Over on his blog, my good friend Sig Rinde thinks that SaaS is a big yawn (and he even wants to abolish accounting too). To him it’s just another software delivery model. I can see where he’s coming from, but I’m afraid I don’t agree. For the SaaS provider’s who have embraced the technology, the delivery model underpins a different approach which affects every aspect of their business from sales, through development to support. Compared to a traditional software company, they have more of an orientation on the customer, because the SaaS providers have to earn their money every day to keep their user community on board with the “pay as you go” model. However, I’ve got a lot of time for Sig’s business philosophy, for breaking processes down to the basics and focusing on value (and by the way, we partner with him on Thingamy).
However, I do see that there is a danger that we evangelists for the SaaS topic often spend too much time focusing on the technology, highlighting those companies that are jumping on the fashionable bandwagon with their SoSaaS solutions. In that vein I received an e-mail this last week from Callidus titled “Prisoners of the On-Demand Cult and Looking for Choice” - I guess we do come across a bit “cultist” at times. That triggered a session with Bob Warfield, their CTO, which I will blog about later this week. Ironically, it does feel like Callidus is an enterprise software company that is jumping on to the wave by providing their sales force compensation solutions on-demand. They aren’t the only ones making a move in to the space. I see that CSC have just announced a suite of services aimed at helping ISVs move over:
“SaaS Acceleration gives ISVs and service providers the tools they need to effectively navigate through planning, development, hosting and providing software over the Internet, and to successfully compete in the market. “
If companies like CSC can see a healthy market in just helping ISVs with the transition, it’s another strong indication of the industry trend. In addition I saw this interview with Adobe’s president and COO where he was being asked how SaaS solutions are affecting his business. He was at pains to explain they have been providing hosted services for some while, but he said on SaaS:
“For the absolute creative professional we still don’t think that mechanism is appropriate to deliver the kind of mission critical application that they expect. But if we can use software as a service to enhance the functionality that’s available in our desktop application, we think we can deliver value to our customers that way in the short run. “
Channel Insider reported that SaaS evangelist Jeff Kaplan delivered the keynote for the Ziff Davis Virtual Trade Show on managed services on March 20. He was expounding on the rise in managed services in enterprise and not just SME/SMB, as well as highlighting other trends in the industry:
“Kaplan said consumerism and the type of on-demand services pioneered by Salesforce.com figure among 10 major trends that are reshaping the market. The other eight, he said, are globalization, commoditization, differentiation, worker dispersion, Web 2.0, social networking, reliability/security and operational efficiency.”
Infoworld have been analysing Salesforce.com’s announcement of AppSpace. They say:
“Martin Schneider, a senior analyst with The 451 Group, says AppSpace represents an obvious shift by Salesforce away from being a silo of technology with its own data to a more process-centric service.
As it moves up the food chain toward ever larger customer deployments, Salesforce is now able to work with IT rather than circumvent it. “
Phil Wainewright also highlighted the AppSpace move with his excellent “The socialization of CRM“. For too long the term Customer Relationship Management has been a misnomer, with the application focus actually being sales force automation to help the vendor, rather than tools to develop a stronger relationship with the customer. Finally, this collaboration space approach begins to address the balance so that they get direct benefits from CRM too.
Ismael was also posting about Salesforce.com, with a “call to arms” to web 2.0 startups to get on the AppExchange platform and become part of their extended application footprint.
Lastly, Microsoft Office Live is finally available in the UK on beta test. The Office Live family provides a low cost web presence, as well as web based mail handling, calendar management, contact management and collaboration tools. It’s free during the beta period, with prices up to £22.95 per month when fully released. This could be a good choice for a start-up or small business, and I think Microsoft will be putting more and more marketing emphasis on their various “Live”, SaaS based tools as we move through 2007. For some healthy analysis you can go to the Liveside blog. They talk about Live as a SaaS platform, the potential roadmap, or their thoughts on some of the Microsoft branding mistakes.
