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Earlier today we told you about HP's new strategy focused on software and cloud-services. This is a departure for HP, which is mostly known as a hardware company but which has been steadily moving into IT services for the past few years. New CEO Leo Apotheker brings several years of enterprise software experience to the company from SAP, but HP's past isn't promising.

Also, I recently read this article by RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady: "How Important is Software? Generational Differences Between Software Producers." O'Grady tracks the recent history of software considers whether software has become so commodified that it no longer confers a strategic advantage. If this is the case, then is becoming a software company really what HP should do?

As we wrote last week, the most common mistakes that SaaS providers make often involve errors made while balancing the incoming subscription receipts with the need to go out and spend some money to acquire new subscribers.

Dharmesh Shah, CTO and founder of HubSpot, recently blogged his thoughts on a similar topic: the insights he's gleaned from the B2B SaaS startup. Describing these as "non-obvious SaaS startup lessons," Shah's blog post contains a list seven important observations.

Drupal software, support, and hosting company Acquia announced that its Drupal Gardens leaves private beta today. Drupal Gardens is a content management & social publishing system, offering "Drupal-as-a-service" and greatly simplifying the creation and management of Drupal websites.

Prior to Drupal Gardens, those wanting to utilize Drupal to build their sites had to download and install the code themselves.

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?

Recently we noted that some large enterprise software companies were calling SaaS a fad that would soon pass away. We theorized that they were doing this not because they actually believed it, but because SaaS is a fundamental threat to the old way of doing business that they dominate. In this post we look at some of the traditional enterprise vendors who are taking a different approach - embracing SaaS and competing in that market.