♦  Business Software Research and Reviews

Software-as-a-Service versus Traditional Licensing

How many different companies might ultimately be involved in providing a SaaS solution? A generic breakdown of SaaS into all of its potential service components produces a surprisingly long list of corresponding providers.

A single SaaS service can be comprised of many of the 20 service providers shown in the list above, located in the front, middle or back end segment of the SaaS service, each providing services through a relationship with another provider.

Beyond the numbers, the relationships between these providers can come in a variety of combinations and can take many forms: customer facing relationships, subrelationships, cross-relationships, hidden relationships, and implied relationships.

All of the potential SaaS business arrangements discussed above are driven by the subscription contract with the end user.

Like magazines, SaaS subscriptions are short term and may easily be gotten out of through non-renewal, unlike software licenses which are perpetual in length. Even if a software license is not perpetual, the purchase of the software is considered a long term investment by customers.

Driven by short term, easily terminable subscriptions, SaaS providers will enter into like kind relationships with each other, leading to high turn over, constantly changing service terms and service gaps.

from SaaS Disaggregation (SaaD^TM) at the Enterprise Level: An Analysis of 7 Prominent SaaS Companies (JR-8500)

Document Collaboration - Microsoft Office

The de facto document collaboration tool is, of course, e-mail, and here Microsoft Exchange continues to dominate the corporate market along with IBM’s Lotus Notes. Although described by Microsoft as a complementary product, Exchange Server sits outside of Microsoft’s ‘Office system’. This, Butler Group believes is a weakness in Microsoft’s overall collaboration strategy, as e-mail is at the centre of just about every user’s world. Indeed, 9 times out of 10, document collaboration relies totally upon the services of email, and to consider it as an adjunct to the main Office system is a mistake. Although still in a very dominant position, we are starting to see organisations wavering over their Microsoft Exchange investments, and if Microsoft were to lose its grip on this most important market, then surely we would start to see the whole Microsoft edifice collapsing like a house of cards. Microsoft needs to re-invent the way that users collaborate - especially across different organisations, and to do this it must re-invent the way we all use e-mail.

Whilst IBM has been struggling to bring its Workplace strategy to market, Microsoft has been steadily building market share (and mind share) through deployments of SharePoint. Now, as we head into 2007, Microsoft is trying to deliver a knock-out punch with the simultaneous release of Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system; and whilst the effects of this mighty blow might not be felt for a couple of years or so, Butler Group believes that Microsoft’s combination of programs, servers, and services will be hard to beat in the long-run. Although there are one or two Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors showing promise, only IBM has the products, technology, and market presence to offer Microsoft a real fight. But from an end-users perspective, the continued domination of the desktop by Microsoft might not be a bad thing, as it provides a set of standards and a level playing field on which businesses can co-operate at that most important level: the human level.

from Document Collaboration: Linking People, Processes and Content (BG-0037)

Enterprise Search and Retrieval

ESR technologies are maturing rapidly, and there has been both innovation and consolidation from the vendor community. Embedded search tools within specific enterprise applications such as ECM, whilst useful and optimised, may not deliver navigation or personalisation functionality. Furthermore, they often require large amounts of bespoke work to connect with other enterprise applications, or legacy systems.

Enterprise applications will change, and new ones will be added for a specific business purpose or potentially after a merger or acquisition: Butler Group, therefore, believes that ESR technologies should be abstracted from, but integrated with, those applications, so that it should be possible to initiate the search from within enterprise applications such as CRM or BI.

However, integration of the ESR solution with internal, and potentially also with external applications, needs to go beyond the positioning of a search box on a screen. As an abstracted layer in the enterprise technology stack, Butler Group believes that ESR technologies should be tightly integrated with BPM technology to drive automated actions that utilise the information retrieved by the solution, and just as importantly to provide the tracking and audit functions. Integration with Workflow functionality in applications such as ECM is a good first-step, but ideally search and discovery at the enterprise level should be regarded as a universal ‘service’ to be called as required, from within process-driven applications working within a SOA. ESR technologies delivered as services are also an integral part of Enterprise Portals.

from Enterprise Search and Retrieval - Unlocking the Organization’s Potential (BG-0035)

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