Smart Cube for SMEs

IBM has teamed up with finance management software vendor Intuit to release an appliance in the US that eases the business operation of small and medium-sized enterprises, states Packet8.

The appliance, the 'Smart Cube', is designed to capitalise on the growing need for technology in the small and medium business sector and is bundled with applications like e-mail, calendaring, security, accounting tools and finance management software.

IBM says it has been inspired to launch such a package in the US following the success of similar offerings in India.

Pegasystems, a provider of business process management software solutions, has released a SmartPaaS (platform-as-a-service) offering to enable businesses to quickly develop and deploy dynamic business applications with all the benefits of cloud computing, reports Trading Markets.

This offering was developed with the support of Amazon Web Services and Capgemini.

This new integrated offering packages Pegasystems' business-driven Build for Change technology with middleware solutions from IBM on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Capgemini's Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence.

Workbooks Online CEO, John Cheney, presented at the Cloud Expo Europe last week; exploring whether the traditional integration issues experienced by organisations deploying on-premises software applications are now being experienced in the cloud. This as businesses deploy disparate hosted applications, and then seek to integrate them, says PR.com.

Cheney says, “Most organisations are choosing single technology SaaS vendors: CRM, accounting, cloud storage, e-mail and Web security services, as a result the complexities and distractions of managing disparate applications have simply moved from the network into the cloud.”

This means that today's customers of SaaS business applications can still be juggling many different suppliers, users, configurations and different versions of the same data, he adds.