May 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Is SaaS just throwaway software?
Is SaaS (software as a service) really destined to replace on-premises software in the enterprise? The smart money seems to say so. Industry analysts certainly say so, and if you've noticed all the on-premises vendors launching SaaS versions of their software these days, it too appears to indicate that SaaS is the wave of the future.
According to the experts, SaaS is cheaper to deploy and maintain. It is also able to offer innovation at the speed of light, they say.
But maybe there is another story here that is not being explored. Could it be that SaaS software, in this age of planned obsolescence, is really just throwaway software? Throwaway software by the way is not my term but Simon Jacobson’s, an AMR analyst. Jacobson suggests this may be the case.
According to Jacobson, some companies are using SaaS as an interim solution. Try it for a year, two, maybe three, and when the time is right, dump it for something better.
That something better could be another SaaS application, yes, which in turn could be thrown away when it gets replaced by the new, more innovative solution that comes along.
Or it could be replaced by a more traditional on-premises application from a major, trusted vendor with a long history of understanding the needs of the enterprise?
SaaS does not require companies to make much of an investment, either in dollars or time. And in the sense that living with software is in some ways a relationship, SaaS requires less "commitment."
The recent announcement by SAP that its BBD (Business By Design) SaaS platform and applications will be delayed about 18 months cuts two ways.
It could mean that SAP can't compete very well in the new business model and it will be left behind by vendors that offer a solid SaaS solution to ERP, supply chain, CRM, and all of enterprise software right now.
Or, it could simply mean that the savvy IT buyers will look at this announcement and say, "OK, so we wait 18 months or 24 months until SAP gets its act together."
Why or how could they wait? The answer is simple. SaaS allows them to wait. They simply subscribe to a SaaS service that gives them what they need for the next 24 months, without the big investment up front, without the major commitment, and when SAP launches BBD, they simply throw away whatever it is they used in the interim.
If my theory is correct, SaaS may suffer the same fate as some prehistoric species that scientists say had so little skeletal structure that they left nothing behind for scientists to dissect. So, 10 years from now, not unlike 10 million years ago for that mythical prehistoric species with no backbone, no one will even remember SaaS existed.
What I am suggesting is that, with SaaS, we might just be witnessing a blip on the software screen that will not last.
What did you have for lunch a week ago Friday? Can't remember, can you. Someday we may say, what did we use until BBD or the Oracle 15i solution came along? Who knows, who cares.
Don't count the major on-premises vendors out. In a unique turn of events, it may be SaaS that becomes the dinosaur and not SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, et al.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on May 21, 2008 03:00 AM
May 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)
IT benefits from big vendors' slow on-demand plays
I won't exactly eat the words I wrote when I said the spate of BI acquisitions a several months back meant boutique vendors were on their way out, leaving IT with far fewer choices in the future. Instead, due to the fast maturing SaaS side of the software industry, I will amend those words, somewhat drastically.
To refresh your memory, the accelerated pace of acquistions such as SAP's purchase of Business Objects, IBM's Cognos play, and Oracle's buyout of Hyperion led me to believe point solutions were fast becoming an endangered species.
Now, I have to agree with Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.
"The [SaaS] market has opened up tremendously to a rich infusion of on-demand business models, and that is a positive force in the industry," Greenbaum told me.
I couldn't agree more.
Add to this the fact that the three top vendors aren't fully in the game yet, and you can see how boutique-provider extinction remains a ways away.
SAP, for example, has backed off its proposed 2008 launch of BBD (Business By Design). SAP put a lot into legitimizing the concept for the enterprise but has been forced to slow down its delivery.
Oracle, on the other hand, has been in the market for many years, but it doesn't have a product comparable to what BBD promises. Oracle has instead more or less followed the ASP model of hosting. Moreover, CEO Larry Ellison has said Oracle does not intend to enter the smaller end of the SaaS market. See Bill Snyder's "Out in the cold: small businesses' ERP deficit" for more on what is unfolding in this space.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is just at the beginning of its real SaaS efforts, announcing only late last month that it will begin hosting its CRM solution.
Such hesitations and nascent efforts from the big players open the floodgates for a deluge of even more vendors.
Smaller, more nimble companies such as PivotLink, a SaaS BI vendor, now have the opportunity to show the world what they can do.
PivotLink was built from the ground up as a SaaS BI solution, and if Greenbaum is right, thanks to SaaS "we will see a lot of 'fun' solutions" like this.
PivotLinks customers include REI, Shakleee, and Rossignol -- not a bad list of midsize companies.
The secret behind PivotLinks' current customer list is probably the fact that its implementation, like many SaaS solutions, requires no major upfront investment, can be deployed rapidly, and is significantly easier to roll out than an on-premises solution. A company such as PivotLink can say to its customers, "Send us a simple flat file." The service allows customers to send unstructured data, which it analyzes and processes in memory for a real-time response. And PivotLink is just the first of many to come.
So what might be bad news for SAP is good news for companies that want choice and flexibility without tying up their budgets for the next year or two.
And, the key area where you will see major SaaS growth is in BI, says Greenbaum. Prior to SaaS, BI has always been expensive and hard to implement. With SaaS, BI lowers the TCO without sacrificing a lot of functionality.
BI and analytics in general are ripe for SaaS players because there is a great deal of synergy to pull in to an on-demand model.
So, let's just say I take back what I said. Companies will in fact have the variety of solutions they want without fear of major lock-in with a single vendor.
Then again, the giants don't give up easily.
If anything, Microsoft is emblematic of a company that refuses to throw in the towel. Redmond will keep trying until it gets it right. Maybe that's where the smart money should place its bet -- because I'm not so sure SAP has the same intestinal fortitude or that Oracle will ever decide that they just can't buy what they need.
We'll just have to wait and see.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on May 13, 2008 03:00 AM
April 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Salesforce and Google ally -- for now
Hamlet: Act I, Scene V
Ghost
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, --
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce! -- won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:
O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!
I'm not sure who will be the queen and who will be the ghost as an outcome of the "global strategic alliance" between Google and Salesforce announced this week, but I do predict there will be one of each.
"O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!" says the ghost of Hamlet's father, and for reasons I will explain, this glorious -- er, I mean, global -- announcement of a close relationship between Google and Salesforce reminds me of that very scene in Act I.
In the announcement, Kraig Swensrud, vice president of applications at Salesforce, described in detail the very tight integration between Salesforce's CRM app and Google's growing productivity suite.
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power/So to seduce!
All is sweetness and light at the moment. If a salesperson equipped with the integrated apps puts a "to do" task in Salesforce, it will appear in the Google calendar entry. If two people are working on a presentation at the same time -- say, an art director changing the colors of the bars and a finance person changing the number of dollars in the bars in the graph -- both will see, in real time, the changes being made. Gmail messages will be automatically sent to leads or contacts in the proper component of Salesforce.
It is indeed quite an integration effort from both parties, due in large part because both companies have the same 100 percent Web- and multitenant-based architecture. On top of all that, next summer, the partnership will become even more integrated by giving customers a single bill that combines both companies' services.
However, my skeptical mind tells me the seeds of discontent are being sown alongside the integration. Because let's face it, both Mark Benioff and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no fading flowers.
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts
How, I ask, will both companies and their leaders be willing to compromise their portion of the partnership if at some later date the other decides it wants to upgrade its service in a way that is not immediately compatible with or beneficial to the other's application?
Who will give in if Google wants to upgrade Apps in such a way that does not sit well with Benioff and company? Who will give in if Google wants to partner with an ERP company that is not part of Salesforce AppExchange? How will Google react if an AppExchange member offers a productivity suite integrated with Salesforce that suddenly grows in popularity?
I see trouble ahead.
O Mark, what a falling-off was there!
Like all great partnerships that fail, there are winners and losers. One needs the other more. So who will be the queen and who the ghost?
Google will receive the crown, and Salesforce will be crowned. Google will buy out Salesforce, or the two will come to a parting of the ways, in which case Google will have lined up another CRM company, leaving Salesforce to scrounge around for another productivity suite that has the brand recognition and industry clout of a Google.
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast
Salesforce meets Microsoft? Stranger things have happened.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 15, 2008 03:00 AM
April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
SaaS favors Google over Salesforce
To say that strategy and technology are finally becoming interlinked in business is pure BS.
It has always been thus.
I'm certain that when the first cash-register salesman convinced the first general-store owner to buy a cash register, the sale went through because he was able to convince the owner that this new technology would improve the general store's bottom line.
SaaS as strategy
Even when companies bought and failed to successfully deploy technologies for technology sake in the late '80s and early '90s, you'd have to say they were well-intentioned. By that I mean, no company decided to spend $100 million on SAP R3 because it was cool technology. Some cash-register salesfolks reincarnated as SAP sales representatives convinced them it would, eventually, improve the bottom line.
There is a difference today, however, as Web 2.0 and SaaS (software as a service) are emerging to create technologies that perfectly serve businesses virtualization as a business strategy.
According to Ben Pring, vice president at Gartner Research, virtualization is just a synonym for the ongoing trend to outsource more and more processes.
Call it what you will, Web 2.0 or SaaS, coupled with outsourcing is a match made in heaven.
"First companies bought SAP instead of using home-grown ERP; then they used companies like EDS to handle customer support; now SaaS is just another version of this story," Pring says, who will elaborate on these points at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas this week.
I suppose this is all about that old chestnut, "Focus on your core competence and let somebody else do the rest."
But what Pring predicts will happen next really caught me off guard. He believes that a company such as Salesforce.com can grow linearly during the next three to four years but that there will be no exponential, sudden leap in the number of customers it serves. And if it did happen, Salesforce.com couldn't handle it anyway.
Enter a company like Google.
"Google is prepared for the exponential. They built out the architecture and the infrastructure to manage that kind of growth," Pring says. Whereas Salesforce celebrated its 1 millionth user a couple of months ago, it is estimated that Gmail serves well over 5 million users.
What's more, as I mentioned in "A step closer to the integrated cloud," Google is looking to acquire ISVs from the CRM, ERP, and BI markets. By combining those offerings with front-end productivity applications, Google could create a service that, over time, will be hard to beat -- a back-end, front-end suite that Pring believes businesses will more readily buy than anything Salesforce develops via its AppExchange partnership model.
Google: Point SaaS solution killer
Google certainly has the cash to acquire ISVs to round out a complete application suite. Perhaps we are witnessing the oncoming death of point SaaS solutions in favor of those who can offer complete solutions and back it up with infrastructure that the enterprise respects. If this is the case, Google’s brand, positioning, and perception of reliability -- real or imagined -- means that Google will soon pose a significant commercial threat to all traditional ISVs.
In this, Google represents the changing of the guard, one that heralds a new wave of upstarts who know how to exploit the Internet. As I said up top, strategy and technology are and always have been interconnected. But companies like Google understand better than most how to leverage the emerging Web 2.0 technology in order to give companies a competitive edge.
Yes, Salesforce opened the door. But it may be Google and its kin who will be the ones to boldly step through.
In the short term, Pring advises enterprises to review their application portfolios to ascertain where SaaS can deliver advantages and then go about making the best use of it. But remember, there are not that many areas where SaaS is part of the equation today. CRM, HR -- but beyond that, there is not a lot out there, yet.
For the long term, Pring suggests keeping your eyes on the SaaS and Web 2.0 vendors but also watch how the old-guard likes of Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft respond.
My advice? Outsourcing, in all of its forms, sounds good in theory, but as outsourcing initiatives have proved over time, it takes solid analytical thinking to understand where it makes sense and where it doesn't.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 8, 2008 03:00 AM
January 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
SaaS means business-to-business
Software as a service's ability to establish hubs for b-to-b data integration is winning over large and small converts alike
For the most part, SaaS (software as a service) has been an evolutionary tale, one that offered quick wins to smaller players at the outset in hopes of eventually appealing to midsize companies and, ultimately, large organizations.
But one market in particular -- EDI between suppliers and buyers -- has already seen some very large players converting to SaaS, as Bell Brands, Welch's, Arena Brands, and Target are tapping its ability to establish a hub for business-to-business data integration.
To be sure, SaaS enables smaller suppliers to meet the integration demands of big customers such as Bell and Target without having to commit the IT and budget resources necessary to perform EDI in-house or via a managed solution. But SaaS-based b-to-b data integration goes beyond that.
Jim Frome, chief strategy officer at SPS Commerce, lays out the typical challenge for a supplier dealing with a company such as Target.
Target publishes a set of rule books that specify the business processes, workflow, and points of integration that a supplier must comply with fulfilling an order Target has placed.
EDI is the traditional solution that suppliers use to map their processes to a customer's requirements –- a.k.a. its rule books.
These rule books are not trivial.
“Rule books are three, four, even five inches thick, and there are multiple rule books, one for shipping to a distribution center, one for shipping to a home address, another for shipping from a foreign port,” Frome says. The list goes on, he adds.
Obviously, adhering to the rules is well worth the trouble if your buyer is as big as Target. And if you had only Target as a customer, it wouldn’t be so bad. But say you have a dozen customers, each with its own sets of rule books. EDI comes at a price, both literally and figuratively.
Companies either develop in-house IT expertise, most likely requiring a full-time staff, to create and manage the various interfaces with dozens of customers, or they go the route of a managed service that takes care of EDI for the company. Neither solution is cheap, nor is it likely to keep up with the constant flow of changes made by customers in a highly competitive marketplace such as CPG (consumer packaged goods).
Another trend driving suppliers to seek an easier way to perform EDI is their penchant for outsourcing. And not just IT. We're talking outsourcing just about everything they do: manufacturing, inventory control, logistics, freight forwarding, and more.
All this outsourcing is making supply-chain management that much more complex. It also means that the entities performing the bulk of the work for the supplier have to act on the supplier's behalf when the customer wants answers or changes.
The on-demand SaaS model enables these entities to respond on behalf of suppliers in a timely manner, whether they are located in the United States or Asia. So how does SaaS do that?
Well, a company such as SPS Commerce creates what the industry calls a Trading Partner Integration Center. Instead of a supplier having to reinvent the wheel -- the data integration code and mappings -- for each customer, the TPIC's multitenant SaaS architecture already has connection points to most of the major retailers in, for example, CPG.
When the customer, Target, changes a business rule, each supplier is quickly mapped and in compliance with the new rules.
As Frome says, without SaaS, you find that each supplier’s IT staff has the same maps as other suppliers’ IT staffs. Very redundant, I would say.
Now, using SaaS, the maps are probably more reliable too because they have been, as Frome says, battle-tested and debugged by thousands of suppliers on a daily basis. Obviously, multitenancy also costs less as the TPIC leverages its solution to many customers and gains economy of scale.
Strangely enough, although suppliers are those most in need of a solution like this, it is the customers -- Target, Welch's, and so on -- that are actually buying into the solution. After all, when a supplier doesn’t get it right, the retailer suffers, too.
The more I cover SaaS as a reporter, the more respect I gain for the model, and the more I believe that in just a few more years it will become the entrenched incumbent waiting for some new upstart methodology to unseat it.
It should be an interesting process to watch.
Related articles:
• InfoClipz: Software as a service
• SaaS gains enterprise cred
• SaaS could hit a wall in 2008
• The five tenets of SaaS integration
• Calculating the cost of SaaS
• Factor sustainability into your SaaS
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 29, 2008 03:00 AM
October 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The five tenets of SaaS integration
The success of software as a service rests on IT
Contrary to what SaaS (software as a service) vendors claim -- namely, that their wares are pay-and-play -- SaaS requires intervention from IT.
Yes, three or four years ago, SaaS was rudimentary CRM, not much more than a contact database in the sky, says Simon Peel, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at Cast Iron Systems. But that picture has changed dramatically.
In fact, many SaaS solutions have become mission-critical. And as the model has moved from the departmental silo to full-fledged enterprise app, seamless integration with other mission-critical apps -- such as ERP, CRM, contract management, and supply chain management -- has proved key. In short, it's not just about importing names to Outlook anymore.
Here are the five tenets of SaaS integration, further proof of the lasting importance of IT.
1. Integration takes the hand of a professional
Not to pick on anyone, but sales force administrators have a simple world to live in compared with hard-core IT folks.
Yes, a sales operator can switch on a CRM app just as SaaS vendors promise. But there is a lot more going on when it comes to implementing a fully integrated SaaS solution effectively.
The first thing you want to plug in to your SaaS solution is the master data record of names, addresses, and phone numbers. That way, when a salesperson calls a prospect, he or she won't get a wrong number because data in your Oracle database wasn't synched with RightNow.
And it only gets more complex than that. What if a salesperson pushes the order button, but the SaaS CRM application isn't linked to the warehouse system?
Peel tells me of a major financial services company that uses 10 temporary employees to take data from one application and rekey it into another. If one of those temps doesn't show up for the day, some orders will not be placed. Here someone needs to understand the workflow and all the business processes from quote to cash -- and how to thread them together seamlessly.
2. Multiple parts mean multiple skills are needed
When a sales manger asks for an extract of data on customers or needs billing info and shipping, that's when the IT team will say, "We knew you'd need to come to us in the end."
Yes, you may be able to extract and import a CSV file into an Excel spreadsheet, but what happens when you need it again and again? That's when integration becomes an urgent problem that requires skills beyond the scope of a single person.
The Oracle guy may know the Oracle applications, but do they know how to write code that sends information up to a Web service hosted by the SaaS vendor?
You need somebody who knows both of those things, Peel says. And this is where having a versatile set of skills in the form of the IT department down the hall comes in handy. After all, if you want to perform bidirectional synchronization in real time and you want it immediately, who you gonna call?
3. Shortages translate to SaaS-IT codependency
Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform and product marketing at Salesforce.com, is quick to flip the "SaaS needs IT" idea on its head.
"IT needs SaaS," Kelman says, adding that every CIO he talks to complains that they don't have enough time, people, or hardware infrastructure -- a good reason why they are starting to look at SaaS.
Kelman does admit that Salesforce APIs are at the lowest level of how every customer integrates and on top of that sits "some type of middleware solution."
Salesforce offers native connectors to support some of the most common and simple use cases with the likes of Oracle and SAP, but moving beyond, say, master data synchronization requires IT and middleware integration ISVs.
4. Integration in a box or as a service may help broker SaaS-IT peace
Aware of a hole in the SaaS-IT relationship, vendors are moving to fill it.
For example, Procuri, a company that offers SaaS solutions for spend management, strategic sourcing, and contract and supplier management, has partnered with Seeburger, an integration middleware vendor, to offer integration as a service. Procuri takes the Seeburger Business Integration Server and hosts it.
Cast Iron's solution is offered in a box, either behind the firewall or also as a service. The company packages up the kinds of IT skill sets required for integration. Peel doesn't claim that you can buy the appliance and ignore IT. Rather, he would say his company's solution makes integration easier for IT.
As an example, he points out that the appliance allows IT to configure systems for integration using drop-down menus rather than code.
5. At its heart, integration is a four-part story
The major integration issues for IT typically center on four technologies.
First, connectivity to a SaaS solution as an end point: The middleware must understand the Web service calls on one end and the database calls on the other.
Second, mapping -- transforming data from one form to another.
Third, intelligent workflow that understands the business rules in play for each operation and that can flag duplicate records.
Finally, guaranteed delivery -- the ability to ensure the right information went from one application to another.
Salesforce's Kelman is right when he says we are at a tipping point in SaaS deployments. It's no longer a question of whether IT admits SaaS into the enterprise. It's a question of how IT makes it work.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on October 30, 2007 03:00 AM
July 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Google's Postini acquisition and Salesforce's development capabilities lend enterprise-level chops to the software-as-a-service model
With two important announcements, one this week and one last, we are finally starting to see a critical mass build around SaaS (software as a service).
And, as I've written before, it is time for enterprise IT to take the model seriously.
Last week we saw Google -- after a four-month partnership with Postini -- decide to buy the security and compliance SaaS vendor outright. This week Salesforce.com finally dropped the other shoe, officially calling its offering what it had already unofficially become, a PaaS (platform as a service).
In terms of gauging the likely success of Salesforce's strategy, the only thing I'm unsure of is whether the acronym PaaS will catch on as well as SaaS has.
By dubbing itself a platform company, Salesforce is now poised to lead the charge -- well, to be one of the leaders, anyway -- that will see hosted applications dominate the software industry. Traditional vendors will just have to jump on the bandwagon whole-heartedly, and ramp up their current half-hearted attempts at hybrid SaaS solutions, or be pushed aside.
Salesforce's Summer 07 launch includes the kinds of components any developer would expect from an enterprise-level environment. For example, the platform now offers multiple sandboxes. In addition to the usual production and development environments, there are now staging and training environments, lending support to all of IT's software development requirements.
On top of that, there is the Apex programming language, which, if you take Salesforce at its word, is the "world's" first multi-tenant programming language, according to Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing at Salesforce. Collins also says the language is "Java-like in its syntax."
I use the phrase critical mass here to illustrate that the SaaS phenomenon started slowly with Salesforce.com, but, as the model gained credibility, SaaS solutions have reached into other application categories such as human resources, supply chain management, and business intelligence.
Salesforce has been the leader here, continually taking the SaaS model to the next level. It opened its APIs to third-party ISVs, in essence giving its customers a reason to stay with Salesforce by offering services it lacked.
Now, just when SaaS growth might have stalled, either because it wasn't offering the custom development capabilities enterprises require or had multiplied into too many proprietary systems, we see Salesforce's platform gaining depth and breadth with its own language and toolsets. If done well, Salesforce could become the standard-bearer for the SaaS industry.
Google's acquisition of Postini is equally important, as Postini -- which provides e-mail security and compliance capabilities, including archiving for e-discovery -- will give Google far more enterprise cred.
But when I asked Postini founder Scott Petry why he thinks Google took the extra step in buying his company rather than continuing the growing close partnership that started about four months ago, Petry said that, with the acquisition, "Google gets the people, the technology, the processes, the back-end infrastructure, the DNA we have in delivering enterprise applications."
Postini's enterprise-grade policy management allows companies to ensure adherence to company-level policies such as who can share what information with whom. Today, Postini does that for e-mail and IM over the Web.
Because of this, the theory goes, enterprise-level customers and their IT departments can now feel more comfortable using a hosted e-mail platform. But Petry's answer reveals that something more is afoot here than simply giving Google e-mail security and archiving capabilities for Gmail and IM.
And so I asked another Postini executive, Sundar Raghavan, vice president of solutions marketing, about the rest of Google's applications, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Raghavan didn't disappoint.
"Our policy management platform is flexible and extensible," Raghavan said. "I expect our product managers to work with Google's product managers to see how to apply this technology to documents and spreadsheets."
Built on an SOA and XML architecture, the benefits of SaaS have always been obvious. Until now, however, the model lacked certain technology attributes necessary for adoption in larger environments.
But now, with development, security, and compliance out of the way, there aren't many hurdles left for SaaS to clear before it becomes the dominant force in the software industry and the enterprise.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 17, 2007 03:00 AM
May 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Google, Salesforce may make software history
Reports say Google is about to strike a deal with Salesforce.com. If true, the deal could have far more significance than simply sharing and exchanging mashups.
As big as Google is, it can't change the high-tech industry
single-handedly. But a deal with Salesforce that embeds Google Apps inside the CRM vendor's service could become that moment in high-tech history that changes the way companies think about office productivity applications forever more.
Salesforce could offer its customers a full set of office productivity apps at a low, low price -- as an alternative to using Microsoft Office.
If this were to happen, first impressions are critical, meaning both Google and Salesforce better get all their ducks in a row to ensure that the productivity applications are easily integrated into the CRM application service.
A second requirement to see this take off would be the inclusion of an ironclad SLA [Service Level Agreement] at the same professional level Salesforce offers for its own CRM applications. Google Apps currently has none, other than for Gmail, and that is not enterprise-ready at only 99.9% uptime.
In essence, the integration of office productivity applications with line of business applications would go a long way toward creating the long sought after single desktop view in which users no longer have to punch out to each separate application.
Rather, all applications are simply part of a pull down menu with users accessing each application as if it were just another feature on the desktop.
If every Web-based app came with Google Apps or something like it, perhaps StarOffice, it would give users the interoperability that they can't get now from Microsoft Office easily, unless they turn to SAP, which has an integration deal in Duet with Microsoft.
This deal could turn office productivity apps into a commodity item and make them ubiquitous, in that they would be an expected part of every SaaS service.
Today, every user expects a spell checker as part of their word processor, but some day every user may expect a word processor as part of their CRM, ERP, BI, PLM, or whatever application they use. All of it using ODF as the standard.
If high-tech has taught us anything, it is that nothing stays the same and no one stays on top forever.
The imprimatur of a business application like Salesforce, which is a leader in its market, with the single most popular online application in the history of the Internet, Google, may start as a ripple, but I predict it will end up as a tsunami that could, one day, wash away the largest software company of all time.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on May 21, 2007 11:09 AM
