Software Business
Executive Report

March 12, 2007

User-Centered Design:   Making your Customers Work for You

Paul Sherman is Director of User-Centered Design and Usability, Sage Software Small Business Division.

Anyone who’s ever used a software application – and that includes pretty much everyone who’s reading this publication – knows that software user interfaces are sometimes confusing. But there is a remedy for this.

For software vendors, the customer can be the best resource when it comes to developing applications.   Their feedback is invaluable.   They are the experts, the ones who use your products regularly, know the strengths, the weaknesses, and what they’d like to see more (or less!) of in your products.   So why not turn to them when you’re making changes, to ensure that you’re on the right track?  

Becoming User-Centered:

In the late 80’s, computers were more the exception than the rule in a business environment; their interfaces complex and driven by command line entries.   Business software was built by experts, usually for experts, so usability was not a primary concern.  

With the advent of the Apple Macintosh in the 80’s and the eventual success of Microsoft Windows in the early 90’s, all of that changed. The graphical approach – where an accounting program could make an on-screen check look like a real check, for example – created new opportunities in software design. As more workers inside organizations were expected to perform job tasks on their desktop computers, software and service providers began recognizing the importance of their products’ usability, turning their attention to usability as a concept and as a driver to their products’ success in the marketplace. By the late 90’s, usability became a differentiator.  

Instead of relying on developers’ and product managers’ intuition, vendors began proactively visiting users’ places of business to learn more about how their customers actually worked.   They began bringing those same customers into lab settings, to see how they reacted to design prototypes- what worked for them and what didn’t.   When people didn’t know how to use the applications or web sites put in front of them, the vendors were then able to tweak the designs, making them more user-friendly.  

Defining the Concept:

This concept has continued to evolve.   Currently, many companies solicit feedback from their customers via surveys, the Internet, or other methods, but rarely through on-site interaction.   Despite the fact that customers are consulted in these processes, this is not user-centered design (UCD)!

Rather, UCD refers specifically to the process of observing the customer in action and applying their input to evolve designs.   It has other names- “customer-driven innovation,” “customer-connected design”- but the concept and outcomes are the same no matter what it is called, and those outcomes result in greater customer satisfaction and a higher top line.

Boiled down, UCD takes the concept of customer feedback a step further, opening up a two-way dialogue between a company and its customers.   In the UCD process, you visit a customer site or bring your customers in-house, let them get hands on with your product or prototype, and use the information gleaned from observing them to modify and improve the product’s design. For new-to-the-world product concepts in particular, UCD practitioners go to customers’ places of business to observe their current work processes, uncover pain points and unstated needs, and design solutions to address these needs.

Another aspect of UCD is its focus on designing the right aspect of the product at the appropriate time. In the UCD process designs are created in well-defined, specific stages, moving from the conceptual to the concrete, and iterations are used to evolve the design.   This is a powerful method; the end result reflects customers’ input, and leads to increased satisfaction across your customer base.  

Drilling Down- UCD in Action:  

How does this process work?   UCD is not something that can be done halfway; rather, it is in most cases a significant organizational culture shift, and must be approached from an ‘All In’ perspective.   Implementing UCD means working through the following:

• Staffing:   At minimum, you need 1 usability and 1 design person – preferably more, depending on the size and complexity of your product - as well as a UCD Manager or Director.   When making a change like this within your organization, you’ll need someone to champion the cause, lead the process changes, and communicate those changes in business and tech-friendly terms to the rest of the organization to ensure success. This is the manager’s job.
• Budget:   Be sure to make allowances for expenses (travel to customer sites, test candidate recruitment and compensation) as well as capital expenditures, such as those associated with setting up your in-house testing environment.  
• Competency:   Making sure that you have the right staffing to manage the UCD process.   The good news is that UCD specialists can come from many backgrounds; this field is still a craft, and there aren’t formal programs in UCD.   A technology background helps, as does an understanding of business.   Most importantly, though, your UCD staff should have a grasp of human cognition and performance, as well as qualitative, observational research design.  
• Engagement:   This consists of the ideation phase, in which you conduct contextual research and discovery; feature design and validation, through which you make designs and test their usability; and lastly, the end-of-cycle validation, through which you conduct summative usability testing and contextual research with the finished product.  

Getting The Organization on Board:

It sounds great, but if you’re not doing this already, how do you get started?   Here are a few steps to take if you are considering a UCD-approach in your products’ development:  

• Cause:   First, identify your cause.   Why is a user-centered design approach even being discussed? Was there a critical or precipitating incident?   Is there something particular you think needs changing?   Is the exploration of UCD being driven by a high-level champion?   Identifying the cause will get your program off on the right foot.  
• Culture:   What is your organizational culture like?   How does this affect your approach?   There are three types of organizations: Engineering-centric, Design-centric, and Customer-centric; each with its own strengths and weaknesses.     Understanding the way things are done ‘now,’ will help you outline the path to transition.  
• Clout:   What power bases can you leverage?   What power bases are in opposition?   Who stands to gain, and who stands to lose?   Adoption of a UCD approach requires strong support from the top down within the organization to be successful, since knowledge gained from these exercises could impact all aspects of the development process. Implementing UCD will likely require a new mindset within your organization that needs to be embraced from top to bottom in order to succeed.  
• Current Efforts:   Is there usability engineering or user-centered design happening now?   Any efforts that are already in place that can be improved or continued?   Any informal mechanisms currently employed for gathering customer data or channels of communication that can be leveraged are key.  

The Bottom Line

The benefits are huge.   Whatever your current environment, to implement a UCD approach, change will be necessary. You’ll need to assist in managing that change as your company rolls out this new development method.   Though there may be challenges at first, they’re worth it.   Your customers will thank you with a higher top line, and increased satisfaction overall.  

For more information on usability and user-centered design, check out the following resources:  

The Usability Professionals’ Association – www.usabilityprofessionals.org

Wikipedia on UCD - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_centered_design

The Society for Technical Communicators on UCD - http://www.stcsig.org/usability/

The Interaction Design Association - http://www.ixda.org/en/

Paul Sherman is Director of User-Centered Design and Usability, Sage Software Small Business Division.   Sage Software supports the needs, challenges, and dreams of more than 2.7 million small and mid-sized business customer s in North America through easy-to-use, scalable and customizable software and services.   Paul Sherman can be reached at paul.sherman@sage.com .  

New IDC Survey Finds SMBs Less Interested in ''Software as a Service'' in General Than in Individual Service Offerings That Address Specific Problems

Software as a service (SaaS) has strong growth potential, with 5.1% of PC-owning small firms and 15.2% of PC-owning medium-sized firms planning to move forward with a SaaS solution within the next 12 months, a new IDC study reveals. But interest in specific solutions, rather than the appeal of SaaS in general, will be driving SMB adoption.

"SaaS is intuitively appealing as a method of software delivery to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but they have not been adopting SaaS as quickly as originally anticipated, even though the reality of their move to SaaS is greater than their perception," said Merle Sandler, senior research analyst for IDC's SMB Markets program. "Providers of on-demand software face a number of challenges when targeting SMBs, including establishing appropriate sales channels and deciding how best to market to these firms."

Other key findings from the IDC survey include:

• The ability to pay for capabilities as needed is the main factor encouraging small businesses (SBs) to use SaaS. Adding new users without difficulty and easing the workload of IT staff are factors nearly as important for medium-sized businesses (MBs).
• Concern about data security is the factor most frequently cited as discouraging the use of SaaS among firms of most sizes.
• SBs are most interested in adding CRM and software to handle remote access from other locations, while MBs are most likely to move to the online delivery of payroll and HR applications.

IDC's study, The Adoption of Software as a Service in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses: Perception Versus Reality (IDC #205798) analyses results from IDC's 2007 U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Business Survey conducted with 614 small businesses and 418 medium-sized businesses. This study is designed to help vendors understand the current and planned usage of SaaS in SMBs as well as factors that would encourage or discourage SMBs from moving to SaaS. The study also takes a look at applications that are being delivered via software as a service or being considered for future provisioning.

To purchase this document, call IDC's Sales hotline at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com.

Contact www.idc.com

According to a recent customer survey conducted by managed Web hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting, nearly 36 percent of responding SaaS customers do not know the uptime guarantees provided in the SaaS vendor Service Level Agreement (SLA), although security, application uptime and network connectivity are among their top technical concerns. The survey also concludes that 49 percent of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) customers do not know where the infrastructure behind their SaaS application lies, whether it is hosted internally with the SaaS provider or through a third-party hosting provider.

“What this survey tells us is that infrastructure issues are top concerns to SaaS customers, but unless they make infrastructure a priority on the due diligence ‘check list’ during the purchasing process, they will be left in the dark and ultimately open to unwanted outages or compromised data," said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “SaaS providers need to clearly communicate their hosting and infrastructure details in the Service Level Agreement, drilling down to security promises, uptime guarantees, network connectivity, data backup processes and more. This way, customers are aware of their SaaS provider’s service obligations, and they can rest assured their mission-critical applications such as e-mail or Customer Relationship Management software will perform as promised.”

As Rackspace’s SaaS survey hones in on infrastructure questions, it reveals that customers value application uptime differently for each category of SaaS application. E-mail and business productivity applications, such as spreadsheets and document creation, were listed as the most critical applications when it comes to availability with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications running a close second. SaaS customers value application uptime enough to pay significantly more for increased uptime guarantees:

• Thirty percent of SaaS customers would pay at least 25 percent more for four extra minutes of guaranteed uptime per month, taking them from a 99.99 percent uptime SLA (i.e. approximately four minutes unplanned downtime per month) to a 100 percent uptime SLA (i.e. zero minutes unplanned downtime per month).
• Fifty-five percent of SaaS customers would pay at least 10 percent more for 41 extra minutes of guaranteed uptime per month, moving up from a 99.9 percent uptime SLA (i.e. 45 minutes unplanned downtime per month) to 99.99 percent uptime SLA (i.e. approximately four minutes unplanned downtime per month).

Overall, the Rackspace survey revealed that SaaS is making significant traction in the small-to-medium size and enterprise market with 51 percent of respondents using a SaaS application and 72 percent of those users considering additional SaaS applications. Rather than a brief IT trend, 69 percent of respondents believe SaaS is the preferred software delivery method of the future, indicating infrastructure scalability will be top of mind for SaaS providers as their customer bases grow.

The methodology for this research involved sending an email survey via a third-party research tool, Clicktools, to 2,788 of Rackspace’s customers with annual revenue ranging from less than $1 million to more than $1 billion. Nearly 15 percent of survey recipients responded to the questions, and the majority of survey respondents’ annual revenue ranged from $0 to $49 million. Fifty-eight percent of respondents provide software services over the Internet and therefore are classified as SaaS providers.

Contact www.rackspace.com

SafeNet to Be Acquired by Private Equity Firm Vector Capital for $634 Million

SafeNet, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an investor group led by Vector Capital in a transaction valued at approximately $634 million. The $28.75 per share price represents a premium of 12% over the SafeNet average closing share price during the 30 trading days ended March 2, 2007 and a 57% premium over its closing stock price on October 2, 2006, the last date before the Company commenced intensive efforts to explore its strategic alternatives.

Under the terms of the agreement, a subsidiary of Vector Capital (Stealth Acquisition Corp.) will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of SafeNet common stock for $28.75 per share in cash. The offer is expected to commence on or before March 12, 2007, and will expire at midnight on the 20th business day following and including the commencement date, unless extended in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”).

The Board of Directors of SafeNet unanimously approved the definitive agreement and recommends that shareholders tender their shares into the tender offer. Members of SafeNet’s Board have agreed to tender their shares.

Walter Straub, SafeNet’s Chairman and CEO, said, “Over the past five months, our Board of Directors engaged in an extremely thorough review of all strategic options available to the Company, including a broad solicitation process that resulted in significant competitive interest in our Company. Based on this comprehensive process, the Board determined that being acquired by Vector Capital and its partners represents a compelling opportunity that is in the best interest of our shareholders, customers and employees.”

“In Vector, we have identified a partner that is committed to assisting the Company to fully realize its opportunities while we continue to address our issues and build momentum in our business,” continued Straub.

Chris Nicholson, a Partner at Vector, said, “SafeNet’s full suite of leading government and industry security solutions uniquely position the Company with its strong customer base, and we look forward to working with SafeNet’s talented employees and management team to build lasting value for the Company and its customers.”

The tender offer is conditioned upon, among other things, approximately 78% of SafeNet’s shares being tendered in the offer based on the current shares and options outstanding. If the Company becomes current in its SEC filings, the minimum tender condition will be reduced to a majority of the fully diluted eligible shares.

The transaction is not subject to any financing condition. The transaction will be financed through a combination of equity and debt, with the debt financing committed by Deutsche Bank and Citigroup Global Markets and the equity committed by Vector and certain of its partners. Provided that the minimum tender condition is met, the transaction is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2007, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. There can be no assurance that the transaction will be approved or consummated.

Merrill Lynch is acting as financial advisor to SafeNet, Inc., and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is acting as the Company’s legal advisor. Credit Suisse also was retained to provide certain financial advisory services to the Board of Directors of SafeNet. O'Melveny and Myers is acting as legal advisor to Vector Capital. Deutsche Bank served as lead financial advisor and co-lead arranger of the debt financing and Citigroup Global Markets Inc. served as co-advisor and co-lead arranger.

Contactwww.safenet-inc.com.

Contact www.vectorcapital.com.

2ndWave Software announced has acquired Amcom Software, a provider of enterprise software systems for mission critical communications. The recently formed 2ndWave Software, led by former HighJump Software executives Chris Heim and Dan Mayleben, chose Amcom as their first acquisition based on the company’s reputation in the markets it serves, a solid technology platform and a prestigious client roster.

Founded nearly 25 years ago by Jack Collins, Amcom has over 400 customers including Duke University, Stanford Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Intel Corporation and the U.S. Army. Amcom’s software solutions are used to automate mission critical communications and improve enterprise-wide communications. Customers benefit with a central, standards-based communication platform proven to reduce cost and increase efficiencies by providing self-service and faster, more accurate call routing.

Following the planned retirement of Amcom CEO and Founder, Jack Collins, Heim will take on the role of CEO and Mayleben will be appointed CFO of Amcom. The company will retain its name, company headquarters, management team and employee base.

"Over the years, Amcom has achieved fantastic business results by providing great solutions to meet growing customer demand for advanced communications," said Chris Heim, CEO, 2ndWave Software. "Many customers reported improved performance and reliability by eliminating manual processes, avoiding costly errors and reducing risk. By saving millions in liabilities and increased efficiencies, the results speak for themselves."

2ndWave Software was formed to address the new reality of slower yet, steady growth in many business-to-business software markets. Despite niche market leadership, many well-run small and mid-sized enterprise software companies have been unable to attract outside acquirers or exit via a public offering. To address this need, 2ndWave Software will seek to acquire quality companies, help management teams improve their business operations, and potentially combine them with other complimentary businesses.

"2ndWave is very focused and committed to the future success of Amcom," said Dan Mayleben, Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer, 2ndWave Software. "We intend to make Amcom the leader in its software category while bringing additional product ands service offerings into their core verticals to support customer demand for better enterprise communications."

Contact www.amcomsoftware.com

Contact www.2ndwavesoftware.com.

Aspect Software Inc. will provide Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server as an embedded component of the Aspect Unified IP product. This offering is designed to allow organizations to enjoy the benefits of high-end speech self-service features at a positive price point, and to leverage the reduced complexity of the unified solution while having greater control and increased contact center functionality.

“Small and midsize contact centers face unique challenges, and they need applications that will specifically address their distinct requirements,” said Mike Sheridan, senior vice president of strategy at Aspect Software. “Most importantly, they don’t want to sacrifice functionality; they want the full array of capabilities, just as large contact centers do. Working with Microsoft is allowing us to bring a solution to market that incorporates a full set of high-end features that supports these organizations’ customer contact strategies, including a fully featured speech capability.”

Aspect Unified IP incorporates an automatic call distributor, a voice portal, quality management, a predictive dialer and Internet connection in a single application. It also provides unified reporting, routing and administration functionality, and hosted capabilities with multi-tenancy, while running on the customer’s transport of choice: either voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or time-division multiplexing (TDM).

Speech Server (2007) is Microsoft’s Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.0-certified speech and telephony platform and provides the tools, run-time environment, and state-of-the-art speech and telephony services needed for speech-enabled telephony applications on a single, integrated platform. Speech Server (2007) helps reduce the complexity and cost of building, deploying and maintaining speech-enabled applications for customer self-service applications, as well as outbound notification services.

The combined offering of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Speech Server and Aspect Unified IP 6.5, scheduled for release in July 2007, will help allow companies in the small and midsize contact center market to easily automate customer self-service calls, reduce time call-center agents spend on calls, improve customer interactions and add speech capabilities to line-of-business applications.

Contact www.aspect.com.

TigerDirect, Inc., one of the industry’s top computer and computer product retailers, has integrated the Protexis RED (Retail Electronic Distribution) solution with its online retail site, enabling the open and efficient distribution of digital content. Consumers can now purchase and immediately download software from TigerDirect.com.

Protexis RED, a breakthrough in electronic software distribution (ESD), directly connects software publishers with online retailers to efficiently extend the availability of downloadable digital software. According to IDC, the ESD market currently stands at $3 billion, and is expected to triple by the end of the decade.

“RED is ground-breaking. It has allowed us to enter the business of digital content distribution,” said Russell Strunk, executive VP of marketing for TigerDirect. “Our customers will be delighted to discover a growing inventory of popular software titles available for download and a seamless shopping experience.”

Most retailers aren’t yet participating in ESD, and those that are must either negotiate multiple licensing and electronic distribution agreements with publishers individually, or engage an outsourced e-commerce provider to “plug in” a separate software download store. These types of agreements aren’t scalable, and result in the loss of customer ownership. This hinders sales by reducing opportunities for building the customer relationship and up-selling, in addition to the interrupted shopping experience, which can lead to abandoned carts.

At the same time, content publishers are limited by a lack of efficient distribution options to reach the aggregate market of consumers shopping at online retailers. To not reach these customers is a huge lost opportunity for publishers, especially since, according to a 2006 issue of Internet Retailer magazine, the top 25 online retail sites averaged 153 million unique visitors per month in 2005.

By directly linking publishers with retailers and providing seamless integration, RED solves these issues. The open, neutral and efficient RED distribution system allows online retailers to instantly access a growing digital inventory of software titles and their accompanying merchandising data. Retailers maintain their customer relationships and deliver content through an integrated shopping experience, while enabling publishers to dramatically increase their reach and revenue.

“Although ESD has existed for over a decade, software publishers and online retailers have not had an open and efficient means to participate, until we launched RED,” said Karl Hirsch, CEO of Protexis. “We’re generating a lot of interest from publishers and retailers alike, and believe that TigerDirect’s implementation demonstrates the beginning of a shift in the market toward our open approach to ESD.”

“We’re thrilled to be a part of this new shift in ESD that opens up the online retail market for software publishers,” said George Kafkarkou, senior vice president, worldwide consumer and SMB sales, for CA. “In addition to increased revenue opportunities, we now have full visibility into our online retail sales activity.”

Contact www.tigerdirect.com

Contact www.protexis.com.

Netuitive, Inc. launched its strategic push into the virtualization arena with the release of Netuitive SI for VMware, a self-learning, self-configuring management solution for virtualized environments. This breakthrough technology is the only solution that automatically tracks and understands the complex interdependent performance relationships in a dynamic virtual environment.

“Virtualization is controlled chaos,” stated George Hamilton, director of enterprise infrastructure research for Yankee Group. “The elements in a virtual environment are highly interdependent. Trying to understand the meaning and impact of their relationships to one another is humanly impossible. IT managers need real-time analytical insight like that provided by Netuitive to enable them to take a proactive approach to monitoring their environment.”

An industry survey found that IT administrators are already spread thin monitoring their physical environments, an alarming forty-one percent of respondents in large organizations said they receive 100 to as many as 5,000 alerts per day, of which at least half — more in most cases — are false-positives. The survey also revealed that many are turning off their alerting systems altogether because it’s too time-consuming to follow-up with each alert that turns out to be false. This survey clearly illustrates that monitoring of existing physical systems is already fraught with problems; and as companies begin to add virtualization to their environments, the complexity of managing these systems will increase exponentially. Netuitive SI for VMware, the company’s first virtualization solution, assures performance of virtual infrastructures from the onset by automating the most difficult, time-consuming and costly processes in optimizing and managing virtualized environments.

“There’s no denying the benefits of virtualization, but rushing to implement without thinking about performance management is an oversight that could have severe implications on the bottom-line,” said Nicola Sanna, president and CEO of Netuitive. “Effectively managing performance on physical systems is difficult enough, which is only exacerbated when they’re virtualized. To save time, money and headaches, organizations should be thinking about automated performance management, and Netuitive, before implementing a virtualization strategy.”

Netuitive SI for VMware self-learns and cross-correlates the performance behavior characteristics of the virtual infrastructure — each virtual machine, the host server and the resource pool — resulting in optimal allocation of the resource pool, automatic baselining and threshold administration, performance degradation forecasts up to 2 hours in advance, immediate pinpointing of problems and proactive managing of system health. Netuitive quickly isolates root-causes, accurately identifies badly behaving virtual machines and spells out necessary corrective actions in plain English — all to greatly reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).

The Netuitive SI for VMware solution is $5,000 per Host Server and $200 per virtual machine and will be available on April 2.

Contact www.netuitive.com.

Hot Banana Software, Inc. has launched Version 5.5, which takes Web CMS to the next level by integrating Web site optimization and marketing automation features. The company also made significant changes to its SaaS and licensed pricing, squarely focusing on small-to-midsized marketers.

According to company officials, the company’s innovative new release, Hot Banana Version 5.5, is first to focus on three areas: (1) Web content management, empowering marketers to build Web sites and take control of their content; (2) Web site optimization, giving marketers the tools they need to fine-tune the marketing performance of their sites; and (3) marketing automation tools for capturing Web site visitors, turning them into qualified leads and transferring the leads to CRM systems.

The Web CMS integrates best-of-breed, third-party Web analytics, email marketing and CRM solutions. It also consolidates all the capabilities from Hot Banana’s formerly optional Active Marketing Suite into one core product.

At the same time that the company has increased product functionality, it has also made its pricing structure more affordable. The company created a three-tier model based on usage: one to five users, six to 25 users and unlimited users. Hot Banana SaaS, the company’s hosted offering, starts at only $329 per month, while Hot Banana Licensed Software starts at $4,999.

The most expensive package is a licensed-software offering that handles an unlimited number of users and URLs for only $27,999.

Contact www.hotbanana.com

March 12-14 – Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, Chicago, Ill. Contact www.gartner.com

March 13-14 – UBS Global Software & IT Services Conference, London. Contact www.ubs.com

March 14-16 – SaaS Summit 2007, Monterey, Calif. Contact www.opsource.net Software Business Will Have an Editor At This Show

March 18-23 – Novell Brainshare, Salt Lake City, Utah. Contact www.novell.com

March 19-23 – Software Development West 2007, Santa Clara, Calif. Contact www.sdexpo.com Software Business Will Have an Editor At This Show

March 19-21 – Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit, Orlando, Fla. Contact www.gartner.com

March 19-21 – AJAXWorld, New York City, NY. Contact www.ajaxworldconference.com

March 21 -- The Hosted Software Summit, London, UK. Contact www.datacentres.com

March 22-23 -- Customer Experience Management Conference, Chicago, Ill. Contact www.conference-board.com

March 23- Working With the Analyst Seminar, Austin, Texas. Contact www.knowledgecap.com

March 26-27 – ETech Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, Calif. Contact http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2007

March 27-29 -- CTIA, Orlando, Florida. Contact www.ctiawireless.com Software Business is a Media Sponsor

Interop Las Vegas
May 20 – 25, 2007
Mandalay Bay Convention Center
Las Vegas , NV

Attend Interop Las Vegas to get the big picture. As the leading global technology event, Interop brings together IT professionals and business leaders to see all of the latest technologies in action. Visit more than 400 exhibitors, attend 200+ sessions, and check out live demos of tomorrow’s business solutions. Learn how different technologies work together to connect your infrastructure, your business, your people and your customers. Come to Interop this May. It's the only place you'll get the big picture. www.interop.com

The third annual conference focuses successful business development models, sales methodologies, licensing technologies, partnering, customer relationship management, growth opportunities, and marketing issues facing software companies. Attendees are vice presidents, directors, product managers and personnel at independent software vendors.

SLAM 2007 will offer visionary keynotes from executives at the software companies shaping the industry and in-depth breakout session will offer insight from the top sales consultants who work for software companies. The program is unmatched in delivering the tools and processes to reach quarterly and annual targets. This year's conference will have added emphasis on New Market Opportunities, Partnership Programs, Software as a Service Evolution, and Future Industry Trends.  

Software Business 2007 will be held October 2-3 at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara , Calif.   The annual conference focuses on current strategic business, financial and technology issues and growth opportunities facing top executives of software companies. It is a two-day conference serving owners, chief executives, presidents, vice presidents and division or department directors of leading and fast-growing software companies located throughout North America who are conducting business domestically and worldwide.

The sixth annual conference returns to Silicon Valley for the first time in four years. It will offer speakers from leading software companies and deliver the industry's most informative sessions through four tracks of sessions. Additionally, the conference will offer full- and half-day workshops on Monday, October 1

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