MSPmentor

Automated loyalty programs have become a standard offering for large customer-facing businesses. For example, online retailer Amazon offers a variety of programs such as Amazon Prime, which offers expedited free shipping and other perks for paying members, and most major supermarket and drugstore chains have some kind of card-based program where shoppers receive targeted discounts and earn credits toward future purchases.

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Averiware and GreenAppX are partnering to promote a range of SaaS and cloud applications to service providers. The move could allow VARs and MSPs to more effectively promote SaaS-based business applications to end-customers. Here’s the background.

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It’s been roughly a year since Israel-based Totango began developing an analytics platform to help SaaS providers understand how clients use their solutions. On July 28, Totango moved its platform into public beta. What’s next? Totango CEO and Co-Founder Guy Nirpaz gave me some insights.

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In an interesting twist, Kaseya is extending Salesforce.com‘s CRM to Cloud9 for a global sales forecasting  and pipeline management solution. Ironically, Kaseya was originally on the hunt for an enterprise business intelligence platform when it discovered Cloud9.

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California-based Zuora, which provides SaaS solutions for subscription management and billing, is partnering with Salesforce.com to deliver a new product designed for the communications industry.  According to a blog post from Shawn Price, president of Zuora, the new offering—called Zuora for Communications—will provide “billing and customer care in a unified solution for managing the entire subscription commerce lifecycle …entirely in the cloud.” Is this a potential recurring revenue billing solution for MSPs?

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As Hewlett-Packard attempts to block former CEO Mark Hurd from joining Oracle, here’s a somewhat related question for your small business: Would your business be crippled if your best sales leader or business leader joined a rival MSP? If so, what are you doing to protect your business from that doomsday scenario?

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Virtela, which bills itself as the world’s largest independent managed network services company, has launched the Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC), a carrier-independent open cloud architecture to deliver anything as a service from anywhere across any network. Moreover, they’re launching the “Virtela Cloud-Based Application Acceleration Service,” which does exactly what it says on the tin for $5 a day. All of those claims sound pretty lofty. Here’s a closer look at the Virtela effort.

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DocuSign, one of the most visible companies in the online document signing market, has brought their solution to SalesForce.com Real-Time Quotes, enabling users to close deals in the cloud quickly and with no messy paper. Interested?

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The Planet is the largest privately-held dedicated web server company in North America. But bigger doesn’t always mean better. That’s why The Planet is positioning itself around “value.” I spoke to Doug Erwin, CEO of The Planet, about how they’re getting there and what MSPs stand to gain. Here are some perspectives.

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When we pontificated on the ups and downs of Drupal a few weeks ago, we kept hearing one thing over and over again: What about Joomla and JoomConnect? Well, here’s the deal: Joomla! (The exclamation point is part of their name), a free and open modular content management system, is compelling on its own. But JoomConnect — a service that integrates Joomla! with ConnectWise — is starting to generate buzz of its own.

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MSPmentor’s SaaS 20 Stock Index declined 1.47% for the week ended September 12, dragged down by bad financial news at Kenexa Corp., which specializes in HR-related on-demand applications. It was the fourth consecutive week that our index, which tracks software as a service (SaaS) stocks, declined. Here’s what’s going wrong — and right — with SaaS stocks.

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Disappointing quarterly results at Dell Inc. dragged down MSPmentor’s SaaS 20 Stock Index for the week ended August 29. The index, which tracks the software as a service industry, fell 2.13% during the week.

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Salesforce.com (CRM) delivered good news — and bad news — in its latest quarterly results, pulling down the SaaS 20 Stock Index 2.86 percent for the week ended August 22. It’s the first time since July 11 that our software as a service index has posted a weekly decline.

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John Roberts is sitting in the middle of the perfect storm. As CEO of SugarCRM, he leads one of the fastest-growing open source application providers. And roughly 30 percent of SugarCRM’s customer wins now involve software as a service (SaaS) or an on-demand approach — meaning the company competes with traditional CRM (Siebel) and hosted models like Salesforce.com.

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RightNow, a CRM (customer relationship management) developer, gave skeptics reasons to believe companies can successfully leap from traditional software to newer software as a service (SaaS) business models.

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RightNow, a CRM provider that has been shifting to a software as a service (SaaS) business model, is scheduled to release financial results after US markets close today.

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Managed services aren’t just for small business. In fact, the managed service providers see ample opportunity in mid-size businesses. But targeting the mid-market often means competing with well-funded, profitable consulting firms that specialize in host ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.

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On their own, voice-over-IP and managed services are hot markets. Toss the two together, and maybe you can fan the flames of opportunity. For instance, check out how Cistera Networks is hosting VoIP managed services for schools.

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