Addendum to SaaS Enablement Collaboration Post

Sep 25, 2006 by Matt Ammerman

In my last post, I mentioned that SaaS enablement technologies must support and promote vendor collaboration and integration. 

Here I’d like to provide one caveat to that statement:  independent software vendors still need a sense of identity.  If your SaaS enablement platform swallows all vendor recognition, what incentive do they have to market their own applications?

I raise this question after visiting the AppExchange from Salesforce.com.  The AppExchange is probably the best known, and definitely the most widely used, early SaaS enablement platform.  But here’s what I saw when I visited the AppExchange and clicked on an application category to peruse the selections:

I wonder if the makers of EDVantage lite and NPOrganizer lite are happy that they paid enough money to be sponsored, but not enough to have their company names displayed.  Not to mention the screenshots… which basically turn the decision of which app to choose into “the left one or the right one”.  These vendors have been stripped of their identities AND have paid extra money to be sponsored in the AppExchange only to present potential subscribers with a 50/50 chance of picking their software.  In this case, it would seem that both the AppExchange marketing model, and the AppExchange development model (i.e. the similar UIs) are working against the vendor.

You can’t fault the vendors on this one.  Instead, this brings up an important point for SaaS enablers.  Wrap your vendors in SaaS enablement, provide them a platform on which to launch service-oriented software, let them work together, but most importantly:

Let them create what they are capable of outside of your platform, not what they are capable of because they are using your platform.

I know - ”Easier said than done, Matt”.  To which I can only respond – stand by and check back often.