Down the line, APB Online is considering business-to-business ventures, such as a call-center service that alerts corporate clients about the latest credit card scams.
For SAP Business By Design, the Software-as-a-Service offering, using cloud based services is natural, because Business By Design is delivered in the cloud.
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Reporting into Phil Harrison, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business (EMEA), the new studio's remit will be to develop a long-term business with Entertainment as a Service at its core, with a focus on Windows 8 tablet devices as the underlying technology and platforms as part of Microsoft Studios' continued expansion across the region.
Unified, based in New York and San Francisco, touts its platform as a business-class service that allows brands and agencies to manage paid media campaigns across a wide variety of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and others.
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The number of Software-as-a-Service applications available today for managing business functions like finance, HR and more can help startups better handle rapid growth.
These legacy competencies are simply not relevant in a world of virtualized business applications, ubiquitous personal devices and infrastructure-as-a-service.
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We also had a conversation around software-as-a-service, and the only asset they had was Business By Design.
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More than one out four of the 1, 364 organizations surveyed (27%), in fact, already use or plan to use cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to augment their core business intelligence (BI) functions.
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Beginning with the well-known Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) structure, Gartner added in a Business and Information Systems layer that includes brokerages, management and security.
"You need a local success story to legitimize creating startups as a viable business, " said Taavet Hinrikus, founder of TransferWise, a currency-exchange service.
This week there was talk of a tie-up between Google and Salesforce.com, a firm that offers business software as an online service and thus also competes with Microsoft.
Ready-made software, service providers as well as in-house solutions are now providing business-grade security to a significant amount of business data.
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Netflix, meanwhile, abandoned its plan to split its DVD-by-mail service into a separate business named Qwikster as part of a new pricing structure that upset some of its users.
YouSendIt is a file-sharing service focused on business-oriented uses such as: lawyers sharing files with lawyers or companies sharing files with their manufacturing partners overseas, or physicians sharing medical images.
ADP, serving 570, 000 business clients, recently streamlined, disposing of lower-margin and slower-growing units, such as a service that processes stock transactions.
Netflix introduced its standalone video streaming service in the U.S. in 2011, marking a significant shift from its earlier business model of offering streaming as an add-on service to DVDs.
Realizing this, the company is capping the number of times a business can contact a customer through their service, as well as offering people the right to opt-out.
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Customers loved it, margins were eye-popping, and as a subscription service MarketWatch delivered the Holy Grail of business: recurring revenue.
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