SaaS fundamentals

Great Article - Want to Speak at IDC SaaS Summit in March

Hi Martha,

I loved your article. As the Program Director for IDC's 2nd annual SaaS Summit on March 26th in NYC, I wanted to invite you to participate as a speaker at our event (which includes a comp pass). I wanted to see if you would be willing to moderate a panel discussion and recommend some end user panelists. We currently have a panel planned on the topic of Securing Standalone SaaS and SaaS in the Cloud but are open to suggestions if you have other topics that may be a better fit. This is a time sensitive invitation though as I am finalizing our brochure for our Jan. 12th deadline. I look forward to hearing back from you soon, answer any questions and hope we are able to work together on this event.

Warm regards,
Jess

Pros and Cons of SaaS

While SaaS has been gaining popularity recently, it is noticeable that its popularity is limited to small and medium-size businesses. Larger enterprises are still rather reluctant to embrace hosted application for their IT needs.
One of the top reasons why big businesses are reluctant to adopt SaaS is business continuity. Next to business continuity, data security, vendor lock-in, and accountability are some of the issues that clients — both large and small or medium-size businesses — raise most of the time. SaaS are typically fit-for-all, so customization is another nagging issue. And, the issue of interoperability and portability also comes up.
We have considered these issues in detail here:
www.executivebrief.com/blogs/the-pros-and-cons-of-saas-part-2
www.executivebrief.com/blogs/the-pros-and-cons-of-saas-part-1

The Next SaaS Wave

While I agree that SaaS is part of a larger business model, it’s useful to briefly frame where SaaS has been, where it might go and what it means to existing ISV’s, the enterprise and the advancement of cloud services.

Many of successful SaaS vendors to date have the following characteristics:
1. New ventures designed specifically for SaaS;
2. Point solutions developed for departments and small business;
3. Solutions operated, managed and delivered on a closed platform;

The appeal to customers has been:
1. No capital expense;
2. Ease of use;
3. Attractive pricing and flexible service terms;

However, in order to provide these benefits, SaaS vendors have had to tightly manage their operational costs, so integration requirements have been kept to a minimum. This is one of the reasons that most SaaS vendors focused on point solutions that were not mission critical to the business.

The current economic conditions have the potential to move SaaS beyond point solutions and blur the boundaries between on-premise and off-premise software. As traditional on-premise ISV’s consider providing SaaS offerings, many will quickly realize the significant investment required to operate and support SaaS. While, ISV’s are the content suppliers with expertise in software development and technical support, SaaS requires application delivery capabilities and end-user support expertise. So ISV’s will either need to make significant investments to develop and/or acquire the needed IT infrastructure, operations capabilities and end-user support, or create new alliances with partners that already have these required assets and skills. To their credit, Salesforce.com was one of the first to recognize this and created a SaaS platform service for ISV’s.

This bifurcated model has the potential to create new innovation with respect to software delivery life-cycle processes, security, integration, provisioning and pricing. Some of the innovation will come from new SaaS platform vendors by leveraging virtualization and SOA technologies to obtain a competitive advantage. SaaS platform vendors understand they need to provide value added services in order to attract ISV’s. We may see SaaS platform vendors specialize in areas such as mission critical enterprise services and leverage SOA services, such as Enterprise Service Buses (ESB), and offer federated security services to make it easier to integrate with on-premise enterprise applications and other service platforms.

Cloud services may also benefit from this distributed model because development and testing by ISV’s will create peek demands for infrastructure resources that need to be dynamically provisioned and scheduled for usage. This is the essentially a core competency of grid-computing, which is at the architectural foundation of cloud service vendors such as Amazon (EC2 & S3) and Google. Needless to say, traditional on-premise solutions will also leverage cloud services in a similar manner.

The next wave of SaaS has the potential to significantly reduce IT costs, provide businesses with flexible service platforms and provide IT with the necessary confidence and experience to move mission-critical applications into the cloud.

Growing in 2009 with SaaS

Execution without planning is foolheardy. But planning without execution is failure.

Success doesn't start with a perfect plan...just a plan, followed by action, evaluation, and adjustments as necessary.

Two of my favorite quotes come to mind when I think about SaaS and what it can do for all business, large or small.

When a company is looking at trying to prosper in 2009, they better start thinking efficiency. Employees are going to have some accountability in how they spend there day. "Software as a Service" can make this all happen, without any spending, complete your free evaluation, set up your monthly payments it may not be "perfect" but it's a plan. Once you have your time management software in place you will now be able to track project time, billable time, or just day to day activities. Is all resources necessary, can I get more billable time from my resources? Now you will have the reports to justify your new 2009 economic strategy or at least an awareness. Trying to build this type of software in house always adds extra internal costs and the adoption for internal systems is almost zero. Look into project tracking, know what is going on. A great place to start is www.toptenreviews.com check out time management section. TopTens gold award winner was DOVICO Software, www.dovico.com, SaaS version selling at $9.75 per month. They do not put any roadblocks up when trying to purchase, no contracts, no setup fees. Their customer base is very extensive including players like MacAfee, Hilton Hotels, Sisters of Mercy.

Executing an SaaS plan is an extremely easy, from there you can adjust as necessary.

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