On-demand travel and expense management vendor Concur signaled the scale of its ambition today with the announcement that it is acquiring long-time rival Gelco for $160 million. The news comes hard on the heels of a big product announcement last week, when it unveiled an upgraded platform for integrating travel...
The pantheon of entities tagged 2.0 grew ever more bloated with the unveiling of 'Travel and Expense 2.0' at the business travel industry's annual convention in Boston this week.Concur was the vendor trying to thrust T&E management into 2.0 territory. But its press release headline misses the point about 2.0...
Steve Singh, CEO of travel and expense management vendor Concur, spoke to a handful of attendees at an early-morning breakfast session at SaaScon today. It wasnt an ideal forum — he would have been better pleased with the opening keynote slot, which Salesforce.com president Jim Steele filled an hour later....
The news emerging from this weeks Convergence conference and elsewhere shows that Microsofts servers+services strategy for surviving the shift to on-demand computing is crystallizing. Whether it will work is another matter. But here are the strands that seem to be coming together: Office running on web services (ie XML and...
One of the Bush administrations most unexpected legacies could be an extra nail in the coffin of customer-installed on-premises software, once Daylight Saving Time comes into effect in the US this coming weekend. Its now becoming evident that theres been a huge lack of preparedness on the part of leading...
I think the BBC hit the right note with its headline today on the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition: Google charges for web programs. Today may go down in history as the day when Google started charging for applications. Suddenly, its once again become acceptable to charge customers for...
Not many people realize that contextual advertising is a multi-billion dollar software-as-a-service category. Yet if you look closely at Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo!s newly launched Panama engine, its plain to see that all of them are Web-native, on-demand applications, accessed either via a browser interface or an API....
BI vendor Cognos has followed in the footsteps of its rival BusinessObjects in joining Salesforce.coms AppExchange marketplace this week, but that doesnt mean its embracing SaaS, oh no. UK-based title IT Week reports: "Graham Walter, vice president of Cognos in the UK, Middle East and South Africa, ......
In my trio of predictions for SaaS in 2007, Ive saved the biggest trend till last. The coming year will see a growing acknowledgement that SaaS is just part of a wider move towards Internet-based automated services. This is such an all-embracing trend that it will drive several other sub-trends,...
Thomas Otter, an Enterprise Irregulars blogger who works for SAP, complains that SaaS has been arbitrarily defined by a purist cult who refuse to admit that, as he puts it, "SaaS is simply the latest evolution of the bureau." Nick Carr, author of the contention that IT doesnt matter,...
Aggregation, integration, mashup platforms and ecosystems are going to be hot topics in software-as-a-service circles next year, according to a group of vendor CEOs who sat on a panel at the SIIAs OnDemand Summit in San Jose earlier this month. I was intrigued to hear how much unanimity there was...
Part of the reason people get dissatisfied with terms like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is that we all know the Web is an unfinished project and were somewhat impatient to see some more progress made on getting it built. So its good when an announcement comes along that suggests...
Mint.com in CanadaThere isn't very much in the way of finance packages in Canada.For small businesses, there are basically two offerings: Simply Accounting, and Quickbooks.There are no online versions of either, at least not by the vendors themselves. Intuit doesn't even offer trial downloads of Quickbooks, nor do...
Search tools more than important!!!Good that mostly everbody knows that in business life nothing works without e-mail and even that important is a reliable and fast search tool for Outlook! One of those is Lookeen It has so many features which lighten your work that is amazing. It works with...
Photo gallery:Sony Ericsson Equinox TM717The Sony Ericsson Equinox is the first phone from the manufacturer to land at T-Mobile since the TM506. In many ways the Equinox is a fitting successor; like the TM506 it has a thin flip phone design and it sports a similar feature set that includes...
Do we have the technology to build a perfect computer? Would it be perfect for a specific purpose or is it possible to build a perfect general purpose computer? Small Business Computing's Mark Beckley has some answers. Do we have the technology to build a perfect...
Random comments...How odd the mixed metaphors sound... "built from the ground up to work in the cloud"...The dinosaurs were around for tens of millions of years, and we mammals can barely say the same. The crown of creation can be wrested from the head of the wearer by something unforeseen--like...
Phil Wainewright's discussion about the cost of running highly scalable SaaS applications like SuccessFactors comes at the right time. He says: Speaking in the opening keynote of SIIA OnDemand in San Jose this morning, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard let slip a statistic that set several...
Iron Speed Designer generates database and reporting applications for .NET in minutes, straight from your database. Quickly create visually stunning, feature-rich Web 2.0 applications that are easy-to-customize and ready-to-deploy. Simply point to an existing database and let the Iron Speed Designer wizards build a sophisticated, database-driven application thats ready to...
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run...