Recently, we finished a book on the SaaS market, Succeeding at SaaS: Computing in the Cloud. (It will be available from our web site and blogs next week.) It includes more than 20 scenarios, stories about successful SaaS ISVs, service providers, and customers.
One of the SaaS ISVs we interviewed and wrote about was Zoho, a company was a portfolio of 16 applications including word processing and spreadsheets, but moving beyond that to a data base product that lets ISVs, resellers, or customers create or customize their own applications.
Recently, Zoho has created a marketplace where their creators can exchange or sell these applications, putting them in the league of Salesforce.com, but in a different part of the market. Salesforce charges for everything and focuses on the enterprise. Zoho makes much of its product available for free, charging only for larger users, and premium features and service.
Our colleague Phil Wainewright likes Zoho so much that he thinks that it might get to be as big as Salesforce.com. You'll want to read his comments.
We think an interesting question (and one we got from lots of reporters last week) is whether the economic crisis is a blessing in disguise for the SaaS market, offering budget-pressured companies an alternative way to obtain software and infrastructure without the need to pay for implementation and skilled employees to manage it. The economies of SaaS will be very appealing in a time of tight budgets. It will also be a useful way to support companies who are coming together (all those mergers and buyouts) and need to communicate, collaborate, and share information on the way to sharing data and systems. More SaaS. Count on it.
The major business issues of deployment, integration and maintenance of IT systems have been growing at an alarming rate. The SaaS model not only is germane in these economic times, but is really a growth requirement for the entire industry regardless of the economy...
Mobile (Edge) computing for business processes bill benefit by the SaaS model at an exponential rate now that carriers are having to drop the walls (business not technical) on network...
Posted by: Eric Eckstein | January 08, 2009 at 12:28 PM
The challenging economic times might drive more businesses to adopt SaaS, moving their IT spend from CAPEX to OPEX and reducing their capital requirements for hardware, not to mention skilled staff.
Another driving issue is the growing acceptance of our environmental situation. For most businesses the biggest challenge in expanding their data centres is the ready availability of electricity to power their growing server farms. Moving to SaaS will allow companies like Amazon and Google to rationalise and maximise their investments in data centre management. This in turn will drive more companies to invest in SaaS solutions because they simply cannnot build the capacity in their own data centres.
We might consider this a perfect strom of economics and environmental issues which will create a compelling shift to SaaS.
Posted by: Darryl Carlton | October 11, 2008 at 05:29 AM
Amy, I agree with you.
Tighter economic times is a blessing for the SaaS market.
Posted by: Jijesh | October 07, 2008 at 09:27 PM