4 Businesses With Their Heads In The Cloud
- Who: Appirio
- What: Helps companies adopt SaaS applications
- SaaS applications: Salesforce, Google Apps, QuickBooks Online
- Employees: 70
- Cloud rationale: "Because it's right for the business," meaning it lets employees focus on the business' mission without having to bother with IT infrastructure
- Who: Author Solutions
- What: Custom publishing provider
- Employees: 400
- SaaS applications: Salesforce and its Force.com platform
- Cloud rationale: "To focus on optimizing our business and allowing the business to run on a platform that is continually being improved"
- Who: Jobscience
- What: Develops health-care industry talent management software
- SaaS applications: Everything from SaaS applications for development, marketing supporting, and expenses, to HR, paid time off, and sales
- Employees/contractors: 26
- Cloud rationale: Time to market, cost, ease of porting existing data
- Who: Voices.com
- What: Web site for connecting businesses with voice talent
- Employees/contractors: 25
- SaaS applications: Salesforce, Google Apps, and from AppExchange, Pollzter (online surveys) plus other applications for project management, bug tracking, and quality assurance
- Cloud rationale: Running entirely "in the cloud" -- financial data excepted -- has been a technology goal since the company's inception (when SaaS was known as "on demand")
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