Shift In Focus: Economic Downturn Requires Companies to Innovate

Last week at the Mid-Size Enterprise Summit (hosted by Everything Channel), Geoffrey Moore touched upon the subject of "innovate to take market share away from competitors."

According to ChannelWeb’s article, Moore said, “a down economy compels companies to cut costs and focus on maintenance and other mission-critical functions rather than spend money on innovation and projects that come with a possible degree of failure attached…However, many of those mission-critical functions -- tasks that are necessary but provide little overall value to the organization -- can and should be outsourced so businesses can further invest in their core, and innovate in a way that propels the company forward.”

That’s the philosophy that we've been educating our clients on. The down economy is actually the time for businesses to start investing in new technologies -- such as cloud and hosted infrastructure -- which would ultimately free up staff and resources that could be allocated to innovation budgets.

Specifically with Pointivity’s iTOS (Integrated Outsourced Solution), it’s an investment into IT centralization, standardization, and resource virtualization. iTOS is now widely perceived by our clients as a business strategy that helps to simplify IT and streamlines their business process enabling more designate resources and time to stay ahead instead of trying to catch up to competitors.

Moving forward, IT’s focus should not be so much on transactional systems, but enablement capabilities, from “computing” to “communications and collaboration.”

Is iTOS right for you? Talk to us.

Hosted Application Gaining Trust Amongst SMBs

Early this week, Mint.com was acquired by Intuit (two years after launching) for about $170 million. Intuit, a $10 billion dollar company is perhaps best known as the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.

The significance of this acquisition goes beyond the typical business strategy of eliminating a potential competitor for Intuit but a validation of hosted applications gaining traction in the market. Unlike your mainstream applications such as Word, Excel and email, Mint is a vertical application completely hosted in the cloud. With over 1.5 million users, Mint.com is a free financial online services that lets users create budgets, pay bills, manage credit card accounts, among other features.

This means more small businesses are adopting and leverage the hosted model to run their financial systems offsite. The packaged software business will continue to flow applications into the cloud as online services becomes widely adopted.

A Walk in the Clouds

In the February issue of the VSR (Vertical Systems Reseller) magazine, VSR sorted through the cloud hype and asked Kent Erickson, President and CEO, Pointivity, as well as several other VARs and vendors to ferret out these seven facts that VARs should know before breaking into cloud computing. Read the article here

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.

Salesforce Chases After Cloud With Force

Salesforce announced the addition of Force.com, which provides a hosted infrastructure for customers to run websites in Salesforce cloud. They're also going to provide the building blocks to integrate with business applications when everything is available in 2009.

It sounds like they're trying to add value to their offerings via the cloud hype while expanding their product reach further with Facebook and Amazon partnership.

Moving forward, Salesforce will continue to be under pressure from Oracle, SAP and especially Microsoft's new Azure, which is pretty much the same offering. Not to mention Microsoft is working hard to replace SaaS with S+S, it's amazing how Salesforce expects to pass US$1 billion in annual revenue for the first time but its profit margin remains extremely slim.

The IT value stack is getting squeezed by players of all sizes trying to reshape the changing roadmap in IT. As we continue to see acceleration in the cloud hype there is also a fundamental shift in how applications are used and delivered but until the general perception adapts to the cloud idea, I still believe in the hybrid model that will emerge as the real solution to the future of SaaS.

Another New Site launched by Microsoft on S + S

Derek pointed out to me today that Microsoft launched another new site - Software + Services yesterday. I like that video on the homepage showing how the "Microsoft Cloud Server Provisioning" works and my favor part is the dude receives a message on his TV screen about his server while he is in the middle of his Xbox game! He then walks up to the TV and touch-screens his way to view his cloud provisioning progress.


Clearly Microsoft is ready for the S+S assault 2.0, it'll be interesting to see how ISVs and MSPs respond.

Microsoft Azure: Their Entrance Into Cloud Computing

Monday this week Microsoft launched their new cloud computing AZURE. Billed as "an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers," which explains why they were shipping massive number of servers for months now.

Azure is designed to provide an "operating system" and a set of developer services that will enable a broadening of the Microsoft platform from on-premise to the Cloud. It should be noted that Azure is positioned as a platform similar to Google Apps and just like before Microsoft is the last to the game and will have their impact. In addition, Microsoft is to provide hosted Windows Servers with full Admin access. Supposedly you can choose how much RAM/CPU you want. (2009 release)

Get ready as Microsoft continues to eat up the technology layers from application to platform, to infrastructure. Stay tune for more information later.