Welcome to OpSource's monthly newsletter. Learn the latest news in the software as a service industry and discover best practices, tips, and trends to help you succeed.

SaaS Summit 2008 - Please join us!
February 27th - 29th, 2008, at the Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, CA.
Register today for the chance to win an iPhone! To save $100 on the registration fee, enter promotional code feb08.

The SaaS industry event of the year is right around the corner and the speakers and panelists are not to be missed! 4 outstanding keynotes, 4 powerful panels, 9 breakout sessions, and more! See the agenda for details. As a preview of what is in store, check out the article below by Frederick Chong of Microsoft, a SaaS Summit 2008 speaker:

The Opportunities and Architecture of Application Marketplaces
By Frederick Chong, Architect, Microsoft
The software industry is currently at an inflexion point where the reward of "long tail economics" is garnering significant attention from technology entrepreneurs and innovators alike.

13 Habits of Highly Effective SaaS Companies
Editor Gordon Graham interviews OpSource co-founder and CEO Treb Ryan for a far-ranging conversation about what makes OpSource tick, and what it takes for an ISV to succeed in SaaS. Source: SoftwareCEO

The Smartphone's Missing Business Brain
There are a number of solutions that push data from web applications to the mobile device. However, we've discovered a fundamental gap - linking business interactions inherent to the mobile device into the web based business process. Source: Ribbit (an OpSource customer)

Trends & Analysis

A Future Without Software Maintenance Fees Overall, decision-makers at North American enterprises report that they will continue to spend an average of 29 percent of their total IT budgets on software-related costs in 2008. Source: Ecommerce Times GSA Looking for SaaS for USA.gov The General Services Administration wants to jump on the software-as-a-service bandwagon through its Office of Citizen Services and Communications. Source: FCW.com

Blogs and Opinions

Cloud Hogwash Treb Ryan, CEO, OpSource David's argument that these applications will run like exisiting applications behind the firewall and on servers bought and managed by IT is short sighted. Instead, I think Cloud Infrastructures will evolve with the applications that they serve. And with that evolution, IT will find a way to exert the kind of data control and security necessary to run Enterprise critical applications. Source: Treb Ryan, OpSource Microsoft Kool-Aid and the Cloud Responding to my recent assertion that Microsoft's software-plus-services mantra is bunkum, Gianpaolo Carraro - the company's chief thinker about SaaS architecture - wonders if he's drunk too much Kool-Aid. Source: Phil Waineqright, ZDNet When Will the SaaS Acquisition Games Begin? (A Primer on Cloud Computing Market Segments) The space isn't very far along, and is still very young. And yet there are machinations going on as various players try to position themselves for the coming battles. Source: Bob Warfield, SmoothSpan Blog

News Headlines