Digital Discourse / Software

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

December 7, 2012 By

OMB to push Strategic Sourcing: This week OMB issued a memorandum expanding the use of strategic sourcing to include commodity IT purchases. In addition the memo establishes Strategic Sourcing Accountable Officers within the CFO Act agencies to be appointed by January 15, 2013. It also establishes a Strategic Sourcing Leadership Council (SSLC), chaired by OFPP, with representatives from DoD, Energy, HHS, DHS, VA, GSA and NASA and requires the SSLC to submit to OMB a set of recommendations for management strategies for goods and services to insure the government receives the most favorable offer. Lastly it requires the SSLC to identify at least 5 products or services for which new government-wide acquisition vehicles or management approaches are needed and requires GSA to implement 5 new government-wide strategic sourcing solutions in each of FY13 and FY14 and increase transparency of prices paid for common goods. Read the memo here.

GSA pulls the plug on Apps.gov: The federal government pulled the plug on Apps.gov this week. The cloud application storefront, which was the brainchild of former Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, was intended to provide a one-stop-shop for cloud apps for the federal government and make it easier for federal IT personnel to acquire cloud services. The initiative never took off as intended. GSA didn’t give a reason for decommissioning the initiative, but noted that everything that was available through Apps.gov, would still be available through Schedule 70. Information Week has a story.

NextGov Prime highlights procurement reform, big data: NextGov held its first-ever Prime Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building this week. The event included a keynote panel featuring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-VA), ranking member of the panel’s Technology Subcommittee, two leaders pushing an update to the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act. The intent of the legislation, which SIIA has been tracking closely and which is expected to be introduced early in the next Congress, is to improve the speed and efficiency of federal IT purchasing. FCW has the wrap up. The event also had a heavy focus on big data and how data analytics can make the government more effective. FCW covers that angle as well.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, Government, Policy, Policy - Cloud Computing, Software, Software Events Tagged With: , ,

SIIA Launches New Affiliate Program to Connect Software Associations & Strengthen the Industry

December 6, 2012 By

Today the SIIA Software Division launched its new Affiliate Program. The new initiative aims to strengthen the software industry by bringing associations together to collaborate and share business intelligence.

The SIIA Affiliate Program, which already includes four participants, provides an opportunity for associations and groups to increase connections within the software industry and work together to improve and take advantage of networking opportunities, visibility, education, and tra­ining resources.

The first four members of the affiliate program are CloudNOW, the Irish Software Association, SVForum, and THINKstrategies. To inquire about joining the SIIA Affiliate Program, contact me.

From  new members of the SIIA Affiliate Program:

  • CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of the leading women in cloud computing, focused on using technology for the overall professional development of women for networking, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and economic growth.
  • The Irish Software Association is a professional association representing the interests of Irish and multi-national software and computing services companies operating in Ireland.
  • SVForum is a non-profit organization that fosters innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership within the Silicon Valley ecosystem of individuals and businesses.
  • THINKstrategies is the only consulting firm dedicated to helping enterprises make better sourcing decisions, IT solution providers make better marketing decisions, and venture investors make better investment decisions to capitalize on the business benefits of today’s on-demand services, including Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Managed Services.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software

Digital Policy Roundup: Senate Cmte. Passes Communications Privacy, Looks to Mobile Privacy, Trade Talks Continue on TPP

December 4, 2012 By

Senate Cmte. Passes Communications Privacy, Looks to Mobile Privacy This Week

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed Chairman Leahy’s (D-VT) ECPA reform legislation (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) with strong bipartisan support. The revised proposal passed with minimal amendments, in what was a huge victory for SIIA members and a wide range of supporters, as it was the first official strong bipartisan showing of support for legislation to level the playing field for access to remotely-stored email and electronic communications. While the next step for the legislation is uncertain in the waning days of the 112th Congress, at minimum it provides an excellent starting point for enacting legislation next year.

Continuing to move forward with targeted privacy proposals, Chairman Leahy has scheduled a markup of the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 (S.1223), legislation that would require app providers to seek affirmative “opt-in” consent from consumers before using their location information. This is another proposal that is unlikely to advance this year, but it is likely to draw broad support and put additional pressure on the NTIA-led multistakeholder discussions that have been ongoing since July.

Major Trade Talks Continue with Little Fanfare, Overshadowed by World Telecom Conference

While much of the world is focused on the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) taking place in Dubai this week, the 15th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks launched yesterday, where officials from the 11 countries participating in the negotiations will try to move toward the goal set by some TPP leaders last month of completing the deal by the end of next year. Intellectual property rights are one of the key issues of interest to the technology community during the ongoing trade talks.

Additionally, in the multilateral arena, World Trade Organization members this week will engage on a wide range of topics, including government procurement, the status of the Doha round and the race to select a new WTO chief. Current Director-General Pascal Lamy will step down next September, and Dec. 1 marked the date WTO members could begin formally submitting names for candidates to succeed him.

SIIA Internet Governance Event This Week

Just a reminder, this Thursday, Dec. 6, SIIA is cosponsoring an event with GW University and several other groups to examine how countries use trade policy to advance cross border information flows, and how these trade discussions could impact Internet freedom. SIIA’s Mark MacCarthy will moderate a panel on the challenges associated with IPR, Privacy and Internet Freedom.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, Digital Policy Roundup, Government, Policy, Software

Interview with New Member: Recurly

November 21, 2012 By

SIIA recently welcomed Recurly to the membership. I spoke to their CEO, Dan Burkhart, to find out a little more about the company and the subscription billing marketplace.

Rhianna: Tell me about Recurly. What makes your billing management solution unique?

Dan: Recurly was designed from day one to provide a subscription billing management as a ‘self-serve’ offering. Every single design decision since the first day had this approach in mind – from our application architecture, to our APIs, our interface design and even our pricing and overall transparency of our service. This has afforded us a tremendous competitive advantage, because our application itself is our greatest sales tool. In our business, establishing trust with our customers is a very large part of customer acquisition, and there is no better way to quickly accomplish that than by NOT hiding anything, and by delighting our customers within the first 60 seconds after signup.

Rhianna: You have been particularly successful aligning yourself with strong channel partners. What makes a strong channel partner for Recurly and why are these partnerships core to your business?

Dan: Recurring billing is a painful thing for companies to get set up and operating smoothly. We do everything we can to eliminate payments-related jargon, and to reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver value to our customers. Our customers are able to go live in days, rather than months required from other enterprise solutions. For channel partners, this means that our service can also be resold very easily because it is designed to be a ‘light-touch, high velocity’ sale.

We have found two distinct kinds of channel partners to date:

  1.  Marketplaces – [Ex. Recurly powers billing for Salesforce's AppExchange Checkout] https://vimeo.com/40358739
  2. Merchant Services Providers – [Ex. Recurly is partnered with TSYS, which has hundreds of salespeople seeking to solve problems for merchants on a daily basis]

The best channel partners are those that share a common passion for helping our mutual customers succeed. In addition, the best partnerships tend to emerge out of a ‘value-sharing’ disposition, rather than a ‘value-capture’ mindset. We always seek to align ourselves with companies that value relationships and show a willingness to invest in growing them over time.

Rhianna: You refer to your solution as “bought not sold”, a formula many other companies would love to have. Did you ever think it would take this direction when you founded the company?

Dan: As a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ service, we don’t require our customers to enter into long-term, unpleasant contracts. This creates a very different construct from the very early stages of the conversation. For example, if a customer has a set of requirements that we cannot support, we are the first to acknowledge that. We’d rather lose the business than sign up a customer that will be disappointed 60 days later.
By offering Recurly on a month-to-month, pay-as-you-go model, we know that if we disappoint our customers on any level, they are free to leave us at any time. (In fact, one of our core promises to our customers is that we will make it easy to migrate should they ever decide to leave us. We never hold their data hostage – and this only accelerates our goodwill with our customers). This immediately engenders trust because it shows that we have confidence in our offering, and we have nothing to hide. There is a bit of an implied guarantee to our customers with this approach.

Many of our original customers are now getting acquired by larger companies, or individuals are moving to senior posts within new companies, and their positive opinions of Recurly are being carried with them. This is very pleasing to see customer goodwill working as our most effective marketing tool.

Rhianna: Is it true that you can get subscriptions up and running on a website in just days? Even with custom integrations?

Dan: Our customers move from sign-up to production on average in less than a week. Highly customized integrations require several weeks at most. We provide tools to easily integrate PCI compliant checkout forms into our customers’ websites. When publicly traded companies come to us, their legal teams require more time to review documents than it takes developers and product people to get ready for launch.

Rhianna: There is a lot of competition in the subscription billing space today. Where do you think this market is headed in the next 12-18 months?

Dan: The market is growing incredibly quickly. With the costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power all declining together, the distribution model for applications and services has naturally followed suit. With this change in the distribution model, pricing models have naturally evolved towards ‘pay-as-you-go’, (subscription or recurring) billing models. In this new world, you pay for what you consume, or ‘pay to play’.

Cloud and SaaS services are by definition offered on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. Digital content, media, and entertainment are also increasingly offered on either a ‘pay per download’ or subscription basis.

Purchasing psychology of consumers has also evolved. As recently as 5-10 years ago, companies felt that they had to own every last aspect of their own operations in house. During this same era, we were also still buying music CDs in music stores and storing them on our shelves.

Today, companies are increasingly comfortable with ‘renting’ capacity via cloud services, along with renting ‘expertise’ that simply isn’t cost-effective to own internally. Subscription billing fits into this latter category. When you consider the total cost of ownership for enduring PCI audits, as well as the enterprise risk of storing customer credit cards, this category becomes one of the first areas to be considered for outsourcing to experts.

We couldn’t be more excited about this market opportunity and the overall future for Recurly.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Webinar – Shaping A New Era of Computing and Business Innovation

November 20, 2012 By

CloudNOWIn partnership with CloudNOW, the SIIA and CloudNOW webinar series features thought leadership and best practices from some of the greatest minds in the industry.

 

 

 

Companies are looking for ways to drive lasting marketplace advantage, with innovation becoming the key driver of business success. In this pre-recorded webcast, Vanessa Alvarez, Cloud Thought Leader & Director of Product Marketing at Gridstore talks with Lauren States, Vice President, CTO, IBM Corporate Strategy in an interview format.  They explore how cloud and this new era of computing is fostering innovation and changing the structure of businesses and markets, and how the use of cloud technologies can enable IT to move out of the data center and into the fabric of the business.

 

About the Presenters:

Lauren States
As Vice President, Technology Strategy, Growth Initiatives and CTO for Cloud Computing on the IBM Corporate Strategy team, Lauren is responsible for the technology strategy for IBM’s growth initiatives, including cloud computing, Smarter Planet, business analytics and emerging markets. In her previous role in the IBM Software Group, Lauren engaged directly with clients to deliver leading edge cloud solutions globally. She joined IBM as a systems engineer after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez is the director of product marketing and an accomplished technology professional. Alvarez focuses on the go to market strategy for Gridstore’s award winning solution, the Grid. Previously, Alvarez was an analyst with Forrester Research, focused on next generation enterprise infrastructure and emerging technologies. She advised Fortune 500 enterprises on how to best leverage their IT environment to enable their competitive advantage, through the deployment of emerging technologies and operational models.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Interview with New Member: Shopping Cart Elite

November 19, 2012 By

Shopping Cart Elite is one of the newest SIIA members. I had a chance to meet with their CEO, Igor Soshkin, and ask him a few questions about the company and their marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Shopping Cart Elite and what makes you unique.

Igor: We are able to provide an all in one solution that combines features from a dozen companies for a fraction of the price. Anyone who is looking for an affordable solution that combines Shopping Cart (Volusion or BigCommerce), CRM and ERP (Netsuite), Multi-Channel Marketing (Channel Advisor or GoDataFeed), Hosted Search (SLI Systems), Price Spying (PriceManager), Support Desk (Zendesk), SEO applications and Social Media applications would love Shopping Cart Elite.

You can read our full story here.

Rhianna: You had great success in the wholesale and automotive industries. Why did you decide to start with a focus on those two verticals?

Igor: When we first started in eCommerce in 2001, it was just my brother Nick Soshkin and I. Since there were no dot net open source shopping carts on the market at the time, we decided to create our own for our company.  We had $20,000 to start the business. Fast track to 2005, we hit our peak gross sales of three million dollars, and we realized that we hit a dead-end. We were paying $125 per hour for data entry and data management, which is a minimum wage job. There was no way of getting inventory levels from our drop ship suppliers; there was no technology to automate the product synchronization between multiple marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. It was frustrating that we were paying thousands of dollars for security consulting to address server issues, and audit the software for compliance. We had to hire in-house designers to update the website at $60 per hour. When we had to address random website issues, test new releases and pay for servers, our monthly expenses exceeded $40,000 in development. These unnecessary expenses were depleting our profits.

In 2006, we officially stopped growing, and we realized that for us to continue growing we would have to hire more engineers to address minimum wage tasks. We also had to develop more tools to automate parts of our business, which meant more developers on payroll. As the economy started to slow down, we had to find a new way to address our software and technology needs. Paying half a million dollars each year for a small eCommerce business was ridiculous. We sold our eCommerce company and started to focus on figuring out a permanent solution for eCommerce businesses to utilize our knowledge.

When we sold our eCommerce company, we made it our goal to take everything we’ve built thus far and create the best shopping cart on the market. We wanted to address everything that stopped us from growing beyond three million dollars per year. I am extremely passionate and deeply involved in this technology problem. Being an eCommerce expert, I knew what the eCommerce industry needed. Our technology would allow new entrepreneurs to create a real ten million dollar company of their own.

The industry needed a platform like eBay or Amazon, but for eCommerce websites. The platform would use the same template, it would just have different graphics to make it personal. This way we could uniformly enhance the technology every month, and everyone could benefit from the enhanced features without any effects on their design. Over time, the new features would outweigh a custom design, which would only remain custom to the store owner for as long as it took someone to copy the design. Customers don’t care how pretty the website is as long as it is professional, trustworthy, and functional. They only care about the price and inventory. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask any eBay or Amazon top seller how their sales are doing on a platform with 100s of other competitors who look exactly the same, sell the same item, and show up in the same search results. Look at any Fortune 500 website such as Staples, OfficeMax, or BestBuy. They all look alike. All the Fortune 500 companies use the same expensive third party plugins such as social reviews and hosted search.

There are over 500 shopping carts on the market. None of them address the problem that Shopping Cart Elite is trying to solve. If they did, all the Fortune 500 companies would be using them instead of paying millions for custom software development and third party plugins. Shopping Cart Elite is a solid platform for serious eCommerce businesses. We will change the game and put all other failed shopping carts out of business.

Rhianna: You have a marketplace module that allows companies to push their products in various marketplaces. Tell me about this and how you also integrate SEO content.

Igor: Companies can use Shopping Cart Elite as a central data portal. Shopping Cart Elite will then take the product data and synchronize over 30 different marketplace including eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and every other one you can find. Customers can pick and choose what to submit, and what marketplace. They can choose only to submit certain products with inventory, or the complete store. We also synchronize their inventory to these channels, and we will soon support price and order synchronization.

As for SEO, we are the only Shopping Cart in the industry to focus on native SEO application built right into Shopping Cart Elite. Since the SEO applications are natively built, our customers can benefit use their existing product data to automate their SEO campaigns. For example, a customer can create hundreds of blogs focusing on different niches within their vertical, and have our blog poster syndicate those blogs with content from their store. You can create articles and use our LSI keyword research and SEO content optimizer to exceed the best SEO practices.

Another SEO feature that we have is called Visitor Generated SEO. You have visitors coming to your website, and searching for products using different variations of rich and long tail keywords. Wouldn’t it be awesome if when they typed something, the relevant search results would be turned into an SEO indexable page for Google?  It would be even better if that webpage automatically added itself to the sitemap and ping Google to cache it immediately.

This awesome feature happens to be available on Shopping Cart Elite, and it is called Visitor Generated SEO. It does everything I just described and more. You can also get groups of keywords from Google Adwords Keyword Generator and plug them in by the thousands into your website. This will automatically create

unique content pages for all the popular keywords that Google recommends for your ranking and visitors will start pouring into your website in no time. Shopping Cart Elite is the only platform in the industry to focus on Organic SEO applications. We believe organic should be the core traffic source of any eCommerce business, and our customers agree.

For further details about our SEO, check out the information on our website here.

Rhianna: You have partnered and integrated many third party solutions to your offerings. How important are these partners and will you continue to integrate more third party solutions as appropriate?

Igor: We do partner with many companies, but we do it a little differently from other shopping carts by choosing our partners carefully. We want to deliver a great experience to our customers while making sure the customers pay an affordable price for the complete bundle.

The companies that have a partnership with us benefit from a very close relationship. We usually make sure that we natively integrate their solution in order to achieve a rich user interface and experience for our customers. We opt-in all of our current and new clients on launch day for our partners. We also make sure that all of our new clients are made well aware of our partner solutions. We partially marry our partners, and they become a part of our infrastructure.

We welcome companies to partner with us, but they need to make sure they bring real value to the table.

Rhianna: What are some of the main areas of focus for Shopping Cart Elite in the coming 12-18 months?

Igor: We finally completed our mobile strategy, and we enhanced our customer templates to automatically render the website based on the visitor’s device. The website will automatically reposition and resize elements to fit any screen including desktop, tablet or mobile.

We are also working on a new feature called Traffic Quality Analyzer which will deduct click fraud, bot traffic, visitor who engage (You can read more here about click fraud). We are very active with product development, so it is hard to predict what exactly we will be developing in 12-18 months. This year we exceeded our development roadmap by releasing over 3000 new features, and we plan to exceed that milestone again in 2013.

We are committed to making an affordable all in one ecommerce solution for companies of all sizes.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: , ,

How the Election Will Impact Federal IT

November 7, 2012 By

Now that the campaign is over it’s a good time to take a look at what the future holds for federal IT. Here are a couple basic things we know: There is continuing pressure on federal agencies to deliver better services to citizens, while reducing the overall cost of government. IT has and will continue to play a role in this effort. We also expect to see moderate overall cuts to federal IT spending, somewhere in the 5 percent range, so agencies will have to reprioritize some ongoing IT initiatives.

All of this bodes well for “innovation” and we expect to see a continuation of the effort to move agencies to cloud computing, consolidate the existing data center infrastructure and better leverage government data. We also expect to see a continued focus on performance and mission-oriented goals and increased attention paid to the need to reform federal IT procurement.

As for federal IT personnel, we know there will be changes at the agency CIO level and probably at other places like GSA and OMB where federal IT policy is driven – we just don’t know what they are yet. All indications are that Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel is planning to stick around for a while as should Federal CTO Todd Park (pure speculation on my part, but I haven’t heard anything to the contrary). We know that President Obama will have to appoint a permanent OMB Director sooner rather than later and that could trigger a reshuffling of some responsibilities and priorities at OMB.

On Capitol Hill, there will be a significant change to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee leadership, as current HSGAC Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retires and current Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) has to step down as RM because of term limits. Tom Carper (D-DE) appears to be in line to be Chairman and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be Ranking Member. Both Carper and Coburn have focused in the past on reducing government waste and maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of government, so we can anticipate some focus there. Sen. Carper’s ascension to the Chairmanship, along with Sen. Coburn’s new role leaves vacancies on the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee. Sen. Brown’s (R-MA) reelection loss and Sen. Akaka’s retirement leave a couple of other subcommittee spots to be filled. Other members of the Senate who can play a key role in government technology are Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and newly elected Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), both of whom represent the tech heavy Commonwealth of Virginia.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee will be more stable than its Senate counterpart with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) remaining Chairman and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) remaining as Ranking Member of the full committee. The key Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement will continue to be led by Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), with Gerry Connelly (D-VA) likely to remain as Ranking Member.

The Government Reform Committees are going to play a significant role in the look and shape of federal IT over the next two years as Chairmen Issa and Lankford move forward with legislation to reform federal IT acquisition. The bill, known as the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) which has yet to be introduced seeks to empower federal CIOs and speed the acquisition process. This bill will likely draw a lot of the federal IT community’s attention next year and I expect Rep. Connelly to play a key role in this debate, with his newly drawn 11th Congressional District heavily populated by tech contractors.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Cloud/Gov, Government, PSIG, Software
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