Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Let’s talk about moving to Google Apps or Google e-mail at some point. Right now you work on an Exchange platform. You have developed all your applications on top of the Microsoft environment. Now if you move to Google, all of that investment kind of becomes

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Based on my research, I see a distinct trend [toward] interesting private cloud deployment. LO: Very interesting! What would you say is the driver; I am curious to know. SM: I think it’s cost that is the driver, which is why I was probing that, to

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO Of RightNow (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: How do you handle pricing for a situation such as the private cloud deployment for the Department of Defense (DoD)? Your primary product is on a per user per month subscription model, right?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What is your take on security in the cloud? As part of delivering this enormous infrastructure to your clients, you obviously have to worry about data security. What is the data security strategy that you deploy for your cloud-based infrastructure?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: I see. So you use your own offering for CRM within RightNow? LO: Yes. We use our own system out of the cloud and have our own dedicated team that manages it separately from how we do that for our clients. For our expense management, we

Read Full Article »

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What is the scope of your internal IT organization? What you mentioned just now is the IT infrastructure piece for delivering your cloud-based offering or product as a cloud vendor. What about the internal requirements of RightNow as a company?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO Of RightNow (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini The Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model of cloud computing has seen steady and overwhelming growth that has cut across industries, verticals, and big and small enterprises. Worldwide SaaS revenue in the enterprise application software market was pegged at $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1% from

Read Full Article »

Intuit and ADP Make SaaS Acquisitions, But High Unemployment Hurts

This month, both Intuit and ADP made some SaaS acquisitions. Intuit has followed an aggressive acquisition strategy this year. It began its SaaS rollup with PayCycle for $170 million in June, and early this month it bought Mint.com for $170 million. ADP made its first acquisition this year with HRinterax, which has an award-winning Web-based

Read Full Article »