What is the cloud? Depends...

If you were to ask a random person on the street to define the term “cloud” for you, you might get a number of different answers. The average pedestrian might pull her earbuds out long enough to tell you that the cloud is where she stores her music and photos. Her definition of “cloud” was shaped by Apple’s iCloud. If your random stranger is a small business owner, his definition of “cloud” might be something like OfficeDrop or GoogleDocs, where he can store and share business files. Maybe a third person would tell you the cloud is for personal finance applications like Mint, or customer management, like salesforce.com.

But you would likely have to stand on the street asking questions for a long time before you ran into someone who’d tell you that the cloud is a system of software and hardware assets, an infrastructure designed and maintained to be infinitely scalable. And if you did run into such a person, she might tell you that this technologist’s view of the cloud is in the modest minority against the consumer-centric belief that the cloud is the applications it supports.

We live in an app-centric world, and the proliferation of on-demand applications necessarily influences the definition of the cloud. The back-end technology-on-demand provided by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others makes the cloud viable, but the consumer-influenced applications that use those services have captured user mindshare.

This consumer definition will only become more dominant as we turn to more apps for help with more of our personal, business and yes... IT tasks. The enterprise world, as we have seen for years, is highly susceptible to commoditization and consumer influence. It will be no different with the advent of the cloud.

Will SaaS Kill ERP?

Larger used to be better.

Back in the 1990s, when the term “enterprise resource planning” moved into the IT mainstream, enterprises needed a comprehensive software solution for integrating internal and external information. ERP served as the bridge between isolated business silos – retail, manufacturing, supply chain and beyond. Those bridges, though, became large and complex. Today, the very nature of ERP is struggling with what a modern enterprise needs to do to survive.

Video: The Death Of ERP? 

The current economic climate rewards agility. The nimble software-as-a-service (SaaS) business doesn’t depend on traditional procurement, and application programming interfaces (APIs) facilitate instant interconnectivity between relevant applications.

All of this spells trouble for ERP. As early as 2007, market watchers were sounding a warning about the eroding relevancy of legacy systems like ERP. In the fall of that year, Cynthia Rettig wrote in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “These systems…promised to eliminate the complexity of multiple operating systems…But these massive programs, with millions of lines of code, thousands of installation options and countless interrelated pieces introduced new levels of complexity, often without eliminating the older systems they were designed to replace.”

That perception has become pervasive. Now, the connotation of ERP among most companies, especially SaaS-based ones, is hulking, monolithic, outmoded software apps. It is time to relook at this once-ubiquitous technology. 

Temenos Cloud Banking With Metanga

The benefits of public cloud computing have reached the banking industry. Temenos is a company supporting microfinance and community banking organizations with its public cloud-banking platform. And, as we announced yesterday, Temenos is now using Metanga to market-enable its application on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

With 1,500 customers, Temenos needed a solution that would speed monetization and adoption of its T24 cloud banking offering in microfinance markets worldwide. It’s a technological and banking objective with social benefits, since microfinance enables low-income households to gain permanent access to high quality, affordable financial services that finance income-producing activities, build assets, and improve standards of living.

As we do for so many independent software vendors (ISVs), Metanga gave Temenos the means to manage all aspects of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) monetization: customer enrollment, product catalogs, pricing, promotions, invoicing, customer self-care and payment capture.

Murray Gardiner, Temenos director of community banking and cloud services, explains why those monetization capabilities matter: “Temenos’ mission is to not only develop leading technology, but also to leverage that technology to do good. Our collaboration with Microsoft and MetraTech lets us cost-effectively deliver, by the cloud, our application to those focused on improving lives.”

Monetization Demand Fuels Job Growth

When New England Cable News (NECN) wanted to do a story about job growth reports earlier this week, MetraTech CEO Scott Swartz invited the station’s reporters into our headquarters to talk about how that trend is evident here.

Across the U.S. last month, NECN reported, there were 250,000 more people working and another quarter million more job openings. MetraTech is contributing to that job recovery, and we expect to bring on another three dozen professionals to fulfill the growing need for monetization solutions flexible enough for today’s consumption economy and agreements-based billing models.

Swartz said, “For awhile, 18 months ago, you had companies and they had a problem, and they might not have been willing to spend the money. And what’s happened is we’re feeling more market pull than we’ve ever felt in our history.”

Want to hear more? Check out MetraTech on NECN news.

Valentine’s Guide To Better Engagement

At last, the most romantic time of the year, step up and consider your relationships. For Valentine’s Day, let’s get engaged…

…with our customers.

In the past, you might have thought about those relationships in terms of conversions first and foremost. SEO, SEM, social campaigns, Adwords – everything you did was focused on creating the awareness necessary to drive clicks, impressions, downloads and conversions.

You were all about the lead generation in those days. Now that you’re a SaaS company, you’re evolving. You need to form relationships with your customers that keep them coming back again and again, so that your incremental or pay-as-you-go business model pays off.

Customer engagement today is a continuum, rather than a one-off lead generator. Want to show your SaaS customers the love? Give them the gift of thoughtful engagement this Valentine’s Day by:

• Creating awareness
• Guiding them to your landing pages
• Serving up useful content
• Showing off your functionality and pricing
• Providing an experience that wins their long-term devotion

Every contributor to your business should be involved in this customer engagement endeavor, not just the folks who sit in the sales and marketing offices. From the login interface to transactional usage, from the landing page to the application download, customer engagement affects who upgrades from freemium to pro, who increases their seat counts, and who walks away forever.

When you learn how to fine-tune your offering and more effectively engage your customers, you achieve the bottom line outcomes that once had us all talking lead generation and not much else. For SaaS and cloud companies, that conversation should now be about customer engagement and nurturing enduring relationships with users.