Are you faced with the need to do a software portfolio analysis but find the prospect daunting given the scattered nature of your operation? A new SaaS-based offering from Cast might fit the bill.

During a series of analyst briefings this week, Oracle has provided additional details of how it plans to play in the cloud moving forward.

For some reason, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of Cloud-based Windows 7 and Microsoft Office offerings, including scarily bad services such as OnLive Desktop, which was a media darling in January based on nothing more than demos. The real product is all but unusable - you lose your connection when you switch to other apps, for example, and you can't use the iPad's native keyboard. Plus, the company violated Microsoft's Windows 7 licensing terms, offering an essentially illegal desktop-as-a-service product. (That issue has since been resolved.)

Mark Adams, vice president of IT at HireRight, is living the dream -- the chance to completely rethink the infrastructure for a $300 million software-as-a-service employment screening service company. While the nucleus of the 1,600 employee company has been around for 30+ years, a three year acquisition spree resulted in data center sprawl, leaving the company with 10 facilities, including company owned and collocation and disaster-recovery sites, some of them overseas. Now HireRight is three quarters of the way through a consolidation effort with a heavy emphasis on cloud. Adams gave an update on the company's modernization progress to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

States are having a hard time keeping up with the cloud, especially when it comes to taxing it.

As past of a four-year agreement with Microsoft, software-as-a-service (SaaS) online video platform business, Movideo, is migrating its integrated online video platform to Windows Azure to attract business growth across APAC.

A recent survey of the IBM SHARE user group found just 25% of respondents were collecting data from social media networks for business purposes, though many more are apparently planning to do so in the near future.

CIOs are waking up to the reality that they've lost control over access to data stored in software-as-a-service applications purchased by other departments.

Oracle president Mark Hurd has pledged to "make it easier" for customers to do business with the company.

Calling itself the 21st century distributor, NewLease is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialist with a sole focus on the service provider community. It facilitates and implements SaaS or subscription licensing models in Australia, New Zealand and India. Company chief Doug Tutus said the company - which was initially established as a service provider - is well placed to attack the SaaS market, having positioned itself early in the game and fine-tuned its expertise. JENNIFER O'BRIEN reports.

CIOs think of Symantec as a company that buys its way into new markets. Over the past decade the Cupertino, California, vendor has snatched up about 30 companies as it's evolved from an antivirus and tools seller to an aspiring enterprise infrastructure vendor.

The two primary forms of public cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), are both growing dramatically in popularity. Over the last few years, the primary focus of the IaaS providers has been on offering the basic compute and storage resources required to run applications.

Both tech vendors are aiming to change the rules of game for enterprise software. And while they're going about it with two different business models, the companies share some things in common.

Small and medium-sized businesses have more important things to worry about than Microsoft's new Azure, a cloud-resident platform for building applications served to users online.

The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.

Amid the growing popularity of software-as-a-service, IT managers are faced with a sometimes monumental task of developing big-picture strategies and policies to govern service-based applications as well as defining performance metrics and support.

Facing uncertain economic times, enterprises may be more likely to turn to cloud computing services -- such as SaaS (software as a service), Amazon-style utility computing, and managed service providers -- for the lower up-front costs, the faster time to market, and the ability to add capabilities quickly without investing in new hardware.