Saas News & Articles

Adobe (news, site) launched LiveCycle ES2, their platform for document-centric business process management in October of last year. At that time, they talked about a cloud ready version of LiveCycle in the works. Today, that cloud version has become available, and here's a look at what it can do for you.

February and we just can’t seem to get away from the dual obsessions of hosted solutions and security. Particularly telling in the SMB sector, it looks like these are two areas we are going to be hearing a lot about over the course of the year.

For as many eDiscovery vendors there are, there are as many eDiscovery prices. Two vendors, who have announced the availability of new pricing models, hope to revolutionize the industry.

DigiTech (news, site) and Fujitsu got together to bring, as they say, the simplest possible solution for those small to medium companies trying to wrangle paper documents.

Crisis, what crisis? Almost every Web CMS vendor who has to or chooses to publicize their 2009 financials is reporting growth and bright future. Some are even going public. OmniUpdate (news, site) joins this joyous bunch and says 2009 was a success in its higher education focused web content management segment.

Last year was marked for OU as a year of record sales revenues. Other 2009 highlights include:

• 28 new clients
• Existing customers increasing/renewing their service levels/terms
• 12 product releases with 16 additional capabilities and feature enhancements (e.g. multi-language preview, global find and replace, garbage can, Serena Collage conversion tool, Live Delivery Platform and others)
• Onboarding of integration partners
• Ability to deploy OmniUpdate's CMS -- OU Campus -- either traditionally or as SaaS

As with all privately-held companies, the amount of financial information being released is limited. For buyers looking to evaluate Web CMS products for higher ed verticals, record sales is probably a little too ambiguous to indicate the overall viability and stability of the company.

While growing revenue is good news, we’ll continue to watch OmniUpdate and update you on where these folks are headed.

Want more proof that cloud computing is becoming very popular? Bamboo Solutions (news, site) has started up a new division focused on providing hosted solutions based on SharePoint.

The cloud is becoming a popular place, not everyone wants to deal with the licensing and deployment issues related to on premise solutions. Bamboo Solutions obviously sees an opening in the SaaS market that they can easily fill.

With SharePoint Online opening its doors to extensibility when it upgrades to SharePoint 2010, Bamboo has a potentially burgeoning market for its Web Parts, accelerators and applications. And there's room to develop even more. But that doesn't mean they should stop there.

The newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group will develop and offer SharePoint based solutions themselves. The first of these Bamboo SaaS-based offerings will come sometime before the end of January in the form of collaboration solution. Called the Bamboo Requirements Manager (BambooRM™), it enables geographically dispersed teams to collaboration and communicate on demand.

Requirements Manager is just the start of a number of hosted solutions Bamboo will offer to small to medium sized businesses on a subscription basis. PMCentral, their flagship application, will also be offered as a hosted service at some point.

If you like SharePoint and you like the idea of someone else providing the application and platform for you, get ready to take Bamboo Online Applications for a trial run (they will offer trials).

Sometimes it really is the small things that count. Not that Adeptol’s new Enterprise Edition v4.4 document viewer is small, but the California based company’s latest version can load documents of up to 0.5 GB in one second -- one of its many small features that will please.

Following up on their plans to bring a little Web 2.0 into the enterprise space, the Sage team (news, site) has announced the upcoming release of the new Sage Enterprise Webtop. Designed to operate on the cloud or on premise, the tool represents the company’s shift toward an all out user-centric good time.  

Next month will see the first of Salesforce.com’s 2010 releases with the launch of Spring ’10. Of the changes, a new interface will combine much of the old with an updated look and feel that is designed to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com (news, site) announced the closing of private placement funding in the amount of US$ 575 million. It comes in the form of convertible senior notes due 2015.

Salesforce.com says these notes are unsecured, unsubordinated obligations, with interest being paid semi-annually at a rate of 0.75% per year.

According to the company, they expect to use some of the funds for general purposes which could include an acquisition or two, maybe a joint venture or something similar.

Tom Foremski, of ZDNet, sees social media as a prime acquisition market for Salesforce.com. He mentioned SocialText, Six Apart and BrightIdea as potential acquisition targets. All are already in the enterprise arena, so it may not take as much work to get them integrated and into the hands of Salesforce.com customers.

And social media does make sense. Many enterprise content management vendors are integrating social media capabilities into their solutions, many social computing vendors are talking more and more about the integration of business and social networking and social media capabilities.

With Salesforce.com offering a host of cloud based business services, integrating the much in demand social media capabilities seem almost a requirement to stay competitive. And they have already started with their own Salesforce Chatter service offering, but they could go much further.

But what will they actually do with the money? We'll be watching to see what they do next.

SDL Tridion (news, site) has spread its Web Content Management wings right on over to the Land of the Rising Sun, thanks to partnerships with Japan based companies Nihon Unisys and TAKT Systems.

The Nihon Unisys Group has been a provider of IT solutions since 1958. In 2008, the company started building their Internet Data Center (iDC) for hosting, ASP and SaaS businesses. Tricked out with SDL Tridion, the model offers Nihon Unisys’s customers a central Web CMS as well as the high quality maintenance and services Nihon Unisys postulates.

TAKT Systems will also be standing by with SDL Tridion, ready to work with consulting and content creation agencies for website implementation.

On a beeline for global domination, SDL Tridion also recently acquired European eCommerce company, Fredhopper. The significance of getting hands-on with a Dutch eCommerce provider like Friedhopper lies not only in the expansion to new territories, but the obvious move in a new direction as well.

With a hold on Global Information Management, and what looks like a promising dip into the online shopping pool, we’re going to guess that it would be wise to keep an eye on these guys.

Today, online storage service Box.net (news, site) says their users can preview and interact with all their stored files from within their browser of choice. How nice.  

Some say Central Desktop (news, site) is like a cheaper version of SharePoint. Others of course, do not. In any case, the collaboration tool has turned the heads of a significant amount of people, and the company has a successful 2009 to prove it.

Central Desktop closed the year with a 44% year-over-year growth in revenue and a 50% increase in staff. How has demand for mid-market online collaboration weathered our economic woes? Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop attributes their success and growth to their "comprehensive offering, outstanding customer service and relentless product innovation.”

Product innovation over the last year has included a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that enables two-way task and calendar synchronization, and a microblogging feature that allows users to post status updates within Central Desktop and syndicate them out to Facebook and Twitter. 

Moreover, they've got an impressive lineup of customers: Netflix, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Empowered Media, CBS, Powertek, DIRECTV PanAmericana and University of Wisconsin-Madison are just a few.

“As we kick off 2010, our core strategies remain on track as we continue to focus on strengthening our social technology platform with exciting new product upgrades this quarter,” Garcia continued. “Central Desktop remains committed to providing the most complete pure SaaS SharePoint alternative for the mid-market.”

Ohio-based Rescentris has just announced that it is releasing its Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for the life sciences and pharmaceutical research industries as a SaaS following a six month trial across 25 organizations.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) partners with CAPSYS to bring online document capture for businesses working in the cloud.