Deliver Order from Chaos

"We told you that widgets were coming, and now two powerful icons of the online world andthe corporate network – Google and IBM respectively – have combined inan agreement to share 4,000 Google Gadgets with millions of WebSphereusers."

"Here are the top 10 gotchas in SaaS agreements that corporate customers should watch out for:

"1. 'I agree' to what? SaaS providers typically send electronic contract notifications to customers with an 'I agree' button for them to click, says Pat Cicala, president and CEO of Cicala & Associates, a consulting firm in Hoboken, N.J. 'People usually get sick of reading these agreements online and end up clicking 'I agree,' says Cicala.

"IT organizations that are poorly governed or don't have a centralized Web licensing strategy run a significant risk of having business leaders agreeing to software terms they're not familiar with."

"Been Busy? Seen all the e-mail about the Daylight Savings Time problem? I wonder if the US Administration calculates the cost to US businesses in their decision making around DST.. Sigh

"Anyway Microsoft Dynamics CRM with it's powerful and robust scheduling, calendering, task list and date sensitive nature is also impacted by this wonderful change."

"I’m not sure how such a document would apply to international customers but two things I am pretty certain of are 1) if anything like a CRM 2.0 bill of rights were to surface it would need 'teeth' in the form of significant fines against companies that failed to deliver and 2) that it would be next to impossible to hammer out the details of those fines if we expect them to apply to more than one industry."

"Microsoft is challenging traditional top dogs in the CRM market like Oracle and SAP and making moves into Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM territory, the analytics and self-service markets."