Examining Examples of SaaS Platforms
You may be overwhelmed when you look at how many companies have created SaaS offerings — even companies whose primary focus is the on-premises model feel compelled to offer a SaaS version of their offerings (or are forced to by customer demands).
The reality is that SaaS comes in all shapes and sizes. Applications run the gamut from accounting to customer relationship management, supply chain management, financial management, and human resources. These integrated offers focus on a specific process, such as managing employees’ benefits, salaries, and annual performance reviews. These products tend to have several characteristics in common: They’re designed with specific business processes built in that customers can modify. They have moved in great numbers to the cloud because customers were finding the platforms too hard to manage and users needed access to the application while on the go.
SaaS is also popular for collaborative applications. This area is dominated by software that focuses on all sorts of collaborative efforts, including web conferencing, document collaboration, project planning, instant messaging, and even e-mail. In a sense, it was inevitable that these platforms would move to the cloud: These tasks occur throughout the organization and need to be easily accessed from many locations.
In the next section, we give you a taste for some of the vendors in the SaaS space, what they offer customers, and the issues to consider. We can’t possibly do this topic justice, but we give you a road map for how to understand the offerings and issues.
Packaged SaaS
We’ve written a lot about how Salesforce.com created CRM as a service and how it also created a rich ecosystem. It took a few years, but the company invested in its infrastructure, built a flexible and modular application, and made the navigation easier. But as with any successful venture, Salesforce.com competitors soon began entering the market in droves.
Knowing which companies to look at in today’s market isn’t as straightforward as you might think. This market is dynamic, so a company that looks promising today could be gone tomorrow. On the other hand, the small, emerging company that looks too new to consider could land a number of impressive customers and quickly become a major force. Likewise, companies that have been successful as on-premises software providers are streaming into the SaaS market. Some of these companies have come out with clumsy, difficult-to-use offerings, and others have polished cloud versions of their traditional on-premises software.
Companies in the packaged software market include the following:
NetSuite: Like Salesforce.com, NetSuite started as a CRM solution in 1998. It added financial accounting, distribution or supply chain management, manufacturing, and human resources and payroll services, and now has a full ERP offering for the small- and medium-sized business market.
Workday: Started by David Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft, Workday, Inc., is a human resources and financial management vendor. The company provides an easy, cost-effective way to run payroll and other processes in different legislative landscapes throughout the world. Although Workday started with a focus on mid-market customers, it now has a number of large enterprises as customers, as well.
Intuit: Provides a financial services suite of products that support accounting services for small- and medium-sized businesses. Some of Intuit’s largest brands include QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken, which all have SaaS offerings. The company provides a rich set of interfaces that enables partners to connect their services and applications into its environment.
RightNow: Acquired by Oracle in October 2011, RightNow provides a CRM suite of products that includes marketing, sales, and various industry solutions.
Concur: Focuses on employee spend management. Concur automates cost control via automated processes. Recall the discussion, earlier in this chapter, about SaaS vendor ecosystems — Concur is an example of a company that has not only built its own ecosystem, but has also partnered with Google Apps in order to extend its market reach to new businesses.
Oracle CRM On Demand: Focuses on a broad range of industry targeted solutions.
SugarCRM: Is a CRM platform built on an open source platform. The company offers support for a fee.
Constant Contact: A marketing automation platform that partners directly with Salesforce.com and other CRM platforms, Constant Contact automates the process of sending e-mails and other marketing efforts.
Some of the traditional on-premises software companies have also moved into the packaged SaaS market, including these:
Microsoft with its Dynamics package
http://crm.dynamics.com/online
SAP with its By Design offering for the small- to medium-sized business market
www.sap.com/solutions/products/sap-bydesign/index.epx
Oracle with its On Demand offering based on its acquisition of Siebel Software
www.oracle.com/us/products/ondemand/index.html
Collaboration as a service
Collaboration is one of the natural markets for SaaS. There’s enough bandwidth, and all companies are connecting to the Internet. In addition, more companies than ever have remote offices and workers across the globe. A team may be easily spread across 100 locations in 40 different countries!
The following list includes some of the companies that are focusing on collaboration as a service today:
SharePoint Online: Microsoft’s cloud collaboration as a service offering. Office 365 provides users with many of the traditional Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office, which can now be delivered as a SaaS with collaboration tools built in. Also, Microsoft offers the ability to run its e-mail server (Exchange Online). Customers now have the flexibility of choosing whether to implement Microsoft’s collaborative tools either on-premises or as a service.
www.cloudshare.com/sharepoint-cloud
IBM SmartCloud for Social Business: Formerly LotusLive, this collaborative environment includes a set of tools that covers social networking, instant messaging, and the ability to share files and conduct online meetings. IBM is publishing interfaces to allow other collaborative tools to be integrated into the platform.
www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/social/us/en/
Google Apps for Business: As many as 4 million businesses use Google’s various collaborative applications, including e-mail, document management, and instant messaging. It publishes APIs so third-party software developers can integrate with the platform. The Google Apps environment has a large Apps Marketplace where ISVs offer a variety of additional functionality.
Cisco WebEx: Cisco, which purchased WebEx in 2007, offers WebEx along with other offerings that allow companies to collaborate both internally and with their customers.
Zoho: An open source collaboration platform, Zoho includes e-mail, document management, project management, and invoice management. It offers APIs to its environment and has begun to integrate its collaboration tools with other companies, such as Microsoft. Zoho offers support for a fee.
Citrix GotoMeeting: Offers an online meeting service as part of its larger suite of virtualization products.
There are many other players in the field, including Jive Software, DropBox, Yammer, LinkedIn — and even the ubiquitous Facebook is making a play in the business collaboration field.