The expansion of cloud computing is unstoppable, and its growth within enterprise software is manifest destiny. Of course, when dealing with cloud storage there are always questions about security. After a recent Unisys survey revealed that more than half of its enterprise participants considered security and privacy their biggest concern with the cloud, eWeek did a little investigation and outlined six tips for security. Details are below, but the main points are to ask questions and don’t assume your storage provider is giving you all the pertinent details, and to be completely familiar—back-of-your-hand familiar—with your company’s security requirements.

• Learn as much as possible about a potential provider’s data management. Whether it’s where data is physically stored or what hiring practices led to the staff responsible for securing your data, make a point to know about it.
• Make sure your provider can show you documentation of encryption used to secure and segregate data between multiple customers.
• Should law enforcement perform an audit, be sure your provider can construct an accurate audit trail. Be particularly wary of providers who can’t give you precise geo-location and compartmentalization of sensitive data.
• Another key to smooth audits: know your company’s compliance requirements inside and out so that these become prerequisites when soliciting a provider. This knowledge could eliminate legal hassles down the road.
• If a provider doesn’t have a trustworthy software security assurance program, find one that does. This means security and privacy will be certain in terms of application development in the cloud.
• Lastly, consider Murphy’s Law. Ask prospective providers how they are prepared to handle a security breach, from damage control to correction.

Salesforce.com has had a pretty strong showing in 2009, due in part to the company’s introduction of Cloud Service (a SaaS application) at the beginning of this year. Early this month, Salesforce announced an upgrade to this application, Service Cloud 2, which consists of three phases to be launched from now until early 2011.

One of the Service Cloud 2’s web-based options is already available to Salesforce.com customers: Salesforce for Twitter. The company integrated Twitter into their platforms in March 2009—and was one of the first enterprise software developers to do so—and now the integration functions within the Service Cloud. This update allows users to track and monitor conversations in Twitter, as well as tweet from the Service Cloud.

Later in 2009, customer service reps will be able to access Salesforce Knowledge, allowing users to quickly access company knowledge bases to provide more efficient customer service. These bases will be like company-specific FAQ pages, and the application will also be integrated with Google search integration.

Salesforce Answers expands customers’ accessibility to company information by allowing platform users to create customizable forums where people can ask and answer questions and rate their peers’ responses. Making this forum feature more modern is the social networking element: Answers also allows companies to set up Salesforce Answers communities on Facebook fan pages, and the information from this integration will be imported into the Service Cloud.

No doubt more enterprise-meets-social-networking features will be added to the Cloud 2 arsenal—at a San Francisco event two weeks ago, Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff called the company a “cloud computing evangelist” and intimated that real-time search and microblogging give CRM “incredible capabilities.”

Jim Ward – President, BrainSell

What’s a Hybrid CRM Solution?

It’s the best of all worlds. Hosted and on-premise customer relationship management software. In fact — it’s the new market trend.

If you’re looking for are looking for the benefits of a hosted CRM solutions, such as low IT resource requirements and low cost of ownership, but you’re concerned about the security of your data (and you should be) since recent phishing scams have attacked some of the most well know pure hosting solutions, then a hybrid CRM solution is probably what you’ll require.

A hybrid CRM solution provides the ability to go with a purely hosted option, however it will also allow you to purchase the software and install the web solution on premise. Pure web solutions, like SageCRM, are easy to maintain (no client installs), can be maintained remotely by a business partner, and the total cost of ownership is so much lower than a monthly hosting fee. Do the math and you’ll likely find that in 2 years of hosting fees you’ve probably paid for the purchased system 2X or more depending on the size of your implementation. The cost of hosted CRM is one of the reasons why hybrid CRM is fast becoming the market trend.

By Chuck Schaeffer – CEO, Aplicor

This post is the second in a series which highlights fundamental differences among SaaS CRM applications.

The majority of hosted CRM software publishers have yet to deliver market specific business solutions for routinely recognized market segments. For the most part, on-demand solutions still trail the media and marketing hype, the industry is still in its infancy and many hosted software publishers view the customer market as a single, giant green field selling opportunity.

This lack of market segmentation is not to be unexpected when compared with previous application software evolutions. When the earliest mainframe and host-based software applications became ready for customer acquisition, the primary customer targeting was not based on company size, geography or industry, but instead on who could afford the cost of procurement. With the release of client/server business applications in the early 90’s, the vendors’ targeting was across the board from start-ups forecasting big growth or small clients desiring to upgrade from LAN-based business software to the largest of companies seeking to replace rigid and monolithic mainframe applications.
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Chuck Schaeffer – CEO, Aplicor

It seems that when surveying the software as a service (SaaS) business applications market, surveyors often either feel there are too many similar vendor solutions or believe that there are still many market voids. I suspect the differences stem at least in part from the depth of the particular survey.

If you only look at the SaaS CRM or ERP markets from a broad perspective, there can appear to be a number of seemingly like business software solutions. However, if a deeper investigation continues, the primary differences among the SaaS solutions become apparent and the market voids become visible.

My view and investigation of the SaaS business software market shows strategic differences among SaaS vendor solutions in seven primary areas – architecture, customer target market, software scope or breadth, software depth, hosted delivery, information security and continuous uptime capabilities.

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