The 2008 Software Industry Awards Announced
Software Business Executive Report is pleased to announce the 2008 Software Business Industry Awards (SIA). These companies were selected for there innovative and leadership qualities. Congratulations!
Outstanding Partnering Program - VMware
VMware owes much of its success to its global partner ecosystem, which includes more than 700 technology partners and nearly 18,000 channel partners. Their customers benefit by being able to access VMware products and solutions through several channels. …more
Outstanding Product - Zimbra
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a Web-based collaboration suite complete with email, calendar, contact, document and Web 2.0 technologies. It offers business users and consumers alike multi-Gigabyte mailboxes, advanced search and tagging capabilities, conversation view and an AJAX interface, with the functionality necessary for enterprises including mobile support, iPhone, Blackberry, Java-enabled phones, tasks and advanced calendaring. …more
Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Large Company)- ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and to manage change and complexity. For the past 20 years, ILOG has demonstrated product and market leadership in all of its core market segments while honing their products to make sophisticated capabilities easier and faster to use and accessible to broader audiences. …more
Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Mid-Size Company) - Apriso Corp.
Apriso Corp. is dedicated to providing a competitive advantage for its customers. It does so by enabling manufacturing organizations to adapt their operations quickly and easily to market changes and unexpected events. Apriso's flagship software platform, FlexNet, delivers applications that enable collaboration across operations at every plant and warehouse location by integrating manufacturing processes across operations (production floor, warehouse, quality, maintenance, time and labor applications). …more
Innovative SaaS Company (Large Company) – Trend Micro
Trend Micro has foreseen the transition from security at the gateway or network edge toward the Internet cloud. While application and storage servers still require resident security, the end point now needs a thin security agent which can be achieved with in-the-cloud updates. Trend Micro is enabling its partners to provide a complete range of Software-as-a-Service security applications either as point solutions or as a combination of services managed through a single web console. …more
Innovative SaaS Company (Mid-Size Company) - Vovici
Vovici is a provider in Enterprise Feedback Management, offering products and services that increase customer loyalty, facilitate collaboration and innovation, influence critical business decisions and provide voice to online communities. Organizations worldwide, including more than 58 percent of the US Fortune 500, rely on Vovici’s SaaS solutions to help effectively use feedback to identify employee satisfaction, market research, customer satisfaction, and to act on that information in order to create long-term relationships, increase profitability and facilitate time-critical actions that drive business results. …more
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Microsoft Joins Working Group for Open Standards Messaging Software
Microsoft Corp. is joining the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization focused on the development of the AMQP specification. Microsoft is joining the AMQP Working Group at the request of its members, including several of Microsoft's customers in the financial services industry, in order to support the development of an open industry standard for ubiquitous messaging.
AMQP is a specification for platform-neutral, open standards-based business messaging. The primary goal of AMQP is to enable the communications necessary for business processes. AMQP Working Group members are collaborating on specifications for messaging infrastructure that provide businesses with a simple and more powerful way of connecting messaging-dependent applications both within and between firms. By joining the AMQP Working Group, Microsoft is seeking to contribute toward the development of such solutions and to enable greater customer choice in the marketplace.
"Customers are seeking scalable solutions with lower costs that will allow messaging within the enterprise and outside the corporate infrastructure," said Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. "By joining the AMQP Working Group, Microsoft is aiming to contribute to the development of the specification in ways that will best promote interoperability for existing market implementations and provide customers with increased choice."
Message-based transports with security and transactional integrity are a vital infrastructure component throughout institutions. As Microsoft continues to provide vertical industry solutions, AMQP will provide an alternative to current messaging options. The AMQP specification and related implementations may provide greater interoperability for a number of vertical scenarios in addition to financial services, insurance and healthcare, among others.
Members of the AMQP Working Group are Cisco, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Boerse Systems, Envoy Technologies, Inc., The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., iMatix Corp., IONA Technologies, J.P. Morgan, Novell, Rabbit Technologies Ltd., Red Hat, Inc., TWIST Process Innovations Ltd., WSO2 and 29West, Inc.
Citrix Drives Adoption of Virtual Appliance Portability Standard for Enterprises and Clouds
Citrix Systems, Inc. has released a technology preview of Project Kensho, its toolkit for the development and deployment of portable virtual machine appliances in enterprises and clouds. First announced in July, Project Kensho provides a powerful, multi-hypervisor toolkit that leverages the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. As a result, virtualized application workloads can be packaged as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance and be imported and run on Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments.
Project Kensho is being released as open source software under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) to accelerate adoption of the industry standard for portable packaging of applications and virtual machines (VMs), as well as management of virtual infrastructure. In addition, Citrix is working with virtual appliance packaging vendor rPath to extend Project Kensho so that users can seamlessly install and deploy DMTF OVF packages on popular IT Infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2.
“The response from customers, partners and our community to the announcement of Project Kensho has been tremendous,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “We are excited about the opportunities that a portable virtual machine and virtual appliance infrastructure offer our customers, ISV partners, and the market at large. Today we can use Project Kensho to easily deploy portable OVF format virtual appliances on XenServer and Hyper-V. And we have also decided to release the core components of Project Kensho and our implementation of the DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) profiles for XenServer as open source software. Combined, we hope these actions will accelerate the adoption of OVF as an industry standard portable VM format.”
Citrix is partnering with rPath to extend Kensho to support the deployment of OVF appliances in infrastructure clouds, starting with Amazon EC2. This collaboration will allow Linux and Windows based OVF appliances created on XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 to be installed and run in the cloud and managed through their entire lifecycle.
Project Kensho enables customers to leverage the interoperability benefits and compatibility between long-time partners Citrix and Microsoft. Because the tools are based on an industry standard schema, customers are ensured a rich ecosystem of options for virtualization. And because of the open-standard format and special licensing features in OVF, customers can seamlessly move their current virtualized workloads to either XenServer or Windows Server 2008, enabling them to distribute virtual workloads to the platform of choice while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.
LinkedIn Raises $22.7 Million from Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, SAP Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners
LinkedIn Corp. has secured $22.7 million in new funding from strategic investors Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies and SAP Ventures, as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners. This financing is a follow on of the Series D fundraising round LinkedIn announced in June of 2008, in which the company raised $53 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The valuation for the Series D was just over 1 billion dollars for the $75.7 million raised.
“We secured this investment with innovators in enterprise software, investment banking and business information who see the potential to create value and transform industries through the LinkedIn platform,” said LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye. “These leading companies understand that LinkedIn is building a network with broad and enduring value.”
Over 30 million professionals use LinkedIn to solve business problems, manage their professional relationships and control their professional identities online. LinkedIn members represent more than 170 industries, 150 countries, and include executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. LinkedIn is currently growing at a rate of half a million new members a week. Members experience the benefits of the purpose-driven network by finding new ways to interact and do business. While standard LinkedIn accounts are free, the company earns revenue through advertising, premium subscriptions, corporate solutions, and job listings. LinkedIn recently added a new line of revenue with LinkedIn Surveys.
“SAP Ventures is extremely excited to partner with one of the leading Internet companies in the world,” said Doug Higgins, partner at SAP Ventures. “We made this investment because we believe that when Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium and large companies.”
"In today's economy we spend more time tending to our professional networks, and so it's no surprise that LinkedIn continues to grow in membership and engagement,” said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
Acresso Software to Acquire Intraware, Inc.
Acresso Software has announced a definitive agreement to purchase Intraware, Inc., a provider of digital delivery and management services. Intraware’s SubscribeNet platform and strong market position in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) entitlement management and electronic software delivery will extend the global leadership of Acresso’s FLEXnet Suite for entitlement and compliance management.
“Along with its technology, Intraware has deep expertise in SaaS application management, and an impressive list of partners and customers, including a number of shared customers,” said Mark Bishof, president and CEO of Acresso Software. “Combining these with Acresso’s financial and market strengths will greatly benefit Acresso’s customers and Intraware’s customers.”
Acresso’s FLEXnet Suite delivers end-to-end entitlement lifecycle management across the compliance spectrum, from license enforcement to usage monitoring. Acresso’s FLEXnet Suite enables a wide variety of licensing models and rapid package reconfiguration to match specific market needs, delivers insight into customer usage for targeted up-sell opportunities, and streamlines operations through a single view for producers and their customers across all licensing technologies in use. FLEXnet Suite includes capabilities to address entitlement management, software licensing, compliance monitoring and delivery of software and updates. The addition of SaaS capabilities makes it easier for software and hardware producers to get started with entitlement management by minimizing the use of IT resources and enabling rapid integration with existing on-premise ERP applications such as SAP and Oracle.
Intraware provides software distribution and entitlement management services for customers such as IBM, Mentor Graphics, Progress Software, Inc., EMC Corp. and Sybase, Inc., serving more than 2.7 million end users.
The offer will be at a price of $4.00 per share to complete the acquisition, which is expected to close in fourth quarter 2008. Until then, Intraware, Inc. will operate as an autonomous entity. |
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SaaS & SLAM 2009
SaaS and SLAM 2009, April 28-29 in Boston, is focused on the economics of managing, transitioning and starting software as a service companies and the successful business development models, sales strategies, licensing technologies, partnering, channel development, growth opportunities and marketing issues facing software companies.
As two separate and successful events in 2008, SaaS Economics and SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliances & Marketing) have been combined in 2009 to provide an extensive and comprehensive conference.
In comparison to enterprise software companies, the economics of SaaS companies are very different. From the initial capital needed, to operations financial benchmarks, to revenue recognition and finally managing subscriptions, this conference will offer attendees the blueprint for managing their company.
The conference will also focus on successful business development models, sales strategies, licensing technologies, partnering, channel development, growth opportunities, and marketing issues facing software companies. The sessions are designed to help grow and improve your company's revenues, opportunities, profits and operations.
Call for Presentations
The deadline to submit an abstract is November 14th. Submission sought for include:
• Software as a Service Models
• Raising Capital
• Managing Subscriptions and Licenses
• Market Analysis and Benchmarking of SaaS Companies
• Valuation of SaaS Sales and Exit Strategies
• Case Studies of Leading and Emerging SaaS Vendors
• Pricing, Licensing and Sales Programs
• Channel Sales and Marketing
• Marketing and Branding
• Partnering and Alliance Programs
• Product & Service Development
• Distribution, Customer Service and Support
For details on submitting an abstract, please visit: http://www.softwarebusinessonline.com/conf2009/SaaS_SLAM/conf2009_presentations.php. |
