2006 SaaS Stories Summary

Another good post from Phil over at ZDNet. This post summarizes “SaaS stories you may have missed in 2006“, couple of good stories I hadn’t seen before, interesting.

Open-Source vs. SAAS

An interesting post by Mark Suster at Koral doing a little bit of a compare/contrast of Open-Source vs. SAAS. I found it interesting since some companies are SAAS (BlueTie, Zoho) and others are Open-Source (Zimbra, Scalix). 

I wonder if it doesn’t come down to the level of technical sophistication that will make one or the other more attactive to an enterprise. For example, would a small business owner of say an office of 5 to 10 people ever think about getting something they have to install or configure on a server like Zimbra for example? Surely they would go with something more ‘turn-key’ like BlueTie for email and calendar and ThinkFree or Zoho for documents.

So maybe it comes down to enterprise size, open-source for larger enterprises that have their own IT staff and SAAS for smaller enterprises or those larger enterprises that are trying to save IT staff costs.

It would be good to include a classificiation of target company size in that product chart I mentioned before.

Web-Based Apps vs. Microsoft

There was a very good article summarizing the Web-Based Apps vs. Microsoft discussion by Cynthia Harvey over at Datamation entitled: Free Web-Based Office Productivity Apps. The sub heads within the article pretty much sum up the discussion to date:

Let’s Share

Wherever You Go, There It Is

Whose Server Do You Trust?

Free!

Show Me The Features

Just A Bit Quirky

Will The Empire Strike Back?

Again, a very good summary. I think it will be great to do a summary of progress in each of these areas say in 6 months and then again in a year to see what changes have occured and progress made.

It’s not an ‘Operating System’…

I’m was glad to see simplerich’s post on Terminology Confusion. I couldn’t agree more with this ‘WebOS’ designation, it’s not an ‘operating system’. Any ideas on what should we call them?

WorldTechLogic Wrike Review

Also reviewed at WorldTechLogic was Wrike. I looked at this last week. Brett would you consider looking and comparing with Central Desktop? I’d be interested in knowing what you think. Also, any chance you guys will take up the challenge for a comprehensive chart of products?

In general, I’m beginning to struggle with the fact that there are so many applications out there now and so many of them focused on such a specific solution, if you want to do email you choose one product, write documents another, manage tasks another and on and on. I believe the latter part of 2007 is going to see a growing voice from users for consolidation/integration amongst these applications. Do you think that industry participants will respond primarily by integration (separate companies integrating their products together) or consolidation (consolidating companies and merging products)?

WorldTechLogic ThinkFree Review

There is a new review of ThinkFree over at WorldTechLogic. I’ve been seeing more and more news about ThinkFree lately. It’s often associated with how much ThinkFree mimics MS Office. This is an important point because Office will continue to be the bar by which online office suites are measured. It’s fine to add other tools and features but if you don’t do the basics (the basics being what I’m used to seeing with MS Office today) then the other features you have won’t matter. 

Slowing Down for the Holiday

Well we’ve reached the bottom of the PR trough with the holiday coming next week. The blogs are slowing down, the only press releases that come out will be the ones they don’t want you to read. Alternatively, who will want to make the first splash of the new year? Who will have the first press release of the year? Zimbra, Zoho, Foldera? I’ll provide what link bait I can for whomever’s first. Just don’t tell Google, otherwise I might have to add a ‘NoFollow’ tag….

 Here are a few other things I’d like to see in 07:

A comprehensive chart of who offers what in terms of applications for business; email, ’word’ documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint, project planning, etc. Any volunteers? You should be able to get a lot of links for something thorough. 

Will storage size stop being used as a product differentiator in 2007? Can someone please do a survey for us and let us know if customers really see this as a key factor?

How many new products will Zoho launch in 07? Raju or Arvind, is there a Zoho Mail coming?

Do those ratios in Nichebot really work? (Keyword campaign in progress.)

Foldera Launch….. Still skeptical Oliver & Dave…. you can send my beta login to catchyaintit [at] yahoo.com  

Who will have a mash up for Goowy first?

Which conference, related to our topics here, is THE one to go to for 2007?

Will the expanded features of products like Zimbra, HyperOffice and others begin to make a serious dent into the Hosted Exchange market? 

What do you think will be interesting with everyone in 2007, basecamp, bluetie, everyone.net, foldera, fusemail, hyperoffice, intermedia.net, load.com, mailsnare, mailstreet, MI8, myoffice.net, norada, runbox, scalix, sherweb, simplicato, solodox, swishmail, thinkfree, usa.net, webmail.us, zimbra, zoho…

What else needs to be covered?

Our visitor stats are growing pretty strong so please help tell your story, provide some thought leadership and expand the dialogue to keep people coming back. We can all benefit from more content, more links and more exposure.

Radicati Reports

The Radicati Group seems to have some interesting reports for email and hosted exchange companies. I’d be curious to hear from any of you that have gotten any of thier reports and if you find the information accurate/valuable? This recent report includes an evaluation with ASP-One, Everyone.net, Intermedia.net, Mailstreet, Mi8, USA.NET, Webmail.us and others. It’s certainly an incomplete report as I would have expected it to include BlueTie, Load and Zimbra and possible a couple of others.

Web 2.0 Product Partnerships

I think this is a very interesting partnership. I wonder if it is a precursor to an eventual merger since the products seem to be such compliments. Or will there be other similar integrations such that you have SugarCRM and your choice of mail products like Zimbra, BlueTie, Fusemail?

Need a couple email addresses to spam?

I mentioned yesterday that just a few days ago Zoho shut down its’ demo account because users were inadvertantly saving public documents with very private information in them. Well today in thier blog they mentioned their service Site24×7, which conveniently provides a Demo login and allows you to add email addresses under the Alerts tab. Uh huh…

Raju, likely you should include a warning to users about putting in thier actual email address while using the demo or modify the email address they put in with a ‘-nospam’ attached to the name portion or something before inserting it into the list.