• SaaS offering provides detailed analysis of your software portfolio

  Are you faced with the need to do a software portfolio analysis but find the prospect daunting given the scattered nature of your operation? A new SaaS-based offering from Cast might fit the bill.

• Oracle quietly plotting ambitious cloud computing plan

  During a series of analyst briefings this week, Oracle has provided additional details of how it plans to play in the cloud moving forward.

• Finally! An Office cloud service for iPad worth using

  For some reason, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of Cloud-based Windows 7 and Microsoft Office offerings, including scarily bad services such as OnLive Desktop, which was a media darling in January based on nothing more than demos. The real product is all but unusable - you lose your connection when you switch to other apps, for example, and you can't use the iPad's native keyboard. Plus, the company violated Microsoft's Windows 7 licensing terms, offering an essentially illegal desktop-as-a-service product. (That issue has since been resolved.)

• IT pro rethinks infrastructure from the ground up, ends up in clouds

  Mark Adams, vice president of IT at HireRight, is living the dream -- the chance to completely rethink the infrastructure for a $300 million software-as-a-service employment screening service company. While the nucleus of the 1,600 employee company has been around for 30+ years, a three year acquisition spree resulted in data center sprawl, leaving the company with 10 facilities, including company owned and collocation and disaster-recovery sites, some of them overseas. Now HireRight is three quarters of the way through a consolidation effort with a heavy emphasis on cloud. Adams gave an update on the company's modernization progress to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

• Cloud services face taxing dilemma

  States are having a hard time keeping up with the cloud, especially when it comes to taxing it.

• Are you ready for networking in the cloud?

  The two primary forms of public cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), are both growing dramatically in popularity. Over the last few years, the primary focus of the IaaS providers has been on offering the basic compute and storage resources required to run applications.

• Open source helps Facebook achieve massive app scalability

  People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

• What Microsoft Azure means to SMBs: not much, yet

  Small and medium-sized businesses have more important things to worry about than Microsoft's new Azure, a cloud-resident platform for building applications served to users online.

• SaaS An Easy Sell For This CIO

  The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.

• Corporate SaaS considerations myriad, complex

  Amid the growing popularity of software-as-a-service, IT managers are faced with a sometimes monumental task of developing big-picture strategies and policies to govern service-based applications as well as defining performance metrics and support.

Whitepapers about SaaS

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  Unified Monitoring™ A Business Perspective

  The enterprise computing landscape has changed dramatically. Virtualisation, outsourcing, SaaS, and cloud computing are creating fundamental changes, and ushering in an era in which enterprises distribute increasingly critical IT assets and applications across multiple service providers.This paper explores today’s computing trends and their monitoring implications in detail. In addition, it reveals how a new monitoring paradigm architecture, that uniquely addresses the monitoring realities of today’s and tomorrow’s enterprises—whether they rely on internal platforms, external service providers, or a combination of both.

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  5 Ways To Get More Out of Google Apps

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  Cloud Computing—Latest Buzzword or a Glimpse of the Future?

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  Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the Business Benefi ts of Cloud Computing