ARC Advisory Group has just published a study of how Supply Chain Management applications are moving to the SaaS model

One of the oldest investment groups in the country has made a bold move to the cloud, under the leadership of visionary CIO Scott Stewart.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/350426/wilson_htm_signs_16m_5-year_deal_cloud/

In The Cloud is my new company – we focus on helping enterprises increase agility and reduce costs through the deployment of software-as-a-service and cloud based applications.  Initially we are providing implementation and development services with Salesforce.com, as well as working with organisations to identify components in their application architecture that may suit development or replacement with internet delivered applications.  We will be adding competencies in Google Apps, Amazon web services as well as some other specific niche SaaS applications in the near future.

At dSales we have been looking a lot at web chat technologies and their application as another sales and service channel – LivePerson is a particularly successful provider that we have been working with especially because of their integration with salesforce.com.   It seems that this chat has not really caught in in Australia like in many other countries and I’m trying to figure out why – it can provide significant uplift in sales conversions and increase in service agent productivity.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Once upon a time, I started a consulting business providing services to implement large accounting, HR and manufacturing systems, later called ERP. We started the business focussing on Oracle Applications, and then, when PeopleSoft came to Australia we signed up as their first implementation partner here. PeopleSoft was started by Dave Duffield, and moved from an upstart challenger to Oracle and SAP by entering the HR & Payroll market first (now called HCM for Human Capital Management) and then expanding into accounting and other applications. The company was very successful and after a long battle were eventually swallowed by Oracle.

Now Mr. Duffield is back, doing it again with Workday, an ERP application delivered using a SaaS or on-demand model.  The company has raised several substantial rounds of capital and already has started accumulating an impressive customer list include some Fortune 500 companies.  Interesting, they list on their customer list some of the major SaaS players such as salesforce.com, Xactly and Astadia, who are using Workday for their back office functions.

I am watching with great interest.

The latest trend in application delivery is  bit like back to the future – once upon a time, companies that wanted computer processing power used time share or bureau services to access part of a mainframe’s processing power unless they could afford the millions of dollars in capital investment required to buy their own mainframe.    As mini computers became available, more and more organisations could afford their own processing plant on-premise.  Hence the rise of Digital, AS/400, Sequent, Pyramid, Sun….  Then the rise of PCs meant that processing could be split between the client side and the server and further decentralised.

All the talk about cloud computing, software as a service, computing as a utility, on demand all harks back to the timeshare model – you access the processing power that you need on a time-share, pay as you go scalable model.  Except now, it’s not a mainframe at the back end, but data centres full of servers that have been virtualised (another mainframe concept!) to provide these services.

As the quotable Larry Ellison said late last year:  “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been researching more and more into the SaaS world.  The ScioDec blog has some interesting posts, and this recent one doesn’t have a lot new to say, but sums up what most of the people I speak to are thinking.

http://blog.sciodev.com/2008/12/31/prediction-more-clouds-and-saas-in-2009/

In the meantime, it’s not totally clear to me how the business model is going to work for a lot of the smaller players unless they get swallowed up by salesforce.com or others.

I’m also reading Groundswell, the book about social media written by analysts at Forrester.  It’s a great summary of the impacts that social media is starting to have in the world of marketing and how corporations can harness the power and reach of social media to their advantage.

Known as On Demand or Software as a Service (SaaS), this area of technology is fascinating to me.   A few years ago, it was known as ASP (application service provider) or hosted applications.  Now it has a new buzzword and although some of the architecture has changed, the idea hasn’t.      And is there really a big difference between SaaS and outsourcing your server and application infrastructure to a 3rd party?

Anyway, the world of www.netsuite.com and www.salesforce.com now have entire eco-systems of other companies and applications surrounding them and they are pushing into the enterprise space, which for a long time, resisted the thought of having their IT infrastructure offsite.  The great thing is that it means a business can get systems up and running very quickly with minimal capital expenditure.

It seems like Software as a Service is finally come of age.   All the major vendors are offering their enterprise software in ‘on-demand’ versions.   And there is a whole host of companies developing applications that were designed to be delivered on-line, along with consulting groups focussing on configuring those applications and integrating them with in-house applications.  Telstra and NEC are both launching SaaS offerings, with single sign on to multiple applications.    And even companies like Amazon now offer platforms as a service (PaaS), allowing you to subscribe to the use of computing power on which you can develop your own services and ramp them up as demand requires.

Just like in the evolution of the provision of electricity where companies built their own power plants and eventually bought their power from the grid,   hardware and software services are migrating to a utility model, whereby users pay for the resources they use, rather than having to build all that capability in house where the capacity is often under-utilised and requires constant maintenance and upgrades.

What a massive change this will mean to traditional corporate IT departments in the next decade!

Amazing, I have figured how to install a advertising widget to this wordpress page’s sidebar and set up a Google AdSense account, all in a morning. So theoretically the $$ should start rolling in now, if anyone visits the site and clicks on an ad. Unfortunately all the ads seem to be triggering off the Title of Steve Sacks, so the ads appear to be for sleeping bags, manufacturers of paper sacks and so on!