Ted Demopoulos has written a new book about blogging and podcasting. I like the angle: he interviewed 101 people who are successfully using new media to advance a business or agenda. Believe me, that is a lot of work! Ted is also the co-author of Blogging for Business. He understands this medium as well as anyone.

I was fortunate to be one of the people interviewed for this book. I haven’t seen the final product yet, but it’s due in stores soon. Take a look at some of the people Ted spoke to. I think you’ll find a lot of valuable practical advice in this book.

The contrast between this morning’s first two general session panels couldn’t have been more dramatic. “CEO Hot Seat” brought together four vendors from the on-demand software business. “The Skeptical CIO” introduced three IT executives. The two groups were on different planets.

The vendors mainly agreed that SaaS is the future direction of the software industry. But the CIOs begged to differ. The SaaS model isn’t nearly as clean and simple as the industry would like people to believe, they said. They see merit in the SaaS approach, but it’s going to be some time before their businesses run on SaaS.

The CEO panelists disagreed on several points, notably the question of whether SaaS will topple the leading software vendors. RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte argued eloquently for the supremacy of the on-demand model. “Six years ago, 50% of our clients chose to host with us; today it’s 90%,” he said. “We can make investments at a level that they could never hope to make because we aggregate across 1,700 customers. The time has come.”

Not surprisingly, SAP VP of CRM Jujhar Singh begged to differ. “We believe the true model will be a hybrid model and the choice is left to the customers,” he said. “We’re seeing the on-ramp model work.” The on-ramp is SAP’s characterization of SaaS as an effective way to deploy software as a transition to an on-premise model. However, Gianforte dismissed the concept, calling SaaS, “the biggest off-ramp ever created.”

The executives also disagreed on the ability of mainstream software vendors to shift their businesses to a hybrid packaged/on-demand model. “It’ll be very, very hard for companies like Microsoft to change the culture and momentum to an on-demand business,” said Rick Faulk, president of Webex Small Business.

Added Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, “You can’t piss off your channel, the guys who sell the on-premise stuff.”

The CIOs poked holes in vendor claims that SaaS is quick, easy and flexible. “We have tens of thousands of interface points,” said Tom Murphy, CIO of Amerisource Bergen. “I can’t imagine the difficulty of trying to integrate into my delivery model a system that is so fundamentally different from what we do today.”

Jesus Arriaga, CIO of Keystone Automotive, told the story of one supply chain application that the vendor promised would be live in three months. “As we got into negotiations, I realized we were not going to do this in three months,” he said. “Sure enough, we kicked off the project Jan. 1 and we’re going to launch it in December.”

The CIOs generally agreed that SaaS vendor claims of rapid deployment are fantasy. They were more inclined to consider hosting for mature applications like e-mail that didn’t require extensive project management or customization. “I’d be a lot more willing to take a leap of faith on those back-office products that are stable, consistent and currently consume a lot of support time,” Murphy said.

Vendors sell features but CIOs worry more about other things. “I don’t think that much about functionality,” Murphy said. “I think about project management, change management, deployment, training and other things” where SaaS doesn’t necessarily deliver an advantage.

However, for standardized applications that are time- and labor-intensive to install across a large number of desktops, SaaS makes sense. “As the delivery model for something like Microsoft Office, SaaS is perfect,” said James Woolwine, CIO, Majestic Insurance. “I can upgrade just like that.”

Keystone’s Arriaga also cited culture as a factor in some areas. Keystone’s customers are auto parts retailers who are mostly conservative and resistant to change. “Over the last 10 years, several companies have sprouted up trying to create hosted applications for them and they’ve all failed,” he said. “Our customers don’t trust handing over their applications and data.”

Moderator Maryfran Johnson, editorial director of TechTarget’s CIO Decisions Media Group, interjected a light-hearted splash of reality. Her editors conducted a survey of 130 CIOs about SaaS and found that most didn’t even know what the acronym stood for. “One guy told us he had to go look it up on Wikipedia,” she said.

CEO Hot Seat panelists (l. to r.) Gianforte, Ryan, Singh and Faulk

Greg Gianforte, CEO, RightNow Technologies

Skeptical CIO panelists (l. to r.) Murphy, Woolwine and Arriaga with moderator Johnson

Jesus Arriaga, Keystone Automotive

The always-articulate venture capitalist, Ann Winblad, offered some valuable perspective on why SaaS makes sense. “It’s a change from automating what you’re doing to giving people access to the data they need to work,” she said. This dead-simple argument for SaaS was echoed by several speakers. Tim Chou noted that the ROI on SaaS applications is often less than a year. “That’s unheard of,” he said.

The packaged software model is so badly broken that it would appear that the market is ripe for a new approach. Deployment cycles for enterprise software can run into years and that cycle simply isn’t sustainable in a business environment that changes quickly. Users mostly hate software companies and software companies disdain their users. It’s a lousy situation that’s ripe for disruptive change.

The economics of in-house deployment also stink. Microsoft used to cite a study that claimed that only 5% of the lifetime cost of a software package was in the original license price. Microsoft was fighting open source at the time, but even if you discount its estimates by a factor of five, it’s still clear that on-premise software is expensive.

Bill McNee of Saugatuck Technology discussed the results of his research into SaaS deployment. He said the rapid deployment model of SaaS appeals to small and medium businesses, which are more than twice as likely to use SaaS for mission-critical applications as large organizations. SaaS is driven by users’ need for simplicity and quick deployment. “Many existing software giants will be significantly challenged to integrate the SaaS model,” he said.

The most likely survival route for packaged software vendors will be to offer multiple hybrid models with combinations of on-premise and on-demand options. This will meet customers’ needs to adopt SaaS for non-strategic applications while integrating internal and external services. This integration will drive the model he called SaaS 2.0, in which external services are adopted for mission-critical processes, including systems management, while working smoothly with in-house resources. This “extended enterprise service bus” will take many forms but will adapt to business’ need to marry the two models, he said.

Tim Chou delivered an impassioned case for SaaS, tearing down the objections he’s heard from IT people in his years as head of Oracle’s on-demand unit. The economics of corporate IT are fundamentally poor, he said. “At most IT shops I’ve visited, well over 75% of the budget is spent managing existing systems,” he related.

SaaS reshapes the basic economics of IT, making them much more efficient. “Every innovation in IT that has changed the economics has been successful,” he said. A big reason is that SaaS companies can build their infrastructure on standardized components, greatly simplifying the delivery systems. Most corporate computing environments are far too complex. “If I took a paint brush and colored every computer running SAP a different color representing its software stack, its hardware and storage configurations, and what processes it’s running, I would venture to guess I would run out of colors,” he suggested.

“Google has 400,000 computers and my guess is we’d paint them all the same color. That standardization enables specialization and repetition. If all my computers are different, I have no ability so specialize or repeat.” He estimated the fully-loaded cost of supporting a typical corporate user is $1,000 per month. SaaS puts users in control of their server environments. “The user has become disempowered,” he said. “No one wants to upgrade software. The vendor pushes that. With SaaS, we have the opportunity to shift the playing field from vendor-centric to user-centric.”

Chapter 10 is called Next Steps. It outlines some questions that marketers need to ask before joining the conversation and looks at where the whole trend is going, particularly in regards to the role of mainstream media as an influence and marketing medium.

I had intended for this to be the last chapter, but I’ve become fascinated with viral marketing and so am putting together a short chapter on that subject. However, the book is basically complete at this point. I’ll continue to welcome comments until October 1, when my publisher takes control. Thanks for all the feedback you’ve given me so far. It’s been enormously helpful.

The last of the six influencer profiles for The New Influencers is now available for review. The subject is Peter Rojas, a remarkable young man who went from laid unemployed in 2002 to become one of the most successful bloggers in the world three years later. He has started not one, but two blogs in the Technorati top 10. He has posted more than 10,000 blog entries in four years (do the math; it’s prolific). He’s made millions from his work. And he’s still just a regular, unassuming guy.

In The New Influencers, I write about how influence is measured and distributed within the blogosphere. The last few days have been a personal lesson in that.

I started posting chapters of the book about two months ago. I’ve alerted many people who were profiled or quoted there, but traffic has been pretty somnambulent overall, about 200 page views a week.

Last Friday, however, Steve Rubel posted an item on MicroPersuasion. The online chapter “offer a compelling overview of how Web 2.0 is revolutionizing marketing, PR and journalism. I highly recommend reading them,” he said. Thank you, Steve!

In any case, the chapters have received more than 2,200 page views since Friday, or more than twice as many visits as happened in the preceeding 10 weeks. Fifteen other blog entries have been posted since Friday linking to the chapters. And I’m getting more feedback every day than I got in the two months since I started posting chapters. So thanks to everyone. Here are the the bloggers who have posted links:

Biz Podcasting by Jon Watson – Jon questions the wisdom of giving a book away for free online but still applauds the effort.

Drew Benvie says its one of “two books on social media coming out soon which I’ll want to read.” I hope to make it so.

Simon Wakeman says, “I’ve read several of the chapters and will definitely make the time to read the rest.” I hope to justify that commitment.

Lloyd added the book to his blogroll (which is rather extensive).

Randy Stewart posted a link at Stewtopia.

Angela Booth posted a short excerpt.

An unidentified Yahoo 360 user calls it “a book worth waiting for.” Well, it’s a book I can’t wait to finish! 🙂

Cathy at The Good Things in Life says, “I just took a quick look at it, but it seems very interesting. I also think I’ve found a great source for my Web 2.0/Social Media presentation.” Cathy, I have PowerPoints if you need them. Call me.

TechnoMojo lists the chapters on its daily link list for Saturday. And give TechnoMojo credit for working on a Saturday.

Chris McCafferty points to New Influencers from his healthcare trends blog. Thanks, Chris. I’m going to need a brief hospital stay after I finish this thing!

Andy Lark says, “Would love to see some of the influencers that are using participatory media and that aren’t ‘A-List’ bloggers – this includes the new media.” Actually, most of the book is about the non-A-listers, so that’s good.

Antonio Granado makes me wish I could speak Portuguese (not Spanish, as I originally wrote).

Some 25 del.icio.us users have also bookmarked the site.

The purpose of posting the book online was to get feedback and, thanks to Steve Rubel, it’s beginning to come in volume. See what a difference on influencer can make?

I’m in the home stretch writing The New Influencers and it’s gratifying to see some people taking notice. Steve Rubel posted some nice comments about the book on MicroPersuasion last week and about 15 other bloggers have linked to the draft chapters since then. I’m eager to hear people’s comments, so please weigh in!

Meanwhile, I just posted Chapter 8, The Talkers. It’s a look at the New Influencers of podcasting, including Mommycast, HDTV Podcast, A Guy, A Girl, and a Bottle and other interesting voices. Please check it out!

I’ve been quiet these last two weeks because the deadline for delivering The New Influencers to the publisher is suddenly very real, and I’ve got three chapters and a profile still to go. The good news is that Chapters 5 & 6 are available for you to review at the drafts page. There’s a lot I want to write about, but most of that energy is going into what you find there.

If you’re a student of computer history and appreciate great writing, be sure to check out Charlie Babcock’s excellent feature called What’s the Greatest Software Ever Written? over at Informationweek. If you’re expecting to find a comparison of Quicken vs. MS Money, forget it. Charlie went way back in computing history and also looked at embedded, scientific and medical applications. Some of the choices will surprise you.