Research conducted by Quocirca in 2005 showed the majority of UK enterprises still pay for software upfront either as perpetual licences or renewable on an annual or bi-annual basis. The same research also showed that more than half would like to see the way they pay for software changed to a monthly subscription. What the customer wants, the customer should get, but this leaves a problem for vendors and resellers who need money in the bank to pay the bills. Two initiatives launched in January this year will make it easier to make a transition in the way software is both delivered and paid for: the salesforce.com AppExchange, and new financing portal smartfundit.com.

If you're an independent software vendor (ISV) and concerned that you are about to miss the software as a service (SaaS) bandwagon, rest assured there is no shortage of organisations out there ready to lend a hand.

If a supplier is lagging behind competitors in a particular area, one way for it to regain lost ground is to redefine that area to suit its strengths, give it a new name and then claim a lead. If it works, competitors will be chasers again - at least for a while. To achieve this the conniving supplier needs to have either such a great idea that it is a genuine breakthrough, or enough marketing muscle to ensure people hear about it and make yesterday's news sound like tomorrow's dream.

As the take up of cloud based services increases as a total proportion of IT spending resellers need to extend their portfolios to include cloud offerings. Some distributors are responding by putting together their own set of offerings, complete with federated billing and management portals, making it easier for resellers.

How to build, secure, manage and measure IT workloads in the age of cloud computing. Computing infrastructure today is highly versatile and this has many benefits for businesses. Unfortunately it also has downsides; use that infrastructure unintelligently and costs can get out of control. This is especially true as the use of both public and private cloud computing increases.