From Austin to Reston we go! We are geared up and ready for the week – my colleague Ben Benner and I will be attending Appian FORUM09 to announce and support the launch of our newly released Jaduka Notifications Service for Accounts Receivable.
Appian FORUM09 is the premier event for Appian’s BPM customer and partner community and a unique opportunity for networking and knowledge-sharing with elite practitioners, thought-leaders, and technology experts in business process management. It’s our pleasure to attend as a Gold Sponsor for this much anticipated gathering. Interested in attending? Visit the Appian FORUM09 site here.
We are excited to get to Reston to launch the Jaduka Notifications Service for Accounts Receivable [...]

With Jaduka and Appian, you can have your cake & eat it too—seriously. By combining Jaduka’s On-Demand Voice Communications Services with Appian’s Business Process Management (BPM) Suite, business processes are able to do something they’ve never been able to do before. For the first time, we are extending the boundaries of business processes safely beyond your internal teams and the corporate firewall. We are taking your business processes and now involving what is most important to you – connecting with your clients, vendors and partners.
This revolutionary way of extending business processes has almost endless applications. You will now have the ability to automate and accomplish such tasks as validating leads, scheduling/rescheduling appointments, validating a client’s [...]

While investigating different methods of enabling enterprise developers with voice services, we examined the services already embedded within the enterprise and why. It was very apparent that one the most successful service providers was StrikeIron, boasting many Fortune 1000 client relationships. That’s why we are excited about our announcement of the partnership between StrikeIron and Jaduka to extend our Notification Services to the StrikeIron developer base.
Jaduka Notification Service enables text-to-speech notifications or a company branded voice recording to be delivered to any phone, inside or outside of the enterprise. Those of you familiar with the StrikeIron Web Services Catalog know they have embedded their services within Microsoft Excel via LiveData for Excel and inside NetBeans. [...]

At Jaduka we are focused on adding voice to improve business processes and our solutions continue to gain traction in the enterprise and with brands, advertisers and resellers.
That’s why we are excited about a collaborative relationship now underway with Appian that will add Jaduka’s Voice Services to Appian’s Business Process Management (BPM) Software.
Appian’s Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) provides a complete platform for organizations to easily design, execute, manage, and optimize business processes. BPMS lets organizations gain control over critical processes, increase efficiency and reduce operating costs.
By combining Jaduka On-Demand Voice Services with Appian’s Business Process Management Solutions we’re aiming to create even more effective and efficient ways for connecting people, data, and systems and [...]

A comment I overhead at SaaScon that I can’t get out of my head and I believe speaks volumes for how SaaS will soon dominate premise-based solutions goes something like this: “Companies are now using SaaS monitoring solutions to monitor their SaaS applications.” Who would have imagined?
Take a premise-based solution and a SaaS based solution and I can’t imagine why anyone would choose premise over SaaS—can you?
Let’s see, a premise-based solution requires:

A server or set of servers for the solution to run on.

Facility space for this server or set of servers.

Cooling costs for this server or set of servers.

Networking costs for this server or set of servers.

Someone to manage the server [...]

In the last 24 hours Ben Bernanke says he can see the light at the end of the economic tunnel and Austin-based Vignette is the newest acquisition of Canadian content management experts Open Text.
Two things to notice here. First, we’re in for at least several months more of what, according to Bernanke, will amount to further consolidation and acquisition before current conditions of market uncertainty draw to an end. Second, when current market conditions of uncertainty draw to an end, it will be precisely those companies that, like Open Text, have not only weathered the storm, but have grown and added new functionality that stand the most to gain.
If you’re an applications developer this means [...]

Imagine if you will, that it is three o’clock in the morning and you are sleeping peacefully—until your mobile phone rings. You fumble for a moment as you wake up enough to answer the call. Even though the CallerID says “Unknown”, it must be an important call as it is three o’clock in the morning, right?
Did I forget to mention that it is Saturday morning?
You say “Hello?” and are greeted by a robotic sounding woman’s voice that replies “Your Velocity Credit Union” ATM card has been de-activated because of fraud, Press ‘1’ to re-activate your card.” This was my recent experience.
I pressed ‘1’, in the hopes of reaching a real operator, who could [...]

The time spent at SaaScon09 last week has only further validated my belief that Software as a Service (SaaS) is not a technology fad, nor is it just one more IT acronym for O’Reilly to fill that last remaining space on your bookshelf.
As I reflect on the many conversations I had, and the feedback I received at SaaScon, I feel more confident than ever that SaaS has become a widely accepted and trusted model that companies are quickly moving towards.
CFOs like SaaS over premised-based solutions because costs savings are paramount: there are no infrastructure costs (i.e. migrate from CAPEX to OPEX). SaaS offers a pay-as-you-go or subscription-based billing models (i.e. pay for what you use). [...]

While most companies are reporting lower than expected earnings in 2008, there are some bright spots. NetworkIP has had our best year ever, reflecting a growing adoption of the NetworkIP Jaduka “Intelligent” Platform for telephony, voice/data applications, and feature development.
The Wall Street Journal reports that while software purchases are expected to decline, three pockets of technology will grow: Software as a Service (SaaS), Mobile Productivity Applications, and Security solutions.
We agree. We’re seeing a large increase in the numbers and types of telephony and commerce applications running on the NetworkIP Jaduka “Intelligent” Platform. Adoption of our SaaS solutions and voice API is growing by about a million API calls a month. Our voice API opens [...]

Believe it or not, I like Wiki’s definition of Cloud Computing the best. Wiki defines Cloud Computing as a general concept that incorporates Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Web 2.0 & other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.
The best example of Cloud Computing that comes to mind & the ones I use most often are Google’s Mail, Talk, & Doc Applications. Why do I use these applications instead of similar applications already installed on my PC? The answer is simple, these Cloud Computing tools allow me to access my e-mail, message with colleagues, & [...]