SaaS Grows Up (and busts out of the Silo)
It's time to grow up….and learn to play nice with others.
SaaS adoption in the enterprise has definitely increased. But with that organizations are increasingly asking SaaS applications to start working with both other SaaS applications and the company's legacy applications as well. According to recent studies by both Saugatuck and Forrester suggest that integration has surpassed security and compliance as Enterprise IT's chief concern with implementing (or growing) SaaS applications.
This is an extremely encouraging sign. It shows the acceptance of SaaS as a legitimate enterprise software solution by the majority of Enterprise IT shops. Up to now, SaaS has been primarily a departmental sale. HR departments buy Taleo for human capital management, Marketing buys Marketo for marketing analysis, and call centers buy SupportSoft to manage their ticketing. As you know from past posts, selling immediately recognizable value at the departmental level is key to a strong success story in SaaS andwe can see how that has happened.
But now these apps are growing up and reaching across the organization (growing your app is another key SaaS sales strategy.) When that happens, IT is willing to accept the app's growth, but needs it to do more now. Enterprise IT doesn't want a separate employee record in Taleo from their payroll system. The want to be able to correlate all this marketing data back to their sales productivity, and they want to use the same master customer record for their ERP system as for their ticketing system. And they don't want to have different log-ins for each employee, they want a single sign-on solution for all of their SaaS as well as on-premise apps (ala TriCipher.)
So SaaS applications have to stop being Silo's that work just inside themselves. They need to start using web services to integrate with other SaaS apps and with legacy applications. By doing so, they'll open up three great new areas for growth
- Increased Functionality by working with other Apps
- Enterprise Growth by integrating with existing Apps
- The Opening of New Sales Channels
Their is so much to talk about in each of those three areas, they will get their own posts in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, think about adding web services, playing nice with others and growing up. It's a great time to be an adult.
