James Colgan

There’s an excellent discussion going on over on the Cloud Computing Google Group about the pace of migration of traditional software to a SaaS model. Here I recently went into some of the very real reasons why the migration is slower than some would like, but didn’t really talk about the pace of adoption.  There are some numbers that make for some interesting analysis. According to PwC, in 2009, the top 100 software vendors (traditional non-SaaS) generated 3.7% of their revenues from SaaS in the US; and 1.1% of their revenues from SaaS in Europe.  In the same report, the US has a 44% market share and Europe has 36% market share by revenue (License, Maintenance and Support). According to Gartner, in 2010, the WW installed enterprise software market grossed about $104 Billion.  So, roughly, we could say that installed software vendors (US & EU only) brought in nearly ... (more)

Cognitive Dissonance in the Cloud

There is an interesting article over on Cloud Times that begs the question of, “why isn’t there more usage of SaaS as a percentage of overall software use/revenue?”. The cognitive dissonance in the market between “SaaS is going to be everywhere” and “SaaS will hit $16B in 2015″ has baffled me. In addition to the reasons stated by Jason Currill (CEO of Ospero) in the article, of why SaaS won’t deliver 100% market share any time soon, there are: Multi-tenancy of data is a problem with many industries; Performance of compiled vs interpretive languages for applications such as simul... (more)

Installed Software Leverages Cloud Computing, Not Replaced by It

Explore why not just revenue streams and business models are slowing the demise of installed software.  And see how independent software vendors and their customers are leveraging the cloud.... Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has arguably been around since the launch of SalesForce.com in 1999. We could even say that it’s inception pre-dates even this milestone, but under a different name - Application Service Provider (ASP). Remember those? The revenue growth rate of the SaaS market is a healthy 22%, and has grown to around $12 billion annually. At the same time, installed software i... (more)

10 Steps to Generate Leads for Software Sales Online

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Leo Reynolds. Lead generation is one of the primary roles of your marketing organization and the greatest demand of your sales force. As markets become more globalized your marketing team needs to make greater use of the web in generating leads for your sales team to follow up on and close. Here’s a list of 10 key steps to take in generating those leads. 1. Identify Your Prospects List the key characteristics of your target customers in order to find where they are on the web, what they are interested in, and what is likely to make them take time out of t... (more)

Step by Step Way to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

There’s a useful check-list blog post by Pamela Vaughan on hubspot that lists up “6 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation“: Participate in LinkedIn Answers Add LinkedIn Applications Join LinkedIn Groups Conduct a LinkedIn People Search Experiment with LinkedIn Direct Ads Try LinkedIn Mobile Expanding upon step #3, here is a step-by-step process for quickly engaging with the LinkedIn community and finding out what works and what doesn’t. 1. Create a Target Customer Profile You should be doing this as your basic go-to-market operation.  Who are your customers and what do they ... (more)