by Tom Pohlmann

Forrester recently hosted our two flagship IT events—IT Forum 2009 in Las Vegas and Berlin.  For those of you who couldn’t attend, I wanted to share one of our keynote presentations by Forrester’s Chairman & CEO George Colony.  George discussed the challenges that will face CEOs coming out of the recession and how IT leaders can step up to the plate and support, and in some cases lead, these efforts.

George outlined the six imperatives that will hit CEOs as follows:

1. Digital will be mandatory:  Move IT to BT.

2. Brand loyalty will decline:  Enable BT to feed social

3. Customers will look very unfamiliar:  Press ahead into new tech – swim in the Y Generation waters

4. The war for people will be intense:  Build attractive internal systems

5. You will sell differently:  Help marketing

6. The way you innovated will die:  Internal tech should enable, not hinder partnerships.

See the full recording of this keynote below:
For more on the subject, please read George’s guest post on The Huffington Post. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you are engaging with your CEO on these types of initiatives.

By Liz Herbert

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues its rapid growth — becoming an increasingly strategic part of firms’ application portfolios. Firms are using SaaS across a wide range of applications from CRM to ERP to IT, for deployments of all sizes, and across multiple geographies. As firms make heavier use of SaaS solutions, CIOs must ensure proper due diligence in the selection process. Although some SaaS still comes in through under the radar screen, business led deployments, centralized groups in IT, sourcing, and vendor management should take ownership of the research, purchasing, negotiations, and ongoing vendor relationships for these solutions.

Forrester suggests CIOs ensure the following considerations in SaaS sourcing:

I get this question all the time because, let’s face it, it’s a significant decision. For example, an Enterprise Agreement (EA) renewal for an enterprise with the main desktop suite on, say, 10,000 PCs could cost around $1,500,000 per year. So what do you get for this outlay? You’ve already purchased a perpetual license for the relevant Microsoft products via your original EA, so the renewal is merely an extension of the maintenance element, which Microsoft calls Software Assurance (SA). Like most terms in Microsoft licensing, SA looks like an industry standard concept, but has sufficient Microsoft-specific nuances that confuses customers. The key differences from most vendors’ software maintenance offerings are that SA:

• Is not tied to product support. Customers that aren’t paying SA still get access to patches, and can purchase additional support services from Microsoft or its partners on a time & materials basis.
• Delivers upgrade rights that live on after the agreement expires. Customers earn rights to any version that Microsoft releases while they are on SA. So, for example, a customer paying SA on Microsoft Office for the next 12 months will earn the right to the next version, Office 14, due out at the end of 2009, even if it doesn’t intend to actually upgrade to that version for another 3 or 4 years
• Includes many additional benefits that, though hard to value, are far from worthless. For example, the extra training, online e-learning and rights to use the same version on a home PC will certainly translate to more effective use of the software and enhanced user productivity, but it's very hard to give that a dollar value.