Peek inside the Kitchen: Why SaaS customers should care about SOA?

If you are a customer that is using on-demand CRM, HR, Reporting, you may think that you probably need not bother about SOA. After all, SaaS is akin to ordering a meal at a restaurant rather than cooking one yourself.

But actually you should care about how the meal is prepared, metaphorically speaking, for several reasons esepecially when evaluating a new restaurant (SaaS vendor):

• Reliability: Will their service be as good tomorrow as it is today? Any time you make a long-term commitment to a service, you need to be able to predict that the vendor will be around a year (or decade) from now and the quality will not deteriorate. In real life, we do this by relying on brands and reputation, and so is true in software. However, when dealing with a new restaurant, you may need to peek inside the kitchen.
• Quality of Service: Will my food be free from E-Coli? Will my data be secure? How do I ensure compliane with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley etc? You need to know that the burger meat was cooked to a certain temperature. In SaaS, you need to know that the software is hosted at a world-class data center, that the service provider is using a technology stack that provides security at all tiers (data, process and user interaction).
• Manageability: Will my waiter understand what I need and help me pick the wine I want or should want! As you adopt SaaS, you will want a solution that not only provides the functionality be it CRM, HR or whatever but you also want to make sure that the users and IT will be able to manage their accounts, integrate with existing systems and processes, monitor usage, etc.
  

So, even though you as a customer are not responsible for development and on-going maintenance of the software, it is imperative that you have a good idea of the architecture and operations of your SaaS vendor. After all, as we all know thanks to Verizon when you buy a cell phone, what you are really buying is the network.

You don't want your SaaS vendor to drop your calls when it is time to close your quarter.

In another blog post, I will discuss why SaaS ISVs should and do care about SOA. This blog post was originally posted on http:blogs.oracle.com/zen

Organic growth story is now just a story

Organic growth works for human beings and cows. Not so well for large enterprise software companies. After beating up on its competitor for pursuing an acquisition-led growth strategy, SAP failed to meet its numbers this quarter.

Message to Waldorf, Germany- let's leave organic to California's Yoga-loving Hybrid-driving meditation-praciticing vegans. For growth, you need to eat some beef.

On a more serious note, the two areas where SAP showed weakness may also be leading indicators:

North America: Is it possible that SAP is getting beat by its arch-rival Oracle?

Asia (outside Japan): SAP had made claims of making great inroads and betting on the emerging market economies. Here, the issue could be either local software companies or custom built software. In either case, it does not portend well for the SAP strategy.

(Another Infosys, India building: by reidmix)

It is my (very personal) opinion that the large enterprise vendors may have to look into acquiring companies that are focused on mid-market and/or emerging economies. It is nigh impossible to take your first-world overly complex software requiring massive infrastructure and compete with local vendors selling low-priced limited functionality software. In fact, some analysts have predicted that at least one large software vendor will emerge from India/China over the next few years on the global scene. Kingdee is one such aspirant that InfoWorld talks about here in "China's Kingdee wants to take on Oracle/SAP".

Jeff Nolan wrote an excellent piece "SAP, Oracle under the SOA, On-Demand gun" highlighting the issues facing enterprise software leaders. Vinnie Mirchandani (or Microchandani, his tech name) wrote on similar theme in "Oracle and the 29.2 factor". With the coming IPO of NetSuite, the focus will once again be on mid-market and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

(Disclaimer: As is the case with all my posts, this reflects my personal views and does not in any way reflect the opinions of my employer or anyone else. See profile for detailed disclaimer.)