Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been seen as a potential solution for piracy, but an expert says it is no silver bullet.

Victor DeMarines, product vice president at V.i. Labs which sells anti-piracy tools to software vendors, said SaaS’ reach against piracy only goes as far as the delivery mechanism’s ability to replace on-premise software.

SaaS may be suitable for some packaged applications, but more computing and graphics-intensive applications such as design software or product lifecycle management (PLM) applications still need to reside within office premises, said DeMarines via e-mail.

Furthermore, SaaS is not immune from identity management and password-sharing occurrences, he added.

He pointed to a recent report quoting Microsoft’s associate general counsel for anti-piracy, David Finn, as saying that cloud computing is making the software giant raise its game against piracy, rather than aid in suppressing it.

DeMarines said the cloud provides a delivery method for providers to distribute illegal software across many users. Companies hosting illegal software via SaaS are also more likely to escape traceability and vendors’ knowledge, he said.

Some mobile app makers look to in-app purchases to make revenue, in order to thwart illegal copies of their software. ReQall, for example, makes an iPhone productivity app and has said it looks to users buying additional functions within the app, rather than making money off each download from Apple’s App Store.

DeMarines said smaller software houses would reap the benefit of a SaaS model more quickly than large companies, because the former has a smaller scale of deployment, allowing IT projects to be rolled out faster.

Bigger vendors are more likely to derive results from the use of digital rights management (DRM) technologies and government enforcement, he said.

“Government actions and punishment can be effective to create an environment which educates end users that software intellectual property (IP) will be protected and laws enforced,” he said.

According to a BSA report released this month, the global average piracy rate stood at 43 percent last year.

IDC analyst Victor Lim commented on the report, saying that SaaS has had a “muted” impact on piracy rates in the region. He attributed this to weak SaaS adoption rates in enterprises in the region.

DRM, government intervention more effective
Two Southeast Asian software houses are calling for additional steps to be taken by the governments in their countries.

Nguyen Minh Duc, director of Vietnam security software provider BKIS Security, said in an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia that the lack of user education on respecting IP has resulted in the company investing in DRM. “This is a drain on our resources, which could otherwise have been redirected to R&D efforts.

“Additional investment in DRM means our customers, in turn, end up paying more for our products,” he pointed out.

Nguyen said the government should move to protect the software ecosystem, noting that the state would benefit from additional revenues brought in by the country’s independent software vendors (ISVs).

“At the moment, users do not recognize the significance of supporting the development of local software in Vietnam,” Nguyen lamented.

Muhamad Ismail, director of Indonesian accounting software company PT Zahir Internasional, said via e-mail that the government has made steps toward educating the public and taken legal action against companies caught using illegal software.

The government’s job is far from done, however, said Ismail.

More needs to be done, he said, adding that the company recently joined the Business Software Alliance in hopes of participating in IP education efforts conducted by the trade association.

“It’s not an easy job…more has to be done. The intervention of the government is very essential,” said Ismail.

www.zdnetasia.com

Software as a Service (SaaS) and other cloud computing services appeal to enterprises in part because they eliminate the need to buy, maintain and power IT infrastructure. But SaaS vendors deliver their applications via the Internet, which means that no single service provider controls the entire pipe between that SaaS provider and the enterprise. This leaves wide area network (WAN) managers with almost no control over SaaS performance.

“You can’t write an SLA [service-level agreement] for the Internet,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp, an independent consultancy firm for service provider and enterprise networking products and services. “It’s a best-effort service, and that’s all it’s ever going to be.”

On a private enterprise WAN that delivers apps to branch offices via an MPLS service, it’s like a “direct flight,” Nolle said. Packets take a predictable path and have fairly static latency and packet loss.

But assessing SaaS performance by those benchmarks over the Internet is nearly impossible since the parameters constantly fluctuate, he added. Packet transport becomes more like a flight with multiple connections — slowed down every time the packets have to change carriers or hop to get to the vendor’s data center or back to the user.

Although service providers have agreements to provide peering points with each other’s Internet backbones, these relationships vary, Nolle said. Operators also often have little financial incentive to optimize their competitors’ traffic flow at those connections.

“You’re not going to find any operator who’s going to sign a contract and guarantee you’re going to get this number of hops,” he said. “The only thing you can do is play the odds a little bit. Your best bet is to watch for signs of access congestion and fatten your pipe a little bit.”

Cloud providers will probably have multiple data centers to alleviate WAN/cloud latency problems, but SaaS performance is still a gamble, according to John E. Burke, principal analyst at Nemertes Research.

“You have no control over performance characteristics if you access them over the Internet,” Burke said. “There’s not a lot you can do to improve performance [of your link] to a SaaS vendor unless they specifically allow some kind of private network connection to them.”

Bandwidth unlikely to improve WAN, cloud and SaaS performance

Because the manner in which packets traverse the Internet is inherently fluid, leasing more T1 lines is going to have limited benefits, according to both experts. Unless enterprises are maxing out their existing links, a faster on-ramp to the Internet won’t affect how packets travel between SaaS vendor and enterprise data centers, Nolle said.

“Buying more bandwidth is only going to help you if access bandwidth is your problem. You can’t buy Internet bandwidth,” he said. “The only thing you can do is buy the on-ramp.”

There are still a few steps that enterprises can take to get at least a rough idea of SaaS performance at various locations across the WAN before committing to the cloud, according to Nolle and Burke.

Basic WAN/cloud performance testing, such as pings at various times and locations, may help determine average latency and packet loss, Burke said. Running traceroute commands a few times may also help determine which paths packets might take but offers no promises, Nolle said.

“Knowing that all of [those results are] impermanent and that, on the Internet, [performance] gets wildly different on a different day … you’ve at least got a shot at analyzing performance expectations,” Burke said. “But it’s in no way a guarantee.

If enterprises’ Internet links are performing well today, both experts agreed, most SaaS apps on the market now shouldn’t pose a significant problem. Basic client-server transactions common to SaaS aren’t going to look much different from casual Internet traffic, but cloud-based storage services will be the least tolerant of latency and jitter, they said.

Public cloud-based SaaS performance may be akin to how remote users experience on-premise applications via an Internet virtual private network (VPN) client, Nolle said.

“These [cloud-based] applications are not high-volume enough to have any overall impact on traffic,” he said. “They don’t create a QoS [quality of service] problem, but they make a QoS problem that had already existed — and existed all along — a problem and not just an annoyance.”

Can WAN optimization solve SaaS performance over WAN and cloud?

Caching and compression features in WAN optimization controllers might sound like a promising solution to improve SaaS performance, but there’s one big problem — an enterprise can’t force a cloud provider to use the box at its end as well.

Even if enterprises could deploy symmetric WAN optimization with cloud providers, compression “nearly always introduces delay … and it may or may not help with latency and packet loss,” Nolle added. “The value of [caching] is also incredibly difficult to determine.”

WAN optimization controllers that inspect packets to prioritize certain kinds of traffic may also fall short because SaaS traffic is usually encrypted, according to Mark Urban, senior director of product marketing at Blue Coat Systems, which promotes the ability to decrypt, accelerate and re-encrypt packets with its PackerShaper product line.

All of these SaaS performance problems are compounded when enterprises backhaul Internet traffic over the WAN from branch offices to headquarters, Urban said. The additional trip makes SaaS performance more vulnerable to lags.

More than half (54%) of IT pros said they use two or more SaaS applications or other cloud-based services, according to an informal survey from Blue Coat, which polled about 150 IT and networking professionals at Interop 2010 in Las Vegas. Nearly a third (32%) use five or more SaaS apps or cloud services. Meanwhile, 68% of enterprises polled said that they backhaul Internet traffic from their branches through their data centers.

Targeting this WAN/cloud delivery dilemma, Cisco Systems claims its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) controller can overcome backhaul latencies that affect SaaS performance by recognizing popular cloud-based services, reducing duplicate data streams and delivering 5:1 compression.

Full Source

Updated: SAP on Tuesday will demonstrate the latest portion of its on-demand strategy: A focus on “orchestration” and additional capabilities added as a service to its core systems such as Business Suite. Think of it as “on-premise on demand.” In addition, SAP plans to launch “starter packs” for Business ByDesign and lower the minimum seats to get more customer volume.

In a nutshell, John Wookey, executive vice president of large enterprise on demand at SAP, will demonstrate on-demand software designed for line-of-business needs. The conundrum outlined by Wookey goes like this:

* Customer installed big ERP suite;
* Wanted to upgrade functions;
* But didn’t have the budget;
* Customers got frustrated and went out and got software as a service to get that functionality.

Wookey, speaking at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, said he doesn’t blame these customers for going out and getting SaaS, but he does see an opportunity to “bring cohesion to the model.” In some respects, Wookey’s plan could be a cure for SaaS sprawl. The rub: Customers that already have gone with SaaS in addition to an on-premise suite may not swap out for on-demand orchestration.

Customers have come to SAP and “said it would sure be nice if you could provide these things on-demand so we wouldn’t have to go to all of these other vendors,” said Wookey.

SAP is trying to adapt to the changing state of IT spending. Simply put, the CIO isn’t necessarily making the purchases. The chief marketing officer may be buying Salesforce.com and the HR head is going for SuccessFactors. Since the upfront spending is low for these on-demand apps, the CIO has been cut out.

Wookey, who is in charge of on-demand strategy at SAP, said the company plans to weave in collaboration throughout these on-demand add-ons. SAP’s game is to sell on-demand software that maps well to a company’s existing on-premise application. Tuesday’s demo will revolve around a product dubbed Sales on Demand, which is designed to improve on communication in the sales process.

SAP’s plan sounds a lot like Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which weaves collaboration inside the enterprise application.

Wookey said SAP plans to “make it easier to update specific business functions” for line of business managers. SAP already has a few of these on-demand add-ons for strategic sourcing and supplier management.

SAP will manage support for these on-demand add-ons and partner for infrastructure and hosting services. Some on-demand services are available today, but the ones demonstrated on Tuesday will be available in early 2011.

Update: Doug Merritt, executive vice president of the premier customer network for SAP, talked more about the on-demand strategy. The biggest takeaway: Merritt said that Business ByDesign is now in general availability. However, the company isn’t exactly screaming it from the rooftops and is looking for more viral sales.

Needless to say, Dennis Howlett, also in this meeting, wasn’t buying it. Indeed, it was hard to see how SAP would make Business ByDesign without a sales channel effort like NetSuite launched.

Merritt said that SAP’s on-demand parts taken as a whole can “reinvigorate the linkage with line of business,” something that may have been lost given Wookey’s comments.

SAP’s Merritt said Business ByDesign will offer starter packs with lower prices to garner volume. Pricing for starter packs will be rolled out later—possibly tomorrow. Business ByDesign prices will remain $149 a month per user for the entire suite. The minimum number of seats for Business ByDesign will also drop from 25 to 10.

Source

For widespread SaaS adoption, security solutions to control and protect critical data cannot come at the expense of functionality

PerspecSys Inc. (www.perspecsys.com), maker of a cloud data security platform that ensures full control and protection of sensitive data used in the public cloud, said today that the knowledge and governance gap that hinders the adoption of cloud-based software-as-a-service, or SaaS, may be narrowing but that significant work remains to be done.

The prospect of cloud computing has been broadly embraced by the marketplace due to the dramatic benefits it offers over traditional enterprise applications installed behind the user’s firewall. Gartner has forecast the worldwide SaaS market to double from $8 billion in 2009 to $16 billion by the end of 2013, as “tighter capital budgets in the current economic environment demand leaner alternatives, popularity increases, and interest for platform as a service and cloud computing grows.”

However, since SaaS offers almost immediate time to value, vendors such as Salesforce.com have enjoyed great success selling to line-of-business managers in enterprises, often bypassing the security and governance rigor associated with traditional software implementations.

This has created a governance gap that potentially makes these enterprises non-compliant with legal, regulatory or internal governance policies. For example, in the recent “Security of Cloud Computing” study by the Ponemon Institute and CA Inc., more than 50 percent of respondents in the U.S. said their organization was unaware of all the cloud services deployed in their enterprise. These rogue users threaten the security of the organization’s sensitive data.

“Enterprises that are adopting cloud applications such as Salesforce.com are increasingly doing so along with the implementation of SaaS security solutions,” said Jeff Campbell, president and CEO of PerspecSys. “This is indicative of IT adapting their infrastructure to address the unique security requirements for cloud computing in support of the evolving needs of the business. However, the key challenge that remains is ensuring security without sacrificing functionality.”

THE THREE LAYERS OF THE PUBLIC CLOUD

The public cloud is divided into three layers. The first is platform as a service (PaaS), which is governed by standards set forth by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The second is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is governed by the SAS 70 II auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

The third layer, software as a service (SaaS), where user’s data resides, has attracted the most interest and positive response from the market place, yet it is the one layer of the cloud not governed by any standards to ensure data security.

THE SECURITY CONUNDRUM OF SAAS

This lack of security regulation and standard in the data layer presents huge adoption barriers for many enterprises.

In its March 2010 Security Spending Survey, Goldman Sachs observed a significant shift in user sentiment to cloud and SaaS solutions. In its survey, only 24 percent of respondents said they would not use any SaaS or cloud applications until they have more clarity on how to secure their data, compared to 46 percent in an October 2009 survey. Goldman Sachs attributed this shift in attitude to companies’ abilities to design customized solutions to solve some of the data security problems, as 20 percent, (versus 10 percent previously) now say that they use the cloud after an additional security solution has been purchased.

However, these customized or third-party security solutions – mash-ups developed in-house, application integration, and encryption tools – can significantly impair the functionality of the cloud application.

Consequently, the public cloud still presents serious issues for many organizations, including data privacy demanded by regulatory compliance requirements, accepted industry standards and the organization’s own internal directives; data residency that dictates control and governance of data, including its backup and recovery; and ensuring data security from both external and internal threats.

In its March 2010 report, “Top Threats to Cloud Computing,” the Cloud Security Alliance highlighted common cloud-computing threats, including shared-technology issues, data loss or leakage, and account or service hijacking. It’s these threats to sensitive data that cause C-level decision makers to block adoption of SaaS applications.

The challenge for most organizations is to take the robust governance that typically already exists for enterprise-sensitive data behind the firewall and transfer this to the cloud.

“While IT departments can set and manage policies regarding platforms and infrastructure, regulatory compliance means the top-level executives must take responsibility for their data protection,” said Terry Woloszyn, founder and CTO of PerspecSys. “PerspecSys allows the enterprise to apply their current data compliance standards and procedures to sensitive cloud data as well.”

AN APPROACH THAT DOESN’T SACRIFICE FUNCTIONALITY FOR SECURITY

PerspecSys has eliminated the security-functionality paradox of the cloud with its Privacy, Residency and Security data governance platform, the PRS Server.

The PRS Server addresses the current concerns surrounding cloud adoption, namely the ceding to the cloud provider of control over private and sensitive data such as company secrets, personally identifiable data such as customer records, and other commercially sensitive information. PerspecSys allows the company to retain the control over sensitive data, thereby mitigating the emerging threats to cloud applications, and remaining compliant with regulatory and standards requirements.

“We sincerely believe SaaS in the public cloud is the future,” said Campbell. “But without a platform that can maintain the integrity of the value proposition and the functionality of applications in the public cloud while mitigating their inherent privacy, data residency and cloud security concerns, widespread adoption simply will not happen.”

The PRS Server has an available plug-in for Salesforce.com, the most widely adopted SaaS platform. PerspecSys plans to apply the same principles to other cloud applications in additional plug-ins to be released.

Source: www.prnewswire.com

Remember the old Paul Masson commercials with Orson Welles featuring the master thespian intoning, “We will sell no wine before its time”?

SAP has been using essentially the same line to explain the delay of its first software-as-a-service product. The global giant announced its intent to enter the SaaS market in 2007 and has been developing and testing its Business ByDesign on-demand ERP software ever since. While that’s not a terribly long time by traditional software-development standards, it’s an eternity in the world of Web-based applications. SAP in 2008 slowed its efforts to bring ByDesign to market, saying it needed more time to get the product just right, prompting critics to say SAP lacked a fundamental understanding of the differences between SaaS and on-premise software.

SAP finally feels Business ByDesign is ready for prime time. Addressing attendees at this week’s Sapphire 2010 show taking place simultaneously in Orlando, Fla., and Frankfurt, co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said Business ByDesign “is not a fantasy. It’s a real product. We wanted to perfect the infrastructure. You only get one chance.”

Some parts of SAP’s vision have remained the same since 2007, while others have changed. Though critics contend that small and midmarket companies, the ostensible target audience for ByDesign, don’t necessarily want to purchase an entire software stack from a single vendor, SAP remains committed to offering a SaaS suite rather than point solutions. SaaS buyers will ultimately favor SAP’s approach, said Jeff Stiles, SAP’s global marketing lead for ByDesign, who predicted integrated suites will be “the next wave in on-demand.”

Another differentiator, Stiles told me, is ByDesign’s native in-memory analytics capability. In fact, in-memory computing appears to be emerging as one of the biggest themes of Sapphire. More on that in a later post.

Perhaps the biggest architectural tweak to ByDesign was SAP’s adoption of a multi-tenant model, the approach used by most SaaS vendors as a cost-effective way to provision computing resources. While SAP will still offer a single-tenant option to customers who want it, they’ll pay more for it. (While no pricing has been released for ByDesign, Stiles confirmed single instances of the software will cost more.)

SAP currently has 100 “charter clients” in the United States, Germany, the UK, France, China and India. It is planning a broader rollout in late July. One of the biggest questions revolves around how SAP will sell ByDesign. Instead of the direct-sales approach SAP employs with its enterprise clients, it will rely mostly on “a co-selling model with partners,” Stiles said. SAP will first focus on existing resellers of its products. Stiles said SAP expects partners to benefit from higher sales volume and also from building and selling packaged services such as data-migration services. SAP plans to share revenue not just on the initial purchase of the software, but on renewals, “to give partners an incentive to own relationships with customers,” Stiles said.

SAP will also offer a development environment in hopes of emulating Salesforce.com’s success with its Force.com development platform. Due later this year is a software development kit and a Microsoft Visual Studio-based environment for customers and partners, which may win ByDesign fans among .NET developers. Echoing the suite idea again, Stiles said:

Clearly over time our plan with on-demand is to leverage the capabilities we have around BI (business intelligence), around collaboration and stream work, in creating structured transaction processes in cloud-based applications and delivering them to partners and customers as a coherent platform they can build on top of and deploy.

A software development kit is the “first step” in that strategy, he said.

Source: www.itbusinessedge.com

SAP’s Business ByDesign (BYD) will be released at the end of July, marking the company’s next steps into the world of subscription services for enterprise customers.

It certainly is a small step into the SaaS world for SAP. And it has been a long time in coming for the company.

But it’s a start even though you hear many analysts scoff at the suggestion that SAP is showing any cohesive approach around cloud computing and its product offerings.

It’s symbolic of a general sentiment we encountered at SAP Sapphire Now. You sense that the company needs to find its bearings and develop a cohesiveness around its product strategy.

Though we know that BYD has its skeptics, we found the presentation of the user interface to be on par with major SaaS services. It also has the underlying infrastructure to make it a viable service for companies to extend the service in the manner they wish.

SAP’s Peter Lorenz showed us the service at Sapphire Now and how it performs on the iPad.

BYD is elegant on the iPad.

It’s a corporate directive to instill beauty into sophisticated, real-time SAP products. BYD uses Silverlight fro its front end display. It is decoupled from the back end system. It means that BYD can have one model rendered to different platforms. It’s pretty cool.

API’s and OpenSocial

BYD connects to Google’s OpenSocial. It uses API’s that makes BYD a framework that customers can build upon.

In that sense, the BYD platform provide the capability to collaborate and perform transactional functions. Data for a customer can be mixed and edited between parties and then generated into a proposal.

That kind of combined capability could be powerful for small and medium sized businesses. Most smaller companies would prefer not to have an IT department. With BYD they can do the work to keep the company running without the concern about maintaining the technology on its own hardware.

That’s a compelling opportunity for the small and medium sized business. A service like BYD gives these smaller companies real-time capabilities, mobility and the option of paying on a subscription basis, starting at $149 per month, per user.

That’s the promise of BYD. Now the only question is how fast the service will be adopted and how this model is realized across the wide breadth of SAP technologies.

Source

BMC Software is planning to offer more versions of its software in the SaaS (software as a service) model in the next 12 months, as it is seeing growing customer demand for these services, an executive of the company said on Friday.

In January, BMC said that its Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM) Suite would be available to customers in a SaaS form. The company also tied up in November last year with enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce.com to host and offer BMC Service Desk Express, a service desk application. Salesforce.com is offering the software from its Force.com cloud computing platform.

Some of the new SaaS services will be offered through Salesforce.com, while others will be offered directly by the company, said Paul Avenant , senior vice president of products and strategy for Enterprise Service Management at BMC.

The tie-up with Salesforce.com has given BMC access to a larger number of new customers, Avenant said.

Avenant did not disclose which other products would be offered by the company on a SaaS model.

A sub-set of new customers and its current customer base want to buy their software in a SaaS model, and BMC wants to be ready for this opportunity, he said.

A number of BMC’s service-provider partners already deliver SaaS services around its software, Avenant said. While some of them will continue to offer their services, others have decided to resell BMC’s own SaaS offerings and wrap other services around these offerings, he added.

BMC also sees a business opportunity from telecommunications service providers who are moving fast to offer SaaS services to increase their revenues. “They are trying to set up a new business to drive new revenue, and they are trying to get there first”, Avenant said.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Zendesk, a SaaS help desk solution, has reached a milestone: the company now has more than 5,000 customers using its platform. Launched in 2008, Zendesk offers a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing solution that gives companies a simple, cost-effective way to manage incoming support requests from end customers.

Over the past two years, the startup has managed to gain an impressive client list, including Groupon, Twitter, Yammer, Sony Music, TriptIt, Lonely Planet, Foursquare and MSNBC. And Zendesk is adding around 20 new customers per day, says CEO Mikkel Svane. In total, Zendesk’s customers have dealt with over 10 million end users.

Zendesk is also rolling out new and improved community support and knowledge base features that will make it easier for users to create online communities where their customers can chime in with feedback, suggestions, and helpful information about the company or product. Zendesk’s price ranges from $9 to $59 per support agent per month, after a one-month free trial.

The company just raised $6 million in series B funding from Benchmark Capital and Charles River Ventures.

Source

Distributed Computing Power Delivers Better Web Site Experience for Consumers, Greater Productivity for Marketers, and Higher Reliability for Businesses

Unica Marketing Innovation Summit — Unica Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!unca/quotes/nls/unca (UNCA 10.66, -0.27, -2.47%) , the recognized leader in marketing software solutions, today announced significant advancements in its software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture that powers the Unica OnDemand product line. This innovative architecture makes maximum use of cloud computing and content delivery network resources to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of Unica OnDemand products benefitting marketers, businesses, and consumers.

For marketers, the Unica architecture improves productivity by speeding application responsiveness. For example, application log-in from Asia is four times faster than without web application acceleration; the user experience is now the same, regardless of geography.

For businesses, Unica’s utilization of cloud computing technology delivers an even higher level of reliability and scalability — for both the delivery of personalized marketing and the collection of site performance, visitor behavior, and campaign results data.

For consumers, the Unica architecture provides a better web site experience by accelerating the delivery of personalized web site content, landing pages, and other online assets.

“Unica is an online marketing technology leader with mature, scalable, and reliable SaaS solutions,” said Eric Peterson, senior partner & Founder at independent industry analysts and consultants, Web Analytics Demystified. “By putting its product intelligence into the cloud, Unica will offer its users improved experiences and accelerated application performance.”

In related news, Unica expanded its UK-based data center to accommodate growing demand in Europe, in compliment to its multiple North American data centers.

Unica’s leading-edge SaaS infrastructure underpins the Unica OnDemand product line which includes Unica NetInsight, Unica Interactive Marketing, Unica Marketing Operations, Unica Search, and Unica Pivotal Veracity. More than 20,000 marketers rely on Unica’s on-demand software.

“The majority of technology innovation is currently focused in the areas of software-as-a-service and cloud computing. More of today’s marketers have a growing appetite for easy-to-implement, easy-to-use solutions that reduce total cost of ownership and demands on internal IT resources,” said Elana Anderson, vice president, Products, Unica. “This initiative enables us to deliver unparalleled reliability of service and will enable our products to easily scale to meet the increasing amount of customer traffic.”

About Unica Unica Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!unca/quotes/nls/unca (UNCA 10.66, -0.27, -2.47%) is the recognized leader in marketing software solutions. Unica’s advanced set of enterprise marketing management and on-demand marketing solutions empowers organizations and individuals to turn their passion for marketing into valuable customer relationships and more profitable, timely, and measurable business outcomes. These solutions integrate and streamline all aspects of online and offline marketing. Unica’s unique interactive marketing approach incorporates customer analytics and web analytics, centralized decisioning, cross-channel execution, and integrated marketing operations. More than 1,500 organizations worldwide depend on Unica for their marketing management solutions.

Unica is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts with offices around the globe. For more information, visit www.unica.com.

www.marketwatch.com

Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud

1) Amazon Web Services
Leading cloud pioneer Amazon offers several different in-the-cloud services. The best known is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, which allows customers to set up and access virtual servers via a simple Web interface. Fees are assessed hourly based on the number and size of virtual machines you have ($.10 -$.80 per hour), with an additional fee for data transfer.
EC2 is designed to work in conjunction with Amazon’s other cloud services, which include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple DB, Cloudfront, Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Elastic MapReduce.
Notable: The Amazon Web Services list of partners is high profile, including the likes of Citrix, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and others.

2) Google
Yes, they own search – and are working on owning the cloud. With Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Picasa in its lineup, Google offers some of the best known cloud computing services available. They also offer some lesser known cloud services targeted primarily at enterprises, such as Google Sites, Google Gadgets, Google Video, and most notably, the Google Apps Engine. The Apps Engine allows developers to write applications to run on Google’s servers while accessing data that resides in the Google cloud as well as data that resides behind the corporate firewall. While it has been criticized for limited programming language support, the Apps Engine debuted Java and Ajax support in April, which may make it more appealing to developers.
Notable: Google recently revealed its philosophy of cloud computing in this Enterprise Blog post written by senior project manager Rajen Sheth: “As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?”

3) IBM

Although it was somewhat late to the cloud computing party, IBM launched its “Smart Business” lineup of cloud-based products and services in June. For now, the company is focusing on two key areas: software development and testing, and virtual desktops. But the company makes it clear that the cloud model has much wider-reaching implications, noting that “cloud computing represents a true paradigm shift in the way IT and IT-enabled services are delivered and consumed by businesses.” The company has also made noises about partnering with Google – the two companies would be a potent duo in the cloud sector.
Notable: A big part of IBM’s advantage in the cloud is the remarkable reach of its international presence. Early customers of IBM’s cloud computing offerings include South Africa’s Nedbank and China’s Sinochem.

4.) Microsoft

It’s a critical question facing the tech industry: Can Microsoft, the king of the traditional world of packaged software, leverage its hulking muscle to grab a similar position in the cloud world? The answer is unclear but Microsoft is certainly trying. The software giant’s ambitious Azure initiative has a solution for every Microsoft constituency, from ISVs to Web developers to enterprise clients to consumers. Formally unveiled in 2008, Azure is still very much a work in progress. If it succeeds as Microsoft hopes, in future years we’ll be talking about “Windows Azure,” a cloud-based OS that offers remote computing power, storage and management services. To make the dream come true, Microsoft is investing a king’s fortune in a network of $500 million, 500,000-square-feet datacenters around the country. The facilities will presumably form the physical backbone of the cloud network. If all goes according to plan, Microsoft will not only control the software but also the physical infrastructure that delivers that software. In other words, the company is attempting to be even bigger than it is now. (No one ever accused Redmond of being modest.) Perhaps the company’s ace in the hole: it understands enterprise management – a critical building block – more than its top competitors.
Notable: In a March 2009 interview with the New York Times, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer jumped up and drew a diagram on a white board of the company’s cloud computing plans. It’s a squiggly, complicated drawing, leading the reporter to ask if the plan wasn’t overly complex. Not at all, Ballmer explained, detailing how current flagship Windows Server will be replaced by Windows Azure. In a quote that suggests that Microsoft is very attuned to the cloud trend, he told the Times: ““Anything that has been a server needs to be a service.”

5) Salesforce.com

More than 59,000 companies use Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud solutions for customer relationship management, which has helped make it one of the most well-known and most successful cloud computing companies. In addition, through Force.com, it allows developers to use the Salesforce.com platform to develop their own applications. Users can also purchase access to the Force.com cloud infrastructure to deploy their applications.
Notable: In its 10-year history, Salesforce.com has amassed an amazing lineup of awards. Its impressive client roster includes Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Kaiser Permanente, and SunTrust Banks. Perhaps more impressive: even in the recession the company reported stellar financial results.