Can the Fortune 500 Achieve Efficiency through Intra-enterprise SaaS?


SaaS is generally approached from the standpoint that a SaaS provider will write an application and sell it as a service to other businesses. This provides the many well known business driver benefits to those who use SaaS. Additionally, it is also well understood that the provider generates certain efficiencies via the centralization of the technical burden associated with the application. Is there another realm of SaaS applicability, however? In my opinion, absolutely!

Whenever I gauge the ’size’ of a SaaS provider, I look to see how many subscribers they support - not customers, but actual individual users. Many SaaS providers are in the 5,000 user to 20,000 user range across hundreds of customers. While these numbers are not small, some Fortune 500 companies have more employees than this, spread across numerous subsidiaries. Furthermore, the Fortune 500 write a considerable amount of software for use by their employees, with some software (such as HR/Expense Reporting/Time Management apps) used by virtually every employee. Can SaaS help organize this scenario? From the technical/architectural standpoint - yes it can. If an enterprise were to write software for their employees & subsidiaries with a single instance, multi-tenant model in mind, they would undoubtedly be able to centralize and organize administration while being able to distribute functionality. That’s powerful and efficient.

Have you worked on any intra-enterprise SaaS applications? Who were your tenants - subsidiaries or departments? Did IT realize efficiencies through the model?

 PS: If you are in the U.S., have a happy and safe 4th!

 

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July 4th, 2007
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Written by:
Gianpaolo's blog « Intra-enterprise SaaS
Posted on:
July 4, 2007 at 12:55 pm

[…]Today, on his blog, Sinclair asks: Can the Fortune 500 Achieve Efficiency through Intra-enterprise SaaS?[…]

Comment Number:
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Written by:
SaaS / Software-as-a-Service « NowSourcing
Posted on:
July 5, 2007 at 6:27 pm

[…] However, in reference to the news shown above, the question is begged, “Can the Fortune 500 Achieve Efficiency through Intra-enterprise SaaS?” So asks SaaSBlogs. The opinion is yes, citing it is also well understood that the provider generates certain efficiencies via the centralization of the technical burden associated with the application. […]

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SaaS, Appliances and Industrialisation « IT Blagger 3.0
Posted on:
July 10, 2007 at 2:37 pm

[…] SaaS, Appliances and Industrialisation 10 07 2007 Picked up a couple of posts over the last few days with respect to on-premise SaaS offerings.  First up was Gianpaolo Carraro over at Microsoft talking about intra-preneurial SaaS.  This is a topic that I’ve discussed a number of times and whilst I’m in complete agreement that taking the benefits of SaaS into the enterprise is a good thing I also feel that it’s in enabling business capabilities to be delivered as services that the real value lies; i.e. conceiving of the organisation as a set of collaborating service providers rather than just encouraging the IT to department make applications available in a new way.  Such a model enables greater focus on the capabilities that actually add value to the organisation and prepare the ground for future unbundling by raising management purview to business capabilities in place of applications and technology.  In this context I was also delighted to see Gianpaolo describe the supporting infrastucture as a ’service delivery platform’, since to me the need to deliver such future business capabilities as viable services with proper management, reporting and monetisation is a critical requirement and one often overlooked by SOA implementors.  Taking this argument a bit further - especially given that the question originated from Sinclair Schuller over at SaaS blogs (who is connected with Apprenda) - the question for me is whether the service delivery platforms to enable intra-preneurial SaaS are better built in house or leveraged from external platform provders?  For me the answer is that enterprises should absolutely use external utility computing platforms to support the service enablement of their business capabilities and stop wasting time, money and brain power grubbing about in the weeds of technology.  A big issue with this currently, however, is one of trust; many large companies have not yet achieved a level of comfort with externally provided, multi-tenancy service platforms that would enable them to make this giant leap forward. […]