I believe benchmarking is also big with http://xpenser.com but I’m not sure how much mileage users are getting from it.

I’d love to see some blog posts proclaiming how useful it is to have the benchmarking data from the perspective of the customer, rather than as a hypothetical value-add for the SaaS vendor.

http://todoondemand.blogspot.com/2008/07/problem-of-saas-integration.html

We started to work toward this at a client of ours in the ecommerce space. The theory was that aggregated sales data could be analyzed and then pushed back to suppliers to provide sales data and through the websites in real time to provide sales and pricing data in near real-time. We are only at the beginning of the project but it looks very promising.

From the website side of ecommerce, being able to determine upsell, cross sell and relative pricing information from aggregated data could have more value than anything the platform itself provides in cost-savings.

I believe that most clients of the SaaS vendor were comfortable with allowing the SaaS vendor to use this data as long as it remained non-identifying. The ones that complained did so for competitive reasons, not for privacy.

Not only can data be a value add via benchmarking, but there are hosts of other ways it can be used to add value.

Take the help desk example used above. Think about if the help desk system had a knowledgebase component that not only allowed users to publish knowledgebase entries for their own use, but also for use by any other tenant of the application.

Say Microsoft releases a patch late in the day that breaks certain exchange configurations. Users of the application on the west coast find a solution, and post the solution to the application wide knowledgebase. The next morning, users on the east coast are flooded with tickets related to the same issue, but they have the solution available to them already and can easily resolve the problem.

Just one example of many.

A great example of aggregate benchmarking in action is what Freshbooks does with their Industry Report cards. I’ve written about it here:

http://www.metricz.com/2007/09/freshbooks-saas-through-and-through/

As to the privacy aspect, I think opt in, is the way to go. That is also exactly what Freshbooks does:

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2007/04/17/report-cards-faq/#privacy

Agreed, I think that a possible way to incorporate this as part of the SaaS offering could be by allowing their tenants to opt in or out of the service making a concious decition of how their data is treated.

Clearly there needs to be value other than just the data to the people contributing to make this service available and I think that finding that value is the tricky part since it could be very different by tenant or even by industry.

Excellent point. Many (including myself) many times neglect the privacy ramifications. It’s very appropriate to establish a framework that helps individuals become more comfortable with the privacy aspects if certain contractual guarantees are in place.

The idea of sharing data across SaaS tenants raises the same sorts of questions. It might be difficult to explain to SaaS users the SaaS provider is using their data in this way, even if the result could be of value to them.