SaaS

News

• 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.

• IBM user group: 75% of companies aren't collecting social media information

  A recent survey of the IBM SHARE user group found just 25% of respondents were collecting data from social media networks for business purposes, though many more are apparently planning to do so in the near future.

• 5 signs that you've lost control over your Cloud apps

  CIOs are waking up to the reality that they've lost control over access to data stored in software-as-a-service applications purchased by other departments.

• SaaS seeds ready to bloom

  One expected benefit from the shift to the cloud is the emergence of a refreshing new crop of innovative software suppliers.

• Cloud consultants Cloud Sherpas, Global One merge

  Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne, which advise clients in implementing cloud-based Software as a Service applications, have merged in what is a sign of the continually busy M&A activity in the SaaS market.

• Riverbed teams with Akamai to boost SaaS performance

  Anyone who has endured the painful wait of a slow-loading application is familiar with the frustration and lost productivity that follows. That's the problem that motivated Riverbed and Akamai to join forces for a new SaaS acceleration offering, with the objective of resolving SaaS application performance issues that were previously untouchable.

• NaviSite wants to host your virtual desktops

  Seeking to capture a slice of market share in the emerging field of virtual desktop services, NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable managed service provider of cloud-based products has announced its next major endeavor: a desktop as a service (DaaS) offering aimed specifically at enterprise customers.

• Bullish on PaaS

  As early as 2008, Bullhorn Inc., a fast growing Boston-based provider of front-office staffing and recruiting management software, was considering the cloud to help streamline development and distribution of its Software as a Service (SaaS) products to over 2,500 customers and 25,000 users in 35 countries.

• CA offers new disaster recovery option

  CA Technologies has launched a disaster-recovery software-as-a-service offering that combines on-site data protection with a cloud-based service, using Microsoft Azure's infrastructure.

• (Fill in the blank)-as-a-service

  IaaS, SaaS and PaaS are the obvious as-a-service offerings, but there are plenty of others. In fact, just about every letter of the alphabet has an "as a service."

• Building an IDPS without big iron

  This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.