I recently wrote a guest article for Austin Startup that just went live today here, about Conformity, a startup in Austin attempting to solve a core process problem for enterprises using SaaS and Cloud applications – how to manage, govern, and provision these applications in an enterprise that cares to protect itself.  Its a clear need in the market and another demonstration of the confluence of enterprise and Web 2.0 innovations.  If Conformity is successful it should help make SaaS applications (even BPM SaaS applications) more palatable to the Enterprise market.  Thanks to Bryan Mennel for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion.

I wanted to comment on MWD’s blog post to this effect but since I can’t get logged in there, I’ll just put the information here and hopefully it will get picked up by trackbacking.

MWD points out the risks that were observed in the CloudCamp session attended:

IT practitioners – They’re likely to have concerns about the ultimate impact on their jobs and the potential of Cloud to take power away from the IT department. Uncertainties regarding processes around platform change management and dependencies. Concerns about security. Concerns about integration, latency and lockin.

There is a new approach to some of the security, provisioning, etc. issues which is represented well by Conformity.

Neil/MWD, check out the Conformity Executive Webinar Series: The Enterprise SaaS Working Group, or check out their blog on the subject here.  This is a group of leading lights in the SaaS community talking about adoption challenges and approaches.  Hopefully there will be a playback afterward for those who miss it the first time around.