SaaS Grows Up (and busts out of the Silo)
It’s time to grow up….and learn to play nice with others.
SaaS adoption in the enterprise has definitely increased. But with that organizations are increasingly asking SaaS applications to start working with both other SaaS applications and the company’s legacy applications as well. According to recent studies by both Saugatuck and Forrester suggest that integration has surpassed security and compliance as Enterprise IT’s chief concern with implementing (or growing) SaaS applications.
This is an extremely encouraging sign. It shows the acceptance of SaaS as a legitimate enterprise software solution by the majority of Enterprise IT shops. Up to now, SaaS has been primarily a departmental sale. HR departments buy Taleo for human capital management, Marketing buys Marketo for marketing analysis, and call centers buy SupportSoft to manage their ticketing. As you know from past posts, selling immediately recognizable value at the departmental level is key to a strong success story in SaaS andwe can see how that has happened.
But now these apps are growing up and reaching across the organization (growing your app is another key SaaS sales strategy.) When that happens, IT is willing to accept the app’s growth, but needs it to do more now. Enterprise IT doesn’t want a separate employee record in Taleo from their payroll system. The want to be able to correlate all this marketing data back to their sales productivity, and they want to use the same master customer record for their ERP system as for their ticketing system. And they don’t want to have different log-ins for each employee, they want a single sign-on solution for all of their SaaS as well as on-premise apps (ala TriCipher.)
So SaaS applications have to stop being Silo’s that work just inside themselves. They need to start using web services to integrate with other SaaS apps and with legacy applications. By doing so, they’ll open up three great new areas for growth
- Increased Functionality by working with other Apps
- Enterprise Growth by integrating with existing Apps
- The Opening of New Sales Channels
Their is so much to talk about in each of those three areas, they will get their own posts in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, think about adding web services, playing nice with others and growing up. It’s a great time to be an adult.
Posted: May 22nd, 2008 under SaaS - Software As A Service, Uncategorized, Web Services, Web applications.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from Mike Oliver
Time: June 11, 2008, 12:31 pm
I can see the day when a business man can subscribe to a service and with no programming at all other than filling in forms and dragging some boxes around, he can build a business solution that gets some data from his company’s SF.com account data, some data from the Marketing Department’s Coghead applications, some data from the internal Inventory System and some data from a new application he created that decorates and extends one of the SF.com tables and one of the Inventory tables and deploys all of that into His own XWiki internal site that he has moved over to OpSource because it is cheaper and greener than his own data center.
I do think the pundits have it wrong on when such an Enterprise 2.0 solution can happen and it isn’t 2013.
Comment from Scott Chate
Time: June 11, 2008, 12:50 pm
One of the things we’re really excited about at Corent is the potential for integration that our SaaS products provide. We see the ability to integrate custom functionality with existing repositories and applications through web services and web service accessible adaptors as a key capability to unlocking the enterprise value of SaaS solutions. Whether those SaaS solutions are custom ones built with our SaaS-Factoryâ„¢ or existing SaaS offerings, the combination of application capabilities can benefit organizations who are simply concerned with making their technology work seamlessly for them.
Write a comment