AmberPoint announced that it has extended the reach of its runtime SOA governance software to include enterprise applications from software vendors and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. SOA-based systems are heterogeneous composite applications that often include packaged applications - such as customer relationship management (CRM) suites, order management systems and billing systems - as well as hosted applications that are provided on demand. Through its non-invasive SOA runtime governance technology, AmberPoint is able to monitor these prominent participants in SOA systems.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

When picturing the relationship between the enterprise and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, imagine an evolutionary process that can be divided into three main stages: 'The Comfort Zone,' 'The Enlightenment,' and 'The Re-Assessment.' Once we examine these, we can then decide on the right course of action when choosing how to adapt to the IT demands of the enterprise.

NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, the SaaS one, and rival of CRM SaaS pioneer salesforce.com, which of course was started by former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff - ah, incest - has named Per Brondum Jakobsen, the former head of product strategy at salesforce, VP of product management. He is supposed to spearhead NetSuite's product strategy, initiatives and operations and move its ERP, CRM and e-commerce software up-market.

Boomi and StrikeIron announced a partnership focused on driving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption by enabling seamless integration of StrikeIron's Marketplace Web services into Boomi On Demand. Boomi users can now integrate the full spectrum of business intelligence, CRM, e-commerce and financial solutions that StrikeIron offers with no additional coding required.

SugarCRM has pushed out a closed beta of Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE), a new product line, due this summer, described as a complete set of system management provisioning and monitoring tools so service providers and large organizations can deploy and handle multiple instances - as in distinct versions of SugarCRM meant to serve the different needs of different business units - from a central console.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it's with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you've got Apex!?). Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

SaaS poster child Salesforce.com did $247.6 million in revenues, up 52%, returning $9.6 million, or eight cents a share, up sevenfold, in the quarter ended April 30. It said it generated more than a quarter billion dollars of operating cash in the last 12 months and preened that it was the first software-as-a-service company to exceed $950 million in annual revenue run rate.

Absolute Performance announced it is expanding the partnership with virtualization and hosting automation company Parallels to better enable managed services and hosting providers to achieve a strategic foothold in the expanding SaaS and On Demand marketplace. The announcement centers around extending Absolute Performance's application performance management SaaS software and services to work more closely with Parallels' virtualization and data center automation products.

Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It says Dell OptiPlex desktop are down nearly 50% since 2005 and Latitude laptops are down 16% since 2006.

Small business owners looking for an affordable alternative to the Microsoft Exchange e-mail platform can look forward to a hosted, cost-effective and feature-rich e-mail and collaboration service, from Network Solutions and Open-Xchange. Open-Xchange and Network Solutions have partnered to deliver a hosted e-mail service to small- and medium-sized businesses. In the near future, Network Solutions will offer Open-Xchange's advanced web-based personal information management (PIM) client as an option to its customers. Based on Open-Xchange's award-winning Smart Collaboration technology, the agreement will provide Network Solutions' customers with highly-integrated and feature-rich e-mail, calendaring, contact and task management, through an easy-to-use interface.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Bluewolf announced the availability of new insurance and banking industry Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions built on the Force.com platform. Bluewolf has implemented and developed more than 1,000 SaaS solutions for organizations worldwide, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, First Citizens Bank and Hartford Insurance Company. Financial services are looking to best of breed solutions that enable their teams to get up and running. Return on investment figures for SaaS solutions are powerful, as industry analyst Forrester Research cites a recent 170% return from one bank's deployment of SaaS CRM as representative of typical results.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

Locus has been selected by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners to perform environmental site assessment, soil and groundwater investigation and cleanup, environmental compliance assessment and environmental information management services for The Port of Los Angeles. The agreement with Locus is valued at $1,890,000 for a 3-year period.

Trubiquity (formerly Autoweb) has launched its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture. Trubiquity's new software architecture, named TRUcore, improves communications among global business teams, from an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) level down through a company's global supply chain. The new architecture also streamlines customers' internal business processes and offers better coordination, data management and process execution between a company's business units and its global supply chain partners.

Epicor announced Boot Barn has selected the Epicor Retail Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to streamline its retail operations and support its long-term growth plans. Boot Barn was one of four Retail SaaS deals Epicor signed during the first quarter of 2008. To support its current growth strategy, Boot Barn sought an end-to-end fully integrated, retail solution to replace existing disparate systems and in doing so, eliminating the manual processes required to integrate and share data among these systems. To this end, Boot Barn chose the Epicor Retail SaaS solution over a number of competitors to provide the infrastructure and retail best practices to support its strategic growth.

SAP has run into a nasty little rollout problem with its new on-demand Business ByDesign widgetry, the stuff that's critical to its future growth and competes with, oh, say, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft. Seems ByDesign isn't properly automated and so SAP's grand plan to get 10,000 small to mid-sized companies up and running on the stuff and generate $1 billion in revenue by 2010 has fallen by the wayside.

Parallels announced that Solar Virtualization Technologies Group (VTG), a Platinum partner in the Parallels Service Provider Partner Program, is using Parallels technologies to launch new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Parallels Automation datacenter software provides a centralized operations and business management system, which enables Solar VTG to offers its customers integrated mobile and messaging services that include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server. Solar VTG provides a single interface to its customers who are actually accessing services that rely on several internal and external application servers and systems.

EquaTerra announced that its Governance WorkPlace tool, which automates the management of multiple service providers and enables informed decision-making in support of back-office processes in both shared services and outsourced environments, is now available as a hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.

HCL Technologies announced the launch of its new SaaS Service Delivery Platform (SDP) AGORA. Service disruption and Web 2.0 have resulted in a sudden outburst of participation by the user and developer communities. This, along with increasing collaboration between independent service providers, communications service providers, application service providers and content service providers have resulted in the service value chain becoming larger.

Sun Microsystems announced Solaris On Demand, its software as a service (SaaS) program for the independent software vendor (ISV) community. This program provides ISVs with the technology, hosted infrastructure and services needed to offer their software as a service. It is targeted at ISVs with a traditional, on-premise license model who want to offer their existing application on-demand without having to use a multi-tenancy application architecture. To provide the hosting services, Sun is working with several partners such as NaviSite for U.S.-based and European Union companies, AT&T's USi for U.S.-based companies and NTT Europe Online for European Union companies. With the Solaris On Demand program, ISVs can create offerings that meet the application availability, security, scalability and cost requirements of their own customers.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Zoho announced it has partnered with Baihui to re-brand and distribute Zoho's online collaborative productivity and business applications to users in China. Baihui's parent company, PC Stars, is one of the largest software online distributors in China with more than 2,400 software resellers across China and more than 1,000 system Integrators.

The way business applications are evolving, enterprises are learning to accept and embrace the notion of applications that they neither control nor host. Now enterprises are leveraging applications that run a business through the Internet platform. As these applications become core to many businesses, so does the need to incorporate these applications into the enterprise's existing infrastructure and make them work together.

AXIGEN and Parallels announced the launch of a strategic technological partnership, in which the companies will offer an integrated AXIGEN Mail Server and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution for Service Providers offering virtualized hosting environments. The new AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers integration presents a high-end, flexible solution that enables Service Providers the ability to offer customized mail server solutions for customers via a SaaS model.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Gemalto and Alternative Technology are allowing small and medium enterprises to achieve the high levels of security in network access and identity management. Alternative Technology will now be offering Gemalto's new on-demand Device Administration Service (DAS) through its network of 3,000 resellers in the United States and Canada. Developed and hosted by Gemalto and supported by Alternative Technology, the subscription-based DAS is a comprehensive online service for issuing and administering authentication devices. Following the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, DAS eliminates the need to purchase a server or software.

Morph Labs announced the availability of a virtual application infrastructure subscription. The service will allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and entrepreneurs to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications while reducing upfront investment costs and speeding time to market.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Service providers that use Parallels Automation software can now easily deliver real-time spam and virus filtering, attack blocking, and e-mail traffic monitoring using a Google Apps security and compliance package. Parallels Automation is integrated with the Google Message Filtering e-mail offering, so service providers can streamline delivery of hosted services to their customers and provide automated billing and provisioning of the Google services through Parallels.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

What does Software as a Service (SaaS) have to do with open source? Not much, you might think. SaaS, as you probably know, is a delivery - and business - model for software that has been proving quite disruptive to the traditional software business - just as the open source model has been. The two combined may turn out to be even more so.

Akamai announced a global increase in the amount of end-user geographies it is serving on behalf of its SaaS clientele. Akamai-accelerated SaaS transactions have grown ten-fold over the past two years, delivering optimized performance and availability of its customers' SaaS offerings to geographically-dispersed users residing in nearly 150 countries.

Parallels announced it is offering service providers an Application Packaging Standard (APS) Certification Service, which is administered by the independent firm Tier 1 Research. The certification recognizes SaaS (software as a service) application providers with either an APS Gold or APS Silver Certification, which designate that service providers offering APS-compliant applications have the highest quality service.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Parallels announced that Swyx Solutions has selected Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 to deliver a cost-efficient and scalable hosted PBX application via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Using Parallels software, Swyx delivered 'Hosted SwyxWare,' a hosted solution based on its 'SwyxWare' telecommunications system for Microsoft Windows.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.