For any modern entrepreneur I`d suggest the sweet spot of cloud applications you should master is the holy trinity of these three killer apps – Linkedin, Salesforce.com and Google+ Apps.

In short these cater for the end-to-end requirements of a sales operation, so you can begin selling and closing deals.

Establishing successful sales teams is naturally a milestone you want to put in place as quickly as possible, and so having the tools as equally as quick as possible is one of the primary benefits of on demand IT.

Getting these three running gets you out knocking on doors, capturing prospect contact details and submitting initial proposals and even hooplah customer contracts.

As things evolve you can add everything else: E-contracting for speeding up return of those contracts, better e-marketing automation and social media publishing. These are also staples but the first three gets your beachhead established.

Google+ Apps …

Combine the supercharged Cloud Computing marketplace with the ubergeek cred of the open source movement, and you’re bound to have some Mentos-in-Diet-Coke moments. Such is the case with today’s Cloud Service Orchestration (CSO) platforms. At this moment in time, the leading CSO platform is OpenStack. Dozens of vendors and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have piled on this effort, from Rackspace to HP to Dell, and most recently, IBM has announced that they’re going all in as well. Fizzy to be sure, but all Coke, no Mentos.

Then there are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti …

Selling software to accountants, auditors and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) takes accuracy, precision and software quality to an entirely new dimension.

Having worked at a start-up selling hosted accounting and finance applications to small and medium businesses, I’ve seen first-hand how demanding these professionals can be.  And rightly so, the system of record they manage keeps their businesses financially strong and growing.  Intacct is one of the companies I’ve tracked for the last few years in this area, and I recently had a chance to speak with their CEO, Robert Reid.

While there are many cloud financial management and accounting companies creating interesting products and winning customers, Intacct is unique.   Rob has infused a passion for customer centricity into the company along with a mindset of continual innovation in their applications’ user experience. 

Rob is a longtime veteran of the enterprise software industry, having served previously as CEO …

Using analytics to better understand the cloud computing job market is fascinating.

One of the most advanced companies in this area is Wanted Analytics, who aggregates job postings from over 500 job boards and maintains a database of over 600 million unique job listings. 

They specialise in business intelligence for the talent marketplace, providing insights into how one company’s salary range compares to competitors for the same position, also calculating the difficulty to hire a given type of candidate. They’ve 
developed a unique Hiring Scale to accomplish this.

I recently had a chance to test-drive their analytics applications.  Using the parameters to analyse all cloud computing jobs that pay $100,000 a year or more for the analysis, I ran several queries.  Key takeaways include the following:

•  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA leads the MSAs with a salary range $118K to $144K and one of the highest Hiring Score …

Software as a service (SaaS) has traditionally been the strongest and most valuable cloud computing market.

Figures from Gartner in November show this: SaaS was valued at $14.4bn (£9.57bn) by the end of 2012; infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was a $6.2bn (£4.12bn) global market; whilst platform as a service (PaaS) was forecast to hit $1.2bn (£754m).

With this in mind, Staff.com has published an infographic looking at the current SaaS ecosystem. The employment site has its own productivity tool, Time Doctor, which is built on SaaS.

According to Staff Salesforce.com, the “founder of the industry”, is still ranked as the number one SaaS company, with almost double the numbers of SAP ($2.27 bn, $1.14bn) and Oracle ($1bn) in positions two and three.

The graphic also looks at large acquisitions of SaaS companies, with billions of dollars at stake. Check it …

For everything cloud computing offers – speed, convenience, simplicity, offsite backups – its “public” nature remains a touchy subject for enterprise.

This simple fact explains why many organisations have been slow to embrace the cloud. In business, data security is everything. And for decision makers at big firms, trusting all mission-critical data into the care of a third-party IT vendor sounds just a bit too risky.

But with the arrival of the private cloud, organizations can enjoy the conveniences of cloud computing without a lot of the tradeoffs. Here’s why they might want to give it a shot:

1. Data security and compliance

“A virtual infrastructure that offers on-the-go, anytime data access may sound great, but how can we be sure our data is safe?”

This was – and still is – the big question for enterprise when confronted with cloud computing. The public cloud, they reason, is simply more vulnerable to misuse …

Recently I’ve been lucky to meet with the CTOs of two important Canadian public sector organizations, Canada Health Infoway and the Province of Ontario.

Indeed Dennis Giokas kindly presented on Cloud Computing in Healthcare at our recent seminar in Toronto.

This presentation was about the recent CHI Cloud white paper, which is quite visionary in its description of how Cloud will evolve and grow in E-Health.

In particular, and this was the common theme for Ontario as well, was the forecast of increasing use of SaaS (Software as a Service) as a delivery model.

This is a simple and logical part of the Cloud trend of course, but exciting to see it described in both strategy and real-world terms – The Province for example has recently a numbed of SaaS-specific tender RFPs.

E-Health Big Data PaaS

It’s exciting because both Dave and Dennis also describe it in terms of …

Moving applications to the cloud can create a more flexible, more responsive IT department, but what about moving application data to the cloud? How secure is that? And are cloud applications truly reliable and less expensive than on-premise applications?

Let’s consider some issues before you take the cloud-migration leap.

1. Goals
 
Are you moving to the cloud to reduce costs, time-to-deployment, or your IT department’s workload? Goals are the foundation of success, so you should list them, prioritie them, and quantify them. Before long, you’ll be able to determine whether some level of cloud migration is right for you.

2. Security
 
Will the cloud application provider secure and encrypt your data, both in motion and at rest; safeguard against breaches; execute threat analyses and penetration tests; and be candid about their findings? Remember: you, not the provider, will have to answer to the client in the event …

Peter Ryan, Lead Analyst, IT Services

Regardless of the sector in question, home-based working has always aroused emotions among executives. The recent comments made by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg against home working have further inflamed this debate, but Ovum feels that contact center services players would be wise to heed the remarks of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, which were well thought out and very much in favour of working from home.

To date, this business model has been classified as “niche” in the CRM space, but all evidence suggests that it remains on an upward trajectory, and those players that have not availed themselves of credible home-agent offerings may miss the proverbial boat.

Branson’s assessment reflects the home-agent experience to date

We are very much in agreement with Branson’s recent blog comments, in which he stated that allowing workers the flexibility …

For enterprises, customer relationship management (CRM) is moving ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the main priority for application software investment.

That was just one of the takeaways from Gartner’s latest report, “User Survey Analysis: Cloud and CRM Nexus Will Drive Enterprise Software Spending in 2013 and 2014”, published last month.

Other key factors emerging from the report include the clear differences between emerging and emergent markets in terms of cloud models.

Mature regions are more likely to go public, accepting the security risks and reliability rewards of the public cloud. Emerging markets, by contrast, are more likely to use a private cloud.

“This could be due in part to an immature telecommunications infrastructure in some emerging countries, while data security is a persistent concern related to public cloud services among our clients in developing-region countries,” said Hai Hong Swineheart, Gartner research analyst in a statement.

Consequently, Gartner …