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So maybe it's not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google's Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia's education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

The field of virtualization just keeps a-movin'. This time, desktop/server virtualization heavy-weight Parallels is taking server virtualization into the up-and-coming realm of SaaS. Their popular OS virtualization solution, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, has been chosen by ProServe, one of the leading ISPs in the Netherlands, to deliver a scalable, cost-efficient Online Backup solution through a SaaS model.

Salesforce.com’s rapid rise to success has been the subject of much debate and speculation. Is Salesforce.com a complete anomaly, a lone black swan in a software market that remains steadfast in its traditional delivery model? In what other market category than Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has Software-as-a-Service been so wildly successful?

CrownPeak, a Gold sponsor of the Gilbane Conference that starts tomorrow in San Francisco, has announced some major new features for its web content management system that should make both developers and end-users as excited as a school boy in a comic shop.

This new set of features includes support for Microsoft developers, better file management and improved web analytics with the flavor of Web 2.0.

Google has launched a new Website Optimizer Technology Partner (WOTEP) program to go along with its Website Optimizer Tool. The Website Optimizer is designed to help organizations increase traffic and turn more visitors into customers. Web Content Management provider Clickability has decided to take advantage of this new technology and is now a partner in the program.

SpringCM, on-demand document management and workflow extraordinaire, has announced SpringCM Version 4.3, the latest version of their SaaS document management and workflow platform. It features numerous new features and enhancements meant to improve business performance and to help automate document-centric processes like contract and proposal management, accounts payable and professional services engagement management.

There's a new game in town for online productivity applications. It hails from Adobe and if you like the look and feel of flash, you will like this suite of applications. The suite is called Acrobat.com and contains three applications that are required for almost all business needs. But does it compare to Zoho or Google Docs? We played around a little to see.

There's a new game in town for online productivity applications. It hails from Adobe and if you like the look and feel of flash, you will like this suite of applications. The suite is called Acrobat.com and contains three applications that are required for almost all business needs. But does it compare to Zoho or Google Docs? We played around a little to see.

CrownPeak has a little more money in their pocket these days. They have just secured US$ 6m in funding from a second round of venture capital financing bringing the total raised to US$ 10.25m. What are they going to do with all the cash?

The second round brought out a new firm, SunAmerica Ventures, to sit alongside their existing investors - Sigma Partners and Altos Ventures. Troy Fukumoto from SunAmerica will join the CrownPeak board which already has a member from each of the other major investment companies.

So what exactly is a web content management vendor who provides their software as a service going to do with all that money? Well, CrownPeak isn't being explicit about the details, only saying it will be used to accelerate new product development initiatives and spend more money on marketing. It's all about "customer value" they say.

For those of you in the Washington, D.C. area, on Wednesday, June 4 Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, presents Gartner InFocus Day: Government.

Spend a full day exploring enterprise change strategies designed to help you drive change specific to your environment. The conference offers a highly-focused single track and interactive workshop style sessions aimed at everyone from CIOS to IT directors to non-technical, strategic government leaders.

"Preserving software freedom in the era of Web applications -- You’ve read the GPL’s preamble, you can name the Four Freedoms, and you do your best to keep proprietary bits off our computers. But what’s the future of free software in the era of Flickr, Google Apps, and Facebook? ..."

Not so new to the SaaS market, but new to us at CMSWire, Jamcracker, a provider of SaaS delivery services is offering an integration kit that is designed to help you get your SaaS offering to market quickly.

Xythos is a provider of on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for organizations both large and small. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service.

The SaaS version of their document management product, launched in December 2006, is the software we've got in our sights today. Xythos on Demand (XOD) is a full featured enterprise document management solution, and true to its name, it is delivered as a hosted service. Join us as we poke around in the binary guts of XOD.

Organizations today understand that a key focus of their marketing activities must be in the social media arena. If they are really smart, they also recognize that user participation is key to successful social media marketing. And what do users like to contribute? Text, video, audio and all the rating, tagging and commenting that goes along with it.

Who better to help these organizations support their social media marketing activities than SaaS User Participation Platform provider Reality Digital? This is a company that not only has the technical experience to create a social media platform with a strong Digital Asset Management backbone, but also has the marketing savvy to understand the key to social media marketing is a combination of user generated and professionally published content.

Software as a service (SaaS) entered the IT landscape in 2000 and has revolutionized the deployment models of many software companies and even entire industries, such as Internet search. It has also becoming an increasingly popular form of consuming applications within enterprises of all shapes, sizes and geographies.