“Software as a Service” products are treading lightly, but with increasingly regularity, into a world that’s not much different than, say, Hershey’s Chocolate. If you visited the home base in Pennsylvania, they’d serve you as much sugary decadence as your heart desired. But you’re far more likely to pick up a bar at your neighborhood grocery store.
Email Center Pro is now among the SaaS products offered on the Etelos Marketplace. The service went live there a couple of weeks ago, and was officially announced on Tuesday, Sept. 16.
It’s a nice opportunity to expose Email Center Pro to an audience looking specifically for hosted solutions to common business functions.
ECP entered the Etelos Marketplace with five other SaaS products looking to gain traction in an ever-expanding market. Those companies, LOOP, Blink Logic, Box.net, Entellium and Central Desktop help to round out what we think is a strong six-pack.
As for Etelos, their marketplace is in the business of giving developers a channel for distributing and hosting applications, and giving businesses a wide selection of those on-demand applications from which to choose.
Tags: Email, Email Center Pro, etelos, etelosmarketplace, saas, software as a service
Posted on September 19th, 2008 | No Comments »
I was in San Francisco last week for the Office 2.0 conference. The effort was the third installment of Ismael Gahlimi’s pledge to bring together leading minds in the Web 2.0 space for a 3-day discussion about moving the duties associated with work off of the hard drive and onto the Internet — exclusively.
That means all of it, from data storage to accounting, and everything in between. It’s a radical shift in concept. Moving all of a business’ operations into “the clouds” gives pause to some (data security junkies) and brings smiles to others (whomever might be concerned about the bottom line).
Whatever your feeling about moving organizational functionality into a hosted state, the fact that it’s gaining momentum is impossible to deny.
Thankfully for those of you who need to use email (please don’t overlook the sarcasm there), Email Center Pro is a product with its eye on “the clouds”. And that’s probably one reason I felt so at ease while scrolling through the demo booths last week in San Francisco. Yes, there were plenty of cool applications on display. But were any of them attempting to do to email what we are? No, not that I could tell.
With a rich feature set that’s only sweetening as we approach the public release of version 2, it was nice to see that Email Center Pro might be standing in the gap between the obligation of email and the genuine usability of a collaborative tool.
Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
Tags: cloud computing, Email Center Pro, hosted software, office 2.0, software as a service, web 2.0
Posted on September 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
