What is the difference between platform as a service and infrastructure as a service? Infrastructure as a service (for example Amazon EC2) provides on-demand computing power and storage. Platform as a service (one aspect of Microsoft Azure) provides computing power and storage plus an operating system. With PAAS, the operating system is patched and...
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Accounting & ERP Software
News and opinions relating to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting software
What’s Best for You, Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service?
Windows Azure TCO Calculator
Next week, Microsoft is announcing the release of their Windows Azure platform at the PDC09 conference in Los Angeles. In doing some prepwork for the conference, I ran across the Windows Azure TCO calculator. So, I figured that I would try it out and report the results. Inputs to the TCO Calculator The calculator...
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New Business Model for the ERP Dinosaur
Carl Mortished, World Business Editor for The Times, published an article entitled “Evolutionary clock is ticking for dinosaur model” (full article here). “SAP has cut 3,300 staff and is asking the rest to be more nimble and opportunistic. A key project is to use “cloud” computing, software delivered over the internet as a service...
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Note on Customizing SaaS
Today, Bruce Richardson from AMR Research commented in the AMR newsletter: “Given my fixation on cloud applications, I did close our meeting by asking the team whether they had plans to offer a software-as-as-service (SaaS) version. The executives said that while the company has a version available now, it’s had very little demand because...
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Customizing ERP on SaaS – Part II
In a previous post we proposed criteria to define criteria for easy to customize ERP systems. We innocuously declared that 0% of multi-tenant SaaS solutions would meet these criteria. After hearing from several folks, we decided that more clarification is required. Savings with SaaS The fact that multi-tenant SaaS solutions are not 100% customizable...
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Customizing ERP on SaaS and Cloud Platforms
The problem of whether to purchase customized software or off-the-shelf solutions was covered in ERP articles as far back as 2001. The chart below tells the usual story with the addition of the “SaaS” and “Traditional” labels. Customized Software (most Traditional solutions) Packaged Software (most SaaS solutions) Benefits Match current business processes Maximize...
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Software At Your Service
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) allows customers to purchase software and services on-demand. SaaS differs from traditional software deployments where customers typically purchase a software license which they can deploy according to their needs (on a server, in a private cloud, on an external cloud, etc.) Software-At-Your-Service is a flexible software licensing and deployment model that allows...
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Scaling with cloud computing and SaaS
Both cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) deliver the ability for companies to scale resources on-demand. SaaS scales applications. In the SaaS world, companies can scale applications. Because SaaS implies outsourcing, this means that the SaaS provider can easily scale application(s) that they manage for customers. Savings are obtained by aggregating computing...
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