Newsletter

April, 2013
Greetings!

 

Welcome to the April Cirrostratus Group Newsletter.

 

The results of the 2013 Future of Open Source Survey results are in and I believe that the news is almost all good for SaaS providers. See my post on the new and changing opportunities for SaaS businesses to use Open Source Software (OSS).

 

Recent earnings announcements from IBM, Oracle and others have blamed their sales organizations for the poor performance. Is that really what is going on? Read more below.

 

Participating in surveys is a great way to gain information about various aspects of the cloud business and I would recommend filling out the Softletter surveys on Freemium and Trial Access and Software Sales compensation.

 

Please contact me if I can be of assistance to you or your organization. I would be very interested in hearing about your plans for the Cloud.


Paul Ressler
The Cirrostratus Group

 

 
Open Source Software for SaaS Businesses
 
    Open Source Software Logos       
 

The new Future of Open Source Survey results for 2013 are available. This annual survey gives an excellent picture of the business trends in Open Source Software (OSS). This is a survey of users and providers of OSS and although focused on enterprise use of OSS it provides some insights for SaaS providers.

 

After reviewing the results of the survey there are three areas areas that I believe provide new and improved opportunities for your SaaS business and I've outlined them in the this post. If the use of OSS for SaaS is something that you'd like to learn more about read my past articles on the topic. "5 Tips for Using Open Source Software for your SaaS Business" goes through in some detail the key areas to be aware of when using OSS and this post focuses on how to select OSS for SaaS.

Blame the Sales Organization?
                
Recent earnings announcements by IBM, Oracle and others place the blame for their recent difficult quarters on their sales organizations. But is this really an accurate picture of what is going on? Many people believe that the pressure of cloud infrastructure and SaaS are having a direct impact on their results. Only time will tell whether this quarter was just a difficult quarter or whether this is truly a turning point where the cloud makes a financial impact on the future of legacy software vendors.
 
Here is an analysis from Information Age and a more in depth analysis from RWW on what they both believe is the impact of the cloud now being reflected in legacy software earnings reports.
SaaS and Cloud Conferences  
Cloud Analytics Summit Logo  SaaS University Logo     
A couple of conferences that are coming up that will be worthwhile:

This site is also a great resource for upcoming Cloud conferences.

 

 

Contact Paul Ressler at the The Cirrostratus Group
In This Issue
Open Source Software
Blame Sales?
Cloud Conferences
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