Canadian firms are adopting cloud computing faster than rest of the world !

Being at QLogitek I was not surprised by IT World Canada report indicating that large Canadian enterprises are more aware and more likely users of cloud computing compared to their global counterparts. This study was conducted by “Kelton Research.” If you were familiar with QLogitek’s client list (see a short selection of clients) using SaaS EDI and SaaS supply chain management solutions even you would not be surprised.

The study surveyed 502 C-level executives and IT and business decision-makers from mostly large enterprise organizations in 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore.

It showed that more than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide.

Nearly two in three IT executives worldwide (65 per cent) and four of five in Canada (80 per cent) believe cloud computing reduces upfront costs.

QLogitek’s clients in retail and CPG markets have been using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Integration-as-a-service (IaaS) both of which are subsets of cloud computing for over 8 years.

Alternative perspective discussion on SaaS

Madison Laird a fellow denizen of Twitterverse initiated an interesting conversation few days ago. He tweeted “I’m ranting about the drawbacks to SaaS. I love being a contrarian. Anyone want to brawl about it?” and I, like others, tweeted back saying yes SaaS has drawbacks, but its benefits to small and medium size business outweigh the drawabacks.

Madison did the appropriate thing and took the conversation to his new blog with the post titled Alternative Perspectives on SaaS. By the way Madison, I applaud you for doing so. It demonstrates your good social-media acumen and gives us more space (>140 characters) to share our thoughts.

I look forward to understanding your perspective better. I did post a comment, that I will repost here next and respond to your questions better.

Guess who else is getting SaaSy?

I just found out that CA Inc, a large traditional IT player, has created a new business unit devoted to Software as a Service (SaaS) and has released three On Demand solutions in the business continuity and disaster recovery service.

Jules Ehrlich, senior vice-president of On Demand business unit, said

“CA was being counted-out in many deals because it did not have a formalized SaaS offering.”

I wounder what Lawson’s CEO, Harry Debes has to say about that?