In today's economy we see more companies than ever trying to outsource applications once considered mission critical. The Executive Strategy Manger software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach allows today's companies cut the time spent running BSC applications in-house and focus time on managing their strategy.

Check out this compelling article posted on forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/cionetwork/2008/06/29/ingres-data-center-tech-cio-cx_es_0630ingres.html

Performance is big to us. We're constantly striving to enhance the performance of the application in any way that we can, because we know how frustrating it can be trying to use a slow website. That's why we were so excited to finally be perusing a partnership with Akamai to help deliver our application to the far reaches of the globe. Don't get me wrong, we've always had very good performance and very good global coverage, but there are a few spots around the world that saw excessive latency and delays that were out of our control.

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I recently came across a case study, published just last month, titled "Information System Effects on Organizations Balanced Scorecard Work". This study was focused exclusively on the ESM application – something our team believes to be the first of its kind!

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The ESM has completed the much anticipated partnership with Akamai Technologies to provide a truly global acceleration of the ESM. Over the next few days we anticipate a 50 -80% or greater speed improvement of the ESM suite of tools, allowing us to reach our clients around the globe at record breaking speeds.

Everyone Benefits

Whether you are an Employee in our Lincoln, MA. USA office or a client halfway around the globe the ESM performance is now equally the same. Akamai route optimization and cache servers work 24x7X365 to identify the best route from your laptop to our ESM servers. There will be no more waiting for content to load as one navigates through Measures and Objectives in meeting view.

The ESM is now 100% globally-distributed using the Akamai EdgePlatform that continuously pulls and caches fresh content onto strategically positioned servers that are closer to our customers. A dynamic mapping system directs user requests for ESM content to an optimal Akamai edge server. Then, through route optimization Akamai identifies the fastest, most reliable path back to your data center to retrieve ESM content. Several connection techniques are in place to optimize communications between the Akamai edge server and the ESM infrastructure to deliver dynamic content to our clients over optimized connections that avoid Internet problem spots.

What to expect

• Much faster ESM performance worldwide.
• Capacity scaling on demand allowing the ESM to meet critical demand.
• Increased availability through uninterrupted service capability.

The quality of the ESM service will not diminish as the ESM continues to rapidly grow it's customer base. The Akamai EdgePlatform scales as the demand increases. That flexibility frees the ESM to allow you to truly execute on the strategy execution premium.

Stay tuned for future enhancements.

Many times when clients ask about the ESM model of offering software as a service, I would say that Salesforce.com does it, and they have 38,000 customers. But if you saw the news today, you would see that there are other prominent believers in the model, including Oracle's Larry Ellison.

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We run into this problem all the time. Organizations, albeit mostly government, want to manage their strategy in the Executive Strategy Manager (ESM), yet they often forget to think about the steps to truly make this happen. The steps aren't complicated, but they need to be considered before commitment is made.

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We're currently working on building out a new datacenter to support our global ESM client base. This new, state of the art datacenter will allow us to continue to grow our global presence, increase reliability of the application and increase the speed of the application for people in the farthest reaches of the world.

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A prospect outside of the US recently asked me to compare the pricing of the ESM to another application (let's call it Application B). My first response was to tell him that the two applications were completely different--the ESM focused on Strategy Management, while Application B focused on data analytics. My contact was undeterred. He said that he knew the difference, but he needed to do a price comparison for the purchasing agent at his company who didn't care about features.

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As Keith noted in a recent posting, the Executive Strategy Manager has over 3,500 users from around the world. In fact, almost 50% of our hits are from non-US locations. What does this mean? This means we need to take global monitoring of our SaaS application very seriously.

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