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Measuring The Success Of SaaS In Your Enterprise
By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-08-24
The Q3 2009 Forrester Wave™: Collaboration Platforms by Rob Koplowitz is out. It looked at eleven providers in the enterprise collaboration space. There is a lot of useful information there.
I was struck that Central Desktop was the only pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the group. It has a focus on small and medium businesses, as well as enterprise departments. Forrester writes that Central Desktop, "is attractive to organizations and departments that are looking to deploy quickly and easily without IT support. To that end, Central Desktop may lack some higher-end enterprise capabilities, but it's likely that those areas of functionality are not of interest to its target market. "
Other providers in the group have a SaaS offering but I do not know the percentage of revenue that comes from this option. It would seem that the big players are not betting on the cloud and/or the larger enterprises are not ready for it to handle their collaboration needs. Now on one hand these large enterprises are more equipped to handle on-premise solutions. Perhaps the are more risk adverse or have more conservative IT departments. The cloud is certainly more attractive to the small to mid-size firm as a quick and cost effective solution as Forrester notes.
Does this mean the title of this post should be "What is SaaS Doing within Large Enterprise Collaboration?" Personally, I do not see cloud-based enterprise collaboration as an oxymoron. I just think it may take time as I think it makes sense. I do know that the cloud providers that I speak with are doing quite well in today's economy, as firms are looking for cost effective solutions that reduce upfront costs and long-term commitments.
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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
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