By Dick Weisinger, on December 19th, 2008
Nine out of every ten companies say that they plan to grow their use of SaaS in the upcoming year. And 37% of companies have plans to replace their in-house hosted applications with SaaS. Cost and ease of deployment are the two main benefits behind what’s driving the switch to on-demand. Those are the findings of a new Gartner report about SaaS.
Sharon Mertz of Gartner commented that “Use of SaaS has been evolving during the past decade and the SaaS model has become increasingly popular over the past three or four years.”
But while adoption of SaaS is up, governance of SaaS applications within the enterprise is not high on people’s lists. 38% of enterprises have factored SaaS into their governance policies, but the need to do that has not registered with most other companies. 26 percent have no plans to address governance at all.
By Dick Weisinger, on December 18th, 2008
Total Cost of Ownership or TCO — at the end of the day, how much does something really cost. Microsoft argues that Linux may be free or low-cost, but after you factor in all costs related to maintenance, training, and support that Windows is a more cost effective option. Now Alfresco is presenting some numbers about TCO that flip the tables on Microsoft, this time around concerning ECM.
In an Alfresco WhitePaper, they make a comparison of the costs for the first year of an ECM installation of Alfresco versus Microsoft SharePoint and other top-tier ECM product vendors. The report finds that Alfresco is 96 percent cheaper to own that most ECM vendors and is 89 percent cheaper than SharePoint.
“In the current economic climate CIO’s and IT executives are looking to lower cost, with a minimal upfront investment that can be driven out of operating expense as opposed to capital expense, as well a simplicity for rapid deployment and immediate business value,” said Dr. Ian Howells, CMO at Alfresco Software. “Open source is at the core of lowering cost, and TCO by reusing existing hardware, software and skills with no lock-in.”
By Dick Weisinger, on December 17th, 2008
Alfresco has released the results of their periodic “Open Source Barometer” survey.
It’s important to note up front that the survey results are from 25,163 members of the Alfresco on-line community who have become Alfresco members from April 1st to September 30th — so this is a highly biased population to be surveying. These are people who are already convinced of the benefits of Open Source and very likely organizations that use or have no problem using a Java-based platform.
But nonetheless, since the survey pool represents 5000 global organizations, the results are interesting. When questioned about Microsoft SharePoint and related products and technology, Microsoft did not fare well. The results of the survey were:
· Open source users as a whole and respondents using Windows are rejecting Silverlight and .NET/Web parts
· 92% do not use or intend to use Silverlight
· 86% do not use or intend to use .NET/Web Parts
· 71% use or intend to use an open stack based on a Java architecture
· 58% use or intend to use AJAX with 21% choosing Flex
· 53% of respondents using Windows use or intend to use a stack based on a Java architecture
· 52% of respondents using Windows use or intend to use AJAX
