On-demand Software

Whether you trust the cloud to host your data, a critical application, or your entire app development effort, there are four steps you can take to make sure the death of your cloud vendor doesn't kill your business as well.

As CTO at Agora Games, Brian Corrigan needs to quickly ramp up and then cut his computing capabilities as new games come on the market, become all the rage, and eventually fade into so-so status. So it's little surprise that he's joined the growing ranks of companies buying computing, storage, and networking power as they need it from the cloud. What is surprising is that Corrigan and a number of other IT managers say that the use of virtualization and open source monitoring tools lets them do just as good a job, if not better, monitoring and managing virtual machines in the cloud as equipment in-house or in a collocation facility.

When online security firm Websense needed to extend an internally-developed tool for creating customer quotes, CIO Jim Haskin was faced with a choice: Continue to build the system in-house or move application development to a third-party service.

Programmers have written uncountable desktop and client/server applications over the decades that have inextricably linked independent software developers and corporate IT shops to Microsoft. Now the company aims to do the same for cloud-based software by luring loyal programmers to its Windows Azure environment.

Despite selling products that inhabit a competitive landscape occupied by technology heavyweights like Microsoft, Google and IBM, Zoho keeps building new online software that consumers can use for free or that businesses can buy on a massive scale for dirt cheap prices.

The world of low-rent key-value storage silos is exploding. Here's a list of some of the more prominent new projects.

Put the days of doing more with less behind you by cutting back on the overhead of IT. Now's the time to cut back on over-allocated services, curtail unnecessary capital expenditures, and clean house of legacy apps and orphaned software.

Amid the growing popularity of software-as-a-service, IT managers are faced with a sometimes monumental task of developing big-picture strategies and policies to govern service-based applications as well as defining performance metrics and support.

Hosted BI trumps the traditional approach of deploying on-premise tools that are often fraught with high cost, risk and time commitment, but beware the hidden costs of SaaS.

In 2008, GE bought the application of a little-known software-as-a-service vendor that would ultimately become the largest SaaS deployment to date.

There's no shortage of forecasts for the coming year. We've compiled a slew of predictions -- including the idea that some unemployed IT pros may soon turn to life of crime.

As businesses tighten their belts in response to the recession, they're turning to project and portfolio management software to help them identify which IT projects are mission critical and to help them execute those projects as efficiently as possible. And increasingly, they're opting for software as a service (SaaS) versions of because they're cheaper and easier to deploy. Here's the tale of two such businesses.