IT as a Service

On-demand subscription billing and payment house Zuora is expanding its multi-tenant cloud into Europe on the back of a $36 million D round led by Index Ventures. Greylock Partners and Workday co-CEO Dave Duffield, who started PeopleSoft, are also kicking in. The infusion brings Zuora's total funding to $82.5 million. Existing investors include Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital and salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Despite the economic turmoil over there Zuora says there's demand in Europe for pay-as-you-go subscription-based services in telecoms, media, technology, consumer services, high-tech and other industries. Early this year Zuora opened an EMEA headquarters in London. After nine months of operations, it has 30-odd customers, including larger enterprises such as News International, Reed Business Information, Touring Club Suis... (more)

Integrated Solutions – 2004 vs 2011

Back in 2004, I worked for IBM, which offered end-to-end solutions that few other technology vendors could provide.  An automotive customer in Australia had a myriad of disjointed processes connecting them with their end users and wanted to achieve tangible cost savings by improving operational effectiveness. To accomplish these goals, the client wanted to deliver services to their dealers, suppliers and fleet customers through a single portal interface. This was going to be achieved through the integration of information, people and processes to help maintain more effective re... (more)

Enterprise Asset Management as a Service

SaaS / BpaaS Adoption This is a continuation of my series of articles on industry SaaS. This term ‘Industry SaaS' can be interchangeably used with BpaaS (Business Process as a Service). However, the term ‘Industry SaaS,' which means a Software as a Service meant for a specific industry need, is stressed for a broader attention, as the term BpaaS has yet to mature with a clear definition. Enterprise Asset Management as a Service Enterprise asset management is the business processes and enabling information systems that support the management of an organization's assets, both physic... (more)

Cloudy Concepts: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, MaaS, CaaS & XaaS

Generally IT folk, whether in Storage, Virtualization, Change Management or Project Management love the use of acronyms and synonyms to express key concepts amongst each other. What other industry would allow an individual to spurt a line such as "Have SOX seen the BCP and CAB approval for our VDC's DR SAN and will this then be added to the CMDB by CoB today?" without immediately flinching or bringing in a logopaedics specialist for help. More often than not, IT folk have also used these synonyms and acronyms as smokescreens to prevent outsiders from realizing "well this IT stuff... (more)

Cloud Computing: Facilities Work Order Management as a Service

SaaS / BpaaS Adoption This is the continuation of my series of articles on Industry SaaS . This term ‘Industry SaaS' can be used interchangeably with BpaaS (Business Process as a Service). However, the term ‘Industry SaaS' meaning Software as a Service meant for a specific industry need is stressed for wider attention, as the term BpaaS has yet to mature with a clear definition. Facilities Job/Work Order Management Most large manufacturing enterprises will have a facilities division that is responsible for various infrastructure jobs within the enterprise whether in the office spa... (more)