SaaS

Steve Cakebread on SaaS, sales performance management

Steve Cakebread has seen a thing or two when it comes to the CRM market. He was chief financial officer at Autodesk before moving on to the same position at Salesforce.com, leading it through its initial public offering and eventually serving as president and chief strategy officer.

He is now chief financial officer at Xactly Corp.

He talked with SearchCRM.com about his career, the trajectory of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging market for sales performance management software.

In this 13-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and business professionals (particularly those in finance), Cakebread discusses:

• CRM’s biggest surprise
• The attraction of SaaS for CFOs
• The drivers for sales performance management software
• How sales performance management software is being purchased and who’s paying
• Why customers aren’t necessarily getting those kinds of features from their core CRM or SFA vendors.

 

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SAP adds to the SaaS multi-tenancy debate

SAP’s John Wookey broke his silence this week on the company’s latest SaaS plans.

As he told SearchSAP.com, SAP will release SaaS-based business applications to augment customers’ existing Business One deployments. Additionally, the new SaaS apps (no word on when they’ll be released) will be multi-tenant, abandoning SAP’s earlier commitment to “isolated tenancy.”

The multi tenancy and SaaS debate has been ongoing for years, lead primarily by Salesforce.com, which contends that a SaaS application that is not multi-tenant is not truly SaaS. Continued »