When a company properly prepares for successful cloud negotiations, beyond ensuring they have the proper pricing and they don’t leave any dollars on the table, they need to make sure all the terms and conditions they need to ask for from their cloud vendors are pushed through and make their way into the contract.  Based on best practices, experience, and knowledge of what each cloud vendor is willing and able to do, there is a list of asks that the client can feel confident their cloud vendor can say “yes” to.   To read this article in full, please click here (Insider Story ..read more

Founded in 1970, Walden University is an accredited university that offers online certificates and bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs in business, IT, criminal justice, nursing, education, and other professions. I recently spoke at length with CIO Karthik Venkatesh to learn about how Walden is deploying the latest digital tools to enable a personalized student experience. What follows is an edited version of our interview. [ Be sure to learn the secrets of highly effective digital transformations — and beware the 7 myths of digital transformation. | Get the latest on digital tr ..read more

If you are contemplating a digital transformation initiative that includes migrating to a SaaS solution, one of the key factors you'll evaluate is the total cost.  But don't stop there. For a more accurate total cost estimate, you'll want to break the costs down to the external costs of the annual contract value for the SaaS subscription and the one-time implementation costs.   To read this article in full, please click here (Insider Story ..read more

As software as a service (SaaS) has gained widespread market adoption, many initial deals are expiring and customers are facing renewal negotiations. But unlike other information technology deals, your negotiation leverage is much more compromised with SaaS renewals since you do not own the application licenses.  Consider the following: To read this article in full, please click here (Insider Story ..read more

As cloud adoption hits another growth spurt, companies are discovering the power of mixing and matching cloud services into solutions that address almost any business need ..read more

Historical wars regarding the comparative benefits of monolithic business application suites versus best-of-breed applications are over. Best-of-breed won. Nowadays there’s a specialized application for almost everything. Barriers to acquisition have waned (or disappeared altogether) and functional teams outside IT routinely purchase applications with little or no IT support, frequently without IT’s knowledge. Most companies employ 10-12 large application platforms to manage their finances, human resources, sales and marketing activities, customer support, supply chain, retail store operations ..read more

Spending on enterprise software, particularly cloud services and applications, is expected to grow faster than any other category of IT this year, fueling an overall increase in global spending on technology ..read more

To make certain your SaaS SLAs are meaningful and aligned to your needs, ensure you have considered the following seven aspects of any agreement ..read more

When Scott Strickland interviewed for his job as CIO of Wyndham Hotel Group in the spring of 2017, the executive committee was focused on standardizing processes and technologies across 20 brands (including Ramada, Super 8, Days Inn, and Howard Johnsons), which had been operating fairly autonomously.  So, Strickland took the job and spent the first nine months continuing the journey that had been started around standardizing the entire company on five platforms: central reservations, property management, service and sales, digital marketing, and data warehousing. Since the hotel group was open ..read more

Cloud technology and the increasing pace of globalization allow small and mid-size businesses to scale faster than ever, but also puts them in a bind. How do they take advantage of opportunities to grow when they have limited resources?At its annual SuiteWorld event, in Las Vegas this week, NetSuite is offering some answers. The SaaS ERP company is, among other things, bringing on software partners with expertise in global tax regimes, offering a planning and budgeting service, adding analytics tools for its product family, enhancing its line of SuiteSuccess preconfigured, vertical-market clou ..read more