My money is on the Suites
About two months ago, I contacted a number of CIOs from large firms about their recent SaaS (Software as a Service) implementations. One of the things I heard from several of these executives was that they would implement more SaaS products only when SaaS vendors develop more applications. Why? These software buyers want an integrated suite of products and not have a bunch of best of breed SaaS applications that the customer must integrate.
Integration in the SaaS world is different than what one finds in the on-premise world.
Technologies from firms like Boomi, Pervasive and others make integration very easy. Just last week, in a conference call I had with Tenrox (a PSA (professional services automation) SaaS provider), I was pleasantly surprised at the number of out-of-the box integrations Tenrox has with leading ERP solutions.
But, customers will do what customers are wont to do. They will buy suites and the larger the suite, the greater the market appeal. So, in the SaaS world, like the on-premise world, we can expect more customers moving to vendors with larger, pre-integrated suites.
Case in point: Workday has released its Workday 10 solution. Now, their SaaS solution includes a number of talent management applications (e.g., recruitment and succession planning) to its core HRMS solution. Interestingly, just weeks before this announcement, one Workday customer expressed this exact functional need (i.e., integrated Talent Management and HRMS) to me. That customer wanted to move more of their application business to Workday and get out of the best of breed business.
Big SaaS suites will benefit at the expense of standalone applications…
Brian,
Interesting perspective, but I am somewhat confused. Why would we go with SaaS suites? It is counter to the concept of SaaS where we can find the absolute best component for each function and they work together via PaaS and IaaS as underlying layers.
I would be the first to say that what we have today is not real SaaS, rather an on-demand or hosted model of the same applications we used to have on-premise. In other words, we compromise security and integration for easier and cheaper maintenance — without the true benefits of SaaS. I will concede that in this model Suites are preferred, same as they were preferred when we did the same software on-premise: tighter integration, faster and easier processing, better security, etc.
However, if we are going to move to a true SaaS model — Suites would not be the winners or the preferred model…
Just my two cents.