There have been several significant announcements of new services, technologies and channels in the cloud. I've highlighted a couple of the ones that I think are potentially of strategic importance.

Currently, cloud service offerings (infrastructure as a service) from different vendors are not compatible with each other, particularly if you are using APIs to control them. Open Source cloud platforms are potentially a way to solve that problem so it is interesting to see that HP has announced a cloud offering based on Openstack, Rackspace will soon be converting to Openstack and Citrix announced that Cloudstack will be an open source project. It will be interesting to see what market traction each of these offerings get.

Amazon recently announced their software marketplace for customers to use a variety of different software on Amazon's cloud platform. This potentially provides new channels for some SaaS providers and more competition for some ISVs and SaaS providers depending on exactly how it works and how it is adopted.

Whether you're thinking about converting to SaaS, adding more revenue and services to your SaaS business or focusing on faster releases, the following can help as you grow and improve your business.

My blog post on Strategies for Converting to SaaS outlines at a high level the strategies that ISVs can consider for converting their business model to SaaS. If this issue is on your radar screen this is a great resource to help you to start thinking about the possible approaches to conversion.

Data as part of your SaaS Revenue is another recent blog post and describes how you can think about using the data you collect from your customers to provide them with additional value added services.

I recently published an article in Sandhill.com on the topic of Creating and Managing High Quality SaaS Product Releases. This article is on the topic of DEVOPS for service providers, as a follow on to my recent presentation on the same topic. A downloadable copy is available here.

Hadoop

I have attended a couple of panel discussions recently on the topic of "Big Data". This term is starting to suffer from some of the same overuse that "cloud" is. However, the important issue is that new tools plus the use of elastic computing in the cloud are allowing us to solve problems that previously couldn't be solved and to analyze data that we didn't have sufficient processing power to analyze.

A colleague recently shared with me an excellent article on the topic, Big Data: Hadoop, Business Analytics and Beyond, which goes beyond the usual 1 or 2 page explanation. I found it to be a very informative article one that I think you may want to refer back to so I put a link to it on my website.