The Almost-Meteoric Rise of SaaS on Wall Street

Wall Street and Technology published a couple of days ago, an article about the use of SaaS for Wall Street firms, written by Penny Crosman.

The article comments the success of some companies, mainly Salesforce and Sungard, in the SaaS market, and also their challenges and obstacles.

The article also mentions that Financial services is the second-largest industry user of SaaS, after the technology sector, according to Gartner. But most of the current financial services SaaS deployments are CRM applications. "Wall Street and financial services firms are more and more looking at [SaaS] from the CRM side of the fence," says Rob DeSisto, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The biggest obstacle to SaaS in large firms is integration with back-end data storage and legacy systems. According the article, Gartner's DeSisto agrees that integration is the primary hang-up for SaaS on Wall Street. Although SaaS offerings can integrate with other programs, he notes, they operate more efficiently when the data is in the SaaS provider's data center.

Despite the obstacles and challenges, the SaaS has been adopted in all kinds of business and is here to stay.

Infoworld presents the Best of Open Source Software Awards 2008

Infoworld presented today the InfoWorld's Annual BOSSIES - 2008 Best of Open Source Software Awards, that "recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done. The 2008 BOSSIE winners include 60 products in eight categories covering business and productivity applications, development tools, middleware, networking, security, and storage."

I highlighted the category Best of open source enterprise applications, with mainly these winners:
- Business intelligence (BI) - Pentaho Open BI Suite
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - Compiere
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - SugarCRM
- Business Process Management (BPM) - Intalio BPMS

You can see the full report to further details.

This is a good award to recognize the effort of open source community in develop good tools.

The use of real-time analytics to provide personalized information

I read in Destination CRM last month, an article about how to use real-time analytics tools by contact center agents.

I think use real-time analytics tools to provide a good experience with customers is a good approach. The companies are using increasingly analytics to define segmentation and provide personalized information to customers, delivering what the customers want, and supplying products or information with high aggregated value.