At Your Service: Where SaaS Goes from Here

"There's kind of a perfect storm brewing," says Mary Laplante, vice president of consulting services at the Gilbane Group, a Massachusetts-based consultancy. Behind the demand for SaaS, Laplante says she sees three key drivers:

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• heightened competition, requiring companies to change the way they do business;
  
• an increasing number of newly available opportunities, particularly with activities on the Web; and
  
• technology that has become more affordable and available.

Clickability's platform comprises four main features:

• Software-as-a-Service: According to the company, the SaaS model "covers the entire Web content lifecycle," and includes content management, analytics, email newsletters, site search, ad server, polls and surveys, RSS/XML syndication, multilingual support, and social media. Furthermore, a multichannel delivery system enables users to publish content to a variety of alternative devices -- such as Amazon's Kindle -- in addition to the Web.
  
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Corporate technology departments no longer have to worry about tedious maintenance concerns as Clickability takes care of hosting, security, data storage, service-level agreements, and disaster recovery.
  
• Implementation-and-Support-as-a-Service: Clickability lives by what it calls a "perpetual vendor accountability" model to ensure that customers have everything they need. "Service and support become so much more important [in an on-demand model] because in essence, that's what you're selling," Laplante says. 数据挖掘研究院
  
• Innovation-as-a-Service: Clickability promises clients the freedom to innovate by using its platform to build off of -- and also gives them the tools to pursue that innovation. Laplante calls this functionality "clever," and adds that Web content management on demand "enables companies to do things they couldn't before."

"SaaS vendors promise [that] you don't have to wait...six months for the next point release and two years for the next major release. [They] release software on a regular basis," Laplante says.

Finally, SaaS vendors have begun selling to a whole new audience. Whereas software was previously directed at the technology department, vendors are now pitching to line-of-business managers, who have an entirely different set of needs and desires. "Their expectations evolve and change," Laplante says of these managers. "They're going to want more in terms of analytics, more in terms of connecting [the information] to executive dashboards, more in terms of integrating it with their transaction systems so they get immediate response to what's going on."

A common concern with SaaS is that information is more vulnerable, a belief that Laplante says is unfounded -- or at least not limited to SaaS deployments: "People with secure laptops lose them all the time," she says. Nevertheless, as a result of the flawed conventional wisdom, SaaS vendors have had to work harder to convey a sense of security. Not for much longer, Laplante says: "Security's not going to be an obstacle to market growth for SaaS -- not anymore." 数据挖掘实验室

SaaS users are finding that the technology enables a new way of doing business; SaaS providers themselves are engaged in a new way of doing business. But as these providers endeavor to make the lives of their clients easier, it seems their own lives will, in many cases, only get harder: Only the SaaS players that are up to the challenges ahead will be left standing when the dust settles.

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"The issue with the SaaS vendors is that mediocre performance doesn't cut it in that market," Laplante says.