SaaS Requires Less Competition and More Collaboration

Sep 27, 2006 by Matt Ammerman

Part of the reason that the move from a traditional software business to the SaaS model presents difficulties to independent developers is just that:  they’re independent.  As SaaS finds roots in the workplace, end users demand the custom integrations and mobility that they’ve come to rely upon in their current (or previous) client-server infrastructure.  So what, or who, in the SaaS world provides these added values of integration, collaboration, and mobility?

With service-oriented companies spawning left and right, fueled by the “If It Ends In ‘r’ or ‘igg’ It Must Be Web 2.0 Goodness” milieu of today’s SiliconValley, and the seemingly blurry lines between an understanding of pure SOA and Web 2.0, true enterprise SaaS applications run the risk of becoming a fragmented pool of killer apps coupled with mashups.  That works in the consumer space, but the corporate world needs something a bit more solid.

The answer is in SaaS enablement technology.  The Internet by itself does not take the integration and collaborative hurdles away from independent SaaS providers, if anything it promotes disparity and a reliance on mashup-style 3rd party integration, as evidenced by Web 2.0.  For SaaS to thrive, a fundamental purely service-oriented layer is required – and this layer has come to be known as ‘SaaS enablement’ technology.

Consider SaaS enablement as an encapsulating device.  A platform that hosts SaaS applications and affords them the ability to share through the commonalities that the platform provides.  In many cases that we see today, these SaaS platforms provide common developer tools, application templates, and so on that aid the application developer in delivering an application that can speak the language of the common platform, and thus the other applications running in that platform.  The end goal of the platform, of course, is to then turn to the end user with a set of applications from different vendors that work together.  Sound familiar?  If you’re using a browser in Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or any other operating system right now to view this entry… it should.

And therein lies the key to enablement technologies.  As you SaaS enablers out there probably already understand, a successful enablement strategy MUST support and foster collaboration between vendors in a service-oriented environment.  Without a comprehensive strategy for providing a communication channel between disparate vendor applications for data and component sharing – you are not an SaaS enabler, you are simply a web hosting provider.

* UPDATE : In doing further reading regarding the SaaSCon conference held earlier this month… I came upon a post by Cliff Reeves of Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team.  The post summarizes the SaaSCon keynotes and if there is a general theme to be taken away from the group of keynote speakers, it’s that the growth of SaaS adoption in the enterprise will require “architecture evolution“, as Bill McNee of Saugatuck Technologies put it in his keynote.  Bill went on to say that SOA (i.e. the enablers mentioned above) will need to “to integrate a choice of SaaS vendors, and share data with and between them“.  Exactly, Bill.

Reading what the SaaSCon keynotes had to say made me quite excited about the direction of SOA… stay tuned.