The debate continues about the relative values of on-demand versus on-premise CRM solutions. Concerns about hosted services hinge on security and, most importantly, integration.
At
the beginning of this year we studied the Software-as-a-Service
situation in general and especially as it relates to Amdocs Clarify
owners, and the value of Dovetail CRM as
replacements for the Amdocs applications. We suggested that the Clarify
owner didn’t need to abandon the investment in Clarify from a desire
for greater agility and extensibility.
”...bring in thin clients, deploy them through the
Web for your outstations and field agents as well as through the
enterprise network, integrate them using the vast legion of Dovetail
APIs with third party systems in-house, use them to unlock the meaning
in your Clarify data, and run it all on the robust and extensible .NET
platform. And start to have a development path again.” – On-Demand CRM and On-Premise CRM
We should have included Dovetail WebServices in that list of components, rapidly surpassing APIs as the preferred approach to integrating with other systems.
In general, on-premise, perpetual solutions provide stronger tool sets for customization than hosted services.
“Ease of integration, stronger tool sets for
customization, a greater range of applications and tailored
configuration capacity were listed by application software decision
makers as reasons organizations prefer to rely on the on-premise and
in-house development and deployment option, according to Forrester
Research. They also cited loss of control and limited verticalization
as reasons for shying away from SaaS.” – Good Reasons for Sticking With In-House, Part 2
The business users in the enterprise are
sometimes tempted to go around IT, and hosted solutions provide a means
to do this when turf battles get heated.
“On-demand became popular from a simple
sales-enablement perspective. For a VP of sales, on-demand is a perfect
solution to bypass IT and get an easy-to-use SFA (sales force automation) tool up and running quickly.
“But pure on-demand solutions are limited in scope
and hit a ceiling in delivering value. There’s definitely a tipping
point for customers where on-demand doesn’t make sense and they need an
on-premise solution.” – CRM Execs: Where Is the Industry Headed?
But none of this squabbling is really good
for the enterprise. A healthy organization requires consensus between
stakeholders, and this requires IT growing into a more
business-oriented view, as we have illustrated – and advocated – countless times.
Beyond
this, the scope of challenge in customer relations today is literally
life-threatening to the enterprise. Technology has to be the handmaiden
of the critical business needs for completely integrated data
cross-enterprise, and genuinely useful business intelligence in real
time. Only IT can deliver these ends.
The great risk with
on-demand proliferation is a “calving” of the enterprise – like an
iceberg – into smaller ice-floes, subdivisions of function that have
given up the freedom of the perpetually licensed, on-premise system,
and choose vendor lock-in for short-term gains. Over the long term, IT
is largely helpless to customize a hosted service. And there are other
ways to cut the cloth.
“Moreover, the ongoing development of Web services standards and SOA (service-oriented
architecture) is enabling in-house application developers and systems
engineers to use the same application and systems development tools,
methods and standards being used by SaaS developers and vendors to
develop and deploy their own rich, native Web application services.” – Good Reasons for Sticking With In-House, Part 2
This is a very strong point, and somewhat close to where we came in, alluding to the open design philosophy
of Dovetail Software, and the ways in which the current trends in Web
2.0, SaaS, and standards-compliant (and standards-enabled) development,
all reflect the core values built into Dovetail from the beginning.
This
debate over the ease of “on-demand throwaway” versus “futurist
on-premise” perpetual licensing will continue, and it’s an important
one, especially in our world, with Clarify owners locked into Clarify
proprietary code, and seeking the way out. We’ll talk more about this.
