GigaOM » software as a service

Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:55:38 +0000

“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes.

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Instart Logic gets $17M to improve mobile site performance with secret SaaS

Jordan Novet — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:49:52 +0000

Instart Logic, a company looking to share its technology for making mobile sites load faster with businesses, has emerged from stealth mode after two years with $17 million in Series B venture funding. The need for this sort of latency-lowering service will become larger mobile keeps rising and consumer-facing and http://gigaom.com/2013/03/18/salesforce-rolls-out-new-mobile-features-for-its-chatter-social-network/enterprise-focused companies look to provide richer mobile offerings.

Even though Instart has emerged from stealth mode, the company is keeping the technology behind its Software as a Service (SaaS) a secret for now. (It won’t say how many customers it has, either.) But suffice it to say that the Instart software won’t require any major reworking on the part of developers. “We do not impose any burden (that) you need to change your code or change development methodology,” said Manav Mital, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. “The process is very easy to come in.”

At the moment, Instart, based in Mountain View, Calif., is aimed primarily at web-based applications, not native apps, Mital said.

Tenaya Capital led Instart’s Series B round, alongside contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and other investors. Total venture funding in Instart is now at $26 million. The new funding will help Instart add sales and marketing and also work more on their product.

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Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Mark Mulligan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:54:59 +0000

Content owners, whether they are publishers, retailers, or marketers, are always looking for new ways to deliver a unique experience to their customers. We call this content personalization. Key trends in this area are led by a collection of technologies that we call post-programming curation. These technologies use the best of behavioral tracking, collaborative filtering, audience targeting, and dynamic content presentation.

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Cloud adoption: It’s not about the price, stupid

Barb Darrow — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:51:55 +0000

Don’t look now, but there has been a shift in thinking around why companies move — or should move — workloads to the cloud. A few years ago, most of the talk was all around saving money. Look at how cheap Amazon Web Services are! Pennies per hour to spin up instances! We don’t need to buy more servers!

But over the last year, the discussion has morphed more into how cloud offers companies flexibility and agility and there’s growing realization that for stable, non-variable workloads, cloud — even public cloud — may not be the cheapest option at all. But that flexibility for intermittent or variable workloads remains the public cloud’s siren call. Check out posts from Virtual Geek and Cloudave for more thinking on this trend.

So the reason to go to cloud is no longer price but being able to move fast — deploy, re-deploy, and un-deploy workloads as needed without having to buy servers and software that could become shelfware next week or next month.

IaaS follows SaaS arguments of the past

What’s interesting to me is that this debate is evolving much like the discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) did a decade or so ago. Initially, when Salesforce.com was coming into its own, most of the sales pitch was around price. Salesforce was so much cheaper than Siebel Systems. (Remember Siebel Systems? It’s now part of Oracle).

At that time, Microsoft was getting into the CRM business with its own on-premises edition. It’s counter-pitch was: “Sure, Salesforce.com may be cheaper at first, until you use it for three years. Then Microsoft on-premises CRM is cheaper.”

Of course, when Microsoft started rolling out its own cloud-based CRM, that price-based argument dissipated. The new thinking was that “cloud” CRM is better because everyone’s on the same, latest release and you can add/subtract users easily. Salesforce.com’s message likewise evolved to mirror that same message — especially as the more feature-rich Salesforce.com package options started to get um, quite pricey. Then Salesforce’s benefits became that it freed companies from the tedium and expense of on-site server and software upgrades. You could focus on business and leave the IT heavy lifting to your provider.

Everest Group partner Scott Bils agrees that the thinking around cloud deployment motivation is happening. “No doubt the conversation has shifted from [total cost of ownership] to agility,” he said. A survey Everest conducted of about 350 attendees at last week’s Cloud Connect show reflects that trend.

Cloud Connect 2012 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey

Customers surveyed cited reduced time to provision applications and infrastructure as their primary reason to move to cloud, followed by the cloud’s overall flexible capacity. TCO, on the other hand, came in way down the list. Now, remember, these people were at a cloud computing conference, so they may be more up to speed on these issues than the average IT user. But as Bils noted: “Interestingly, vendors still mistakenly believe [cost remains] the most important factor.”

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Building energy management systems: overview and forecast

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:46:16 +0000

Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses.

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Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:55:57 +0000

The first quarter of cleantech was a mix of good and bad news. Avis’ purchase of Zipcar and Silver Spring Networks’ long-awaited IPO finally occurring were further signs of thawing capital markets and movement in the acquisition space. However, in both situations valuations were lower than hoped, a sign of how investors view cleantech.

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How energy data will impact the smart grid

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:40:19 +0000

The deployment of smart meters combined with the growth of cloud computing infrastructure has created opportunities to build business models around the volume of emerging energy data. Those who use data to solve customer problems and leverage decades of software development and advances in big data will attract investment dollars.

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New Relic moves ahead with mobile-app performance monitoring

Jordan Novet — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:00:16 +0000

Application performance management player New Relic, running on a recent $80-million round of funding and aiming for a 2014 public offering, is adding support for native Android and iOS mobile apps, showing further evidence of the importance of mobile devices for business.

The approach differs from the application performance management for mobile devices available from Compuware and Hewlett-Packard, as “they’re generating fake mobile loads in order to tell you how a fake mobile app is doing,” said Jim Gochee, senior vice president of product at New Relic. Compuware disputes Gochee’s claims, saying in a Thursday statement that its application performance monitoring software lets users monitor actual end users’ experiences on mobile devices. Still, New Relic responded by saying “New Relic is the only vendor with monitoring technology on the mobile device that can capture real-time data for every user and every version of the mobile app.”

With its mobile monitoring abilities, New Relic also differentiates itself from fellow application performance management vendor AppDynamics, which has been on a capital-raising spree of its own.

New Relic’s new mobile app support highlights the importance of smartphones and tablets in the cloud computing revolution, for consumer and enterprise applications alike. And the trend will likely persist. Forrester Research projects sales of mobile devices will keep growing. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of kids aged 12-17 use their phones — as opposed to PCs — as their primary means of accessing the internet. That figure is 15 percent for adults. In other words, mobile apps could become the main route for customers to communicate with businesses. That’s why providing better monitoring for them is a smart move.

This story was updated on Thursday to add comments from Compuware and New Relic.

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How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:06:48 +0000

Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much.

Those optimistic about 2013 point to the second half of the year (now only four months away) as when we’ll begin to see some stronger growth. In their view, Europe will be better, the U.S. will be stronger, China will begin to reaccelerate in earnest, currency will be stable, and (perhaps most importantly) the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons between 2012 and 2013 will be easier because mid-2012 was so weak. Moreover, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci stated during the company’s recent earnings call, “You can’t starve IT for too long,” which suggests that better times must get rolling again. On the other hand, CEO John Chambers’ statement in the Cisco earnings call, that perhaps 2012 represents the new normal, might be a better indicator of what we can expect in 2013. We’ll see.

That said, here’s what we’re expecting for 2013.

Table 1. 2012 and 2013 worldwide IT spending (in $ billions)

Market segment	2011	2012	2012 growth rate	2013	2013 growth rate	Note
Smartphones and tablets	$213	$265	24.4%	$319	20.4%	Smartphones and tablets
Hardware	$429	$419	-2.3%	$423	1.0%	PCs, servers, storage, peripherals, network
Software	$256	$270	5.5%	$291	7.8%	Systems, middleware, solutions
Service	$797	$805	1.0%	$826	2.6%	Consulting, IT outsourcing, systems integration, BPO, education and training, maintenance
All spending	$1,695	$1,759	3.8%	$1,860	5.7%

Overall, smartphones and tablets will lead the way, with a 5.6 percent worldwide IT growth rate in 2013. While Apple’s tepid forward guidance in its recent earnings call and its implications for smartphones and tablets gives us pause, we expect the category to continue to lead, with growth in the 20.4 percent range in 2013. In hardware, 2013 will look like 2012, with smartphones and tablets buoying the otherwise-weak spending in the PC, peripheral, and server segments. (This will be offset somewhat by stronger storage and network hardware spending.) Software continues to flourish — especially solutions-related software like SaaS-enabled customer-relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), and industry vertical systems like health care. This sector will continue to grow in 2013. Finally, services has experienced a punishing 2012, and this area will only look modestly better in 2013.

A methodological note: We’ve reevaluated our model and determined that we have underweighted business-process outsourcing (BPO) as a service category. As such, we are restating 2012 and 2013 growth rates to accommodate a higher weighting of BPO in our services spending. The net is that growth in services and all spending are a bit more robust, since BPO is growing faster than the aggregate of traditional IT services. The full methodology can be found at the end of this report.

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Paperwork manager Nipendo lands $8M to add US enterprise customers

Jordan Novet — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:30:19 +0000

Nipendo, a company with a business-to-business Software-as-a-Service network for managing invoices and other processes, has taken on $8 million in Series B venture funding. Horizons Ventures led the round. The money, which brings the total the company has raised to $12 million, will help Nipendo add business in the United States. It already operates in France, India and Israel.

Nipendo’s Software as a Service (SaaS)

In addition to invoices, the Nipendo network lets companies exchange requests for proposal, purchase orders, delivery information, feedback about suppliers and other information.

The first version of the product became available in 2010, Co-founder and CEO Eyal Rosenberg said. Now several enterprises in Israel use the product, along with some in the United States, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Pfizer. The customer count has passed 3,500, Rosenberg said.

Nipendo faces competition from IBM’s Sterling Commerce and SAP’s Ariba. But legacy systems can take months to connect a vendor and a supplier, Rosenberg said, and Nipendo can do that in just a few hours, and it can also cooperate with enterprise-resource planning products from legacy vendors. As for newer competitors, such as Tradeshift, Rosenberg said, “The competitive advantage … is that we cover a much deeper space of this area, where we manage the whole process and we validate everything.”

Enterprises certainly can benefit from software that brings together invoices and other kinds of paperwork, instead of keeping it spread out on paper and in emails. The question is whether Nipendo will stand out as the top SaaS choice internationally.

This story was corrected on March 12 with the correct spelling of the venture-capital company that funded Nipendo, Horizons Ventures. Horizon Ventures, a different company, has not funded Nipendo.

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