Last week, Dennis Howlett announced some exciting news on both his personal and ZDNet blogs: the ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) and several UK trade groups will be working together to develop SaaS/cloud standards.

This year, “SaaS” and “cloud computing” business softwares have been discussed nonstop, and those two terms have become largely interchangeable—and at the expense of understanding what each is. As Howlett puts it, “everything getting an _aaS label [is] now conflated into ‘cloud anything’”. The three trade groups are Intellect SaaS Group, the BASDA’s Cloud SIG, and EuroCloud UK, and they will meet with the ICAEW to develop best practices, or some sort of “quality mark” for vendors. The idea is to engage both the buy and sell sides to develop business standards for the erstwhile ambiguous SaaS economy.

In addition to working toward best practices and quality stamps, security (from data to APIs) is another issue to be discussed. But it should be noted that some of the security issues at hand for these groups are EU/UK-specific, and would not necessarily color a similar US debate.  As Howlett sees it, the important objectives are as follows:

1. Clarity for buyers and sellers about issues that are currently causing endless and at times futile debates
2. An opportunity for ICAEW to act as honest broker between buyers and sellers, demonstrating leadership for both members (who may have concerns) and more broadly as a body that has the public interest in mind.
3. A requirement that all trade groups act in concert to help develop business led standards that elevate discussions around technology to a level where business decision makers can readily understand what’s going on and relate it to their business needs and concerns.

He also notes that his extensive experience causes him to be “100%” behind this initiative, but those who don’t share his level of expertise can easily get behind the move as well. The simple fact that this would clarify “SaaS” and “cloud” for buyers and sellers is huge, and seemingly more necessary as the two become muddled. Hopefully we will soon see a similar venture stateside.

Research and Markets announced this week that they added a “PaaS Remains on Edge” report to their offerings, based on studies by Tech Strategy Partners, an analyst firm. A large portion of the report centers on the edge that developers have by developing on Force.com, but there was also a look at how Workday, NetSuite, and Intuit are making space in the enterprise application space.

During Dreamforce 09, Salesforce gave some impressive figures regarding Force.com. They claimed that 135,000 custom applications, and 10,000 sites have been built using the platform, and that 55% of the HTTPS transactions processed come through the API (while only 45% come from Salesforce’s own apps). We did not purchase the report, but it does evidently show how Force.com compares to similar offerings from NetSuite, Intuit, and Workday. Based on the Force-heavy content in the summary, it can be assumed that that PaaS is the favored subject.

Potential Force.com favoritism aside, there are some interesting notes from a study by Tech Strategy Partners. They note that PaaS is beneficial for both corporate and ISV developers, but corporate developers are more likely to leverage a PaaS. The reason being that they are less concerned that ISVs about long-term technology platform lock-in, and have generally different business models. ISVs tend to build applications similar to a PaaS vendor’s SaaS applications, and this adjacency is considered an “edge” (and the apps are “edge applications”).

Another fascinating prediction is that within the next five years or so, there will be less development (among both corporate and ISV programmers) on SaaS-provided PaaS, and that that the favored PaaS deployment will be a hybrid one. We’ve talked about the rise of the SaaS hybrid model before, and it’s interesting to see other services going that way as well. Tech Strategy Partners’ research also points to the fact that the PaaS hybrid model will offer developers the current benefits they reap from the service, as well as greater control over their development processes.

This week, LoopFuse’s VP of Field Operations, Matt Quinlan, sat down with Helpstream’s Bill Odell to discuss utilizing Social CRM to create customer success. Quinlan oversees sales, marketing, and “customer success” at the on-demand marketing automation vendor, and gave some insight into how LoopFuse has been using a Helpstream community to optimize his work. Helpstream is a self-proclaimed provider of Social CRM, and offers integrations for Oracle and Salesforce.com users. Their product is built for web-driven customer service and support, ultimately engaging customers through the creation of a community.

An example of a Helpstream Online Community

One of the interesting points Quinlan made is that Helpstream has been integral to his ensuring customer success as LoopFuse grew. The bigger the company became, the more difficult it was to ensure customers were satisfied throughout the implementation process (in LoopFuse’s fledgling days, assistance was performed on a one-on-one basis). Quinlan states that deploying a Helpstream community allowed LoopFuse to provide better customer service via an interactive, searchable, digital environment.

The suggestion is that having a customer community will soon be as important as having a company website. Now, this isn’t surprising considering the information came from the Helpstream website, but the information’s source doesn’t preclude its validity. Helpstream users are provided with the ability to engage their customers through the community—as opposed to customers passively consuming content—which helps them maintain stronger relationships.

Integrating social media into CRM, creating Social CRM, has been a much-debated topic over the past few years. It’s tough to find a solution that utilizes the technology effectively without creating distractions in office, and perhaps greater adoption and monitoring of the customer community is a step in the right direction. Only time will tell how many other large companies employ similar communities, and with what amount of success, but for now it seems a good way for large companies to reach out to customers with social media—something that’s eluded them for a while now.

SAP is holding their Influencer Summit in Boston this week, and it goes without saying that as a major ERP vendor, attendees are paying very close attention to what they have to say about on-demand solutions. Not surprisingly, SAP has taken to offering non-ERP products this year, in a conscious movement away from their reputation as an on-premise ERP vendor.

This newfound focus on helping companies acquire a network of on-demand tools is a good start at diluting their on-premise standing, and several SAP executives noted in their keynote speeches that their move to the cloud is going to be a structural overhaul. One of SAP’s board members, Jim Hagemann Snabe, spoke of the eventual demise of the three-letter acronym—SAP doesn’t want to deal in ERP, CRM, and the like anymore, and wants to move away from the isolation implied by these divers platforms. This is part of the reason SAP’s latest offering, Business Suite 7, has a non-acronymic name, and the intention is to lower the total cost of ownership and provide enhancements without necessitating a costly upgrade. Snabe also acknowledged that the short-term goal would be a platform through which users can interact with back-end, ERP data, and also be able to work collaboratively via social networking platforms.

Another reason SAP cannot continue as it once did is that large enterprises are finding they can no longer afford the costly upgrades required by on-premise solutions. John Schwarz, another SAP board member, stated that SAP will continue offering on-premise products, but that SAP’s newest enterprise software innovations will be web-based additions to help customers adopt a SaaS-hybrid model. As noted on this site before, the SaaS hybrid model is gaining lots of ground with companies wanting to get more use out of on-premise investments.

Below is a video of ERP pundit Brian Sommer (filmed by Asuret CEO Michael Krigsman), and in it he suggests that on-premise ERP will soon be extinct. The hubbub surrounding the SaaS hybrid model certainly supports this theory, as entirely web-based ERP solutions would be the next logical step. Sommer argues that on-premise ERP systems being slow to change was fine when improvements weren’t occurring at light speed. Now ERP platforms have to keep up with the speed of innovation, and hybrid models support this; yet SaaS hybrid models aren’t for everyone. Sommer predicts that many more large enterprises will move their ERP to the cloud, but entirely cloud-based systems aren’t right for everyone, and the hybrid model provides a nice limbo for companies wanting the security comforts of on-premise solutions. Signs point to on-premise going extinct, but this wipe out may take longer than people expect.

Earlier this month, CRM Buyer re-released an interesting story as part of a “Best of ECT News” series, and it touched upon an important aspect of business management that many SMBs are reluctant to implement: time reporting.

Small- and medium-sized businesses tend to have their CRM spread across multiple applications, so it’s not surprising that some invaluable applications can be neglected. But time tracking is not to be ignored, because it provides important information about where companies are making money (i.e. which customers are the most profitable), to control costs and revenue growth, and helps to really understand costs and focus on key areas. Having an automated system to streamline tasks is beneficial for cutting administrative costs.

Time tracking applications are recommended for companies with 30 or more employees, but they can also be helpful for even smaller business and freelance workers. Simply put, it helps users to not only keep track of their time, but also to make the best-informed decisions when it comes to projects and clients.

Still, CRM Buyer points out that many SMBs are hesitant to adopt these programs, and for a variety of reasons. Some companies are just averse to change; some might find their employees take offense at being asked to record their time at work; and many people just don’t like timesheets. But timesheets can help enforce union contracts and consistency, and the advice given to managers here is to fully explain the business needs for these time-reporting tools.

Naturally, a lot has changed with the economic decline, and time-tracking apps are reportedly on the rise. That time reporters are priceless in running a business isn’t surprising, but what is amazing is the number of companies—no matter what the size—that are shying from using them. Still, most everyone has been affected by the economy, so the demand for these types of productivity tools is only increasing, and will likely cement their status as a business management staple.

And of course, because no CRM application is considered complete if you can’t access it from your iPhone, most time-reporting companies are offering mobile applications.