Michael MaozThe day my wireless connection dropped on vacation turned out not to be the end of the world. I didn’t know if we’d get a table for dinner, or map the direction to everything in the world from cinema to fish market to town hall. I couldn’t search, couldn’t post, and walked out into the woods along the salt marsh, and it was good.
But the idea of SaaS and the market for SaaS-built applications keeps going through my mind. Who has been wildly successful? How many sales force automation companies have gone public and succeeded? One? How many in the Customer Service area? One? How about in the ERP/CRM area? One? Most have not succeeded, and even the few that have may have enriched the holders of the original founder shares, but that’s about it. Yes there is an exception, and it likely proves the rule.
And what about end users? Has SaaS from SaaS-only vendors revolutionized their business? Has it helped them avoid shelfware? There is not much data out there that can be independently verified by an external auditor that can say one way of the other. That is good in that people need advice on how to get the SaaS purchase decision right. But it isn’t good if you are trying to build a five year applications strategy and you are a large enterprise.
Guess this means I’m back from vacation. That was fun and this is fun, and done right, hopefully your software decisions will be too.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Esteban Kolsky August 21, 2009 at 10:43 am
Interesting question you ask, and as usual – early to market.
In my view the SaaS until now has been nothing more than a glorified label for hosted apps. We’ve said many times in the past that the Achilles heel for SaaS / Hosted apps remains the integration with corporate data and systems. I still maintain that.
However, I have been thinking lately about the move to the cloud (the real cloud that is just beginning to form, not the hyped-as-heck, already-released that lives in vendors’ minds). If we succeed in building it as we plan it, and early indicators are that we should, then we will have a game-changer for SaaS and integration between systems. The cloud should manage the security, transfers and data-flows, and the ability to connect from point A to point B in a secure environment. Sure, this is still a few years out, such as is SaaS.
But think how cloud-storage and cloud-execution will effectively change the game for SaaS companies.