Should You Be Concern About SaaS Security?

At Pointivity we offer many IT services to our clients and one in particular is gaining popularity - our SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution. The IT industry is currently moving quickly to adopt SaaS to help customers control costs and take advantage of a shift towards the increasing availability of data and applications away from a traditional office setting. As the SaaS trend continues, there is also the growing concern over the security of SaaS delivery model versus on-premise solutions.

According to a recently article published on MessagingWire by Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, there are some misconception that the SaaS delivery model is less secure.

He points out the specific fears that decision makers have with regard to hosted/SaaS solution and went on to provide two key takeaways from his research findings:

• Education should be priority to help decision makers understand how their on-premise infrastructure and data transmission stacks up against SaaS solutions.
  
  
• Realize internal security procedures may be giving them a false sense of security. In many organizations, any employee can gain access to a server room or a backup tape quite easily, leaving the organization vulnerable to serious data loss.

For Pointivity we’re able to offer better security because we have access to more resources than most organizations do with their on-premise implementations. All our hosted/SaaS solutions are housed at a state-of-the-art SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70) Type II compliance data center, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide. In addition, our 24x7 help desk is staffed by certified engineers that can provide both remote and onsite technical support for desktops, servers, network, routers, firewalls and other IT infrastructure.

Unlike traditional hosting providers, we bring process-specific and industry focused experience that help our clients integrate and manage their applications. Hosted in the cloud or onsite, we can assess and quantify the costs of your current technology platform then provide a complete ROI analysis using our infrastructure.

Osterman goes on to suggest that "on average, SaaS providers offer better security than most of their prospective customers because they have a) the resources to do so and b) they have much more to lose if they don’t."

We couldn’t agree more, supporting our client’s infrastructure is what we do, it’s our business and our core focus.

Do you have questions about SaaS? Are you interested to learn more about how Pointivity can transition your business into the hosted model? Contact us.

Survive and Recover: Why You Need to Expand Your Offering

The numbers are in: consumers are saving more than they're spending, and that spells trouble for businesses. This means the recovery will likely to be slow because businesses will continue to be cautious on IT spending due to consumer cut backs.

Unlike the March period, when no customer segment was spared, SMB and public sectors improved somewhat while large accounts continued to deteriorate,

according to the latest report from Raymond James.

However, instead of focusing on the bad news, service provider should take into consideration that small businesses will continue to embrace the hosted service model, or the "cloud." The days of large capital expenses (CAPEX) are gone and the new way of doing business is the monthly pay-as-you-go (OPEX) SaaS model.

If you're a VAR or a MSP, ask yourself this: How are you staying competitive with enhanced services or new product offerings? What are you doing to lower the cost of your customers' IT costs?

Contact us if you're interested to learn more about our Total Outsource Solution or our private label hosted services will help you expand your offering.

One in Five Enterprise to use Hosted Email in 3 Years

According Gartner, surge in hosted email will likely to represent 20% of the commercial email market by 2012 even though it was only at 1% in 2007.

The report stated that:
"Gartner's E-Mail SaaS Threatens Third-Party Vendors report warned that traditional third-party product vendors will suffer in four key areas.

Applications core to the running of on-premise email, such as disaster recovery, and spam and virus filtering tools, will be significantly affected by the move to SaaS email solutions, as will applications that extend the email platform, such as encryption and archiving.

Client-side applications, meanwhile, may not be affected initially, but are likely to decline as the prevalent storage model moves from client to server side, and users access emails via a browser rather than a client."

We have been helping partners to deliver IT smarter with a wide range of products in our hosted model starting with hosted Exchange, SharePoint (collaboration), archiving & compliance and wireless email.

Simply put, on-premise is not looking good as the cloud (hosted) model gains adoption and accelerates in this economy.

Outsource IT: The Trend Continues

Traditionally, outsourcing has been seen as a way to rapidly and dramatically cut costs especially with technology. As outsourcing IT matures, companies are also realizing that the technology they outsource still must be woven into larger, end-to-end processes that's cost efficient and cost effective. For example, sales people still must roll up into an organization's CRM system, share sales report with other team members, then dispatch emails to customers efficiently and on-demand regardless of location.

As we move into the ubiquitous adoption of Software-as-a-Server (SaaS 2.0) evolution, one thing is for sure - technology must optimize business to transform how we work in a meaningful way.

From a business perspective, organizations must integrate various in-house and outsourced technology to enable seamless, reliable business process ready to scale (up or down) with minimum complexities while delivering real ROI.

This, in turn, require a whole slew of processes that includes:
- identify infrastructure, software, growth needs
- define IT goals and policies
- purchase hardware and software
- hire and/or train staff to implement infrastructure
- maintain the IT environment
- support internal and external users

Pointivity has unified all the processes above with the best-practices outsourcing resulting in a Total Outsourced Solution from Managed Services to Hosted Services delivered on a simple per user per month OPEX model. The solution enables businesses to maintain control and focus on their core competencies while shifting all IT risks and responsibilities to Pointivity.

Outsourcing can also reduce operating costs, help companies to make efficient use of technology, save on investment in hardware and software, streamline reporting to management and regulators, provide access to additional functionality, improve data security, and the list goes on!

How we do it, click to enlarge

We're now offering "Total Outsourced Solution" to selected partners who qualify to private label the entire solution to their customers.

High SaaS Adoption + SEC Mandates = Hosted Email Archiving

Email archiving continues to grow in market demand despite the downturn, in December the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent an open letter to CEOs of SEC-registered firms imploring them to not ignore or cut short of their compliance responsibilities because of the economic downturn. Some of the SEC mandates for these firms includes proper email archiving and email compliance. The message is simple: do not cut corners just because things are getting tough, cut cost elsewhere but not email archiving.

Interesting enough, according to ZDnet last week, Forrester disclosed their Q4 SaaS research report which indicated an accelerated growth with SaaS adoption amongst companies looking to seek cost cutting alternatives.


Combine the two and you get a growing market demand for "Hosted Email Archiving" in a shrinking economy. There is no doubt that customers want the benefits of email archiving but this time they want it on a SaaS (pay-as-you-go) model.

Pointivity partners can now offers email archiving (Global Relay) along with enterprise communication (Microsoft Exchange), collaboration (SharePoint), and wireless email (BlackBerry, ActiveSync) as part of a complete hosted solution with private label capabilities. Our partner program is designed to enable partners to be more competitive and flexible while building a strong recurring revenue stream.

Parallels Summit 2009 - A Big Success!

Parallels Summit 2009 was a big success this year and thanks to the Parallels team for putting on a great show! Attendees could clearly see why Parallels is becoming the industry leader in this space.

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, provided the key note speech to about 1,000 attendees.

Serguei's presentation focused on the latest industry trends and he identified the channel falling into 5 different computing or cloud models.
1) Google Cloud, 2) Microsoft Cloud, 3) Other Platform Clouds (HP, IBM, Apple, EMC, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Adobe and more), 4) Channel Clouds like Pointivity (mass market hosting, Telco, SaaS VARs, MSPs) and 5) In house clouds (large companies).

Serguei noted the keys to partner success are to become a one stop shop, differentiate your product offering and focus on customer and partner retention. Many VARs will not have the resources to support large product lines and it will be important for VARs without hosting expertise to partner with hosting providers who can support and train their staff both on the technology and on how to sell and position these products in the marketplace. Serguei noted there's a huge demand both from customers and within the IT industry for cloud and SaaS computing solutions.

The show included a great set of speakers most notably Morris Miller (founder of Rackspace) and Bill McNee (Saugatuck Technology). Morris focused on the importance of POSITIONING and provided a month by month/year by year historical overview of Rackspace's go-to-market strategies and product positioning strategies. Bill McNee provided in-depth research on the current SaaS industry and provided an end-user / CEO perspective of the hosting industry.

Over 160 companies utilize Parallels Automation and thanks to Parallels team for promoting Pointivity in your presentations!

Another big announcement was the release of Parallels SaaS module which now includes over 200 products that can be delivered through one interface. If you are a ISV or have a hosting solution product, please check out www.APSStandard.org. APS Standard has an open API directly to Parallels Automation engine, allowing any ISV product to be integrated with the Parallels engine. By leveraging this API you can get access to hundreds of master distributors and master resellers worldwide. If you need any help on getting your product integrated with Parallels, please feel free to contact partners@pointivity.com.

The two best additions to APS Standard and Parallels Automation at the show were Global Relay's message archiving and Open Exchange email replacement for Exchange Server. Both products are much needed in the SaaS and hosting industry and offer tremendous value to end-users and companies looking to outsource complex email services on a low cost, month to month, pay as you go option.

Aggressive SaaS deployments in 2009

According to IDC SaaS will grow by more than 40 percent in the current year.

Hardware and software will continue its commodization spiral which will lead to service commodization. The idea is not becoming the low price leader but to be perceived as value for money moving forward in this economy. Today companies are looking closely are the values of their internal staff, aligning current costs with business goals, and evaluating risk ownership. More organizations are willing to evaluate SaaS as an alternative to reduce overall cost via opex versus the traditional capex. As quoted by IDC "right-sized, zero-CAPEX alternatives to on-premise applications."

According to IDC, by the end of 2009, 76% of US organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use revised from previous SaaS growth projection which has 73% in 2010 (see below).

All the data points to our partner program approach to SaaS enablement allowing partners to reduce barrier to offer more products, insulate from ongoing changes in IT and position for rapid growth during this economy.

Tightened budgets making SaaS attractive

Today we honor the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and tomorrow we have President Obama moving from the on deck circle to the home plate. However; we couldn't stop more bad news from the banks. Royal Bank of Scotland bites the dust on a massive 28 billion pounds ($41.3 billion) loss, which would be the biggest loss ever reported by a British company, ouch!

So if banks don't and won't lend, business that used to depend on it will have to employ operation cash preservation - CapEx to OpEx mode. While enterprise software vendors are pushing for SaaS contracts, it can benefit the small-mid size VARs, MSPs, and solution providers.

By doing the math correctly on licensing, services and hosting; solution providers can market a value package that makes their customer feel like they're receiving huge discounts. And because of current economic conditions, more businesses are willing to give SaaS a try, employing pilot programs to seek proof of concepts. Pre-sale SaaS trials are good for traditional customers that had no experience with SaaS and if the user experience is great and the price is right why wouldn't they continue?

This is why we developed our partner program around SaaS enablement for partners, reducing hardware and software risks to the minimal while allowing the focus to shift towards business, marketing (brand) and sales. We can't control the shift in technology but we can implement control in our business and that's where the focus should be to deliver IT smarter.

The Empire Strikes Back: Reselling Google Apps

Another vendor has entered the channel with promises and optimism, this time its the search king Google. Yesterday Google introduced their new Reseller Program focus solely on gApps Premier Edition (email, chat, word, spreadsheets, presentations, and security). Until now Google only cooked up the menu to resell Google enterprise search appliances, Apps and Maps to enterprise customers. Key word 'Enterprise' partner program.

And now Google is ready to grow their channel during this economy knowing Microsoft is consolidating with web-based Office Web Applications not ready until 2010.

Google and Microsoft solutions can actually coexist depending on each customer on a case-by-base basis since Google has a slightly different approach to their channel. Solution providers or VARs may even combine the two but ultimately Google App is more appropriate as a cloud-based solution at lower cost than say an on-premises solution from Microsoft. Microsoft is restructuring its channel while Google has just begun, the perfect storm's thunder and lighting.

I am not surprise that Google doesn't having a deal registration because they spend years building their brand and offer free tools directly to customers. So the customers are already trained and used to their brand while Microsoft spend trillions creating products to build a service around their brand.

VARs and solution providers should focus on the business drivers: Continue to foster your relationship with your customers, look for ways to add value to their business, strengthen your brand, and deliver flexible solution (SaaS) that you can build your business on for the long haul. That translates to high customer retention, brand recognition and recurring revenue with real margins!

2009 MSP Watch

An interesting article from MSPmentor with regards to Dell aggressively pushing their managed services.

Joe made some excellent points on the fact that Dell is focused on the mid-market while small MSPs gets the SMB space. There is also the argument that MSPs will do a better job servicing their clients vs big guys like Dell which allows a separation in market share.

It will be interesting to see what MSPs will do once Dell gains more ground as momentum shifts to À la carte service at very competitive prices. Hardware and software will continue its commoditizing path to serve the SaaS model, aggressive direct sales will be the focus as time passes. You can't piss off everyone in one go, but you can break them down so only the strong survives.

Welcome to Pointivity's Blog

Welcome to Pointivity's blog, here you can learn Pointivity's perspective on the IT industry, SaaS, and opinions on the changing road map in IT.

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