Tag Archive for 'enterprise'

McKinsey on SaaS

Published by Ben Kepes on June 13, 2008 in Business, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

RobinB sent me the latest McKinsey enterprise software report. It makes for interesting reading and will validate what SaaS vendors already know. It’s very interesting that a large number of respondents described SaaS as the most important trend impacting the business, this shows that SaaS goes beyond simply another way of delivering software, but actually delivers (or can deliver) added value to customers. Customer criteria for choosing SaaS providers are, unsurprisingly, weighted in favour of quick deployment, the vendor track record and costs. The two graphs below highlight these results;

New Picture (1)

New Picture (2)

There are some interesting results in terms of software budget spread - it shows that smaller business are spending less on traditional software licences, and more on subscription services than their larger business brethren. It also shows the expectation that this trend will ramp up over the coming year.

New Picture (7)

New Picture (6)

Finally, and not unexpectedly, there are some interesting results in terms of both decision making process and vendor preference across different sized businesses. Larger enterprises show a far higher incidence of expressing a preference for SaaS to be supplied by a traditional mega-player (as opposed to an incumbent or startup). SMEs however tend to prefer the smaller, more agile and proactive startups and SaaS incumbents.

New Picture (5)

So… what are the takeouts from all of this?

  • Traditional software vendors need to think long and hard about whether they can successfully transition to SaaS
  • SaaS startups are best to focus their attention on the SME market
  • SaaS is gaining traction rapidly
  • SaaS vendors need to focus strongly on deployment and integration
  • Traditional vendors should be concerned, their lunch may not being eaten yet but it’s getting closer
Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

Scoble on Google for Enterprise…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 14, 2008 in IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 0 Comments

Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on Google’s moves into enterprise over here. His comments come after seeing a demo of a Cemaphore product called MailShadow for Google Apps, which synchronizes email and calendar items between Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and Gmail/Google Calendar.

Now there are already products that do that but they tend to be a little clunky and not up to enterprise level use. Scoble sees this product (and bear in mind it’s a third party product) as being proof enough that Google will end up in enterprise eventually.

As Scoble points out;

…the early adopters have already moved. When I ask audiences what they are using now, I see more and more Google customers.

I can’t think of a situation where the enterprise didn’t eventually follow the early adopter crowd. It might have taken years, but they do follow eventually.

My take is a little different - Enterprise will move to cloud based apps given time (their benefits are obvious and eventually CIOs will work it out too), but Google won’t necessarily be the victor in this battle. While the big vendors (Oracle, SAP, MS et al) have significant amount to lose by changing to a cloud based provision in a hurry - they can begin to move people - in the way Cemaphore wants to slowly wean users off MS and into Google, so to could the big players shift the paradigm. The question is whether they have the balls to risk their legacy earn to do so.

Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »