January 20th, 2006
Analysts who really understand on-demand
There are plenty of industry analysts out there who will rent-a-quote about SaaS and on-demand, but only a handful really understand what it’s all about. As part of my occasional series of postings about where you can learn about on-demand, here’s an introduction to them all (obviously you already know about me).
- Laurie McCabe: Laurie is well known to all the main players in on-demand, having followed the industry since the beginning of the ASP boom and bust back in 1999. She started out at Summit Strategies and a couple of years ago moved to AMI Partners to concentrate on the SMB market.
- Tom Kucharvy: Laurie’s former boss at Summit Strategies had long been forecasting the advent of on-demand computing and remains a great source of vendor analysis. Disclosure: I wrote three reports under contract to Summit in 2004-2005.
- Denis Pombriant: The principal of Beagle Research and a former Aberdeen Group analyst, Denis specializes in CRM but is a great fan of the on-demand model. The link is to his blog, as the Beagle Research site itself seems to have been written in VML, which Firefox doesn’t support. (This means the home page displays to Firefox users as a GIF image — I kid you not — and consequently all the links are dead. I must have a rant about web designers one of these days. What planet do those guys live on?)
- Amy Mizoras Konary: Amy has been IDC’s resident SaaS and on-demand applications expert for several years and has some interesting things to say about the impact on software licensing and business models.
- Clare Gillan: You won’t find Clare writing about the topic these days, but it was her 1998 report for IDC on Application Service Providers that established the ASP moniker.
- Ben Pring: In my view the only Gartner analyst who gets the on-demand model, Ben is another long-term follower of the industry.
- Amy Wohl: Last week I kicked off this series with a whole posting about Amy’s recent series of articles for IBM PartnerWorld, in which she displays her extensive knowledge of the SaaS world. UPDATE: Amy has just started a new blog on SaaS. Good to have you back, Amy!
- Jason Maynard: CSFB’s software analyst has just published a report declaring that "traditional software is dead," which I discussed on Monday. This is equity research rather than industry research but still a good read.
I hope I didn’t miss out anyone that I should have included. Let me know if you think I did. In my next posting in this series I’m hoping to link to the best of the blogs out there about SaaS and on-demand, but I’m having trouble finding more than a small handful. If you want to recommend any, please post a Talkback comment below or drop me an email to zdnet <at> philwainewright <dot> com.
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/21/06
