ReadWriteEnterprise

It's rare when you will see a post in this blog about Saas and its place in the financial markets. But a report by former ReadWriteWeb-er Bernard Lunn shines an interesting perspective on the SaaS market.

The report is noteworthy as it comes on the heels of the annual earnings report from Salesforce.com, the first SaaS provider to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. We feel the SaaS market may be the most pivotal sector of the cloud computing world and we expect several other companies in the SaaS market to also reach the $1 billion mark.

Yammer is opening up its microbogging platform. In "Yammer Community" people may now create a community without the requirement that an email address be associated with a particular domain.

This is a big change for Yammer. Many companies do not have their own domains. Opening up the platform means that the service is open to a much larger audience - and has created a much wider place for itself in the enterprise.

A study by Burson-Marsteller finds that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using social media tools.

At first glance, this may seem significant. But a closer look shows that Fortune 100 companies are showing interest but nothing to prove that social media tools are gaining significant corporate acceptance. Here's a copy of the full report and an accompanying power point presentation.

But it is early in the game and these are results show that social media tools are making credible gains.

If there is any doubt about the social Web moving into the enterprise, then the news today from Jive Software has to make even the hardest skeptics start to wonder.

The Portland, Oregon company that has built its success on providing a social layer to the enterprise is pursuing a path that may lead it to a public offering.

Fueled by venture capital, the company said today that it is looking for a new CEO.

The Windows Phone 7 news kind of threw us a bit this week. It had almost no mention about how it would serve the enterprise. It almost seemed like Microsoft had given up.

Now we are starting to see some reports about how Windows Phone 7 would fit for the mobile enterprise. And it makes us wonder. Will the Windows Phone 7 better serve the enterprise than the iPhone?

The Obama Administration told the country on Wednesday about all of the jobs saved since the U.S. Congress passed the stimulus package one year ago. This got us to thinking about how the technology world is faring in these hard times.

Unfortunately, some of the largest technology companies in the world don't want their story to be told. In this post we tell the story about the racial and gender makeup of technology giants in Silicon Valley; and how diversity has changed over the past several years.

Samsung is taking aggressive steps to reach deep into the enterprise with plans for a suite of mobile collaboration applications and partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and a host of others.

The collaborative tools including enterprise email, instant messaging security, mobile device management, unified communications, customer relationship management, salesforce automation and business intelligence.

Samsung is working with its channel partners to provide the applications. It's another form of bundling, really, providing options for what products an enterprise customer may want to include on devices for its employees.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in his address to the World Mobile Congress on Tuesday that Google's future is not to compete with mobile operators. Instead, he pointed primarily to search advertising as Google's focus. But notably, Schmidt also mentioned Google's interest in enterprise software to deflect operator's concerns that the search giant wants to compete with them.

Schmidt's address to the world's leading mobile executives came as Google treads a delicate path. Google entered the mobile market in January. Instead of working through carriers, Google decided to sell its Nexus One directly to consumers. Last week, Google announced it would be offering Internet connectivity to select communities. That's another sore point for operators who wonder if Google is planning to enter the networking business.

The Windows Phone 7 received a lot of praise after its launch at the Mobile World Congress today for its elegant, minimalist interface. From what we've seen, it does look striking.

What we also find to be crystal clear: Microsoft is putting far more emphasis on the consumer market than its productivity features for the enterprise.

Companies are dropping Internet Explorer 6 in droves and vendors are quickly following the lead by sunsetting support.

It's a pretty safe move on the vendor's part. Data collected by the exo.performance.network shows how quickly companies are dropping the IE6, which was first introduced in 2001.