Software-as-a-Service, SaaS, is driving – or perhaps riding shotgun with – an enormous, sea change in CRM.
The model of “monolithic business function and application” is being
broken down into smaller transaction sets and granular processes. The
model is using easy-to-build interoperable services that further
empower the customer-facing agent, and also deliver real-time analytics
that personalize the customer experience.
The true heart of this change is SOA,
the new Service Oriented Architecture for software, which is busily
re-engineering computing deployments around the world and at all scales
of enterprise. Because native SaaS is designed in the disciplines of SOA and built from the ground up to deliver Web Services, it would like to claim this sea-change credit for itself.
One definition of SaaS says:
“[...] a SaaS platform is a software and hardware
layer that allows the applications it hosts to be distributed in a
multi-tenant, service fashion without having to explicitly engineer the
distribution model.” – Taxonomy of SaaS Platforms
However, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison would disagree with the multi-tenancy part:
“It’s sheer nonsense: most companies don’t want
multi-tenant. It’s a convenience for a supplier. Most companies don’t
want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will
tolerate it.” – Ellison’s thoughts on Software-as-a-Service
Oracle has been developing methods to address Customer Data Sharing and this arises in a time of greater maturity for SOA, as enterprises increase their commitment to the architecture, on-premise as well as with the on-demand delivery of SaaS.
“Increase in the depth of customer sophistication and SOA
implementations – Rather than simply being about Web services or a
collection of shallow service implementations, companies are looking at
the more difficult and SOA-specific issues
of security, management, reliability, quality, governance,
process-driven composition and semantic integration. As such, it’s
clear that SOA has moved from an isolated,
proof-of-concept or small pilot concept to becoming mission-critical
and core to the long term efforts of organizations.” – SOA After the Hype
It seems likely in 2007 that larger enterprises, as well as smaller, will continue to explore on-demand, Saas services.
“SaaS is not simply for the small to medium size
enterprise, but for an organization of any size, even a large one, as
it offers increased choice, flexibility, and scalability.” – True SaaS
And CRM vendors too are
gradually changing their internal cultures and development
resource-allocations to reflect a true belief in the new, online
deployment model.
“While SAP has offered hosting for years, it has only in the last year gotten into the SaaS business with CRM, releasing SAP Sales On-Demand last February and following with modules for marketing and service … SAP dubs its on-demand CRM application “isolated tenancy,” providing a separate database for each customer.” – Is SAP eyeing ERP SaaS?
But SaaS should be kept in perspective. On-demand
is a market phenomenon, delivered across the largest network the world
has ever known. While SaaS offers many market attractions, such as
pricing, sampling, and ease of abandonment, the underlying software is
the real story, often obscured by the surface land-rush activity.
