Earlier this month, I had the privilege of presenting the key findings of a new ebook that I produced with Chris Barbin, the CEO/Founder of Tercera, in a webinar which identified the critical characteristics of leading cloud consultancies in the coming decade.

This is the first of a series of ebooks and webinars planned by Tercera to describe the unique opportunities and challenges associated with the third wave of the cloud. You can find these and many other informative resources about the third wave cloud market dynamics on the Tercera website here.

You can also read about Tercera’s first two investments – BeyondID and Terazo (in conjunction with Twilio) – which possess many of the key ingredients for building a successful cloud consultancy in today’s rapidly changing environment.

Tercera’s mission is to fund and guide the next generation of cloud consultancies seeking to help enterprises capitalize on the latest advancements in cloud-based solutions.

I’m pleased to be one of the initial advisors of a new venture capital and advisory services firm focused on the ‘third wave’ of cloud consulting companies that are emerging in the market to respond to the escalating cloud deployment and management needs of enterprises worldwide.

As you’ll see in the press announcement and my blogpost associated with the kickoff of the new firm, Tercera is unique because it is targeting ‘people-based’ consulting and managed service companies that help enterprises maximize the value of their cloud investments, rather than funding cloud product vendors.

I’ve known the principals of the new firm for many years since they previously founded Appirio, one of the most successful cloud consultancies of the past decade. After selling Appirio to Wipro, the Tercera team now wants to fund and help the next generation of cloud consulting companies achieve success as we enter a new stage of market growth.

Stay tuned for more updates regarding Tercera’s first round of investments and views about current market trends.

In the old information technology (IT) world, systems integration and consulting companies flourished, helping enterprises of all sizes across nearly every industry pull together a plethora of proprietary systems from a wide array of software and technology vendors.

Despite the promises of the cloud, not much has changed. While there may be fewer pure-play proprietary systems and applications, the need to customize software solutions and integrate disparate databases has continued to grow.

So, it’s not surprising that the demand for IT services — including upfront consulting, systems integration and software development skills — also has escalated.

Yet, there are several important differences in today’s IT services requirements that set them apart from the demands and offerings of the past.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ latest perspectives in E-Commerce Times regarding the changing nature of IT services and solutions in the cloud marketplace, and how this sector of the market will continue to evolve over the coming years.

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of becoming affiliated with the rapidly growing Catalant expert network which has enabled me to extend my consulting services to a wider assortment of enterprises seeking help with their Cloud strategies.

Catalant recently gave me an opportunity to provide my perspectives regarding the state of the Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace, as well as the new business opportunities and challenges which these unprecedented technological developments have created for corporate executives and their organizations.

You can click here to read my views on the Catalant blog, and contact me if you’d like to discuss ways I can help you capitalize on the Cloud to achieve your corporate objectives.

Cloud Service Intelligently Streamlines the Accounts Payable (AP) Workflow Process

THINKstrategies announced today that Yooz has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Texas-based Yooz provides a cloud-based accounts payable (AP) automation workflow solution. Yooz offers a simple, secure, end-to-end P2P platform that integrates with more than 175 enterprise resource programs (ERPs).

Yooz has over 2,000 global customers that leverage its solution to optimize their AP operations and increase the productivity of their finance teams.

An example of the measurable business benefits delivered by Yooz’s SaaS solution is the Peterson Auto Group—the largest auto dealer group in Idaho and a family owned and operated company. The company’s five stores sell 900—1,400 units/month. The group has a centralized accounting department with about 10 people who process an average of 2,500 invoices and 800 supplier payments per month to about 3,300 vendors. Entering an invoice used to take the Peterson Auto Group’s accounting department about five minutes. Now, it’s 15 seconds or less by using the Yooz cloud-based AP solution—a 95 percent time savings. Invoice approval also takes much less time, dropping from an average of 45 minutes per invoice to just five. Instead of spending two or three hours a day attaching invoices to checks and routing them for signatures, the system sends the checks for electronic signatures, and funds are electronically transferred. Paying bills now takes only about 15 minutes a day. The cost associated with cutting checks also dropped from about $5 per check to just $1.43, a savings of nearly $35,000 a year.

Based on this customer success story, Yooz has been named a Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award winner.

“We are honored to receive this Best of SaaS Showplace Award from THINKstrategies. And we appreciate that Peterson Auto Group was open to letting us share their story about how the Yooz platform positively impacted its operations,” said Laurent Charpentier, chief innovation officer and COO, Yooz Inc. “Our goal at Yooz is to provide an easy-to-use, powerful and smart cloud-based AP automation solution to our customers; one that will be highly scalable, integrates with all financial systems in an agnostic manner, and leverage emerging technologies.”

“We were so pleased to hear about Yooz receiving this BoSS recognition,” said Patsy Price, Peterson Auto Group director of operations. “I can’t tell you how much easier our lives and operations are here at Peterson because of the Yooz solution. We’re happy to continue to share our story and hope it will help other companies and leaders as they transition from a manual to automated AP workflow.”

“Yooz’s Cloud-based AP solution is helping a wide array of companies significantly reduce the time and expense of performing the billing and invoicing tasks that are essential to their businesses,” stated Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, the strategic consulting firm that conceived and administers the Cloud Computing Showplace.

For more information about the BoSS Awards, go to http://www.cloudshowplace.com/boss-award/.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program that recognizes companies delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, and Connected Cloud Internet of Things (CCIoT) Award program to recognize IoT companies that are leveraging Cloud services to deliver IoT solutions which produce measurable business benefits for their customers.

For more information regarding THINKstrategies’ awards programs, see http://www.cloudshowplace.com/award-programs/.

Anyone who has attempted to adopt Salesforce cloud solutions in an enterprise environment knows that it may not be as easy as expected because of the additional effort typically required to integrate various data sources.

This is a common problem that has plagued the enterprise application industry since its inception. In fact, it spawned an entire subsegment of data integration solution vendors and systems integration service providers that have prospered by helping organizations overcome their data integration challenges.

However, by spearheading a new generation of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) alternatives, Salesforce gained control of the enterprise application marketplace. The SaaS model promised to rectify the age-old data integration issue so that organizations could accelerate the software adoption process.

The lingering data integration challenge has prompted Salesforce to make it’s biggest acquisition to date – the purchase of Mulesoft for approximately $6.5 billion.

Click here to read our analysis in E-Commerce Times regarding the industry implications of this acquisition.

Salesforce.com’s definitive agreement to acquire MuleSoft for approximately $6.5 billion represents the company’s biggest acquisition yet and a calculated move to consolidate it’s position as the leading enterprise software company in the Cloud.

The move also illustrates that the real power in the market is quickly shifting to those vendors that can facilitate the most cost-effective flow of data across applications in an increasingly connected and complex world.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ analysis in Datamation of the key market drivers that have led Salesforce to make this strategic move and what it means for the rest of the enterprise software industry.

All you have to do to recognize the changing face of the consumer retail market is pay attention to the growing number of packages piling up on your neighbor’s front step. The explosive growth of the home delivery business also has been influencing the industrial, business-to-business world.

As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the Cloud to keep pace. This means revamping their transportation and logistics systems to meet their customers’ escalating delivery expectations.

These rising demands have been fueling the growth of a new generation of cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to provide end-to-end product delivery and fulfillment capabilities more cost-effectively. They also have been forcing nearly all software vendors in this market to expand their functional capabilities to address the full lifecycle of supply chain management requirements — from fleet to financial management.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ analysis in E-Commerce Times regarding how the cloud is changing the nature of supply-chain and logistics management in the new “Delivery Economy”.

Now that moving to the Cloud has become mainstream, it’s time for organizations to confront their biggest enterprise application challenge in the era of digital disruption – revamping their enterprise resource management (ERP) systems to keep up with the times.

A clear indication of the shifting tides in the ERP market is the growing number of organizations that are replacing their installed systems with a new Cloud-based solution.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in Datamation about the forces that are reshaping the ERP software business and the competitive landscape of this market.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes trying to move to the cloud is finding and retaining the skilled workers necessary to implement today’s rapidly expanding assortment of on-demand services.

This skills gap cost companies more than $250 million in lost business opportunities in just one year, according to a recent survey conducted by the London School of Economics and sponsored by Rackspace.

In order to close this gap and accelerate the customer adoption process, Salesforce.com decided to rethink its training program and radically change how it delivered customer support. The company’s relatively new Trailhead program relies on peer-to-peer, end-user training techniques fortified by gamification tactics that recognize and reward Salesforce customers who help others.

Click here to read our latest commentary in E-Commerce Times regarding how the Trailhead program is not only solving Salesforce’s customer training and adoption challenges, but also fundamentally changing its customer support, new product development and other go-to-market strategies.