a-service business.
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New 2007 editions of products promise improved protection and better use of computing resources.
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(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
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Network Appliance has announced what it terms a key milestone in its Storage Grid vision with the release of its Data ONTAP 7G enterprise storage software, which the company is touting as bringing newer functionality and lower costs to the concept of
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(InfoWorld) - SAPÂ is stepping into uncharted waters with the launch of itsÂ hosted business applications service, codenamed A1S,Â on Wednesday. The move will give it a head start over Microsoft and other rivals, but could also mean SAP learns the hard way that offering hosted ERP on a wide scale is difficult to do. Offering business applications on demand, also called software as a service (SaaS), is not new. But most services, including those from trailblazer Salesforce.com, have focused on customer relationship management or human resources management, only a part of ERP (enterprise resource planning). Those functions are easier to offer as a hosted service, since managing sales and payroll tends to be fairly standard across industries and countries. ERP as a whole is more complex, involving tasks like supply chain management, procurement and accounting, for which requirements and regulations can vary greatly. "It's less standard across industries, but even more importantly across geographies. The regulatory differences are profound even between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg," said Bo Lykkegaard, a research manager with IDC in Denmark. Even the existingÂ leader in hosted ERP, NetSuite, has found it difficult to offer the services widely outside the U.S., according to Lykkegaard. "They've been selling mostly CRM internationally, which is easier to localize because it's mostly a question of currency and sales tax." "Hosted ERP is still nascent, and that's what A1S is largely about. That's what makes the A1S launch today so interesting," he said. SAP executives are giving the first public demonstration of A1S, aimed at midmarket companies with up to about 2,000 employees, in New York on Wednesday. They are also expected to unveil the name for the service and possibly pricing. The software is being tested by a handful of customers now and is likely to be rolled out gradually next year starting in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The complexity of hosting ERP software has prevented Microsoft from announcing plans to offer its Dynamics ERP applications as a service, although its hosted Live CRM software is being released this quarter. "Software as a service makes a lot of sense for CRM, because the offering typically goes in with very little customization -- a sales process is a sales process," Klaus Helge Andersen, corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, said in a recent interview. "ERP has more deep vertical content, and all the multitenant platforms I know about don't have a customization model that works well for individual customers." SAP is expected to show in New York Wednesday how it gets around this problem. It has touted the benefits of A1S at some length but hasn't shown publicly yet how it works. It has said it will be quick and easy for businesses to set up, with interfaces tailored for industries and users. And it promises to open a new market for ERP for smaller companies wary of its complexity, much as Salesforce.com opened doors for CRM. Lykkegaard has seen A1S and said it is built from the ground up as a hosted service, and that SAP has done much to make it easy to use. Customers can look at the software on the Web and try configuring it before they purchase it, "so what used to be a presales exercise the customer can do for themselves," he said. "Then when you configure a business process it's all model-based, so you choose a business process and the user interface will change correspondingly. It's procedure driven." "They truth will be in the details, and we'll see that when some of these midsize companies start to work with the software," he said. Besides NetSuite, SAP will face competition from many small companies offering hosted ERP in local markets. In addition, Deloitte & Touche has been offering hosted ERP using Microsoft's Dynamics software in some European countries, Lykkegaard said, although Deloitte declined a request to discuss it. The rewards are potentially big. IDC projects revenue from on-demand applications to increase almost 60 percent in 2007, and grow at a compound annual rate of 32 percent over the next five years. In 2006, hosted applications accounted for about 3 percent of all software applications revenue. That will increase to 10 percent by 2011, Lykkegaard said. "Keep in mind that's revenue from licenses and maintenance, not just new software licenses, so it's a very profound impact," he said.
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Online auction The long-rumoured and speculated Initial Public Offering (IPO) by Netsuite, the software as a service (SaaS) specialist, is at last underway. and it looks like it will use a novel way to determine the share price and the volume of shares to be issued.â¦
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Microsoft on Monday released Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005, a major upgrade that adds support for Windows Vista and Office 2007. In addition, Microsoft is now allowing unlimited virtual instances of SQL Server on severs licensed for the Enterprise Edition of the database software.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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EnterpriseWizard this week is releasing the 2.0 version of its CRM application, a product built on top of its SaaSWizard Web application development platform and designed to be easily customizable.