Razorsight - Intelligent Data Capture Services

www.razorsight.com Founded in April of 2001, Razorsight provides financial executives with next-generation business intelligence software and services to process, manage, and analyze financial data -- from a single invoice to global expenditures. No other company offers a fully-automated software platform that scans and converts any paper or electronic invoice or financial document into actionable, structured data. This data is placed into a web portal, providing previously unavailable visibility and streamlined management of an organization’s finances.

Razorsight's Software as a Service (SaaS) has transformed the way that companies process invoices. Razorsight provides finance executives with detailed visibility into every line item on every expense, and seamlessly integrates with any financial system. Razorsight has delivered exceptional savings, and a return on investment (ROI) in 12 months or less to both Fortune 500 and mid-sized businesses. Our business intelligence, analytics, audit and reporting tools have been recognized as unique and best of breed.

Named as a finalist for the 2005 American Business Awards Best Product of the Year, Razorsight’s revolutionary software platform is dramatically transforming the way Fortune 500 companies process, manage, and realize significant value from their financial data. Razorsight has successfully implemented its managed service solution at several Fortune 100 corporations with documented savings in the millions and a return on investment in less than one year.

RazorFacts

Razorsight’s proprietary technology mechanizes the conversion of any paper or electronic invoice to an actionable database, including all invoices, contracts, purchase orders, and other financial documents thereby facilitating audit, analysis and review. This improves your finance team’s management of all corporate expenditures, while also enhancing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

SPARK Las Vega 2006

sparklasvegas.wordpress.com "We wrapped up the SPARK architecture workshop late yesterday afternoon here in sunny Las Vegas. This very intriguing event on the future of software architecture consisted of a two day conversation between some of the brightest people in software and try to figure out where it's all going. The trends that are generally associated with the concepts of Web 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS) are really reshaping views and expectations while the industry's experience with SOA has been mixed. Web 2.0 and SOA, and to a lesser extent SaaS, are first order collections of software architecture forces and contraints that overlap quite a bit. But there are clearly disjoint concepts like Web 2.0 social aspects and SOA's orchestration and its galaxy of obscure standards. The convergence of major visions of software architecture is a fascinating and vitally important topic, as I discussed in my cover article last last year in the SOA Web Services Journal on the subject, Web 2.0: The Global SOA."

IDC's SaaS Predictions 2006

IDC's top ten predictions for SaaS in 2006 are:

* Large ISVs Will Spin Off On-Demand Versions of Products
* Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Remain a "Tough Nut to Crack"
* Microsoft Strengthens SaaS Resolve
* Software on Demand Providers Focus on Partnering
* Mini-Ecosystems Emerge to Extend the Reach of Software on Demand
* SaaS Enablers Continue to Aid Availability of On-Demand Offerings
* Merger and Acquisition Activity Continues
* SaaS Providers Concentrate on Improving Offerings and Customer Experience
* Hosted AM Becomes a Stepping Stone Towards On-Demand Delivery
* SaaS Will Help Drive a Software Industry Transition to Subscription Licensing

ThinMind - Smar products, smart business

www.thinmind.com

Shift Technologies, Inc. (STI) was founded in 1997 and is a privately held / funded corporation located in Charlotte, NC. Shift Technologies provides 100% web based workforce management solutions. The company’s flagship product suite ThinMind includes Timesheet Reporting, Expense Reporting, Issue Tracking, and Project Management.

Thousands of people worldwide use ThinMind web based solutions. The ThinMind suite is designed for small to large businesses and specifically for the professional services market including, the financial services, legal, and IT and business consulting industries.

The ThinMind suite of solutions is available on an application service provider (ASP) basis.

Our sole purpose is to provide powerful business tools to small, medium, and large companies without the headaches, costs, or risks associated with 'software implementations'.

UltraDNS - Intelligent Scaleable Directory Services

www.ultradns.com UltraDNS Corporation, the world's leading provider of managed DNS services, today announced that salesforce.com, the technology and market leader in on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM), has selected its Managed DNS Service for enhanced network security, performance and reliability. Salesforce.com's hosted CRM solutions are powered by the UltraDNS Directory Services Platform and backed by its industry leading Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Saleforce.com is a leading innovator in the software as a service (SaaS) market, whereby business applications are utilized by customers via the Internet. According to a recent report from the market research firm IDC, SaaS will represent a $10.7 billion market by 2009.

"Given the critical nature of our service, our customers require outstanding reliability. To achieve this we need the very best network infrastructure of which DNS is a critical component," said Christopher Amen-Kroeger, Vice President of Service Delivery, salesforce.com. "We chose UltraDNS because its Managed DNS Service provides unparalleled security and performance and its platform allows us to scale seamlessly as our business grows."

Recently, UltraDNS announced the deployment of the DNS Shield(TM), a revolutionary extension of the Directory Services Platform. The DNS Shield involves the deployment of authoritative DNS servers within the heart of the networks of leading ISPs including Yahoo, Verio, Earthlink, and America Online, creating a hardened and secure DNS infrastructure providing unprecedented levels of Internet performance, and the most advanced protection available against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and pharming attacks.

"In the increasingly competitive 'software as a service' market, superior DNS security and performance is a key differentiator," said Ben Petro, president and CEO, UltraDNS. "We are delighted to partner with salesforce.com and to enhance the online experience for its impressive client list."

UltraDNS Corporation is the world's leading Managed DNS Service Provider, delivering superior security, reliability and performance to organizations that rely on DNS for their critical business processes, applications and services. With the growth in e-commerce and the emergence of advanced DNS-based communication and supply chain management services, organizations can no longer rely on traditional approaches to DNS. UltraDNS provides a range of global and local DNS solutions - both managed services and custom infrastructure - built on its unique Directory Services Platform and proprietary, patented technologies. Through its thousands of enterprise, service provider and TLD infrastructure customers, UltraDNS powers the resolution of over 15 million domains around the globe. UltraDNS has offices in California, Virginia, Arizona, Chicago and the UK.

Empagio - Creating harmony in human resources

www.empagio.com We provide a solution covering all of your HR, payroll, and benefits administration needs.

Add employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS) through the SymphonyHR Employee Portal and you have a complete solution. All at your fingertips, all with the click of a mouse. All through a single-source service over the Internet and at a price that any company can afford.

SymphonyHR is dedicated to those HR Professionals who never intended to become bureaucrats. This service is designed for companies serious about effectively managing their people processes and offering more service to the organization without increasing costs. This Web-based masterpiece calms and coordinates all your HR beasts - administration, payroll, benefits, and even open enrollment.

Okere - Client Management Solutions

www.okere.com Salesforce.com consulting partner. Prediction: In 2005, vertical-industry-specific sales solutions will be used in 85 percent of active deployments in the automotive, pharmaceuticals, consumer products and financial services industries (0.8 probability) - Gartner - "CRM Predicts 2005: Sales Will Drive Revenue and Growth" December 2004

OKERE creates industry specific client management solutions for product vendors and individual companies. OKERE is focused on revolutionizing the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in financial services.

What is customer relationship management?

Customer Relationship Management was the term coined to define the business strategy companies employ to attract, gain, retain, and maximize the value of their customers. In the businesses that have generated success from CRM implementations there has been a focus on the customer experience, the employee experience and interaction between the business and the customer.

Industry Solutions

OKERE works with Fortune 500 companies to further help define and implement industry specific CRM go-to-market strategies through a mix of best of breed vendors and product development.

Services

Companies are challenged with developing and implementing growth strategies, identifying innovative ways to attract and retain their own customers, effectively transforming their business operations, and managing the impact that these changes will have on their organization. A clear strategy to address these issues provides the business perspective and insight to frame business decisions and projects. We offer advisory services to help analyze, improve and transform business operations and technology strategies. We leverage deep industry expertise and thought leadership to help our clients move quickly from vision to value and drive sustainable business advantage.

Sapien - On demand HRMS and HCM services

www.sapiensoftware.com Sapien is a market leader in HRMS and HCM software services, serving organizations with 1-100,000 employees. All Sapien services are 100% web native and offer integrated or modular functionality with cross platform reporting, query/search, workflow, setup/administration, and security/roles.

Based in Morristown, NJ in the same building as our Sapien.NET data center, Sapien’s mission statement is ‘to be the vendor of choice for organizations for HRMS and HCM. To be viewed as a strategic partner by all clients and earn the respect of each client partner.' With integrated HRMS, HCM, Payroll, Benefits, and other HR services, Sapien is emerging as a market leader in HR BPO. Sapien’s software development partner, and the author of the award winning HRM Connect platform on which Sapien's services are based, HRM Software Ltd. is located in London, England.

World's First SaaS Conference, Napa Valley, CA, March 2006

The world's first SaaS event, hosted by turnkey SaaS conversion and hosting provider, Opsource.Net, has released videos and presentations from the event.

Sant Corporation - Proposal and Sales Document Automation

www.santcorp.com The Sant Corporation, a world leader
in proposal and sales document automation software, today announces an on-
demand deployment option for Sant Suite. Sant Suite On-Demand provides
users the flexibility to create proposals, RFP responses, presentations, and
related sales documents directly via the Internet. It is designed for
companies of all sizes who choose not to utilize internal resources to host
and maintain Sant Suite.

"Companies are trending to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to
realize a lower total cost of ownership, faster deployment times, increased
user adoption, and decreased implementation complexity," said Sheryl
Kingstone, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. "Companies with IT resource
constraints should use a SaaS solution to speed time-to-market and minimize
ongoing maintenance requirements."

Sant's customers have the option to purchase an on-demand subscription or
perpetual license of Sant Suite. Both versions contain identical product
functionality; the only difference is the delivery model. Sant Suite On-
Demand is fully hosted by The Sant Corporation and provides the necessary
hardware, software, infrastructure, bandwidth, security, and other necessary
services. Sant Suite On-Demand is offered through a subscription-based
licensing model. Companies will pay as little as $59 per user per month to
use Sant Suite applications.

First Research Industry-Specific Content Included with ProposalMaster(R)

Sant has formed a strategic partnership with First Research, leading
provider of industry intelligence tools for sales professionals, to provide
industry-specific content for use in sales documents. Customers using
ProposalMaster can create persuasive, client-focused executive summaries by
including insight into their prospect's key business issues and outcomes.
Content is provided from 30 different industries and can be easily tailored by
the customer. Additionally, users can quickly generate "conversation
starters" containing industry-specific questions to ask throughout the sales
process. Research indicates that demonstrating an understanding of your
prospect's key business issues and industry significantly increases your win
rate.

Advanced Hosting Services Provided by The Planet

The Planet provides safe, secure, reliable, and highly-available hosting
services to Sant's on-demand customers. Sant has been using The Planet to
host Sant Suite for several customers since June 2005. Feedback from these
customers has been very positive. "We are very pleased with the accessibility
and performance of Sant Suite via The Planet," said Paige Harkins, CEO,
Enterject Inc. "We selected a hosted solution to allow our business units to
share information via one portal and increase deployment time. The software
is always available and upgrades are applied automatically."

Ideal Hire - Talent Acquisition

www.idealhire.com IdealHire Technologies, Inc. based in Phoenix, AZ, is dedicated to developing innovative technology solutions to improve recruitment efficiency. Patent protected web-based matching, ranking and rich media technologies enable recruiters, associations and employers to dramatically reduce the time and resources required for finding top talent. The result is better quality hires and more time for recruiters, HR professionals and hiring managers to focus on mission critical objectives, which translates to the bottom line in easily measurable ways.

IdealHire was founded by Bruce Culver, chairman and CEO, who has over 20 years of staffing industry and software experience. Mr. Culver recognized the need for resume management and accurate candidate identification as stacks of resumes piled high in recruiter’s in-boxes. The time spent by recruiters trying to understand resumes and varying jargon created bottlenecks that almost ensured the best candidate for a given job may not be found before a competitor filled a job order. Hiring managers had an equally difficult time deciphering massive amounts of resumes that often were completely incompatible with the advertised job. IdealHire Technologies was founded to develop unique process solutions to improve candidate identification and selection accuracy.

Intellectual Property

IdealHire is the owner of US patent number 5,592,375, issued in 1997, covering the matching & ranking of buyers to sellers based on specified criteria and rich media technology. The company utilizes this patent to match & rank job seekers to a company’s open job requisitions based on information contained in the candidates profile and the company’s job profiles. While IdealHire applies this patent to the Human Resources industry, there are several opportunities for the company to enter into licensing agreements for application of the patent to other non-competing industry segments.

Softrax - Complex Billing for SaaS and BPO

www.softrax.com/solutions/complex-billing/ Softrax Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise billing and revenue management solutions, today announced the immediate availability of a white paper entitled, "Billing Strategies for Innovative Business Models: How Boring Old Billing Could be the Competitive Advantage You Never Knew You Had." The paper examines the very complex billing requirements of a range of businesses -- including business process outsourcing (BPO), Software as a Service (SaaS), information providers, e-learning and research, e-commerce and Internet, high tech, telecom, utilities, and other business services.

"Companies that rely on business model innovation to drive growth have unique billing requirements," said Gottfried Sehringer, Softrax Vice President of Marketing. "Their billing systems must continually adapt to new ways of bundling, pricing, and charging. Companies that manage billing and related financial processes as an integrated strategic asset are able to go to market faster, increase market share, and outmaneuver their competition. This white paper discusses how to manage billing -- and the financial infrastructure -- as a strategic asset capable of continually delivering competitive advantage."

For companies with periodically recurring contracts, subscriptions and complex services, there are a number of mission-critical financial processes that must be optimized and integrated in order to produce a competitive billing system. These processes, which are examined in this paper, include:

* Contract Management
* Pricing
* Metering
* Billing
* Revenue Management

Checklists within each of these sections help readers rapidly access where to start, and how far they have to go in order to make billing a competitive asset. The paper is available for download free of charge from http://www.softrax.com/billing

Extract: The real key to implementing a sophisticated billing solution for SaaS is how tightly integrated it is with the current terms of your customer agreements. Contracts are the source for all the terms that govern how you bill your customers, track expenses and how you recognize the revenue you’ve earned. Softrax was specifically designed to seamlessly integrate robust billing functionality with Billing Strategies White Paper in-depth information about contracts and related records. This ensures your billing activity is always synchronized with the latest changes and amendments to a contract’s key elements. Softrax automatically generates billing schedules and manages transactions over the life of a customer relationship. Softrax also handles miscellaneous charges and contract changes that occur during a billing cycle with ease, and creates associated matching expenses, such as royalties, commissions, and unit costs to these items.

Solution highlights

Powerful and flexible functionality gives you total control over subscription, transaction and usage billing models

* Consolidate multiple charges into a single bill
* Manage simple and complex billing schedules
* Multiple, customizable formats for bill presentation
* Automatically split bills across multiple bill-to-addresses
* Distribute charges across multiple services
* Control discount activity on individual services

Manage Royalties, Commissions, and other additional expenses

* Create expenses based on percentages, fixed amounts, and unit rates
* Define the period over which an expense should be calculated
* Setup multiple expenses for each charge
* Automatically assign expenses to vendors, sales people, and products

Customize Billing to Your Customers’ Needs

* Easily manage prepayments:
o Ensure proper application of a prepayment against a contract
o Link prepayments to any associated services on the contract
o Create revenue schedules for prepayment
o Review, credit, and cancel prepayments

Revenue Accounting and Revenue Management

* Independently manage billing and revenue schedules
* Fully control revenue and expense general ledger account distribution at the time of contract creation
* Track unbilled and invoiced revenue and receivables activity
* Account for complex adjustments
* Automate journal entries for every billing and service activation event
* Simplify compliance with complex accounting standards

Sophisticated Pricing Models

* Easy rate table creation and ongoing modification
* Support for tiered volume discounts
* Easily implement variable pricing bands over the life of a contract
* Visibility into how time-dependent pricing affects future account profitability

Agile - SaaS PLM

sme.agile.com Today's small and medium enterprise (SME) is pressured as never before to preserve capital assets, maximize return on capital investment, and minimize costs. At the same time, these organizations face intense competitive pressures.

A powerful product lifecycle management (PLM) system can help level the playing field for an SME against larger competitors by speeding product innovation, cutting product costs, improving cycle times, increasing efficiencies, enhancing product quality, ensuring regulatory compliance, improving customer satisfaction, and driving overall profitability.

Agile Advantage, a world-class PLM solution from industry leader Agile Software, delivers the benefits of PLM quickly, with the flexibility, fast time to benefit, and low total cost of ownership that is crucial to small and medium enterprises. Our licensing options, including Agile On Demand and its rapid implementation, combine with services that are right-sized for SME needs to deliver the value SMEs seek.

Since its inception in 1995, Agile has been serving more than 1,200 customers successfully. We understand the business processes and challenges facing our customers and we've built our solutions to ensure that you can rapidly turn your products into profits.

Overview

Agile Software Corporation is an industry leader in product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions and provides Agile Advantage for small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. Agile Advantage is a comprehensive PLM suite that enables SMEs to drive profits, accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and ensure regulatory compliance throughout the product lifecycle. And, Agile Advantage was designed to offer the flexibility that SMEs require. Choose the product modules your organization needs, and be confident that at any time, as your needs change, fully integrated additional functionality is easy to add.

Agile Advantage delivers quick time to value. In fact, for those who choose the Agile On Demand model, the system can be implemented in one day, and customers begin to realize value on the second day—guaranteed! Additionally, Agile Advantage was designed to assure low total cost of ownership, with services, maintenance plans, and training options, all right-sized to meet the requirements of SME customers.

Agile customers include SMEs like Colubris Networks, Novoste, ONStor, Proxim, ReVera, Sonic Innovations, Visx. Agile’s enterprise solutions, developed to meet the requirements of large and global enterprise (LGE) customers, serve the needs of global enterprises such as Alcatel, Boeing, Dell, Flextronics International, Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, Logitech, Magna Steyr, Siemens, QUALCOMM and ZF. Our Agile solutions serve more than 1,200 customers in the automotive, aerospace and defense, consumer products, electronics, high tech, industrial products, and life sciences industries.

Agile Product Compliance Management is one of many new solutions added to Agile Advantage(TM) 2006, Agile's new and expanded, industry-leading PLM solution for SME customers. Agile Product Compliance Management enables SMEs to market their products and compete in global markets by tracking of material and substance information concurrently against multiple compliance directives and environmental regulations for each specific product. Today's SMEs face a growing amount of increasingly stringent environmental regulations around the world. Environmental mandates such as the European Union's Restrictions of the Use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) have proliferated worldwide as large corporations, the state of California, and even China implement similar standards. Product manufacturers who fail to comply must pay significant penalties or risk the loss of sales by exclusion from certain markets.

For SMEs, regulatory compliance management imposes a disproportionate burden. With smaller IT staffs and leaner budgets, SMEs cannot afford the additional burden of compliance management solutions. And while many SMEs contemplate manual solutions, such approaches are mistake-prone, slow the pace of innovation, and often fail to stand up to environmental audits.

"As an industry pioneer in the highly technical and rapidly advancing WiMAX market, tools such as Product Compliance Management enable us to design for compliance," explains Scott Woodworth, senior vice president of manufacturing and operations, SOMA Networks. "By incorporating environmental compliance at the design stage, we can ensure that our products meet the latest regulatory specifications, eliminating costly hardware re-spins, and accelerating our ability to respond rapidly to market demands for product innovation and enhancement. We work with a large supply chain, but compliance responsibility for all product content ultimately rests with us. Agile Product Compliance Management is an easy-to-manage solution that provides us with the necessary safeguards to ensure complete regulatory compliance."

As a fully integrated module of Agile Advantage 2006, Agile Product Compliance Management links all product content (design, manufacturing, and compliance) into a single system that provides visibility, enhances productivity, and facilitates audits. One of the most powerful advantages of Agile Product Compliance Management is its change-based logic. When an Agile Advantage user changes a Bill of Materials (BOM) or Approved Manufacturers List (AML), those changes are noted and checked against relevant regulations in the database. Such capability provides assurances that regulatory compliance management will not slow the pace of innovation, a vital competitive advantage for SMEs.

"With increasingly stringent environmental regulations and limited IT resources, small and medium enterprise customers face many great challenges managing regulatory compliance," said Craig Livingston, vice president of worldwide SME operations at Agile Software. "Recognizing these constraints and the serious business problems created by manual compliance methods -- lost efficiencies, the potential for human error, long investigations, the potential heavy fines, and even exclusion from lucrative markets -- Agile Product Compliance Management, with its ease of implementation and management, is designed specifically to help SME's meet today's regulatory management requirements."

amdocs - Integrated Customer Management relevant to SaaS and BPO

www.amdocs.com Integrated customer management is the way forward for our customers to compete and win in their markets. The Amdocs value proposition of enabling integrated customer management is now being taken to the next level with the delivery of Amdocs 6, the next generation of our product portfolio.

Amdocs 6 is the most comprehensive portfolio of integrated, modular products designed to accelerate the delivery of integrated customer management. Bringing together our industry-leading: billing, CRM, self service, ordering, service fulfillment, mediation and content revenue management products to deliver comprehensive coverage of the customer lifecycle: target, sell, deliver, bill, support. This approach removes process barriers to delivering the customer experience you intend and results in creating stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

Building stronger, more profitable customer relationships

In the past, services companies were focused on achieving top-line growth through customer acquisition. Although growth is still very much a business priority, the focus on how this is achieved has evolved. To grow the business and remain competitive, companies are focusing on building stronger, more profitable customer relationships. This means understanding customer needs intimately, and efficiently delivering and supporting solutions that create and capture the most value. Today, customers have more choices than ever. But what they want in their relationships with their service providers is simplicity, convenience and value. Amdocs has envisioned a strategy for our customers' success. We call this strategy integrated customer management.

Amdocs is the leading industry expert and trusted advisor that enables and accelerates the journey to integrated customer management and the delivery of an intentional customer experience. Through the unique combination of comprehensive services, a portfolio of integrated, modular products, and unrivaled delivery skills and expertise, Amdocs transforms services companies into customer centric businesses and dynamic service providers. The benefits are increased customer loyalty, higher revenue, lower costs, and greater resulting shareholder value.

Our broad portfolio of integrated products spans the entire customer lifecycle, seamlessly linking key customer-facing business processes - targeting customers, selling services, managing customer orders, service delivery fulfillment, billing, and customer support. Our portfolio of industry leading products includes: billing, CRM, self service, order management, mediation, and content revenue management.

Over the last three years alone, Amdocs has invested more than $390 million in the development of our product portfolio. Our portfolio is built with a common vision and development roadmap ensuring reduced risk and lower cost of ownership for our customers. Although our products are part of an integrated portfolio approach, they remain modular ensuring a stepped and incremental approach to executing a comprehensive integrated customer management strategy. Our products are built with standards-based technology and open architecture to ensure they fit seamlessly into any environment.

We support our customers with a wide range of services, including consulting services, implementation and integration services, learning services, software support services, managed services and outsourcing. Our services are designed to provide each customer with the necessary strategy, guidance and execution required to achieve integrated customer management and deliver the intentional customer experience.

At Amdocs, we are committed to incorporating quality into every aspect of our work-ranging from software development and internal business processes, to the way we work with customers-and we invest considerable resources in company-wide quality programs to ensure this. One of our key quality programs is the ongoing assessment of all our development centers to achieve the prominent Level-3 rating of the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM), developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

Over the last 22 years, Amdocs has built a global customer base of industry leaders by developing lasting relationships and delivering real business results. Backed by deep industry experience and an unsurpassed track record of success, Amdocs continues to help enterprises all over the world plan and execute their business strategies with confidence.

LightHouse1 - On Demand Benefits Administration Systems

www.lighthouse1.com At Lighthouse1, we believe in delivering endless possibilities for your success. Our vision, to provide the benefits administration industry with innovative technology solutions, has produced the premier hosted benefits administration solution, Lighthouse1 OnDemand. This powerful solution was developed to address challenges in the administration of Section 125, 105, 132 and other pre-tax spending programs in the employee benefits industry.

As an innovative, technology-driven organization, our team combines unsurpassed technical expertise, extensive benefits administration industry knowledge and unparalleled qualifications to make Ligthhouse1 the premier benefits administration software solution provider.

With innovative technology and vision, our solutions and services assist and support business administrators in the management of healthcare account services through their core business and infrastructure. Lighthouse1 OnDemand is a powerful, revolutionary software solution that is delivered over the Web making it accessible from a secure Internet browser. Customers can deploy Lighthouse1 OnDemand™ quickly, easily, and affordably.

SaaS is Big, The Future is Bigger

"One of the misconceptions about software-as-a-service (SaaS) is that it’s all about software. Granted, on-demand online applications are the foundation of SaaS, but not all software is delivered equally.

A new generation of SaaS vendors has emerged, and its mission is much more ambitious than simply delivering software over the Internet. Instead, next-generation SaaS vendors seek to leverage their large customer base to create virtual global enterprises, making the efficiencies of scale available to their entire customer base.

The goal is to create an application ecosphere, one that links business applications with business processes. These business-automation SaaS providers offer more than software: They give startup, small and other businesses a set of automated processes that fundamentally change how common business problems are tackled."

Here comes HaaS

Nick Carr writes "There's been a ton of discussion about the delivery of software applications as subscription services over the internet. The software-as-a-service, or SaaS, model is pretty easy for people to understand - most everyone these days uses a browser to tap into web services of one sort or another - and the spread of the idea has benefited greatly from the charisma of promoters like Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff.

Much less discussed has been the idea of buying IT hardware - or even an entire data center - as a pay-as-you-go subscription service that scales up or down to meet your needs. But as a result of rapid advances in hardware virtualization, IT automation, and usage metering and pricing, I think the concept of hardware-as-a-service - let's call it HaaS - may at last be ready for prime time."

Unyte - Web Dialogs

www.unyte.net Unyte: a Webdialogs service. Share documents, presentations, application and your desktop in real time with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

WebDialogs has been delivering reliable, high quality web conferencing and collaboration services and software to leading service providers and equipment makers since 1999. We have over 60 distribution partners including several top 10 providers - you may even have used our software and not known it was us.

Our services save people money by reducing travel, increasing productivity and by bringing remote resources together.

Unyte is a plug-in to Skype. A plus version provides recording, annotation and remote PC access. A premuim service, Meeting Central, provides web and voice conferencing that support 5 to 5000 plus people and includes event management, polling, audiocasting and more.

The Definitive Guide to On-Demand CRM

"My belief is that the vast majority of applications are going to be consumed in this on-demand model," said RightNow's Gianforte. "This on-premise model takes five times longer to get benefit and cost five times more to implement. It's outdated and it will go away. That's why this is so important. I was talking to a venture capitalist who said they won't even fund a company that develops on-premise software anymore. On-premise is over, done."

Progressive SMB Manufacturers offer SaaS

i-MARK, the leading provider of web-hosted eBusiness solutions for discrete product manufacturers, has witnessed a significant shift among the small-to-medium-size businesses (SMBs) in their utilization of the Internet. Looking beyond websites as just another vehicle to distribute their marketing message, SMB manufacturers now recognize their websites must satisfy the instantaneous search-to-acquire requirements of their primarily large OEM customers. "Large manufacturers have been our bread-and-butter since we first offered sales automation solutions in 1998. Now SMB manufacturers recognize they must add affordable self-service, search-to-acquire tools to their 'information-only' websites if they expect to compete effectively and grow globally", says Del Merenda, i-MARK's president. He added, "lamenting the low ROIs of traditional marketing, SMBs realize they must put their websites to work if they expect to recapture profitable growth."

Two leading SMB manufacturers, Nielsen / Sessions division of Actuant, and Morganite Molten Metals division of The Morgan Crucible Company plc, acquired i-MARK's 24/7 BUSINESS software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to better interact with customers and to identify valuable prospects. "Clearly, the Internet has become the information destination for buyers and specifying engineers and it's no surprise that SMBs are rushing to implement our 24/7 BUSINESS solutions", says Merenda.

Nielsen / Sessions chose 24/7 BUSINESS to transform their static website into a self-service business tool, addressing the real-time-response needs of OEM prospects and customers, and enabling buyers to transact on-line. Nielsen is long-reputed for being well out in front of customer demand for reliable information. They expect 24/7 BUSINESS to deliver mission-accomplished visitor' experiences and intuitive, self-service e-commerce.

Morganite Crucible chose 24/7 BUSINESS because they needed to consolidate products and supporting information from multiple websites into one easy to use web destination. Morganite was missing too many up-sell/cross-sell opportunities because inside sales did not know about all the products that Morganite offers worldwide. CSRs took too much time to lookup details, resulting in impatient buyers; unproductive call transfers to Morganite product managers; and ultimately, lost sales.

i-MARK offers self-service business solutions to manufacturers that increase the productivity of their engineering-oriented end-users.