Just catching up on my blogs and I found this really interesting article on TechCrunchIT thanks to Michael at Salesforcetimes.

Basically this is a guest article written by the maverick himself; Marc Benioff. Long story short:
Web 1.0 was about getting businesses and people online to ‘transact’ or lookup information. Web 2.0 was about getting users involved in the process. Getting users to blog, upload/tag pictures, Digg pages and contribute to wikis. Although each wave operates in an overlapping and simultaneous manner, Web 3.0 is emerging on the horizon.

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There were 2 very interesting SaaS discussions organized during the Always On Summit at Stanford. One session was titled ‘Will the Next Salesforce.com Please Stand Up?’ and the other was titled ‘Will SaaS Disappear in the Cloud?’

Both discussions were focused on the future of SaaS and where the industry is heading. The discussions surrounded the questions of “Why is SaaS having trouble entering the enterprise space?” and in particular, “Why hasn’t there been another breakthrough company like Salesforce.com who has penetration in the enterprise?”

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For those with some time this Wed July 30th take a look at these free webinars.

1. eVapt’s Exceed Your Revenue Goals: 4 Actions for Unlocking Overlooked Sources of Revenue Inside Your SaaS Business

Phil Wainewright who has a popular SaaS blog on ZDNet will be moderating this webinar. Reuben Swartz, President of Mimiran and eVapt’s VP of Sales; Joe Tinnerello will presenting the following topics:

Learn how to generate significant marginal revenue by:

* Deploying existing, easy to access resources
* Model prospecting efforts on the most profitable existing relationships
* Better spend marketing dollars on the segments that drive revenue growth
* Development customer strategy that also integrates retention and price optimization
* Move your clients beyond product-focused cross-selling to predictable, long-term customer-centric growth strategies.

This session is indispensable to SaaS company executives who manage:

* Sales
* Marketing
* Customer Support
* Development / Engineering

Click here to register for eVapt’s Exceed Your Revenue Goals

2. Salesforce.com’s The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs

This seminar is intended for developers who want to build Salesforce.com apps that directly integrate with Google Apps. Presenting are Ron Hess (Salesforce.com), Jason Ouellette (Appirio) and Ryan Boyd (Google).

During the free live webinar, you will:

* Learn about the Google Data APIs
* Explore the Toolkit functionality
* See a demonstration of an application that uses the Toolkit
* Get all you need to start using Google Data APIs in your own applications

Click here to register for Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs

I love reading the interviews on Sramana Mitra’s blog. They’re long (sometimes 12 parts) but they’re in depth and take you through an amazing story with each CEO she interviews.

There are actually 2 interviews that I found really interesting. The first was with Lars Dalgaard from SuccessFactors and the second with Michael Gregoire from Taleo. Both interviews will give you a rich story beginning with their background and leading all the way up to their present day success.

I’ve learned something really interesting about Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire. He actually attended the University down the street from my school, where I did my undergrad. Actually Wilfred Laurier is almost like Waterloo’s sister school. And at age 30, he became the CTO of EDS Canada! Brilliant!

Check them out:

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire
Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors

As anticipated Microsoft announced a new Online Services strategy at their annual Worldwide Partner Conference. They announced new pricing and availability of Microsoft Online Services. Products such as Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting, and Dynamics CRM will be hosted by Microsoft and sold by partners. This presents a huge opportunity for partners to provide integration, migration, customization or consulting services for Microsoft Online Services.

And they are also dangling a big fat carrot. Partners will receive 12% of the first year contract price and 6% each year after (for as long as the customer is subscribed to the service). That means for each customer a partner brings in, they will receive an 18% commission of the subscription value in the first year and 6% each year onward. This announcement inevitably means some partners will be left behind. Particularly those who already hosting plain vanilla versions of those services. Now that Microsoft is providing the hosting, many of these companies may see their businesses disappear.

The news made only a small splash in the blogosphere however, I think this announcement is monumental and one that shouldn’t be overlooked to quickly.

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The geeky developer in me has made me spend some more after-work time on a hobby of mine…

About a week ago I made the post Whether you invest in SaaS stocks or not: don’t forget the fundamentals. The post describes how no matter what you invest in, you should look at the whole package. Don’t just invest in SaaS stocks because they are new and cool. The YTD Return of 18 SaaS stocks (called the On-Demand Index) had a return of -18% on or around June 29th. Another item that impressed me in the post: the really cool graph that was used to display this (done by the author of my reference).

I took this one step further. I wrote a web service and an AJAX script that takes those 18 stock indices and looks up their latest prices and other information from Google Finance. Then I re-created the table of the YTD returns.

I am happy to introduce the new page here on the WarriorPoint blog called the
On-Demand Index.

Now you can go to the On-Demand Index page to get the latest and most updated version of the stocks on the On-Demand Index and their respective Returns since January, and Returns over the last full year. Maybe in the future I will add some code to track past index prices and I can display it in a graph. It would be nice to see how the Returns of this index change with time.

I still have some kinks to fix:
The table currently only works in IE due to some AJAX I am using, and also the it sort-of breaks the styling of the right-hand menu. Sorry!

In case you are curious, this is how the table looked around June 29th.

Enjoy!

Microsoft has long mastered partner sales channel and in fact that is the primary reason why they were slow to enter the SaaS market. How can they enter the market without pissing off many partners who are already making money off SaaSified Microsoft products? This is mostly concerning for Microsoft ASPs (Application Service Providers); those partners who provide hosting for products like Dynamics, Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server. What happens if Microsoft suddenly offers Exchange Online? (like what happened with Dynamics CRM and Office Live) This is the billion dollar question. How can Microsoft delicately get into the SaaS game without stepping on any of their friends’ toes?

To address some of these concerns Intermedia has been chosen to present at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. Their hopes is to address the growing concern of how Microsoft’s new business will cause many partners to realign their products, if they still want to be in business.

Click here for more information.