OnDemand Speed Links Jul 16 2008

Workday Signing Large SaaS Clients
Evidence is starting to mount that SaaS is becoming more accepted within large Fortune 2000 companies. Workday; in particular, is a good case study as Dave Duffield’s company was architected from Day One as a SaaS provider ; like Salesforce.com and Netsuite, and is not attempting to switch gears like traditional application providers.

Why Firms Should Wait Before Entering The Cloud
Jim Connoly outlines a few valid reasons why firms should wait a bit before moving their mission critical data to the first phase of Cloud Providers. The recent bankruptcy of Saas provider Marqui lends additional credence to this warning.

Will SOX & Auditors become a threat to SaaS Vendors?
Vinnie Mirchandani recently posted an article that indicates that another threat to full adoption of SaaS and Cloud Computing in the Enterprise could very well be Sarbanes Oxley (SOX). Many OnDemand Beat Blog readers may not be aware of the implications of SOX but it will more than likely impact SaaS vendors sales cycles in the future and as such SaaS vendors should become more familiar with SOX.

Phil Wainewright On Why Multi-Tenancy Matters
Although Multi-tenancy could very well become an issue with many firms in terms of SOX compliance; Phil Wainewright discusses why Multi-Tenancy is the choice of most SaaS providers from an architecture and business model standpoint.

1. Bill Knowles , July 16, 2008:

   Once you take away the hype that a lot of the startup Cloud Providers rely on it will in the end boil down to most managers will not be willing to trust their data to a startup.
   It is too big of a risk not only from bankruptcy, but also from SAS compliance, confidentiality of data et al.
   In the end, the large players like Oracle, IBM, HP and Microsoft will end up dominating the Cloud Computing arena becase companies will not be willing to roll the dice with dicey startups.

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   Ameed Taylor reply on July 16th, 2008 :

   Bill,

   You are right. When I worked for an ASP during the dot com days, we were able to sign customers that our smaller startup competitors could not due to us being a joint venture between Qwest Communications and KPMG. If we had been a small startup ASP we would not have been anywhere as successful as we were signing Fortune 500 clients.

   Likewise today; especially in a recession, it will be very difficult for the generic startup cloud providers to gain entry into Fortune 2000 without other referenceable Fortune 200 clients.

   Mind you I think that SaaS vendors who focus on a particular vertical industry or have a niche offering will do fine as they are not asking companies to entrust ALL their mission critical data to a new Cloud Provider.

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