I thought this article via SearchCIO-MidMarket was worth pointing out for a few reasons.  First, it continues to reinforce the buzz about using on-demand delivery for enterprise software. In this case the granddaddy of them all – Enterprise Resource Planning.  Second, it lays out a bit of skepticism both about the general rate of adoption as well as SAP’s bold forecast of 10k customers on their Business ByDesign offering by 2010. 

A recent SearchCIO-Midmarket.com survey found that although 22% of CIOs plan to purchase an ERP system this year, only 9% of those plan on a SaaS product and 15% plan on a hosted product. A full 52% plan to use a traditional on-premise product and the rest selected "I don’t know."

And third, lays out some of the obstacles to that adoption (via Ray Wang of Forrester Research) including integration.

"…the downright dismissal of SaaS as an ERP option is because of concerns over integration, security, cost, performance and lack of customization to a business’ needs."

On the integration front, recent landscape activity includes ERP newbie Workday (founded by Peoplesoft founder David Duffield) acquiring integration on-demand company Cape Clear.  While not a blockbuster acquistion by an industry giant, it does point to needing an answer to the integration question as an enterprise SaaS application company.

Good article by Mark Hall of Computerworld taking a look at the platform strategies of both Google and Salesforce.com.  I continue to believe we are seeing the natural evolution from a new delivery model for applications (SaaS) to one that will eventually be applied to every major category of IT.  Local Seattle on-demand database company Blist just raised $6.5MM on their march to make databases easier to consume and use.

Interesting announcement and coverage today (here, here, and here) from Bungee Labs about the public beta of a new version of BungeeConnect.  Essentially this is a pure SaaS application development environment for programmers. They are defining "platform-as-a-service" slightly differently than Salesforce.com as:

"a single environment for delivering the entire software lifecycle as a service to increase productivity, shorten time-to-market and reduce overall costs for enterprise-class applications."

…and pointing out that the Salesforce approach requires a plug-in for working off-line whereas they do not.  Is that the right approach?  I’m not sure yet but the Bungee folks point out that although "off-line access has been a high discussion point" the "developers" told them "that if they are building live apps with interact services they couldn’t imagine why they would want to develop offline."

The off-line/on-line debate is an interesting one especially if you look at how Google launched Google Gears almost a year ago to enable off-line usage of its on-line apps like Gmail and Google Reader because "One of the most frequently requested features for Google’s web applications is the ability to use them offline."  Maybe this is an application usage (end-user) vs. application development (developer) argument?

We are seeing more and more companies with SaaS integration needs out there.  What the heck is that you may ask?  Well, consider the scenario where you use an on-demand application like Salesforce.com or Netsuite AND you happen to have a premise-based application that you use for other functions like SAP or Oracle.  You need to connect what is in the cloud with what is behind your firewall or you need to connect to your trading partner’s SaaS or premise-based application.

Meet the next generation of application integration challenges.  Proving again that there really are no new problems in enterprise IT, just shades of the same ones over and over, we now have an "extra-enterprise" application integration challenge that further blurs the line between EAI and B2B.  This is an emerging need as companies seek more and more capabilities from their SaaS applications and have to actually integrate them into existing infrastructure. 

An interesting development in this area…and the reason for my post title has to do with Salesforce.com’s new "Salesforce-to-Salesforce on-demand services" detailed in this article.  An interesting embrace of social networking concepts to allow different users of Salesforce to connect and share information.  Pretty cool. 

This is certainly one way to avoid the complexity of integration by standardizing the same application on both ends.  While technically this is a two-way connection, a complete approach to SaaS integration will have to accommodate the disparate systems that exist out there.

Continuing a theme of "Top 10" posts, here’s a good slide show from Bessemer Venture Partners on "being SaaSy" (via Adventurista).  They recently held a session on SaaS with a pretty impressive list of folks.  Some good nuggets here…

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=bessemer-s-top-10-rules-for-being-saa-sy-1202744982519196-4

| View | Upload your own