Not surprisingly, SaaS vendors have decided there’s no time like the present to make a full court sales press. In a down economy with slashed IT budgets, when there’s no tolerance for 18-month software implementations and the price tags for on-premise software from Oracle and maintenance fees from SAP applications are not falling, software-as-a-service and cloud computing offerings become more attractive options for businesses.

Gartner recently noted that worldwide SaaS revenue in the enterprise application markets was on pace to surpass $6.4 billion in 2008, which is a 27 percent increase from 2007 revenue of $5.1 billion. By 2012, Gartner predicted, the market is expected to reach $14.8 billion. Continue Reading…

If you’re one of those rare entrepreneurs that has the discipline to stay reasonably focused on what you should be working on, feel free to skip the rest of this article with the comforting knowledge that you have my admiration and envy.

But, if you’re like most of us, you are probably plauged at one time or another by the “Shiny New Thing” (SNT) bug. This particular syndrome is pretty easy to describe. There you are, minding your own business (literally) and working on your startup. Then all of a sudden, BAM! Some shiny new thing comes along and tries to distract you. You either get distracted, or you stay up nights wondering if you should have gotten distracted. If you’re like me (my sympathies if you are), you have this experience quite frequently. I think it harkens back to our childhood days when just about any shiny new thing would immediately grab our attention. [Hence the toy robot photo, blog image selection is not a core competency.]
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