Forbes Column 2009: Consolidation Looms For SaaS

Here’s Forbes Zero-In this week expressing concern over the looming consolidation in SaaS.

Oracle Acquires Sun. OpenSource, First. SaaS, Next.

The media chattered and twittered about the mega players HP, Cisco and IBM following the news of IBM’s desire to acquire Sun. No one talked about Oracle as one of the mega players in data centers. Larry Ellison’s ego apparently didn’t like that very much!

Deal Radar 2009: Extentech

We continue our focus on businesses that have monetized open source and discuss another core business tool which is being remade as a web-based application: the spreadsheet, by San Francisco-based Extentech, a leading developer of Java components and development tools. Founded in 1999 by John McMahon and Nicholas Rab, Extentech started as a consulting and

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Deal Radar 2009: Service-now.com

San Diego-based Service-now.com was founded in 2003 out of the ashes of Peregrine Systems, which was purchased by Hewlett-Packard (and is now that company’s competitor) in a fire sale. Fred Luddy, who was the CTO of Peregrine Systems, believed that legacy enterprise IT software is akin to “customer abuse” and set out to build a

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Deal Radar 2009: Central Desktop

Central Desktop is a web-based collaborative tool that allows users at small and mid-sized businesses to share information and communicate in real time with others in their workgroups. Users can also manage projects, coordinate tasks and share files on their own time by using this collaboration platform, whose features include web and audio conferencing, wikis

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Deal Radar 2009: CollegeNET

Harvard, Syracuse and the University of Toronto are just a few North American institutions reporting that a record number of students have applied for fall 2009 admission. But as the economy flounders and endowments drop, more students than ever are also applying for financial aid. One company aims to make it both easier to apply

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Deal Radar 2008: WiZiQ

I spoke at length this morning at my INSEAD Global Entrepreneurship Forum talk about entrepreneurial opportunities in the educational technology space. Today’s Deal Radar post focuses on WiZiQ, an online tutoring technology startup that offers a learning center and an online collaboration tool for teachers and students for a wide range of subjects and grades. The

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Deal Radar 2008: Operational Memory LLC,Raleigh, North Calorina

This week’s Deal Radar series begins with coverage of Operational Memory LLC, which launched its first solution, a social networking application for enterprises, in September 2008. Founded in 2005 by two “soccer dads” who got to know each other and their areas of expertise over several seasons of girls’ soccer, the SaaS company is based

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