SaaS, Business, Strategy, Web 2.0, Collaboration and a whole lot more
And I’m not referring to the share price turbulence of recent days.
Check out some products from Cupertino with, ahem, less than stellar success in the marketplace.
Newton anyone?
Thanks to Zoli for pointing this out. Yet another business area has been introduced to the SaaS concept, SmartTurn have created the first Warehouse Management System (and yet another three letter acronym - WMS). WMS seems a fairly logical place to be using SaaS, it’s a discrete area of business, one that is often geographically diverse and one that has obvious connections to ERP systems which are already delivered via SaaS.
Interesting to see that the chairman of SmartTurn is former CEO of Salesforce (so he should know a thing or two about SaaS models), and the series A financiers are Emergence Capital who only do SaaS VC funding.
What is also really interesting is to see the enterprise SaaS space start to get filled out. As mentioned before, I’m presenting at the ICT Outsourcing summit in a couple of months. When first approached to do so, Salesforce was the only well known enterprise level SaaS provider and they were joined by a few specialist SaaS application (expense claiming, HR management etc). We now have SAP with it’s SaaS product BusinessByDesign, Netsuite who recently IPO’d with their SaaS solution and others waiting in the wings.
Enterprise needs to sit up and listen, we’re rapidly nearing the time where most enterprise functions can be provided via SaaS and enterprise organisations need to be prepared to venture into this new and exciting area.
The Unreasonable men posted about what the future holds for Microsoft as a SaaS player. It’s a great post, some of which I even agree with! 
Part of the rationale for the UM’s point of view is a leaked Microsoft memo which outlines the closely couple nature between the new MS operating system and the Windows Live suite of services.
The UM however have an interesting perspective and one which stems from their involvement (I assume) within a large enterprise organisation. The UM say;
MS are in a unique position here. They own the desktop space, they own the email market. They have a growing and aggressive stance in the mobile market and they have a growing play in the unified comms space
.
All of these share one key attribute. You use them all many times a day, that is to say they own eyeballs. Many many more eyeballs then Google, and look at their ad funded revenue and subsequent market cap. If MS pull this off not only will they get you on the desktop licenses, they’ll get you on the live component AND tie it all up with some advertising revenue to boot!! Ambitious play, perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I’m pretty sure of the logic here.
Horses for courses. In an enterprise world, tied as it is to Outlook, MS Office in general and oftentimes IE to boot the above statement carries plenty of validity. However my contention is that the future is about small, nimble and agile organisations, the sort of organisations that run on Zoho, Google and Twitter. I use MS Office but I use Google apps or Zoho roughly 10 times as much as I do MS. Similarly I email with Google and browse with Firefox. We CRM with an Open Source/SaaS product and project plan, specify and Wiki with similar solutions.
So what does this all mean in relation to MS and SaaS?
Sure they have consumer eyeballs and enterprise eyeballs, but consumers will tend more and more to being earlier adopters and will outrun MS developments and even enterprise is starting to see the value in the new, nimble and alternative options.
My pick is that the operating system/windows live tie up will buy MS some time, but a reinvention is what’s needed if they really want to win this race. Can they do it?
Loading ...Is Apple's MobileMe being pushed onto iTunes users a case of
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Mobile will displace fixed-line broadband...
Total Voters: 8
Start Date: June 21, 2008 @ 4:41 pm
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Is the Judge who posted porn to his personal website;
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Start Date: June 17, 2008 @ 11:37 am
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So, is the ability to sms-to-donate a case of;
Total Voters: 9
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Is advertising a sustainable revenue model for web businesses?
Total Voters: 13
Start Date: May 19, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
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