It’s no longer news that
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a booming industry. We learned last
year that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion
planned to adopt one or more SaaS applications this year. And Gartner
projects that 25% of all new business software (CRM, ERP, SCM, etc.) will be delivered by means of SaaS by 2011. SSPA News – 2007 Service and Support Technology Trends
What’s becoming news is what’s happening online. We’ve talked here before about the influence of Web 2.0 on CRM development.
And the social networking achievements on the Web are compelling,
especially as they suggest methods for delivering better customer
service.
Datamonitor
recently suggested in a report on the pharmaceutical industry that it
should develop online communities as a tool for learning about its
customers. Datamonitor predicts that in the future, the focus of CRM will move beyond managing customer relationships towards community-building and support.
“Online communities can play a role in developing a successful predictive CRM strategy by enabling companies to monitor the evolving thought processes of their customers.” Highlights of Datamonitor report
More than a decade ago Sun Microsystems
proclaimed that “the network is the operating system.” Software
developers are of course attuned to the development path and behavior
of operating systems, since this is where their users and their
applications will work together. It should be no surprise that the
Internet, as the largest network ever created, demonstrates almost
daily new and original uses of applications. Here at Dovetail we take
note of these innovations.
Many commentators, including Bill
Gates, predict a future in which applications reside online, to be
accessed at need through the network. The basic concept of that vision
is that:
“independent services will exist on the network—either
the corporate intranet or the public Internet—that can be called by
multiple applications and shared among them. A good example is identity
management. In an SOA environment, a single
identity management service will manage all identity profiles in an
organization. Applications that need to match a profile to an
individual, for instance, to authorize a transaction or access to
corporate resources, will call on that single identity management
service. When someone’s file needs updating, for instance, to reflect a
change in job responsibilities, it can be done in a single instance
instead of requiring changes in multiple applications.” full story
As if to demonstrate this point, recent
speculation says that Google has the technology in place to unveil an
online tool in its Google Docs suite that parallels Microsoft’s
PowerPoint: Google Docs to support PowerPoint presentations soon
This
news gives rise to strategic analysis of the relative positions of
Microsoft and Google with regard to what used to be the ubiquitous –
and offline – desktop productivity suite:
“In the end traditional Office uses – word processing,
spreadsheets etc. – will move online leaving Microsoft’s shrink-wrapped
Office to become a high-end application. Office 2007 already resembles
more of a business intelligence tool than a way to type up memos.” Google Office vs. Microsoft Office: What’s the end game?
The forces at work on the evolution of software
are fairly massive, in today’s connected global operating system.
Microsoft may yield its original configuration to better online
operators, with services reduced precisely to majority needs, or
perhaps, to a degree, configurable on-demand. At the same time its
original software may unlock so much new value that it occupies or
dominates an entirely new market, especially as Microsoft becomes
increasingly visible in the CRM field.
Through it all, developments online will continue to beguile:
“It will be interesting to see whether Google offers a
YouTube-like service for easily storing and streaming business
presentations online. It amazes me that Microsoft doesn’t have such a
service up and running for Office 2007.” Cloudwatching
