Month: July 2011

More and more companies are moving towards SAAS based software solutions such as salesforce.com, workday, Google Apps and even MS’s Office 365. Biggest SAAS vendors are making tons money selling their wares as cost effective solutions. But does that automatically translate to cost savings to organizations that deploy the SAAS solutions? The answer is somewhere in between. Companies need to be careful in how they are selecting their services and deploy them inside their organizations. There are plenty of comparison services out there that go into detailed review and comparison of each online services. There are legions of companies that will help you get off the ground with SAAS deployments.

Any typical software role out cannot live on its own. IT systems are so interwined within and outside organizations that they need to share data amongst themselves. CRM systems need to be integrated with email, calendar, inventory, billing, manufacturing and sales data base systems (to say the least). HR systems needs to be integrated legacy systems, packaged software and other SAAS. No single provider gives these solutions out of the box. If you visit salesforce.com’s partner eco-system you’ll realize there are partner’s and solutions for every system out there. They’ll happily help you to integrate and customize these systems for a cost.

I don’t remember asking for Google Music invite. Surprisingly received an invite today and promptly signed up for it. It is obviously a competing service to iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive, no matter how slice and dice it. Difference is, Google Music is free while the others are offered for a nominal price but with unlimited storage.

After sign up, the music service ask you to select your preferred genre of music style. To upload your songs you need need install a small piece of software. You can update up to 20,000 tracks to the service. I suppose that is more than enough to store most people’s collection (I’ve 32k tracks!). Here is a screenshot of the service:

Google Music has free selection of music that is presented to you based on the music genres you like. I’ve some free selections shown (I cannot figure out the total number of tracks in my free music playlist?).

The service is a good add-on for Google’s ChromeBook OS, as a iTunes replacement for ChromeBook. Google’s strategy does seem to evolve towards moving users to Cloud based OS, Storage and Media(refer my previous post on SageTV acquisition). However, I would like to have offline storage as well. ChromeBook’s cloud OS seem to choke my computing senses by offering just a browser. I invariably try to close that damn browser (jail) and feel choked when I cannot access my hard disk!. Why not offer a local caching option so that I don’t need to always look for internet connection to use my Laptop? Have some intelligent caching and offer users a way to access local storage for music, photos and video that they don’t want to upload to cloud?